Melissa Faliveno’s debut novel, Hemlock is many things: the chronicle of a breakup, a cabin-in-the-woods horror story, a paean to nature, a grief narrative, a vexed hymn to the destructive pull of alcohol, and a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid. At once genre- and gender-bending, steamy and menacing, Hemlock follows Sam, who leaves her long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn and returns to her family’s crumbling cabin in Wisconsin’s remote Northwoods. Haunted by her mother’s disappearance, Sam finds herself encountering the inexplicable, both in the woods outside, and in her own transforming body.
I loved Hemlock, just as I suspected I would, having admired Faliveno’s excellent essay collection, Tomboyland (TOPPLE Books & Little A, 2020). Both books are concerned with the fraught expectations the world places on the individual, especially with respect to gender. And both are marked by a deep familiarity with the landscape and culture of Faliveno’s home state of Wisconsin. Faliveno writes with the unguarded intimacy of your most observant friend who, having considered something at length, has chosen to take you into her confidence.
To my delight, after her Midwestern youth and a decade as a Brooklynite, Faliveno now lives in North Carolina, having moved to the state a few years ago to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As it happens, her house is not far down the road from mine, so it was a pleasure to talk with her about her novel, both in real life and online.
The Rumpus: I’m curious about your shift to fiction. Were there habits of mind as an essayist that you had to shed as a fiction writer, or essayistic techniques that were helpful to you in writing your novel?
Melissa Faliveno: I don’t think I planned to write a novel per se; I’m an essayist at heart, and essays are predominantly how I write (and how I think, and make sense of the world). And I certainly feel like I essayed my way into this book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it began as an essay, but as I worked on it, this other story, this other world, began to emerge. The fictional mode took over, and it was super fun, especially after writing such deeply personal essays in my first book. I had no idea where I was going, or what would come of it, but I followed the story as it unfolded—which is how I write essays too.I never know where I’m headed when I sit down to write. I’m not an outliner, I’m not a plotter. I just allow the writing to take me, and then make organizational sense of it in revision. I did a lot of research, too, which I love to do while drafting an essay—in this case, bringing in details of land and history, the ecology of the Northwoods, folklore and mythology, which opened up these other threads of story. When I was working on the first draft, back when Twitter was actually Twitter, I did Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer, which was super helpful, and so great to have a community doing the same thing. It was extremely low stakes at that point—I was just writing to have a project as Tomboyland went into production, and I didn’t necessarily think it was something I’d publish; I was just writing something weird, and fun, and (ostensibly) not about me, and I was writing every day and having a great time. And suddenly I had 300 pages, and I was like, “Oh, wait. Okay. Maybe this is actually something.”
Rumpus: There’s something so tense about someone going off to an isolated cabin in the woods—was this your starting premise for Hemlock?
Faliveno: Yes! That was absolutely it. In the spring of 2019, I was living alone in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, finishing my first book, Tomboyland; I had quit my job in New York and went there to hole up and work, and I was living in this remote cabin with no Wi-Fi and very little cell service, and I was very much alone. Because I had little else to do, at night I started writing this thing about the process I was experiencing—of leaving the city, of returning to this place I had come from, about being more alone than I’d ever been. (A version of that essay did get published, in Lit Hub, when Tomboyland came out.) But then, as I said, the story began taking over.
I was still drinking at the time—unlike Sam, I was not a recovering alcoholic, but I did have a problematic past with drinking, and have since quit. I had been trying to cut back in New York, and I got to the woods, and found myself drinking more, and very aware of the fact that no one was there to monitor how much I drank. I didn’t go off the rails, but there were a few nights I definitely drank too much, and I wasn’t sleeping well because it was terrifying at night, and I was having really weird dreams. I started to imagine this alternate life where I did go off the rails. And this question emerged: What happens if a person steps fully into oblivion? I kept looking at the hazy edge of the woods at dusk, and thinking about this idea of stepping into that darkness. I love horror, and a disappearance story, and stories of mothers and daughters, so this idea of a mother who disappears into the woods (of this place, of her mind) and a daughter who sort of, however consciously or not, chases after her, began to take root.
Rumpus: Back in middle school, we learned to think about conflict as Man versus Man, Man versus Nature, Man versus Self. Hemlock hits all of the above! But I wonder what you see as the driving conflict for Sam?
