Poured Over: Victor LaValle on Lone Women

Jenna Seery

All of them, in my mind … were wrestling with the same question, which is — what do I do with either the burden of family or what do I do with the found family that I’ve made?

Victor LaValle’s Lone Women takes supernatural suspense to early 1900s Montana as one young woman sets out to leave her past and family secrets behind. LaValle talks about the history that inspired this novel, the connection between this story and one of his previous books, the upcoming streaming adaptation of The Changeling and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Madyson. 

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. 

Featured Books (Episode)
Lone Women by Victor LaValle
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
Big Machine by Victor LaValle
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang
How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been a fan of Victor LaValle since Slapboxing with Jesus and that was more than a minute ago. I do actually have a paperback that has an $11 price tag on it, so it really was more than a minute ago. But here’s the thing, a lot of folks know you, Victor, because of all of the stuff you’ve done very recently, The Changeling and a lot of comic books and now Lone Women, which I am madly in love with. I adore this book. But dude, you left Manhattan, you left New York, we’re in Montana.

Victor LaValle
I left New York and I left the century. Oh, yeah. All of it, all of it.

Okay, would you set up Lone Women for listeners for us because I am so in love with this book. But I don’t want to give anything away and I’m going to ask you to stay spoiler free to as you describe what you’ve done.

So Lone Women is the story of Adelaide Henry, who is a Black woman farmer from a family of farmers in California in 1915. At the very opening of the novel, we see her fleeing her home, the farmhouse that she grew up in, after something terrible has happened to both her parents, she flees California and goes all the way to Montana because even though she has been a farmer in California, she’s secretly held on to this dream of going out on her own and becoming a homesteader in Montana, something that was actually historically possible for a Black woman in 1915 and not just a Black woman, but for lone women in general, while at least some lone women it was possible. And so, she travels up to Montana, running away from everything she’s known and all she brings with her is a large steamer trunk that has a very big clock on it and she refuses to let anyone else open it, because when people open it, people die.

Right? It’s a very good premise. It’s a little bit of and I say this, I was a huge, huge fan of the Little House on the Prairie books. When I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts, I desperately wanted to live on the prairie. I wanted a sod house, I wanted to have to like a string between buildings, so I could find my way home in a blizzard. I wanted all of that, right. I’m not sure I want Adelaide’s trunk, right? No, no, seriously, this story is fantastic, and these characters are great. But I have to ask— what took you into the past? What took you to Montana? Because I know what took you to monsters and we’re going to come back to that piece of it, but how did we get to the basic idea of Lone Women?

The heart of all this is just that by chance, I got invited to the University of Montana to do a reading. And I have a practice that I’ve developed, which is that if I go to do an event in a place where I’m guessing I probably won’t return to, I like to buy a book of local history and bring it home with me. So because going to do an event usually means like a day of travel, then you get there, then you visit a couple classes, you read a story, go out to dinner with the faculty, and then you fly back home the next day. So you were there but you weren’t, you know. And so buying that local history book feels like a way to get to know the place. And so. I went to the University of Montana bookstore, and they had a local history section and so I was just browsing through it, and I came across this book called Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own. I appreciated the Virginia Woolf play on that and I also was like, I didn’t know there were women homesteaders, like really at all. Your Little House on the Prairie comparison is a great one because of course, I knew that there were in the sense that like, there were wives and daughters. But my narrative of homesteading and of quote unquote taming the West was white dudes on wagons, white dudes on horses, white dudes on foot. And the whole point of this book was that it was about women who didn’t come out there with anyone, and wanted to stake a claim, have land that was their own. And many of them maybe want to even leave behind the lives they did have, for various reasons. And this was the place they wanted to come to try and I was fascinated. So really, it just began with that. Like I was just interested, and I was just reading the book. But then I wrote to some of the faculty I’d met at University of Montana. Just by chance, I said like, have you ever heard of these women? And some of them were people who are new transplants, came there just for the job, but some of them were people who had been born and raised in Montana, and none of them had heard of the lone women at all. And so that’s when I said, oh, so it’s not just that I’m just some New Yorker, some naive New Yorker who doesn’t understand this thing that everyone knows out west. I said, if they don’t even know about it, then maybe this is a story.

