Granted my motivations were not as powerful as Wavy’s, but I could certainly extrapolate from what I felt about the situation. “I know for example what it was like to be twelve years old and madly in love with this guy who was fifteen years older than I was I knew what it was like to be thirteen, and trying to figure out how to seduce him. “There are things that are of course reflections of my life, but it’s because these are things that I knew,” Greenwood said.

But she certainly doesn’t view the novel as completely biographical. Greenwood herself is the daughter of a reformed drug dealer, so she lived many of Wavy’s experiences first hand. Wavy in the beginning of the novel is shipped off to the home of Val’s sister Brenda while the former is in a rehab program, attempting to get clean so she can get her children back. Wavy Quinn and her little brother Donal are the children of drug dealer Liam Quinn, owner of a lucrative meth lab enterprise, and his wife Val who craves drugs as much as her husband’s inconsistent love and attention. There is certainly enough to nitpick at the novel to make its central topic controversial. When you’re writing a first draft, if you let yourself worry even a tiny bit about what somebody else is going to think, you’ll freeze up.”īryn Greenwood, author of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. I’m not the kind of person that worries about what anybody is going to think when I’m writing. “I have to distinguish between being aware and concerned of people’s reactions, because I certainly was aware how some people were going to feel about it,” Greenwood said.

She knew that the topic of a younger girl and an older man falling in love surrounded by the violence and danger of a meth lab ring wasn’t necessarily going to be widely embraced, but clarifies that it didn’t deter her from telling the story the way she wanted to tell it.

Greenwood didn’t particularly set out to be controversial when she began writing this novel.

If you’re looking for a novel that has the potential to redefine and contradict what you think you know about falling in love and the potential damaging ripple caused by family, look no further than Bryn Greenwood’s new novel, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.

Bryn greenwood author