Leigh Radford joins our October Book Club to discuss One Yellow Eye, a haunting novel that explores love, grief, and survival in the aftermath of a pandemic.
Leigh Radford joins our October Book Club to discuss One Yellow Eye, a haunting novel that explores love, grief, and survival in the aftermath of a pandemic.
This week on Book Gang, we’re joined by Leigh Radford, whose haunting debut One Yellow Eye is our October pick for the MomAdvice Book Club. In this genre-bending debut, Radford weaves her personal journey of loss into a haunting story of a scientist, Kesta, whose devotion to her husband pushes the boundaries of science, ethics, and the human heart.
We explore how horror fiction can expose the hidden costs of caregiving, the complexities of grief, and the fierce hope that keeps us moving forward—even when the world feels unrecognizable. Join us for a gorgeous conversation that goes beyond scares and excavates the messy, unbreakable bonds that make us human.
In this week’s episode, we discuss:
📚Blurring Boundaries: Genre, Publishing, and the Art of Defying Labels: Leigh shares the real-world complexities of bringing a genre-bending novel to market. From conflicting advice on editing and cover design to the challenges of positioning a book that sits between literary fiction and horror, we discuss how One Yellow Eye’s unique identity created both obstacles and opportunities—from the UK to the US—and what it’s like to navigate a publishing landscape that often resists stories that don’t fit neatly into a single box.
📚 Writing, Caregiving, and the Birth of a Novel in Crisis: Leigh opens up about how caring for her terminally ill father during the pandemic didn’t just inspire her horror novel—it transformed it into an intimate meditation on love and the unseen burdens of caretaking. We explore how Leigh’s personal grief and resilience, coupled with her desire to honor her father’s memory, became the emotional core of this engrossing debut.
📚 The Humanity in Horror: Turning Fear into Connection: Leigh examines how horror, at its best, can be a mirror for our deepest vulnerabilities, allowing us to explore the messy realities of love, loss, and ethical choice. We discuss why discomfort on the page can spark empathy, how horror reveals the hidden costs of survival and devotion, and why stories that unsettle us are sometimes the ones that linger.
FREE BONUS BOOK LIST: This week’s bonus book list features 16 Zombie Books to Try This Spooky Season that play with those blurred lines between humanity and monstrosity. Patrons of the show will receive a printable list to take to their local library and a bonus spoiler chat with Leigh Radford, where we dig deeper into the ethical and emotional questions at the heart of One Yellow Eye.
Meet Leigh Radford
Leigh Radford trained as a broadcast journalist before producing and presenting arts and entertainment content for commercial radio, Time Out, The Times, and The Sun. She has made documentaries for the BBC, including Rilke’s Women for Radio 4. A former book publicist, she is a 2023 graduate of Faber Academy and the founder of Kenosha Kickers, her film and television production company. One Yellow Eye is her debut novel, available now wherever books are sold.
Gratitude to Our Show Patrons: This week's episode is open to all listeners thanks to generous donations made through Buy Me a Coffee and your community memberships. If you'd like to keep the conversation going, you're invited to join our Patreon Book Club chat on October 29th at 8 PM ET, where we'll dive deeper into spoilers, themes, and reader reactions. Membership is $5 a month, or you can prepay for the year and save 10%.
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2026 MomAdvice Book Club Books (All 12 Selections)
FREE BONUS BOOK LIST: 16 Zombie Books to Try This Spooky Season
One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford
Carrie by Stephen King
Misery by Stephen King
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
Mrs March by Virginia Feito
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
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Book Gang Podcast Transcript:
Leigh Radford (00:01)
Hello, my name's Leigh Radford and I am the author of One Yellow Eye.
Amy Allen Clark
Hey Book Gang! This week, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Leigh Radford and her knockout debut, One Yellow Eye—a novel that reshapes what we expect from horror by digging deep into the raw, unvarnished truths of love and loss. Far from your typical zombie apocalypse, Radford’s story lingers in the quiet aftermath, where the real terror is found in caretaking, memory, and the lengths we’ll go to for those we love.
One Yellow Eye centers on Kesta, a scientist whose world has narrowed to the four walls of her home and the husband she refuses to let go—even as he slips further from the world of the living. Drawing on her background in journalism and the profound grief of losing her own father, Radford infuses the narrative with both unflinching honesty and deep compassion, revealing how unwavering devotion can offer solace while quietly becoming its own form of captivity.
What stands out most is how Radford delves into the emotional cost of survival. Kesta’s determination to save her husband is both moving and unsettling, leading her into moral gray areas with no clear right answer. Rather than offering easy resolutions, Radford invites us to reflect on what it truly means to keep going—especially when loving someone means risking pieces of yourself.
The conversation you’ll hear today was recorded almost a year ago, and listening back now, it feels surreal. Since then, my own mother suffered a stroke—her journey taking her from the ICU to long-term care and, heartbreakingly, to hospice in just a few months. Nothing can truly prepare you for how isolating and overwhelming this season of life can be; you only understand its weight when you’re living through it.
Throughout this difficult time, Leigh has been a quiet, steady source of comfort in my messages. She’s checked in, offered kind words, and held space for my story as I once held space for hers. Leigh’s compassion has reminded me that connection can bloom even in the darkest moments—and that sometimes, the authors who move us on the page become the friends who hold us up in real life.
