Hannah Mary McKinnon, YOU WILL REMEMBER ME

[1:47]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowenscom. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Today is the last day of my official book blast, and these did not fit into any neat categories, but they were still here, so I'm putting them all together. We have one thriller, one story, and one travel book. So I am calling this thriller, travel, and tales. Enjoy this last day. I hope you've had fun following along on the book blast where I've released multiple episodes a day. Sometimes I do this when I don't schedule properly and I have too many at a time. So I hope that you have found in the last, what, twelve days or something, books and episodes that spoke to you. I hope you've ordered some of the books and enjoyed and keep listening because I'll have an episode, at least one episode a day all summer long. Hannah Mary McKinnon is the author of You Will Remember Me. Hannah was born in The UK, grew up in Switzerland, and moved to Canada in 2010. After a successful career in recruitment, she quit the corporate world in favor of writing. While her debut, Time After Time, was a rom com, she transitioned to the dark side thereafter. Her suspense novels include The Neighbors, bestsellers Her Secret Son and Sister Dear, and Now You Will Remember Me. Hannah Mary lives in Oakville, Ontario with her husband and three sons. Welcome Hannah. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss You Will Remember Me.

[3:44]Hannah Mary McKinnon: Thank you, Zibby. I'm so, so pleased to be here. Thank you. This book, oh my gosh, so gripping.

[3:51]Zibby Owens: I couldn't believe the ending. Like I, the whole thing was like, I just couldn't believe it. I feel like, I still feel like wet from the beginning, like with my feet all like messed up. I feel like I'm in the convenience store with the phone calls and Maya coming. I mean, just the whole thing. Was so visual and immersive that I feel like I need to like, I don't know, get in a warm robe or something like that. That's how I feel. Well, that's all the feels then. Pleased. Yes, all the feels. All right. Well, would you mind just quickly telling people who are listening what this book is about? And then how did you come up with this whole plot? That's what I really wanna I'd

[4:35]Hannah Mary McKinnon: love to. So it's a psychological thriller. You will remember me. It's my my fifth novel. And it's about the story of a man who wakes up on a beach and has no idea who he is or where he is or how he got there. But it's also the story of Lily who goes looking for her boyfriend who went missing after an evening swim. And there's another young woman who's looking for someone, Maya, who's searching for her stepbrother Ash, who upped and left town two years prior and hasn't been seen or heard from again. But the question is, is the man from the beach Jack, Ash, neither, or both? Oh.

[5:23]Zibby Owens: So I have to ask, is there actually the type of amnesia that you wrote about in the book where Jack or Ash or whoever he was could remember just the phone number for Maya, for instance, not know who it was? Or like, did you have to do a lot of medical research to figure this out? And like, where did this whole story come from? I did, yes,

[5:45]Hannah Mary McKinnon: to answer your very first question. Yes, that type of amnesia does exist, retrograde amnesia. And yes, I did an awful lot of research and reading into different cases and disappeared down multiple rabbit holes of cases of amnesia and how it works and how the brain works. And the inspiration for the book came from a real life case of amnesia. A gentleman from Toronto went missing on a ski hill in Lake Placid a number of years ago. He was skiing there with his family and he just vanished. He disappeared. So after they'd searched for him on the ski hill and in the village and everywhere they could think of, they feared that he had possibly fallen and and died or or had fallen and and was dying, I suppose, on the ski hill, you know, in the in in during a brutal winter. But weirdly, six days later, he showed up in Sacramento. And I don't believe he had any ties to Sacramento. And he knew that he had got on a truck and ended up in Sacramento, although why he went there really wasn't clear. And he was still in his ski gear when he showed up there. And the truck driver was never found. He never came forward to say, yes, I was the one who transported this gentleman across the country. But the man who went missing and then showed up in Sacramento did remember, I think he remembered his wife's either her name or part of her phone number or the entire phone number. I'm not really sure anymore because my story and his story seem to blend because that was the kickoff point for You Will Remember Me. So there are lots of different types of amnesia. Retrograde, where can only remember from a certain point forward. So you basically lose your history. Then there's, I think it's anterograde, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that properly, where you remember your past but every time you wake up all of the memories, the new memories that you've created have disappeared. And then there's another type of amnesia where you lose absolutely everything, but that's generally because of some psychological trauma. So it's your brain protecting itself. It's called a fugue state, I think. And that generally lasts maybe a few hours or days. It's absolutely fascinating to look into. Spent a lot of time looking at all these different cases and deciding what would fit my character best.

