Interview with Emma Grey - Author of Start at the End
Interview with Emma Grey - Author of ‘Start at the End’
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Emma Grey is an award-winning international best selling author of seven books including THE LAST LOVE NOTE and PICTURES OF YOU. Her novels have attracted multiple foreign translations deals & a TV option. They were reviewed in the New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post & People magazine.
❤️ INTERVIEW ❤️
What inspired you to write Start at the End? Also, please share a little about the story?
Start at the End is best described as Sliding Doors meets P.S. I Love You. It’s a story of love, loss, creative betrayal and resilience.
We all meet various crossroads in our lives. Sometimes, something happens to us beyond our control. Other times we make choices that send us down a new path. Sometimes we look across at the path we’d been on, and we wonder ‘what if?’
I faced a devastating crossroads of my own in 2016, with the sudden loss of my husband, Jeff. Since then, I’ve wondered from time to time, ‘what if this had been the other way around?’
I wanted to explore this concept: a devastating situation ricocheting through a family in two potential directions. It was the most technically difficult idea I've ever had but also the most rewarding.
You show us in your novel through the characters and their actions, how people can react to grief. Please provide examples?
Our two protagonists, Audrey and Fraser, respond very differently to the grief that they face. Fraser juggles his grief with diagnosed depression. As the mother of a teenage son and I feel that we need more examples in fiction of strong men coping with difficult mental health challenges.
Audrey takes a different path and one of her struggles is with addiction. Again, I feel it’s important for us to read about characters struggling deeply with real-world problems, and finding a compassionate way through.
Describe Audrey, Parker and Rachel in three words each.
Audrey is musically-gifted, creatively-stuck, and vulnerable. Parker is courageous, talented, and bold. Rachel is steadfast, compassionate, and loving.
How are Josh, Fraser and Beau different and/or alike? Share their virtues and foibles.
Interestingly, Josh was virtually missing from the first draft of this book. My editor said he was on the page so little, I should just take him out. Instead I chose to really ramp up his character and he's become crucial to the narrative. He was enormous fun to write, despite the fact that he is in essence a very weak man. His brother Fraser is a brilliant scientist, a wonderful father, a patient ex-husband, and a good friend. Beau is a hot screenwriter, creative, funny, witty, and charming, and a worthy love interest.
Authors often draw upon their own interests or experiences in writing a novel. Has this been the case with Start at the End? If so, how has this affected the narrative and a reader’s response to your work?
In addition to my experiences with loss, I drew on my life as a parent and step-parent, and as the mother of daughters with a step-parent. I’m proud of the mature way that the characters navigate through multiple deep problems and face the world as an imperfect family.
I also drew on my love of musical theatre. Several years ago I wrote a teenage novel about a boy band for my daughter, who was fourteen and hated reading but loved Harry Styles. My high school friend Sally Whitwell, who is an award-winning Australian composer, co-wrote a musical with me based on that novel. It was a joyous experience. We're still working on it today and so there is a strong theme of composing and musical theatre in this book.
Please comment on the concept/message in Start at the End: to find joy and light in the midst of darkness. And to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of grief to start again.
It's really in the title. I love the concept that for all of us we have experiences that feel like an ending. Sometimes it feels like our life is over because something is so devastating, we feel we can’t survive it. But we can have a new beginning. We can have multiple new beginnings and reinvent ourselves over and over. We can ‘start at the end’. I've just returned from a wonderful holiday in Canada, which was the culmination of a lifelong dream to visit Prince Edward Island with my sister, my high school best friend, and one of my daughters. Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would be experiencing one of the top highlights of my life a decade from then, I would not have believed it possible.
Music is a wonderful medium for telling a story. It sometimes expresses the inexpressible. Your novel is filled with brilliant musical references and experiences. Audrey and Parker are gifted musicians and show us what it is like to create and play musical instruments. Do you play or write music yourself?
In addition to the musical that I mentioned, I was surrounded by music growing up. I had years of piano lessons. I used to play the euphonium in various bands. I was in orchestras and choirs, and I've always loved going to concerts with my family, particularly with my children and also with my dad, who is 94 and still sings in a choir.
