“Last Girl Gone” | Heart-Pumping Realism Hits Close to Home

LITSTACK: What is your connection to Hillsborough, NC? What made you decide to set your novel there?

HETHERTON: I lived in Carrboro before Durham, and the Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsborough was only about twenty minutes away and was one of our top dog-walking locations. I must have walked around that loop in silence a hundred times with no thoughts of it as a setting in some book, and one day the whole prologue to Last Girl Gone basically fell into my lap, from…wherever these things come from…and the idea was set right where I was standing.

It took me a few more years to figure out the rest and write it all down. When I was finished, it had some major differences from the book as published, the big ones probably being that it was set in a small town called Westmark, Missouri, and that the timeframe was the 1980s. Both aspects were changed pre-publication for various reasons, but the town I created was a combination of Hillsborough and the small town where I grew up in Wisconsin. Since I’d let the story begin at a real location, a lot of the geography was taken from Hillsborough and the surrounding area. From my own hometown I took a sense of remoteness, of an insular community, of your town being a collection of buildings standing along in the middle of fields as far as the eye can see. Surrounded by so much empty space it might as well be a moat or a wall, keeping at bay the outside world while at the same time trapping the inhabitants inside. Real Hillsborough, as you know, is practically cosmopolitan these days; Durham and Chapel Hill are both less than half an hour away. I’m not too particular about setting specifics, as long as it serves things like tone. And for the tone of the story, Laura needs to feel like she’s on her own, so I made the story-version much more isolated than in real life.

But in the book, it’s both Hillsborough and not at the same time. Laura is washed up in the small hometown she’s always hated, but none of that is Hillsborough’s fault. The real Hillsborough is a perfectly nice town, and I was a bit nervous how the book would be received by residents (or the city council, or the chamber of commerce. etc.) But I hoped they would understand that what I did, I did in the service of the story. I took lovely little Hillsborough and I twisted it. I perverted it, to make it the kind of suspenseful, sinister setting that infuses a good mystery. But also, the town is the way it is because we’re seeing it through Laura’s eyes. Hillsborough is the place where she grew up, and she did not have a very nice childhood. But of course, bad childhoods make the most interesting adults.

LITSTACK: How did you decide that Laura would be a disgraced journalist? What do you feel it adds to her backstory?

HETHERTON: Let me take that in two parts. The disgraced part was easy. I wanted Laura on her backfoot, at a low point in her life, both to give the arc of her character some heft, but also because I wanted her to be in a position where she would be willing to bend the rules a bit, or take risks she wouldn’t normally take, to drive the story forward. Laura’s profession is everything to her. This is a person who’s spent their life feeling less-than, she wants to feel more-than, and the tool she’s going to use to fix it is her work. If the work is good enough, she’ll finally be good enough. I also think she’s reflective enough to recognize some of the psychological forces at play inside her head, and one of the main tensions of her character is ambivalence about her own ambition.

The job of an investigative reporter is to counterbalance powerful people and institutions, to take the side of the downtrodden, to empathize with them. It makes them a natural fit as a mystery’s protagonist. Laura does all those things, but she also wonders how much of her interest is self-interest—that question is always in the back of her mind. For someone so caught up in their career, I wanted to make her professional life as difficult as possible.

LITSTACK: You have such cruel characters sprinkled throughout Last Girl Gone. In addition to wondering how a friendly guy such as yourself can craft such villainous characters, I’m curious to know why and how you develop them. Did you feel it was important to have more than one? The plot takes lots of twists and turns, but who do you feel is the real antagonist at the heart of the narrative?

HETHERTON: It feels good to be bad! In my (very limited) experience as an actor this is also true, something about playing a villain is freeing. It’s fun. All those morals and rules are pretty heavy to carry around and throwing them off makes one lighter on their toes in a disturbing sort of way. 

Of course, I don’t (generally) do those things in real life, but one of the major appeals of a novel to both reader and writer is escapism, to leave this ordinary life behind for a while and take the ride. Another major appeal is the way in which stories, especially genre fiction, are places where the good guys win and the bad guys lose (to varying degrees). The real world isn’t like that at all, of course, so I take comfort when it happens in books. In romance, it’s happily ever after; in a mystery, it needs to be solved, and the responsible parties held to account. As a writer, I think there is a subconscious feeling that it’s okay to let that part of yourself come out, because it will in time be duly punished.