Walking Home with Marie-Claire
CBCA Notable Book 2003
WAYRBA (West Australian Young Readers Book Award) Shortlist 2004
The day Marie-Claire walks into PJ’s life, everything changes. Whether they are wagging school or just hanging out on the beach, Marie-Claire can make any day an adventure. She’s funny and unpredictable and full of good ideas – well, they seem like good ideas to start with. But why won’t she let PJ visit her house? What really happened to her older brother? And why won’t she listen when PJ tries to steer them out of trouble?
Walking Home with Marie-Claire is about being brave and crazy and loyal. It’s about making the wrong choices and doing the right thing. It’s about the stories girls tell and the secrets friends keep. It’s about growing up and still being yourself, no matter what.
The How and Why of Walking Home with Marie-Claire
When I was growing up, I never thought about the time I lived in as being part of history. It was just NOW, and there didn’t seem anything very special or memorable about it, especially not for me. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of a big story, it’s hard to see the part that you’re playing in it. But now that I’m an adult, I can look back and see that time for what it was: rich and complex and fascinating. It was a time when a lot of ideas that people had taken for granted for generations were being turned on their head. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the early 1970s was an important era in history.
Teenager Kirsty in 1974
When I was in Year 7, in 1973, I started a short story about a girl who was a mixture of all sorts of characteristics that I found intriguing and annoying in my friends. I only wrote a few paragraphs of the story because I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen next but I kept the idea of it with me for a long time. When I was older, I wrote a longer version of the story and called the girl in the story Marie-Claire but I still couldn’t quite make the story work.
Year 7 is a complicated year for a lot of kids. When my own daughter and step-daughters were going through Year 7, I was amazed at how the sort of dilemmas they were facing were so much like the ones I’d had to deal with when I was their age. No matter what time you grow up in, everyone is faced with tough choices and complicated decisions. Everyone has someone in their life who makes them happy or drives them crazy or makes them miserable.
A number of girls had commented on how there were so many boys in Market Blues and so few girls. Why hadn’t I written a book about girls? Their comments inspired me to start messing around with the unfinished pieces of my very old short story about Marie-Claire and suddenly she started walking right off the page and I knew I had a good story happening.
As with all my stories, I started doing some research into the era in which the story was set. Even though I had lived through the seventies, there was still a lot to learn about it. I read about the Vietnam War and the political upheavals that it caused and I thought about all the different families I had known when I was growing up and how they were affected by those events.
I listened to the ‘Hits of the Seventies’ over and over as I wrote about PJ and Marie-Claire and their families and I thought about the impact the music of that time had on the teenagers of the era. I always listen to music when I’m writing, especially music that is related to what I’m writing about. Music is another language that talks about feelings and ideas in different ways to story but can be just as moving. And music can bring back a time in your life like nothing else can.
Some stories come to you very quickly but sometimes, a good story can be a long time growing. Walking Home with Marie-Clarie was a story I carried around with me from when I was thirteen years old, but when I finally got around to writing it all down it was one of the most satisfying stories that I have written.
What the critics wrote about Walking Home with Marie-Claire
A must read for all girls aged 10-14 years.
YARA website
www.yara-online.org
For all its apparent simplicity, the pace of this short book builds smoothly and the conclusion is compelling. Murray captures well the immediate spark and ferocious intensity of childhood friendships in this gentle and thoughtful book about a girl who learns that, when it comes to standing up, her own two feet are as good as any.
Virginia Klooger
Sydney Morning Herald
February 2003
Kirsty Murray’s latest novel nicely captures the spirit of the era without overdoing it. Nostalgia is never allowed to creep in and spoil the realism. The characters are well drawn, with the mysterious Marie-Claire being an edgy blend of free-spiritedness and dishonesty.
Bella’s Books – online reviews
November/December 2002
Click here to check out extracts from
Walking Home with Marie Claire