The Deepest Lake (Soho Crime, 2024) is Andromeda Romano-Lax’s sixth novel, an atmospheric thriller with suspenseful notes, a thematic departure from her body of work. The story follows Rose, a mother grieving the loss of her daughter, Jules, a twenty-something free spirit who recently disappeared and is now presumed dead, near Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, the deepest lake in Central America. Jules had been working as a private assistant to Eva Marshall, an acclaimed but controversial memoirist, who runs a high-end writing retreat in a resort location on the banks of the lake. Seeking answers about her daughter’s disappearance—and some kind of closure—Rose applies to the writer’s retreat under a false name. In Guatemala, armed only with rudimentary Spanish, Rose discovers an emotionally charged writer’s workshop run by the charismatic leader who may or may not have her students’ best interests at heart.
Alternating between the narrative voices of mother and daughter, the novel explores the sometimes-toxic world of premium-priced writers’ workshops. It is a satisfying thriller—complete with plot twists and a wallop of an ending—that explores the haunted world of a grieving mother.
I spoke with Romano-Lax via Zoom about the power of a good idea, ways to edit a wild manuscript, deep fears that mothers carry, a new community of suspense writers, and how she can’t seem to stay in one genre-lane.
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The Rumpus: I loved your previous novel, the acclaimed Annie and the Wolves, which had suspenseful moments but would probably be categorized as historical fiction. Did you deliberately set out to write a thriller with The Deepest Lake?
Andromeda Romano-Lax: Yes. I wanted to create that “What’s going to happen?” feeling, which gets back to basic storytelling. Most of my books have a third act, where the stakes are raised and everything speeds up. Even the book I wrote about the Sea of Cortez and traveling with my family in the wake of John Steinbeck’s journey started in an almost philosophical mode. Then, several bad things happened in real life, so the book became a bit of an action story.
For The Deepest Lake, I wanted the premise to be clear from the outset. I wanted everything to speed up. For this book, I didn’t have to insert historical facts, science, or some complicated magical realism, as I had done in my other books.
Rumpus: Does the act of writing a thriller seem more straightforward, without those “troublesome” details?
Romano-Lax: It has to read as if it’s straightforward, but in terms of writing, it’s actually more complicated. With non-genre books, maybe there’s a digression, for the history or the science or whatever, but with suspense, the gears have to be working. They have to be touching, they have to be turning. For me, that took a lot of revision. The first draft of The Deepest Lake only took four months, but then I revised it for more than two years—far more than any other book I’ve written. I wrote multiple versions, each with very different characterizations and tones. All of that had to happen, though, to make the gears mesh smoothly, which suspense requires.
Rumpus: To write a thriller, the writer has to plant the casual references that will eventually become important. Was it hard to figure that out?
Romano-Lax: Yes. Before The Deepest Lake, I was working on a different thriller and realized about midway through that I was doing everything wrong. It was set in Canada and Italy—I told myself, “Hey, in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith starts in America and then goes to Italy—and it took place over a long period of time with lots of flashbacks as well as commentary about art.
I told my editor I was writing an art thriller, and she said, “Okay, sounds good, let me know when you’re done.” Then I told her what I had figured out for a really good taut story: “It should be located in one location, over a limited number of days, in a constricted tense atmosphere, where we meet all the characters at the beginning.” As an illustration, I said something about a writing retreat in a remote and beautiful location with a missing person who is thought to be dead. To that idea, she said, “Go home and write that book. Can you do it in two months?” I said yes—not realizing that it would take years of revision to make it really work.
Rumpus: The setting is a writer’s retreat in Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlán. Why there?
Romano-Lax: The book has two origin stories: one is the question of what happens in these creative writing workshops, specifically memoir workshops. I had thought about writing an essay about all the damaging behaviors I’ve seen in workshops, but I never thought about putting those ideas in a novel.
The other origin story is from when I went to Lake Atitlán and was struck by the atmosphere. There are natural dangers, in terms of the lake itself, plus crime, drugs, gang activity. [Tourists] were told never to walk anywhere by ourselves and not go out at night. I was there as a solo woman traveler and was aware of things that had happened to tourists in the past. At the same time, people think of Atitlán as a creative, magical place. Only when I pitched that hypothetical story to my editor did I realize how all these things might go together.
