In the Woods
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Tana French on In the Woods
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A scrap of paper under a heap of phone billsThe idea arrived not at a desk but on an archaeological dig, during a break between acting jobs. French had worked on two digs before she wrote the novel, and it was the proximity of actual woodland to actual excavation that sent her mind in an unexpected direction.
There was a wood near the dig, and one day I thought, That would be a great place for kids to play… And instead of stopping there, I thought — and this is what I mean about always looking for the mystery — What if three kids ran in there, and only one came out? I scribbled the idea down on a piece of paper, went off to do the next show and forgot all about it. But a year later I found it again, under a heap of phone bills, and I decided that I really wanted to do something with this idea.
She filed the idea away and returned to theatre. A year passed before she found it again, and by then it had become something she felt compelled to pursue even without a publisher, a plan, or any certainty she could finish.
Years of theatre had given French the craft of inhabiting other people’s material, but by the time she started the manuscript she had reached a limit with that. The NEA podcast caught her explaining what pushed her toward fiction in the first place.
I just needed to tell my own stories. I wanted to create my own universe, my own characters, instead of always stepping into someone else’s. [paraphrased from audio]
French kept the project secret while she wrote it, turning down acting work to protect the time. The full weight of what that cost her, and what the book meant before it had a readership, came out in conversation with Sophie Hannah at a Barnes and Noble event years later.
In a weird way I think In the Woods always has a special place, even though I’m 100% positive it is not my best because it was my first novel and I had no idea what I was doing. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Playing Rob Ryan on paper for two yearsFrench entered the manuscript without a plot. She knew her narrator and her premise, and she trusted those two elements to generate the rest, discovering who committed the murder only around a third of the way through. That tolerance for not knowing was, she told Bookreporter.com, the defining condition of her process.
Here’s the main fact about the way I write: I have no clue what I’m doing. When I start on a book, I don’t know where it’s going to end up; I have a narrator, the kernel of a premise, an awful lot of coffee, and that’s it.
The first-person form was not a deliberate craft decision but a consequence of her acting training at Trinity College Dublin. She had spent years learning to build a character from the inside out, and when she sat down to write fiction, the only point of view that felt available to her was the one she had already been practicing on stage.
Writing In the Woods was just an extension of that process. I played Rob Ryan for almost two years — on paper, rather than on stage, but the mental process was the same.
Rob Ryan, the detective-narrator who survived a childhood disappearance in the woods of Knocknaree only to have no memory of what happened, arrived on the page largely complete. The challenge was not designing him but sustaining him across nearly two years of drafting.
Almost as soon as I thought of the basic premise of the book, the character of Rob Ryan came into my head: intelligent, sarcastic, secretive, proud, too badly damaged to be honest either with himself or with his readers — and male. It was never a conscious choice; that’s just how he popped up.
Writing a narrator whose psychology is as damaged as Rob’s meant that his gender was never the real difficulty. Something more fundamental was harder to hold: the need to write from inside a perspective that distorts and withholds even from itself.
The biggest difference between him and me, and the hardest thing to write, wasn’t the fact that he’s male, it was the fact that he’s phenomenally messed up.
The red herrings in the novel were built around Rob’s psychology rather than around the logic of the crime itself. His fixation on Rosalind, the dead girl Katy Devlin’s older sister, is the most deliberate example: Rob projects his own survivor guilt onto her in ways that blind him as an investigator. French explained the governing principle in a Vulture piece on red herrings.
In my first book, In the Woods, more than anything, I was thinking about what clues would cause the most interesting series of reactions in Rob, my detective, rather than how various clues would fit into the solution to the crime.
The personal thread
A broke actor betting on one long shotFrench was still working as an actor when she wrote the manuscript, and the financial logic of continuing to do so was clear. She ignored it anyway. The stakes of that decision are what give this account, from Vulture, its texture.
I think, though, the one I’m fondest of is always going to be Rob from In the Woods. It was my first book. Practically nobody even knew I was writing it. I hadn’t sold it, I had no reason to believe that anybody would ever read it. It was just me and Rob and my computer, and the chance that someday this might be something. I was a desperately broke actor and it was a crazy thing to do. I was turning down work in order to finish this book. Yeah, I’m really attached to Rob.
Theatre had taught French one specific lesson that turned out to matter enormously in prose: that failure during the making of a thing carries no cost as long as you keep going. She wrote about the moment that lesson transferred from stage to page in Publishers Weekly.
This was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, In the Woods: I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.
What she wants us to sit with
The ending that kept faith with RobThe question readers ask most often about the novel is why the 1984 disappearance in Knocknaree woods, the childhood event that Rob cannot remember, goes unresolved. French has answered it more than once, and her clearest account appeared on Goodreads, where she laid out the three options she actually considered when writing the ending and named the logic behind the one she chose.
I went with the third one — because that was the one that was true to the character and the rest of the book, and because I always saw In the Woods as a book about Rob and what that old mystery resurfacing does to him, rather than a book about the mystery itself. I knew some readers would be furious that it didn’t stick to the conventions of the mystery genre, and I could see why — but on the other hand, I also knew some readers would be furious if I sold out my narrator in the last chapter for easy closure. I figured all I could do was write the best book I was capable of writing, and hope it was good enough.
The answer she held onto was that Rob’s psychology, not the conventions of crime fiction, had to determine the shape of the book’s ending. Giving him a resolution he was constitutionally unable to seek would have falsified everything the novel had built.
French has pushed back on readings of the ending as a genre failure or a broken promise to the reader. Her counterargument reframes the novel’s central question entirely, away from the puzzle and toward the man who refuses to solve it.
Personally, I think it’s quite wrong to depend on the contracts involved in the genre. To me, with that book, the big question wasn’t ‘whodunit’ but, ‘is Rob ever going to take the leap to find out what has been lurking inside his mind for the past 20 years? Is he ever going to mend that damage that was done all that time ago?’
The unresolved childhood trauma was also a deliberate formal argument about how trauma actually works. French made the case in the NEA podcast that resolution, in this context, would have been a kind of dishonesty toward the child Rob once was.
I wanted to leave it a little bit more ambiguous, because I didn’t want to explain away a child’s trauma. I wanted to leave the trauma intact. I wanted to leave it mysterious, like a trauma itself can be. [paraphrased from audio]