While I was lucky enough to grow up with loving, responsible parents, as an adult I encountered someone like Matt’s mother, Nikki Walsh. I ended up doing a good deal of thinking about what it might be like for a child to be in the power of someone like that.
This novel began its life as a short story that wouldn’t leave me alone. There was a longer story there for me to explore. Eventually I realized I had to sit down and go into its dark places and find out.
The Rules of Survival is “told” by Matthew to his little sister Emmy. This approach was a deliberate artistic choice to try to involve the reader more intensely into the story. If “you,” hearing the story, are not only yourself but are also a five year old girl…a child in danger…that does things to your emotions as reader that cannot be done when you are reading as an outside observer.
This is a realistic novel. There are children and indeed, adults, who are prey to people like Nikki Walsh. Many readers have written to tell me that they grew up in circumstances like those in the book. It’s not always the mother, of course. More often, frankly, it is the father. Sometimes, it is a boyfriend, a husband, or a wife. It might be a sister or brother who terrorizes the family. Or a neighbor. It could be anyone . . .