Delving deeper into my heroine

More about Juliette:

Juliette goes for drinks with a bunch of friends every Friday evening at Moyos. This is a flagrant tourist trap, adorned with garish African motifs and icons, masks and deities. But it is noisy and fun and the cocktails could be lethal.

What about her little brother? And what is her relationship with him? He’s 15. He’s absolutely sure of what he wants to do: accountancy, then, after a few years of experience, an MBA, and then he wants to make millions. He has a girlfriend who wants to do a degree in business science. They don’t appear to have sex—or even sexual desire, and Juliette doesn’t know whether to envy or pity him. (I can see one or two conversations with her mother about her brother. What’s his name? Pierre, for the moment.)

Juliette wishes she knew better what she wants to do with her life. (Perhaps, then, part of her journey—apart from falling in love with Simon the actor—is to realise what she does want to do with her life: she does want to study law and do what she can to see justice done. And so this theme—of wanting things to be done fairly, of having people treated fairly—becomes important in the novel.)

Another part of her journey is to learn to trust her instincts when it comes to men.  So here’s a possible passage that might occur somewhere in the middle of the book…

“After Rob, she’d made it an article of faith that men who praised her wit and recognised her intelligence were to be trusted, allowed in through the perimeter fence—but now she saw that this acknowledgment could become just another weapon in the arsenal of an unscrupulous predator. Jonathan had penetrated her defences by praising her. It was a cheap trick— but one she hadn’t seen coming at all. She realised now—how stupid, how young she was not to have known this all along—that a simple set of rules, an emotional algorithm, would not suffice. The right man—an honourable man—would have to be recognised by all his actions, by who he was, by what he said and what he did… And even then, she admitted ruefully to herself, mistakes were possible…”

Juliette speaks French, learned from her mother. But she’s only once been to France before, a few months before her father died. (She got lost in Paris on that trip.)

Juliette is subject to fits of internal disloyalty to her friends, about which she then feels guilty. To wit: she occasionally thinks of Bronwyn that a little self-discipline in the matter of biscuits and liquorice all-sorts would go a long way to bringing her weight down. (And on one memorable occasion, after Bronwyn has chided her about some aspect of her relationship with Jonathan, she snaps something at her about not being in a position to dish out advice when she is herself in such need of advice from someone like Dr Gillian McKeith. The rupture that results from this impulsive remark takes weeks to heal.)

Juliette occasionally has a cigarette, although she knows she shouldn’t. Jonathan smokes. (A nice marker: he tempts her to do things she shouldn’t.)

Now, I don’t suppose that these details are cast in stone. (And I do know that I have, even now, only skimmed the surface: but the fact is, I want to get on with the writing!) Some of the details that Juliette whispered in my ear are bound to change. She was either mistaken in her own self-assessment (and why shouldn’t she be—aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own stories? And even more unreliable when it comes to describing ourselves?) or she will develop over time, as her character clashes with other characters, or as experience teaches her its sometimes harsh lessons.