I didn’t know until I read this and you sent me down a rabbit hole.

Oh good. Oh good.

Sent me down a rabbit hole, there are books arriving on my desk probably in the next week that hopefully I will get to read all of instead of just pieces, but unfortunately, sometimes it’s you know, you do the piecing parts, but I had no idea. I had no idea. And one of the things that I love about what you’ve done with Lone Women, too, is you have put Black and Brown and Chinese people and Japanese people back into American history where we have always been, but we get left out of those narratives a lot or were put into a very specific piece of the narrative and we never come out. I mean, anyone who’s seen Deadwood knows that apparently, laundry and feeding bodies to pigs, that was it and I was, that seems a little limited,

And very little personality even within that. So yeah, I mean, even if that’s the job, who’s the person? That’s the question. And I don’t think that was that was Deadwood’s interest.

No, no, it really wasn’t. I mean, I should have been kind of excited to at least see a familiar face. But at the same time, I was like, really? Yeah. Okay, here we go. I mean, for you, did you start in California? Did you start with Adelaide and her family in her trunk before you got to Montana? Or did you work backwards from Montana?

It was a little bit of working backwards, because one of the things that was true in most of the history I read, like, there’s the historical record, blah, blah, blah. And then there’s also a good number of those somewhat, some of those limited kept journals, you know, but each one of these I found so interesting was even in their quote, unquote, private journals, they didn’t tell the truth. Right? Like they it’s not like what we consider the truth today, where someone would write down, here’s every single intimate detail of why I’m doing what I’m doing, and all the rest. And so what that meant was number one, in theory, you could piece together some things like they might say, I’ve come out here, Mrs. Friday, says, I’ve come out here and I’ve met a lovely woman named Mrs. Monday and we decided to stake claims right next to each other, and just build one cabin that we will share. Okay, you’re the best of friends. And you go, okay, I think maybe I have an idea of what’s going on. But even in those journals, they’re not going to say this is my partner, this is my lover, this is just not going to happen, you know. And so in a way, that could be a little frustrating, because you say like, I wish I could get the real gritty details of why people made these choices. But the fun part in a way was that it allowed me to say, well, then maybe anything is a reason for someone to come. And so then I kind of said like, well, what would be the reason that they would come? I was interested at the time in the idea of like, family as a as a curse, family as a burden, maybe in part because as I’m getting older, I have older family members, I have siblings who are getting older, there’s gonna be some caretaking that is probably involved. So these things are starting to be on my mind. And so there’s a part of me that had the fantasy of like, oh, what if I could just leave all of them and just go do something else, but then the part of me that hopefully is mature said like, even if you left, the responsibility would still be there.

And family mythology is something that you’ve always played with, even when you were doing sort of the literary realism, right, in the two early, let’s say the first couple of books, you hadn’t quite embraced your love of genre the way now. And stylistically, I mean, in terms of the beautiful sentences, of course, those are all there. But the monsters were a little more contained, let’s put it that way. But family mythology is a lot to carry around and, you know, in some cases, we’re still sort of poking ourselves in the eye with this stuff. And Lone Women, you’ve got a lot of characters who are saying, hey, wait a minute, I don’t have to do that. But on the flip side, we’ve got some members of the town that say… yeah…

All of them, in my mind, like all of them were wrestling with the same question, which is just what do I do with either the burden of family or what do I do with the found family that I’ve made? And that like through the course of the book, even though it’s not very long book, people get to feel lots of ways about family. It’s not till the end that we sort of see the people who can come to a healthy place of understanding about what one does with not only family, but also shame, which is like a big aspect of the book, like in a way they’re the ones who find a way to triumph and the ones who hold on to the fear of either control or hiding one’s shame or hiding one’s secrets, it’s kind of like those are the ones who can’t survive, because that stuff kills you.

I have to say the ending was very satisfying. Very satisfying.

