Spoilers for She Was Here ahead, as usual.
People assume I write Venice because it’s home. That’s true, but it’s not the reason. The reason is that Venice doesn’t let anything stay hidden for long, and I’ve never found a better setting for a book about what happens when something finally surfaces (do you like my water puns).
The city has been standing long enough to watch nearly everything happen to someone. Weddings, funerals, betrayals, small private cruelties — Venice has been the room where it happens, over and over, for centuries. And it doesn’t intervene. It just keeps the record. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and whatever was underneath is, periodically, visible again. That’s not a metaphor I imposed on the city. It’s just what acqua alta does.
Which is why I’ve come to think of Venice less as a witness and more as something closer to a magistrate. A witness only watches. Venice watches and reveals, on its own schedule, regardless of whether anyone’s ready. There’s something almost punitive about that rhythm — not cruelty, exactly, but a kind of certainty that nothing gets to stay buried indefinitely. The flood doesn’t care who it’s inconvenient for, and there’s a flavour of divine retribution in that,
That’s the quality I needed for She Was Here. A city that only shows you so much, at a time of its own choosing, is the right place to set a book about a girl who only shows you so much, on the same terms. Roz’s margin notes work the way acqua alta works — they sit beneath the surface of an ordinary book, in an ordinary hand, until the right conditions bring them back up. Nobody goes looking for them. They simply resurface, the way the canal floor does, and once they have, you can’t consult the earlier version of what you thought you knew.
I don’t think Venice forgives anyone in this book. And I don’t think it’s supposed to. It just keeps doing what it’s always done — holding everything under the surface for exactly as long as it wants to, and then, without warning, not.
P.S. Did you catch the Hamilton reference?