摘要：Amy T. Matthews won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript for End of the Night Girl (Wakefield Press, 2011), a novel about an Adelaide waitress haunted by the Holocaust. TNL editor Gillian Dooley spoke to her about the challenges of writing on this immense, vexed subject. GD ‘There is no equivalence’ – End of the Night Girl seems to invite criticism for its use of the Holocaust, while at the same time providing a response, or series of responses, to that kind of criticism. How do you negotiate that tension? ATM When I started this project I felt like I was walking on people’s graves. I felt a great sense of anxiety about whether I had any right to fictionalise the Holocaust. Every time I sat down I had a little voice in my head criticising every word I wrote, accusing me of voyeurism, appropriation, historical inaccuracy, moral vacuity. So I put the anxiety into the book. For me, it was the only ethical choice. In essence End of the Night Girl is a novel about the ethics of fictionalising the Holocaust.
