Under the hard rain of the Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, two prison guards discover a growling, wild-eyed girl surviving alone in the cold woods beyond the penitentiary walls. The girl came out of nowhere, they say. Who is she? Has she run away or been left to fate? Whom does the girl’s silence protect? This is how award-winning lyric short story writer Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum starts her novel, Elita (TriQuarterly Books, 2025).
Elita follows Professor Bernadette Baston as she travels to their remote island to coax the feral girl into learning how to speak so that she might tell her story in this Nordic noir book. Drawing upon the suspense of a buried secret, Elita entices readers into considering how language can be made into both cage and key. With her haunting, delicate prose style, Lunstrum grapples with the subtle, profound truths of women’s interior lives.
Like the girl, Bernadette is making the best of a bad situation. Four years earlier, with no notice, her husband abandoned her to care for their daughter alone. In the midst of single parenting and too proud to show her struggles, Bernadette is still trying to enact the promise of training as a scholar of child development and language acquisition. If she can help the girl (named Atalanta by her social worker), maybe Bernadette can earn them both a place in a society that wants little more than compliance from women. On this journey, Bernadette must confront the myriad ways that women betray and subvert each other in a desperate attempt to endure the patriarchy. Will she abandon herself to belong? Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Elita shows that we can escape into indeterminacy, if not freedom.
Of Lunstrum’s debut, Melissa Febos writes: “I devoured this novel, held sway by its expert construction and luminous prose, and I am haunted still by the wise and impossible questions that simmer under its breathless plot and within its indelible characters. Belongs on a shelf among the great literary page-turners of our time.” Over a Zoom call and email, Lunstrum and I spoke about Elita’s influences, about defying expectations—both in fiction and in life—and about the steep price of learning to conform rather than resist.
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The Rumpus: So many mysteries begin with the disappearance of a girl. In your novel, a girl appears, and the search for her truth begins to unfurl. Why did you structure your book in this way?
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum: As a mystery reader, I’ve read so many beautiful, lyric novels that are compelling but are hinged on violence against the bodies of women. When I set out to begin my own, I wondered, “What would happen if I wrote a mystery in which no girl or woman was harmed?” I wanted to see if I could write a story in which the compelling feature of the plot is not violence that erases a woman or a girl but rather the act of a girl or woman becoming more herself. I wanted the story to examine the systems that typically diminish women’s agency and to highlight the existing violence of those systems through a girl’s increasing visibility rather than her disappearance. In Elita, both of my central female characters materialize and become more embodied as the story moves forward.
Rumpus: This freedom, this agency that you’re talking about, is not without its costs. Part of Elita is showing the price of freedom. What do you think noncompliance exacts from women and girls?
Lunstrum: For both Atalanta, the nonverbal girl at the center of the novel’s initiating mystery, and for Bernadette, the protagonist tasked with uncovering Atalanta’s story, there’s a steep cost to noncompliance. Bernadette doesn’t quite recognize, at least initially, that entangling herself in Atalanta’s case will force her into noncompliance with the systems she has always aimed to fit herself into. She thinks that she is, in fact, furthering her career by taking on Atalanta’s case.
But the deeper she gets into investigating the girl and understanding the ways in which Atalanta has been silenced, the more she recognizes the parallels between Atalanta’s subjugation by the systems of authority and her own, and she quickly realizes that the only way forward is noncompliance. She will have to abandon her desire to please, in order to be free.
Simultaneously, the cost for Atalanta in noncompliance is much more direct. She’s being held against her will. She’s also a child, and so she has a lot less agency to begin with. For her, the stakes are a complete lack of autonomy if she doesn’t resist. And because she is nonverbal, she doesn’t have the typical tools to advocate for herself. Noncompliance is Atalanta’s only way of speaking to power, really—of speaking her anger to the people who become her captors rather than her caretakers.
Rumpus: As a scholar, Bernadette is interested in how we learn to perform our humanity and understand the world through language. There’s a particular focus on the mirroring between youth and adults that she garnered in the past during her service as a wartime nurse. What did you learn about communication and language during the researching of this character, and did any of it surprise you?
