Had you always had them in different tenses? And when did that feel like it really worked for you?

So Ava's voice came to me in first person very, very immediately.

And I don't really like working in first person, but it didn't feel like I could write her any other way because her narrative voice is so strong.

She's so bold and she so knows what she wants that she always had to be in first person for me.

And then Alia's took me a little bit more time and she's in the third person past tense.

And that's because even though I feel like you can get a lot of like...

You know, there's beautiful novels and close third and you can feel very close to a character that way.

Was that like, did you want to pick the books and films that you loved at that age? Or did you want to make that separate to you? So you kind of had to imagine what the posters were in their room and everything like that.

Where do you feel like now, having finished Strange Girls, you feel with that question of who gets to tell a story?

I think you're so, so right that it still feels like a question.

And...

I think that makes more interesting art, to be honest.

I think if either of us had set out to write our books with that answer being like, yes, it is completely permissible for writers to use anything in their lives as fodder for their art, or if we had come into the novel sort of feeling that that was a completely morally reprehensible thing to do.

I think our books would have been far more boring than they are.

I think what's so incredible in a real piece of work is that sense of tension throughout it, not just with your character and the people that the book is about, but also internally, that sort of like really juicy sense that she's still exploring it and still figuring it out and that's what makes it alive.

How do you feel like your work, maybe you can describe a little bit briefly what your day job is and also how you feel like it really feeds in and helps accelerate your creative process when it comes to novels?

When did you start to think about it?

So I started to play with these characters around the time that my, uh, last novel, The Giant Dark, came out, and I was searching for a new idea, and these two characters sort of came to me.

And actually, the story itself has had many different forms.

It was a role-playing game at one point.

It was a period piece at another point.

The vessel kept changing, but these characters stayed the same.

I think I was really interested in their particular relationship, which is something that is in between a friendship and a romance and incredibly intense and difficult to name and difficult to define.

How do you think that happens?