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Many who’ve read THE INFORMATIONIST have asked if I see myself as Vanessa Michael Munroe, the kick-ass gender-bending chameleon heroine of the story, or if in some way she is modeled after me or anyone I have met. The answer is a very boring no—although if I had to pick an alter ego, Munroe would definitely be the one.
However, the idea of Munroe’s gender neutrality did come from real life in a loose sense, because I have either directly or indirectly experienced many of the cultures through which Munroe navigates. Unfortunately, a large part of our world is still very much a man’s world, and it made no sense to me that a woman, who is blatantly a woman, accomplishes what Munroe does. For her career as an Informationist to have a sense of realism, for her to be able to infiltrate and walk among so many cultures, she would have to either be male, or at times pass herself off as male. I wanted a female heroine, therefore who she is and her androgynous characteristics are a direct response to the environments she has been thrown into.
And certainly, there are also touches of me in her: the hijacked childhood, the having no home to return to, and always being the outsider looking in. Having spent a good part of my life craving knowledge and making up the educational deficit by teaching myself, it also came naturally to me to create a character whose world revolved around seeking information.
Reading Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series cemented my decision to become a writer—a rather spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment flash of “I want to do this. Wait. I can do this.”
There was no way I could have known at the time, struggling as I was to find a place in the world, with no education and no career path in sight, fighting for every dollar, that because of Robert Ludlum, my life would change forever. Reading his stories ignited the long dormant desire to create. I might not have had an education, or a background in books, or even much a clue, but the nomadic nature of the cult had taken me through locales as exotic as anything Ludlum had brought to life and I determined to write about them.
And, oh, how I loved Jason Bourne, that tormented man who was brilliant and invincible on so many levels, and yet was to himself his own worst nightmare. I didn’t set out to copy Jason Bourne when creating Vanessa Michael Munroe, heroine of THE INFORMATIONIST, but I did want the essence of that conflicted, capable character which was where the seed of her was born (no pun intended). Several months later, while watching the Tomb Raider movies, I was drawn to the sensual strength and confidence of Lara Croft, and felt that combining all of these elements into one would create a woman that made sense to me, a woman I resonated with and thrilled to write.
I was fourteen the first time I heard of Equatorial Guinea. With a postage stamp in one hand, and a world atlas on the floor, I’d set out in a quest to track down the origin of this place called Guinea Ecuatorial. I had already lived on three continents and in roughly a dozen countries, so I’d been around a bit and I wasn’t searching in, say, South America. I did eventually find my prize: two tiny specks, halves, one part sandwiched betweenCameroon andGabon and the other an island off ofAfrica’s west coast. Never in my wildest imagination could I have predicted that thirteen years later, I would be living on one of those tiny specks.
I’m often asked how much of the setting within THE INFORMATIONIST is real, and if any of the events described withinMalabo, the country’s capital, could have ever actually happened. They would, and they did, and many of theMalaboscenes were drawn from real life experience. These were some of the most difficult parts of the book to construct, the issue not in painting the landscape, but dampening it sufficiently in order to avoid turning the book into a travelogue, and to keep the action moving.
Born and raised into the Children of God, an apocalyptic religious cult that didn’t allow education beyond sixth grade, or access to television and books from the outside, I’d spent most of my life insulated from popular culture. By the time I was an adult and free of the cult, and had started writing THE INFORMATIONIST, I’d read perhaps thirty novels, most of them thrillers, and most of them, like Robert Ludlum’s books, not at all current.
I was determined to write “a fiction book” but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t set out specifically to write a thriller, I simply started with what I knew—the types of books that Ludlum wrote—and found out later about genre. And I hadn’t deliberately intended to create a world-class, kick-ass heroine either, it sort of just happened. It wasn’t even until feedback started arriving from test readers that I clued in to how strong—and perhaps unusual—Vanessa Michael Munroe is.
My initial desire in developing THE INFORMATIONIST, before there were characters, or plot, or any idea really of what I would write, was to bring to life some of the foreign and exotic worlds I’d lived in, and Vanessa Michael Munroe, chameleon and predator, a woman with her own brand of morality and a take-no-prisoners form of justice, gradually came alive as a result of the demanding locations through which the story traveled.
My background is, perhaps, a little unusual for a novelist, in that I was born and raised into the Children of God, an apocalyptic religious cult that believed education beyond sixth grade was a waste of time and didn’t allow access to television and books from the outside. Whereas many writers spend years reading voraciously before setting out to hone their craft, I grew up in a popular culture void: a worker bee—child labor, if you will, and in place of schooling, the majority of my adolescence was spent begging on city streets at the behest of cult leaders, or as a worker bee child, caring for the many younger commune children, washing laundry and cooking meals for hundreds at a time.
Our reading material was restricted to the cult leader’s writings, the King James version of the Bible, and a very select few approved outside books. Novels and other forms of fiction were strictly forbidden. There weren’t a lot of career options, either. No talk of “what I wanted to be when I got older.” In this environment, imagination became a survival mechanism and eventually I began to write, sneaking stories into notebooks until eventually I was discovered and these laboriously handwritten stories were confiscated and burned. I was punished, and then ordered to never write fiction again.
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