What does it mean to carry trauma across generations? How do we navigate identity in a world that demands definitions? In Glass Tower, published in 2023, Sarah Isaacs tackles these questions with unflinching honesty. Here, she shares the creative process behind her novel and the personal journey intertwined with its characters.
Joy Watson: Glass Tower is a beautiful, complex achievement. Tell me about the inspiration for the book. When you started writing it, how did you plan to hold the complexity of its subject matter?
Sarah Isaacs: Perhaps it’s because I’m a photographer, but when I was thinking about this book I kept coming back to an image of a pebble landing in water and sending out ripples in all directions.
I’m a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse and it was only in my mid-thirties that I began to appreciate the implications of that wound for my parents and brother, how it blended and bumped up against their own wounding and set off a sequence of emotional responses that continue to this day.
I wanted to explore what the pain of a victim’s family might look like, to give the ripples a face and a name and to situate them in the larger context of South Africa trying to recover from its own deep wounds.
I wasn’t yet sure who my characters were going to be, what obstacles they would face and how the storyline would play out, but I knew I was interested in the way pain travels. I’m easily overwhelmed when I think about family trauma — how it spreads from one member to another, both in the present and intergenerationally through time — and that simple image of a stone hitting the water helped to calm the jumble in my head and get me going.
Safe to say the themes of this book were personal, so to go back to your question of how I planned to hold it — I’m not sure I did have much of a plan. Just an image of a stone and the understanding that I’d need to take time between writing to cry it out and not let those tears land too heavily on the page.
I also took great comfort from the small details that fill a storyline. Themes are important but it’s the characters that take you from one sentence to the next. Whenever the subject matter started to feel too heavy, I found reprieve in focusing on my characters, what they were wearing, saying, seeing, doing with their hands. Dialogue, physical surroundings, mannerisms. Focusing on the small everyday details released me from the big stuff, at least enough to finish my manuscript.
JW: I really enjoyed the ‘realness’ of the characters — seeing them through their own words and through the eyes of others. How did you stitch them together so meticulously?
SI: It was an absolute mess at the outset!
I wrote the first 20,000 words jumping randomly from one character’s head to another, thinking I could unpack the interior worlds of my four central characters all at once without confusing the reader. Much of what I’d written before Glass Tower had been in the first person, and I didn’t appreciate how clear your point of view needs to be when switching to a third person narrative.
Leilah, the survivor at the centre of the family trauma, opens the book and she was the most challenging for a number of reasons. Though we had childhood sexual trauma in common, I had to draw a clear line between the two of us, to fictionalise her while dipping into those same feelings I’d experienced at her age.
Stepping into her shoes was tough: trying to strike that balance between naivety and suffering, tapping into teenage vernacular from the mid-nineties, seeing the world through a 13-year-old’s eyes, feeling all that teenage angst — nothing about it was pleasant. It was also challenging because Leilah was the beginning. I didn’t know who she was yet, and while trying to get to know her, I was also developing her parents, Elke and Dwight, and Frankie, the girl she meets and falls in love with.
The upside to spending so many months working on Leilah, was that by the time I reached Elke, Dwight and Frankie’s parts, I knew quite a bit about them, albeit through Leilah’s eyes. Adding pieces to their character’s was less of an uphill battle than starting from scratch, as I had with Leilah.
Elke and Dwight had their own challenges, namely that I don’t know what it means to have a child. There I turned to my mother for guidance, trying to understand what it feels like to see your daughter suffering, how a parent might deal with that while processing their own grief.
I’ve had feedback that this is a mother-daughter story as much as a love story between Leilah and Frankie, and I have my mom to thank for that. She’s always been very open with me about her experience of motherhood, and that helped me trust my understanding and development of Elke.
Frankie was a joy to write. I’d say she’s my favourite character, and because she came last I knew her intimately by the time I got to writing from her perspective.
You always hear about writers getting into “the flow”. That feeling evaded me for much of the novel but was kind enough to pay me short visits for Frankie’s section.
To your question of how I stitched the characters together — it was instinctual more than planned. I was going through my own, very gradual, process of getting to know them and how they related to one another. Perhaps that unveiling within myself lent itself to a connectivity between the characters that felt natural, or human, on the page.
JW: Race and the way it drives the construction of identity is a key theme in the book. Tell me a bit about your creative process for bringing such a complex theme to the fore.
SI: Writing about race was frightening. Like Leilah, I am a white-presenting mixed race woman, and I’ve always carried a lot of shame around that.
Growing up during apartheid and early democracy, I was scared of being discovered as non-white, and as I got older I’ve struggled to process the racialised trauma I carry because of the immense privilege my “white” skin affords me.
I carried this shame with me into Glass Tower, afraid of centring a character like Leilah whose internalised racism and privilege echoes my own. But whenever that fear got in the way of my creative process, I turned back to the freedom that fiction allows us.
