#dawn west
FellowFemale GazerKirsty Logan’s debut novel, The Gracekeepers, is darkly dreamy and utterly absorbing. Reading it feels like swimming in a cool blue sea. It features a floating circus in a drowning world sprinkled with archipelagos, the last earth on Earth, and a hallowed grace-yard with totem birds marking periods of grief by slowly starving in their buoyant gilded cages. This novel is a gorgeous shard of sea glass washing onto a chilly northern beach. It’s a bit like a richer, more compelling Waterworld.
The Gracekeepers primarily unfolds through the eyes of two heroines–North the fiery bear girl and Callanish the somber gracekeeper. Their stories kiss and diverge like waltzing lovers. A few other characters get their chance to shine in their own POV chapters, which I’m usually wary of but it ended up working beautifully. Everyone is struggling with their own bone-deep desires.
Logan gives us a wonderfully strange and sad post-apocalyptic world with humanity split into two factions–the earth-bound landlockers and the sea-bound damplings. Fear and prejudice fuel their interactions, and the damplings, like North, are clearly the disenfranchised ones. This book is built on binary conflicts. Can one form one’s own identity, outside of a binary? Are there paths between binaries, and if so, how safe are they to trod?
1. Congratulations on your novel debut! Would you share the origin story of this lovely tale?
Thank you! I’ve spent so long living in this weird, dark dreamy world, and it’s a treat to finally be able to bring other people in.
It began with a small, strange image. About a year after my dad died, I was out on a boat with my uncle. We’d both suffered a terrible loss – me of my dad, he of his brother – but we’d never spoken about it directly. I happened to see floating buoys with lights inside that looked like birdcages. So my mind began to wander: why would there be birdcages at sea? Grief was still very much on my mind, as well as my secular lack of a structured mourning, and a lack of a way to discuss it, and so I thought that perhaps the birdcages would be grave markers, and the lifespan of the birds inside would mark the mourning for the person who had died. The whole novel arose from that tiny, personal place.
2. Who was/is your first reader?
My partner, Annie. I read the entire novel to her, chapter by chapter, as I was writing it. Sometimes there would be a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, and she’d then have to wait weeks until I’d finished the next one! She’s now heard about three different versions of the book, as it changed with each edit. I like to think that there’s this first-draft ghost-book that only exists in mine and Annie’s imaginations, because we’re the only ones who heard it.
3. I loved all the gender-play with the circus–the subversive clowns, the sensual glamours, the wild costumes and make-up, the androgynous performances. Am I right in believing all this gender-fucking reflects intentional themes of freedom and identity?
Very much so. It’s about freedom, and about blurring boundaries, and about not having to just choose one thing or another. There are lots of different binary conflicts in the book: land/sea, male/female, gay/straight, security/freedom, wildness/domesticity. A lot of the conflict in the book is about the characters feeling they have to choose one and sacrifice the other.
By the end, I hope that the characters (and maybe the reader) have begun to feel that their world (and maybe our world) is not just a binary choice. If we want, we can choose one thing. But we can also flip between the two, or we can choose neither and follow a third path we have marked out ourselves.
I think partly that comes from my own life. I’ve had both girlfriends and boyfriends, and each time I had a new partner people would ask whether I was ‘gay now’ or 'straight now’. And the answer was yes and no. I’m a monogamous person by nature, so when I was with a man I wasn’t interested in women – but I also wasn’t interested in any other men, just the one I was with. So now I’m with Annie, and it’s not that I’m a lesbian and not interested in men, it’s that I’m not interested in anyone except her. But no matter who I was with, it didn’t change my identity. The person you’re sleeping with doesn’t have to change you if you don’t want it to.
I was born in England to Scottish parents, so I didn’t properly belong there; and now I live in Scotland but have an English accent, so people don’t perceive me as being properly 'from’ here either. I’m from both places, and also neither entirely. I’m a cis female, and I like dresses and lipstick, and generally I’m happy to present as female. But that doesn’t mean I want to always look typically female. I don’t think the way I present myself changes who I am inside, because I don’t want it to. We decide who we are, and the freedom to present ourselves however we like doesn’t change that. I’m quite happy to hold all my contrasting identities simultaneously.
4. When I started reading, I assumed that North and Callanish were the only point-of-view characters, so I was surprised and honestly a little wary when I turned a page and met a chapter from the clown Cash’s POV. I’d already grown attached to North and Callanish, and I believe it’s a risky choice to use multiple POV characters, but now I can’t imagine the novel without those secondary character chapters–especially Red Gold’s and Avalon’s. Did you always intend to tell the story from multiple POVs, or did that come about during the writing process?
This is very much a short story writer’s novel! Short stories come more naturally to me, so this was a way for me to approach the massive undertaking of a novel while still keeping to my own natural rhythm.
Each chapter is its own little tale, and I wanted each character’s point of view to subtly undermine the one that came before. So in one chapter we have the clowns observing the ringmaster’s wife, and thinking how cruel and silly she is; and then we have the ringmaster observing his wife, and of course he’s thinking that she’s sweet and beautiful and sensitive. There is no single truth, not about the world and not about the people in the world. We are all complex. We all have multiple selves. Which self we present is different depending on our company, so it made sense to me that each character could be described from multiple viewpoints, and each of those would be true – even when they were contradictory.
5. So Avalon was the closest thing to a classic villain in The Gracekeepers–a pregnant Machiavellian beauty with a burning coal heart and desperation wafting from her like the smell of strong drink. I’m particularly fond of lady villains, flawed women, “ruined” girls, and the like, so of course I hate-loved Avalon. She reminded me a bit of Lady Macbeth, aka one of my favorite characters of all time. I was particularly enamored with the idea of a pregnant woman doing and saying the things she does; that clash of growth and destruction, and how it contradicts the popular image of pregnant women as life-giving beatific figures. I clearly don’t have an actual question–I just want you to dish about Avalon a bit. Do you agree with my assessment of her?
Avalon was the most fun to write. She’s the wicked stepmother from 'Snow White’, she’s the biblical Eve, she’s Cruella de Vil. She’s seductive and full of rage – and still, she’s a loving wife and a nurturing mother-to-be. She loves her family, and everything she does, she does for her own good reasons. She can be all of these things, just as we can be myriad and contradictory things. Becoming a parent doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. I very much want children, but I don’t think it’s an intrinsically noble act.
