Poured Over: Sarai Walker on Cherry Robbers

“I didn’t want it to be just very overwhelming dark book. I mean, it has so much tragedy that I had to balance that I wanted to make it part of, you know, light and airy and fun and frothy and feminine to contrast with what’s going to happen. I think there’s power in that contrast… I felt like it can’t all be this very goth all the time, this very gothic world, the kind of fog-on-the-Moors kind of thing…” We were utterly thrilled by Sarai Walker’s debut novel, Dietland—inspired in part by beauty culture and in part by Fight Club (yep, that one)—and we’re delighted by her newest, The Cherry Robbers. Sarai joins us on the show to talk about sisterhood, love, marriage, romance, feminism, her literary inspirations (including Emily Dickinson and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life), and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and his bookseller guest, Becky.

Featured Books:

The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

Dietland by Sarai Walker

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m so excited to welcome Sarai Walker to the show. You may know her from her first novel 2015 is Dietland, it was everywhere. It was exciting. It was a feminist novel inspired by Fight Club, which we’re going to come back to at some point in this conversation, but The Cherry Robbers is her noon novel. And I have to I’ve been dying to ask this question, though. Is this the prequel to Dietland?

Sarai Walker: Well, it’s funny, I’ve never thought about it like that, you know, they’re very different novels on the surface, but I feel like in their bones, they’re sisters. You know, they’re very subversive stories about women and gender, but I never thought about it that way. So that’s a really interesting idea.

B&N: I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I was reading The Cherry Robbers. Now, granted, we start in Connecticut in the 1950s. And we’ve got this family of six daughters and mom and dad, and we’re gonna get to all of these characters. But the whole time I was reading this, I’m like, Oh, I see exactly how we get to the world of diet land, given everything these young women go through and everything they put up with. So would you set up The Cherry Robbers, please, for listeners?

SW: Sure. So it’s bookended by a present day narrative on 2017. And we need this 80 year old very reclusive artist who lives in the northern deserts of New Mexico and a town a little village called Abbaque, which fans of Georgia O’Keeffe might recognize, even though she’s not Georgia O’Keeffe. But she’s a very famous painter, she is very reclusive, or eccentric. And at the beginning of the novel, she received a letter from a journalist, basically, who was threatening to expose her real identity. And so this is something that has never happened to her throughout, you know, she’s been living under a different name from her early 20s. And so this was quite a shock to her that this would happen at this point in her life. And so she decides that she wants to tell the story of what happened to her five sisters back in 1950s, Connecticut, so she sits down to write that story. And so most of the novel takes place in the 50s, starting in 50, going up to about 1957. And then we have the bulk of the novel there, and then it goes back to the present at the very end. So you know, in the 1950s, we meet the Chapel family, they are a firearms dynasty. They have six daughters are all named after flowers, Astor, Roslyn, calla Daphne, Iris, Hazel. Hazel goes by Zelie. They live in this big Victorian mansion that looks like a wedding cake. So it’s the wedding cake style of architecture, and they’re in Connecticut. So it’s very much a New England novel in the 50s part, they live in this Victorian mansion in this quaint little village in Connecticut, they’re very wealthy, but they’re very eccentric, and sort of cut off from, you know, the rest of the town, the mother is got problems, she’s very haunted. And just as all a person who doesn’t fit into society, you know, the daughters kind of are embarrassed by her, most of them are embarrassed by her. And she’s basically locked in their house and on almost kind of Emily Dickinson kind of way, and their father runs the firearms company. And he’s, you know, not really very interested in his family or what they’re doing. And so the main character of the novel is Iris, and she’s the second to the youngest, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that she will be the only one that survives. It’s one of those novels that is like a, you know, at the beginning, a kind of a broad strokes, you know, something is going to happen to all of these sisters. The question is, what is it? What happened? How and why does it happen. So it’s like all the arrows kind of moving forward, and you don’t you don’t know how it all unfolds. But that’s what kind of novel it is. And I really love that kind of structure. So I think that’s kind of a overview of what’s in it without giving too much away.

B&N: It has a little bit of a fairy tale feeling to it, though. I mean, the girls aspire to be married, they aspire to settle down, they aspire to leave their parents houses, but not necessarily with careers ahead of them. And it’s partially a product of the time, certainly, I mean, 1950s America, you know, if you’re a woman, you got to be basically a teacher, nurse, or a stay at home parent. I mean, those were kind of your options. And they’re also they’re very upper class and we start with a wedding.

