AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Florence Grimes is a hot mess. She's shopping and about to shoplift a pricey outfit she thinks she needs when ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, her phone gets a rapid series of messages.
SARAH HARMAN: (Reading) Emergency at school. Get here quick. My eyes dart across the screen, trying to make sense of what's happening. Police are on their way. A warm, woozy feeling washes over me. What's going on? I type. No one replies. There's a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I try again. What is going on? But the other mothers just ignore me. The group chat goes silent. I throw my sweatshirt on top of the body suit and barge out of the dressing room, racing towards the escalator. My heart hammers in my chest as I pound out a text to Dylan on my phone. Are you OK? Text me back, I command, right away. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and stare at my phone, willing my son to reply. Last seen four hours ago, his profile taunts me.
RASCOE: There's been a kidnapping at her 10-year-old son's London prep school. And over the next 300 pages or so, Florence will make a series of questionable choices in order to make sure he's safe. "All The Other Mothers Hate Me" is Sarah Harman's first novel, and she joins us now from the BBC. Welcome.
HARMAN: Hi, Ayesha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
RASCOE: Why do all the other mothers hate Florence?
HARMAN: I think Florence is somewhat of an unlikable protagonist, right? She's not like the other mothers at this ritzy London prep school that her child attends. For starters, she's a washed-up girl band singer. She's a decade younger than the other mothers. She doesn't really have a job. She's getting by making balloon arrangements that she sells to the rich moms of Holland Park. It's like that thing, Ayesha, that people say about child stars or people who get famous really young. She's sort of had an arrested development at the moment that she tasted fame, and she's been about 19 in her mind ever since, even though she's now 31 when the story kicks off. And she gets up to a series of hijinks, which you perfectly alluded to, once her son becomes a suspect in his classmate's mysterious disappearance.
RASCOE: I was thinking about the other modern British literary hot messes, Rebecca Bloomwood, in "Confessions Of A Shopaholic," "Bridget Jones." How do you think Florence fits into that canon?
HARMAN: As an author, I'm flattered to have her mentioned in the same sentence as any of those characters. I think Florence herself would think that she's a lot edgier and cooler than those women...
RASCOE: (Laughter).
HARMAN: ...Because she's kind of got a chip on her shoulder, at least at the beginning of the book. That said, I don't think that Florence has ever read a book in her life. So aside from watching the Bridget Jones movie, I'm not sure how many of them she would actually know.
RASCOE: (Laughter) You're an American living in the U.K. In this book, Florence is an American living in the U.K. Because she's American, and for all the other reasons we've outlined, she's a bit of an outsider. Like, did you feel any connection to looking at British culture from the outside? Is that part of what you brought to the book?
HARMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I felt like it was really interesting to have this outsider's perspective on this really rarified slice of society. The school that her son attends is an expensive private day school in London that's paid for by her ex-husband. Florence could never afford this school. It's such a class-obsessed society. And sometimes I feel like being an American here, you're, like, a neutral observer. Like, you're not really part of the class system. I moved here as an adult. Like, it's too late for me to get a British accent.
So I'm just sort of on the outside looking in. And I tried to bring some of those observations to Florence, who also is American in the book and is looking at this society that she's never really going to fit in and be a part of. I think the difference is, Florence is completely uninterested in fitting in. She's happy being an outsider, whereas, I tried very hard to make friends with the other moms and not do some of the naughty things that Florence gets up to.
RASCOE: She's a lot of things, Florence, but she loves her son, Dylan. Tell us about Dylan, though, 'cause Dylan's a little - he's a little bit different. He's a little quirky.
HARMAN: Dylan's a little quirky, but come on, wouldn't you be if you were raised by Florence? Like, he didn't have much of a chance. He's 10 years old. He's a real do-gooder type. He has, I would say, a good heart. Because of the way other people perceive him, he gets bullied at school. But he's a good kid.
RASCOE: Just very into, like, the environment, very protective of animals. And that's what kind of gets him into it with the school bully, Alfie. Tell us about that mystery at the center of the book, because Alfie goes missing.
HARMAN: You know, I was really intrigued by the idea of these missing kids story. There's a lot of books and a lot of media and stories about missing kids, fact and fiction. It's clearly something as a culture that really gets under our skin, and I wanted to see if it was possible to kind of have a more lighthearted take on a missing kids story. And I know that might sound sacrilegious because, obviously, it can be a difficult topic. But...
RASCOE: It's not heavy drama. It's, you know...
HARMAN: Not heavy drama, right?
RASCOE: Yes.
HARMAN: Like, it's the lightest possible version, I think, of this story. Look, I was a news reporter for, like, 15 years. There's a lot of darkness in the world. When I started writing this book, I was like, I want the happy ending that we never get.
RASCOE: But it's very twisty and turny. Like, she goes there with some of these decisions.
HARMAN: She really does. And I thought it was important for her as a character because one of the things that I was interested in was, like, we see a lot of depictions in media. Like, the hard-boiled male detective and, you know, he's on the case, but he's really detached. He doesn't have any, like, feelings about it. And that's part of what makes him cool, is, like, he's looking at all this hard stuff and it doesn't touch him. And Florence is the opposite.
She's incredibly invested, overly invested way beyond what would be appropriate or ethical, and I thought it was interesting to think about. Look, even if you're not a parent, you don't have to be a parent to appreciate this, but what would you not do for your absolute favorite person in the world? If you really thought they were in trouble, is there something that you would say, no, that's just a bridge too far. We all have someone that we just are not rational about and that we would go there for. And for Florence, that's her son, Dylan, and she does go there.
RASCOE: (Laughter) That's Sarah Harman. Her debut novel is "All The Other Mothers Hate Me." Thank you so much for joining us.
HARMAN: Ayesha, it was so fun. Thanks for talking with me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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