The Perfect Child
The Perfect Child
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Lucinda Berry on The Perfect Child
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The parents no one was asking aboutThe book grew from a gap Berry kept noticing in public conversation about troubled children. Clinicians, journalists, and the public trained their attention on the child, and on whether the parents were to blame. The people living inside the marriage, absorbing the daily cost, were simply not there.
We only talk about the parents in relationship to their children’s issues when we’re pointing the finger directly at them. We vilify parents of children that are struggling as much as we do the child. We never stop to consider how it might feel to be that parent.
Before she could frame the parents’ experience, she needed the right kind of parent to write about. Her hospital years gave her a specific figure who haunted her: not neglectful or absent, but devoted, well-resourced, and watching something go terribly wrong anyway.
I was intrigued and obsessed with the parents who were incredibly involved in their children’s lives. Who sent them to the best schools. Gave them the best education. Surrounded them in love and support. Who then watched as their child did something terrible.
Years after finishing the book, when Berry described the prequel she wrote to go even deeper into the same territory, she named the question that had been driving the project all along. The phrase “even further” places where that digging started.
It digs even further into answering my favorite question — can a child be born bad?
That question, left deliberately unanswered in the novel, is what Berry built Christopher and Hannah Bauer’s entire ordeal around.
How she wrote it
A hospital notebook and a deleted epilogueThe raw material for the book was not invented at a desk. Over roughly twenty years of clinical work in inpatient psychiatric units and treatment centers, Berry kept a private archive of the most unsettling things she witnessed, written on the margins of assessment forms and transferred to a single notebook.
I had a notebook in one of my offices at the hospital that was reserved for character ideas and stories taken from my cases. I made notes about all the frightening and unsettling things the children said or did so that I wouldn’t forget. I scribbled side notes in the margins of the testing protocols I used that I transferred into my notebook after we were finished with our assessments. I still have this notebook in my office at home today.
When readers ask whether the events in the book are real, the question is more complicated than it looks. Berry’s answer draws a line between legal fiction and clinical fact.
The answer to that is a disturbing yes. Everything I write is loosely based on my personal experiences with clients or birthed from a traumatic story someone shared with me in real life.
The book’s abrupt, unresolved ending was one of its most divisive choices. An epilogue existed in an earlier draft. Berry cut it after deciding that closure would undo exactly the effect she wanted, and she explained the decision directly to a reader who asked.
I didn’t want to tie things up. I wanted people to feel exactly as you felt — like you’d just gotten off a rollercoaster and been slammed to a stop after a wild ride. I also knew that I didn’t want to end their story because there were so many different angles that I wanted to leave open for potential sequels.
The psychological acuity that shapes the novel’s POV structure came from the same professional training that filled the hospital notebook. Berry has described the overlap between the two disciplines in terms of a specific skill rather than general expertise.
The same skills that made me a successful psychologist, also make me a good writer — to get inside the psyche of another person. The ability to set aside my own thoughts, ideas, and prejudices in order to view the world through someone else’s lens.
The personal thread
Control she could not have in the clinicWriting and clinical work ran alongside each other for years, and a reader on Goodreads asked whether sustaining both at once was difficult. The answer revealed that for Berry the two were not in tension but in balance: fiction gave her something the clinic never could.
Not at all. In some ways, writing was the way that I coped. I always have control over the story. I don’t ever have control over the trauma in real life.
The writing ambition preceded the psychology career by decades. Berry has described wanting to be a writer before she was old enough to hold a pen, and the two-decade clinical detour as a route back to something she had always been headed toward.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. Before I could write, I used to have my mom write down stories for me... My education and experience for twenty years is psychology and trauma, but I found a way to bring my two passions together.
What she wants us to sit with
The character you were not supposed to enjoyThe moral discomfort Berry designed into the book is not accidental. Janie, the foster child at the novel’s center, is written to attract as well as disturb. Berry has been open about the fact that the character’s pull on readers is part of the intent, not a side effect to apologize for.
The Perfect Child was one of the books I had the most fun writing... I just love writing about Janie. She’s one of my favorite characters. I just love a good child psychopath. I can’t help it.
A reader who finds Janie compelling rather than simply monstrous is already inside the question Berry set out to ask. The enjoyment is the point.
The novel refuses resolution, and that refusal is structural. Berry made a deliberate choice to delete the epilogue and leave the central question open. What she wants readers to carry out of the book is not an answer but the experience of not having one.
I didn’t want to tie things up. I wanted people to feel exactly as you felt — like you’d just gotten off a rollercoaster and been slammed to a stop after a wild ride.
Underneath the thriller mechanics, the book is an argument for taking the parents’ interior experience seriously. Berry spent her clinical years watching attentive, loving parents get erased from every conversation about their child’s behavior, and The Perfect Child was her attempt to put a reader inside that erasure rather than above it.
We only talk about the parents in relationship to their children’s issues when we’re pointing the finger directly at them. We vilify parents of children that are struggling as much as we do the child. We never stop to consider how it might feel to be that parent.