Most people I know are many different things. This book began with the loss of my dad, and he was a contradiction too. He was an alcoholic, self-destructive, couldn’t hold down a job. But he was also a loving father who continued to support me financially and emotionally, even through his darkest times. Even as he couldn’t properly look after himself, he helped other people by working for an addiction charity. He never settled to a career, but he was massively inspirational in my career. His funeral was packed with people I didn’t even know he knew – people whose lives he’d touched, who had good memories of him. Recently his university girlfriend got in touch with me, and she had such strong and affectionate feelings for him even though she hadn’t seen him for thirty years. He was a great man, but also a deeply flawed and troubled man – and at the same time, he was a regular guy, nothing special, someone you’d pass in the street and not even notice. Every single one of us is just a regular person, but is also vitally important.
6. I really enjoyed how you used the clowns; how they ended up being central to the plot. I was terrified of clowns as a child, and as I grew up that terror evolved into just being creeped out by them. What clowns are (ambiguous) and what we project onto them (fury, anarchy, sadness) is exactly what’s so creepy about them. As you say: “Dough knew that clowns made perfect scapegoats, because what’s scarier than a clown? They stand for money and hunger, sex and rage, loss and loneliness, displacement and death. They stand for everything, and they stand for nothing.” Did you ever fear clowns as a child, and have you encountered any readers who are afraid of your clowns?
I hate clowns. Properly hate them. They’re scary and sinister and I have never found them amusing, not even as a child. I’m creeped out by painted faces and masks and anything that hides people’s faces in a grotesque way. But of course, that’s why I’m so fascinated by them. One of the weirdest things about being a writer is that you’re constantly exploring things that disturb you, because that’s where your emotional truth hides.
When I researched the history of circuses – because there’s loads of research in this book, though I don’t think it really shows; I researched circuses and English folk traditions and naval superstitions and different types of boats and which crops grow in different climates and which landmasses would exist as islands if the world did flood – I found that clowns have always served as scapegoats. Their tradition goes back to court jesters and fools. The common people (the 99%, as we’re now called) would be angry at what the kings and lords did, at their flaunting of wealth and charging of taxes. But it was too dangerous to criticise or mock those in power, or the platform to do so just didn’t exist. So instead there were the jesters and clowns: figures of fun who made themselves look silly so we could all scorn them and feel superior to them. Also, the fools and jesters could talk about political situations in a way that no one else could, because they dressed it in a funny story. We don’t just mock the clowns because they’re silly – we mock them because they stand in place of those we really want to hate. It’s the same with nursery rhymes and fairy tales: they seem like fun little stories, but many of them are a sneaky way to criticise those in power.
7. In our interview for The Rental Heart, we discussed your teen years and current life in Scotland and how it informs your literary aesthetic. Since The Gracekeepers is set in a fantasy post-apocalyptic world, how did your Scottish identity influence the atmosphere/settings, if it did at all?
Scotland is so inspirational to me. There’s the folklore and fairytales, of course, and so many of those stories (selkies,kelpies, mermaids) are based on the sea. No matter where you go in Scotland, you’re never more than 40 miles from the sea. I’ve written so much about Scottish folklore, but I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Folklore is the well I keep returning to, and I don’t see how it could ever run out.
So there’s the sea part, and in Scotland we also have the tradition of the ceilidh, a social gathering with music and wild dancing. It’s a very sociable country, and people are much friendlier here than any other place I’ve visited. Scottish folk – and those in Glasgow in particular – will always help a stranger, or chat to fill the silence, whether you want them to or not!
I love that raucous, sociable aspect: drinking and music and dancing until dawn. But I also love the other side of Scotland: days of silence and watching the tide breathe in and out. I try to bring that contrast, that non-conflicting contradiction, to all my writing. I’ll never stop being inspired by this country.
8. Are you superstitious in any way?
I’d like to say no, but I did develop some little superstitions when writing this book. I wrote the first chapters on a series of writing retreats along the Scottish coast, and at one point I was in a little east coast fishing village called Cellardyke. While I was there I visited an antique shop and bought a brass compass. From then on, I always had to make sure the compass was pointing north before I could begin the day’s writing. That was very much a book-specific superstition, as I haven’t done that for any writing since.
9.If you could pick a classic fairy tale to retell (that you haven’t already), what would it be?
’Kate Crackernuts’, a Scottish fairytale about a girl who isn’t pretty or demure, but who gets her happy ending by being clever and resourceful. It also features a fairy ball, which has a contradiction I love: it’s beautiful and glamorous and happy, but it’s also destructive and can ultimately kill you.
10. Now, please do share a little about your third book, the forthcoming story collection, if you don’t mind. I can’t wait to see it in print!
Thank you! I’m excited about it – I love writing short stories, and they’re more fun to read at events than novel extracts because you get to share a fully-formed piece rather than just a sliver. Also, the collection is written in thirteen different voices, so that’s more fun to perform as each story has such a different mood.
The book is a collection of linked stories called A Portable Shelter (due out in the UK in August). It’s inspired by Scottish and Scandinavian folk tales, and it’s all about loss, identity and the purpose of stories.
To be honest, I’m already getting excited about starting Book #4, which will be another novel. This September I’m off for a one-month writing retreat to a forest in the middle of Finland, where I’ll start writing it. I’ve been planning three possible novels, and I don’t know yet which one I’ll actually write. But it’s nice to have options!
Conversation by Dawn WestandKirsty Logan.
Fellow Female Gazer Leesa Cross-Smith’s award-winning debut Every Kiss a War is one of the sexiest books of all time–a collection of twenty-seven heart-throbbing, richly detailed stories concerning a series of evolving relationships and their inhabitants. These are highly textured, strong-voiced men and women who kiss and run and fuck and fight and mourn and pine and find themselves standing in a light snow with someone they don’t love and drinking “ice clinky frontier whiskey” and wearing bracelets that make bright sounds and letting someone kiss them “because fireworks.” When I think of these stories, I see starlit gravel roads; a girl standing in the southern heat, pretty brown legs ending in cowboy boots; a dimly lit kitchen swollen with country music; a woman’s braid coming undone in the crepuscular light; and ROSCOE PIE, written twice and underlined.
1. One of the things I love most about your work is how sensually vivid it is. There are so many stellar passages I can’t possibly start referencing them–I’d end up pulling at least twenty quotes. Do you write lines like this in bits and pieces, as inspiration strikes, stitching together so many colorful word-quilt patches, or do you sit down and write in long bursts until you get to the end?
