Sunday Book Club: Felicity McLean on The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

Felicity McLean tells how an unexpected encounter with Aussie actor Bryan Brown inspired her to bring her debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone, to life.

Author Felicity McLean’s novel The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a critical success.

Felicity McLean grew up in suburban Sydney, where fenceless yards backed straight onto thick scrub, a natural pathway for children to explore to the great Aussie bush.

It is the environment her debut novel The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is centred around — and the topic that sparked its very existence.

In 2016, the 37-year-old ghostwriter and journalist was a panellist at a Sydney Writer’s Festival at a western Sydney theatre named in honour of actor Bryan Brown, who happened to be hosting the event on “creativity and place”, dissecting how the landscape of an author’s youth, influenced their writing.

Sydney author Felicity McLean. Picture: Adam Hollingsworth

At the time, Felicity had ghostwritten half a dozen titles, including the award-winning Body Lengths with Olympian Leisel Jones. But as a ghostwriter, it was her job to be invisible.

“Worthy topics certainly — but difficult to answer if, like me, you wrote other people’s stories for a living,” McLean says.

“Back then I’d ghostwritten half a dozen titles for various people, but I’d never published anything where my experience of ‘place’ crept onto the page.

“And so I found myself on stage at the Bryan Brown Theatre reading aloud to several hundred people from my ‘novel’ — a novel that existed almost exclusively in my head and that weighed in at around 5,000 words.

“It was, I explained, very loosely inspired by the setting of my childhood — a bush suburb on the fringe of Sydney.

“Following the panel discussion, a tall figure in the front row was first on his feet for question time — what was the title of my novel, he wanted to know.

“Could I tell him more? What happened next?

“‘Good question, Bryan,’ I said.

“And so I got to work on The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone — because Bryan Brown had shown an interest in my work, and he needed to know what happened next.”

Part mystery, part coming of age, Felicity McLean’s novel has been getting rave reviews. Picture: Adam Hollingsworth

Already attracting rave reviews since being published this month, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone will now be sold in the US, UK, France and Spain. And Bryan Brown? He’s almost finished reading — and is loving it.

“I certainly have a lot to thank Bryan Brown for,” McLean laughs.

Part mystery, part coming of age story, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is

set over the long hot summer of 1992. The haunting novel is narrated by Tikka Molloy, who is quite precisely 11 and one-sixth when her friends, Hannah, beautiful Cordelia and Ruth Van Apfel vanish during the night of the local school’s Showstopper concert.

Years later, Tikka has returned home to try and make sense of the

summer that shaped her, and the girls that she never forgot. A thrilling page-turner, dark Aussie humour filters through the keenly written piece of gothic literature, aptly descried as Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation.

“I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl because 11 is that murky territory — that blurry in-between land — caught between being a child and adulthood,” McLean says.

“Balanced between knowing and not knowing.

“For a start, Tikka’s too close to the three Van Apfel sisters to be able to view their disappearance objectively.

“Her version of events hinges on second-hand information and neighbourhood gossip that she tries to piece together, so often she’s deemed too young to know and details about the disappearance are withheld from her, and yet Tikka knows things that the adults around her don’t know.

“She keeps secrets about her friends’ disappearance.

“As a result, for the next 20 years Tikka remains trapped in a purgatory of only partial understanding.

“She never fully learns what happened to her friends — nor can she let the mystery of their disappearance go.”

The Van Apfel Girls was written over a three-year period - between the hours of 5am and 7am.

Felicity wrote the novel without a book deal or publisher backing her — so its creation fit in around paid work and her role as a mother. It was written over a three-year period between 5 and 7am — no mean feat for a self confessed non-morning person.

“Some days I was much more enthusiastic than others — but to keep going, you need to enjoy the process,” she says.

“There were times when I really didn’t look forward to waking up at 5am, but other times I would, and I would think about it all day, because it was my own project.

“What I really wanted to do was capture everything that was really wonderful about an ordinary Aussie childhood — to reveal the beauty in the every day.

“There is so much in there that is nostalgic — those stinking hot summers,

Cicadas screaming, running under the sprinkler — growing up on rissoles and Redskins and Sunny Boys.”

McLean is currently working on her second novel, which will be a new work and not her debut’s sequel, and will now tour The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone around Australia and America.

“It’s surreal to be doing events in New York, and it will be hilarious reading about Australian things like Tupperware and the Hills hoist in French and Spanish, but people seem to identify with it,” she said.

“I felt like it was a very Australian landscape, but it has been much more universal than I had anticipated.”

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone, by Felicity McLean and published by HarperCollins Australia, is available in all good bookstores and online.

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Here’s a challenge for you: which famous Aussie work of fiction gets a subtle nod (or more than one) in Felicity McLean’s The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone?

Described as “blackly comic, sharply observed and wonderfully endearing”, the novel, published by HarperCollins Australia, is our new Book of the Month.

That means readers get it for a 30 per cent discount, by going to Booktopia and using the code BCBT19.

Once you’ve read it, and you think you can spot the literary hint, come discuss it — or any other book, for that matter — at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.

Originally published as Sunday Book Club: Felicity McLean on The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone