In Goldenseal (Counterpoint, 2024), two estranged friends revisit the circumstances that drew them apart decades before, revealing deep-rooted secrets and longings. Maria Hummel probes the complexities of female friendship with a deeply immersive writing style, showcasing her poetic chops and skill in crafting nuance. In this entrancing novel—her fifth—the author weaves a complex tapestry of nostalgia, regret, betrayal, and love against the backdrop of Los Angeles in fading splendor.
The novel opens in a luxury hotel in downtown LA, where Lacey Crane has been living as a recluse for years. Her old friend Edith has returned to California for a reckoning and waits downstairs in the lobby. Lacey and Edith haven’t spoken in over forty years. Their friendship began at a summer camp in Maine, where an intense connection saved each teen from their respective despair and isolation and bolstered them through the challenges and traumas of their young adulthood. Together the best friends moved to Hollywood, until love and life divided them. The story unfolds as both a conversation and a journey through memory, compelling the reader with a touch of mystery and compassion for its captivating characters.
Hummel’s previous works include Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, and its follow-up, Lesson in Red, along with the poetry collection House and Fire. She is a professor at the University of Vermont.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Hummel over Zoom, where we discussed a breadth of topics including the craft of plot and character development, the ramifications of pandemic isolation, and the intricacies of friendship between women.
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The Rumpus: How did this story come to you? What was your inspiration?
Maria Hummel: I think every writer my age probably has some story they’ve been sitting on for a while, and this was definitely one for me. The inspiration came back in 2001, when I was working at an art museum in downtown Los Angeles and my husband was working at the Millennium Biltmore. On lunch breaks, I used to go meet him, and I fell in love with the hotel. It hosted the Academy Awards back in the 1930s, and it had been renovated to its former splendor in the 1990s. It was just amazing. People always think of LA as everything new and next, but here was this pocket of history. So it sank into my mind as a potential setting.
I stumbled on another point of inspiration in Embers by Sándor Márai, which came out in translation that year. It was one of the most beautiful, essayistic novels on male friendship that I had ever read, and it had a very strict structure that I admired, where a general and soldier meet for the first time after multiple decades at a castle in the Carpathians, and they have a big hashing out of what happened to break their friendship years ago. Embers is a defining book, but I also felt like female friendship operates differently and that, one day, I could somehow take some of the same plot ingredients and really probe into female friendship.
And then the idea just sat there for twenty years. I had always wanted one of the women in the story to be living in the hotel because I knew of a woman who lived there for decades, and I thought that was romantic and sad and interesting all at once. After the pandemic lockdown year, I got a glimpse of what that isolation was like. I joke with my students that we could all write deep-space travel novels now, where you’re stuck with the same people for years. We know exactly what that feels like! Once I had that isolated locked-in-the-tower point of view, everything fell together very fast.
Rumpus: You’re a novelist but also a poet. Your writing is beautiful and immersive, so lush and vivid with imagery and sensory details. What is it like for you to write fiction as a poet, or vice versa? How do the two genres intersect—or not—in your writing practice?
Hummel: Poetry was my first love, and it enabled me to bring to fiction a level of sentence control, image control, that kind of stuff. But what I had to learn was how to suppress my lyric impulse and work on my dramatic impulse. The lyric impulse is to package a moment with meaning, right? You raise up the moment, and then you look for the meaning and you get out of there. And the way that drama works is that you want your reader to not feel finished with a moment. Instead, you want to string them along to the next moment and the next moment and the next, and then you have your novel. So a novel needs me to shut down the lyric impulse in order to propel readers through the narrative. And learning that took a long time. My first novel [Wilderness Run] is definitely my most lyric novel, because I just didn’t know how to control my instinct toward poetry. And then I spent ten years between my first novel and my second one [Motherland], mastering the cause-and-effect way that narrative works.
Rumpus: Your third and fourth novels were mysteries set in the art world. There are some elements of mystery in Goldenseal as well. The narrative involves twists and turns and some unknowns that aren’t revealed until the very last page. Secrets are kept both about facts and about feelings, but interestingly, the truth throughout is two-pronged, which feels very nuanced and true to life. I’m curious about your plotting process for this book. How precise or instinctive was it?