Thank you so much for this sweetness Dawn! I appreciate it and you muchly. I write most of that kinda stuff in bits and pieces, yes. I will sometimes write a whole list of them in the notes on my phone and put them together later…however they end up coming together.
2. How important is symbolism to you?
I rarely do it on purpose. Sometimes it happens and I’m not even fully aware of it and that’s my favorite!
3. Your collection is a blend of flash fiction and longer stories–you seem to flit back and forth effortlessly. Which comes more naturally: little fables or tall tales?
They both seem to come naturally, honestly. I like to go back and forth because some stories just feel longer than others and some…I only want them to be a little peek between fingers. A blink of a feeling.
4. So let’s dish about genre a little bit. In my humble opinion, you definitely write love stories but you’re not technically a romance writer. If I were a librarian I would shelve your book in the general adult/literary fiction section. Do you find any value in these kinds of distinctions? Speaking of which, I’ve always carried a hot stone of hate for the “African-American” section in libraries/bookstores for several reasons–chiefly because an author’s race tells readers absolutely nothing about their book(s) and because it’s often ghettoizing. Is that a “pet peeve” of yours too?
Romance is my favorite thing to write…complicated relationships. It’s what I always come back to. And I always wanna be able to keep those ideas fresh and sexy and comfy and compelling and not-cliche. I think the distinctions can be super-helpful for people when they’re looking for a certain feel or emotion as they’re hunting for a book…but a good book is a good book and a good story is a good story, no matter what the label is.
I’m prettymuch anti-African-American section for the same reason you are. Once we start doing that…we have to do that for everyone/everything right? I’m African-American with some Great British and Scandinavian. I also love noodles and strawberries and Harry Styles. I could be shelved in a lot of different ways and so could everyone! It’s weird to me. I mean I get it…in a way…but it’s still weird.
5. Some of your stories have a male protagonist (Hem, The Wild Hunt, Wayfaring). I believe you write men quite well, whether they’re protagonists or love interests or supporting characters. Do you find it difficult to step inside a man’s mind and write from his perspective?
Thank youuuu! I love writing men/writing about men. I love the quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals where she writes “My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy.” Men interest me because humans interest me. It’s not always about sex or seduction or lust. I just like trying different things and coming from different points of view.
When writing from a man’s point of view I tend to make them a little more straightforward and a little less chatty. This is because most of the men in my life are that way. But when it all boils down I always give them the same emotions I give my women. Because people are people. And I write both the men and women in my stories as having lusty, sinful, grumpy…whatever thoughts because some feelings are universal.
6. I LOVE your Every Kiss A War playlist. Totally perfect mood music. Did you listen to these songs while you were writing or did you arrange the playlist later?
Thanks for listening! I don’t really listen to music when I write, but I had some songs in mind that I wanted to put on the playlist. The Steve Nicks, the Neko Case…those were on the list in my head from the very beginning.
I’m deeply in love with your trilogy of stories (What the Fireworks Are For; Hold On, Hold On; Cheap Beer & Sparkles) starring Violet, a strong-willed but painfully confused runner with a husband, Dominic, and a crush, Roscoe Pie (I also have a crush on the perfectly-named Roscoe Pie, thanks to you!). I have a major soft spot for recurring characters, as you know, so I have a couple questions:
7. What first inspired you to write this trilogy?
!! Thank you Dawn! I do have a crush on Roscoe Pie, too. I love him madly. I wrote the first one “What The Fireworks Are For” just because I wanted to write about a wild girl. A woman who was gonna do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. And when I got to the end of that story I realized that I wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I’d recently finished Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and I wanted to write about a woman who ran away from her husband for no real reason besides the fact that she just wanted to…a woman who was confident and surprising and rebellious and confused and a lot of other things too.
8. Did you know Violet’s saga would be more than one story from the start?
I didn’t! I was just gonna go with it and it turned into three stories then it turned into a full novel, which was nice and surprising.
9. Do you see more story series in your future?
There is another recurring character in my collection. His name is Sam. I have other stories about him and could probably write a whole novel about him too. I really love Sam. I think about him a lot and he’s special to me. He’s a precious man.
10. Speaking of which, I was tickled pink to read that you’re working on a novel starring Violet. Can you tell us anything about it?
Aw, yay! I have it all finished and it’s in my agent’s hands now, which is still so surreal and amazing for me and always will be. It’s a continuation of the trilogy of stories from my collection and it’s about Violet and Roscoe and Violet’s ex-husband Dominic and all that those complicated relationships entail. I could write a couple more books about Violet. I adore her, even the hard to love parts. She’s so sexy and complicated and messy and wild and easy and hard to love. She feels real to me so I just keep writing her because bless her heart…I wanna kiss her mouth.
Conversation by Dawn WestandLeesa Cross-Smith.
California,Edan Lepucki’s debut novel, is a stunning tragedy set in a post-apocalyptic near future. There are no zombies, no aliens, no genetically mutated humans. The only monsters are us.
A young married couple, Cal and Frida, flees a decaying L.A. for the woods of California, in a desperate attempt to stay alive together. The United States is a desolate, crumbling shadow of its former self, due to increased natural disasters, rapidly dwindling resources, and a steadily swelling gap between the rich and poor. The world as we know it is releasing its final death rattles. The realism of this outcome is beyond unsettling. The novel sustains this uncanny, skin-crawling feeling until its final devastating moment. It lingered with me for several hours after. This is a testament to Lepucki’s masterful way with words; the writing is gorgeously, deceivingly plain.
The beginning of California finds Cal and Frida in almost-total isolation—their only outside contact is August, a reticent man who travels with his mule and cart to various isolated homesteads in the area, trading precious supplies. He urges them to stay put, to not ask questions. In these early moments we watch Cal and Frida eke out a life together while they mourn the world they’ve lost and use sex to pass the time. Their robust love glows in the dim, stark cabin that holds what little they still own.
This fragile existence is demolished when Frida gets pregnant. They don’t trust their ability to keep a child alive in this new world (especially after an early and pivotal tragedy that I won’t address because no spoilers), so when Frida accidentally discovers a nearby settlement, they strike out for it, despite previous warnings to avoid the area. Frida is determined to increase the safety of her unborn child, but Cal is more reluctant, being wary of the unknown. The paranoid community they find carries dark secrets and mysterious rules, and when they meet the leader, Cal and Frida’s cabin-life is set on fire. They know they can’t turn back now.
