WINNIE M. LEE IS an American author and activist who has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed ecotourism projects. Her first novel, Dark Chapter, was nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into 10 languages, followed by the critically acclaimed Complicit. A survivor and advocate against gendered violence, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her new novel is What We Left Unsaid, just out from Simon & Schuster. Join us as we discuss the role of writing in the recovery process, and so much more.

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Winnie: Thank you. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Marion: I’m delighted to have you here. You have a remarkable history of advocacy in your writing. Your debut novel, Dark Chapter, is a fictionalized version of a 2008 rape you survived that is told from both the perspective of the victim and the perpetrator. Your second novel, Complicit, was inspired by the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein and the predators in the film industry and the #MeToo movement. You’ve written multiple essays on sexual assault, reviewed influential books on sexual violence, and published many opinion pieces for major publications. And while you’re really well published across genres, you’re best known for writing about sexual violence. And the phrase every writer is taught is to “write what you know.” But this is a particular kind of doing so.

So, let’s start off so my audience gets to know you a bit by digging into that a bit. My audience is writers, many of whom have experiences that have sparked a deep sense of advocacy, but many of whom have questions about how to translate experience, including trauma, into prose. So let’s just start off by talking about this.

Is writing part of the process of recovery for you, part of a process of understanding? How do you portray the act of writing in the continuum of your own life?

Winnie: So for me, writing is essential, right? It’s kind of my lifeblood. I can’t really imagine living without writing in a lot of ways. So, aside from the stuff that gets published, you know, there’s a lot of writing I do, which is just me trying to make sense of my life, right? So from a pretty young age, I wrote a lot. And it, you know, wasn’t, me thinking I was going to be an author or a novelist someday. It was just like that was my way of self-expression. That was my way of kind of dealing with life, I suppose. So that’s always kind of been a through-line in terms of me and writing. And it was only until kind of my mid to late 20s I started taking writing more seriously.

But then what really sparked me to actually try to become published in a significant way was that rape that happened when I was 29. So, I think for me, I wrote about the assaults in many different ways.

First of all, it was just that kind of almost stream of consciousness, like writing as a daily kind of barometer of what I was feeling, right? But I kind of always knew that I wanted to turn what happened to me into a novel. So I would say it was, but it was only about like five and a half years after the assault that I finally felt like I was ready to actually write that novel. So I’d had a long time to think about it. I’d had time to recover. And I guess I would say that the writing itself was really important for my own recovery. But the writing that got published, i.e. that first novel, Dark Chapter, wasn’t part of the recovery. Writing was my way of dealing with life. So it was kind of like me journaling a lot. But I made a pretty clear distinction, and I still do, between the writing that I do for my own kind of self-expression and the writing that I do, you know, as a professional writer to get published.

Marion: Yeah, and I can see that absolutely being an essential. And what do you think, in terms of that distinction, what are we asking a writer to do, do you think, when we ask her to write into trauma? What is the expectation of the marketplace as differentiated by the expectation of the writer writing for herself?

Winnie: Yeah, and that’s a really tough one. You know, obviously I have a lot of students. I work with a lot of writers who are dealing with their own trauma. And so I always say to them, like, “don’t worry at first. If you’re writing because you want to make sense of your trauma, like, don’t worry about the marketplace,” right? You know, don’t worry about, you know, what are the people going to think? Because, you know, writing first and foremost needs to be a form of expression for us. It needs to kind of, you know, help us balance the stuff that we have to deal with in life. You know, in the ideal world, writing helps with our mental health. So, first and foremost, that’s the role of writing, I think, in our lives, or for many of us, right? But then, you know, when people start to think about, “Okay, but how would I get this published?” I think then you bring in issues of, okay, what do you feel comfortable having published out there?

For me, somebody just has to Google my name and they’ll know right away that I’m a survivor of a violent stranger rape, right? And am I comfortable with that? I mean, now it is, it’s kind of my reality, right? But like, I don’t think everybody would be comfortable with that.

So, it’s a sense of knowing that you’re kind of in control of things up until you get published. And then, like it is for any published writer, once you get published, people, you know, they might have opinions about your writing, right? And you have to make a clear distinction between what you think is a good reflection of your experience and the reflection that you want to have out there in the world. And so I always describe writing, being a published writer, as being such a strange thing because you have to have the sensitivity to be able to experience life events and interpret them in interesting ways and interpret them creatively. But then you have to have like this, I don’t know, thick skin, this like steel skin, that like protects you from all the stuff that people might say and all the judgment.