For me, One Yellow Eye isn’t just a novel—it’s a cathartic companion for this Spooky Season, and Leigh is as extraordinary a human as she is a writer.
In today’s episode,you’ll discover how her experience of loss and caregiving inspired the novel, the emotional journey of writing horror grounded in humanity, and what surprised her most about the realities of launching a debut during a time of personal and global upheaval.
If you’re new here, hi! I’m Amy Allen Clark, the voice behind the Book Gang podcast and the founder of MomAdvice.com, where we’ve celebrated a book club pick every month since 2014. This space is dedicated to debuts, backlist favorites, and under-the-radar gems. I’m just so happy to have you here to celebrate one of my favorite storytellers.
This week’s Book Club episode is open to all listeners, thanks to the generous support of our Patreon community and Buy Me a Coffee donors, who helped cover this year’s expenses. If you’d like to keep the conversation going, join us for our exclusive Patreon Book Club chat on October 29th at 8 PM ET, where we’ll dive deeper into spoilers, themes, and reader reactions from One Yellow Eye.
It’s a special week on Patreon! Alongside our spoiler-filled episode with Leigh Radford, you’ll get access to a brand-new FULLY BOOKED podcast and a 27-page newsletter packed with our latest book reviews and reading recommendations for October, created in partnership with getbookedwithlarry. And if you’re reading along with our Classics Club, we’re moving into section two of Jane Eyre—Chapters 14–26 on October 22nd at 8 PM ET. Membership is just $5 a month (or save 10% when you prepay for the year), and every member keeps this podcast independent and commercial-free.
To celebrate this week’s podcast, you’ll also find a free bonus book list to browse—this time, it’s packed with 18 Zombie Books for spooky season. Patrons will receive a printable book list of all the books featured for your next trip to the library.
Now, let’s meet today’s guest: Leigh Radford trained as a broadcast journalist and has produced content for commercial radio, Time Out, The Times, and The Sun. She has created documentaries for the BBC, including Rilke’s Women for Radio 4. A 2023 graduate of Faber Academy, Leigh is now developing film and TV projects through her production company, Kenosha Kickers. One Yellow Eye, her debut novel, is now on bookstore shelves.
Finally, if you’re enjoying the show, leaving a quick review on iTunes is one of the best ways to help others discover Book Gang—it’s free and means so much to us. And to our loyal patrons—you’re the heartbeat still thumping in our chest, even when the world feels like a zombie apocalypse! Thank you for supporting human creators in a world turned upside down by AI.
Now—let’s get chatting!
(transition music)
Amy Clark (00:07)
Ooh, Leigh, I am so excited to have you on our show today. Thank you so much for being part of this.
Leigh Radford (00:13)
Thank you so much for having me Amy, it is a proper pre-Christmas treat.
Amy Clark (00:18)
I love it. Well, we are obviously recording right before the holidays, but this is for our Halloween episode. So that tells you how ahead of the game I am for this year, which I'm feeling like I should pat myself on the back for that one. We are really off to a good start.
Leigh Radford (00:32)
Very organized.
Amy Clark (00:34)
Yes. Well, of course I was like thinking about this season and wondering, are you a horror reader? Because sometimes horror novelists aren't readers, but do you read horror?
Leigh Radford (00:46)
I love horror. I think the first horror novels I read were the Point Horror series when I was about 11 or 12. And they were great authors like R.L. Stine, like Caroline B. Cooney. And they made me want to move to small town America. They made me want to become a babysitter so that I could see what fate would befall somebody else's children on my watch. They made me want to go to prom and see if anyone would attack my college dropout boyfriend in a sedan or something. Incredibly cool. I thought they were so terrifying, but also very weirdly aspirational.
And they were like a gateway drug, I think, into the world of horror. And like lots of other readers, I moved on to Stephen King. I would say that Carrie is actually one of my favorite books, but Misery was quite a big inspiration for One Yellow Eye as was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, she obviously the kind of grandmother of British horror. So I do enjoy reading horror. I do read quite broadly.
I think the last horror novel that I really got a kick out of was Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, which is just a kind of fantastically, it's a romp, actually a bloody romp where a governess turns up at a Victorian mansion and kind of slashes her way through the whole thing. And it's also quite a festive novel. It's like a kind of Die Hard or a Home Alone, but a literary Gothic fiction horror novel. And because it's set in the holidays. So I think she's just fantastic. Her first book, Mrs. March, is kind of an homage to Daphne du Maurier and things like that. So, yeah, big fan of hers.
Amy Clark (02:35)
You are legit coming through. There is so much to like latch onto. I was a kid that also read a lot of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike was also like another. Yes, those often I wish I could bottle that feeling. I used to go to the library and we would have like big paper bags and like fill them with like a million of those books. You know book one book ten I read them out of order. I didn't care. I wanted to read those all the time and stay up really late at night reading those kinds of books.
I also loved Victorian Psycho. I think it's so fun. It's actually really awesome on audio for people who are audio listeners. There's just a very deadpan sense of humor to it all. It's very good. Well, I'm excited to talk about your book, Leigh. We typically start all of our episodes out with learning about the seeds of your story, how this all started for you. Obviously I want to talk a little bit about, you know, making this transition with your career over to writing. So tell me a little bit more about how this book got started.
