An Interview with Rachel Lyon, author of Fruit of the Dead
Rachel Lyon is the author of Self-Portrait with Boy, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize, and Fruit of the Dead, out with Scribner on March 5. Her short work has appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. A teacher of creative writing at various institutions, most recently Bennington College, Rachel lives with her husband and two young children in Western Massachusetts. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Epiphany from 2019 to 2022. Prose Editor Chris Leslie-Hynan sat down with her recently to ask her about her latest novel.
Chris Leslie-Hynan: First of all, thank you for being willing to do this interview. Welcome back to Epiphany! I’ll start by asking: what drew you to a mythical retelling for your second book? I feel like the cachet of Greek and Roman mythology has drained away a little during our lifetimes, as Western culture has become dominated by different kinds of garishly flawed Gods. Writers don’t get called “a modern Orpheus” or whatever nearly often enough any more. So thank you for bringing it back! What made you choose this project?
Rachel Lyon: At the risk of replying like someone who just adopted a rescue dog — “she chose me!” — I have to admit I didn’t set out to retell a Greek myth. The first couple of years I spent working on the book, I imagined it would be a kind of sordid beach read. (I still hold out hope for that, actually.) But in perhaps my second or third year of work on it, I couldn’t help but notice that not only did my working plot echo the plot of the myth, my characters also seemed to want to be these campy, larger-than-life, “garishly flawed,” as you say, members of the 1%.
I tried different ways of doing it, some stupider than others. But I liked the idea of recasting the gods of Olympus as flawed but powerful people. It felt radical to me to toy with the idea of divinity and worship and even celebrity, in that way. Eventually I found my ways in. I started having fun with the myth, letting it into the text in different ways, planting (sometimes literal) Easter eggs, extracting and adapting lines from my source text, etcetera.
This novel alternates between two perspectives you would seem to have reasonably good authority on — Cory, a young woman with a thirst for parties who tries to convince herself there is nothing to fear, and Emer, a mother who feels every danger so acutely it drives her to the point of madness. I’m curious which half of this mythical duo you began writing first? Was one character’s perspective more the seed of the book than the other?
Not only did I begin with Cory, I actually resisted writing Emer’s side of the story for years. Novels told through alternating perspectives can be a tough sell for me, as I often find it hard enough to “get into” a character’s POV without being whisked out of it at the end of every other chapter. I found Cory’s voice quickly and loved it immediately, this young and reckless woman who lacks a stable self-image and craves escape. On another, more removed and analytical level, I wanted to write a rape victim who retained agency and even a degree of culpability on the page — not because being assaulted is her fault in any way, but because I was tired of black-and-white victim narratives that make survivors out to be fallen angels.
Anyway, two things happened as I wrote. First, I began to feel that Cory’s unreliable narrative, read without an external, balancing voice, would leave the reader feeling kind of unmoored, lost in her experience. Second, I became pregnant and had a child, and then, two years later, became pregnant again, and had a second. (Books take so long to gestate, comparatively.) In new parenthood I experienced a profound and irrevocable shifting of self that felt unignorable. Emer’s voice made its way in there because I had to write about motherhood.
You’ve been sober for as long as I’ve known you — over five years now! There are some scenes of absolute hedonism in this book, and a creeping dread when Cory begins to truly lose control of her ability to say no to the cornucopia of substances readily available to her. How did sobriety alter how you approached the writing of these scenes?
Six years now! Hard to believe.
I wrote the first paragraphs that would end up in the final manuscript (after much revision) a few months before I got sober for good. It had become unmanageable, as they say, I knew I was about to quit, and I was already beginning to mourn it. That section remains one of the most wistful, romantic bits in the book, and it’s wistful and romantic not about a character but about the feeling of falling into a chemically altered state of euphoria. In my first year of sobriety I treated the Scrivener project that would one day become this book as a repository for my own ambivalent desire to go back to chasing that euphoria. As time went on, and I began to understand the many ways in which that habit of chasing had, itself, betrayed me, I began to understand Cory better from the outside, as Emer does.
One of the things I admire most about Fruit of the Dead is its depiction of Rolo, the Hades figure, a lascivious pharmaceutical CEO who is by turns magnetic and revolting. There is something bold, and a little against trend, about how three-dimensional you make him. I feel like we are coming out of a period where we were supposed to make our villains nice and obvious, lest by rendering a complex fictional portrayal we somehow made it easier for them to hang around in the real world. But Rolo, though he comes from some kind of unholy Weinstein / Epstein / Sackler lineage, is not just a wandering tub of cringe. How did you go about creating this character?
Ha! Well, dare I say, I would not be interested in writing a character who was a wandering tub of anything. The guy has to effectively seduce her. If he did not also, at some level, seduce the reader, it would just be hundreds of pages of cringe. Without anything to betray — not necessarily the reader’s trust, but her affection, maybe, her curiosity, her benefit of the doubt — there could be no betrayal.
I did a lot of stomach-turning research for this character, and Weinstein is actually not quite right in terms of a real-life model for Rolo Picazo. Weinstein used coercion, blackmail, verbal and physical abuse; he did not seduce. In terms of the intersection between wealth and predation, which did interest me, at least for the purpose of the book, Epstein made a useful model, because he was charming, as well as a sociopath and pedophile who offered his victims opportunities in exchange for sex, and he had that convenient private island. But even he was too exaggerated. As campy as I allowed these characters — Rolo in particular — to be, on an emotional level I wanted them to be nuanced and contradictory.
So, more than any of those famously hideous men, I found myself poring over the testimony against, the false apologies delivered by, all the men who fell from grace as a result of the so-called Weinstein Effect. The demi-predators, you might call them: these aggrieved, entitled men who are not all bad, whose work we might even like and admire, who might even think of themselves as okay guys, guys who maybe compromised a bit on their values, here and there, and/or maybe have kind of a sexual fetish. But who hasn’t compromised; who doesn’t have one little pet fetish? I have known these compelling yet repellent men. Haven’t you? They are hanging out in the real world everywhere you look. I don’t think I glorify him. I literally magnify his pores.
How did three years in the Editor-in-Chief chair at Epiphany help you grow as a writer? How did it help you with this project specifically?
I loved my time at Epiphany and have always felt — since my days in grad school, when I helped out at the Indiana Review — that reading and editing fiction by other writers is incredibly instructive. I don’t know that it helped with this project specifically, but I know it helped me as a writer more generally. Having those discussions about craft and quality, working with other writers to shape and refine their stories, gave me confidence, refreshed my writerly vocabulary, and set me up with many kind and formidably talented peers. Ani Cooney was One Story’s Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow in 2022! Mengyin Lin just signed with my agent! Vida James was just awarded an NEA grant! These writers are out there kicking ass, doing great work. I’m just proud that I got to work with them.