In this new society, called The Land, knowing what to do and who to trust becomes far more complicated than they anticipated. The best and worst aspects of humanity are dragged out in the open, forcing them (and us) to confront the depths of our treachery and vanity and the heights of our resilience and honor.
The evolution (or devolution) of Cal and Frida’s relationship is both compelling and frustrating. Their bond is affected by the mere presence of other people, with all those other human sounds and smells and personalities and fears. They have different roles to play and different distractions colonize their attention. Also, from the beginning Cal and Frida kept secrets from each other, but they get progressively worse after moving to The Land. Adversarial feelings flower between them. The love we saw in them earlier begins to transform, turning into something barbed and slightly poisonous.
Violence and death hang like a mist over the book, as Cal and Frida try, in their separate ways, to unravel the mysteries of The Land. As the story progresses to its climax, they form tenuous relationships with a few memorable residents, like Sailor, Anika, and Peter; and we gradually learn those dark secrets. Many of them are little individual cataclysms, hurtling Cal and Frida closer to the fork in their road.
[Spoiler Alert] I can’t resist addressing the chilling, somewhat open ending that seems to have divided readers. Personally, I thought it was brilliant. Even though it would have been entertaining to read how The Plan turned out, it’s unnecessary. It probably would’ve weakened the ending if Lepucki kept going to show us how it all turned out for Micah and Pines and The Land. If California was about the Group and the Communities and The Land, Cal and Frida wouldn’t be the main characters.
Pines possess a more familiar horror than The Land, which made the ending more unnerving for me. Cal and Frida are trapped in this profoundly elitist, sexist, and heteronormative shadow of a structure that is partially responsible for the apocalyptic landscape in the first place. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, after all.
The husband goes to work and the wife keeps house and they eat their beef wellington protein in their little boxes on the hillside and they pretend the wild, rotting “out there” isn’t there, just outside of their reinforced gates and security patrols. Her job was to not ask any questions. She and the child, they would stay here. Frida and Cal turning into Julie and Gray after surviving in the wilderness and living on The Land is so perfectly tragic that I’m getting queasy just thinking about it. [End Spoilers]
I am far from an expert on post-apocalyptic novels, but I believe this is a thoughtful and unique entry into the genre, peopled with flawed, distinctive characters, refreshing wit, and a provocative plot. Lepucki uses the dystopian setting to explore human fallibility, and how far we will go to preserve what love and safety we have in our lives. It definitely deservesthehype.
Review by Dawn West.
Kirsty Logan’s fantastical fiction has thrilled me for nearly four years now, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with her hereandelsewhere online, but my favorite experience (so far) has been reading her debut story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. These twenty surreal and sumptuous stories defy tidy labels. Fairy tales, magical realism, steampunk, literary fiction. It’s all there.
Logan’s work is humming with dreamy, erotic energy. Every detail, even the mundane, is scandalously compelling. Her characters are far from meek damsels and hollow princes–they are adventurers; positively lusty with their desire to discover what fate has in store for them. Witches, coin-operated boys, Eros-soaked lovers, an imprisoned empress, a girl with antlers, a boy with a tiger’s tail. Many of them are at liminal stages in their lives, in the twilight of adolescence or facing a major personal upheaval. Some of them live within traditional fairy tale retellings, and some of them live in their own contemporary fables, but every one of them is stuffed with lust and loss. They all seek love or a worthy substitution, and from Logan’s dark, wild worlds, they will haunt you.
1) First of all, when and how did you find out that Salt wanted to publish The Rental Heart?
It was an unexpected tweet. I have my phone set to flash up Twitter messages and Facebook comments but not new emails, and as I was getting ready to go out with my girlfriend Annie one afternoon I noticed a Twitter message flash up: CONGRATULATIONS. I had no idea what I was being congratulated on (though it’s always nice to be congratulated, no matter what it’s for). So I checked my email, and there was a lovely message from Salt saying I had won the Scott Prize and they were going to publish my book. Annie and I jumped around the room for a bit going WOOHOOOOO, and then we went out for a coffee. It was a good day, though really it was just the first step in a long process. I know in films there’s always The Moment where they get The Phone Call and then Everything Changes. But that made me realise that in life it doesn’t go that way. Book publishing is generally a slow and staggered process, and there’s not one big explodey moment where you’re showered with glitter and praise.
But as often happens in life, what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong, because for my next book I did get The Phone Call and The Moment! I was in a cafe and my agent called – the cafe was noisy and she was in a car with her baby in the back, so it was all rather loud and I knew I’d misheard her when she said ‘We’ve got an offer, are you sitting down?' It was only two days since she’d sent out the manuscript so I knew I’d misheard, as it takes months for editors to even glance at your manuscript. But no, it was true, and the offer was so fast and so amazing that I was glad that I’d been sitting down because if not I’d have fallen over. Now I try and live by a Dutch proverb: “Don’t worry. It will happen differently anyway”. Publishing, like life, often surprises you.
When I got home, I flipped through my writing notebook and found a note I’d written to myself months ago – lady lifts servants’ skirts. I have no idea what I meant, but I thought it fit nicely with the painting. A story can’t be about one character – what the lady needed was a love interest. I searched through online archives of paintings and found this one of a farmer-girl gazing dreamily into the distance. Aha!, I thought, this is the sort of girl who would run away on adventures.
So I wrote a story about a lady who lifts her servants’ skirts, and about the sorts of girl who ran away on adventures. One weird thing was that my first thought on seeing ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ was “hey, she reminds me of PJ Harvey.” And when I went down to Bridport, a little seaside town in England, to collect a prize that 'Underskirts’ won – who was there at the ceremony but… PJ Harvey.
3) Which story was the most difficult to write and why?
They were all easy, and they were all ridiculously hard. Ideas are simple and plentiful – I have more story ideas right now than I could write for the next ten years, and every day another one appears. I don’t struggle to create worlds or situations, or to put sentences together. But there is one thing that I find near-impossible, and struggle with on every story I write: the 80% mark. I don’t know what it is, but something happens when I’m about 80% through a story when I just… stall. I’m frustrated, I’m bored, I know how to finish the story but I just can’t do it. I have to really push myself through. It helps to talk it out with other people, to take a break, or sometimes to just put my arse in the chair and my hands on the keyboard and just write the bloody thing. It never gets easier.
