Beautiful Ugly
Beautiful Ugly
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Alice Feeney on Beautiful Ugly
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Stranded on an island, a thriller takes shapeThe book began with a practical problem: Feeney couldn’t leave. During one of her annual trips to Scotland, she found herself stuck on the Outer Hebrides, waiting on ferry schedules and weather, and the forced captivity of the place started working on her imagination.
I was stuck in the Outer Hebrides — these tiny, lonely islands as far north and west as you can be off of the coast, which you can only get to by ferry. With the weather and the storms, it often means that things go wrong.
Setting alone didn’t explain the darkness Feeney brought to the book. That impulse has roots in her fifteen years at the BBC, where her work at the main news desk included deciding what footage of violence and terror the public should be allowed to see. One interview she conducted stayed with her: a mother whose 13-year-old daughter had been raped and murdered, with the family Christmas tree still up in January and one unopened gift beneath it for the dead child.
When people ask me why I write about such dark things, I always think, I could never write anything that is more horrific than the things people do to each other in real life. The writing of these stories is my way of trying to make sense of a world that increasingly doesn’t make any sense to me.
The ending Feeney originally wrote was not the one that reached readers. After completing several drafts, she attended a book event in Macedonia, where a 12-year-old girl arrived at her signing table with a stack of Feeney’s paperbacks. As she signed them, Feeney imagined how that girl would receive the ending she had written, went home, and changed it. The revision was not about softening the story. It was about making sure a reader could understand why the women of Amberley, the fictional island community at the novel’s center, behaved as they did.
I wanted her to understand that there was a reason why the residents of Amberley behaved the way that they did, because there is always a reason why. I always think whatever you’re doing, wherever you’re going, even if you see someone behaving in a bad way on a train, there’s a reason why that person is behaving the way they are.
How she wrote it
A planner, a map, and a hidden messageFeeney’s working method runs counter to the draft-and-discover approach many thriller writers describe. She lives with a story for one to two years before writing a word, plotting everything onto a large board, so that by the time she opens a document the characters are as familiar as people she knows in life. She described this process at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore event held for the novel’s release.
I tend to think about the stories for at least a year or two before I write them, so once I sit down to write them, I know them better than I know my own family. [paraphrased from audio]
That deep immersion in her characters produces unexpected side effects away from the desk. At the Poisoned Pen event, Feeney described ordering mushrooms at a restaurant because the character she was writing would have liked them, then being surprised when the food arrived because she doesn’t eat them herself. She also recalled honking her car horn and making rude gestures at another driver while working on an angry character, behavior she said was entirely unlike her normal self. Her practical advice to writers follows the same logic.
Buy clothes the character would buy, then open your wardrobe six months later wondering what that ugly jumper is doing there. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing the novel’s protagonist, Grady Green, a thriller writer himself, gave Feeney one structural game she played at two levels simultaneously. Inside the story, Grady hides a coded message in his manuscript by making the first word of each chapter spell something out across fourteen chapters. Feeney did the same thing in the actual text of Beautiful Ugly, and at the Poisoned Pen event she asked the audience not to hunt for it until after they had finished the book. She also pushed for the map printed at the front of the novel, drawing it herself while writing so readers could track where each character lived on the island. Her publisher agreed to include it, then hired a professional artist to redraw it.
But didn’t they do a great job? I think it looks absolutely stunning. I love it. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing Grady required spending extended time inside a male point of view. At the Poisoned Pen event, Feeney was asked how she approached narrating from a man’s perspective, and her answer was brief.
I think writing men is actually quite easy. You just remove the logic. [paraphrased from audio]
The joke lands, but the craft choice behind it was deliberate: Grady’s narration needed to feel unreliable without feeling dishonest, and the gap between what he notices and what the reader suspects is where much of the novel’s tension lives.
The architecture of her twists follows a principle she has applied across her seven novels. A twist that the reader had no chance of seeing is, for Feeney, a cheat. She articulated the rule while discussing Rock Paper Scissors, her sixth novel, but it describes the contract she sets up in every book, Beautiful Ugly included.
For a twist to be good you have to have left enough clues for the reader to have guessed it, but at the same time create obstacles to prevent them from doing so. The game has to be fair or it wouldn’t be right to invite the reader to play. A good twisty thriller is a puzzle, one which most readers don’t want to solve.
What she wants us to sit with
The version of yourself no one seesThe title is not just a description of the Scottish landscape or the island community at the novel’s heart. At the Poisoned Pen event, Feeney explained that it names something she wanted the whole book to enact: the gap between the self people perform in company and the self they are when no one is watching.
The book is filled with these oxymorons, like ‘Beautiful Ugly’ throughout the story. And it’s just about the way we all present a version of ourselves, I think, to the rest of the world, but that we can be somebody very different when we’re on our own. [paraphrased from audio]
That same conviction shaped the ending revision. The women of Amberley behave in ways that are, on the surface, inexplicable and unsettling. Feeney wanted readers to leave the book having looked underneath that surface, not just at it. The line she gave Publishers Weekly applies as a reading instruction for the novel as a whole.
There’s always something going on underneath. There’s always a story, if you’re willing and able to look for it.
Feeney has spoken across many interviews about the island of Amberley, the fictional Hebridean community in Beautiful Ugly, as something more than backdrop. In the Harper’s Bazaar India interview, she compressed the idea to a single sentence, one that applies to every novel she has written but feels especially apt for a book where geography controls who can leave and who cannot.
For me, the setting is often a character in the book.
Before the book reached readers, a film adaptation was already in development at Hidden Pictures. Feeney’s public statement about the deal was brief, but what she chose to single out from her first meeting with the production company was the feeling it gave her, not the terms.
I have loved the experience of having my books adapted, and I’m thrilled that Hidden Pictures is developing ‘Beautiful Ugly.’ I had such a good feeling about them from the very first meeting, and I can’t wait to see Grady Green come to life on screen.