When I first met bestselling South African author Lauren Beukes at a pavement café in the Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst, just after the publication of her book The Shining Girls, she had shoulder-length blue hair that seemed to suit the conversation we were having about her foray into writing comics.
At the time Beukes was enjoying critical acclaim for her genre-bending novel that mixes historical fiction, gritty crime and sci-fi.
The book follows the travails of Kirby Mazrachi, a Chicago newspaper archivist whose journalistic ambitions were put on hold after she experienced a traumatic assault. When Kirby learns that a recent murder mirrors her own, she partners with seasoned but troubled reporter Dan Velazquez to uncover her attacker’s identity.
What they find is surprising, to put it mildly. The killer stalks his victims, the shining girls: bright young women burning with potential through their lives across different eras, leaving clues on their bodies.
After my interview, I followed the book's success and was delighted to learn that Appian Way Productions, a Los Angeles-based film and TV production company founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, was interested in securing the rights to turn it into a limited TV series.
Fast forward almost a decade and that series launches worldwide on Friday featuring The Handmaid's Tale star, Elisabeth Moss, in the role of the time-travelling reporter turned revenge-seeking investigator. In last week's interview with the author, she still has her mermaid-blue comic book-heroine hair and beautiful exuberance.
“The experience of having the novel turned into a worldwide premièring Apple TV+ series is incomprehensible,” says Beukes. “I watched the series with my 15-year-old daughter and seeing it through her eyes made it real. I could say to myself, 'Oh, it is really a show, not just this ludicrous hallucination I came up with.' It's thrilling and I love what the production team and cast have done with it.”
The series was optioned in 2013 but Beukes says she didn't set her heart on the series ever being made. “It's been a long time coming. Most work that gets optioned never gets adapted. I've had that with other projects when they've been optioned, you get free money, you talk with producers about the cast, maybe there's a script and then it just doesn't go anywhere,” she says. “It's a huge process that involves millions of dollars.”
When it finally did seem it was about to become a reality, the production went through a number of iterations. “We looked at different directors and possible cast members. Then Elisabeth Moss came on board and absolutely clicked with the material. She took it to Apple TV+ and said, 'This is the character I want to play, this is the story I want to tell. She became so involved, not only as the star, but as an executive producer and as the director of some of the episodes. To have her vision and connection, to have her as the story's champion, has made all the difference.”
Although Beukes didn't write the script for the show — that responsibility went to show runner, writer and executive producer Silke Luisa — she was extensively involved in the process. “We had long conversations about the adaptation. We had an all-women team on the writing front — all female directors. It was beneficial to have Silke bring a different vision, a different understanding, to the material. I sent her all my research and put her in touch with some of the journalists I'd interviewed for the book. She also spoke to a cop I'd interviewed who explained how they handle violent cases, and with Jim DeRogatis, the hard core, dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Sun-Times journalist who broke the R. Kelly story,” says Beukes.
The texture of the newsroom in the present day scenes of the series is particularly impressive to Beukes. “The attention to detail was so rich and deep, in ways that are different to the book. The story has become its own animal — an adaptation has to be like that — filming it word for word from the book wouldn't work.”
Beukes is delighted by what her initial creative vision has become, having come up with the idea so many years ago when she was messing around on Twitter. Something sparked the idea to write about a time-travelling serial killer. And yet, the underlying topic, she believes, is even more relevant today.
“As a South African, with our gender-based violence problems, we live with these issues, even if we just read the news every day — knowing that there are plenty of stories that don't make the news,” says Beukes.
She ascribes the inspiration for the book to two very personal experiences: “My domestic worker's daughter was killed by her boyfriend. It was the murder that took months to happen because he poured boiling water on her and stabbed her and, after four months, she died from her injuries.”
“I went to court in Athlone and the accused was sitting there with his new 19-year-old girlfriend. I just knew he would do the same to her and that filled me with rage. I wanted to help to take him down and get justice. But the prosecutor pulled us into his office and said he couldn't try the case. The Khayelitsha police hadn't investigated it thoroughly enough. There was a one-page report — basically it was a case of his word against hers and she was dead. Because of my visibility and media contacts I thought I could help. It broke my heart that the family didn't want to go through with it. They couldn't face it, didn't want to deal with it any more — they wanted to let it go.”
The way we talk about femicide was illustrated horribly by the story of Anene Booysens - the murder and rape only made the headline because of how brutal the attack was
The book was inspired by much of this. At least in the book, Beukes believed she could get justice. “The way we talk about femicide was illustrated horribly by the story of Anene Booysen — the murder and rape only made headlines because of how brutal the attack was,” says Beukes.
And a few months later, Reeva Steenkamp's murder hit the news because she was “a hot bikini model”. “Reeva was actually a law student and was involved in a number of NGOs, but that was secondary.
“I wanted to discuss the way we talk about violence against women — what is loss when we lose someone that could have had a great impact on the world? The book is about femicide, about being a survivor, about trauma.”
Beukes says that sometimes survivors of violence and abuse — once at a bar in Cape Town, once after a book signing in New York — came up to her to tell her that they'd been through similar experiences, and the way that she'd written the book was true to their experience. “These women said, 'I felt seen and heard — you got it right.' That was the most wonderful praise.”
Beukes based her story in Chicago because she wanted to set the present in the 20th century but, she says, that was apartheid-era in SA and she didn't want that part of history to be the focal point of the story.
“I'd lived in Chicago and thought I could write about it authentically. Chicago feels like South Africa — there's a certain racism there and the apartheid government went to Chicago to learn about spatial segregation. There's also a lot of corruption and crime — it feels a lot like Johannesburg, but with a wider landscape.”
Beukes is busy with the rewrite of her new book. She's developing a few original TV shows for production and is anticipating new readers of her books.
“There'll be people mad at me for whatever reasons, but I have a good therapist.”
What she really hopes is that this story shows the rest of the world that South Africans are awesome. “We don't tend to appreciate our writers and artists until they make it big overseas — until you're a Trevor Noah. I want us to appreciate the talent we have here, right now.”
BOOKS LAUREN BEUKES IS LOVING
- Mermaid Fillet, by Mia Arderne: A quintessentially South African dark fairy tale.
- It Doesn't Have To Be This Way, by Alistair Mackay: The story of three queer friends trying to navigate an increasingly fractured, violent and unstable world.
- The Promise, by Damon Galgut: A family saga spanning four decades, each of which features a death in the family. It concerns the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm outside Pretoria.