I’m so happy and I must say I’m saying this is really, really my wife’s doing. The ending went through like a few versions. The first version was the grimmest version. That was like no one gets out of here alive. And then I even felt like, I can’t, I can’t do it. It’s too much. And then another version was maybe what would be the more typical thing, which is like, okay, you have a few winners, a few losers, some of the people that you like, are going to lose blah, blah, blah. And then I was talking to my wife about it. And she just said, I don’t want that. I don’t want that to happen. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, like, this was 2018, when I’m working on this, she said, women are losing enough in the real world, I’m not interested in seeing them lose in a story, I’m just not, so don’t do it. And I was really like, Okay, I don’t know how to pull that off, you know, like, and then I realized, you know, because there was a part of me that fell into that trap of thinking, you can’t have happy endings in in like, serious stories. But then I realized, like, you can have hard earned happy ends, you can have qualified happy endings. And that to me, that’s, that’s as much life as like, there’s no hope. And everything is terrible. Sometimes that even feels less realistic.

I think a satisfying ending too, doesn’t necessarily have to be happy. I think it has to fit the narrative and the characters, and I just there was a little bit of whooping. Whooping, just because it couldn’t have gone anywhere else. I mean, there were a couple of moments, a couple of different moments, where I was sort of back on my heels a bit in the story. And then I was like, okay, and I loved the pacing, because I never knew exactly where you were going to take me. And I’ve been reading you long enough to know that there’s going to be a monster, you’re going to surprise me, that there are going to be references in the book where I’m like, oh, right. He studied with Mary Gordon. Right. You know, there have been other interviews with you, where people have just been like, let’s just talk about all of the monsters. And it’s like, yes, let’s talk about the monsters because I think what you do is very cool. I mean, I remember reading The Changeling for the first time and thinking, I just read a novel about trolls, and changelings, and it happened in New York, and I believe every single word of it, right? I believe. And, you know, ultimately, it’s a metaphor for parenting and being terrified of parenting and all of these other things. I’m perfectly happy to be an auntie. So you know, that tells you where I fall into the whole spectrum of it. But I want to talk about the art that goes into this and the balancing of the monsters and the metaphors and the sentences because you write some sentences that I think plenty of other writers would be jealous of, but sometimes the sentences get lost behind the monsters.

Right? Well, but that’s kind of you to say I’m really glad that that comes through. But you know, if my sentences had to play second fiddle to monsters, I wouldn’t feel so bad about it. But I do love the kind of books where it’s almost like you have to read, you have to go back over something to go, oh, part of the reason that worked is because of what was happening but it was also that the writer was doing something, that whether it was the language or the pacing or the tone, the mood, and you realize like, oh, yeah, right, that’s the kind of hidden hand that is making me go along with monsters, is making me go along with this very atmospheric and moody Wild West or whatever it might be.

You’ve got the idea. You’ve been reading this book on women homesteaders in the last century, you know, roughly what you’re playing with, we are going to come back to shame. You’re working backwards from Montana into California. But I want to talk about the creation of Adelaide because she is great, she is a fabulous character. And she has a thing for Anne Bronte and there’s a very specific reference that comes up a couple of times. And again, this just it feels like something only you could pull off. I end up reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, because I was like, why does Adelaide love this book so much? It is. I will say it was her favorite book. Yes. Maybe the only book she has but it is her favorite book. Okay Bronte? Really?

well, I mean, what I kind of loved is the idea that, number one, that she’s the least known or loved of the Bronte’s so I felt like okay, we go with the surprise pick there. But that that book in particular, is in many ways so forward thinking for its time, in particular about the ability for the wife to leave a life that is abusive, with a drunken husband, who also cheats on her, he’s verbally abusive within the narrative, that’s a bold choice and then within the time period, this is the 1800s. It’s astounding. Like it was a super controversial book in its time, because it dared to number one, write about this stuff at all, that women were living through, and then two, that had dared to show, she got away, she left him, it feels like the right thing. It was a good thing. It was a safe thing. And so I liked the idea of like, the Bronte’s are such Gothic writers and I did want some sense of, rather than, its takes place in the West, but I always thought it was a gothic novel, my novel. And so I said, Okay, if it’s going to be one of the branches, which one will be, and then I looked back, and I said, I think it should be Anne, number one, and then I think it should be this book. Because it just hits everything that my book is about, while not being literally just a retelling of that book, you know, so it just, it just struck me as like the perfect. And I did, I did think like it would be the kind of thing where a reader might go, which one is this? And that that might be fun.