If I had to choose one, though, it’s 'Bibliophagy.’ For years I’d avoided writing about my dad’s alcoholism, for so many reasons: because I loved him, because I didn’t want to hurt him, because I didn’t want people to think that he was an alcoholic and nothing more, and because it hurt me too. I find that the best way to approach difficult truths is not head-on, but sideways, through the medium of myth. I couldn’t write about an alcoholic, but I could write about a man addicted to eating words, even though he knew that his addiction was tearing apart his already fractured family. That was tough to write, though I’m glad I did it. Honesty hurts, but writing falsely safe stories is no good for the writer or the reader.
Even when I write stories that aren’t set in the present, they’re rarely historical in the strict sense – I’m sure a historian would shred them to pieces! I often write in 'fairy tale time’: a vague past, a once-upon-a-time that might not be historically real but is real in a timeless sociological and emotional way.
5) Speaking of settings, how important is your upbringing and current life in Scotland to your literary aesthetic?
Scotland is so inspirational to me. Although I’m Scottish by family, I was actually born in a small town in the English Midlands, and it was dull dull dull. Both my parents are from Scotland, and my family moved back to Glasgow when I was 13. If I’d stayed in that English town I certainly wouldn’t be the same writer I am today.
My dad was also a big influence on me, and I’ve always associated him with water and the sea. He was born on the small Scottish island of Bute. When I was a child he had a small sailboat called First Symphony on Lake Windermere in England, and used to take me out sailing. After he died, my mother and brother and I scattered his ashes on the beach at Culzean Castle, which looks out on Bute. Now every time I’m by the sea, I feel that I’m with my dad.
I’m currently working on my third book, a collection of linked stories called A Portable Shelter. It’s inspired by Scottish and Scandinavian folk tales. Part of the research for the book is to travel around the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and I did the first part of that recently when my girlfriend Annie and I went up to the Applecross peninsula with our lurcher puppy Rosie. The landscape there is glorious, whether it’s endless blue skies or torrential rain (and we got a bit of both!). I ate local squat lobster, went out on a fishing boat, explored lochs, and climbed seaweed-slippery rocks. I even stripped to my knickers and waded into a loch to retrieve Rosie’s ball when I threw it in deep water. And it was a particularly memorable trip because Annie and I got engaged. So many of my memories are linked to Scottish landscapes.
Photo by Luis del Rio.
6) What are your favorite fairy tale retellings?
I’m madly in love with Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on retold fairytales, and to my mind Donoghue’s was the only book that actually subverted fairytales at their base level, rather than just changing a few details or flipping characters around. It’s sadly out of print now, but if you can find a copy then grab it. Reading it is an education.
Conversation by Dawn WestandKirsty Logan.
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” This is the first line of Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s debut novel. It’s May 1977 in small-town Ohio and James, a Chinese-American professor, and Marilyn, a white housewife, are going about their married morning. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Lydia Lee is the middle child and their favorite. Her younger sister Hannah is the first to comment on Lydia’s absence, and it descends into horror from there. Lydia’s body is found soon after; apparently she drowned in the lake near their house. The Lees’ lives detonate, of course, but this story is far from your typical “lost child” tale. How each person in Lydia’s life absorbs the reality of her death is only a fraction of the narrative, which is why I fell in love with it. Everything I Never Told You is subtly exquisite.
I was drawn to this novel for many reasons. First of all, it’s set in Ohio, where I’ve always lived. I’m also fascinated by familial drama and the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s and the author’s name is lovely: Celeste Ng, pronounced ing. It’s aesthetically and phonetically pleasing. And chiefly, it explores the lives of an interracial couple and their children—being an African-American with very fair skin, I grew up being identified and treated like a multiracial person, even though I’m not (I have white ancestry but it’s too far back to matter). Those feelings of isolation and social anxiety and mild body dysmorphia forever in my marrow. The various racially-charged interpersonal dramas. So what are you? What are you? No one looking like me, not anywhere I looked, not ever. When the local newspaper writes about Lydia after her death, they mention how alone she was, how she didn’t have any friends, and the editorialist always mentions directly before or after that she was the only Asian girl at the school, that she stood out in the halls. No one looked like her, not there, where she looked.
While Ng unveils the complex inner life of our dead 16-year-old heroine, she deftly weaves in the equally multifaceted inner lives of her family, sliding back and forth in time and place. The ways that James, Marilyn, Nath, and Hannah loved Lydia illuminates each of their fatal flaws. If this were a Shakespearean tragedy they would all be dead by the end, except Hannah, who would bear witness, being the shadow—the keen observer in their quiet world of love and betrayal. Ng shifts focus expertly, without any indication that we are changing perspective, except for the tender white space between scenes.
We learn how very different difference means to James and Marilyn, and how that shapes their parenting styles, for better and for worse. James grew up as the perpetual outsider, being Chinese in a sea of white classmates, being working poor among a sea of middle-class and wealthy peers. This all contributes to his marrying Marilyn. “This was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.”
For Marilyn, difference is salvation. She grew up desperate to distinguish herself from her fiercely traditional home-ec teacher mother, which illuminates her own initial feelings for James, who came into her life as a young history professor. “How skinny he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never seen anyone like him.” She was on her way to becoming a doctor before she fell in love with James and became another pretty housewife, despite her best efforts to avoid such a life. Years later, when she discovers that she’s pregnant with their youngest, Hannah, and James comes to her, “[e]verything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been possible.”
These defeats and desires linger in their bones, shaping how they raise their children. They do love them; they’re positively drowning in it (no pun intended), but they betray them anyway. Perhaps some form of betrayal is inevitable for everyone.
The atmosphere of this novel reminds me of one of my all-time favorite novels and film adaptations, The Virgin Suicides. Thick and soft, silent, poisonous. The pulpy suffocation of the parents. Lydia’s apparent and assumed virginal suicide. The way no one truly knew her, like no one truly knew the Lisbon sisters. Everything I Never Told You is the perfect title—it’s plump with every characters’ wretched, deafening secrets. Everyone is an iceberg—the vastness of them hidden below their self-revealed surfaces.
In the midst of all this, there’s Jack, Nath’s envy and enemy, and the only real friend Lydia had. I won’t ruin the heart-rending twist in Jack’s story, but I will say that he is there to the end, and he is more than he appears, to Nath and Lydia alike, and I could see the twist coming, but it was executed so flawlessly that I was still deliciously devastated.
