His & Hers
His & Hers
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Alice Feeney on His & Hers
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A walk in the woods and two stories that became oneThe structural premise of two narrators telling opposite versions of the same events grew from a fascination Feeney had carried long before she sat down to write the book. Her years at the BBC, where she watched footage of the same incident arrive in different cuts and had to decide which version millions of people would see at lunchtime, trained her eye for exactly this problem.
How our memories can make liars of us all has always fascinated me. People rarely remember or recount life in the same way, and I wanted to explore that in HIS & HERS. Jack and Anna both believed their own versions of events, so I thought it would be fun to give both of them the chance to tell their side of the story. It’s up to readers to choose who they believe.
Anna’s storyline and another major thread of the novel began as entirely unconnected ideas. The moment they locked together came not at a desk but outside, and the connection felt fragile enough that she didn’t trust herself to walk back at a normal pace.
Anna’s story originally was separate to another part in the book... they were basically two different books. And then one day — I’m fairly sure it was August the 23rd, 2018 — the whole story came together in my head on a walk in the woods with the dog. And I thought these two stories belong together... so that I practically ran three miles back from where I was in the woods back to my house to scribble it all down. [paraphrased from audio]
That sprint home is a useful fact to hold onto when reading: the novel’s central architecture arrived as a single gestalt rather than being assembled piece by piece, which may explain why the two narrative threads feel load-bearing rather than decorative.
How she wrote it
Three months in a shed, three narrators, and one anonymous killerFeeney plots on giant boards in a garden shed, using colored cards for each character and timeline, and she completed this book faster than almost any other in her catalog. Across her novels, the gap between first idea and finished manuscript has ranged from three months to five years, and this book sits at the shortest end of that span.
From that initial seed, it can take anything from three months (His & Hers) to five years (Daisy Darker) for me to have a finished book.
Speed here was not a function of ease. The three-month turnaround on the first draft was the result of treating the shed as something close to a sealed room for the duration of the project.
‘His & Hers’ took three months. It was super fast, but because I really didn’t leave the shed other than to eat and occasionally sleep, it was a bit of an obsession for me this one. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel has three points of view: Anna the BBC newsreader, Jack the detective, and a third narrator written entirely in italics whose identity the reader does not know. That third voice is the killer’s, and Feeney has been open about the fact that it was the hardest part of the book to inhabit.
Suspense is about choosing what information to withhold and what clues to share. But it’s also important — and only fair — for the reader to know that were they to turn back the pages, the clues were all there.
That commitment to fairness matters for book-club readers in particular: every detail that seems incidental on a first read is worth interrogating on a second. The novel rewards the re-examination it seems to dare you to attempt.
The personal thread
Fifteen years of BBC decisions that became fictionFeeney rarely draws a clean line between her working life and her fiction, and this book is the most direct case of the two overlapping. She spent 15 years at the BBC in roles that included reporter, news editor, and One O’Clock News producer, and the novel’s central character is a BBC newsreader.
A little bit of me finds its way into every novel. I worked for the BBC for 15 years, both in the newsroom and in the field, so those aspects of the story should feel authentic.
The book’s darkness, like the darkness in all of her novels, is not something she treats as a genre convention. She arrived at writing thrillers after spending years in a newsroom watching real events that were worse than anything she had invented, and her fiction has been one way of processing that.
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.
Her attachment to this book goes beyond ordinary professional satisfaction. Authors are conventionally reluctant to name a favorite among their own work, and Feeney has given that convention its due before setting it aside.
I always think books are a bit like children and authors aren’t allowed to have favorites, but I confess this is mine.
What she wants us to sit with
Lying as a survival language, not a moral failureThe book’s murders are the plot engine, but Feeney locates its real subject in something far more ordinary. She built the novel around the idea that deception is not a pathology confined to killers but a behavior that everyone practices, in forms ranging from social courtesy to self-preservation.
Lying is a language we are all fluent in. We lie to fit in, or to stand out. We lie about our age, our weight, our feelings. We lie online, on the phone, and in person. Ironically, perhaps, we often lie to be polite.
That argument could read as cynical, but Feeney complicates it. What she finds interesting is not the mechanics of dishonesty but the pressure that produces it, and she wants readers to extend that curiosity to characters they might otherwise simply distrust.
For me, the reasons why a person lies are far more interesting than the lie itself. Someone who believes their own lies isn’t necessarily a sociopath. We’re living in a lonely world. Sometimes people believe what they need to in order to survive. That’s true of some characters in HIS & HERS.
The novel’s sustained refusal to let the reader settle on a trustworthy narrator is intentional rather than a structural trick. Feeney frames that disorientation as a realism about how relationships and institutions actually work, not a puzzle designed purely for entertainment.
I like that it’s hard to know who to trust in my novels, because sometimes it’s hard to know who to trust in the real world, too.