So, I think a lot of it’s about, you know, especially if you’re taking something that’s so… deeply personal and raw making sure that you’re comfortable with it being out there and making sure that it appears in the form that you’re comfortable with, both as a survivor, and also as an artist, right so for me that’s why writing fiction was preferable to writing memoir because with fiction I had the opportunity to kind of reshape things and you know and add my own kind of artistic spin on things without feeling like I had to be telling the truth all the time

Marion: That’s a lovely distinction. Absolutely. And as I said earlier, you write articles, reviews, opinion pieces, screenplays and stage plays. And I’ve read around the articles listed on your site. And thank you for those. And we’ll direct everyone’s attention there with a link. But I want to concentrate on one tremendously generous piece of work. which is called A Pocket Guide to Writing Through Trauma. Everybody should read this. You advise the writer reading this to do several essential things, including to write for themselves, not to worry what others think, write whatever comes to mind, use distancing techniques such as writing in the third person, in an unusual verb tense, writing purely in dialogue, staging it as a fairy tale, and to practice self-care.

And I want to dig into one of those in which you suggest we write from a new, unexpected perspective. Maybe not as the person who lived through the trauma, but from that point of view of a passerby, the grown child of a victim, or a tree in the neighborhood. So that one really stopped me. And I know you teach writing and I teach writing. So talk to me about getting outside oneself and having a look through another’s eyes at our own trauma.

Winnie: Yeah, you know, I just do that because on one hand, you know, I hate to use the word “fun” when we’re talking about trauma, but it adds that kind of creative spin to things that make something interesting. So I think, you know, and I did this with Dark Chapter as well. You know, you can write from your point of view and, you know, in Dark Chapter, it’s fictionalized, but Vivian, the victim slash survivor is pretty much original, my experience. But then, you know, everybody else in this world has a different perspective of your trauma, right? And that may not be the correct perspective. So with Dark Chapter, I obviously wanted to write from the viewpoint of Johnny the perpetrator, because for me, that was like an essential way of trying to understand why he had committed this act of violence, which obviously then, you know, changed the course of my own life.

But, you know, so it doesn’t have to be as extreme as that. But there is something about taking yourself out of your own trauma and looking at it from a different perspective, which kind of fires up the creative juices, but also gives you a different take on things, a different angle on things. And I think that different angle is what allows us to inquire into our own experience and maybe puts things in perspective. Because I think, you know, one thing is that when you become a victim of trauma, especially something like rape and sexual assault, it is easy to think that your life is ruined and you’re the only person out there who understands what you’re going through. The reality is there’s millions of survivors out there. We just don’t often talk about it, right? Which is why writing is so important because you can find writing by other survivors.

But ,once you have the perspective that actually there’s many of us out there who’ve had that experience and many of us would probably understand, then that kind of helps your understanding and it helps deal with your own experience of things. So in a similar way, if you tweak things slightly or you take it from a different angle, then it kind of helps to put things in perspective. So, I think it was like, I can’t believe I actually said that, like a tree like nearby. But if I thought about that, you know, there were loads of trees around where I was assaulted. And who knows what each of those trees has witnessed, right? You know, I mean, that tree might have witnessed multiple assaults. That tree might have witnessed assaults and then, you know, animals being killed underneath it, right? So that kind of different perspective, especially if you’re talking about a tree, is a different change of time scale, right? That helps to put things in perspective. When I think it’s so easy for us to get really immersed in our own trauma and our own misery. But there’s a sense that things can have a beginning and an end, and things can recede into the distance on a much bigger scale, I think, is humbling in a certain way, but also kind of reaffirming, I suppose.

Marion: Yeah, I think so. It struck me. I’ve not had that advice given to me ever, but I think it’s helpful. I deal mostly with memoir writers, and memoir writers always want to know what’s expected of them in terms of revisiting trauma, and they get discouraged by the people who love them. “Don’t go back there,” they get told. “Leave it alone,” someone says. “Don’t re-traumatize yourself.” I’m sure you heard some of this. And what was the opposition and what was the support for your voice as you moved into the territory that you inhabit as a writer?

