However, when she was 12, the passing of a cherished childhood friend awakened her to the aching fear of death. It was then that she felt "the intoxicating pull"  to the world of Wuthering Heights and started identifying with the protagonist Heathcliff, who grew up neglected on the streets and was adopted by the kind-hearted man Earnshaw. Still, he was cruelly bullied by his foster brother and sought to take revenge after his love Catherine married another man. Rice poignantly writes: "In my teenage mind, I was Heathcliff. I was misunderstood, angry and grieving—I wanted people to feel, see and understand my pain. Emily Brontë saw me. She felt death everywhere and understood loss as sharply as I felt my own." Indeed, Brontë also lost multiple family members during her lifetime.

As she matured, the once cynical Rice, nurtured by the art forms of theatre, dance and literature, discovered that the female protagonist Catherine was wrong and that "happiness does exist!" Her passion for Wuthering Heights gradually faded, but then in 2016, when she learned of the plight of refugee children in the Calais camp in France, she was reminded of Heathcliff's traumatic childhood, prompting her to revisit the book. "I saw a story not of romance but of brutality, cruelty and revenge. A tragedy of what might happen if, as individuals as well as a society, we allow cruelty to take hold."