It was very much fun. Because, honestly, I had there’s a joint biography of the Bronte sisters that I had read billions of years ago. And I knew Anne existed and I knew like her sisters, she had to publish under a man’s name. And I think I vaguely knew this book even existed, but I hadn’t. It was one of those things because I was a history major in college, I missed some of these bits that other people caught because they were English majors. And so there’s a little bit of catching up sometimes for me, yeah. It’s a really feminist novel. Yes, a wildly feminist novel. And I was kind of like, Oh, right. I forget sometimes, that just because people are writing about, you know, marriage, and other sorts of things that it’s not necessarily, oh, here we go. Again, kind of this great. We’re running over the Moors after a bad boy.

I mean, it is that too. But it’s not only that.

It’s less of that than one might expect from a Bronte.

Certainly hers for sure. For sure.

Okay, but Adelaide, where did she come from?

So this is like, such a deep cut thing that it’s, it’s almost silly, but like, so I had a novel that it published in 2011, I think called Big Machine. And in that novel, there’s a character named Adele Henry, who I love very much and so I basically was like, what would her great grandmother be like?

Thank you for doing that. Because I didn’t want to assume. I was like, I think there’s a connection here. But I’m gonna wait for Victor to tell me if there is. Thank you for making my day. I’m really happy.

Yeah, I’m so happy that you picked that up. So, it was like, I’ll tell you like the thing that I actually sold to my editor at the time was three novellas but like this expanded a little bit, like three novellas. So now it’ll be like three short novels. And it’ll basically be Adele’s great grandmother, who is Adelaide, Adele’s grandmother, Adele’s mother, and then we reach, and it’s not— that doesn’t matter to anybody. Like it’s not essential to the stories, but in my head, the idea is like, I just want to trace the line of the Henry women, and the idea that like, they’ve always been something special. That was like this super deep cut thing in there. But it was, because I really loved Adele and I kind of wanted to write about her again, but I wasn’t thinking of writing like a sequel to Big Machine or something. So I said, Well, maybe I could go backward. I was thinking that and then I said, like, okay, so then her name’s, she’s a Henry. And then I was like, well, if this is Adele how about if she’s Adelaide? And then I really was like, okay, Adelaide Henry. That’s who I’m with. And then I started just saying, like, alright, spiritual predecessor, to the woman we meet and love. Okay, and all of a sudden, it started to sort of like open up in all these fun ways.

That is so wild. Like I said, I didn’t want to assume, I didn’t want to assume I was like, maybe this is just a name he really likes, maybe this is a family thing. You know, and stuff sometimes burbles up that maybe you weren’t even thinking about, you know, it’s your fifth book. But does this mean we might actually see the other two novellas in some other form at some point or are?

I’m working on, no no I’m gonna have like I mean, I they had a very sort of one paragraph. You know, Lone Women is about the homesteading women then the second one is about the some next phase that I’m still like, reaching into. And then the next one is right before Adelaide, I mean Adele, or potentially, if worse comes to worse it might be, she’s a niece or something like that. And then it’s not like, straight line, but it is that Henry blood kind of thing,

I will take what I can get. I’m not picky about familial relationship. But I want to get back to shame for a second because, you know, the opening line of this book is so good, you know, with shame in the people who died from it. And I sort of want to argue that Adele is a third version, she’s the one who grabs it by the throat and kills it.

And kills it. I like that.

She really does. And, you know, shame for anyone, regardless of gender, shame, is the thing that a lot of folks wrestle with, and it and it can do terrible things. And it really is, but the way you play with it, in this book, and the way Adele grabs it by the throat, and he really, Adelaide, excuse me. She’s amazing, she’s absolutely amazing. It’s not the first time you’ve come sort of head on at a very big serious subject, like shame and the legacy and what it can do, and just the realities of it. Sometimes monsters make it easier, but you still have the human piece, you can’t let the monsters do all of the talking when it comes to this. So I think maybe you knew from the beginning that that was going to be part of the story.

