Samantha Harvey on Writing a Story Backwards QUOTES FOR WRITERS

If some of the most confounding times of our lives arise when we lose clear sight of how a situation came to be—what caused me to become unwell, what induced my husband to leave me, etc.—then the reverse narrative reclaims some clarity. It puts emphasis on tracing back what has seemed untraceable. It has a forensic quality, a power of retrospective illumination, of hindsight supplied by the reader who now knows more than the characters to whom the events are happening.