Rumpus: When did you decide to specifically focus on a memoirworkshop?
Romano-Lax: I’ve taught a lot of workshops, so I know how difficult it is to create the right atmosphere. [You must] make sure that everyone treats the work with respect. I wrote a little bit about that for Jane Friedman’s blog recently.
I’ve also attended lots of problematic workshops across multiple genres, and memoir seems the most risky. People aren’t talking about what they made up—it’s personal stories, secrets, vulnerabilities. It’s also possible with private workshops, versus a school setting, that attendees might never have been in a workshop before. They don’t know what to expect or what the rules are. They don’t know they can say, “I’m not going to answer that question,” or “That’s not in my pages.” The process can very easily slip into retraumatization, whether they are discussing what’s written—or, worse, what’s not on the page. When that happens, it’s hard on writers—and for other people in the workshop, who have to listen to often graphic discussions of trauma.
On the teaching side, instructors might feel like it’s their job to shape the story, make it better or more marketable, which can sometimes result in the workshops turning into amateur therapy sessions. That might feel good on the spot because it creates intense moments of connection, but there’s no follow-up care—no responsible trained individual who’s going to talk to you next week and the week after about that incident you shared for the very first time in your workshop.
Rumpus: Sharing can be incredibly powerful, but once it’s out, it’s the genie out of the bottle.
Romano-Lax: Yes! It can also become performative in a workshop setting because people desperately want to connect. They may want to impress the instructor, especially if the instructor is famous or has connections within publishing. That can lead to people embellishing their stories and losing touch of what they wanted to do with memoir, which is to discover and make meaning out of their experience.
Rumpus: You said something about that in your newsletter: The Deepest Lake is about what happens when writers lose control of their own stories. This addresses something about the interiority of writing. What did you have to consider in order to get that idea on the page, in ways that will satisfy readers who might not have ever tried to write?
Romano-Lax: Suspense and crime fiction are all about that pressure-cooker atmosphere. The Deepest Lake is not just about how people react to their work [in a workshop]. What if, during a workshop, you inadvertently share secrets that could be used against you, or someone else? In this book, a mother has come to the workshop, undercover using her maiden name, to discover what happened to her daughter, who has drowned in the lake, and who had been working for the famous memoirist/retreat leader. Right away, there are questions: What happened to the daughter? Will the mother’s identity be revealed?
As the mother participates in the workshop, she begins to discover things about herself and her relationship with her daughter. Even as there are physical and emotional risks for the mother, let’s remember that memoir can also lead to growth.
Rumpus: The novel is beautifully complex, filled with suspenseful details that are critical to the plot. Through subplots involving the staff and workshop participants, it also explores multiple other issues. When you started the book, did you have all these narrative strands in mind, or did that happen during revision?
Romano-Lax: The investigation of memoir—wanting to satirize elements of memoir-workshop pedagogy—was there from the outset. As I revised, I learned more about how suspense works, the sorts of risks I could take.
With literary fiction, risks might be really subtle. In my very first novel, The Spanish Bow, for example, the structure was based on Don Quixote. I used a deliberately episodic structure, which most readers won’t see, but that’s fine. With suspense, on the other hand, the risk is in going the opposite way, saying, “Okay, this is not going to be subtle. It’s going to be larger than life. It may be over the top.” Suspense, as a genre, can be a Trojan Horse. It’s a strong vehicle that you can hide things within [to] explore ideas about culture, gender, language, or place.
Originally, the book was a grimmer, quieter story, maybe more of a mystery. Ultimately, through revision after revision, I ended with a much more active story, with more peril.
Rumpus: I’ve been listening to Beyonce’s new album, Cowboy Carter. She takes the country–western genre that some people might find confining and makes it into something uniquely her own. How can genre be both confining and inspiring?
Romano-Lax: The confinement, I think, comes from the marketing side. Someone puts a label on you and that’s all you get. For example, one of the books I loved last year was Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. It starts slowly, then builds up in a surprising, suspenseful way. If I’d seen the label “eco-thriller” when I picked it up, I would have been confused. It starts slowly, not at all thriller-y. The label would’ve ruined it for me.