Yes, I definitely knew. So when I was talking about like family responsibility or family burden or whatever. What was definitely tied to that was maybe one of the central feelings I would say, of my family, which is shame. So to be as transparent as possible, we have a good bit of mental illness in the family across various generations and various people. Sort of a refrain for our family was like, well, you’re not going to talk to anybody outside the family about these things. Right? You’re not going to tell these people? Oh, we have a diagnosis, someone has a diagnosis of this or something this, even if people like, to think that was part of my process of like writing the book, but also growing up I thought, because we never spoke of it, people didn’t know. And as I got older, what I realized was people knew something was wrong or off or troubled, but because we wouldn’t speak of it, then they just were like, oh, they’re jerks. Like, that’s what they thought, you know, they’re just this family that’s very hard to get along with. Like, not everyone, but like, that could be the narrative. And for me, part of the undercurrent of the book is like, whatever our family’s shame is, there’s that sense that we’re keeping a secret. And I kind of want to get across that idea. Like, you’re not keeping— the messed up part of it is you’re not even keeping a secret, right? People know something’s wrong, something’s off something’s, whatever. It’s just that they don’t know what it is. But when you’re in the secret, you think we’re doing great. And so I wanted that to be a part of it was like, for having to face like, what was it even for? I kept the secret for what? Like everyone knew, and we kept people away. So I got nothing out of this.

Yeah, keeping up appearances really doesn’t work for anyone ever. No, we get great books out of it. We get good movies out of it, we get good art out of people’s attempts to keep up appearances. But I can’t think of a single— and maybe this speaks more to my taste in art, but I can’t think of a single example where keeping up appearances helped anyone.

I think that’s the fun. The fascinating thing, right is like, I would say, more surface level or popular entertainment, whether it’s TV, movies, or whatever, inevitably is more popular, but I think part of it is because it’s selling the illusion that like, this is how you live too, isn’t it? Yeah, you know, you make jokes with your friends. If this isn’t this, you all go home and have a nice dinner. But nobody yells, nobody drinks too much, nobody cheats on anybody, nobody’s in foreclosure. Because if you bring those things up that people go, oh, that was a downer. I want that. There’s a reason it’s, it’s so desirable to people. It’s like just eating candy all the time. You’re gonna get sick.

Here we are talking about family mythology. But you’ve also created a world of second chances and it’s not just Adelaide but it’s also there’s some folks, I’m thinking of the Reeds. Who folks will meet, there are characters that are desperate for second chances who don’t quite find them, there are some characters who do get second chances and the way you present that search, you know, regardless of who’s who’s doing the sort of these character arcs, they’re really fun. They’re really wild. And part of me needs to know if you’re plotting this out in advance or you’re just letting yourself be surprised because I really am not kidding when I say there was, you know, there were some vocalizing as I was reading.

I’m endlessly happy that that was the reaction and that it wasn’t vocalizing like curses at me. But I’m the kind of writer that writes very quickly and so I write many, many drafts. I write quickly, I surprise myself and then if it’s a good surprise, like that, keeps, keeps sort of growing and, and giving benefits to the story and allowing for new complexities. Then I realized, like, oh, that’s a good surprise. And now I have to go back and make it look like it was always on purpose.

Yeah, it feels like you’re a little more playful in Lone Women than you have been in previous books. And granted, this is not the first time there have been monsters in your work. But yeah, this just feels a little lighter. It feels a little faster. Yeah, I guess playful really is the word I’m looking for it because I really there was, I was laughing a lot. But also, I was like, happily surprised when wild stuff happened and that’s really all I can say about that. And there were some moments where I was like, oh, wait, that’s not what I thought, oh, it’s like you’ve zigged when I thought you were gonna zag. And that as a reader is impossibly satisfying, because you don’t always get that. Like, when you read a ton, sometimes you’re like, oh, I know what’s going to happen and it does happen, right. But let’s go back to craft for a second. Because you’re doing multiple drafts, you’re writing it quickly, you’re going back you’re correcting, but you do always sort of have some kind of endpoint in mind, right? Like, I’m not talking about the physical end of the story. But it’s like, I’m trying to get from point A to point B, or I’m trying to get from A to F and maybe I’m gonna hit C and E, but I don’t know if I’m gonna hit B, right? Or is that too sort of mathematical and clean?