Winnie: There wasn’t any opposition for me. And some of that might be because I’m quite single-minded. So if I want to do something, like I do something, right? And most people probably know that it’s not worth trying to convince me otherwise. So for me, it was very… And I had a pretty clear artistic idea of what I wanted to do, which was to take Johnny and Vivian’s perspectives, and to kind of start with them in childhood and have kind of this… malleable timeline where time became quite flexible, but you’re always moving forward in time until you reach the moment of violence. And then you kind of look at their lives afterwards. You take them through the entire criminal justice process, right, to see how their lives were changed by that moment of violence.

So for me, I kind of always knew what I wanted to do. And I didn’t actually show significant chunks of my work. I did most of the writing when I was doing my creative writing masters. So, that would have been 2013, at Goldsmiths. And so people were seeing small bits of things, but nobody actually sat and read the entire thing until I actually went out and got an agent. So it’s important for me to kind of like keep a shroud over what I’m working on because I don’t want people judging too early on if they haven’t seen things.

So there was always encouragement, right? And that was… essential for me, right? If I’d encountered discouragement quite early on, then I might have turned away and decided like, Okay, maybe it’s not worth doing it. But I always did get quite a lot of encouragement from the people on my course and from other writers. So I think that was essential for me to realize that like, no, actually, this is worth pursuing.

And the other thing was obviously, you know, it was five and a half years after my own assault. And during that whole time, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to how sexual violence is portrayed, in literature but also in water culture so i eventually started kind of a cross-arts festival that platforms work artwork created by survivors, so I think I had a pretty good idea of what was already out there in the literary landscape, and I’d never seen a novel that kind of combined the perspective of both the victim and the perpetrator so for me i was pretty convinced like this was worth doing. Not just for my own kind of personal edification and my own kind of artistic, you know, exploration, but also because I hadn’t seen it out there in the marketplace. But then obviously when it came to getting a book deal, we ran into other issues. So, yeah.

Marion: Yes, I suspect you did. Absolutely. In terms of novels we haven’t seen, let’s turn to your new novel, What We Left Unsaid, in which we go on a road trip, an American road trip.

Winnie: Yeah.

Marion: The American road trip has been utilized, of course, by writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Least Heat Moon, John Steinbeck, Robert Persig, Richard Ford, Hunter Thompson, to name just a few male writers who come immediately to mind. And I do think of it predominantly as a male-dominated subgenre, always very muscular and buddy-buddy and soul-searching and some of them kind of drug-addled. And so this is not that. Not a bit. So I’m just so dying to talk to you about this. You know the genre. You know what’s out there. So what about the road trip attracted you, please?

Winnie: It just seemed like an iconic thing to do. So obviously I love traveling, right? So I’ve, I’ve loved traveling. I mean, that’s why I live abroad, right? So I, I’ve loved traveling for as long as I can remember since I was, you know, the first moment I started traveling, which was maybe when I was 15.

So I, I knew I wanted to write a book about travel. And I guess if you look at the three novels I’ve done, Dark Chapter is very closely about my rape, but it, there is actually a fair amount of traveling in it because so much of it mirrors my own life and my own life involved a lot of traveling at the time. Complicit was about working in the film industry, which I had done prior to the assault. And then, so in some ways, you know, that was my book about the movies and I love cinema, right? And so I wanted to write another book that was about travel. Travel movies and like storytelling are kind of my great passions in life, so I wanted to write about travel and I also I think thematically wanted to write in a way where like, you know, I don’t want to get pigeonholed as the person that writes about sexual violence all the time even though you know it’s kind of my wheelhouse and as you said in my introduction like that’s what I’m best known for 10 years from now I don’t want all my novels to still be about sexual violence.

So I wanted to write in a way that allowed me to embrace another passion of mine, traveling, while still also acknowledging kind of the impact of trauma and the legacy it can have by having sort of a traumatic incident receding into the distance of these characters’ lives, but also being dug up at the same time. So for me, it was like, Okay, let’s write a road trip, but let’s write a road trip that like obviously challenges all those tropes you just mentioned, but like the muscular white guys kind of going on an adventure together. Because for me, it’s important, you know, as a woman, certainly who’s experienced sexual violence when I was traveling, and also as a woman of color, like, it’s a very different experience doing the great American road trip if you’re not a white guy, right? That was important to explore. But also, you know, I still wanted to embrace, like, the joy of adventure, the joy of the open road, which those more classic texts kind of obviously are very much about.

