PhD in British literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her short fiction has appeared in literary collections and journals, including Best New American Voices, The Best American Mystery Stories, Epoch, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Crime Reads, and Poets & Writers, among other publications.
Stewart applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Good Ones, and reported the following:
Page 69 of The Good Ones occurs in the middle of a scene where Nicola, the narrator and a substitute high school teacher, is having lunch with one of her students, Mabry Ballard. Mabry’s father Warren has asked Nicola to help Mabry with her college application essays, but this conversation is a minefield for Nicola for several reasons: 1) Mabry is also the daughter of Nicola’s childhood friend Lauren, who disappeared fifteen years earlier; 2) Nicola and Warren just started sleeping together; and 3) Mabry really couldn’t care less about her college application essays.Visit Polly Stewart's website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Even though she’s relatively tangential to the plot, Mabry was one of my favorite characters to write. I love writing in the voice of teenage girls, and this scene was particularly fun because Nicola, despite having taught for many years, doesn’t really understand or relate to teenagers all that well. On this page, Mabry reveals that she knows about Nicola’s relationship with her father and later reveals a couple of secrets of her own. She’s always one step ahead, and by the end of this scene, she’s convinced Nicola to help her break into the house where her mother disappeared—a spectacularly bad decision.
At its heart, The Good Ones is about troubled relationships between women, and even though Nicola and Mabry aren’t one of the major dynamics, I like the fact that this scene takes on that theme from a different angle. It was one of my favorites to write, and whenever people ask me if I could write a sequel to The Good Ones, I always say it would have to be from Mabry’s point of view.
--Marshal Zeringue
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