Well, I would say it’s more like emotionally, what I’m thinking is Adelaide is keeping a secret, the midpoint of this has to be that the secret is exposed and then the endpoint is and what is Adelaide do with the truth. So it’s thinking like that, and what I’m in the earlier stages, what I don’t know is, will she be destroyed by the truth? Like, is that kind of book I’m writing? Or will she do what needs to be done to acknowledge the truth and become a person who lives in their truth? Versus a person who has been living with their shame? And what would that look like? And in some ways, that was the more surprising choice because I didn’t know what that would look like. But I liked the idea that maybe someone could have all their family stuff exposed, and they could learn, it didn’t kill me, okay, so then, what do I do?? And that that would be kind of an illuminating and interesting journey for the reader too.

Well, for this reader, certainly, yes. I don’t think I’m alone in that, Victor. I really don’t. But why do you write?

I really don’t mean this in a glib sort of way: to pay for the home that my wife and I have for our kids, to leave them some money when we die, and maybe pay for them to go to college and for them to come out of college with no debt. As the son of a secretary who came here from Uganda, I would feel like, I’d won all the American lotteries if that happened. So I suppose that’s what maybe that’s the true thing is that’s why I publish. Maybe that’s why I publish and then the result, right, is I love telling stories, I really do. I think I started wanting to write when I maybe by 10,11,12. I was a truly independent reader picking my own things, without my mom having any, if I’m honest, any interest in what I was picking up, so that was very freeing. But when I was reading those stories, the thing I would be thinking sometimes is like, I want to do this to someone, or I want to give this to someone, like this has been so fun. I want to give this to somebody, right? So in that way, it’s fun. And I look at the writing as a way to transfer joy to someone else if I do it well.

When did you start to realize though, that you wanted to write about monsters more than you didn’t want to write about monsters? Because again, those first two books are wildly different. Yes, everything that’s come since, but when did you start to make that switch?

Well, I guess the thing I really would say is that I started writing when I was 12 and at 12, it was full of monsters, right? In fact, like I would say the journey I was on was like I learned to be ashamed of wanting to write monsters when I was in college, right because I was taking I was an English major, I was reading serious literature, serious literature from more than 200 years ago, had lots of monsters. I mean, Shakespeare’s got fairies and all the rest in it. Certainly, if you’re reading like Gilgamesh or you’re reading like The Iliad or whatever, Beowulf, Dante, it’s nothing but supernatural stuff or it’s tons of supernatural stuff that is speaking to the real world. That was okay. But the minute we got to like, the American shores or the 1800s, or something like that, certainly the 1900s it became ridiculous, in quote, unquote, to genuinely have these things in your story. At least that was the message, I felt I was getting based largely on what we were reading, and what was being taught to me as like the serious business. I’d never consciously said this. But somewhere in me, I said, like, oh, I would like to be taken seriously as a writer, I guess I’ll write realist stories. And so the first two books are, I think there’s some weird stuff in there, there’s some funny stuff in there. But they are absolutely realist stories. And then I got to the end of the second realist book, and I was really, I hated writing it.

Oh, okay. I didn’t realize you hated writing it.

The book itself, I feel like I poured everything into it. But I was like, especially that second, especially the novel, first novel, but even the stories, I can see myself laboring under the delusion that serious writers write about misery. Yeah, that’s what is art. And so those books are, they’re funny at times. It’s bleak humor. So it’s all misery, all the time and so the idea that I was going to dive back into like, another book of misery, was not compelling. And then also, I was writing very autobiographical books. So I had written all the way up to finishing college. So the next book would have been about being an MFA student. And, you know, like, who wants that book? Not me. Not from me, at least.

Now, because we got Big Machine instead. Right?