[8:18]Zibby Owens: Wow. I mean, to your point about like just ending up in Sacramento and people just disappearing into thin air, right? You have this whole line, you know, towards the end that it's so easy for people. You wouldn't believe how easy it is for people to just disappear. And that like gives us goosebumps, that line, because, gosh, you're right. I mean, there are all these attempts, but in truth, people do just vanish. How do you know if it's one of these cases or if it's some, I don't know, monkey business? I don't know. Yeah.

[8:51]Hannah Mary McKinnon: And very often, I mean, because adults, not children, but adults in particular, if they just vanish, there are thousands of adults every year who just decide to leave. Just to up and leave everything and I mean it's okay, there's birth certificates and passports depending on where you want to go, but Canada's really big, where I live. The US is really big, need not leave the country. So people do it apparently all the time. They leave. Which is awful for those left behind because the uncertainty, you just don't know what happened to them. Are they dead? Are they alive? Are they happy? Are they was it me? Was it them?

[9:34]Zibby Owens: It's very rich for writing books. That's for sure. Lots of material. I recently interviewed an author about this shipwreck called The Lost Boys of Montauk, but it was the same thing where these four men, they just disappeared. And they think it was the boat, but there's no closure. So some of the families left behind refused to believe that they had really died. Then there's the question even still, what if? You know, you just don't. I don't know. This so lack of closure is Yes. Anyway, you obviously tapped into that extremely well in this story. Oh, thank you. So this is a pretty dark tale, really. I mean, especially the way it ends up and everything. And it's like where I understand you you this is a rip from the headlines type of a story or it piqued your imagination to to read read it. It. But But it's it's another another to then spend all your time writing it and thinking it through and being in these in the minds of these characters. Just what appealed to you about this? Like, what drew you to say, like, I'm gonna spend all my time. This is what I need to write about. Like, I don't know. Like, whole thought process behind it. I mean, it's great. I don't mean to say you shouldn't have picked it or something like that, but

[10:42]Hannah Mary McKinnon: I'm not known for my everything works out for everybody in the end endings. Jenny Milchman, a friend of mine, she gave me the title Queen of Happily Never After, which I thought was hilarious. So I'm very drawn to messy characters and messy situations and putting really quite ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances and seeing what happens. So it's really an exploration of, it's two things I realized. It's an exploration of the dark side of things and people and how far they will, these seemingly ordinary people will go. But it's also an exploration for me to see what that feels like because from the safety of my own keyboard, and nobody gets hurt. Because I'm a rule follower. I always have been. I was the good girl at school. I'd always do my homework on time. If the kids now come back with anything for school, it always gets done right away. Know, drive the speed limit. I'm a bit of a nerd really. Know, I'm not a rebel really, never have been. I've had my moments, but few and far between. So being able to have these characters do these terrible, terrible things is interesting for me, really, to find out, well, what what would that be like? And and it's it can be really uncomfortable to go down these dark Machiavellian roads because that's just not who I am. I'm a very happy person. But I find it extremely interesting just to I don't have spies or detectives as primary characters in my books. It's just your ordinary people and seeing what might happen. And when I thought of the premise for You Will Remember Me with the Gentleman Who Went Missing, my first instinct was Oh wow, thank goodness he made it home. You know, phew, I wonder what happened. But then my second reaction was but what could have gone wrong?

[12:53]Zibby Owens: And that's the brain of the thriller author, I guess. So I find it I find it very interesting. I feel like every time now I'm thinking, what if this happened? Well, what if this? I'm like, oh, that's another novel. I should write that down. I was like, not that I'm gonna do it, but I'm like, if I were one of the novelists I was interviewing, that would be how I came up with my novel idea. Did you write me? Yes. Very often Yep.

[13:15]Hannah Mary McKinnon: Yep. Yep. That's right. I mean, last year's book Sister Dear came from something I heard on the radio. A woman was looking for the owner of a ring that she'd found at a playground, and she was searching for them through social media, and and the radio got hold of it, there was this segment. And my first reaction was, oh, that's so lovely. But what if, you know, the owner was had a much better life than her and then she gets jealous and starts talking to her and that's kind of what the premise is, not really, but kind of, that's where that came from. So you're right, it's the exact same thing. It's you hear something and you think, oh, but what if and then and that could be that could be a romance too, you know? It could it doesn't have to be dark.

