Aussie trailblazer Nikki Gemmell on a provocative new plot with shades of Picnic At Hanging Rock

Four girls disappear from a school camp and a male teacher goes after them. The girls return – but the man does not. Wouldn’t you be asking hard questions, writes Nikki Gemmell.

What happens when a best friendship is lost? When teenage kids veer off track? When a menopausal school principal questions her entire existence? And when a teacher goes missing and four school girls, in the spotlight, aren’t talking about what happened?

It’s all in my new novel, Wing. Which feels like it has the same kind of energy and audacity as a book I wrote 20-odd years ago calledThe Bride Stripped Bare. Women felt heard, validated by that one. I had plugged in to something.

I think it was the book’s unflinching honesty.

Bride was a novel that got women talking, spoke to them, and I hadn’t been able to write like that since. To tap into writing that had the same kind of crackly power, dynamism. Until now, with Wing.

‘I had plugged into something’ ... author Nikki Gemmell. Photo: Stuart Spence

Its premise: Four girls go missing from a school camp. A male teacher volunteers to retrieve them. The girls eventually return – but the teacher doesn’t. It’s a contemporary take on Picnic at Hanging Rock – Lord of the Flies meets Promising Young Woman perhaps, with a ferocious feminist sensibility. Will the male teacher emerge safely? What happened? Did he do something to them? Who’s guilty – and who isn’t?

I wanted to write a page turner, if I could, an un-putdownable literary thriller. Writing that once again gets women talking. It’s about mothers and daughters, teachers and teenagers, communities of women as well as their men. It’s also about complicated female friendships.

A few years ago I lost a friendship, a dear one, decades old. The sundering was worse than any romantic breakup I’d ever experienced. This dissolution of this mateship was accompanied by a mental decline so grievous and discombobulating that I stumbled in life. Racing heart. Unable to concentrate. Unable to work. I was that bewildered by the whole thing.

‘What happened and who’s guilty?’ ... Samara Weaving, Madeleine Madden, Natalie Dormer and Lily Sullivan in a scene from Foxtel’s adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

How to fell a woman at the knees, and in a way only a woman can! My confidence was shot. Gradually I realised that this was that friend’s intention, perhaps. To break me. To crack my confidence and strength. And she almost succeeded.

The campaign against me was ingenious, in a competitive way; the competitive way of women. She was establishing dominance. I fought to retain the friendship because it was part of a wider circle of friends, and I didn’t want to lose them all.

I thought at the time of the American neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, who theorises about the way women group together. She believes it’s programmed into them to connect intensely in the childbearing years, because that’s when they need the support of other females around them when the male is often away (hunting in the old days, working in modern times). Yet the flip side of this biological need is the way women control each other. If everyone acts and thinks the same way, Brizendine theorises, the group will stay intact and everyone will be protected. But if someone can’t be controlled – if an individual acts differently – then the other women turn. Try to destroy the rebel’s confidence, to destroy her, in an attempt to change her. So as not to show the rest of the women up – because they need their choices in life affirmed.

‘Strong and provocative and powerful’ ... Wing by Nikki Gemmell.

So yes, Wing examines the complexity of female friendships. But it’s also hopeful and full of love. Hence the title. Ie: winged with love. Tucked under your wing. Wing, as in flight, as in free. It was written for anyone who’s a parent, guardian, God parent, grandparent – or for anyone who’s just looking for a page turner of a summer read. This one feels as strong and provocative and powerful as The Bride Stripped Bare did back in the day.

I’m terrified and excited about Wing’s reception, just as I was with Bride’s. Because like that one, this new novel feels blazingly honest. ‘I shall confront everything,’ Terrence Davies has Emily Dickinson say in A Quiet Passion, his film of the poet’s life. ‘ Ah yes, confronting everything. That feels like a mantra for my own life’s writing – which has developed over three decades as an examination of the female journey – and a mantra for Wing itself.

Wing by Nikki Gemmell is out now, published by 4th Estate. Have you read it yet? Tell us what you think at The Sunday Book Club on Facebook.