As a writer, I can’t offer any neat solutions to the very complex, very nuanced, and very painful history of racism in South Africa. But as a narrator of a fictional story, I wanted to develop specific characters — at a specific time, and in a specific place — who could pick at the seams of racial constructs in a way that would interest rather than alienate readers.
Through Glass Tower, I learnt to embrace my own mixed identity. Rather than something to be scared of, I used it as a vehicle to explore ideas of belonging, alienation and shame, the confusion of occupying an in-between space when you’re trying to work out who you are. Because Leilah was fictional, I could empathise with her in ways I’ve never been able to do with myself, and that helped to shush the critical voices in my head, to focus on the humanity of my characters rather than intellectualising race and trying to land on the “right” answer.
JW: The book deals with the theme of the secrets we keep — especially in relation to how we have been harmed. Talk to me about how you brought this to life so vividly in the book.
SI: I have a kind of fascination with secrets, the hidden truths that we carry around. They hurt us but they also belong to us, they are all ours — to do with as we wish because nobody else knows they exist.
As freeing as sharing one’s most painful secrets can be, there is also a possessiveness I feel over them, like I have the power to control the secret so long as it stays inside me. It’s a self-destructive belief, but it also made me into a very good secret keeper, which as a survivor of sexual trauma I spent many years convincing myself I needed to be.
With Glass Tower, I wanted to unpack secrecy from this angle, as sinister but also alluring, valuable.
One of the turning points in the book is when Leilah and Frankie trade their darkest secrets with one another, like a currency, exchanged as a means of deepening their connection and commitment to one another. How they go on to handle each other’s treasures forms one of the threads of the book, with Frankie deciding to pass Leilah’s secret on, betraying her trust in the hope that Leilah will get the help she needs. Out in the open, the story of Leilah’s abuse takes on a life of its own, changing shape as it affects the lives of each new character it touches.
Perhaps that’s what lent vividness to this aspect of the story — I wanted Leilah’s secret to be one of my characters, to have an arc of its own, one that starts to develop once Leilah lets it out from under her control.
In its telling and development, it releases secrets held by Elke, Dwight and Frankie, and those then become their own characters, changing shape as they trade hands. In that sense sharing a secret is not too different from giving your manuscript to someone to read. The story is all yours, and then it is not. It develops its own life, its own ripples that you are not privy to. How people respond to, take care of, pass on your secret/your story is not under your control. Maybe that’s one of the reasons sharing one’s wounds and one’s work is so daunting. They stop belonging solely to you.
JW: Love and redemption emerge as a key theme in the book — especially in relation to being hurt by others and needing to draw boundaries with those who hurt us. Can you talk a bit about the complexity of redemption and on what terms we can let those who hurt us back into our lives?
SI: Redemption is, as you say, complex, and when it comes to real life, I don’t know that I have much wisdom to share.
Through fiction I found freedom to explore its complexity without needing to tie it up in a neat bow. As Glass Tower progressed, the fractures between my characters could show signs of repair while keeping the promise of redemption somewhat elusive, which is what I suspect redemption is: elusive.
The way we talk about boundaries online makes it sound so straightforward — do this thing and you won’t get re-hurt. It’s appealing, I think, because the reality of forgiveness and redemption is so messy.
I remember the first time the idea of forgiveness raised its head between my mother and I. We were sitting in my therapist’s office, I was about 15, and she instructed my mom to apologise to me for not protecting me from my abuser, and then I was supposed to say: “I forgive you, Mom”.
We played out the scene as we were told to, but it was completely hollow. They were just words, not backed up by the feelings we were theoretically supposed to feel. It was only 15 or so years later that I was able to acknowledge any real anger towards my mom.
Of course, I’d experienced varying degrees of resentment towards her over the years — as with every other mother-daughter relationship that I know — but it was only as an adult that I could explicitly say to her, “you didn’t protect me” and for her to respond in a way that rang true to me.
In my experience, forgiveness is long and slow because processing hurt is long and slow. And it’s not a big “Aha” moment when it does happen, signalling the need to set new rules as one moves forward. Forgiveness tends to creep up on me, sometimes without me even realising it.
How does one set boundaries for those who’ve hurt us when our deepest wounds are so hard to outline, morphing as they do over time, gaining and losing ground in unpredictable ways, with no real start and end point? That’s why I enjoyed exploring this theme from a fictional standpoint.
What happens between my characters once they take those first steps towards redemption is up to the reader. I didn’t have to consider what their terms of forgiveness would look like because a fictional tale is never really finished. As for those terms in my own life? I’d have to say they remain elusive. My feeling is that those we love are likely to hurt and re-hurt us, and vice versa. I have yet to learn how to shield myself from that. DM