Rock Paper Scissors
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Alice Feeney on Rock Paper Scissors
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A face at the window in a Scottish blizzardThe novel began not with a concept but with a scare. In 2018, Feeney and her husband drove through the ‘Beast from the East’ blizzard to a remote Scottish property with no power and no phone signal, cut off from any neighbor except a small herd of sheep. What happened just before bed that night gave the book its atmosphere before she had written a single word.
I first had the idea for Rock, Paper, Scissors during a trip to Scotland in 2018. We drove to a remote property in a terrible storm, which they called the Beast from the East. When we finally arrived it was dark, there was no power and our phones didn’t work. The place was beautiful – albeit a little spooky – next to a loch, in the middle of a vast valley surrounded by mountains. We were completely isolated with no neighbours, except for a small herd of sheep. Thanks to the snow, we were trapped. Then, late that night, just as we were about to go to bed, a ghostly face appeared in the window. Someone was outside. Watching us. It turned out to be the caretaker, who drove through the storm to see if we were ok, but the moment definitely sparked an idea!
The setting was in place, but the plot itself arrived a year later, when Feeney and her husband returned to Scotland and stayed in an actual converted chapel. The book didn’t accumulate slowly over months of drafting; it arrived in a single, sleepless burst.
I woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled down most of the plot for Rock Paper Scissors between two and five AM. I remember every single thing about the day this story happened inside my head and the book insisted that I write it.
That chapel became the novel’s central location, and the isolation Feeney felt there, surrounded by mountains and cut off from any outside life, became the pressure that the book applies to its marriage.
Feeney returns to marriage as a subject across her fiction, and readers familiar with her books tend to ask the obvious biographical question. At a Poisoned Pen Bookstore event, she answered it directly, drawing a clear line between the unhappy unions she writes and her own twenty-year relationship.
I’ve written about a few unhappy marriages, um, in my books, including in ‘Rock Paper Scissors,’ where it’s about a very unhappy marriage. And the thing is, I’m actually very happily married. We’ve been together for 20 years. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Whiteboards, anniversary letters, and a fair gameFeeney’s fifteen years at the BBC as a reporter and news editor trained her to control what an audience sees and when. She carries that discipline into her plotting process, and the physical system she uses makes the architecture of a novel visible before a word of prose exists.
I tend to plan everything out on a giant whiteboard... it has magnets. There are different colored cards as I’m plotting... I make it so big that I can see everything in one place, so I can see the pattern of the story in one place all at once, and that helps me to know when to drop those little seeds or when to leave a few breadcrumbs for readers to find. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s structural centerpiece is a series of anniversary letters that Adam’s wife, Amelia, has written over the years of their marriage. Feeney designed the letters around a specific constraint: Amelia never intended anyone else to read them, and that constraint is what makes them capable of carrying the weight of the book’s eventual reveal.
The letters are a way for Adam’s wife to tell him what she really thinks and how she really feels about their marriage once a year. Because she never planned to let him read them, she could be honest with her words and with herself.
Feeney built Adam’s character around prosopagnosia, the neurological condition that makes it impossible to recognize faces. She keeps her books entirely secret during the writing process, so it was a genuine shock when her agent sent the manuscript to the editor and the editor revealed she has the same condition.
Books are like children for authors, we’re not really allowed to have favourites, but this is one of mine.
The coincidence of the editor’s prosopagnosia arriving as an unsolicited confirmation of the book’s premise only deepened Feeney’s attachment to it, and that attachment shows: this is the one novel she will name openly as a favorite.
What she wants us to sit with
What love costs, behind closed doorsThe remote chapel, the storm that traps the couple, the weekend with nowhere to retreat: Feeney built the setting to intensify a fear she believes is almost universally legible. The isolation is not just atmospheric; it is the mechanism that forces a reckoning that ordinary domestic life allows couples to postpone indefinitely.
When you really think about it, everything we do, we do for love. Everything. This is a story about what we will do to and for the people we love.
Feeney has been clear that the darkness she writes toward is not sensationalism but an attempt at comprehension. The marriage thriller, and the genre she works in more broadly, is her way of examining the gap between the world’s surface and what moves beneath it.
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.