SW: Once we get back into the 1950s part, the first 100 pages or so are building up to this, this wedding, which Aster. the sister’s getting married, is very, very excited about but the mother or the family, you know, has this premonition that something terrible is going to happen to Aster and so she clouds this time, and it becomes this real struggle between aster and the other sisters were very excited and all wrapped up in this wedding. And then the mother, her premonition and Iris, who was the only one who believes her mother’s premonition and tries to stop the wedding. And so we’re heading into this kind of novel about, you know, the 1950s housewife. And I wanted to take that kind of premise and like blow it up. And so that’s kind of the terrain we started and it’s really a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to write those parts and then get ready to sort of turn it on its head.

B&N: So we’ve got this cast of the six girls, we know it’s the 1950s in America, and I’m sort of staying away from the book ends only because so much happens there that I do not want to spoil. So this is why we’re focusing on everything that happens between the first few pages in the last few pages. But there’s a wedding that how did we get here? How did this book start for you?

SW: I was still reading Dietland, when I first conceived of what would be kind of a very broad premise for the for the novel. Dietland was so difficult to write it was very plugged in to the present moment. And all these brutalities and all these horrible things that were happening to women and that sort of thing. And it also had an autobiographical component, like the kind of in an emotional sense. So everyday was writing, it was like picking at a scab, it was very difficult for me personally. And so I just started to fantasize about what I was going to write next. And I wanted to be very different. I wanted to not have a kind of personal connection, I just wanted it to be like just a completely different story. And I started to think I wanted it to be a historical novel. And I just was kind of fantasizing about it here and there just gave me something to look forward to. And I, for some reason, have the idea that the novel would be about a family with a lot of daughters. I think in Dietland, Plum was very alone all the time, even though she ended up meeting these women, but she was still very, you know, alone and these other women kind of orbited her, but I wanted someone who was kind of immersed in this bigger family and was around people. And I have one sisters, I don’t know what it’s like to have five sisters. But I wanted to have a lot of daughters. And I thought, well, because it’s me, of course, I think, well, something’s gonna happen. And I think a lot of these sisters, most of them, all of them are all going to die in some mysterious way. But I didn’t know what it was. And then it was not long after that, it just kind of popped into my head of what was going to happen to them. Because I, you know, I thought what could kill these all these women as not at one time, it’s not like an accident or fire thing. So what could kill them and you know, over a period of years, and then I have the kind of core idea of what that was going to be. And then I was like, that’s it. So I just have that kind of real sketch. And then it developed over a long period of time in my head, before I could ever even have a chance to start writing it probably like that was about 10 years ago that I had the first half of the idea. So it was about three and a half years before I can even try and do any writing on it.

B&N: There’s a lot of sort of fairytale feel to the narrative in this book, the way it’s told in sort of, you know, marriage is what these women aspire to, because it’s the era it’s the time they want happiness, they want to be gone. And really the only way for them to leave home is to be married. I mean, there is a sort of dreamy quality to the story early on. How did you know when you had the right tone, because you don’t want this to be frothy. I mean, you’ve essentially written a really big gothic novel. But there’s a lot of humor in this book as well. And there’s a little bit of eyebrow raising at some of the things that your characters do.

SW: My British editor when she acquired it said she thought it would had campy elements to it, as well. So yeah, kind of playing with a lot of things like that in it. So the world of the novel was very important to me, I knew I want it to be very lush and very sensual. And so I really needed to build that world because I’d never written anything like that before. You know, I did all sorts of things. I mean, I’m a very visual person. So I created these boards, like both the bulletin board things and these kind of private boards I had on Pinterest with like images of the pre raphaelites and paintings of women than Meadows. And you know, all that kind of stuff was very influential. I was reading poetry. It has a very Victorian vibe, The Cherry Robbers. I love the Victorian era, but it takes place in the 50s. So at the same time I was you know, on eBay ordering, you know, Mademoiselle for 1950 and bridal magazines, and I have this huge stack of Oh, my closet, as I was just immersing myself in this kind of imagery, I didn’t want people to just see the world I wanted them to like feel it and taste and smell it, there’s a lot to do in the book to do with flowers. And I just wanted all of that to kind of come to life. So yeah, it was something I built very carefully of what that world would be like. And I knew that I wanted, you know, the details of the wedding, you know, the dresses, and the gowns and everything. But that was a very important part of, you know, just building up to the story and what was happening with this family and taking these things that are happy, you know, the wedding dress, the flowers and infusing them with like dread, this kind of dread kind of starts to seep in. And then tragedy later. So always playing with these kind of things that are associated with femininity, like very high femininity. I love playing with that, like in Dietland, I wrote about the beauty products and the makeup closet. And I love that. So I was sort of in my element when I was able to do that.