Marion: So in your version of the road trip, the road trip is a request by the mother of her children asking them to travel together and stop and see the Grand Canyon. But this is not a simple trip across the country by three siblings, as you say. There’s something that happened in the distant past that gets revisited. And they’re Asian. They are estranged, these three siblings, and they are traveling across today’s America.

With this device, you take on some of the most important themes of our time, including prejudice, race, and what it means to be American. So tell me how you chose to look at what you did ,or where you did, specifically at those themes. This book lands in our eager laps right now. This is the book for right now. So… You know, novelists have an extraordinary ability like dogs and, you know, earthquakes to know what’s coming. But did you go theme first thinking this is what we’re going to be thinking about in 2025? Or did your characters appear to you? You know, I know you’ve got this backstory, you love to travel and you’ve got this thing about the distant past, but this is written to this moment. So what order did you take on these themes and how did you construct that to be so timely?

Winnie: So the theme of travel came to me, well, obviously it’s something that’s always been important to me, but it was very much tied to COVID and being locked down, right? So again, a few things happened to me in 2019, 2020. I became a mother for the first time. And obviously once you become a mother, you can’t travel in the same way. And then COVID happened. So I gave birth three months before the lockdown. So suddenly I went from being, you know, relatively immobile. Obviously I’d been pregnant for a while, but being relatively mobile to suddenly, you know, having a newborn and not being able to travel because of lockdown. So that made me really miss traveling. So, in a lot of ways, that’s probably what prompted me thematically to want to write about that.

At the same time, I knew I wanted to write a road trip because I was trying to come up with a sort of an excuse to give myself a reason to travel. But the only way I could travel with COVID and with the baby, I realized was doing a road trip, right? So I’m like, okay, maybe I’ll write about a road trip. And then of course, you know, Route 66 was the obvious one because, you know, again, as Americans, we’re kind of raised, we somehow grow up and we imbibe the sense that like Route 66 is this classic thing we have to do. And, you know, I’d never done it before. Some good friends of mine had done it, but I was like, Yeah, I’ve never actually, you know, I’ve lived outside the U.S. and I’ve done all this traveling, like backpacking to like 65 different countries, but I’d never done the American road trip. So I thought, okay, actually it’s lockdown, but I’m American, I can still travel. I can actually bring my family because, you know, I’m a citizen and I’ve got a kid. So why don’t I drive Route 66?

So I kind of convinced my partner to fly to Chicago with me and our one-year-old. He was 22 months, so he was still counted as one-year-old. And we flew to Chicago, where I had some friends and we rented a car and we drove to California. So in some ways, the premise, the first premise was the road trip. But then I knew that obviously I wasn’t going to write a novel about me doing a road trip. I was going to write a novel about fictional characters. So I think around the same time I’d been thinking about a lot of my cousins and friends had had sort of falling outs with their siblings over politics, like, you know, their brothers voting for Trump and owning guns and that sort of thing. And just this very divisive political situation that we live in.

But, you know, this isn’t just 2025. This has been going on kind of since 2015. I don’t know, even like 2010, certainly, you know, if you look at American politics over the past few decades, that polarization has been developing, right? So by 2021, remember, this is post-Trump one, we already had this kind of division among, okay, which of your friends and family members have voted for Trump? So that I’d noticed among my friends and relatives my age.

So I started thinking, okay, what if like the road trip was three siblings who had grown apart and kind of politically, but also socially, financially, like personally, and they were forced to go on this road trip together. So that’s how it came together, right? And I thought of the characters before I actually went on the road trip, but then I hadn’t done much more writing until I actually did the trip. And again, as somebody who travels a lot, there’s no way I could have done, written the novel, without going to those places, because you just can’t capture the sense of place in the same way. It doesn’t feel authentic. So I just kind of had in the back of my mind, okay, these are going to be my characters. Went and did the road trip, which obviously gave me a sense of which places I could use for settings. And then I kind of started writing it a few months after that. But I don’t really plan ahead with my writing. I just kind of sit down with a premise and characters and then it just sort of comes out. Obviously, there’s a lot more editing after that, but I don’t really plan ahead. And for me, this was probably the least efficient process novel that I wrote. Because I ended up writing 30,000 words, which I then threw out after draft one because it just wasn’t working. But eventually I got there.

Marion: That you threw out. And you said before that you don’t share your work much except for when you were in school. So the idea of throwing things out, the idea of community, the idea of feedback, give me a little sense about how you work. Do you have a trusted reader, or do you just share it with your agent or your editor? What got you to throw out those 30,000 words? Was it just you or did somebody else say, no?