Some may say the ending is rushed, but I believe it was building methodically to such a conclusion all along. It wasn’t a happy ending—it wasn’t necessarily thrilling, but there is a release, a deep exhalation, a sort of coalescing. So much of it is still vivid in my mind now, days after reading it; that tortured glare of Jack’s with his golden-tipped eyelashes, Hannah curled and absorbent under the kitchen table, the Lees crossing the last name off a tidy list of teen girl false friends, the tragic scent of lemons, Marilyn’s mother’s cookbook, “the curve of Louisa’s back and the pale silk of her thighs and the dark sweep of her hair,” Nath and the astronauts, Lydia’s silver heart on a chain, the smell of the lake .This is a terrifically nuanced, haunting novel that is practically begging for its own film adaptation. Someone brilliant, please make my wish your command.
Review by Dawn West.
Forobviousreasons, I think Katie Coyle is effing fabulous. Her debut novel, Vivian Versus the Apocalypse, is unsurprisingly fantastic. A winner of Hot Key Books’ Young Writers Prize, this book is clever, accessible, thrilling, and refreshing.
For those of you who aren’t in-the-know, Vivian Versus the Apocalypse is set in an alternate modern America, where the ultraconservative and super-powerful Church of America predicts that their most hardcore Believers will be raptured in six months. We meet our lead Vivian Apple the night before the Rapture, at a mock pre-Rapture party thrown by her fellow non-Believer best friend Harpreet Janda. The next morning Vivian’s parents are missing and there are two holes in the ceiling and society goes batshit crazy (because we totally would). This leads Vivian to embark on an epic road trip with Harp and a handsome blue-eyed stranger to find out what really happened to Vivian’s parents and the thousands of other Believers who disappeared, while the world around them seizes with panic and zeal.
This book isn’t the end for Vivian either. A US edition, titled Vivian Apple Versus the World, will be released in 2015, and Coyle is working on a sequel. Bless her lovely brain.
1.) First of all, how and when did this marvelous book come about? Was it plot first, character first, imagery first, theme first?
I first started writing Vivian as a short story a few years ago, around the time of the last widely publicized Rapture prediction. I hadn’t paid much attention to it, but the morning after the Rapture didn’t happen, my husband handed me the newspaper article he was reading and said, “This sounds like one of your stories.” The article was a slightly jokey story about a family of about five—the parents believed that the Rapture was coming and the kids, who were all teenagers, didn’t. I don’t really remember much besides that, except that the youngest child noted that the weirdest thing about the situation was that his parents didn’t make him do his homework anymore, because they thought the world was about the end and he was about to end with it. It was a totally bizarre story but I was so struck by that detail—how shocking and strange it would be to force yourself to grow up under those circumstances, where your parents are convinced you’re not going to get the chance to grow up. I had written basically the first chapter of the book under the assumption that it was a short story, and it was only after I got to the final image—of Vivian seeing the holes in her parents’ ceiling, through which they’ve presumably ascended—that I realized it was going to be much bigger than I’d anticipated.
2.) And that’s one of the most marvelous and anxiety-producing realizations a writer can experience haha. So Vivian and Harp are both unquestionable badasses. I LOVE their relationship. They begin from very different places socially and they have such a strong, complex bond. Vivian was somewhat timid, obedient, a “good girl,” while Harp was comparatively wild, “boy-crazy,” disobedient (and hilarious). Their dynamic was so refreshing to me, because Harp was a truly valuable, three-dimensional character, instead of the magical person-of-color sidekick or the comic relief “slutty” girl. Also, Vivian’s love for Harp didn’t stop her from feeling alienated by her lack of Harp-like wildness, and that was intertwined with her lack of desire to be like her former Believer friends. So I have two questions about them. 1: When you were their age, were you more like Vivian or Harp? 2: Can you imagine what the story would be like if Harp was the lead?
I’m so thrilled you love their relationship! The Viv/Harp dynamic is the most important aspect of the book for me. I wanted the central love story to be the love between them, as opposed to their relationships with the boys in their lives.
I was totally Vivian as a teen, and I felt at the time like I was surrounded by Harps—all my friends seemed so much brighter and bolder and more vibrantly alive than I felt, although I have a feeling they probably felt the same way I did. I think I’m still trying to become the person Vivian does over the course of the story—a little closer to Harp’s total lack of fear than she started.
That’s such an interesting puzzle, imagining Harp as the lead and Vivian as the best friend! I don’t know that the arc would change that drastically, although it would go somewhat in reverse—Vivian’s story is about pushing yourself to be a little braver and work a little harder to do what’s right, even when it’s easier to lie down and let life happen to you. Harp’s is more a story about letting yourself be vulnerable, letting the people who love you in when you need them, when you’re in pain. Hopefully both those threads are visible in the novel, but Vivian’s was definitely the one that came across to me as more dynamic, plot-wise.
3.) Vivian goes from being passive to active because she wants the truth, and along the way she learns that being obedient isn’t necessarily being a good person, among other things. In the beginning she prays, “Dear Universe, make me the hero of my own story.” LOVE that line! I was so into how Vivian becomes exactly what the Church of America doesn’t want women to be. They want women to be obedient bit players–supporting characters at best. This is just one aspect of the excellent social commentary in the story. Did you find it difficult to deftly weave so many serious, complicated social critiques in the story, or did they mostly come about organically? I mean, you’re addressing religion, corporate capitalism, sexism, cults and radical political movements, homophobia, and youth politics while retaining some nuance and avoiding overt cynicism. Quite a feat, considering you didn’t let it slow down the pace or pollute the plot.
Well, I’m really glad you think so! When I started writing the book, I definitely never had the conscious thought, “Oh, this will a young adult novel that will also be a radical feminist anti-capitalist tract.” And throughout the writing of the first draft, I was only ever trying to get from Point A to Point B plot-wise. The social commentary is just what seeped in once I started writing around the margins of the things that are important to me. I’m not a particularly nuanced political thinker; mostly I just believe that people are people regardless of gender, race, class, or sexuality, and the authorities that make them feel like less than people—laws, the more archaic bits of the Bible, advertising—are things that need to be aggressively questioned/destroyed. And it was important to me that Vivian be a Girl Who Does Stuff—I’m always annoyed by passive female characters, especially passive female main characters, which I think happens all too often. So for the Church of America to have such a specific idea of what women can and should be capable of, and for that idea to be a limited one—as has historically been the case in many religions, and which persists today—means that Vivian doesn’t just have personal, internal reasons for wanting to become her own person, but external pressures as well.