B&N: And femininity ultimately doesn’t save any of these girls. Everything they’ve been taught, doesn’t really quite get them where they think it should.

SW: Right. It’s their literal undoing, again, just kind of taking these scripts and sort of flipping them, you know, and even the idea of for example, romance. You know, when I was writing it, I was thinking of it as an anti romance novel, in the sense that no matter what type of book you’re reading, or film or TV shows, people love to feel like maybe the character is going to find love or something that they don’t have, even if that’s not the main point. But yeah, that’s always kind of a part of stories that we read. And so I wanted to subvert that I didn’t want I wanted people sort of saying, Oh, I hope these two good together I hope, you know, she gets together with this person, whatever is said, it’s like, oh, no, no, no, stay away from him, don’t go on that date, don’t accept his proposal, like this kind of horror at romance again, you know, just flipping these things on their head, which I find a lot of fun.

B&N: So with these women in the 50s, and you know, there’s a lot that goes along with how tactile you’ve made this environment. And part of that is seeing these women deny their own appetites, to suppress their own hunger. And I’m not talking about literal things like food and sex, per se, although there’s this really great moment where Iris is in college. And she’s like, No, I want the full pastrami sandwich. And I want the bowl of soup and the waiters, like, What do you mean? It’s just like, No, I need to eat. Like, I mean, have we made any progress? I mean, I know I was in the 1950s. And then I was in the 1960s. But at the same time, I sort of felt like, oh, it’s Tuesday.

SW: Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, in the world of the novel, The women are very constrained, you know, in a lot of ways, and their house is almost like a prison. But just in the terms of Yeah, the 1950s culture, you’re so constrained, in what you could do, what you can say, what you can wear and all that kind of thing, one of the things that I was trying to break free from, and I think that the book ends the novel that take place in New Mexico to represent that this sort of she’s not confined anymore, but she’s out in this vast landscape under this huge sky. But as for how that connects what we’re experiencing today, I mean, you know, in Dietland, I was so immersed in that, and when you consider when I actually wrote Nightline about a decade on from that, you know, I’m a Gen X er, and I, um, I just read recently, something in New York Magazine about the beauty culture of like TikTok, and it was just like, Oh, my God, it was like, okay, the specifics of like, shifted, and all sorts of ways since diet land, but just reading that article about this beauty culture, and wanting to look hot, and it just seems like nothing’s changed. And it’s kind of worse in certain ways, because there’s now it’s all you know, social media, and I don’t want to sound like some old, old person, like social media is to blame. But you know what I mean? It’s just like it escalates it, you know that it’s not just your peer group who’s interacting with you and seeing you what you look like. But now it could be like anyone on Earth could see you if they have, you know, an Instagram account or TikTok account, which just kind of broadens this idea of being looked at and under surveillance all the time in a totally different way, in a more extreme way. So yeah, I feel like things are changing all the time, but not getting better. I mean, in some ways, things are getting better terms of fat positivity and some some aspects of body positivity. So I’m not saying it’s all doom and gloom, but there’s some scary stuff happening out there. And it’s very demoralizing. For someone like me, who spent so long looking at these issues.

B&N: The girl’s mother sits in pretty significant contrast to her daughter. She is, as you mentioned early on very much an Emily Dickinson type recluse and she didn’t want to get married, but she had to because her brother was like, Well, I’m not going to take care of you. So get out. And she couldn’t really find a job what she really wanted to do a study science and her brothers like, Yeah, I’m not paying for that. So you really just need to get married. And by the way, here’s this dude I work with and marry him. In a way it’s really tragic. But Iris is the daughter that connects with her mom on a pretty significant level. And Iris doesn’t really know what’s going on with mom, but she trusts her mother in a way that her sisters do not. How did that relationship develop for you? I mean, obviously, you need one sibling, at least who’s going to be a little bit of a contrast to the pack of very girly girls. Oh, wow. The sisters are very, very girly, girly, girly, girly girls. But here’s iris, and she wants to help her mom. But she’s also loyal to her sisters.