Leigh Radford (03:41)
It started, I think, as an idea in January 2020. So it kind of just about predated COVID. We were hearing about COVID as a virus, but none of us were in lockdown at that point. And it still felt quite remote and not really like it was going to affect us that badly. It got me thinking about how, at the time, I was looking and have been for about four years at that point, looking after my dad while he was being treated with leukemia.
And it made me slightly concerned that it might interrupt the management of his care. And if he had a very low immunity, if there was a virus out there, how would it kind of compromise him? And probably my jumping off point to that was thinking about how could I possibly keep my dad kind of in cotton wool through this viral epidemic to keep him safe.
And it made me think back to the last scene in Edgar Wright's film, Shaun of the Dead, where Nick Frost's character, who is a zombie, is sitting in Simon Pegg's shed playing Xbox. And I loved the idea that despite all of his kind of revolting physical attributes and the fact that he had absolutely no agency as a zombie, he was quite happy playing Xbox for hours in Simon Pegg's shed, evidently without doing anybody any harm.
And I thought, gosh, how nice to be able to effectively keep somebody who was so profoundly unwell and compromised in a kind of safe space, a haven, if you. So I think that was the sort of genesis point was thinking about how could I do that? And if I had somebody with some medical expertise, how long would they legitimately be able to keep somebody hidden from the world and try to manage their care, even if it felt like they were really, really kind of fighting against the tide and completely clutching at straws with what they were able to provide for that person. So I think that was something I thought about in January 2020.
And then, of course, Covid hit. And I spent most of that year nursing my dad in his home. And I didn't think about writing until realized after about two years after he passed away that I hadn't really processed my grief at all. I'd allowed my mum's grief to take precedence, which was absolutely the right thing to do because she'd left, she'd lost her husband of 50 years and her partner of 55 years when she was completely in bits. So she needed to come first. But it meant that I didn't really deal with, I think, the anger that I was feeling about the way in which my dad died and how traumatic it was for us as a family to try to get over that.
So I started writing. I wrote another novel, which I don't think will ever see the light of day because my literary agent absolutely hates it. And I think probably the reason for that is because it was just me angrily screaming 120,000 words into the laptop with no particular rationale or narrative arc or any of the things that make a decent book. But I didn't want to give up. was definitely in my nature. I think, too, I've always loved as part of my job to prioritize the works of others and I was never any good at prioritizing anything I wanted to do for myself, but I thought I owed it to my dad not to give up.
So I signed up for a writing course. I committed to that for six months. By the end of that course, I had what ended up being 42,000 words of One Yellow Eye. And then only two short years later, it was published. So, in publishing terms, it was a relatively short turnaround process. But yeah, the idea was born on a fairly gray, miserable January day in 2020 before all of our lives changed forever.
Amy Clark (07:29)
Hmm. It's incredible what transpired during the pandemic for creatives because I feel like so many authors have come here because of that season in life. Unexpected maybe time at home, all of our routines were changed. We all started to do different things. We had maybe some isolation. We were able to focus on other things and I am so astounded that this like came out of such a profoundly personal, you know, thing that had occurred in your life. I'm very sorry to hear about your father and I'm sorry that that was actually part of the, you know, story equation.
I am curious about going into this class and learning about writing a book. What do you think that that course offered to you that you were unable to unlock on your own.
Leigh Radford (08:24)
It gave me confidence that I didn't have on my own. The opportunity to share my work for the first time, I'd never shared anything I'd written with anyone, with people who were incredibly well read, arguably much better read than I was, and who had an enthusiasm for each other's work. They were supportive, they were passionate, they were encouraging. I'm still in touch with a number of them today. And we all kind of egg each other on with our endeavors because sometimes it's hard and you get frustrated and that support was completely invaluable.
It also gave me deadlines which I love and needed and it doesn't matter how hard you try to set a deadline for yourself when it's self-imposed you just don't take it seriously and I think women were very guilty of we'll prioritize everything first and then the thing we want to do for ourselves invariably gets lost. We give it the least amount of our time, our attention, our effort, and we're in the least best shape to deal with it at that time, I think. So having these bite-sized scary deadlines applied by an author who was published and by a really good reputable publisher, Faber and Faber, gave me momentum. And there's something incredibly profoundly rewarding about seeing that word count rise. Once you get to a kind of tipping point of about 50,000, 60,000 words, you feel the weight of the effort you've invested into it and how terrible and remiss of you it would be to abandon ship. It forces you onwards, I think, even if you're crippled with self-doubt. So for me, it was that safe place. It was really invested feedback and it was deadlines that helped me ratchet up the word count.
Amy Clark (10:12)
So then did they put you in touch then with the publishing house? How did that work? How did you end up landing the book deal?
Leigh Radford (10:19)
So I think this is becoming increasingly common. Publishing is such a, it's a crap shoot. It's a lottery. Finding an agent is incredibly challenging for them to find you a publisher the same. There are, I think something crazy like 30,000 books published every month and agents are inundated. More often than not nowadays, especially with social media allowing them to reach out to writers or would be writers directly.
They're looking for different ways, I think, to find that needle in the haystack and to make their own lives much more efficient. So the course that I did was called Faber Academy. At the end of that course, they bind a beautiful edition of samples of all of the author's work, synopsis, a short biography, and they send it out to tame literary agents who are expecting to receive it. So you've already circumnavigated that terrifying gatekeeper who's waiting to stand in judgment of your work, these agents are up for looking at new writing. They want to consider writers who've done the Faber course, whether they view it as an indicator of quality control or just that frankly it's had a really great track record, particularly with literary fiction and particularly with thrillers.