Hummel: Before you start writing a murder mystery, you have to write out the murder. I had to at least map out what happened between Lacey and Edith, especially the pivotal moment that was their Rubicon. I had to know exactly how that unfolded first. My writing process generally is to sketch in notebooks some of my plot. Depending on the book, it might be more or less, and with this one it was a little less because I did want to run on intuition for some of it. But I definitely did some of the plotting in advance.
Rumpus: How did Lacey and Edith come to you, both as individual characters but also as this pair of humans who clash and mesh and reverberate off each other? I’m curious about this specific pairing of characters.
Hummel: Charles Baxter has a great chapter in Burning Down the House about counterpoint characters, and he defines them as characters who bring out the best and the worst in each other. We see a lot of people working with counterpoint characters, especially in drama, like Tennessee Williams and Martin McDonough. So I had an antenna out for creating two characters who did that.
Lacey also draws more from my mother’s family history. I had a great grandmother who became a recluse after her son went missing in World War II and never left her apartment in New York. I also had a Jewish great-great-grandfather who emigrated to the United States and left behind his Jewish identity when he arrived. And I think there are elements of my maternal grandmother in Lacey as well. My grandmother’s nickname in the nursing home was “The Actress.” She had that sort of ladylike grandeur, and she loved fancy hats and wore them even there.
Bits of Edith came from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay’s biography, Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford, is so good it reads like a novel, and it inspired me. Millay also had an isolated Maine childhood, an ability to get on stage and cast everybody under a spell, a sheer talent coming from nowhere, and also this very open idea of what her physical relationships were going to be and not wanting a conventional life romantically. But I have to say that Edith was a little enigmatic to me at the beginning, and I wrote the novel to understand her as well.
Rumpus: I find these two characters fascinating both together and separately. When I finished reading this novel, I felt the same sort of poignancy I have in the past when reading a powerful love story. Was it your intention in writing this friendship for it to parallel the arc of a romance?
Hummel: I think there are different kinds of transactions in friendships and love stories. I’m sure this book was deeply influenced by Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels because she made female friendship epic in that series, and no one had really done that for me before, except maybe Toni Morrison in Sula. There were epic male friendship stories dating back to The Iliad, and probably farther, but epic friendship in literature between women is rarer.
There’s some fundamental difference between a friendship story and a typical love story, though, because, well, there’s no sex, and there’s not a chance for children. And you could say that a love story has greater pressures because it involves the potential to build a life together, but I think friendship is in some ways the purest expression of love. Friendship doesn’t ask for something back in the same way that other loves do.
Rumpus: That’s so true. Lacey and Edith seem like each other’s greatest love in some ways, but it certainly manifests in a different form than a romantic relationship. Lacey and Edith are linked by tragedy and loss and by their respective isolation, which remains a constant for each of them. I’m curious what your intent or curiosity was in crafting these two fundamentally lonely women who are also polar opposites in so many ways. Can opposites attract in friendship?
Hummel: Pandemic isolation fed my characterization of these women. I felt old in the pandemic. I felt old in the way that elders who have lived full lives probably feel a sense of fulfillment but also become bystanders to life. There’s not a lot of forward motion. I don’t want to make big generalizations about aging, but becoming a bystander of my own life during the pandemic was a strange but instructive feeling. There’s a part in the book where Lacey talks about the second self growing, a second self who’s very aware of who you are, and she doesn’t look at it negatively. I do think that happened for me during the pandemic. Life got so much less busy that I was able to see it in a different light.
In terms of their oppositeness, I think what often strains friendships between women is the passing through archetypes at different times or in different ways. Women have, in the traditional sense, the girlhood or the virginal kind of state, and then the lover state, and then the mother state, and then the old woman state. And for all of these we go through massive shifts where we choose whether to lean into the archetype or lean out. Those transitions unite people and also break them apart. You can have a very close friend in girlhood, but then you choose partners the other person despises, say, and your friendship flounders. Then maybe you both become mothers at the same time, and your new roles bring you tightly together again.
