How did translating the Cleary story from the historical record to a dramatic narrative compare to writing fiction?
Bourke: I suppose writing fiction made me acutely aware of the value of details of how things looked, how they sounded, who was present, so that although I didn’t make anything up, I think I did retrieve information from the record that a writer of straight history might not have—like the names of Bridget Cleary’s dog and cat, for instance, or the garment-by-garment description of her clothing. I also reconstructed quite a lot of visual and other detail from statistical records. There is one very big difference, though, between writing fiction and writing this kind of non-fiction. When you write fiction, you have total authority: you can go inside the minds of your characters, and say what they think, or hope, or fear, and I couldn’t allow myself to do that. I gave people’s words when there was documentary evidence for them, and only said they had done something if more than one source said they had. That ran the risk of sacrificing some drama, so I had to compensate with the rhythm of
