Victor LaValle is the author of six previous works of fiction: three novels, two novellas, and a collection of short stories. His novels have been included in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and Publishers Weekly, among others. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids and teaches at Columbia University.
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Lone Women is set in 1915 and tells the story of Adelaide Henry, who is homesteading on her own in Montana. What kind of research did you do for this book? Did you find any interesting historical tidbits that stand out in your mind?
My interest in this locale and time period was sparked by a book called Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own, edited by Dr. Sarah Carter. It’s a fascinating work of non-fiction, giving historical insight about the women who went out to states like Montana at the turn of the last century and tried to homestead on their own. The book includes excerpts from the diaries of many of these women—who were called ‘lone women’ because they came to the territories with no families. I never heard anything about them—meaning I didn’t know they existed at all. I was hooked. In the beginning I just wanted to read what I could about them and this time period, but as time went by, I realized I wanted to write about them, too.
Many readers had a taste of your horror stylings from your award-winning novel The Changeling. How was your approach to horror in Lone Women similar or different than it was in that book?
I like for my fantastical work to feel deeply grounded in the real world before I introduce the weird or impossible elements. In The Changeling I wanted New York City to feel lived in, tangible; I wanted the marriage of the two leads, Apollo and Emma, to be believable, and I wanted the trials of being new parents to be utterly grounded. And then—SMACK—here comes the strange stuff. I followed a similar pattern in Lone Women. For me, the fun is in opening up the real world and suggesting that this place we think we all know can actually contain the “impossible.” Someday it might be nice to write something that’s just pure fucking horror right from page one. I’m not there yet, but just typing that sentence did make me smile, so we’ll see.
You were recently Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention. Is there an impact that you feel from notability, awards, and the like? For example, do you feel an added pressure, or a sense of relief that your work has spoken to a lot of people, or does the notability not really have an impact on you or your writing process?
Being a Guest of Honor was an absolute blast, and an honor. That kind of thing is always welcome and feels like a nice gust of wind in the sails. As I’m guessing everyone reading this knows, the creative life is often one of isolation and self-doubt. Is this thing I’m spending years on worth a damn? That’s a question I’m always asking myself. Being recognized as a Guest of Honor, in that light, at least suggests you’re on a good path. Who doesn’t need to hear that from time to time?
A number of venues, including The New York Times, have praised your prose. Craft-wise, what is the key to great prose?
I love this question, though there is no single answer. There are great prose stylists like Graham Greene and Toni Morrison, but you’d never mistake one for the other. Ray Bradbury and Ramsey Campbell, Arundhati Roy and Ben Okri. All so different and yet, such profound stylists. So I think the key to great prose is just that the author makes language feel fresh in a way that is distinctive and personal. This might mean they’re lush and complex, or clear and direct in a way that makes moments vivid. What’s even more amazing, to me, is that language itself is so flexible, and renewable. No matter the language, anywhere in the world, people have likely been using it for a damn long time. And still someone can find a way to string those characters together and make it feel utterly new.
People often discuss some of your work as being a response to or critique of Lovecraft. Is there a similar relationship between Lone Women and westerns, or other kinds of narratives?
I think of most of my recent novels as being a more purposeful reimagining of some trope or literary system (for lack of some better term) that I find limiting. My novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, was a kind of critique of Lovecraft and the particular limitations of his ability to imagine complex lives for the non-white, non-male characters who might inhabit his tales. My previous novel, The Changeling, was a chance to reexamine various fairy tales, particularly the fairy tale that falling in love, getting married, and having a child is the path toward a “happily ever after” kind of life.
Lone Women does fall into something of that pattern, in particular the trope of the western frontier and the narrative—maintained in so much historical fiction and entertainment—that the west was white. That it was solely the domain of men and that many of the political and cultural wars we’re fighting now are somehow new. They aren’t.
What were the most challenging things about writing this book, and how did you deal with those challenges?
The book takes place in Montana in 1915, and I’ve only been to the state a handful of times. I don’t have family who lived there, though I have friends I was able to talk with, some who are newer transplants and some who have family going back generations. I tapped into those resources, their stories and lived histories, even as I dreamed up history all my own.
Also, the main cast of the story are all women, and I am not one. Some aspects of life maybe be universal—maybe—but most are not. So many factors of one’s background, one’s identity, shape how each of us experience the world. I had a few close readers—women I respect and admire—give me reads of my book, my plans for the narrative here or there; my wife was my best reader in that regard. Overall, I didn’t assume I had to create this book entirely by myself. One never does. One way or another, the world is always your co-author.
When you think about this narrative, the writing process, the story, and you look back on it all, what are you most proud of with this book, and why?
This book is probably the farthest, in so many ways, from my own lived experience. I didn’t have as much of my personal history to fall back on or mine. I’ve been so gratified by the fact that readers have simply believed in Adelaide and the other Lone Women, that their interior lives are rich and complex, that their trials are real and their triumphs are earned. I’m immensely proud of that.
Readers will have reviews and blurbs and even interviews, but what do you really want folks to know about Lone Women? What is important about this one for you?
More than anything, I want this to be a big, exciting, moving adventure. After that, I want to do what so many great writers have done with stories set in the past—to make a time people assume they know everything about become surprising and revelatory all over again.
What else are you working on now? What do you have out or coming up that readers should know about?
We’ve adapted my novel, The Changeling, for Apple TV, and we’re well into post-production. Hopefully it will be airing this fall, 2023, so keep an eye out for that. It’s got an amazing cast, and I had the chance to serve as an executive producer on the show, so I was on set for shooting the whole season. The team has put together something amazing. I can’t wait for folks to see it.