The Names
The Names
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Florence Knapp on The Names
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A talk she couldn’t unhearThe book began at a single event during the pandemic, when Knapp was sitting in a women’s group and found herself fighting to hold it together in front of a stranger whose daily reality had just become impossible to set aside.
About six months before I started writing The Names, when it was still the pandemic, a woman from a domestic violence charity came to speak to a women’s group that I belong to. While she was talking, I was struggling not to cry, and I felt like I couldn’t cry because this was her job and her reality every day.
Writing, for Knapp, is where thinking actually happens. She had kept diaries since childhood, but the connection she describes below explains why a subject she couldn’t speak about aloud became one she had to put on the page.
When I have a pen in my hand and writing it down, that’s the point where I start making sense of my own thoughts, in a way that I often don’t do when I’m talking out loud. [paraphrased from audio]
The domestic violence talk had given her something she could not think past. Writing Cora’s story became the mechanism for thinking through it.
Long before the talk that triggered the novel, Knapp had been drawn to how invisible forces accumulate into a life. She grew up with an unusual name, moved to Australia at six, and stood in classrooms of strangers already aware of being pre-read before anyone knew her. That personal history attached to a broader preoccupation she had carried for years.
I’ve always been interested in the things that shape us as people. Whether that’s our upbringing or our circumstances or the people we’re friends with, or just those moments where something that’s meant to be an innocuous, small thing happens, but it lodges in our psyche and becomes a far bigger thing. To me, a name felt at the root of all that, because we’re given it at birth, and then carry it through the whole of our lives with us.
The image of naming as shelter came through in a TODAY show conversation, where Knapp described what parents are really doing when they reach for the right word for a child. The three names in the novel, Gordon, Julian, and Bear, were each chosen to test a different version of that hope.
naming a child feels like it has so much possibility and it feels like creating like a little nest that the child’s going to live in, and you hope that it’s going to have enough space for them to be able to spread out and become the person that they want to be in it [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Seven-year stepping stones and cheap notebooksKnapp drafted the novel by hand, on her sofa, over five or six months. She had written earlier unpublished manuscripts at a keyboard and learned what went wrong. The method she describes below is a direct correction of that experience.
Handwriting slows me down in a useful way. On the keyboard, I over-edit constantly because it’s too easy to perfect sentences immediately. There’s also something psychologically freeing about writing in cheap notebooks. With notebooks, there’s more permission to be messy.
Previous manuscripts had stalled in their middles. The structure she stumbled into for this book solved that problem and also, she came to realize, gave her a way to work with emotionally difficult material without being overwhelmed by it.
By accident, rather than design, the structure of this novel offered me a relatively safe place to work from as a writer. We revisit in turn each version of this boy’s life every seven years, and once I’d established that, it provided a very clear roadmap to follow.
In the Virgin Radio UK interview, Knapp described what the seven-year intervals meant at the level of the sentence, not just the outline. Because entire years are elided between visits, she could strip out the mundane and go straight for what defined each character at that moment.
it meant she wasn’t ‘handing the reader a kind of bowl of spaghetti to try and make sense of it,’ and it let her focus on the defining moments for each character and ‘just do away with all the kind of everyday stuff and just really go for those moments.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Knapp’s writing weeks were not continuous blocks. She describes a rhythm that looks like stopping but functions as a second stage of composition, one that the pressure of an open document would have short-circuited.
I might spend, say, seven or eight days writing really intensively, and then put the book to one side and maybe not write for another two weeks. And during those two weeks off, I always assume that I’m not thinking about the novel. Then suddenly I’ll wake up one day and be ready to go back to it, and I’ll realise that in the background, I was working out all the things I needed to be working out.
The epilogue was the last thing to settle, and it cost her more than any other part of the book. Her husband read each chapter as she wrote it, her daughter helped with plot, and her son supplied contemporary phrasing for younger dialogue. By the end of editing, the section that had defeated her most often was also the one she felt most certain about.
I cannot tell you how many times I rewrote it during editing. I really struggled with it, and got to the point where I was just thinking, I cannot rewrite this another time. But now, in the place where we ended up, I feel like it was really worth going through that pain barrier.
On what the book is wrestling with
What you show and what you withholdOne of the central structural decisions was how much space to give the abuser. Knapp made an early commitment, drawn from thinking about what domestic abuse narratives risk doing when they try to explain a perpetrator’s psychology, and she held to it across every draft.
Because I didn’t want the novel to become his story. When writing about domestic abuse, I was very conscious of not giving the abuser too much power or narrative space. I wanted the focus to remain on Cora and the children, on the people surviving him, rather than on understanding him.
Knapp showed Gordon’s capacity for violence early, then pulled back from graphic repetition. The quieter mechanisms she chose to foreground instead are ones that operate without leaving visible marks, and she considered them just as devastating as physical violence.
I felt I needed to show the reader what Gordon was capable of early on. Otherwise, you wouldn’t fully understand what Cora was facing. But after establishing that reality, I didn’t want the novel to become scene after scene of graphic violence. Instead, I wanted to explore the quieter mechanisms of abuse: isolation, humiliation, financial control, gaslighting, threats involving children. Those forms of violence can be just as devastating.
Writing Cora’s attempts to leave, and watching Gordon block each one, changed what Knapp understood about a question people often ask from the outside. By the time she finished the novel, the question had stopped feeling like a question.
And when I walked alongside Cora in this novel, every time she would try to do something to change her situation, Gordon had a road block to put up. By the end of it, I felt as though I understood why someone stays, and why they might believe that it’s the safest choice for them.
What she wants us to sit with
Further than they feared from their fatherKnapp was explicit, in multiple interviews, about what she did not want the novel to be. That clarity about what it was not helped her locate what it was actually for, stated here in a single sentence that came to function as her working thesis.
For me, the actual violence is not the main point of the book. The point is how people survive awful things, and then go on to heal.
All three boys in the novel grow up fearing they may have inherited Gordon’s capacity for violence. Knapp described the emotional destination she was building toward in the TODAY interview, and it is the thing she most wanted readers to leave with.
by the end of the novel, both Bear and Julian are in a place where they understand they are not their father, that the distance between themselves and that inheritance is far wider than they feared, and that they each get to decide who they want to be. [paraphrased from audio]
When a Goldsboro interviewer asked Knapp what single word she hoped readers would feel, she answered before she explained. The word came first, and then she made the case for it in terms of how the novel earns it.
Hope. My novel explores what it is to be shaped by our circumstances – our name, our upbringing, the people around us. By fate and chance, too. But what I hope readers will also feel is that, as Bear, Julian, and Gordon move into adulthood, each gains a sense of his own autonomy and, within the context of the hand he’s been dealt, does ultimately get to decide the person who he wants to be in the world. To me, this feels a profoundly hopeful thing.
Since publication, reader responses have arrived that Knapp did not anticipate. The volume and intimacy of those messages confirmed that the territory the novel covers is far more common than she had understood when she began writing it.
The thing that has really shocked me is how many people I’ve heard from who have said that this has been their situation or upbringing. It means a lot to me to hear from people, but I feel so sad that it feels so familiar and real to people.