Multi-Level Marketing, Monsters and More: A Q&A with Kiersten White, Author of Lucy Undying
Kiersten White joined blog writer Isabelle McConville to talk all about her new novel Lucy Undying. Read on for an exclusive author Q&A where Isabelle and Kiersten discuss multi-level marketing schemes, toxic beauty standards, Dracula and more.
Hardcover $28.99
Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel
Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel
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Hardcover $28.99
Dark, dazzling and decadent, Lucy Undying gives a voice to an overlooked character from one of the most famous monster stories in history.
Dark, dazzling and decadent, Lucy Undying gives a voice to an overlooked character from one of the most famous monster stories in history.
IM: My name is Isabelle McConville, and I am the blog writer here at Barnes and Noble. Today I’m here to talk with the great Kiersten White about her brand-new novel. Lucy Undying is the gorgeous and gothic, dark and decadent take on Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. Kiersten, thank you so much for joining us today.
KW: I’m so happy to be here.
IM: Can you please set up the story of your brand-new novel?
KW: Lucy Undying takes the character of Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula and gives her a new story. In the original Dracula, Lucy is beautiful, everyone loves her, she’s only 19 years old and she dies horribly in a prolonged awful series of attacks by Dracula. She comes back as a vampire and then is immediately killed again by the men who love her. It sucks! So, I took Lucy gave her a new story. Lucy Undying is about Lucy’s journey through the decades as an undead vampire while she’s searching for identity, meaning, love and trying to reconcile what she lost with what she’s gained by becoming a vampire. It takes place everywhere from the 1890s to modern day, so it’s very sweeping and epic, but also very character driven.
IM: When did you know you wanted to tell Lucy’s story? She was such an overlooked character in Dracula, and we never know much about her even though we read about her life primarily through her letters. What did you see in her and how did this story start for you?
“Lucy’s letters and journal entries are so funny. She’s charming and has a way of telling stories that really make you feel like you’re talking with your best friend. I loved that about her and I hated the way she died.“
KW: I first read Dracula when I was in college, and I didn’t think that much about Lucy — I was very into Mina, because she’s the one who’s presented as “not like other girls.” There’s a quote about her that says she has the heart of a woman, but the mind of a man. This is basically explaining why she has value and virtue and gets to live, whereas Lucy, who is so open-hearted, loving, funny and charming, has to die, because she doesn’t have the same value in the narrative that is assigned to Mina. As I got older, that really started to bother me. If you read the original Dracula, Lucy’s letters and journal entries are so funny. She’s charming and has a way of telling stories that really make you feel like you’re talking with your best friend. I loved that about her and I hated the way she died.
For years, I’ve been talking about writing a “Justice for Lucy Westenra” novel, but I kept trying to tackle it from a young adult perspective, because that’s what I was writing at the time. It wasn’t until I moved into the adult space that I realized this was the story. It was never a young adult story because Lucy’s story is a lifelong journey of discovery and of reconciling who she hoped to be with who she is, which is not a teen story. By reconsidering my idea of who Lucy was in terms of writing for adults, coming specifically from a horror background, I was able to engage with it in ways that I couldn’t have if I had written it for teenagers. It’s an idea that has been simmering for about a decade, but it was only the last couple of years that I finally landed on how to tell the story.
IM: With the letters, journal entries and even a therapy session transcript, you had a lot of fun with style while writing this one — which is also an homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Did you always know you wanted to write it that way?
KW: It’s definitely an homage to the original Dracula, which was an epistolary novel. My initial draft of this book was insane — I not only had journal entries and transcripts, but I also had internal documents for the Goldaming Life Wellness Company. I had memos, emails, all sorts of things. There’s a difference between complex and complicated, and my first version was extremely complicated. Getting to this version was a matter of really zeroing in on the heart of the story, which for me is a love story for Lucy. It’s Lucy finding love in the modern day, but also Lucy finding ways to love herself. I took out everything that distracted from that core narrative.
As far as writing it, it was a really different process for me. I’ve always been a very linear writer — I start at the beginning, and I write until the ending, even if I have a narrative that’s told out of order. With Lucy Undying, I found my way into the story by writing each timeline separately. Initially, I wrote Lucy’s journals just for myself. I didn’t think I was going to include them in the book, but I wanted to get to know her before she was turned into a vampire. Then I wrote all of the therapist transcripts. It’s not Interview with a Vampire, it’s Therapy with a Vampire! I wrote all of those and then I wrote all the Dracula pieces where he’s stalking new victims. I stitched everything together to the midway point of the book, and continued writing from there. It came together in a very unusual way for me, but by writing each of those through-lines separately, I was able to get to know Lucy in all of these iterations and fall completely in love with her, which hopefully helps the reader fall in love with her too. I hope what I landed on was a complex, rich narrative because I worked very, very hard to pull it back from way too complicated, which is how it started out.