They have, I think Lucy Steeds, who has just won Book of the Year at Waterstones in the UK. I'm pretty sure she did a course at Faber several years before me. So they have a good track record of being able to spot authors and kind of supporting that talent early on and allowing agents to then kind of swoop in when the manuscript is almost ready to then develop it. So when I was meeting with my agent, I had about half of a book and then she sent me a rigorous deadline to make me turn out the second half and we went out to market to publishers on submission within about 10 weeks. So it was pretty quick.
Amy Clark (12:23)
Wow, so you get this book deal, which is so exciting. And obviously you're taking a bit of an avenue I don't think we've gotten to explore yet with having your work found. Like all of these things are so special. It's such an incredible way to market a writer. What has surprised you about being a debut novelist, especially right now?
Leigh Radford (12:42)
I think actually the thing I have found most challenging is genre. Is the way in which the. I think it would be naive of me to say that authors don't ever write with genre in mind. Of course they do, but often it's instinctively based around their own tastes. I don't know that anyone expressly is thinking right - I am in a subcategory of literary horror or you know, or they're not necessarily trying to.
They're just writing something because they have a story that they want to tell. So then suddenly when you're faced with a lot of very challenging conversations about where in the market your novel is going to fit, I think that threw me for a loop to some degree. There are strong horror elements in One Yellow Eye. There is a lot of body horror and there is, I suppose, the greatest thing there is medical experimentation and human suffering.
And that was deemed early on to be unpalatable for the straight commercial fiction market. And yet there was no consensus over whether the book should definitively be in horror. So for the US market, they felt very comfortable about putting me in horror. In the UK, there was resistance. So I think because I suppose I've written a somewhat genre bending book, I don't know that that's necessarily a positive. It might, on the one hand, you might think, brilliant, I've ticked loads of genre boxes there. This should appeal to loads of people.
Uninvariably, that's not how the publisher will view it. And it's not always how the reading public will view it either. I've done a lot of events with bookshops where fantastically erudite booksellers have come to me and said, I don't necessarily see this book as a horror. Or I disagreed with how it was presented to me. And that may have changed or influenced people's desire to engage with the book or to connect with me on it in lots of different ways. So I think that's kind of baffling and certainly an eye opener when you suddenly start to look at your book being commodified, I suppose, and prepared for market in that way. The conversations do leave you behind to a degree.
I think certainly as a first-time author, you defer to the expertise of the voices around you and kind of let them shepherd you into making the right decision. The challenge, of course, is that you only get to be a first-time writer once. So whether we called it correct, I do not know. It remains to be seen.
Amy Clark (15:18)
Where would you put yourself on a bookshelf?
Leigh Radford (15:21)
I think One Yellow Eye is a love story. For me, it is a story about how far we go to keep the ones we love alive. I don't think you can tell a story inspired by terminal illness without referring to the gruesome decay of the human, us as people and how we love and how painful it is to lose someone. So it's certainly not a book for the squeamish, but I wouldn't have wanted to sanitise it at all because that would have felt like a really inauthentic way of talking about death and trying to work through grief. It's gruesome. It's a messy business. So I hope it would appeal to enough to horror readers, but also to people who want to read about how painful it is to lose someone and one woman's desperate, sometimes valiant, sometimes bonkers efforts to try and stop that loss from happening.
Amy Clark (16:18)
Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I've gotten to talk about this with a lot of authors and sometimes behind the paywall where we talk about endings or where their book lands, they don't always talk about that forward facing, right? The genre really, really matters because people go in with expectations.
So I will not say the book title, but maybe and maybe listeners will pick up on who I'm talking about. But there was a book that came out that was a thriller. That's what it was marketed as, but it was clearly a horror novel. And it ends up that readers become very divided on reviews. So by saying that it's not horror in order to sell more, to say it as a thriller, and it ends up really biting the author in the butt a little bit when it comes to reviews, because if you say you're a thriller, I think people go in expecting that feeling. They want that.
And then when things go sideways, whether that's body horror or things, gory things that happen, if they're not expecting that and they bought something that they didn't know that they were getting into something completely different, it really, really reflects poorly on the author when it comes down to reviews.
Leigh Radford (17:33)
I agree. It also represents such a colossal challenge in the edit because I made a lot of substantive changes based on my literary agent's feedback initially because her resolve, of course, was to sell it to the broadest base possible when I ended up with effectively two speculative editors they wanted to strip out all of the changes that she'd made, which were largely to minimise the gore and to kind of really load as much of that in as possible.
As I say, you try to accommodate the people around you because you hope that they know best. I think I ended up with the book exactly where I wanted it. I don't know if I've articulated it well, and you do feel responsible as the author. It's nice of you to say that it falls to the publisher about communicating that message and it does, but it's my message that I've given them to communicate. And I think it's difficult to figure out when as a writer, you only ever hope you're gonna find a reader and you kind of don't wanna do anything to turn anyone off, but the idea that anyone will read it is still quite staggering to me. So you want your book to speak honestly I think to people so that they know what they're getting.