SW: Yeah, I think that she and her mom are very different people and very, very different. But I think that so the mother, Belinda, and Iris are both survivors. I think they are not afraid, I think to stand outside of the crowd of what everyone else was doing. Where there was another character than all Daphne, one of the other sisters who is like that, but that doesn’t save her. But Iris, you know, So towards the end of the novel, one of the things that she says is that I listened to my mother when and when she said we were in danger. And I’m the only one that listened to her. And so I think that part of it was she was just willing to listen to what she had to say, to receive this maternal knowledge that her mother was trying to pass on to her daughters, but she didn’t know how so she was this very what would be viewed as this quote unquote, hysterical presence and you know, seeing ghosts and crying and all of this kind of stuff screaming in the night and she didn’t know how to communicate, but Iris tried to tune in to her and the others just kind of discarded her. So I think that’s what sets Iris apart from her sisters. In that sense.

B&N: Do you think Belinda’s husband loved her or was he just trying to minimize the chaos that came with the way she was presenting in the family?
SW: As I wrote it, I didn’t think that he loved her. That was just you know, he needed to get married and like, Hey, here’s this, you know, woman And that’s a sister of a friend of mine. And so let’s just get this over with kind of thing, which I think, you know, in some ways a lot of men and women do and times when they feel like they just need to get married and, and live up to this certain role. So I don’t think of it that way. No, but I mean, I’m, you know, I want the reader to kind of interpret how they want.

B&N: I went back and forth a little bit, to be honest, there were a couple of moments where I thought, Oh, that’s a little more tender than I expected him to be under the circumstance. And then of course, there’s the, you know, must present the solid man about town kind of impression. And then he starts to pull back from the community because he’s like, this is now this is too much. And I’m gonna spoil the moment that makes him say, Now, this is too much. We’re not doing this anymore. But there does sort of come a point in the men. In contrast with the six chapel sisters, the fiance’s and the boyfriends and the husbands, they see no reason to change, everything is perfectly fine for them. They’re just going to do the things they need to do. Because Why worry? Everything goes according to plan.

SW: Well, I think Mr. Chappel, you know, he’s a very wealthy man. And I feel like he feels like his money and status means that he doesn’t have to be bothered with his family, you know, that he should have a wife should just take care of everything. He should come home for dinner and sit at the head of the table and have this nice family surrounding him. It doesn’t ever really do much to kind of nurture that family provides for them materially. But that’s all you know whether he has any love for His children. I you know, he I’m sure he does. But it also just kind of protectiveness that comes in, as we see from time to time. But then also this kind of exasperation, when he can’t control the outcome and how they behave, the daughters. So that’s what I would say about that.

B&N: The husbands and the boyfriends and the suitors and whatnot, the men in this book, they’re so sure of themselves. And it’s slightly different from the way the chapel sisters are sure of what they want, and what they believe they need to move on to the next piece of their life. But the men are just very sure. There’s one character who is a student at Yale but he’s from Texas. And less so of Papa chapel. But, you know, some of the younger men, there’s a little bit of comic relief to them. And I don’t think they know how funny they come off to the reader.

SW: They’re quite a character, especially Roderick with his cowboy and his Cadillac and everything. But I think the men, you know, it’s interesting, the role that they play, they don’t get a lot of airtime. The novel is very interested in these ideas of like domination, which you know, ties in with all sorts of things like the guns that are very important, and the mother Belinda thinking that the family is haunted by the spirits of people who’ve been killed by these weapons. And you know, these girls are, of course, very upper class and I wanted the men that they were involved with to be the sort of larger than life men who are very successful and were kind of, you know, very egotistical and follow themselves just because they were born into these very privileged families. And that’s what they expected of life, you know, and so they were marrying these kind of captains of industry and, and that sort of thing. But it’s funny that when the men come to visit, for example, it’s like Iris compares Robert, at one point, like a monkey at the zoo, it’s like, they just kind of observe them, they don’t really fit into like this very female world of the chapel house. And so in a way, they kind of eye them as this odd curiosity, so they do provide some comic relief and just some contrast to this very kind of stifling femininity that’s in the house.

B&N: Ultimately, though, the book always comes back to the women, whether it’s in a specific moment in the sisters relationship, a specific moment between the sisters and the mother, or Daphne has a girlfriend. It’s very sweet. But there’s also a hint that it’s going to be doomed because of the era. I was rooting for Daphne. I was hoping she wasn’t gonna I was like, Well, isn’t she exempt? But apparently not. She is not exempt. Because there is this sort of fairytale atmosphere of you know, the wedding and the marriage and the sex. And then a terrible thing happens. I was just thinking, well, Daphne can escape but no, honestly, I’m not spoiling anything. We’re not going to tell you how definitely does not escape, but I was really rooting for her.

