Rebecca Fallon: 'I wanted to write about that elastic sibling relationship that pushes you apart and pulls you back together'
BY Maya Fernandes
15th Jan 2026
In this interview Rebecca Fallon, author of the debut novel Family Drama, shares her advice on writing complex family dynamics and how to approach agents for the first time.
'My advice would be: seek out agents who are willing to travel with you from the point you are at in your journey.'
We caught up with Rebecca to discuss her time studying with us, the inspiration behind her debut novel and her tips for querying agents.
Family Drama follows soap star Susie Byrne, her husband Al and their two children as they navigate long-buried tensions and the fallout of a tragic loss. How did you go about shaping this ensemble, and what advice would you give writers who want their readers to root for dynamic, lovable characters who are also deeply flawed?
Family Drama began as a story of twins. I knew I wanted to write about siblings and that elastic relationship that pushes you apart and pulls you back together. It was only after a year of shaping the book with Felicity Blunt and Rosie Pierce that a scene appeared in Susie’s voice, and they said, ‘There she is!’ So the cast really developed through a long process of evolution!
I’m sure most therapists would agree, you gain new depth on children when you understand their parents. As it is important to shape characters from their own perspectives, it’s almost more important to identify which characters hold the keys to each other. Create characters that offer different lenses onto one another. This allows you to play with different sides to your characters in different environments and create complexity. It can also help to explain – if not always redeem – their flaws.
Dual timelines can be notoriously challenging to navigate, but you weave past and present together seamlessly to demonstrate the emotional impact of Susie’s death. How did you approach structuring and balancing these different timelines?
Honestly, a large spreadsheet. I knew the trajectory I wanted the twins to have – going apart and coming back together – so, working Susan’s timeline through theirs was a matter of injecting the right clues, artefacts, stories and people from her life that would be discovered at the right moments to produce the desired effect. As a process, it was probably similar to approaching a mystery or crime novel: I thought a lot about clues that might be ambiguous or misinterpreted by characters.
Equally important was thinking about how the reader might interpret different clues, and where I wanted to give the reader definite knowledge about who Susan was, in ways that no one else would be able to access. I was able to do this through adding her perspective, but this is also the privilege of having an omniscient narrator.
A central thread of the novel is legacy – what we inherit and how we live in the shadow of someone’s absence. How did you land on this as the emotional core of the story, and how did that choice influence the way you developed the plot?
This core theme about inheritance came very early on, and was one of the few things that never changed over years of redrafting. In fact, in the very early stages of this book, I’d actually toyed with a plot designed more explicitly around a physical inheritance. But none of those mechanics felt quite right for the gentler story I wanted to tell. So, I needed to come up with softer ideas about inheritance in terms of personality and identity.
Siblings tend to think about identity in comparative terms: what did I get compared to my brother/sister? This can relate to both material things as well as immaterial things: attention, attributes, abilities. Twins – even more than other siblings – have intense ideas of sameness and difference projected onto them and built into their relationships. I knew I could develop a plot that involved twins struggling with their identities, and losing and finding each other in that struggle – Shakespeare had already done it in Twelfth Night.
I also knew from the very beginning that Susie was dead. The first page changed hardly at all from the moment I wrote it, and set out a whole plot that would happen from there. From the very beginning, I was able to use her absence to build tension around who had inherited or not inherited which of their mother’s traits. Because she wasn’t there to be part of the conversation, her silence became a vehicle to create suspense.
You’re represented by Curtis Brown literary agents Felicity Blunt and Rosie Pierce – how did you know that they were the right agents for you? Do you have any tips for new writers approaching agents for the first time?
I’m so lucky to be represented by both Felicity Blunt and Rosie Pierce – they took me on jointly, and I have the privilege of being Rosie’s very first client. As a result, the editorial process was an amazing combination of Felicity’s experience and Rosie’s fresh perspective.
As a team they have been the perfect choice – I had no prior novel writing experience, and both of them were willing to invest in the editorial development of my book in an extremely patient way. Family Drama took three years to evolve before we sold it, and I learned so much about my own writing process in that time.
My advice would be: seek out agents who are willing to travel with you from the point you are at in your journey. Have a conversation about how much revision you think the book will need up front, and how much you are willing to do – I know authors who feel very strongly about most elements of their book, but because I was more open-minded, I was happy to have a longer process before submission.
Fundamentally, your agent should see promise in your prose and your ideas. Everything else can be learned, but if you click with someone on that level, you’re probably in for a good long-term relationship.
Are there any family-centred novels that influenced you while writing Family Drama, or that you found yourself returning to for inspiration?
Obviously, I drew inspiration from Twelfth Night. But the novel that I returned to the most was undoubtedly Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. The way she weaves together different perspectives and memories to create a kaleidoscope around a singular event is pure magic.
Other sibling books that inspired me were The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The first is a gorgeous story about siblings whose political entanglements send them spinning in different directions. And the second is an incredibly tender and devastating portrait of twins, which captures so well that indelible sibling closeness even after long stretches apart. Both completely brilliant.
You studied with us on our flagship London Writing Your Novel – Three Months course. How did your time with us shape your approach to writing and are you still in touch with anyone you met on the course?
The course gave me a huge amount of confidence, and was the first time I decided to take my writing more seriously. I left not only with some really practical ways of thinking about different elements of composition, but also with a really talented cohort of fellow writers. We continued to critique each other’s work regularly for a long time afterward and still stay in touch to support each other.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I am currently under contract for a second book with the Borough Press which I hope to share more on soon! This one takes on a very different set of relationships: four friends on a university campus across four years of love and betrayal. It’s been really rewarding applying everything I’ve learned from the first novel to a totally new world and set of challenges.
Get your hands on a copy of Family Drama, out now from The Borough Press.
Rebecca was a student on our London Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in 2019.
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