It was a gift. I have to say like, I think is an interesting story. I’ve had the same editor for every book, except the first, a wonderful editor named Chris Jackson. And so he came on board for The Ecstatic. My first novel, clearly, he was like, I believe in you and I’m here for the sort of absurdist realist black novel. That’s what we’re doing. And then I came to him, and I said, I got a novel about Black secret societies and monsters, he really was like, just get out of my office, I just don’t want this at all, he was really like, I’m not buying this book. And so then I wrote him a letter and I said, in the letter, if you don’t buy this book, it’s gonna be one of the biggest mistakes of your career. You better buy this book, okay? Because this is where I’m going, if you want to be in the blah blah blah, and it was like, nobody else was asking for that book. So it’s not like I had anywhere else to go, but I was trying to make him see I mean this. And so then he came back and because he, for whatever, for his own personal reasons he’s got a particular bias about the sort of supernatural he’s, you know, one of those people who is just very much like, I just, I just don’t believe it. But he came back and he said, alright, look, here’s the compromise. You’re gonna write this book and the entire time, I’m gonna say to you, why? Why is that what’s happening? Okay, and you need to come up with real answers. It can’t just be because it’s magic.

Yeah, no, honestly, that’s fair. Because yes, there are a lot of books in the world where it’s like, because. And that’s not enough of an answer. It’s just not enough.

Unless you’re, I mean, well, in a way, and his point was, you could write that book when it’s just like, because is the answer. He said, but I won’t buy that book, because I would never read that book. And so you might find another editor who would, but I’m not that person. He said, but if you’re into the idea of saying, here’s the fantastical, and it’s grounded in the real, then I’ll do this with you. And it really was like the perfect blend. So every book, I find myself, we have a phase where I give it to him when it’s in hopefully strong enough shape and then we just have a whole conversation, which is him just being like, why does it have to be this? And I’ll go like here’s what I’m thinking and then he’ll say like, here’s three totally realistic versions of that exact same thing. Could you do that? And I’ll say like, no, because I need this thing to be able to fly, right? He goes, okay, and so we hash out like, how do I get him to climb the ladder up to here, but also, but then how do I build the ladder so he can climb.

And that sort of explains how I came to be a longtime reader. Honestly, I will say, like, I’m not reaching for genre, I’m not, but there are things that I appreciate and one of the things I’m really looking for when I’m reading is narrative voice. Like, if the voice is there, I will follow you. And I know when I’m picking up a book that has your byline on it, chances are really good stuff is gonna happen where I’m gonna be like, okay. Which I’m not always willing to give that over to other writers. But partially, it’s because you’re so grounded in a New York that I recognize, you know, NK Jemisin did a very similar thing in her cities duology. It’s just like, I recognize this New York, I get this New York, without a doubt. I would like to never see Cthulhu. Yes, please. No, but do I believe it could happen here? Absolutely. And you know, that’s not necessarily where my taste runs. But I’m also, I want narrative voice and I want language, I need language that makes me buy in to what you’re trying to do and who your characters are and it’s not just enough to have stuff happen. Yeah, I need I need the whole package as the reader. So I’m guessing language is the thing you read for first, and then you’re going from there? Or are you like me, and you’re reading for narrative voice first and then language?

I would say voice matters to me even more than language because there are… in a sense that I’m gonna get, like, in the sense that there are some folks whose voice is super distinctive, but I couldn’t necessarily say like, here’s every beautiful sentence they make, you know, or even that they necessarily write beautiful sentences. But there’s something about like, that voice just sort of like kicks you and you just go okay, this is great. Like, no one else could have written it, that maybe that’s what I really feel like. If I fall in love with the book, it’s because I really feel like this author had to write this and no one else would have done it like this.

Have you had a chance to read Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark. He does some really cool stuff in that book, some wildly cool stuff in that book and well, I think you’d fly through it. But I also think that you would appreciate sort of what he’s doing, the balance he’s pulled between voice and language and also structure. He does interesting stuff. He plays with time in a way that I’m just like, okay, and format, you could argue that it’s a novel, you could argue with the novel in stories, you could argue it’s stories. I just didn’t want it to stop. Like, I don’t really care what the format is. I just read a cool thing and you apparently are the person I need to hear from.

I’ll check that out. For sure. We’re Twitter friends and I know I’ve heard nothing but great things about the book. And I just hadn’t had a chance to read it yet.

The Changeling is coming to FX.

Apple TV.

Apple TV? My mistake.

No, it was originally FX. But I guess, in the ways of these things. Where— it’s home turned out to be Apple TV.

Do we have air dates? Do we know?

But I’m hoping it’ll be this fall. We’re in the tail end of post-production. I would be thrilled if it was this fall.