At the same time, sometimes we need constraints for creativity. Genre gives us powerful tools. In suspense, one of those tools is tension, which helps keep the pages turning.
In suspense, one of the constraints would be that something really bad has to happen, which immediately creates a high-stakes situation. We’re not going to have a character who just thinks in a room and there’s no plot. I love plotless novels, like Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, which takes place over a lunch hour and is mostly about a man having interesting thoughts, but with crime fiction, there’s got to be action. There has to be peril. There’s that question: “What’s going to happen?”
Rumpus: You co-author a newsletter devoted to thrillers and suspense, called Present Tense, with your friend and fellow author Caitlin Wahrer. Has a monthly newsletter helped or hindered your writing process?
Romano-Lax: The newsletter has put me in contact with a community of suspense writers because we invite guest writers, and that’s been really fun. Even more importantly, it gives me a deadline for thinking about suspense writing, to continue self-educating. I spend a few hours a week on the newsletter, but I’m spending fewer hours on social media. In the process of writing the newsletter, I came up with two new novel ideas, one of which I’ve already started. That never happened while I was just doing social media.
I’d say that’s a good question for anyone thinking about starting a newsletter: what do you want to get out of it? Writing the newsletter has never depleted me, it gives me a sense of connection, of focus and learning. Social media is a mixed bag. There’s some connection, but a lot of depletion.
In a newsletter, sort of like with fiction, we can write about what we don’t know. Whereas on social media, there’s more sense of, “Here’s what I want to show off.”
The Rumpus: I remember a newsletter article you wrote about what it means to “stay in your lane.” Could you talk a bit more about that?
Romano-Lax: I am open to staying in a lane, I just can’t seem to do it. It would be a huge advantage in terms of having readers and interviewers and booksellers understand me, if I wrote only one kind of book. Instead, right now I’m doing suspense, but I also write historical fiction, as well as novels that have a weird element, things that are fantastical or magical. No one is telling me to stay in my lane, but it keeps me up at night because I realize that I could sell more books if people understood who I am.
Rumpus: As someone who sounds like she’s always open to the unexpected, did anything unexpected happen while you were writing The Deepest Lake?
Romano-Lax: One of the unexpected themes that emerged was the question of how you get to the truth if you don’t share a language. For example, in Atitlán, the mother and other people assume the locals speak Spanish, but in fact, a lot of them speak indigenous languages. The mother can communicate in Spanish, but she can’t communicate in the Mayan languages.
I also had one of those moments where a character sort of spoke for himself, something writers talk about but is generally too woo-woo for me. In this case, though, my Guatemalan male character, who has lived through [his country’s long] civil war, says the women at the memoir retreat are lucky—they have the privilege of trying to remember their stories and work through their trauma. For someone who is in a more profoundly traumatic place, the best survival mechanism may be trying to forget. The two worlds sort of collide—the women at the retreat, processing, while surrounded by Guatemalans who may have experienced murder, missing relatives, violence—and the last thing they would probably think to do is write that story because they’re just trying to survive to the next day.
When the character said that, I had one of those moments, like “Ooh, yes!” I’m not sure where the realization came from, but he’s right. What an incredible privilege, to try and convey your ideas to other people so that they can maybe think about the world in a new way.
Rumpus: Given all this discussion of genre and different lanes, do you want to say anything about your next book, What Boys Learn, which is also a thriller?
Romano-Lax: The Deepest Lake is a story of a mother’s worst nightmare: something terrible happening to her daughter. After that, I asked myself, “Okay, how about the mother of the son?” What’s the worst thing that can happen to a son? Unfortunately, I came up with—not something terribly happening tohim but the fear that maybe he did something. What Boys Learn is about a mother, who happens to be a school counselor, who is worried that her son may have done something really terrible.
It was easier to write because I knew, earlier, when I was making mistakes, instead of drafting all the way to the end. I’ve gone back to the beginning to retool aspects of the premise and, even more importantly, characterization. That’s been my biggest lesson with suspense: even though we talk a lot about plot, it doesn’t work if the reader doesn’t care about the characters.
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Author photograph courtesy of Andromeda Romano-Lax