SW: Zelly as well. My sister is actually not speaking to me, because of Zelly. I’ve heard that from a few people. Like how could you do that? Yes, Zelly is the one that really gets to people. So I feel you know, kind of like a monster.

B&N: I don’t think you should feel like a monster. But I think we can talk about Zelly without giving away the important piece. But ultimately Zelly makes the decision to walk head on into a situation instead of trying to deny that it might happen or try to escape it. She’s just like, You know what, I want love. And she makes a choice that I thought was kind of surprising, but it was surprising to me. It was not surprising for her as a character. Can we talk about Zelly the youngest Chappel daughter? She is not like her other sisters.

SW: Just for one sec. Going back to Daphne, I think that she did want to make different choices, but she was overwhelmed by grief. You know, the crushing grief of people of the sisters who are left as you go along. So I think that’s kind of what happened with her but with Zelly Yeah, I mean, she’s the youngest, the youngest of the of the six So the tail end, and along with Iris, they’re very much a pair. And they witness everything that happens to their other sisters. And then we have the two of them. It’s really the heart of the story. And there’s a real contrast between them and what each of them want. I think that Zelly you know, she can’t imagine her life, you know, Iris was just trying to imagine a different future for them outside of this narrow, 1950s kind of pathway that they have and Zelly can’t get there. She can’t, that’s just not possible for she doesn’t have an alternative vision for what life could be. Because of that, I felt like her ending was very true to the character. Yeah, that’s the tragedy of Zelly. I think it’s just not being able to imagine a different type of life.

B&N: Was there anything that surprised you while you were writing The Cherry Robbers, because I feel like these women almost presented themselves as complete character, or at least the reading experience was that they’re complete characters of their own. But Did anyone surprise you?

SW: So when I started, it was hard, because, you know, there were so many of them, it’s very hard when you’re writing a book to have six characters, and they’re all you know, they’re all girls and this, you’re worried that they’re not gonna, they’re all gonna kind of blend in. And in a way there is this kind of, they’re kind of this mass, but on the other hand, they’re very differentiated. And so they really reveal themselves as I was writing, I have to kind of write them into existence. I mean, originally, I just had, I knew what all their names were, I knew they were all named after flowers, but I had to write them into what they were and how they interacted with each other. That’s how they kind of came alive is how they interacted with each other. You know, I’m glad that they seem to be, you know, to the reader quite vivid. And also, you know, one of the things I was worried about was, is this novel was going to be like, really depressing. And people have told me that they think it’s very fun. It’s really fun, because they’re like hanging out with the sisters. So that was such a relief, you know, that it’s, it can be tragic. But there’s also a part of it. That’s a lot of fun being with them, because they’re just such, you know, kind of fun, vibrant characters, I hope.

B&N: Well, I think for fun, too, I think you need a little bit of darkness for the fun to really pop. These women, they’re all very distinct to I have to say like, I’m very clear on who all of the six sisters are, and mom and dad, certainly. But the sisters, they’re very, very, even though I was saying how girly they all are. Each of them has their own sort of center, but they are very much a product of their family and their situation and their time. And I think that’s a lot of where the girliness comes from.

SW: Yeah, I mean, they’re definitely products of the 50s. Because they don’t learn this at home, right when their mother’s not home teaching, oh, you’ve got to get married and have kids, she doesn’t really want that. And she’s absent from their life. So she’s not really teaching them anything, but she’s not, you know, shoving it down their throat about you’ve got to, you know, be the happy housewife, but they just absorb it from the culture that they live in. You know, it’s just like today, when you have parents who teach their daughters, you know, very body positive messages at home, but they’re still out in the world, and they still absorb all those messages, you know, and so we’re all products of our society, you know, as well as our family and our home environment. So they’ve absorbed all of that just in the culture, and they want all of those things, you know, as diverse as normality is deadly for us. But they want normality. That’s what they want.

B&N: And one of the things I appreciate as a reader of The Cherry Robbers to is how claustrophobic the environment is, it is Gothic with a capital G and claustrophobic and moody and broody. And even though I know you describe the house as sort of a wedding cake, I have this idea of this very dark Victorian interior. And the idea that there’s all of this pastel fabric roaming around on these tiny girls. That balance though, how did you find it because it would be really easy to tip, I would think, towards the sort of broody and dark or the sort of super hyper feminist, but you bring these two together in a really exciting way for the reader. So what’s that like for you as a writer.

