Both of your novels focus on women and girls who do violent and immoral things. Is that something you’ve always been drawn to?

Yes, I’ve always been interested in female characters and also in horror – in my teens, I got really into Korean cinema and I was obsessed with the revenge film Lady Vengeance, which is filled with really, really morally grey female characters.

I’m specifically interested in the way gender intersects with sex and violence, too – and how that changes the way we look at violent people and, to an extent, how rare it feels when a woman that behaves like that.

‘Sad girl literature’ has become huge over the past few years. Was this something you were aware of when you were writing your novels?

With Boy Parts, I was responding to the rise of [sad girl literature] in general. I found it interesting the way people would talk about the characters in these books like they were these super-troubled, complicated female characters and then you read about the book and it’s like, she’s lost her job and is going on a holiday. It’s this sheltered view of being ‘messy’, the kind of woman who you could imagine doing MDMA two weeks in a row and being like, “I have a problem.”

A lot of the conversations around Fleabag, for example, were so insipid, like people had never done anything slightly bad and I found it a bit twee and strange. So I was thinking about it when I was writing Boy Parts.

With Penance, though, I did not set out to write a sad girl novel – I just naturally write about sad girls.

“It’s rare a woman behaves like that”: author Eliza Clark’s female characters are grimly violent, and readers are obsessed