Sarah Crossan is back with a new book about the death penalty

After the phenomenal success of ‘One’, Sarah Crossan is back with a new book about the death penalty. Jonathan deBurca Butler meets the award-winning author.

Sarah Crossan deplores the death penalty. When I ask her why, she pauses.

“How can I put this succinctly,” she says to herself, looking towards the ceiling and contorting her clasped hands and folded legs.

“You don’t judge a society by the way they treat those who are loved and admired,” she says.

“I think you judge it by the way they treat those who are hated and I don’t think justice should be vengeful.”

Sarah’s fifth novel, Moonrise, tells the story of Joe, a teenage boy from Staten Island who hasn’t seen his brother Ed for ten years.

When Joe was just seven, Ed was sentenced to death for murder and an execution date has now been set.

The novel follows Ed’s final days and Joe’s determination to spend that time with him.

As is often the case with Sarah’s work, inspiration for Moonrise was drawn from real life; in this case the story of Edward Earl Johnson who was executed for murder in 1987.

“I really started writing this book more than twenty years ago,” she explains. “I was doing Religious Studies and our teacher showed us Fourteen Days in May, a documentary about Johnson’s last fourteen days of life in this Mississippi prison.

Unsurprisingly, #MoonriseBook by @SarahCrossan is an absolute corker. A heartbreaking, beautiful gut punch of a book! 💙💙💙 pic.twitter.com/i7CEnVPvTH

— George Lester (@TheGeorgeLester) September 9, 2017

“It’s the most devastating documentary you can see. And there’s a moment in it when he is saying goodbye to his family and to his sister and the way she looks had haunted me ever since. So it’s her story.

“What I wanted to explore was the family; the families of these people on death row. What happens to them?”

Given that her reference point was a woman, some might find it curious that Sarah’s main character is male. Then again, Sarah relishes nothing more than a challenge and having looked at the relationship between sisters in her multi-award winning novel One, she was ready for a new literary expedition. “I wanted to explore brotherhood,” she explains. “I have three brothers [and no sisters] and I have a very different relationship with them than they have with each other. I just wanted to try writing from a male perspective and that was the big challenge, writing from the perspective of a 17-year-old male from Staten Island.”

The 39-year-old novelist has spent much of her life living between Ireland and the United Kingdom. She was born to Irish parents. Her mother hails from Meath and her father from Donegal. Although she moved to Churchtown at the age of seven and spent her pre-teens in Dublin, much of her later life has been spent close to London and bar the occasional appearance of a tinny Irish ‘t’, her accent is unmistakably English.

Moonrise, on the other hand, is undoubtedly American. Her characters eat in ‘diners’, wear ‘sneakers’ and don’t have a ‘dime’ to spend.

In the hands of a less skillful writer, all this might seem contrived, but Sarah’s short but vivid descriptions of America’s claustrophobic vastness and red hot sweaty bleakness pin the story and its language to its rightful setting – one she knows quite well.

“I spent about seven years there,” she explains. “I was living in Hoboken near Jersey City, which is not a million miles from Staten Island so the language would be similar. I don’t know if it’s some sort of sentimentality or just having the distance but I’ve written two books based in the States while being back in the UK.”

At first glance, Moonrise is a commentary on the United States and one of its totemic polemics but for Sarah the main theme is more universal.

“It’s about saying gooodbye,” she says. “The heart of the story is how do you say goodbye to someone? And we all have to do it. When a person dies, when marriages end. We’re saying goodbye to people all our lives so how do we do it and stay standing and that’s the question I pose.”

Astonishing, incredible and utterly utterly stunning. Thank you @SarahCrossan I will be recommending this to anyone that will listen. pic.twitter.com/Pxplty0X7y

— TCA LRC📚📚📚 (@TCA_LRC) September 10, 2017

Sarah has posed and, she assures me, still poses many questions for herself around her writing and its validity.

She admits that all the prizes and praise that was heaped on her masterpiece One has done little to relieve the niggling doubts. When I ask her to tell me about the good angel and bad devil that every writer carries on their literary shoulders she describes two devils; one that tells her she’s no good and another who makes snide remarks about her “thinking she’s great”. When I suggest that they “both sound like pricks”, she agrees. Writing, she says, is still difficult and she has been known to rip up texts and start all over again.

Moonrise was no exception she says and she probably doesn’t make it easier on herself by writing in verse; a medium some might find off-putting but which is in fact utterly enchanting, much like the writer herself.

“I feel verse allows the reader to create the story,” says Sarah.

“The reader has to do so much of the work that I don’t have to fill in all the blanks. It’s the same in picture books, the illustrator does a lot of the book once the words are written. But with this, there’s no illustrator and I think readers like that, they like the white space on the page because they get to write what’s left in their own hearts and minds.”

Moonrise by Sarah Crossan is published by Bloomsbury.