I wrote the short story ‘Women I Know’, then looked back at the stories I’d been writing over the past half a decade or so and realised I had a theme I kept coming back to. It was women who were trapped, predominately by gender. Sometimes this was because they were sexualised or discarded – because they were victims, sure – but more often, they were women in positions of privilege who had, in conscious, but more so in subconscious ways, used their womanhood to get ahead in life, and in doing so become complicit in acts of violence against other women, minorities, and the planet. So from then on I wrote very deliberately to theme, trying to fill in gaps between ideas, ways of embodying that.

There were two very influential books I read after I knew what I was doing that developed these ideas: White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad, which really had me think about weaponised white feminism, and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, whose idea about making familiar landscapes uncanny as a way of writing about climate change really resonated with me. I think you can see the influence both of these books had on this collection. 

So there’s that, and there’s also this idea in the titular story I kept coming back to: the grandmother keeps talking to her granddaughter about these ‘women I know’. She makes these sweeping generalisations about women she ostensibly does not know. So I kind of ran with that. I don’t really know these women, of course, but I think I understand them. Which is a different kind of knowing. I think I understand how they have come to their place in life, and I was interested in understanding that – how these often very flawed women come to be the way they are.