Spoilers for She Was Here ahead.
When I set out to write this book, I wanted to explore what we fail to notice because of the roles we’ve assigned each other — how a teacher-and-brilliant-student dynamic creates an expectation of normalcy, and what happens when that expectation turns out to be wrong.
Roz’s teachers, Ms B and Mr C, aren’t flawed for missing what she was going through. They’re human. I wanted the book to hold that — not to indict anyone for failing to see clearly, but to sit with how little any of us actually see.
Which is why Roz never gets a POV.
I thought about it. But giving her one would have undone the thing the book is actually trying to do. The whole premise is that you can’t know what’s happening in someone else’s head — you can only watch, and let new information recontextualise what you thought you already understood. Roz’s marginalia means something different once you have that context. Her teachers’ conversations with her mean something different, too. That recontextualising only works if the reader is left in the same position her teachers were: guessing, retroactively, at a version of her they never fully had access to.
So the ambiguity is the point. Maybe the notes in the margin were innocent. Maybe a conversation that felt significant to Ms B was a footnote in Roz’s life. You don’t get to resolve that, because the book’s actual argument is that you shouldn’t need to be right about someone in order to treat them with care. Handing you Roz’s interiority would have let you off the hook — it would have turned the book into a puzzle with a solution, instead of what it’s supposed to be: a case for kindness.
That’s the thing I hope carries over, more than any twist. You don’t get to know. You still have to be kind anyway.