Surface Tension: a novel that plots recovery and narrative therapy devices to articulate the heroine’s developmental journey

Submission note: This novel and exegesis are submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This PhD project contains two parts. The first is a detective novel titled Surface Tension and the second is an exegesis that describes the methodologies I have utilised in writing the novel. I have written Surface Tension as a vehicle for social justice advocacy, with the objective to influence readers’ attitudes about people who experience serious mental health problems. Stigmatising and discriminatory discourses about mental illness are pervasive and often pose insurmountable challenges for people who are struggling to recover, and for whom such attitudes result in multiple human rights violations (Corrigan, 2005; Solomon, 2004). Surface Tension is intended to offer all the pleasures of a plot driven detective novel, while also taking readers on a moral journey. Surface Tension introduces readers to new ways of understanding forces that exclude people from being equal and participating citizens. The novel also provides alternative narratives about “recovery” to elicit reader identification and exposure to a new worldview. I have utilized the detective genre as a utility for representing social justice themes, because, as Cole argues, the genre’s very purpose is to examine moral and ethical terrains and the good/evil dyad (Cole, 2004, p. 86). She contends that the genre traditionally gives voice to society’s “less fortunate” and that this can function as a type of protest, offering new ways of seeing the sociopolitical world (Cole, p. 22).