Kathryn Barker, currently a resident of Sydney, Australia, was born in Canberra, started school in Tokyo, and finished high school in Washington State. Subsequently she became a lawyer, earned a master’s degree in film production, and has worked in television. Her first novel, In the Skin of a Monster, won Australia’s Aurealis Award in 2015 for Best Young Adult Novel. PW’s review for her second novel, Waking Romeo, called it “fast-paced and brilliantly futuristic,” adding, “This Romeo and Juliet variation splits and swirls timelines, ecological collapse, and hope into a virtuoso five-act telling.” We spoke with Barker about inverting classic love stories, the challenges of writing time travel, and interrogating gender stereotypes.

Waking Romeo draws on a lot of literary sources: Shakespeare and the Brontës, of course, but also Dire Straits songs and other art that talks about Shakespeare. What made you decide to write a book based in these stories?

For me, it was because the love stories of Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights were presented as these epic love stories, and when I was an impressionable teenager I bought it hook, line, and sinker: like, they were the love stories. That’s what love meant. And when I got older, I looked back and reflected upon those two stories, and there was such a huge disconnect for me. What I had learned in real life about love was not the impression that I had when I read those books.

I wanted to explore that territory and what real love might look like with some worldly experience, as opposed to what I thought it looked like. And so I chose those two literary works because for me, they represented what I thought love was about—and it was really destructive and terrible for the women. There was something quite violent about it, and also really narrow. The women in particular were so focused on love pertaining only to this one man, and my considered experience of love many decades later was that it was much bigger: there was family, there was love of a planet. It was the broader perception of love that gave perspective when the boy didn’t like you so much, but I didn’t have that broader perspective when I was a teenager.

The book has timelines that split, join, and build. How did you build Waking Romeo’s timelines and ideas about how we affect our own futures?

With great difficulty, is the short answer! I just had this idea—where you just get this “what if?” And the “what if?” I had was “what if we could only go forward?” And then for years I would think about it: like, if we could only go forward, but we had the option [not to], what would happen? Would people actually stay in the now? And I decided that eventually they wouldn’t, and if they kept going, nobody would actually be investing in the infrastructure. It became this vehicle for exploring the idea of selfishness: the idea that if you assume everybody else is going to put the work in, it frees you up to travel forward and reap the benefits.

Jules’s future London is part ruin, part museum. What drew you to that time and place, and that atmosphere?

I was drawn to London because it felt like where I would naturally see both Ellis and Jules existing in their natural environment. In terms of the time, I thought a lot about this—in fact, I argued with my dad about this. We were trying to decide when would be the exact right time for this story to take place. I suppose what I wanted was a time and a place that didn’t feel too removed from now, but had had enough time for the impact of time travel to be really present. I also wanted an element of feeling like the natural environment was reclaiming some territory, which meant there had to have been enough time for abandonment to set in, but not so long that the people were unable to rely on elements of the past, because that made them feel too separate from the readership.

What I wanted also was this idea of people not actually embracing the now, because for me it’s a really big issue, particularly environmentally, in current times. I liked the idea of this tension where we had a settlement where they were effectively living off the remnants of what was no longer there, almost to a degree revering the glory days of the past. So they’re constantly confronted by the relics of the past, the idea of the future—which is where everybody has fled to—but what they haven’t really grasped, and it’s one of the progressions of the novel, is they haven’t invested in the now.

Jules’s disability is lightly handled, but pervades her life and self-image. How did you approach that portrayal?

With incredible care. It’s really important, I think, to treat this space with delicacy and regard. I worked closely with people who have disabilities to understand how I could make that a positive representation.

One of the tensions we had was that part of her character journey is learning to love all aspects of herself, and not see herself as in any way broken. But in order to establish that journey and that character arc, she has to have a degree of not necessarily self-loathing, but she can’t be at peace with that to start with—because in the absence of that disconnect, she can’t go on that journey. And that journey was really important for me, because I think that on one level, the way she changes is really important, to see how she comes to accept not just herself, but her world and what love is.

It meant that we had to set up a character issue and disconnect in relation to her arm early on. Trying to find the right balance of that was really hard. I was nervous that if, for example, somebody had internalized negative feelings about an aspect of their body, to read the first few chapters and see that there was a girl who was our protagonist who was also negative toward her own self might be confronting for them and uncomfortable for them. So finding the balance of how I could set up a character arc and a character journey while trying so hard to not inadvertently upset somebody that might have faced difficulties themselves was the main thing I was trying to achieve there.

Waking Romeo has a proactive, hands-on idea about hope, how we create change in the world, and what the limits of stories are. How did that emerge?

I think that part of it was me reacting to the source texts. I always felt that the adult me wanted Juliet and Catherine to be proactive. I wanted them to see beyond the limits of a romantic relationship and I felt that that was key to the wholeness of their characters. So the idea of proactivity, particularly in the female characters, was always tied to any retelling I would want to do.

