Rebecca Starford Q&A - The Visitor

Allen & Unwin
Jul 23
6 min read

We chat with author Rebecca Starford about her new book, The Visitor.

When Laura returns to Brisbane after the sudden and mysterious deaths of her parents, she finds herself back in her dilapidated childhood home, confronting not just grief but something far more unsettling. As strange events begin to unfold, she’s forced to question whether the house is haunted—or if the neighbour who had entangled herself with her parents is manipulating her at her most vulnerable.

Set in the oppressive heat and brightness of suburban Queensland, The Visitor is a gripping exploration of trauma, memory, and the psychological residue of the past. In this Q&A, Rebecca Starford shares the personal inspiration behind the novel, the Gothic potential of the Australian landscape, and why the ghosts that haunt us are often the ones we carry within.

A&U: Hey Rebecca, thank you so much for chatting with us! What was the first spark or idea that led to The Visitor?

RS: The house in The Visitor is actually based on the house my wife and I lived in when we first moved from Melbourne to Brisbane. I had started working freelance for the first time in my career, and I was mostly working from home, so I was alone for long stretches of time while my wife was out at her job in the city. And there was something about the atmosphere inside the house that I found incredibly unsettling. It was so bright and hot, but there was this heaviness to the interior of the house (anyone who knows Brisbane will hopefully understand how that climate infuses a domestic space) – it just felt weighted, and strange. So this combination – being alone, and the quiet new environment – all started to feel a bit spooky for me. And I got wondering: Could I set a story about ghosts here, in this house, and if I did, what would it all be about?

A&U: The novel explores intergenerational trauma and grief—what drew you to those themes?

RS: I began exploring these themes from a more abstract position – with the question of what sort of things would haunt an ostensibly ordinary, middle-aged Australian woman, who is happily married with a teenage daughter. Someone, in many ways, who is not all that different from myself. The concept of trauma and grief evolved from decisions I made about the story itself, especially concerning what would draw Laura back to Brisbane from the UK, why she left in the first place, and what actually happened to her parents in the Outback. The challenge was to knit these elements together convincingly, and for the reader to feel both empathy and intrigue as Laura tries to understand a quite unexpected and bizarre personal tragedy.

I think Australians have a powerful and persistent understanding of intergenerational trauma in all its forms due the very nature of our country’s violent settler colonial history. These truths, which as a nation we have struggled to adequately examine, are always very near to the surface, whether we care to admit to this or not. It is impossible to write about ghosts in Australia and not acknowledge that history – what I tried to do in The Visitor is take a shared psychological concept and make that focus narrow and particular to Laura, and her own upbringing, personal history, and decision-making.

A&U: How does The Visitor speak to the experience of returning home—and finding it changed, or finding yourself changed?

MS: Central to The Visitor is the idea of not so much returning home (though that is of course an important element in the story) but what home and belonging actually are, and how they can be disturbed and unsettled. Laura is a character who has experienced all kinds of unsettlement in her life in relationship to home – she left Brisbane in her early 20s, lived in the UK with her husband and daughter but never felt quite “at home”, and then is forced quite suddenly and traumatically to return to Brisbane when her parents die. But this homecoming is fraught, and Laura doesn’t feel that same sense of belonging – in fact, there’s an active hostility to this setting, the possibility of haunting and danger, and it has profound impacts on her while she’s in the midst of grieving for her parents.

A&U: There’s a sense of unease around the neighbour who entwines herself with Laura’s parents. What inspired that character and her role in the story?

RS: My main interest in creating Anita was to bring someone from Laura’s past into the present, and this character needed to have intimate understanding of the house, Laura herself as a child, and Laura’s parents. I think there are some elements of my own childhood friendships that took form as I started to piece her together, but Anita plays a very important role in the story, and depending on how you want to read her, she has incredible symbolism. She tests Laura, and it was really interesting from a narrative point of view to see how Laura reacted to this as the story progresses and Laura’s unravelling intensifies.

A&U: Tilly is just 14, but incredibly perceptive. What was it like writing from the perspective of a teenager caught in something so eerie and adult?

RS: I’ve always believed teenagers are incredibly perceptive! My first book, Bad Behaviour, is told from the point of view of a 14-year-old as well, so I think that period of life is imprinted on my creative psyche. Tilly’s role in the story is two-fold: she bears witness, in a way her father Andrew can’t or won’t, to the unravelling of Laura, and there is something very sad about how this mother and daughter relationship fragments. She is a kind of control, I guess, for the reader to measure what is happening to Laura, and judge whether it might all be in her head, or whether some otherworldly manifestation has arrived at the house. Tilly, too, represents ideas of inheritance, and how we carry guilt and haunting from generation to generation.

A&U: How do you create a “Gothic” atmosphere in the bright Australian landscape, as opposed to the traditionally shadowy settings of European Gothic fiction?

RS: The gothic is a genre riven with secrets, repression, fear and the uncanny. We do certainly associate it with dark and stormy nights, the Northern Hemisphere, and ruinous manors and castles – but I did want to bring those psychological elements to Brisbane and test how I could produce terror in this setting. As I mention above, I do think there is something quite sinister about quiet suburbia, especially when you consider what it overlays, so I approached this challenge more practically. What sort of thing would freak out Laura, someone who has been through this recent loss of her parents? What are her emotional vulnerabilities? Once you start posing these questions, a pathway to writing this atmosphere becomes clearer.

A&U: Were there scenes that were especially difficult—or especially satisfying—to write?

RS:It was fun and challenging to create all that tension and unease for Laura – and how to best measure that as the story unfolds – and it was especially satisfying to explore how to depict haunting in an unconventional setting for a ghost story – a brightly-lit Brisbane home. I’m not sure I found some scenes more difficult than others, though I was always conscious of balancing that question: is this happening, or is this all in her head?

A&U: What do you hope readers feel or take away after finishing The Visitor?

RS: Primarily, I always hope readers have a thoughtful and entertaining reading experience. I hope, too, that they might even get scared reading The Visitor, that it creates discomfort, a sense of recognition. I never want to impose ideas about what to feel or think about a story, but I’d be delighted if they are intrigued by the ideas central in the book, and that it encouraged them to reflect on their own lives and relationship to home and our sense of belonging.

The Visitor releases July 29.