SW: I didn’t want it to be just very overwhelming dark book. I mean, it has so much tragedy that I had to balance that I wanted to to make it part of it, you know, light and airy and fun and frothy and, you know, feminine to contrast with what’s going to happen. I think there’s power in that contrast, but also just for the reader. I felt like it can’t all be this very golf, you know, all the time, this very gothic world, you know, the kind of fog on the Moors kind of thing that there needs to be some kind of break from that. And I felt like the novel I describe it as a mash up of like Victoriana 1950s americana. And so it was just a lot of fun bringing that to life, most Victorian elements and in the 50s. So I think that that just kind of it gives it a nice contrast to what actually happens in the story, which is very disturbing, and they can kind of play off of each other those different aspects.

B&N: Can we talk about some of the literary influences for The Cherry Robbers? I mean, I know when you were talking about Dietland quite a lot. You would say, well, it was based on Fight Club, it’s not Fight Club. He was like, oh, there’s an idea here and it makes perfect sense. I mean, the structure of diet and everything that you’re doing in Thailand, it makes perfect sense. But this obviously is even though the feminist threads are there even though there’s a lot that is basically the sibling to diet land, but I’m guessing there’s less Fight Club in this book?

SW: No Fight Club. It’s funny, you know, Fight Club, I think don’t land was a response to Fight Club. I wasn’t writing in conversation with any other book, I would say the cherry robbers, and there’s no one book that was really important to me, I couldn’t really find a book that I thought was doing exactly what I was trying to do. But I would say that, you know, one book that was really important to me, and I may not, it may not seem obvious, the connection was Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. I love Kate Atkinson. Like, I just want to be her when I grow up. And life after life, I had the idea for this novel, I had started writing it yet. And it was just something that I felt very inspired by, you know, you have a historical novel, you have a rather large family. And you know, it’s grounded, it’s very lush, but it’s grounded, you know, in this recognizable reality, but there’s this conceit at the center of it, there’s something that happens, that can’t happen in real life. And so I felt like that was kind of a good, I don’t wanna say model, but it just was a good inspiration. For me, it was doing something kind of what I was trying to do. So that book was really, really important to me. And just all of her writing, whenever I feel kind of uninspired or I have writer’s block, I’ll pick up one of her books, and I don’t know why, but just, I just, I just love her writing. So it really it just helps me find my own work. Sometimes when I feel like I maybe have writer’s block or something. A couple of you know, some other influences. I would say, you know, Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Haunting of Hill House. Those two, Rebecca, you know, D’Amore Rebecca, you know, a lot of that was that just that kind of playing up the real Gothic aspect, you know, that the House and the lush flowers and all of that. I love that. And also My Cousin Rachel, I mentioned in the author’s note, you know, Emily Dickinson and HD Hilda Doolittle, those two poets were very important, really important to the novel and all sorts of different ways. So I would say that I don’t think I’m leaving anyone out. But those were sort of the books that influenced me a lot. And then I was, you know, just kind of would turn to sometimes I need inspiration, or

B&N: You mentioned early in the show that this character that we meet in New Mexico is not in fact, Georgia O’Keeffe. But can we talk about your personal connection to Georgia O’Keeffe. There’s some art that represents her work to a certain extent. And again, this character is absolutely not Georgia O’Keeffe. But she does loom a bit large over this book. So when did you sort of make that decision to pull her in as an inspiration.

SW: When I’m thinking of an idea for a novel, like, especially for Terry Roberts, another novel I’m working on now sometimes I’ll have this little things that I become interested in. But I don’t really know if they’re related to the novel or what it is, but I just kind of start collecting these little things in my mind that I’m kind of intrigued me. And then sometimes they all kind of come together in an interesting way and kind of are part of the novel. So you know, when I was first thinking about this idea, I kept thinking about Georgia O’Keeffe and northern New Mexico, a little part of that was that when I first conceived of this idea, I had read True Grit. I’d never read that before. So my original thought was, oh, maybe this could be a Western or something I love you know, I love that book. I thought maybe I could do a Western or, you know, I was one of the possibilities, but it didn’t happen. But it hasn’t, you know, I’ve managed to get a little bit of the west into the novel. But I became very interested in Georgia O’Keeffe as figure in New Mexico and you know, her art. And then another person I was interested in was Sarah Winchester. And this idea really the legend or haunted by the spirits of the Winchester rifles.