Rumpus: That’s an amazing point, so true. Returning to that feeling of bystanding briefly, Ithought that some of Lacey’s isolation also seemed rooted in regret or perhaps anxiety about her regrets.
Hummel: Oh, yes, Lacey has regrets. But I also think the novel gives her and Edith a chance to finally say everything they want to say. There’s a fearlessness to their conversation that I just love. It made writing them so fun. Even as I was tearing my heart out sometimes, I knew they would just go right into it, and there would be judgments and there would be dodges and parries, but at a fundamental level, they had arrived at a place where they were going to be brutally honest with each other.
Rumpus: There’s definitely this sense of nothing left to lose in their conversation. The point of view in the story is almost exclusively Lacey’s. The novel could also have worked with an equally split point of view between the two main characters, though it might have been a bit different. Why did you choose to focus on Lacey, and less on Edith, as a point of entry into their relationship?
Hummel: On a nitty-gritty craft level, I wanted to play with monologue and how it can become almost like narrative. It can start like speech and then just unfolds. I felt that that would be harder to do with a tit-for-tat point of view. But also, I think Lacey’s the one who changes the most in the story. She never got a say, she was always considered decorative. And when she goes and locks herself into the hotel for years, she’s emancipating herself into becoming, in some ways, an intellectual—somebody who reads and somebody who has a coherent and nuanced point of view. And I think readers like Edith more because she is the more active, badass character, but I also cherish Lacey because she finds a way to set herself free, in her own idiosyncratic way, through books.
Rumpus: Your two protagonists are the only essential female characters in this novel. Men seem like both the catalyst and the connection for Edith and Lacey. In this novel so sharply focused on these two women, men seem employed, plot-wise, strategically to make them act and react. What was your thinking in crafting this cast of secondary male characters?
Hummel: I subconsciously leaned toward the men when I felt like I needed for the story. Some characters grew on me, like Bruno. He was not a character that I thought was going to become as big in the story in the beginning as he does over the course of the book. And Lacey’s adoration of her father was really important to me. However, I intended to have a small cast. Because I’ve written a lot of books with bigger casts, especially the two preceding Goldenseal, I wanted to do something that you could put on the stage and, you know, the program would just have this many people. I really wanted that limitation so that I could go deep.
Rumpus: I think this really comes through. Every character is well defined and fleshed out as an individual. Shifting gears a little, you spoke a little bit about your inspiration for the hotel, but I wonder if there were other intentions or benefits in setting the story in Los Angeles. Much of the story unfolds in a luxury hotel in downtown LA, where Edith travels to meet Lacy. Hollywood is also where they came apart. Why did you choose California and this setting, characterized by filmmaking and glamor?
Hummel: I was interested in creating a novel that had an allegorical Western feel. The stranger comes back to this city for the first time in forty-four years; “the stranger comes to town.” That’s the beginning of the classic Western, and Westerns play an important role throughout the story, as both subject and backdrop, especially in regard to gender. Because in the classic Western, the “stranger” is male, right? But here, it’s Edith, an old woman in a wrinkled skirt and sneaker boots.
Hollywood also helped characterize how we see the twentieth century, especially in its iconography, and this book is a look back at the twentieth century and how it changed life for American women. I don’t think women’s lives, at least in this country, changed more radically than in the twentieth century, and Lacey and Edith are as caught up in who they’re supposed to be, who they’re supposed to admire, as anyone.
Rumpus: The present timeline of the story happens in 1990. I see a parallel in our current nostalgia for that era and the nostalgia that Gen X grew up with for the 1940s and 1950s. Was this intentional? Why did you choose those time periods for the main events of this novel?
Hummel: I have a sense of the twentieth century through my grandmother because I knew what she did from the 1930s through the 1980s. And so it felt natural for me to set something within that basic timeframe. But I did like that 1990 was almost the end of the century. That enables Lacey and Edith to cast a glance backward at changes in their lives but also at the changes in American women’s lives. I also needed downtown LA to be at a certain point of decrepitude, making the hotel truly an isolated tower. And I lived through 1990, so I could pull from memory. My film/TV agent told me that 1990 is considered “period” now, which made us both feel old!
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Author photograph by Karen Pike
