Ruthless On the Page: A Guest Post by Ivy Pochoda
Our Mystery/Thriller Monthly Pick, Sing Her Down, is a gory, violent story that doubles as a study on women’s rage and will keep you guessing until the very end. Read on to discover author Ivy Pochoda’s inspiration behind this haunting tale in her exclusive essay down below.
Paperback $18.00
Sing Her Down: A Novel
Sing Her Down: A Novel
By Ivy Pochoda
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.00
A haunting thriller featuring two women, their collective rage, and a shared past that haunts them both.
A haunting thriller featuring two women, their collective rage, and a shared past that haunts them both.
Sing Her Down started as a bet in a bar over a few too many beers. Could someone—could I—write something close to Cormac McCarthy’s poetically violent epic Blood Meridian but feature women? What happens when we give women the same permission to be ruthless on the page as we do men? Can we only accept the extreme violence of McCarthy’s masterpiece if it is enacted by men?
I was about to embark on a book tour for my novel These Women—a novel about violence against women. So, I’d been thinking about violence a lot, in particular about how we permit women to be violent when they have suffered at the hands of a man. Excuse me for getting graphic here—but it acceptable for a woman to retaliate, to fight back against a rapist, an abuser, or a system of degradation. It’s ok for a woman to be violent if we understand that she is somehow “out of her mind”—if she is psychotic, delusional, or manic. We are especially forgiving if one of these states is brought about by sexual trauma, or to a lesser degree, post-partum trauma. And we are especially forgiving if her violence has been summoned by a man. Then we are, like, “You go girl!”
But a woman who is violent simply because she is—a woman like Anton Chigurh, Patrick Bateman, Judge Holden—well you don’t see that on the page or screen because it’s unacceptable. It’s a crime against what we need women to be in life and in fiction—a crime against their maternal natures. If women are violent, it upends the social structure. If a woman is violent then she doesn’t need a man to defend her.
The more I thought about this, the more irritated I became.
If we believe that women are as capable as men in every other way, we have to imagine that there are certain women with the same violent predilections as men. Even if there aren’t many—as many as there are men—there sure are some.
So I decided to write about them.
What started as a challenge, grew into a thought exercise, then blossomed into a novel. I wanted to write about women who are inherently violent without the influence of men, women who are violent regardless of the circumstances of their upbringings. As I wrote I kept catching myself explaining the reason for their actions, justifying them—creating backstories and explanations. In my writing, I was proving my own point, our need to soften the blow of women’s violence, to deny them their (our) power and strength, and to diminish their capabilities.
I’m not saying that the women in my novel are typical. But in them I hope others find unusual strength and unambiguous power. I hope that they make you think about how we gender violence and our reaction to it. And if you can’t identify with the action on the page, if you cannot accept what these women can do—then I believe I’ve succeeded.
