More Phwooar To Her Elbow
A frequently steamy tale of college shenanigans, Emily Gillmor Murphy’s debut novel You & I is a proper thrill-ride. But, she insists, her own student days weren’t nearly as outrageous.
Olaf Tyaransen, 23 Aug 2012
“No!” she insists. “Similar events to real life kind of happened, but no character is one person. They’re all mixed together.”
While there’s certainly no shortage of casual sex, binge drinking and recreational drug abuse within its pages, she’s also insistent that it doesn’t reflect her own college lifestyle.
“Well, I think everybody’s college life is different,” she syas. “My experience wouldn’t have been at all the same as the characters in the book, but I was surrounded by people who would have had very similar experiences to the characters in the book. I was more of an observer in college. Whenever I noticed something that was interesting, or saw something or heard about something, I kind of took note of it. So things worked their way into the book and slowly turned into something resembling a plot.”
It’s not all sex and drugs, however. The plot also encompasses such thorny issues as broken families, online bullying, mental illness and suicide.
“People think that all students care about is drinking and having sex and stuff like that,” she says. “But they kind of forget that a student is actually an adult and we have to deal with all these very serious adult issues. But what makes it so much more interesting is that we’re not really ready for it yet. When you’re in your 20s and living the student life is probably when you make most of your mistakes and kind of don’t cope with it great. So suicide and mental illness and depression and bullying are part of a lot of people’s lives. It’s very real to a lot of people and that’s what I wanted to honestly address. I didn’t want to gloss it over and go ‘oh, it’s all about partying and all that’, because it’s not. That’s only part of it.”
Olaf Tyaransen
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