The jackets are quite different in the US and the UK. The US one is much more kind of speculative looking and quite, quite gory, quite, there's an element of revulsion in there. It's quite graphic. And also I think hauntingly beautiful and I love it. My US cover is like a punch to the face, but it is kind of neon and bright. So it sits in that slightly more mainstream on a table in a Barnes and Noble kind of thing rather than being sort of squirreled away somewhere murky on a horror shelf. So I think they try to present it in a manner that looks more mainstream in the UK. I guess whether that has worked, only time will tell.
Amy Clark (19:40)
Well, I will say your cover in the US is so eye-catching. I mean, really, I was scrolling on the library app and saw this cover and was immediately intrigued. I'm a horror reader, so I'll read pretty much anything. But when I got into it, I was like, this is so much more than just a horror story. And I think, you know, sometimes horror books surprise me in that way. I just read When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy. I don't know if you've read that yet,
Leigh Radford (20:08)
I haven't read it yet.
Amy Clark (20:09)
But it's astoundingly good. And it's also like a really moving meditation on fatherhood as well. And I love it when I unbox a horror novel and I'm getting something that is so much more than what I might expect. And of course, I go to the back and I look at your bio because I'm like, who wrote this? How did this, you know, how did this happen? And I see all of these incredible creative jobs you've had. You have this bio that's really, really intriguing to any reader.
I want to talk about playing around in all of these mediums. Do you feel like you had any kind of storytelling advantage by having this kind of creative background and what you've done before in your prior life?
Leigh Radford (20:50)
Well, my first kind of job out of university was working for a radio strand that was taking Time Out magazine as it was then and turning it into content for commercial radio. So I got to basically broadcast and bring to life those kind of elements of arts and entertainment that Time Out did so well. And it was an incredible privilege.
The thing it allowed me to do was meet with people who were living my dream. And so I spent a number of years living vicariously through the writers I met and the actresses I met and the directors I met who were all putting into practice the things that I would gush about with them when I got to speak to them. They were brave and they were bold and they were fantastically creative and taking risks. And I didn't seem able to do any of those things.
I think working as a journalist, I was very comfortable not being the story. And I think the thing that I was best at as a journalist was knowing what the story was, depending on who I was talking to, having a nose for what the angle was, because it isn't always what the person thinks it is when they're talking to you. People often underestimate the real appeal that they have and struggle to communicate it directly. So I enjoyed speaking to people who were living these fantastic creative lives. I enjoyed vicariously celebrating their work, but I always yearned to write.
So I think the work that I did as a journalist and even when I worked as a book publicist, you know, you're creating copy, you're creating content, you're sending messages out, you're telling miniature stories, whether you're writing a script for somebody to present in a documentary or whether you are writing a list of questions, you're crafting a small story, short stories, little tiny vignettes that you hope will entertain people and allow someone to get that story across in a way that resonates with a listener. So I think that was a great privilege. I hope it also made me responsive to deadlines. I hope it made me relatively thick-skinned. I think there is, you can be thick-skinned and still lack confidence.
So I can, I think, take criticism relatively well. It doesn't mean that I necessarily believe I have the capability to process that criticism and turn it around constructively. So it was kind of a long time coming. I didn't think about doing any writing until I was 40, but I think there's something about that, isn't there, where you realize you turn 40, you lose your dad, you know you're running out of time yourself and you don't have time to waste. And I think I was very good at making lots of excuses for why I wasn't getting on with doing anything that I actually felt very passionately about. also had this kind of sort of metaphorical concept of there being something terrible that could happen if I tried. You know, if I wrote something and everybody hated it, that would be the worst thing that could possibly happen.
And then my dad died. And in that way, it was incredibly liberating because that was the worst thing that could happen. And anything else that happened after that, it didn't matter. So it pushed everything. It's such a cliché, but it put everything into perspective for me. And it allowed me to write the book. And it was a terrific catharsis in a way that nothing I'd ever done before had been.
Amy Clark (24:25)
I love this. I love that you were able to step into this story and yeah, I feel like these midlife years are really changing me and I'm open to more. And I also feel like maybe you're toughening up a little bit. I don't know if it's a hormonal shift, but it's kind of like, who cares? Like who else is doing this? Like if they hate it, whatever.
Leigh Radford (24:42)
Yeah, I mean, the hormones, the hormones don't care about us. They're just abandoning left and right. So yeah, we're just left to our own devices. And I do think it makes you maybe a little bit more ruthless with the time. You know, so much of my time is spent on my, you know, my menstrual app. I've got I'm wasting so much time on that. I don't have other time to waste.
Amy Clark (25:04)
It's so true. Well, I want to get into this book. Obviously this is a zombie story. I love zombie stories and I found the opening to really set the tone of this book. You know, we come into Kesta's routines, her daily routines. She's going through a bit of these cycles where she's going to work. She is showing up to the support group for people who have others that have been, you know, have gone away and she's getting support that way. But she also has this best friend, which we will get into a little bit because I think she really becomes a foil in the story. But I want to talk about, you know, the opening scenes that we are getting and why you decided to start with that as the tip off point for your story.
Leigh Radford (25:56)
I think a lot of zombie fiction and certainly films, they concentrate on the zombie apocalypse itself, don't they? They focus on the terrifying outbreak, the rampaging, the biting, the contagion. And I wanted to set it after that when people were starting to get bored. And it's a very British thing how we handle our general sort of seething impatience with life. We're obviously quite sarcastic. And I felt like three months after a viral outbreak of this nature would allow us to meet Kesta when she is, her emotions could not be more heightened. She has been carrying this dreadful secret around with her for three months. She has had to pretend to play the grieving widow and yet she is the grieving widow because her husband is infected and there is no cure.