I tinkered around as a teenager and wrote a couple of pieces of music. Interestingly, my son and I got a piano last year, inspired by writing this book, and I found that I could still remember those pieces and the way that I felt when I wrote them.
Would you say writing is therapeutic for you? And if so, how has it helped or shaped your perspective on the world around and within you?
It’s not only therapeutic but essential. I don't know how I would have come through what I've faced if I hadn't been able to find a way to capture it in words. Writing fiction has been particularly helpful. I think there's something that happens in the brain when you separate yourself slightly from the story. It's not you that you're writing about but it is your emotion. Through writing or reading fiction, we get to dress-rehearse how it might feel to get through a particular scenario. It can show us a path through.
I understand one of your novels is being made into a TV series? How does that make you feel? Are there any concerns on how the public may respond to it (the book vs screenplay) and what expectations do you have for the outcome? Congratulations, by the way, as it is an author’s dream to see their story on the screen!
It is an absolute dream! Pictures of You has been optioned by Magpie Pictures in Australia. Producer Lois Randall and screenwriter Deb Cox have been extraordinarily welcoming not only of me as the author of the book but also my daughter, Hannah Robertson, who is a criminologist and is advising on the series.
Having a story adapted is a process of flexibility and letting go. I was thinking the other day that for me the version of the book that readers know is only one of my many drafts. As the writer, the story doesn't feel static; it feels alive and ongoing. There was a lot of story around the words on the page. This has been an opportunity to explore not only what might have happened next…
Do you love creative challenges and what are the benefits of these new experiences?
I do love creative challenges and have written teenage fiction, a parenting memoir, a non-fiction book about productivity, adult fiction, the musical and various other projects, some of which are embargoed. I'd love to learn screenwriting next.
This book itself was technically very challenging to write, a story that is about parallel universes. I had to hold two complete stories in my head and remember what was happening to each of the supporting characters, who had slightly different lives in each universe. I loved setting myself that challenge. I think my editors are probably looking forward to me coming up with a less complicated idea next time but there's something about stretching yourself and challenging yourself to learn something new.
What is your favourite social media platform and why? Provide at least one positive benefit it offers with promoting your books.
I feel most comfortable these days on Instagram, where I have been overwhelmed with support from readers. I love to share the behind-the-scenes reality of being an author and write a lot about rejection and persistence, about the harder parts of writing, and always find that people are incredibly supportive and open with their own experiences, which is beautiful.
If you could go back in time to an earlier you in your writing career, what advice would you give yourself that might alter your path or change the outcome? Yes, a sliding door experience!
What a beautiful question. I love this.
I think I would go back and tell myself to keep going, even when it’s hard. To expect that it won't get easier even once you're published, that you'll still have new and bigger and different challenges but to back yourself that you can overcome them. I don't think I realised how much rejection I would encounter across my career but now I know that this is entirely normal, I embrace it. I aim to be rejected a hundred times a year, and this has changed my creative life and opened many more opportunities, because I’ve let go of things having to unfold ‘according to plan’.
Are you working on a new novel? If so, can you share a little about it.
I'm just in the very early planning stages of an idea that I conceived during my recent Anne of Green Gables pilgrimage. I haven't pitched it to my publishers yet but it is shaping up to be a novel that will encompass the relationships between mothers and adult daughters, the complexity of the creative life, and the meaning of coming home.
What is the most captivating book you have read since January 2026?
This is a little bit different but when I was in Guelph, Ontario, I had the incredible experience of going into the University archives and reading L. M. Montgomery's original handwritten journals. Being able to get inside the mind of a literary idol who was struggling with the same feelings I do — of not being good enough, creative rejection, worrying about how her next book might be received — was just absolutely a gift. I found it a life-changing part of that trip and hopefully a life-changing crossroads in my career.
Thank you, Emma, for being my guest author and sharing your thoughts on your stunning new novel. I wish you continuing success on all your creative endeavours. It has also been nice to meet another kindred spirit who shares a love of L. M. Montgomery’s writings!
I hope everyone will get a copy of ‘Start at the End’ as it is brilliant. Follow a link to my review.
