CANADIAN AUTHOR EXPLORES THE DARK SIDE

Watch Out for Her bristles with themes of menace and paranoia

In real life I'm a very upbeat, positive person. I look at the world as a place of hope rather than sorrow. Yet I'm attracted to darkness in my writing. Samantha M. Bailey

Watch Out for Her Samantha M. Bailey Simon and Schuster

When Samantha M. Bailey embarked on her new novel, Watch Out for Her, she was driven by one main concern — to deliver another tense psychological thriller worthy of her earlier book, a surprise bestseller on both sides of the border.

What she didn't expect was that the arrival of a pandemic would mess things up so much that, during the writing of her latest, she would start questioning her own identity.

Yet ultimately she found relief through the creation of an unsettling story bristling with menace and paranoia.

“Writing this book during the pandemic gave me a place to put all my fears and worries into my characters,” she says from her Toronto home. “In real life I'm a very upbeat, positive person. I look at the world as a place of hope rather than sorrow. Yet I'm attracted to darkness in my writing.”

Bailey's writing career began in earnest on a momentous winter day in a Toronto subway station when she saw an exhausted young mother standing too close to the edge of the platform with her infant. It was then that Bailey, herself a mother and aspiring novelist with unpublished manuscripts sitting in a drawer back home, experienced what she calls her “lightbulb moment.” So she grabbed an empty gum wrapper and quickly scribbled down the premise for the novel that would become Woman on the Edge.

When that book appeared in 2019, readers were transfixed by its dramatic opening: a young woman on her way home from work is on a subway platform when a distraught mother thrusts her infant in her arms, pleading with her to take the child, and then jumps to her death in front of an oncoming train. The novel shot to the top of Canada's bestseller lists and was snapped up by publishers in a dozen other countries.

“This was the fifth book I had written and its publication and success stunned me,” Bailey says now. “My dreams had come true.” However, given her lengthy career background as a freelance editor, she also understood the need to deliver a solid followup to this initial triumph. “I felt immense pressure. I wanted to make sure that I would learn and keep growing with the second book.”

This new novel, Watch Out for Her, begins with the ominous words — “I watch people.” It was always there in the manuscript, and Bailey saw no need ever to alter an opening that defined her narrator so well.

That narrator, a self-confessed voyeur named Sarah, is so obsessed with keeping her family safe that her anxieties have precipitated a move to Toronto from Vancouver — away, she hopes, from a clinging young childminder called Holly who Sarah believes is intent on tearing her family apart. But, even in new surroundings, Sarah is unable to sever herself from the past, a past compromised by secrets and lies on all sides, and paranoid memories of those last months in Vancouver. The discovery of hidden cameras in her new Toronto home isn't the only menacing development. There are also sinister text messages, prying neighbours and inexplicably creepy occurrences at night.

“Woman on the Edge was about the postpartum state,” Bailey says. “The main character has a baby and suffers from postpartum anxiety.

But in Watch Out for Her, I wanted to focus on the middle period of motherhood when our kids are starting to be more independent, and Sarah is reaching that point in her life where she feels she wants to get back a missing piece of her identity as a woman that she feels she has lost.”

Bailey is straightforward about her main purpose as a novelist. “I write to entertain, to make people think and feel and, yes, to scare them — to help them escape from a real world that can be quite scary at times into a world I have created for them.” However, the new book provides more than just escapist thrills — with Bailey also exploring the idea that a woman can lose a part of herself when she becomes a mother.

“Where is our place as women when we are mothers?” she asks. “What about the guilt that a mother can feel when trying to establish some separation? That sometimes causes us to hide our true selves ... and that leads to lies and danger.”

Bailey was at a point in her own life when she felt she had achieved a balance between motherhood and career. But COVID intervened.

“When I started the book, I felt I understood Sarah but didn't identify with her because her life was so different. Then when the pandemic hit, I started to identify with her because I did feel I was losing a sense of my own identity as being separate from my children.”

Family concerns became dominant. “I had to fit my own writing in whenever I could,” she remembers. That often meant being at her desk in the kitchen at 4 or 5 a.m.

— Bailey has no personal office — if she wanted to fit her writing in.

“It was so I could always be there when my children needed me. The pandemic scared me. It made me very frightened and insecure because I didn't know what was happening. At the same time it personally taught me that I can't control the uncontrollable — which is something Sarah learns as well throughout the novel.”

As she persevered with this new book, Bailey began to appreciate its therapeutic value. “The characters are not me — they have their own lives — but I was more able to access their emotions because of the pandemic and everything I was feeling from that.”

So ultimately she felt she was gaining strength during this period. “I'm a survivor. I knew I would have to fight through all these fears and do what I hope I do best — which is to put everything I have in my soul into my work. In the end I'm so proud of this book because I worked so hard on it. I feel I gave it my all. I call it the book of my heart.”