But she feels an enormous amount of jeopardy, incredible betrayal, but she's also just crushingly desperate. And there's something I think about looking after anyone who's ill. And when we're ill ourselves, it can be boring, it can be frustrating. And there's a lot of pretence involved, I think, to project a stiff upper lip or to pretend that minimizing our suffering and how we feel.
So I wanted the reader to see Kesta when she's already pretty threadbare and struggling so that they become quite quickly acclimatized to the degrees that she is willing to go to to save the man that she loves. I also wanted to give her lots of agency. I didn't want her to be running around scared. I wanted her to feel it was her responsibility to fix him because that is a crazy responsibility to have.
But when we love someone, whether it is a partner, whether it is a child, we suddenly become almost godlike in our accountability towards them and the lengths that we will go to, quite dehumanizingly, I think often, both for the individual who is ill and for ourselves, you know, we'll cut ourselves in half to do something right by somebody that we love. And those were the kind of elements that I wanted to focus on and having to go to like a kind of NHS mandated therapy group to Kesta would just feel like a massive waste of time. Not that she was not empathetic towards the other people, but again this was just a drain on her incredibly limited resources. So everything in her life is colliding to make her feel more stressed and more desperate and more inclined to perhaps turn to the dark side in her efforts to save her husband Tim.
Amy Clark (28:47)
Yes, I love that you gave her some agency, right? She has this role as a scientist where she could potentially truly unlock some kind of cure, maybe save him. That's really the goal of her work. Instead of being a passive character, we feel like, yes, maybe she could change the trajectory of the story. But I also feel like it's threaded so deeply with the, just the weight of caretaking, right?
Caretaking is exhausting. It is draining and people don't know that she's doing that. And I would like to say that, you know, there's probably people that are listening. I can say like, as someone with a chronic illness, that my husband is my caretaker in many aspects of our daily life. And that is a draining role and people don't always see that. And you still have to function. You have to, people expect you to show up for social obligations. They expect you to interact with society. They expect for you to put on a brave face. They often have no idea what people are weathering in their four walls. And while this is certainly taking it to an extreme, right? His situation is much more dramatic than maybe what people are enduring right now, but you have to endure and you also have to carry around this like anticipatory grief, this heaviness around while also like pretending in your daily life, which I feel like was done so well in the story.
Leigh Radford (30:14)
Thank you. It's also really lonely. It's a really lonely process when you're dealing with something. And as you say, there's a harsh juxtaposition between the absolutely essential role that you're playing at home looking after someone, and this kind of frivolous nonsense that goes on outside. But you also desperately want to reconnect them. Because to admit defeat and to admit the fact that this person may never go back outside again, and they may never get to reclaim those daft, frivolous aspects of life is incredibly demoralizing. But I think going out into the world and having to play act and to pretend to be normal, to pretend not to feel devastated and crushed and exhausted all the time is incredibly draining.
But I think the thing I learned in looking after my dad was actually just what a low tolerance a lot of people have for other people's grief. It's embarrassing, they don't know what to do with it and this strange industrial gaslighting where people are too squeamish to hear about the true realities that you're dealing with encourages you to minimize them yourself. I mean in my case it just made me incredibly angry and I shut a lot of friends out as a result of that because I didn't feel it was right that I should minimise my dad's suffering and what he was going through just because somebody didn't feel able to ask me about it on a Zoom call. And so it makes you feel worse. It compounds the thing that you're already going through.
And of course, you can't talk about it with the poor person who is suffering because they've got enough to deal with it. And of course, your experiences as the carer are nothing in the grand scheme of things compared to the person that you're looking after, but it's still hard and it's a challenge not to cry and it's a challenge not to seem defeated because that is infectious. Now that is a thing you can't bring back into the room.
I also think people have no understanding of how long these things take. My dad was ill for four years. He'd actually had a number of different cancers in the sort of 15 years before. So he did not enjoy good health. And in many ways, I moved in with him for the last six months of his life, and I administered the care. And effectively, because we were in the COVID lockdowns, a lot of those care options were terminated because they simply the NHS couldn't provide them. So he was supposed to be on a medical trial at one point, and the services were rerouted understandably to look for to treat COVID and to manage the big COVID centers that they set up in London. But it made us feel more trapped and it made us feel more isolated. And the good thing about COVID for us was that it did force us together for six months. And whilst there were incredible challenges with that, we got a lot of time that we wouldn't have had together otherwise. But the last three weeks of my dad's life, you would not wish on an animal. And I think that it was the nature of how he died and actually how traumatic that was. I think even now, even talking about the book, and it's a privilege to talk about what I went through with my dad, because it's a privilege to get to talk about him.
Another great thing that people really hate to do is to talk about the person who's died, because you know, how terribly embarrassing for them. But again, it means they just evaporate because nobody wants to talk to you about them. And I think it compounds everybody's loss. I'm sure many, many of your listeners and I'm sure you will understand what that's like. It makes it harder. So I think there is a lot of commentary on other people's mismanagement of grief through Kesta and the other characters in the novel, because I think it's something people forget about. It's something people hide away from, it is a horror in and of itself.