[13:57]Zibby Owens: That's true. Like my books. So how did you even begin writing? What drew you to this profession? How did you start writing novels? My

[14:07]Hannah Mary McKinnon: writing career was born out of failure of another. So I was in IT recruitment before, very successful. I ended up as the CEO of pan European IT recruitment company. And my husband's Canadian, we decided to move to Canada for a better work life balance because we had none. We had three kids, we had twins second time around. The three of them in sixteen months. Rob was a stay at home dad. And it was very difficult. I had a very high powered career and I didn't have any time. As is the case for so many, I wouldn't see the kids much. I'd get up before or leave the house before they were up and come home often by the time they were already in bed and I travelled a lot. And Rob kept seeing his career behind the horizon because with three kids with a school system in Switzerland, it was very difficult for him to ever go back to work. So after many discussions, many, many, many and a few tears on my side, we decided to come to Canada. So I started up my own business and it was a spin on HR and it failed miserably. I mean crashed and burned and died within its first year of inception. And for the first time in my life, I didn't have that anchor. My career was my anchor. That was who I was. And I felt completely lost. I look back at it now, it's so ridiculous. I just want to go back and give myself a stern talking to because people who come to Canada who don't necessarily speak the language or not to the level I do because it's my mother tongue, have it a lot harder than I do. So I just want to go back and say, just shut up and take a seat, you know, figure out what. But at the time I couldn't see that. So my husband Rob, he said, well if you could do anything, what would you do? What would you choose to do? Because the question was, did I want to go back corporate and basically in the same situation but no family around? Or did I want to try something else? And I half heartedly said, well I've kind of always thought that maybe I'd like to write a book. And he said, well why don't you do that then? Because you're at this crossroads now, if you don't do it now and see what happens, you might never do it. And so I did, and here we are. Wow, that's

[16:31]Zibby Owens: a great inspiring story. I'm sorry about your career failure, but I don't even really view it as a failure after all. I mean, how great. Just it's just it just goes to show. You have to try, you know, even if it's and that the worst things that happen, sometimes they end up being the best things. Yes. That's right. And I think actually that the

[16:50]Hannah Mary McKinnon: fact that the company failed and that that was such a slap around the face, but it really was. It hurt, it stung badly. But it made me even more determined to succeed at writing because I didn't want to feel that failure again. So I was determined that this was going to I made tons of mistakes along the way, I mean tons, and it took me a while, but I got there in the end. Yes, I mean, the company failed, absolutely. But I learned a lot and certainly it gave me a lot of drive to succeed. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[19:29]Zibby Owens: So how did you just how did you do it? How did you just say, okay. Well, I'm gonna write a book. Like, what kind of mistakes did you make? What how did you learn how to do it? I mean, this is a really good book. It gripped. It was super it was tightly written and narrated and like kept your attention and the suspense, and you cared about the characters enough, but not too much. And I don't know, like, how did you learn how to do that? Well, the very first book I wrote was Time After Time. That was a rom com. That was my first