But I think that in terms of the environmental message and the proactiveness of that, I’ve got kids, and I feel that it’s never been more important to invest in the now. If there’s an aspect of this book that feels like a call to arms, it’s because that’s where my heart is at the moment. If we languish, if we don’t actually accept that we have to change, there is less hope for the future. I remember writing the scene where Jules is speaking to her classmates and the things that she wants to say, the idea that we have to be the best generation there ever was or nothing’s going to change—it’s never felt more true.

The reality is, we are on a precipice. I think that the generation of kids now understands that the way that the generations before them have conducted themselves, particularly with regard to the world at large, isn’t sufficient. And the people who are going to end up paying the cost—it’s not us. It’s the ones that come after us.

This book takes a compassionate but pragmatic approach to the ways that a suicide attempt affects everyone around it. How did you develop those ideas about loss and the impact of even the suicides that don’t happen?

There was no getting around the idea that I was going to have to traverse the territory of suicide, because if you’re retelling Romeo and Juliet, even if they survive—which is obviously the way I’ve chosen to do this retelling—that is a core, central theme to that story. I had various discussions with my editors around this, and it couldn’t be the elephant in the room. They both tried to kill themselves after knowing each other for a short period of time, and it’s easy to gloss over how huge that is. You can’t really get to that point without there being considerable turmoil.

It was really important for me to explore how that impacted everybody, because I couldn’t write this story without the perspective of being a mother. The idea of living through that, just the thought of that is excruciating. So I couldn’t write the surrounding characters without putting myself in their position. But I couldn’t make it just about the impact that had on them.

It took a lot of drafts to try and find the balance of how I felt everybody was impacted. But one of the things that took me a while to understand in my own writing was there was a lot of explanation given as to what had led Jules to that point in time, but it wasn’t until I was in the later drafts that I realized for myself that actually, it had to be more than what was on the page.

There’s a line where she gives her reasons, but then she acknowledges that that was never the whole story, and I think that that’s a really important truth to acknowledge when dealing with this territory. It’s really easy to reduce motivations or circumstances to clear-cut things, and I think that when I read Romeo and Juliet, it felt clear-cut: she couldn’t be with the boy, he was dead, that was why. But when I was retelling the story myself, I felt that a portrayal of it as being caused by any singular thing was perhaps disingenuous to the fullness of the story. When I revisited Romeo and Juliet, I could see other threads that I couldn’t see as a teenager; I could understand with greater depth what perhaps brought that character to that moment and made suicide seem like the only possible choice.

How did that inversion of classic love stories look at gender?

One of the most important aspects of the book to me is having empowered women. I like the idea that we have an active, as opposed to passive, protagonist. But an aspect that was really important to me as well is when I first had this idea of rethinking love stories or rethinking the love stories that shaped me as a young woman, I was thinking only in terms of the women. I identified with Jules, I identified with Catherine; I looked back and thought, “What unhealthy examples.”

But it took a bit for me to then reflect, and go, “Well, hold on. It’s not just about the women.” And so it was really important for me to explore the flip side, which, in this story, pertains to toxic masculinity. So, the idea that as a young woman, I could read Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet and feel like there was no space for a really authentic portrayal of young love from a female perspective—the flip side is, I think it’s just as narrow for young men. When I look back on the way Romeo is characterized and the way that Heathcliff is characterized, there’s not a huge amount of space for, for example, femininity, for traits other than what is deemed masculine. And so one of the things that I wanted to explore with Ellis was his reflection upon the limitations of how his character had been portrayed.

I feel like this story wouldn’t have been complete without understanding how both stereotypes are extraordinarily limiting. As important as it is for young female readers to see strong and empowered female protagonists, I want young male readers to have the opportunity to identify with sensitive men. One of the key defining features for me of Ellis was that he was different to Heathcliff, and he inhabited the space that I think is how we have moved as a society: he has masculinity, but also femininity.

I think that they’re twin journeys. And, again, when I was a teenage girl, I could only see the female journey; as a grown woman, I can see how both characterizations have the capacity to let down our teenage readership if those love stories are presented as healthy. I want to present them with an alternative. I want to say, “Do you know what? That’s what it used to look like. But here’s what it can look like now.”

There’s a lot of attention to intergenerational conflict and inter-reliance in Waking Romeo. Why did you emphasize that aspect of the Romeo and Juliet story so strongly?

It was really important to me to show Jules’s parents and aunt and different generations—sometimes it’s easy to forget that we do live in that context. Shakespeare was great at understanding the impact of generations above and below, and I think that for me, that mirrored the idea of past, present, future. We exist in a timeline of humanity; the humans who came before us and the humans who come after us. We’re all profoundly interconnected, and I think that really includes how our protagonists’ parents impacted her, how the children will impact [her]?—that aspect of generational interplay. I always loved it about Shakespeare, and I think it adds to the richness of any story, particularly because it gives us a better insight into the primary characters.

Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker. Flatiron, $18.99 Jan. 4 ISBN 978-1-250-17410-9