Amy Clark (34:20)
Hmm. Do you remember what the most helpful thing was to you when you were going through this? Did you have a friend or any kind of scenario in your life where someone did something unexpectedly beautiful for your family that you would recommend to other people who want to show up for people other than just asking like how their father is and like maybe a great story about them after they pass away? How do we keep the memory alive, but also was there anything during that season that you think was astoundingly awesome that someone did for you?
Leigh Radford (34:54)
Isn't it terrible if I say no?
Amy Clark (34:57)
Really?
Leigh Radford (34:58)
No. My husband was an absolute diamond and I couldn't have got through it without him. The greatest thing he did for me was just say, well, just go live with your parents for six months. You know, don't worry about me. I'm fine. I'll look after the cats, which he did. And he had done that before. My dad had prostate cancer in 2009 and I just moved home for three months so that I could keep him company. He didn't really need me there, but it was something that I wanted to do. So the fact that he gave me the freedom to just focus on my dad was an incredible sacrifice on his part. And I don't know many people who would make that. So he is my one shining example.
I have good, decent people around me. I also have a different, entirely different group of friends now who I've met since my dad died. And I don't know if they would behave differently. But people I'd known for a long time, people I thought I was close couldn't text, couldn't phone. In lockdown, we were all doing these kind of crazy Zoom parties, weren't we? And trying to stay in touch with people that way. And even though that constitutes kind of the frivolity of life for me at that point, I went through the motions of doing it because I thought it was the right thing to do. You know, in two hours of conversation knowing full well that my dad was in the bedroom upstairs dying, people wouldn't even ask how he was, wouldn't even ask how my mum was. They couldn't bring themselves, they were so, I think, hamstrung by their own incompetence, their own embarrassment, they just didn't ask and that just made me really cross.
Amy Clark (36:37)
Yeah. my goodness. I do think, you know, I will say midlife definitely showcases who are your friends and who aren't like
Leigh Radford (36:46)
Doesn't it just? Yeah. When the chips are down.
Amy Clark (36:51)
I do feel like there's just kind of a wave of new people. It's not fun. It really is not fun. And I do think, you know, that that has definitely been the case, you know, with weathering what our family has weathered who wants to stick around when things aren't fun, right? When there's no fun time at all or like things are not progressively getting better. It doesn't go on for just maybe a couple of weeks. Everyone's there at the initial start. They feel really bad for you. And then as time goes on, everyone is fatigued. They can't ask about it. They don't wanna ask about it. And you're just carrying around this thing by yourself. And so if that's the case, then why do I need them? So I get it, I completely get it.
And I can see some of that frustration on the page too, like the things that she is going through. I mean, obviously, why does she wanna go to a support group if it's not beneficial to her and it's not helpful? We also have this friend in the story who is well-meaning, right? She is well-meaning in so many ways, but she's also frankly annoying. Like she's not really bringing a lot to the story. Did you want to showcase that as an element as well?
Leigh Radford (37:58)
I mean, I wanted her actually to be fundamentally much more hateful, but my agent and publishers were like, no, we need women to like her a little bit. She has to have some redeeming. She has to go on a journey. These are the kind of conversations you have with publishers. So she did need to have some redeeming features, I think, to make her readable, but she's selfish and she wants her friend back. And it's actually really kind of annoying that Kesta's grief is permeating into her own life.
She feels she sacrificed herself because she's had to survive a zombie apocalypse and she deserves some fun. She is not a friend who is there, as you say, for the times that are difficult because those times require real tenacity. They require qualities, I think, that a lot of people realize that they don't have or they don't want to learn that they don't have them. They don't want to risk failing at something that they know is going to be important and difficult.
It's very easy to be the person who turns up at cocktail hour on a Friday. It's very easy to be the fair weather friend. And I think we, as you very astutely said, there is a kind of clearing period, isn't there, where you go through certain things in your life and people do fall by the wayside and sometimes you forcibly eject them from your life because they don't add things that you need.
It's absolutely fine to have friends that you don't rely on, you don't trust, you just see for drinks. They can be, you know, they're kind of like the tinsel on the Christmas tree, but you've got to have a Christmas tree stand and you've got to have lights and you know, you've got to have a star. So they are surplus, I think, a requirement as you get older. You don't need them if you can't rely on them.
And I think Jess wants to be relied upon, but deep down, no, she can't. So I think she's indicative of a lot of our failings, particularly when it comes to showing up for our friends, showing up for family and doing the right thing. Not always prioritizing what we want, but actually just sticking around. I think in terms of you mentioned earlier, you know, how to, how best to support people with grief. I really do think it is just be there.
Don't disappear, don't ghost them. Don't ask them how they're doing. Don't ask them, you know, just connect. Hello, I was thinking of you. Do you want to have a chat? Absolutely fine if not. I thought I'd go and do, I'm going for a walk if you want to join me. But you know, anything that keeps the communication. Be prepared to be stonewalled, be prepared to be ignored, but keep that link open so that when they're ready you can help coach them back to life.
Amy Clark (40:47)
Hmm. That's really good advice. Well, I want to talk about her role as a scientist. Now I did stumble upon an interview that you had done on YouTube and I will link to it. But in that interview, I was very surprised to hear that you wrote the role of a scientist, knowing that your mother is a scientist and did not give this opportunity to your mother to check your science, go through your things. And you were even hesitant for her to read your story. So I want to hear, did she end up reading the book and why did you not let your mother help you?
Leigh Radford (41:26)
She read the book two weeks before publication. I really made her wait.
