So I became a commercial lawyer at a city law
firm and it seemed like everything was fixed and
set and would never change again. There was a
treadmill, and a tentative invitation was made to
get on it. But in my spare moments, I still wrote
these dreadful things that I would send in to the
Vogel Awards, or obscure poetry competitions,
and hope that one day a magical bridge would
appear. And I was lucky, because one did: in the
form of a letter from Allen & Unwin that informed
me that my latest manuscript was, indeed, quite
dreadful.
But they extracted something from the judge‟s
report which included the small, quite magical
phrase: “Lim can write.” And that completely
unsolicited and marvellously generous letter gave
me the courage to quit my day job and start a
second act as a writer.
Many of the issues that used to preoccupy me
when I was a lawyer, however, still inform my
writing for adult and young adult readers in lots of
unexpected ways:
When you’re a little kid, days seem to
go forever and it feels like nothing will ever
change. What you want to be when you grow up
seems both an easy question to answer (Fireman!
Astronaut! Writer!) but impossible to achieve.
How do you get from A to B when you‟re a kid?
I had tiger parents, so the gap between “writer”
and “how does one achieve the state of
writerliness?” always seemed particularly
insurmountable. School‟s great for telling you how
to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, but the
signposts for less “traditional” jobs were missing
back then.
My parents never read anything that wasn‟t a
newspaper or medical journal, so even my
decision to study law was met with consternation
and seen as unwise: there was no precedent for
lawyers in the family. When teachers asked where
the fascination and facility with language—rather
than science—came from, my parents would
answer in honest bewilderment, “We do not
know.”
Women matter and women’s stories matter
because I saw—day in, day out—how hard women
had to do it just to earn as much as men or even
speak up like men in a hostile corporate landscape.
My fictional female characters are always
going to be strong women because I have been
exposed to strong women who think on their feet,
and speak their mind, all my life.
Sociopaths come in all shapes and sizes. I‟ve
been exposed to the full spectrum of personality
types/disorders/drinking problems, so I know this
to be true.
The world is ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. In the firm I worked for,
partners came from “the wrong side of the tracks”
(and continued to live there) and reflected the full
gamut of nationalities. In my fiction, people will
break into other languages at random and be found
sleeping in their cars because they‟ve got no home
to go to. I‟m not interested in portraying the lives
of pretty people with mildly perplexing personal
problems because I don‟t know anyone like that.