Why is her job at Jonah and the Whale and her friendship with Lavinia so important to her?
Lavinia is a very perceptive woman who for a while is almost a mother to Grace. She’s unlike the other people in Grace’s life in that she doesn’t offer advice, but tells Grace to trust her own instincts. Lavinia is the one character in the book who was based quite closely on someone I knew, a dear friend of mine who died a number of years ago: writing Lavinia was a way of remembering her. Grace becomes hemmed in on all fronts, first Karen and then the stern-aced Mrs. Pace-Barden; even Doctor Strickland isn’t really that much help. Why are the staff at Sylvie’s nursery so at a loss to help Grace find a solution to Sylvie’s problems? In writing the story, I especially enjoyed showing the collision between the everyday and the supernatural. So all the people around Grace – Mrs. Pace-Barden, Karen and the other mothers, the child psychiatrist – come up with various sensible-sounding theories to explain Sylvie’s unhappiness. Yet nothing’s going to work, because they’re dealing with somethin