IM: My personal favorite style you wrote in was Lucy’s journal entries from back in the 1800s. I thought the voice was incredible. I loved reading those and related to Iris — who wouldn’t develop a crush on Lucy from those?
KW: Including the journal entries was a late addition because initially you only saw those through Iris’ point of view. Iris discovers Lucy’s real teenage journal as she’s cleaning out a house and falls in love with Lucy while reading it, but I didn’t plan to include the full journal entries. This was the one time in my entire career I’ve ever done something nice for myself by doing more work than I needed to. In revisions, I realized I already had exactly what I needed for a better focus on Lucy.
IM: Did you have a favorite of those styles to write in, and were any of them more challenging than others?
“I don’t care why Dracula is the way that he is. He’s a predator. He’s a predator who preys particularly on vulnerable young women. I don’t need to know why.”
KW: I liked writing Lucy’s journals, but I also really liked writing Iris, because she’s our modern-day point of view. She’s so funny and has a very modern sensibility, so I got to be very tongue in cheek and sardonic with her, which was really fun to do. The hardest to write were the Dracula chapters because I didn’t want to give him a full point of view. I felt like he didn’t deserve it. At one point, I had a chapter drafted out of his backstory that explained why he is the way that he is, but then I realized, I don’t care. I don’t care why Dracula is the way that he is. He’s a predator. He’s a predator who preys particularly on vulnerable young women. I don’t need to know why. That’s all I need to know about him. Writing his chapters and keeping him strange and repulsive and inhuman was the biggest challenge of the book by far.
IM: I thought Dracula’s chapters were the most chilling parts of the book as a reader. You can see how he convinces himself that the girls want him to turn them, how he stalks them, and he even believes he’s saving them. As much as I want every bit of this book I can get, Dracula doesn’t need to be humanized, because there’s nothing human about what he’s doing. How did it feel to write in that voice where you were in the mind of a monster?
KW: It was challenging because I’m competing with so many different versions of Dracula. For my reference points, I only used the original novel — I didn’t use any films or other retellings. Many versions of him portray him as sexy and seductive. I changed the original title of the book, which was Dracula and Lucy, because I knew people would think it was a romance between them, which I found so repulsive. I wanted to go back to that original version of Dracula where he was monstrous — he wasn’t appealing, and he wasn’t sexy. I get why people find vampires sexy, but this version of Dracula is 100% a sexual predator. When you look at who he’s attacking, his methodology and what he’s doing, he’s a sexual predator. It felt very oily and gross, so it was nice to go back to other characters’ perspectives after revising a Dracula chapter.
IM: What did your research process look like for the rest of this book?
KW: I did a lot of research on the historical eras that we see Lucy in. Since Lucy is very old and not very detail oriented, she’d say, “Oh, I went to Istanbul and I was spying, and I met some people, but I don’t remember their names, but here’s my dress.” Then she’d describe her dress in intricate detail because that’s what she remembers. She remembers the women she loved, the ones she couldn’t save and the ones she hurt. It was fun writing those historical events because I could play a bit with the details. I have written historical fiction — the And I Darkened trilogy is set in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, and I did thousands of pages of meticulous research.
With Lucy Undying, I wanted to give more of an impression that your best friend went to the coolest event and is telling you about it afterward, so it’s a very conversational tone. I wanted to explore the feeling: what did it smell like, taste like, sound like? I focus more on Lucy’s emotional reactions and connections to what’s happening around her rather than specific details. I did a lot of research on historical fashion because that was important to Lucy. I also did a lot of research on multi-level marketing companies, which becomes important later on.
IM: You mention how we go back in time with Lucy’s transcript and read about how she has an emotional connection to everything around her — that makes me think of how you play with memory in your novels. This is not the first time you’ve done that in your writing; you did a lot with memory in Mr. Magic, especially. What draws you toward telling those kinds of stories?
“We can’t help but write parts of ourselves into everything we’re creating.”
KW: I didn’t realize how many of my stories hinge on memories until my friend Stephanie Perkins — who is also an author — pointed it out to me. Guinevere in the Camelot Rising trilogy deals with that, and Mr. Magic hinges very strongly on it. I think it stems from the fact that I have a very bad memory. I’m not good at storing memories. Part of it is ADHD and issues with depression. There are periods of my life that I don’t remember and that haunts me, especially as a mom. It’s a theme I go back to because it’s something that’s very personal to me; it’s something I struggle with and think about a lot. I think it’s natural that it finds its way into my horror novels, particularly because we can’t help but write parts of ourselves into everything we’re creating.