Winnie: Yeah, it was my editors. And obviously, each novel has been different. So I’ve written three. Dark Chapter, you know, I didn’t have an agent for most of the writing of it. So that’s where I probably workshopped it the most or sent it to trusted readers.

Complicit, by that point, I had an agent. So I kind of had the okay that what I was writing was actually good. But I did still show it to a few other people.

And then this one I wrote in contract, right? So this was the first novel I’d written where I wasn’t then going to have to go out and try to get a book deal. I already had the book deal. So in some ways that gave me a bit of license to be a bit artistically bolder. So Complicit and Dark Chapter were both quite suspense oriented. This one has its share of suspense, but I definitely didn’t want it to be sold as crime, which had happened with the other two. So I decided, okay, I’m going to write something which is not going to be sold as crime. So I kind of wrote something and then my editors looked at it and they’re like, “This isn’t quite working.” And they came up with a few ideas and I rejected kind of most of those ideas, but I was like, okay, you know, I think I do need to have this backstory kind of woven in so I can kind of alternate between past and present chapters. So that was kind of bringing, again, another element of suspense into the story, but not having it be a suspense-led novel, I suppose. But yeah, it was my editors who kind of… told me certain things weren’t working, which I agreed with. It was fine.

Marion: It’s set up beautifully. I mean, it’s set up the way I counsel people all the time to set up memoir. You know, give us something that happened and then leave it there on the page and go to a different time zone and get on with it. But with that thing that happened, in that case, an event that the kids witness, you know, we the reader carries that with them into the book, wondering… How’s that going to get used? So, you know, as soon as you create that kind of gap, the reader is hooked and it works really, really well.

So you got good advice, obviously. So as we start to wrap this up, I ask this a lot when I meet people who write in many genres, because when I started out, I was told to pick one and stick to it. And apparently you didn’t get the memo. So talk to me about the benefit of writing what and where you want to write, and not merely being defined by the industry as an essayist or a person on sexual violence, or a novelist or a nonfiction writer, just doing it as, now you said you were a little bit stubborn, but go a little past that if you would, about how to keep this multi-genre career going.

Winnie: Yeah, I can’t imagine doing it otherwise, because if you’re writing to what the industry expects or what you think the industry wants, you know, I mean, there’s got to be that joy in the actual writing. And for me, the joy is in discovering and kind of challenging myself, right?

And I’m sure, yeah, probably I would have editors who were making a lot of other editors happier if I was just writing like thriller after thriller, you know, writing a good thriller every one or two years. But I would find that actually quite boring. So for me, it’s important to have each book be different, Because otherwise, you know, I need to keep like creatively engaged with something. I’m the kind of person who never goes on vacation to the same place. You know, I’m always going to want to go to a different place because that’s the joy of discovery.

So for me, it’s about, you know, always kind of challenging yourself artistically, but then also latching on to an idea. If I’m writing a novel, you know, that is going to power you through that. 80,000, 90,000 words, right? And so for me, that needs to be a pretty rich world, or rich premise, that opens up, you know, the opportunity to kind of thread in different themes. That’s why, like, you know, the road trip was so interesting because you’re constantly moving to a new place and there’s always more exploration there. And while that’s happening, you know, the character’s dynamic between the estranged siblings changes, right? For Complicit, it was in the world of filmmaking because, you know, there’s so many different films out there that you could kind of reference. And the whole act of how a film gets made was for me kind of the perfect way to take the reader into the story.

So I think it’s about finding a rich world that excites you. And I normally, I guess, think. I might have an idea for a novel and I usually will be thinking about it for at least six months to a year. And then by the time I sit down, if I’m still thinking about it six months or a year later, then I’m probably interested enough to kind of then write, you know, 80,000, 90,000 words on it. So, yeah, I mean, don’t let yourself be defined by the industry because otherwise, like, you get bored and you lose the joy in the artistic process. So, yeah, that would be my advice.

Marion: So yeah, that’s great advice. Thank you, Winnie. It’s a joy to talk to you. Good luck with the book. It’s a wonder. Thank you so much. The author is Winnie M. Lee. The book is What We Left Unsaid, just out for Simon & Schuster. Get it wherever books are sold. See more on the author at winniemlee dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios.com. Our producer is Jacquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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