Lunstrum: I think it’s a human truth that we’re not good at perceiving beyond our own experience. And even when we do become practiced at stepping into another person’s point of view, there are limitations to fully understanding someone else’s lived reality. Bernadette is deeply interested in other people’s thoughts and experiences, and so she goes to great pains to step into a perspective that she imagines is Atalanta’s and to use that to communicate nonverbally with the girl—to intuit, to imagine, to empathize as a way of communicating.
Adults too infrequently do this with children in the real world. We don’t regularly pause and give our whole attention to children—not to meet their needs or wants but just to perceive their experiences from their point of view. And I think this is our loss as adults, because children are incredibly insightful.
In writing Bernadette, who understands this about children, I drew heavily on my own experience as a K–12 teacher. I teach middle school, so I’ve spent a lot of time with young people, and I really believe that they are too often underestimated. Adults don’t often enough make an effort to communicate with kids in a way that respects what a child innately knows. I wanted Bernadette to believe this, too, and to give weight to the “word” of a child, even a child who cannot literally tell her own story.
To do that, I needed Bernadette to be a person who trusts intuition as a credible form of communication, which is something that patriarchal structures undermine. Intuition is often dismissed as not concrete, not logical, not “data.” The same is true of empathy. Empathy is often dismissed as too soft—as “feminine,” and therefore invalid—but intuition and empathy are central methods of communication when we look to understand others and to put ourselves in others’ positions.
Rumpus: It seems to me that empathy and intuition are fundamental skills needed to successfully mirror another person in conversation because language is more than just about saying the word. It’s also tonal, and so much of tonality is influenced by emotion.
Lunstrum: Right, yes. But we’re taught to ignore this. We all come into the world learning primarily through mirroring and observation and perception.
A lot of Bernadette’s attention in her personal life is spent on mothering, which she experiences as a deep investigation into how a child learns. She keeps extensive journals of her daughter Willie’s language acquisition because she’s interested as a scholar but also because she’s fascinated as a mother by the ways her own perceptions of the world can be translated to her daughter.
In Willie, Bernadette sees her own vision of the world, which she’s been conveying as new parents do through a continual narration of their days (you know, “This is a flower, and we call it tulip,” etcetera), reflected back to her in the form of Willie’s developing language skills. There’s wonder in that for Bernadette, as I think there is for all parents. In translating the world as you know it to your child and then receiving it back through your child’s growing awareness, the world is made new again for you, too.
Rumpus: One of the things that I find so fascinating about this book is its depiction of working motherhood and the ways in which Bernadette, lacking her partner for most of the book, must arrange for childcare so that she can then go be with this other child and solve her mysteries. I’m curious about how you configured these echoing relationships, both built around language between these girls and the women who would mother them. Bernadette is not alone in trying to mother Atalanta. We also have her nemesis.
Lunstrum: The honest answer to that is that this story came together through collaboration. In workshopping with my writing group, what started as a short story became this novel, and that process was revelatory to me. That collaborative discussion and imagining yielded intricacies of Bernadette’s inner life that I hadn’t yet unearthed myself in drafting. This novel was truly talked into being. It honestly wouldn’t have come to be without the conversation of the women who are my first readers.
I say something like this in my acknowledgements at the back of the book: All art is collaborative. I believe that as a central truth of art-making, and I tell it to my students all the time. There’s an appeal to the myth of the writer working in intensive isolation, but that is so rarely the reality of writing. Because of the power of that narrative though—the genius of the individual mind—I think writers worry that we might cheapen or undermine our own credibility if we admit to the fact that writing is, like all other arts, a collaborative art form. And it’s that belief in collaboration that shows up in the relationship you’re referring to, between Bernadette and—as you called her—the nemesis, Nora. The two of them are colleagues on Atalanta’s case, but they spend a lot of time thinking about one another too.
Bernadette’s feelings about Willie and her own motherhood radically change once Nora comes into her life. Nora is childless, but Nora’s perspective on motherhood, and on her own role as Atalanta’s social worker and caretaker, changes how Bernadette sees motherhood. She defines herself both in alignment with and in opposition to Nora’s positionality as a woman and a nurturer and a professional. They create each other.
Rumpus: They’re both tasked with supporting Atalanta. What is it about their institutional and sociological surroundings that leads them into competition rather than collaboration?