IM: I think the way you used memory in this book was very powerful, especially when it came to the process of becoming a vampire. Newly turned vampires don’t remember their names or their lives, and they must be told, or ‘given back’ their names to find themselves again. It makes me think about how after going through trauma, you have to go on a healing journey and find out who you are again.
KW: It comes down to identity and what defines us. So many of the vampires that Lucy meets are only defined by the worst thing that ever happened to them because they never got themselves back. They were never able to reconnect to who they had been before, so all they were was the after, which is a very hard place to be in and move through. That aspect of the novel was important to me.
IM: Another part of this book I really loved was how you write about the wellness industry. The terrifying Goldaming empire represents how predatory the whole industry can be, especially for women’s impossible beauty standards. There are always new tinctures, creams, lotions and potions that promise us long-lasting beauty and quick fixes on issues we didn’t even know we had. What made you want to write about that and where did that idea stem from?
KW: There’s something inherently predatory about the beauty industry — they create problems to make you insecure, and then they charge you money to fix the problem. I have no problem with makeup, skincare and things that are fun and make us feel good. It becomes predatory when the entire business model is built on making you feel like your worth is literally skin deep. I paired it with a multi-level marketing company because pyramid schemes are inherently vampiric — it was the perfect metaphor. The reason it’s set in Salt Lake City, Utah is because it’s the world capital of multi-level marketing companies. The government in Utah looks the other way and lets companies have these very predatory business structures because they’re making money off it. They pick vulnerable people — they usually target young, stay-at-home moms who don’t have an income, and say “We’ll make you more beautiful, we’ll make you more valuable, you can earn money and help other people.” So much of that industry is so vampiric and predatory toward women specifically. They don’t care about women; they just care about making women feel bad about themselves so they can make money off of them.
IM: I agree that it’s an inherently predatory industry, especially when I think of how it’s taken over social media and convinces adolescent girls that they need to start putting retinol and anti-aging products on their faces.
“We have been taught that aging is the worst thing that can happen to you. I hope it becomes clear in my novel that aging is a gift, aging is power, aging is natural.”
KW: It also ties into stories of vampires because of this idea that aging is the worst thing that can happen to you. I think a lot of that is why vampires are romanticized, especially modern-day vampires, because we have been taught that aging is the worst thing that can happen to you. I hope it becomes clear in my novel that aging is a gift, aging is power, aging is natural.
IM: You also write a lot about toxic motherhood and how children, especially girls, are poked and prodded to be their parents’ idea of perfect. I think horror is such a great medium for that, especially with Lucy and Iris both being queer women as well. How do you hope to change people’s perspective on Lucy, and what do you hope people who read your book think of Lucy when they’re done with it now?
“Just because the people who should have loved you and seen your value didn’t, doesn’t mean you don’t have it.”
KW: I’ve been focused for a long time on exploring all of the ways that women can be strong. Strength is typically coded as masculine — physical strength, financial power, those types of things. I’ve been trying to move into exploring other ways that women can be powerful. Lucy’s power is love. She greets the world with an open heart and sees the best in other women. She sees the ways in which they’re remarkable and sees them in a way they have never been taught to see themselves because of the way they were raised, their parents, their cultures and the societies they grew up in. They were never taught to see their own value. Lucy seeing that for them changes them in a way that nothing else ever had or could. That’s important to me as a woman and as a queer person — just because the people who should have loved you and seen your value didn’t, doesn’t mean you don’t have it.
I joke that I write horror, but I want it to feel like I’m hugging you when you get to the end. If you’re queer, if you’re a woman, if you’ve grown up in a marginalized community or identity, there’s so much of the world telling you that you don’t have value, and I want to counteract that. Especially with Lucy Undying, because in the original novel Dracula, she had no value. Nobody saw value in her except for what she provided to other people and what they projected onto her. She died because they didn’t think she was worth saving. To me, the point of Lucy Undying is saying she always had value. Loving people, meeting them where they are and accepting them for who they are is such a tremendous strength.
IM: I’d argue that Lucy Undying is a type of coming-of-age novel, especially considering how queer people are constantly having to come of age. If someone has a childhood where their queerness isn’t accepted, it stunts your emotional growth as a person. You have to figure out those first crushes, coming out to people, and discover who you are much later in life. I love how that’s represented in this novel and I think it’s really powerful. Lastly, what would you like to tell us about what’s coming next for you?
KW: If you’re a fan of my YA novels, you should stay tuned. I think you’ll be very excited to hear of something coming next year. If you like the gothic and historical aspects of Lucy Undying, then you should be very excited for what I have coming next in adult, neither of which I can talk about yet, but both of which I’m very excited for. There is also a Mr. Magic graphic novel in the works; seeing that interpreted in a new format is really incredible.
IM: I can’t wait for the world to get their hands on Lucy Undying. Thank you so much for being here today.
KW: Thank you.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.