B&N: Wait, wait, wait. So you’re talking about you almost wrote a Western and I get it. We’ve got the gun manufacturing and the American dream and all of these elements. But somehow we ended up on coastal Connecticut. Wait, how did that happen? How did you make that transition from, oh, I can’t make this work as a Western the way I want it to. And I think we’ll take this Gothic over to New England.

SW: I mean, one of the things about this idea is that it could take place in many different eras. I think the 1950s is as late as I could push it, because it needed to be in a society where traditional marriage was sort of the norm and that sort of thing. But so it could have been a Victorian it could have been a Western originally took place in the 20s. So I did toy with it being a Western, but I don’t know, I just kept coming back to this idea of, you know, one of the people that I was on my radar was Sarah Winchester, and you know, who was from Connecticut, and I just had this idea of this Victorian New England mansion, you know, you can’t beat New England when you’re thinking about, you know, mansions of Victorian homes and you know, that kind of setting but you associate with a lot with gothic and horror and that kind of thing. So I just felt that it just kind of gravitated to that to that setting that it needed that but then I wanted to contrast it with the New Mexico setting. So kind of being from that environment again, which I kind of viewed as very constricting. Going to the west, this idea of it being more a kind of this open space where she could finally breathe, you know in thinking about people like George O’Keefe and the landscape so and how attractive that was being drawn to that. So yeah, I ended up with these two locations in the novel. I’ve lived in New Mexico when I lived in New England. So I’ve experienced both of them. And it was very rich. Both of those locations were very rich and offered me a lot to work with and play with.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from the Connecticut sections of the book?

SW: I do. Yes. My favorite part, which is really kind of sad as this chapter about Calla. So Rosalind has died. And Calla takes Iris out to New York for the day with her to go shopping for a dress because she’s going to a dance. And then she takes her out to lunch. So they spent the day at Bloomingdale’s, and then at a restaurant. And that was just my favorite part. It was, again, it was that idea that it was kind of fun and frothy and cute, like clothes and makeup. But it had this real twisted element to it for people if you picked up on what was really happening. And I love playing those two elements off of each other. So I really loved writing that. It was sad, but fun.

B&N: It had a definite edge that I appreciated. And I think it’s gonna be really clear to readers, when they come across that part of the book, they will understand exactly what is happening, because really, who wants the stuffed tomato, but I will run away now because I’m dangerously on the edge of a spoiler there. I’m trying to bring in the New Mexico parts without giving anything up. Because there’s so much that you set up in those two pieces of the book. Where did they come in the writing process, though? Did you start with those two pieces? Did you start with that idea? Or did they come as they sort of needed to and then you place them where they needed to go?

SW: You know, so there’s some things you just can’t figure out to your writing. But I thought a lot more of it would take place in New Mexico that ended up happening. So you know, I also didn’t realize that for a big chunk of the novel, my character would be 14 years old, you know, things that you just can’t anticipate. But that’s how it all shaped up. So, you know, I spent a lot of time in New Mexico after Dietland was published, I went there and I started kind of just getting a feel for it. I really wanted to be central to the novel, I think, you know, I think it is and the whole Georgia O’Keeffe and all of that, that kind of vibe, you know, when I’m playing with, you know, I realized once I started writing it, that it really just needed to be with the Chapel family that that’s where most of it was, you know, and for her, other very young woman. And then I worked in the New Mexico part as the present day narrative. Originally, there was no present day narrative. So you know, I really struggled with a novel, I describe it as a second first novel, I just couldn’t figure out how to write the story, I couldn’t figure out how to tell it, it was so different from how I normally write, you know, Dietland, the voice of Dietland is more my natural voice. And I have a more contemporary sensibility, I think. But I really wanted to write a historical novel, which was a challenge for me, because I, again, I just have a very sensitive or a very contemporary sensibility, I tried to write the novel in the 1920s. And that didn’t really work. So I pushed it a bit more into the 50s, which I felt like was an era that I was a bit more familiar with, because my parents were born in the 50s. And it just seemed more real to me, but it was still really hard for me to write in the mindset of somebody who was a product of night, you know, 1937, and then, you know, this was in the 50s. And so I ended up thinking, you know, I think this what this might need is a more contemporary voice. So I decided to bookend it with my character at 80 years old, and then she was telling it looking back, but it was a modern perspective. And as soon as I did that, it just clicked, I was finally free, like these years of figuring out I don’t know how to make this work, it won’t work as soon as I did that, it just kind of took off then you know, those parts that she lives in New Mexico and I’m really excited to write those parts because I love New Mexico so much and I love that voice of the 80 year old woman she’s very cranky and irritable and I just kind of that voice comes to me much more naturally than that. I would say the Iris voice for the 1950s was very removed from how I normally write.

