There is, to put it simply, no book quite like T Kira Madden’s Whidbey, a literary thriller that braids together the perspectives of three protagonists—two survivors of childhood sexual abuse and the mother of their recently deceased abuser—with skill and astonishing empathy. If it’s short on facile platitudes about what it means to live through something awful, it just might reconfigure your expectations about what it means to live at all.
This week, Vogue spoke to Madden about moving from memoir to fiction, shadowing projectionists and gas station attendants to get a feel for her characters’ worlds, creating a mood board for her writing projects, and complicating our cultural understanding of abuse. Read that conversation below.
Vogue: How does it feel to be making the leap from memoir to fiction? How do the two differ for you in terms of craft?
T Kira Madden: It feels really good! I’ve wanted to be a fiction writer my entire life. I studied fiction, my MFA’s in fiction, and all my first failed books were works of fiction. My first published book happened to be memoir, but that was never the plan, so it’s amazing to finally publish a novel. Craft-wise, I would say I work pretty similarly, because with both fiction and nonfiction, I do try to write from a place of discovery and allowing the story to tell me where it wants to go instead of hyper-imposing a narrative or hypothesis onto the story of what I want to say. I always have a set of questions that I want to work with that feel unanswerable or prickly or complicated, as well as a list of scenes that I would really like to write. I was always excited by the filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s idea that all of your utility scenes should become scenes of desire. I kind of stand by that, and I have those images and scenes in mind, and then it’s just kind of the act of discovery and getting to know the characters, getting to know what the world of the story will be. Ultimately, that informs the shape and the style.
Can you tell me a little bit about the research that went into making your protagonists’ lives and professions so vivid?
I love characters with jobs. The book is born of some real life-trauma and experiences of being a survivor of early childhood sex abuse that I have written about, but I really wanted the day-to-day moments of these women’s lives to feel like a complete departure from my own, in order for me to feel like I could really access the fictional world and possibilities of the project. Linzie King is a former reality-show star who worked at a mall, so that’s one experience I do have; I used to work on film sets, never a reality TV show, but I understand a little bit about production and film and how that works. I’ve talked to many people over many years about the production of such shows and read every Bachelor Nation book I could get my hands on, including the memoirs of reality television show stars. For Mary-Beth Boyer, I talked to lots of both current and former gas station attendants—mostly at Stewart’s gas stations in upstate New York—who allowed me to kind of move through their day-to-day tasks with them. For Birdie Chang, who works as a film projectionist while digital is kind of taking over theaters, I worked with Lillian Hardester, a projectionist at Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park, and she let me shadow her. That really informed the story so much more than any other job, in terms of opening up the metaphors of film projection and damage inspection reports and how that might inform how Birdie kind of lives and thinks.
I’ve heard you give wonderful advice about creating a mood board of sorts for different writing projects. What was on your mood board for Whidbey?
A lot of music. Each character in the book, even more peripheral characters, have their own soundtrack that I made of what they would listen to when they want to be cheered up. I had all of their celebrity icons. I thought about the dynamics in other news stories, like with Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones, who were always kind of haunting the text for me. [Those] three women were presented to the world for criticism and believed or not believed because of their likability or appearance or proximity to power.
I am really into the natural world of Florida and Whidbey Island, so just learning so much about trees and the animals that occupy these spaces and getting to see this wild root system that nobody can figure out on Whidbey Island, where four trees share the same root, was really, really cool. I am really into bringing tactile and sensory details into the text, so spending time in all of the places that I’ve written about because I had the luxury and privilege to do so was huge. Taking recordings of what it sounds like when you’re sitting under a bridge near Biscayne Bay and finding out, what does it smell like? What’s the sappy, milky stuff that comes out of specific leaves in Florida that would be on the characters’ skin? All of these things are kind of collectsed on the greater mood board, from the fun soundtrack and celebrity stuff and astrological signs to the sensory details that I try to collects and mimic as best I can.
The project can become your companion if you let it kind of blossom in that way, so that when you see something out and about, you’re like “Oh, this character would love that tree, or that kitschy magnet.” It becomes this thing that can always be kind of working in your mind when you’re not sitting down to write. When I’m teaching a semester and I don’t have time to write, I still feel like I’m working if I’m getting to know the characters through collectsing that kind of mood board data.
What aspect of writing Whidbey surprised you the most?
Well, I went in with a lot of rage and anger. The kind of instigating prompt was my former teacher, the author Lydia Yuknavitch, asking where the rage lived in my work, because Long Live was so much about forgiveness and tenderness and understanding. She was like, “Where’s the rage, where’s the teeth?” Because of what was going on in my personal life at the time when I was starting to write Whidbey—having to go to court and feeling super traumatized and full of rage that not only was I part of this system, but that my abuser was not being given the mental health support that could have maybe prevented him from continuing to abuse children—I was very angry at the system. I think I’m surprised by how, after spending years and years and years with the project, I was able to get past that feeling and into places of compassion and even some places of humor.
I grew up with Whidbey in a way, through the writing process of it, because it took almost a decade. So I’ve moved through my own kind of phases of recovery along with writing it, and I was able to find those moments in the book as I was writing my way through it. I always resist the idea that writing is simply cathartic or helps you heal—and the book is about the false promise of healing and the false binary of that—but I do think it became a safe landing place to work through these feelings. I think there’s an assumption that this book must have been just horrible to write, but really, it became a place of finding some sort of an illusion of control in an uncontrollable system through being able to edit and sequence and find moments of beauty and softness in the book.
How did you decompress from the intensity of writing this book?
With both books I’ve written, I’m often asked: What about self-care? What’s the trick? I don’t have one. Some days are just bad. I have an excellent therapist who I’ve had for a very long time, but some weeks are bad. It doesn’t just go away in one writing session. Like I said, I’m not an every day writer, so I think gaps between writing feel important to me. When I feel depleted, I do think the well fills back up in the weeks or month I spend away from the work. I’m a full-time teacher, so summer and winter break is my real hit-the-ground-running writing time, and over the course of the semester, I’m typically just editing, note-taking, building those mood boards, sometimes transcribing, because I write from a typewriter. I just let the work kind of fill back up, and I don’t push myself to write when I feel like I’m in a bad headspace. I work with animals, and I know that if they’re having a bad day, it’s not worth pushing them into a place where it’s going to be a bad day for both of you. Sometimes it’s like, Okay, we’re just going to take a walk today, and I’m going to comb your hair, and that’s okay, and then we’ll try again tomorrow.
What do you hope most for people who, like your three protagonists, have had their lives touched by sexual violence or abuse?
I hope that readers can sit with the complexity of what it takes to be a so-called “survivor.” I’ve had a lot of mixed feedback about the character of Mary-Beth, but for me she’s more than just a mother. Everyone’s like, “Why are you choosing to embody this mother who’s an apologist or enabler?” And for me, in every case that we see blown up on our screens, there are always enablers who say, “They can’t possibly be capable of doing this.” It just startles me and bewilders me every time, and I think it’s worth taking a moment to ask, Why would someone do that? How? What? How is that possible? Is that denial? Is that love? I don’t think we should really ignore that anymore.
I think there’s been a lot made about the abuser and what made this person monstrous or what made them do what they did, and my book is obviously interested in the complexity of being a victim or survivor—and I deliberately say both, because I don’t think everyone wants to be boxed into one label or the other. But also, I think it’s time that we have a conversation about the apologists and the enablers in the story who are almost always present. The nature of child sex abuse is such that it might be the center of our news right now, but it’s unfortunately so pervasive. This is happening all the time to so many people and so many families, and I do think we need to look at it and talk about it in order to figure out how to best serve the people who need support.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
