Ella Berman on how the vilification of women inspired Before We Were Innocent
And why teenage friendships are so special to explore.
Ten years ago, best friends Bess and Joni were cleared of having any involvement in their friend Evangeline’s death. But that didn’t stop the media from ripping apart their teenage lives like vultures. While Joni capitalized on her newfound infamy to become a motivational speaker, Bess resolved to make her life as small and controlled as possible so she wouldn’t risk losing everything all over again. And it almost worked. . . Today we have the honour of having Ella Berman here to chat about her novel, Before We Were Innocent.
In late-2020, I was faced with the prospect of starting the third draft of a book I didn’t love, in another London lockdown. Feeling the pressure, I put everything on hold for a moment to clear my head. My mum had recently dropped my teenage diaries over and, as I started to read, I was struck by the level of intensity in the pages – particularly when something had to do with my tight-knit friendship group. Not long after, I decided to write the book I’ve always wanted to write – one about friendship. Specifically, teenage friendship. The dark side as well as the intense love. When you’re a teenager, you’re constantly testing everyone around you – will they still love you if you do this? And what about this? Everything feels so critical, and it was a time in life I’ve always wanted to write about.
In Before We Were Innocent, Bess and Joni’s dream summer in Greece ends in tragedy when their best friend, Evangeline, dies under suspicious circumstances. Over the following months the young women wait to be judged not only for what happened to Evangeline that night, but everything leading up to it too. Now, ten years on, the past threatens to catch up with both women in Los Angeles when Joni, caught up in an eerily similar crime, asks Bess for a favour.
I knew early on that the 2008 storyline would take place in Greece but that the three girls wouldn’t find the dream vacation they expected. What was meant to be a bittersweet send off before they part ways for college soon becomes a pressure cooker, as claustrophobia sets in and simmering resentments ultimately lead to the moment their lives are ripped into two. And it’s this dichotomy that interest me the most – the danger lurking around the corner from even the most perfect moment. The relationship between beauty and ugliness, hope and terror.
Like many people, I’ve long been horrified by the vilification of women in the media and I knew it was a phenomenon I wanted to explore. In Before We Were Innocent, Bess and Joni’s entire lives up to this point are made public and dissected through the lens of the worst moment of their lives, and even when their acquittal comes they are still blamed for having courted their own fate by not behaving appropriately in the days following Evangeline’s death. This is something we have seen play out often as facial expressions, mannerisms and coerced statements are all combed over and held up as examples of someone’s culpability, ignoring any of the nuances of the human experience: the things that make us react unexpectedly at the best of times let alone when under immense pressure.
After Evangeline’s death, the media flatten her into a saintly figure and, inevitably, Joni and Bess are cast as the villains. Young women are either saints or sinners, with little in between. Before writing, I became incensed by the treatment of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year old victim of the so-called ‘preppy killer’, Robert Chambers, in the 80s. The media latched on to the idea that Levin was wild and promiscuous, suggesting that she was somehow deserving of her fate. This is something we’ve seen repeated over and over since then, but this story, the way every part of her private life was publicly scrutinized after her death, set something alight inside me. I started thinking about how other women have been treated by the press, and how that attention and level of infamy can affect someone’s life going forwards.
Bess and Joni are eighteen when they are publicly shamed and I wanted to show the impact this exposure would have on them years later. One of the aspects that fascinates me most is that it could have happened to any of us, if we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if your history, all your diaries, and (being 2008) your facebook messages and albums, were leaked to the public, how many of us wouldn’t have said or done things we weren’t ashamed of? And what options are you left with, really? In this book we see two best friends who react very differently to the same trauma. Would you face it head on, or would you hide yourself away, for fear of everything being snatched away from you all over again?
As the hours passed, I went from finding it nearly impossible to feel inspired, to not being able to stop writing about these young women. I remembered new things from my own teenage years – the power struggles and jealousy, the vulnerability and bravado, the love, and everything else took shape from there. And while there’s a mystery at its centre, I think Before We Were Innocent is, above all, about friendship – all the ways we test each other, and the different ways we show our love.