B&N: And she also, your 80-year-old knows so much more about the world I mean that was one of the things that did really get me as I was reading about the sisters is their world is so tiny yeah it’s tiny they have resources they could no they couldn’t do anything they wanted despite the resources because the girls.

SW: Yeah exactly they’re very wealthy family the world could have been there but you know not only a confined to the home but they’re confined to this one wing of the home the girls weighing you know, so their world is very small in that way. Yeah, so it was just the idea I love that idea die Atlanta, it’s a it’s a motif as well as they do of women being forced to be made smaller and die. Atlanta was like literally smaller, but in this world was just like everything that you want in life has to be fit into this narrow path of what society approves of. And so just this idea of construction, I’m always kind of writing about that and I really liked that.

B&N: So what’s next for you then? You’ve done the contemporary you’ve done sort of the Gothicy ghost story, Victorian historical.

SW: I mentioned, you know, Kate Atkinson. I wanted to be here when I grew up, but so I’m writing a thriller. I got detective kind of story, but there’s no detective in it. But it’s a detective story. My character kind of stands in for the detective. I’ve always wanted to try writing a mystery, you know, and so I’m pretty deep into that actually, because there’s been kind of a long break from when I finished The Cherry Robbers to when it’s being published. So yeah, I’m quite deep into it. I’m very happy about that. So that before The Cherry Robbers comes out, I’m already in another world in my head, which I think is important. Because you know, when a book comes out, it can be very distracting and all sorts of ways. And so yeah, I’m very deep into that. And it’s really how the more contemporary voice, but I’m really having a lot of fun with it. So yeah.

B&N: That’s awesome. I cannot wait to read that before I let you go because I know you have many many things that need to be attended to. But can we talk about Emily Dickinson for just a second before you go Belinda embodies so much of her but like Georgia O’Keeffe. Dickinson really is, she’s an influence she’s not Belinda is not Emily Dickinson. Belinda is not Sarah Winchester, there are elements to their stories who are part of Belinda but she is very much her own person. But Emily Dickinson I’ll take any chance I can.

SW: So I’m able to quote her in the novel a couple of fragments of her poems, which I was very excited about before you kind of start writing a novel or at least for me, you know, you do a lot of reading about all sorts of different things, you know, and I was reading about the New Mexico art scene, you know, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mabel Dodge Luhan you know, all of these figures. From there, I was reading about Sarah Winchester and her life in Connecticut, and Emily Dickinson was one of the people that I gravitated to, because originally, you know, I thought could I set this in the Victorian era, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it would have a Victorian influence. And I just saw her as such a Victorian figure, you know, in her house and wearing these white dresses and writing poetry, of course, is very important in the cherry Roberts poetry. You know, I just decided to read a bit about her. And so I read Linda Gordon’s biography of wives like loaded guns, which is just, I think, my favorite biography I’ve ever read. You know, there’s so many things in that book that ended up becoming significant because she was writing about Emily Dickinson, for example, her obsession with flowers, which is very common for Victorians. And they love flowers, not just gardening, but the symbolism of flowers. And that’s really how that became part of the book. And then I bought books about Emily Dickinson’s gardens. And I just love that there were so many interesting things about her life that kind of ended up connecting to this, for example, I was reading in the book, you know, that Emily, of course, never got married, neither did her sister, you know, the book kind of discusses that for women at that time, you know, getting married, having children carried a great risk, because you could die so easily in childbirth. So a lot of women related, you know, marriage with death. You know, I already had the idea for my book with this kind of light bulb went on. And I was like marriage could be, you know, for women of that time, literally, death a death sentence. And I really ran with that idea. So it was one of the kind of ideas that I took with me on how to play with that idea. And I really love that. So she gave me so many gifts, just like Georgia O’Keeffe, that just I can’t imagine the novel, you may not you may read the novel and not notice Emily Dickinson except for being quoted, but she was so important to so many parts of the novel and really the foundation of it in so many ways. So I can’t imagine what I would have done if I hadn’t read that Biography at that time, and then started reading about our gardens and our poetry and it just changed everything.

B&N: That’s such a fun way to connect the dots because honestly, Belinda, I don’t want to give her short shrift. She’s Belinda she’s got stuff going on. And it’s it’s nice to know that she had a little bit of help. Sarai Walker, thank you so much for joining us. The Cherry Robbers is out now.

SW: Thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you.