Desire, Ambition and Complex Women: An Exclusive Guest Post From Julia May Jonas, Author of Vladimir
Hardcover $27.00
Vladimir
Vladimir
Hardcover $27.00
Vladimir is a sharp, provocative story that dives deep into issues of power, misogyny, and relationships of all types through the lens of a female English professor whose husband (also a professor) is on the precipice of professional doom. When our narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with a new, young colleague named Vladimir to escape from her current life, things start to get wild. As her perspective and actions transform into outright absurdity, you settle in for the satire and hold on tight! We LOVE this book, so we’re thrilled to have author and playwright Julia May Jonas here to discuss desire, ambition, complex women, and the inspiration behind her brilliant debut.
Vladimir is a sharp, provocative story that dives deep into issues of power, misogyny, and relationships of all types through the lens of a female English professor whose husband (also a professor) is on the precipice of professional doom. When our narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with a new, young colleague named Vladimir to escape from her current life, things start to get wild. As her perspective and actions transform into outright absurdity, you settle in for the satire and hold on tight! We LOVE this book, so we’re thrilled to have author and playwright Julia May Jonas here to discuss desire, ambition, complex women, and the inspiration behind her brilliant debut.
Back in 2018, when there was a crescendo of #metoo stories in the media, I started thinking not about the accused men, but about their wives. I thought they might make a good subject for a play. As I was writing, I started to realize that I had a host of unexamined assumptions about these wives — that they were dour and sexless saints who had made some Faustian bargain, that they were either cold, shriveled and calculating or pathetically resigned and long-suffering.
At the same time, I was reckoning with another assumption — this one about aging as a woman. I realized that I had internalized the thought that as I grew older I was supposed to want less — that my desires would lessen, my expectations would shrink, my standards would relax, that I would grow naturally content with the marginalized existence of an invisible older female. Once I recognized that I held that belief I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And it made me furious.
It became clear to me that both of these assumptions required examining and upending — I wanted to think about a wife who had a personality beyond her husband’s actions. I wanted to write about a woman wanting more as she aged, not less. I wanted to think about desire and ambition in a flawed and complex woman — a person who would not shrug and say, “well, life didn’t work out as I hoped,” but who would refuse to resign, someone who would “rage rage rage against the dying of the light.”
As a play, this story never quite worked. I put it away, but the character who eventually became the narrator of VLADIMIR stayed with me. When March 2020 descended on all of us, I had a kindergartener doing online school, a teaching job that was suddenly remote, and exactly two hours a day to myself: one to run and one to write. A big theatrical project was postponed indefinitely and I found that I couldn’t write for theater. Once I wrote the first chapter of VLADIMIR I knew I had a novel. And it became clear why it didn’t work as a play — the story needed intimacy with the narrator, her history, her opinions, her self-doubt and recrimination, her angers and fears and secret passions — all her internal thoughts were required to bring humor, nuance, and drive to this complex subject matter.
One of the benefits of being a playwright is the immediacy with which you hear feedback. I can write a first draft of a play, invite actor friends over to my house for dinner, and hear it out loud within a week. I can bring a few pages to a writing group and very quickly get a sense of whether they work or not.
There are frustrations, though, with writing a play. Plays are meant to be seen, and so they require a community of collaborators to bring them to life. Scripts are a map, intended to be interpreted by other artists before they reach their audience. There is only so far a writer can get with a play without needing a group of people to rehearse and show what it looks like “on its feet.” The exciting and surprising and delightful thing about writing the novel was knowing that I was writing the thing itself! I’ve seen plays ruined by bad casting, of course, but also by a bad set or even bad lighting design. A novel is a direct transmission from a writer to a reader, and it felt powerful, terrifying, liberating to work on the book knowing that the reader would receive the work exactly as I wrote it, for better and for worse!