What’s that like for you though, handing over a really personal story, to I mean, some very talented creatives, please don’t misunderstand. It is a very different form of storytelling. You actually, did you write any of the teleplay the street did not okay. No. I mean, my understanding is you hand over the project, and everything gets stripped out so that the actors can do what the actors are going to do. So a lot of what you do as the creator gets turned into what, a 60 page script depending on how long each episode is.

What I will say, I mean, as time goes by, and I hear more and more of these stories, I do think that is the usual way and that’s what you’re signing up for kind of thing. Maybe that’s like the Stephen King with Kubrick, you get The Shining you get you signed over, you know, whatever and King gets to be unhappy about it as much as he likes as well. But in my case, the woman who is the show creator is a woman named Kelly Marcel, the minute she signed on, she called me up. She lived in LA at the time, she called me up, she said, I’m flying to New York, we’re going to have lunch. Okay, so we sat down to lunch, we had a couple hours lunch, and the whole her whole point was like, two things: number one, this isn’t my show, this is our show, and I want you to stay involved. And so she really advocated for me, I think when we signed the deal, part of the deal was I was a co-executive producer, but it was just a title, you know. And so she said, I want you to be an executive producer, because I want you involved in a very serious way. And then the second thing she said was like, I’m not going to take anything like, I’m going to tell you, everything in this book I’m going to use. And what I’m going to do is, her perspective was you do an amazing job telling Apollo’s story and I want to add Emma’s story. The show was great, but the show is going to be, you definitely have Apollo’s narrative, Emma has, you spend a lot more time with Emma and her narrative, you get Apollo’s mom, Lillian, you get a lot more of her. It was either the limits of my powers, or the way that I set the story up. I was in a powerless perspective. And so that’s that, that’s what we’re telling at one point was like, the show doesn’t have to be in one perspective. Right? So how about all this stuff where Apollo learns later, what Emma was doing, what if we just do it? And we just see it, and we see what she was going through and all this. So I was really spoiled, okay, because she just added, like, in particular, the first six episodes of the first season is like almost beat by beat the book.

Oh, that’s a lot.

It’s a lot and the dialogue, tons of dialogue is the same, all this kind of stuff. I feel like I got a prize, you know, and then on top of that, she said, if you’re up for it, we want to, I want you to be on set every day for the New York shoot, and then move to Toronto, and be on set for the whole summer. So I was on set for four months. Like in every way, Kelly was the showrunner and there was never, I think the other reasons sometimes that the authors get kind of pushed out is because the showrunner or the director, whoever is like, this is my show, right? And I don’t want any battles, but Kelly is a real force of nature. And so there was no question that it was her show, in her confidence. She was like, you being there is only going to make it better. So come see, reach out to me, she’d be like, I want them to be reading such and such, but I don’t know what they should be. Can you look around to some classic literature and come up with a couple of things for me and Bob, and then I’d send over some stuff, and we talk it through and then all of a sudden that’s in the show. And so she was such a generous and confident captain, I got to spend time with all the cast, I spent time with all the crew, I’ve worked with the director sometimes, I got all this experience and it remained, I think, a really supportive and loving relationship between me and Kelly. Like it was just great. It’s all I’m saying.

I mean, your relationship with your editor to sounds a little more collaborative, in many ways. And so the idea that you just sort of slid into this collaborative role in a different medium makes perfect sense to me. But it also makes me wonder, do we get to maybe watch Lone Women too, because I would go there in a second. I would totally go there.

The most I can say is it’s funny you say that and I’m working diligently as we speak to make that a reality. It’s in a place where I think that’s a genuine possibility, because we’re making some very cool things have been happening with the potential for the show.

I’m very happy to hear that. But that’s also not going to necessarily interfere with the next book. Right?

So, it definitely will, it definitely will. That’s the only thing I will say for sure.

But I think for good reason, for good reason. Yeah, no. All right. Victor, thank you so much. It’s always really good to see you. I’m sorry to see you more often but Lone Women is out now. If you haven’t read The Changeling or any of the backlist including Devil in Silver or Big Machine — really go back and check out Big Machine. I’m on a really big Big Machine thing. Victor, so great to see you. Thank you.

Always a pleasure. Thank you

Poured Over