4.) She is most definitely a Girl Who Does Stuff! So the worldbuilding in VvtA was subtle and truly immersive. I could easily believe that a church of that magnitude run by a couple of charismatic douchebags could gain fame with violently patriarchal messages and spread through various upper echelons of power. Would you consider VvtA to be dystopian fantasy, or literary satire, or do you think labels are meant to make love and have beautiful book babies?
Oh man, Vivian definitely falls into some weird hybrid of genres. I wanted to play around in the realm of dystopia, because I’m a big fan of it as a genre, and very interested in the way it’s surged in popularity for young adults over the last few years. I’ve read a lot of YA dystopia of late and been frustrated by some of it—it always seems to me like the dark future societies a few of these books describe, while interesting, would just never happen. People would never let them happen. So it was sort of a fun challenge to imagine what a feasible dystopia would look like at this point in time.
ButVivian definitely has elements of satire, too, and I tried to plot it as a mystery—I started with the question “Where have Vivian’s parents gone?” and let that lead to a number of additional questions. Plus it’s a road trip novel, plus it’s a romance, plus it’s a radical feminist anti-capitalist tract, plus it’s got that big musical number. (Note: there is no musical number; it is a book.) So I hesitate to label it as anything in particular.
5.) Speaking of dystopians, I have another two-part question. 1: What are your favorite dystopian novels? 2: Have you ever read any utopian fiction? If so, what are you favorites?
Yes! I’ve read a bunch of both at this point—one of my favorite classes in my MFA program was on dystopian and utopian fiction, and that introduced me to a lot of great works. My favorite dystopian novel is, by far, The Handmaid’s Tale, which is just one of the best-written and most chilling books I’ve ever read. I also love The Hunger Games andNever Let Me Go. No one really writes utopian novels anymore, but the one I liked the most was Marge Piercy’s Women at the Edge of Time—it’s sort of like Slaughterhouse-fiveandOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had a feminist utopian baby. I also loved Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, which among other things, boasts a hilariously accurate early 20th century depiction of dumb bros.
6.) So let’s dish about Peter. SO DREAMY. I almost stopped reading to applaud how you handled Peter’s re-entry into the story. After that faux-Rapture party in the beginning, I knew he’d be back, and I was oh-so satisfied with how and when he did. Did you know he would re-enter Vivian’s life all along or did you figure that out as you got further along? By the way, you have my highest compliments for pulling off a love story without allowing it to get too cheesy or overwhelm the major plot.
Hooray! I knew that Peter would re-enter the book, because I wanted Vivian to have someone to make out with. I don’t think romance is an integral part of YA fiction or even life for a lot of people, but that underlying yearning that Vivian feels for Peter throughout the book is a big part of what I remember about being seventeen. The main difference is that I had no impending apocalypse spurring me to take the lead and make out with boys. It was important to me, also, that the person Vivian makes out with would be a person who is attracted to Vivian when she is at her most outspoken and rebellious, rather than someone who saw her face from across a room and had to have her.
It makes me so glad when readers find Peter dreamy because I basically took all my favorite parts of my husband and constructed a fictional teenage boy out of them. It really feels like anyone responding well to Peter is just validating my own good taste.
7.) Were you ever concerned by conservative Christian reader reactions? Particularly parents, considering that the book is YA. Even though the Church of America is entirely fictional and the situation is dystopian, I can imagine some far-right readers taking offense to the PG-13 content (underage drinking, a little recreational drug use, implied sex, off-page violent deaths, a violent attack) and the various critiques of certain ideals. (Personally I think this book is fine for the 13-and-up crowd, but I’m not a politically-far-right religious parent.)
I was definitely aware in writing the book that it isn’t for everyone—the PG-13 content and the social commentary more or less guarantees that ultra-conservative Christian parents are whatever the opposite of a target group is for me. I was trying to stay true to what would have appealed to me as a cynical, goofy 17-year-old (and as a cynical, goofy 27-year-old), and so I didn’t purposely pull any punches when it came to depicting Vivian and Harp’s lives or beliefs. It is important to me, though, that religious readers don’t take the fact that Vivian’s antagonist is a church as a sweeping condemnation of religion itself. I know and love plenty of very spiritual people, and I fully support their freedom to believe in anything at all. I start to get a little itchy at the point that someone’s beliefs encroaches on someone else’s right to live a reasonable life, and that’s the space in which I hope Vivian makes the points I want it to make.
8.) Movie fantasy time! If you could write and cast a film adaptation of Vivian Versus the Apocalypse/Vivian Apple Versus the World, who would play whom? (If you can’t think of a particular actor for a character, you could suggest a type, like “fresh-faced/well-known” or “someone with a Broadway background,” etc.)
THIS IS MY FAVORITE QUESTION OF ALL TIME. I would love to see Vivian played by Hailee SteinfeldfromTrue Grit, who absolutely blew me away in that movie: she is just the right combination of tough, tender, and uncertain that I think is key to Vivian’s character. I saw the movie Mud last year right around the time I was finishing up revisions, and I could totally see the star of that, Tye Sheridan, as Peter. If Ty Sheridan is busy, I would like Harry Styles to step in. Not because I think he’s particularly right for the part, just because he’s a dreamboat. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any prominent teenage Indian-American actresses, so Harp would have to be some baller sasscat of an unknown. Also I included a character in the book (Vivian’s favorite teacher, Wambaugh) specifically so that if the book was adapted into a movie, Amy Poehler could play her. I think she’d do a really good job as Wambaugh, but also I’d really just like to hang out with Amy Poehler.
9.) I love all of those answers but especially the incomparable Amy Poehler. She would be the perfect Wambaugh. Finally, I must say that I was tickled pink when I read your post about the pending Vivian sequel. Congratulations! Could you whet our whistles with any more details about that? Primarily, will this sequel be the final Vivian novel or do you suspect this may become a full-on trilogy/series?
I am finally at the point where I’m writing a bit of the sequel every day, and I’m really excited about where it’s headed. I’ve always seen the story as being a duology, which means the sequel will tell the end of Vivian’s story as far as I’m concerned. So far, I would say the second book is about Vivian learning how to come to terms with everything she learned in the first book about her family, her society, and herself—it’s a new world for her, and she’s trying to figure out her own place in it. There is also a lot more Harp, a lot more kissing, and even more biblical puns! I’m very happy with it so far, and I hope fans of Vivian Versus the Apocalypse will like it, too.
Conversation by Dawn WestandKatie Coyle.