Faliveno: It really does! I think in some way the question at the heart of the novel is, which is more a threat: man, nature, or self? I think Sam is mostly in conflict with herself, and her past, and, in fine Midwestern tradition, has been unable or unwilling to face the ghosts that haunt her, particularly the unanswered questions in the wake of her mother’s disappearance. I see her as, both literally and figuratively, standing at the threshold of those dark woods—on one side, there’s light. Maybe that’s sobriety, maybe it’s the stability of Stephen, and her life. It’s certainly being alive and present. And on the other side, there’s oblivion. Her darker desires, this inherited thread that pulls her. Her story is about the choice to stay on the side of light or step across that threshold into darkness.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages is this one, in which Sam observes: “And anyway, people always assumed their grief was the heaviest; whatever small losses other people carried could never compare to their own. It was one of the deepest flaws of humankind, she thought, the inability to see other humans as capable of being as complicated as oneself.” I found this so apt, so relevant–especially at our particular moment– and yet I also think fiction like yours somewhat refutes this claim. I’m curious to hear your take?
Faliveno: I’m pretty preoccupied by and fascinated with grief, and the complexities of humanity—what it means to be a person,the shapes grief takes, the way we deal, or don’t deal, with it, the way it shapes us either way. I’m continually learning that the process of grieving is not one where you recover, but just learn to carry it along with you as you go. And the grief becomes part of you. I think if we realized this about everyone—that everyone is multidimensional, not least in the pain they carry and how they choose to carry it—there’d be a lot more empathy in the world. And I see books as a way of enacting empathy, to get people to see something they might not have otherwise seen, or understood, about other people, the world, themselves. I think we write with this hope in mind—I know I do—that someone will find what I’ve written, and it will resonate or connect in a way that helps them think of something differently, or feel less alone in the world.
Rumpus: A central concern of Hemlock is addiction, something your main character Sam and all her female forebears have faced. I think it can be incredibly challenging to write well about this, and you do it beautifully. Can you talk about how you approached this topic?
Faliveno: Whew. Yeah. Thank you! That’s the big question. Addiction, and in particular alcoholism, has been a significant part of my life story. I think about inheritance a lot, and going back to that question of grief, alcohol is so often a way people deal with their grief—numb the pain, as they say. Not least in my home state, which is literally the drunkest state in the union. Booze is part of the fabric of our culture. I tried writing about drinking in Tomboyland, but I just couldn’t, not fully, not yet. There were too many stories I didn’t know how to tell, that weren’t mine to tell. I made several attempts, and I think I wrote around drinking in that book, but never directly about it. I never looked directly at it. So this novel, in some ways, was another attempt. A different kind of attempt to look directly at something that has haunted me my whole life. Certainly there is a lot of me in Sam, and my family in hers, but it is fiction, and much of it is imagined. But somehow I feel like I arrived at an even greater truth about addiction through the fictional lens—like I could write more honestly about it outside of the parameters of my own life, and my experiences. It felt right, and it felt freeing. And I was able to see myself, and my past, more clearly the deeper I got into this story. At a certain point I was like, “Wait, I think I have more in common with Sam than I suspected.” My first book was deeply, deeply personal, but in many ways this novel feels even more true.
Rumpus: Your novel is steeped in myth and urban legend, be it stories of wendigo or the deer woman. I’d love to hear about your relationship to such stories.
Faliveno: I’m fascinated by the mythology of a place, and there are all these great, weird, hyperspecific myths and folktales of the Northwoods. Maybe that’s true of any place, but I tend to think things are a little weirder and wilder up there. One of my first jobs in publishing was as an editor at a small nonfiction press based in Madison, and we published this collection called Strange Wisconsin, which was basically a tome of all the weird shit that’s been documented in the state. That book is actually alluded to in Hemlock. So, like my love of horror, I also wanted this book to be steeped, like you say, in these myths and legends of the place. In part because I just wanted to write about these fun, spooky stories, and the way that stories become a part of a place, of the bearers and receivers of those stories, how their telling is a cycle and an inheritance. I also think a lot about the stories we don’t tell, and how silence can be its own kind of mythology. There’s also a thread of religion in the book, which is its own mythology, and so much of Sam’s past is mythologized, so I was interested in weaving together the personal and familial mythological with the mythologies of place, land, and culture. There’s such an interesting confluence of mythology in Northern Wisconsin, much of which originates with the Indigenous people there,and all these men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein who truly haunted us growing up. I was also interested in stories about women transforming into something animal, which exist across so many cultures, and wanted Sam’s transformation to feel very animal too.
Rumpus: I love the physicality of this story, especially Sam’s acute awareness of her own (transforming) body. I also admire the nuance with which you capture Sam’s complex and often-ambivalent relationship to gender. I see her as ultimately exploding and redefining the possibilities for what it can mean to emerge from girlhood. It reminded me of a wonderful 2021 Fresh Air interview with Alison Bechdel, who, in acknowledging her own gender fluidity, said, “I’m just my own weird kind of woman,” and noted that she’s “expanding that definition.” I felt that Sam, too, was expanding the definition. Can you talk about gender in this novel?