Amy Clark (41:29)
Okay. You did!
Leigh Radford (41:32)
I don't think she's forgiven me. I don't think she's forgiven me. Things are very cool between us now. No, I think I, when I was a kid, my mom was a biomedical scientist, like Kesta is in the novel. And I thought my mom was just the cool, apart from my dad, I thought she was the coolest person alive. She had this incredibly important job. I knew she dissected dead bodies on a table for work whilst wearing like heels and a really cute pencil skirt and an Angora sweater because it was the 80s, you know. So I just thought she was incredibly clever.
I knew that what she did saved people's lives and I knew that it was an unusual job, not just for a woman at that time, but it was a demanding job and a significant one and she had a real gift for it. And she would often pick me up from school. They let her work kind of flexy time. So she wasn't really part time as a mum. She was kind of full time as a mum, but she would dip in and out. But as a result, it meant she would often pick me up from school and take me straight to the laboratory, which stank of pickles, not because she was like in there eating pickles a lot, but formaldehyde, which they used relentlessly in the 80s, was used as a preservative solution in almost everything she did, so it really did stink.
And my mum and my dad were both incredibly candid about what they did for work. They did not sugarcoat it at all. They were incredibly frank. I would ask questions, but they often just elected to tell me what they would be, what they had been up to at work. And my mum would pick me up from school and she would say quite gleefully, what would you like to look at today? And I'd say I have absolutely no idea backing away slightly. And she would drag whole buckets like gigantic plastic buckets out of this cold store. And they would have all manner of like amputated human limb or organ. And it was like a show and tell. I mean, I couldn't take it into the classroom because I think I would probably have been expelled from a series of primary schools.
But she just was very frank about what she did. But to me, she was like some sort of sorceress, I think, as a child, and the smell of her laboratory and the mood I felt the anticipation of going there, this sense of a kind of witch's brew that she was creating in there. I just found it fascinating. And that was the thing I think that I wanted to evoke in the novel, that the science was a character and it kind of had a taste and a smell and an ambition and a drive. I was mindful of not making the science too heavy handed. I wanted to try to get it not right because it's experimental science with a completely novel virus here. So I did give myself a little bit of leeway, but I needed it to read authentically and legitimately. And I tried to do that through I think character, and I try to do that through the confident, assured way that Kesta talks about her work because she doesn't have confidence in anything else.
So she's very compelling when she's talking about her job, just the way my mum was always very compelling about the way she talks about her job. And I knew that if I consulted my mum on it, it would become incredibly personal and there would be a line I would cross that would stop me from finishing the book and I needed to, I wanted to pay tribute to my dad with what I was writing, but I also wanted to pay tribute to my mum and I needed to do that on my own, I think, without consulting her because I think, I mean, she gave me one of the best reviews. She said, and I quote, the science was not completely wrong. So, I mean, that is just damned with faint praise, isn't it? The science was not completely wrong. Which I just was thrilled by. So it felt like I needed to do it by myself. It probably would be much better, much more rigorous science if she'd helped, but hopefully the read is still there.
Amy Clark (45:46)
I thought that was so interesting because when I got to the end I'm like, well, no wonder there was such a scientific aspect to this and how lovely like to have such a great resource like, you know, that you could reach out to and then watching this interview and being like, wait, she didn't involve her mom and she hasn't even read it yet. And I think that's really incredible. I think standing on your own talent, not maybe putting her through that so early, like with everything that you guys had gone through and that she is giving you praise in the ways that she can, which I really love.
Leigh Radford (46:20)
I mean, my mum used to leave medical textbooks with histological blow-up photographs in them around the house the way other women would leave copies of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and things. So I think really she's really got herself to blame.
Amy Clark (46:36)
Well, I love that. We always end our main show, and just for those of you that are listening, if you're a patron of the show, we will be behind the paywall going through the spoiler section of this. We want to keep the magic alive for all the readers that are reading it right now or intrigued by the plot of what we are going to be gathering for book club. But at the end of every episode, it is standard for us to ask the author what they are feeling proud of, whether it's with this project or with life in general, but it also gives me an opportunity to just say I loved this book.
I'm so glad that this book landed in my stack. I did not expect to be weeping through a horror novel the way that I did, but this moved me so deeply and I am particularly in love with books about caretakers and caretaking and just honoring that commitment that people go through and you know, it is not a small sacrifice to care for someone. And despite the lengths that this woman has gone through to the end of our story, I'm so grateful that we have books like this. It was cathartic, it was beautiful, and what a beautiful way to honor your dad. And I'm so glad that we got a chance to talk about him today. But I would also love to hear what you are feeling proud of right now.
Leigh Radford (48:00)
Thank you. I think that's the thing. Probably the nicest thing about all of this is how many opportunities it's given me to talk about my dad with people who never met him and to keep his memory alive and to share silly stories and anecdotes with him. He was an incredibly shy, self-deprecating person who loved nothing more than a dirty joke and a good giggle. And so I think he would, I hope he would enjoy the book for the elements that are entertaining and funny. He would delight in telling me he only ever read non-fiction. But I think that has been arguably the nicest thing is feeling that something positive came out of the worst thing that ever happened in my life. I think that's pretty good as a success.
Amy Clark (48:45)
Well, I'm so glad that we got to talk about him today and friends, we will meet you behind the paywall for the last half of our chat.
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