Lunstrum: Too often, women are not permitted to claim our work as our own and to simultaneously claim our work as the product of the relationships we’re in. We’re in a culture, as I said before, that too often negates collaboration as a legitimate form of creation, so instead of elevating collaboration and seeking it out, we put ourselves in competition with each other. Of course, this serves the patriarchal structures that overarch everything we do. If we’re competitors, we’re not uplifting each other. If we’re competitors, we’re likely to isolate, to hoard, to keep what we know to ourselves rather than to serve as each other’s creative midwives. And in that space of competition, which is really a space of fear, we’re not able to live the full intellectual and emotional lives that we’re capable of.
Right now, in my life, I’m lucky to be in relationships with women who are uplifting and supportive. But as a young woman, I was often in competitive relationships with other women. I know that competition made me smaller and ungenerous at times, mostly because I was afraid. I drew on those experiences in writing the relationship between Bernadette and Nora. Nora isn’t a terrible person. She’s afraid that there’s not enough attention, resources, space, time, credibility to go around, and the fear makes her smaller.
Rumpus: It makes her ruthless.
Lunstrum: It does. And it cuts out the possibility of a fruitful relationship with Bernadette. I do think they could have been friends. They admire each other quite a lot. You really only compete with people you actually admire. It’s not worth your time to compete with someone who doesn’t feel like your equal. It’s unfortunate that two women who otherwise might be great friends and supporters are pushed into a kind of animosity by a sense of scarcity, but it happens all the time.
Rumpus: Bernadette’s husband reappears, stepping back into a family he abandoned without recognizing or acknowledging that he is displacing his wife in her own home and workplace. That seems a very stark possibility in the fifties, when this book is set. What hasn’t changed since then?
Lunstrum: Bernadette is very isolated as a single mother, and she’s also financially always on a precipice. These realities are not different now than they were then. It’s much, much harder to be a single parent than a co-parent, especially as a woman. Beyond that, more is asked of her as a mother than is ever asked of him as a father, and I believe this is still true of the difference in expectations for mothers than for fathers in nearly all family constellations.
When Bernadette’s husband returns to her and Willie after having first abandoned them, he assumes that he can step back in as a father and that there will be no ripples of the trauma his absence has caused her and their daughter, like their household will just absorb and swallow what he’s done. Water closing over a stone thrown into a pond. He returns and thinks, “Well, I’m here now, and I’m a good guy because I’m going to provide for you. And by the way, you don’t have to worry about working.” He dismisses that she might find fulfillment in her work, and he thinks of himself as a kind of hero because he’s able to financially support her. She’ll be able to focus solely on being their daughter Willie’s caretaker. And won’t she be happy about that?
And while it’s a representation of history, some of those gender constructs are still present in the way we interact with one another in heterosexual domestic relationships now, but also in the way we talk about women. One of the things that’s rising to the surface for me as we discuss this is, of course, the presidential election we’ve all just been through and how obvious it was that we expect so much more proof that a female candidate can do any job. This is not news to any of us. Bernadette is called to such a high standard in her place of work, in her interactions with the detective and the social worker on Atalanta’s case, and in her marriage and motherhood. That has not changed. In my own experience as a mother and a wife and a writer and a person with a full-time job, I know these things have not changed.
Rumpus: It seems to me that so much of commercial fiction requires a lie about what someone is able to do within the constraints of a system. Your book does not lie, although Bernadette does find freedom. Can you talk about how you negotiated the ethics of positive resolution for characters who are within the grips of the patriarchy?
Lunstrum: Commercial publishers want to sell books, and often what is asked of authors to meet that goal is an ending that resolves everything smoothly, easily, and completely. As a short story writer, I wrestle with this. Short story writers are always accused of ambiguous endings. Many times, I’ve had readers ask me about a story saying, “Well, how’s it going to end?” And I’m left to explain that, “No, I won’t be writing a more direct resolution to the story.” If I’ve done my job, the truth is already buried there in the pages, and you, the reader, will understand it even without me telling you what it is. There’s the role of intuition in perception again!
In a novel, though, I found I had to be more direct. I couldn’t leave the ending quite as ambiguous as I might have liked, but I was also still unwilling to write an ending that resolved everything very smoothly and completely because that isn’t reflective of life. I did want some verisimilitude in the story. I did want some sense that Bernadette’s ending could allow for a kind of satisfaction and a kind of growth without necessarily being easy. The job of the writer is to reflect the complexity of what it is to be human rather than to repackage any of it in a sweeter form.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