Faliveno: Well, I adore Alison Bechdel, and teach Fun Home every semester, so I’m honored that my work reminded you of her! I think she and I are probably pretty in line when it comes to our own gender identities, especially in that idea of expansiveness—the evolution and fluidity of the self. Sam is in some ways a reflection of me, but she’s also a shadow self, and a thought experiment—like, what would happen if I were to fully shed the last few remnants of “womanhood,” of femininity as I knew it? Would becoming truly genderless be itself a kind of oblivion? This is a story about transformation, and I was thinking a lot about transition as I wrote. Not from woman to man, necessarily, but from woman to something else, beyond external categorization or gaze, some ambiguous form in which a person feels more at home in their body—which is a version of transness, in that transness isn’t always moving from one binary to another, but sometimes into a more fluid version of the self. (And I wish more people understood that.) At one point I toyed with changing Sam’s pronouns as she undergoes this transformation, but in the end I wanted her transformation to be open to interpretation, and resisted giving it a new name. Not least because, for me, I don’t really experience gender as a named thing until something external happens—when someone clocks me a certain way, or misgenders me, or tells me I’m in the wrong bathroom. Gender euphoria, for me, is when I feel very alive and at home in my body, when language and external input falls away. So I thought about ways to step outside the lens of womanhood—this thing that once was woman, and is now something else—to reflect the experience of gender as a kind of wilderness, a place beyond language.
Rumpus: I’ll be Professor Obvious and state: I think you love the Northwoods of Wisconsin! Can you talk to me about your sense of place, and the pull of the Northwoods specifically?
Faliveno: Ha! It’s true—I do love the Northwoods! It’s a beautiful place. It’s also idiosyncratic and strange. It’s so much itself. I love that. I consider myself very much a place-based writer. Place (and landscape) is such an important part of my work, regardless of what place I’m writing about, but, let’s be real: it’s usually the Midwest. I’m really interested in places that have a lot of character, and the idea of place as character. And I think Wisconsin, in particular, will always be one of my favorite characters. It’ll certainly always be a part of my DNA. Tomboyland was described by Wisconsin Public Radio as a love letter to the Midwest, and I think we’ve got a follow-up letter in Hemlock, but this very specific corner of it. I think that, as long as I’m away, I’ll always be a little homesick. And I’ll probably keep sending these love letters home.
Rumpus: A talking animal is always a gamble, I think—but you pulled it off! How did you realize this would be part of the story?
Faliveno: Oh, thank you! That’s the best news because I know it’s totally a gamble. And this shit-talking doe is absolutely my favorite character in the book, and was my favorite part of writing it. This piece of the story also began when I was up in the woods. I was feeding the deer even though I knew I shouldn’t, because of chronic wasting disease. But my parents feed the deer up there, so I kept the ritual going. And I would write all day, and then I would crack a beer and sit on the porch at dusk with a book, and this doe began emerging from the edge of the woods, and she would walk down to the trough, and she would eat her dinner. And we would look at each other, and eventually I started saying hello to her, maybe asking how her day had been. And especially on the nights that I cracked a second beer, I started imagining the doe responding, and us sort of sitting there and having whole conversations. In the book, she becomes a kind of oracle—maybe a kind of mother figure Sam is missing, maybe something god-like—and I loved that she took on both this maternal, and god-like, quality. And she’s also kind of a bitch, which I love. She was so much fun to write.
Rumpus: Are there books, or other works of art, that you drew from, were inspired by, or that you feel like Hemlock is in conversation with?
Faliveno: Oh man, so many! Horror movies were a big influence—the discerning reader and horror-lover will find many tropey Easter eggs and homage. Stephen King’s The Shining is a big one, and gets explicit mention—it’s terrifying, obviously, but it’s also one of the best stories ever written about the interior of a disintegrating mind, and a perfect metaphor for addiction—specifically, the ways in which alcoholism can turn a person into a monster. I’m also a huge fan of Gillian Flynn, and Sharp Objects was a big inspiration; I’ve read the book and watched the series several times, and just love the way it grapples with drinking and self-destruction and mothers and daughters, as this family mystery unravels. Plus it’s got that excellent Southern/Midwestern Gothic vibe. Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot, pretty much all Megan Giddings’s novels, which are about the Midwest and mothers and daughters and disappearances.
On the craft level, I kept Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done by my side for several years when I was in the depths of revision, and took the charge very literally. That book was so helpful, especially in its revision exercises, and I teach from it now too.
Rumpus: If you don’t mind sharing, what are you working on next??
Faliveno: I don’t mind at all! I have four book projects I’m currently spinning around. The ones I’m deepest into are a second essay collection, which I think will probably be my next book, and another novel (which just may be a spooky campus novel, inspired by the strange two years I lived in Ohio). I’m also at work on what I think will be a book-length essay, a form I’ve always loved, on the loss of my former partner to suicide, and a collection of essays on music.