[20:00]Hannah Mary McKinnon: try. And I wrote it, I had the idea, honestly, the idea just came to me. It was 40 year old, 40 year old something other, woman with, maybe with some curly brown hair, which I have, who was questioning the decision she'd made in her life and was wondering how things might have turned out had she, for example, married her first ex boyfriend. And she then wakes up married to said ex boyfriend and she's the only one who realizes that this is not her life, so she's getting a glimpse. So it's Groundhog Day meets sliding doors. That was the premise for it. And I wrote the book really quickly. It was something ridiculous like six weeks. I gave it to my mom who said, Oh, this is great. And then I went out on submission, which is mistake number one, don't do that. My mom was great, but she wasn't going to say, Well, this is everything that's wrong with it, but the agents did. So I got a lot of rejections, but some of the agents were so kind and they said, I mean, were all kind, some of them went a little bit further and said, we love the premise, but the execution is flawed. And I thought, oh, well I can work on that. If it was the other way around, if they said it's a rubbish idea but you write well, then I think, oh no, I've got to come up with a new idea. So it was almost, it gave me validation that they liked the idea and if I reworked the manus manuscript and I worked really hard, maybe it would get somewhere. So that's what I did. And it took a while. I mean, worked on that book for probably two years. I took creative writing classes, which I should have done earlier on. I took one online, I took some locally, I did some workshops. And sharing my work with other unpublished authors was really, really helpful because we would critique each other's work. I learned a lot from them giving me feedback on my stuff, but also on me giving them feedback on theirs. So looking at something that I really liked and thinking, how did they do that? I must do this too. And I read a lot and that was really, I think it was practice, know, it just writing some short stories and getting feedback and having people say, yes, this is great, but here's where you can improve. So I didn't work in a silo, know, I didn't do all of this. Sure, yeah, wrote the manuscript on my own, but then the editing of it, I hired an editor to help me which was eye opening. She was from The UK and she pointed out all of the things that I shouldn't do. I thought, oh wow, I didn't know that. Because when you read something, let's take cliches, you know, you're not supposed to use cliches in writing unless you change them around and make them a little bit different or funny or whatever. And in the first version of Time After Time, I'd used a ton. And she said, no, no, no, you shouldn't use cliches. But when you read as a reader, certainly I hadn't realized that authors don't use cliches or not often. Hadn't, because if they're not there, you don't notice them, you know. But that was a mistake I never made again. So I learned a lot during the first couple of years of editing that manuscript. And every time I learn something, that's then acquired. That's your knowledge. It's something that you will never that you will either never do or always do depending on what it is. Wow. So are you working on anything now? I am. So next year's book is done. That one will publish in May again. I'm really excited about that one because it for the first time, I've written from the antagonist's point of view. From a man's I've done an entire book from a man's point of view that was Her Secret Son already. One that was a great experience. But this time I've gone a step further. So it's a man called Lucas who has hired a hitman on the dark web to kill his wife. And a month later, after she's disappeared and he's ready to cash in or getting ready to cash in, he receives a partial photograph of her in the post. But he doesn't know who's messing with him. He doesn't know what's going on, what they know, what they don't know, and what will happen next. So it's very different. It's still a thriller, but it's written from the antagonist's point of view, which was a completely new experience for me. So that was a fun one to do. So now I'm plotting book seven for 2023, I think. Oh my gosh. And what's the next one called? Do you have a title? We have a working title, but it's not finalized yet. So I'm not at liberty to say. Maybe it's not working. Maybe it's not working. That's right.

[24:39]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. Well, you've already offered so much advice for aspiring authors, but if you had to sort of distill down what you've learned and you were telling your younger self, what would you say?

[24:49]Hannah Mary McKinnon: I would say, give yourself permission to write, when people told me this, give yourself permission to write a rubbish first draft. I couldn't get my head around that. So the way I like to convey that is to say, it's a loose draft, a skeleton draft that only you will see. This is not a draft that you're going to give to anyone. This really is just for you telling yourself the story. Write a skeleton draft and then layer it and edit it because you can edit a page with words on it, you cannot edit a blank page. So that was something that I didn't understand at the beginning when someone said, give yourself permission to write a rubbish first draft. I thought, but why would I do that if someone's going to see it? Well, they're not going to because you're going to edit it. And the other piece of advice that was enlightening for me was when somebody said, if you don't know what happens in the scene or the chapter that you're writing, skip ahead. And I thought, wow, of course, now I'm a heavy plotter, so that really works for me. But even if people plot as they write, so they plot on the page, and they're stuck on a scene, but they know what happens at the ending because they at the end because they have that in mind, or three chapters down, come and write that. Because nobody said that a book, case in point, you will remember me, was not written in the order that it ended up. I wrote the characters. I wrote the man from the beaches chapters and then Lily's chapters and then Meyer's chapters and then shuffled them. And there was a lot of editing. It was a complicated book to write because of the whole amnesia thing. That was really tough. But you can easily skip a couple of chapters and then go back and backfill. Because what you write two, three chapters down the line might then unlock whatever's been blocked for the chapter that you've been struggling with. So that was quite enlightening for me. Thought, never even thought, skip it? Really? But it works. It's very old. Wow.

[26:57]Zibby Owens: And how interesting that's the way you wrote that book.

[27:00]Hannah Mary McKinnon: Yes, yes. That was a Mary Kubica tip. Actually. So Mary is amazing. I love her work. And she doesn't plot at all. Oh, she plots We like to say, we have the pantsers and the plotters, but we have people who plot before they write, and then we have people who plot as they write. And Mary plots as she writes. She discovers the story as she's writing it. But she has multiple point of view characters. And I asked her once, I said, how do you write those? How do you do that? And she said, well, I write the first character first and then the second and then the third, and then I shuffle, Which I think is a brilliant concept to do, and really worked for You Will Remember Me. But the fact that she plots on the page and does that just blows my mind. I love Mary. She's amazing.

[27:49]Zibby Owens: Well, Hannah, thank you. This was great. Thank you for all the entertainment and suspense, and you all remember me. Thank you. I really appreciate our conversation, and thank you so much. Thank you, Zibby. Thank you. This was so much fun. Thank you. Okay. Take care. You too. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.