Jill Malone

 

Jill Malone is, surprisingly, an accountant. Let’s face it: no one expects accountants to be able to write. Let alone write a book described as “terrific” (Jess Walter), “wonderfully impressive” (Sarah Waters), and “One of the best books I’ve read this year” (Ellen Hart). Jill Malone, it turns out, is an accountant who doesn’t pay much attention to expectations.

She’s been writing since the age of six, when she gave the world the story of Mac the Mouse with the Mighty Ears. (Can’t help thinking Walt Disney may deserve a co-credit there.) At college, she wrote the songs she sang in her all-girl band, and she continues to write music to this day. She’s also taught English–to high school students and to prisoners (guess which ones actually did their homework).

Her own writing begins with a single image. An image that she knows she has to explain. For Red Audrey and the Roping, she saw a woman dangling from a plane. For A Field Guide to Deception, it’s not a plot spoiler (more like a plot tease) to reveal that she saw a door opening on a bleeding woman and a voice saying, “What have you done?”.

As she figures out the story behind each image, Jill is careful to tie each story to a specific place. Place, she reckons, “is its own character.” So Red Audrey and the Roping belonged to Hawaii. And A Field Guide to Deception is set in Spokane, where she’s lived since 1996; during the writing process, she says, “I realized how much I like the weirdness of this place.”

While writing, she’s not afraid to let the story take her where it wants to go. A Field Guide to Deception evolved from “a notion I had about self-sacrifice being the highest form of love.”

“Turns out,” she says wryly, “I don’t believe that.”

Right now, Jill is working on her third novel, Giraffe People. About which this singer-songwriter turned accountant turned novelist says only that music plays a prominent part. I guess we should just let her get on with it . . .

When she’s neither counting nor writing, Jill can be found in the company of two dogs, a cat, her five-year-old son, and her partner. (Does she have more than 24 hours in her day?)

Jill won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Novel with A Field Guide to Deception.
Jill’s first novel, Red Audrey and the Roping won the second annual Bywater Prize for Fiction.

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