I usually hate prologues. To me, it seems like the writer’s undercutting their own authority; like they weren’t confident in their story’s beginning so they slapped on an extra coat of icing. You Are One of Them, Elliott Holt’s debut novel, has a prologue, and despite my long-standing dislike of them, I loved it. It drops you into a cultural and atmospheric icebath—the American Sarah Zuckerman, our lead, during her time in Moscow, in winter, in the 1990s.
In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia is known for. Winter. But it is winter to a degree I could not have imagined before I moved there. Winter not of the pristine, romantic Doctor Zhivago variety but a season so insistent and hateful that all hope freezes with your toes. The snow is cleared away too quickly to soften the city, so the streets are slushy with resentment. And I felt like the other young women trudging through that slush: sullen and tired, with a bluish tint to their skin below the eyes that suggests insomnia or malnutrition or a hangover. Or all of the above. Every day brought news of a drunk who froze to death. I saw one: slumped over on a bench on Tverskoy Boulevard with a bottle between his legs and icicles decorating his fingers.
It only gets better from there. You Are One of Them is a bildungsroman mystery woven with Cold War tensions and culture shocks, but at its heart, it’s the story of Sarah Zuckerman and her fierce and complex friendship with Jennifer “Jenny” Jones, the seemingly perfect girl from the seemingly perfect family who moved into a house across the street in the summer of 1980 and changed Sarah’s life before leaving it, becoming yet another defector.
“The first defector was my sister,” begins Part 1. The defectors in Sarah’s life never truly leave her—she’s practically a haunted house, the way she carries their absences. Sarah’s older sister Izzy died on Sarah’s first birthday, warping her parents and leaving her with an emotional phantom limb. A few years later, the “second defector was my father,” back to his native England, and her mother has defected too in a way—consumed by acute anxiety and an obsession with nuclear disarmament. “To my father, fear was weakness. To my mother it was preparation.”
Sarah’s home life is no match for Jenny’s sunny, traditional parents and their well-appointed home; not to mention the fact that Sarah has always yearned for a sister. “I longed to share secrets and clothes. I wanted a co-conspirator.” She gets that and more from Jenny over the next five years, until Jenny and her parents go down in an apparent plane crash, after the girls write their fateful letters to Yuri Andropov, a primary plot point inspired by the real American schoolgirl Samantha Smith, who wrote Andropov in 1982. Jenny’s letter garners a reply that makes her, like Samantha Smith, swiftly famous.
Before Sarah meets Jenny, Sarah has a habit of sneaking into her mother’s dressing room and retrieving the Super 8 film of her, Izzy, and her parents on the beach in 1973, a few months before Izzy died, to watch her sister move, to see her mother happy. The moments with the Super 8 film of Izzy bruised my heart—they were incredibly moving without being maudlin. The film is so priceless, so ephemeral, and when it starts to burn, I almost cried out like Sarah’s mother, “Stop it, stop it, turn it off!”
After Jenny becomes a media magnet because of the Andropov letter, her friendship with Sarah decays. They are nearly strangers by the time Jenny dies, but the death still rocks Sarah to her core. She spent all her time with Jenny for years, and now everyone knows her as “the best friend of Jennifer Jones,” and she doesn’t know what she is or what to feel.
After she died, I found myself writing letters to Jenny. ‘How could you lie to me?’ I wrote. ‘How could you leave me?’ I furrowed the words I could never say when she was alive into handkerchiefs of paper and tucked them into our old secret spot in the wall of the Bishop’s Garden. And even when I’d made new friends and discovered, in adolescence, that my sad stories were valuable currency with the skinny New Wave boys I favored, I still wrote to her sometimes. The letters became a sort of diary in which I told her what she was missing. Every new experience was muted by her absence; I needed to confide in her to make the colors pop.
Years later, Svetlana, a Russian young woman who toured Moscow with Jenny before the plane crash, sends Sarah a letter, strongly insinuating that Jenny is alive, so off Sarah goes, eager for truth. Svetlana is an expertly rendered character; cruelly funny and naïve and cynical and smug and delightful, somehow all at once.
Holt’s descriptions of Moscow and the people Sarah meets while there are fucking fabulous. “Moscow was a furtive city,” Sarah says. “People were as closed and guarded as fists.” There are so many fascinating passages and one-liners it’s nearly impossible for me to pick one: the American expat men working with Sarah who collect “pillow dictionaries,” aka Russian girlfriends; the intoxicated Russian girls tumbling off of bars into the “greedy arms” of American businessmen; the oafish man rocking back and forth on his feet, choosing among an underpass line-up of teenage prostitutes called nochnyebabochki, night butterflies; Russian flower superstitions; the sharp babushkas on the street, scolding strangers; “the concentric rings of its streets,” aka grid-less ‘90s Moscow; the birth trees coming into view, “long white limbs lining the road like ghosts,” and more. I was there, wandering and searching with Sarah. I would love to go into what and/or whom Sarah finds and how, but that would spoil it. I wish I could talk about the last two chapters. At times I rolled my eyes at how Sarah went about solving the mystery surrounding Jenny’s death, but I still relished the journey and the destination.
I’m also madly in love with this book’s cover—definitely one of my all-time favorites. The source material is a stunning photograph, the design is striking, and it speaks directly to the moment when that Super 8 film of Izzy begins to melt and Sarah thinks, “[I]t was as if our past were being annihilated right in front of us.” Talking Covers ran an excellent article about the cover, which includes thoughts from Holt, the designer Janet Hansen, and the photographer Martin Adolfsson.
Holt’s smooth, graceful prose blends the personal with the political to tell a story teeming with intrigue and unreliability. She makes fine storytelling appear effortless, like any skilled craftsman should. And in the end, the Jenny mystery isn’t the most important element—this is as much a ghost story as anything else. Sarah is haunted by multiple various losses—her sister, her father, her mother, Jenny—to the point that it degrades her self-esteem, changing her like Izzy’s death warped her mother. “I should have known better, I’d tell myself after someone left me.” These absent people left deep wounds, like people tend to do. “I wasn’t used to asking myself what I wanted. I was used to taking what was offered. What did I want? In what ways was I wanting? Wanting. Wanton.” Sarah’s trip to Russia changes her as irrevocably as each of those losses did. I would have read more about her experiences there, but I think the final scene was perfect—understated but highly absorbing, like the rest of the story. Elliott Holt has penned one hell of a debut novel. I can’t wait to read her second book, whenever and whatever that may be.
Review by Dawn West.
