The multi-point of view emerged from realising I needed to tell a couple of character’s different viewpoints for the plot to work. The story is told from the perspectives of four different characters. For me, telling stories about young, gay lives is just a small way I can help tip the balance in our favour. I wasn’t even watching the show at the time, but I loved that this audience had the passion and the anger to respond and say “stop discounting our lives”. Why would I? When they’re so badly needed? Besides, with everything that has been going on television, with the outcry after the death of a teen lesbian character in The 100, and the general annihilation of lesbian characters on our screen, we need representation now more than ever. I’ll never write a book that doesn’t have at least one LGBTQIA main character. I felt that lack when I was a younger reader, and I still feel like it exists now. Why do you choose to write LGBT young adult fiction?īecause there are still not enough books about young gay women. Or there’s Olivia, who,being away from her usual world allows her to see that maybe she’s just been living a kind of set existence, and to feel like maybe she can break from it a little. She’s quit running and she’s come out to her parents and her best friend, and now she wants to see what it’s like to live life outside the strictures of training. That’s what Liza’s doing in Points of Departure. It’s also a time where you can shed your old self a little, and try on a new kind of being. All the girls in this book are going through something, and being overseas with people they don’t know make these experiences more intense or unexpected or serendipitous. Travel is a time of change and growth because it challenges your comfort zones. And I wanted to use travel to mark this period of transition from high school to university-and supposed adulthood in Points of Departure. I feel like travel is a real rite of passage, so it’s a great setting for a story about eighteen-year-olds who are coming of age. I’m actually surprised there aren’t more Aussie YA books about the experience. Even though we come from this great big island far from anywhere, where getting on a plane is an arduous and expensive thing to do, we do it anyway. What made you write a book about travelling?Īustralians travel.

Melbourne based author Emily O’Beirne spoke with us about her new novel Points of Departure, travel, and why she decided to write from a multi-point view. 82 Emily O’Beirne We sat down with Australian author Emily O’Beirne to discuss travel, LGBT fiction, and what we can expect next.

Points of Departure by Emily O’Beirne