build your house around my body violet kupersmith

All of the wires are going to connect at some point. You don’t have to do the work because I did it for you. I hope the readers know, my baby birds, they’re all going to connect. It does ask a lot of the reader, there’s a lot to keep track of. Little connections would kind of write themselves, which was fun. I describe the process as kind of trying to do a crossword puzzle, like trying to construct one.

And then when I started interweaving them, that’s when the story felt more like a novel instead of three poorly connected novellas. Originally I pictured it as a kind of tryptic, with three novellas following these similar characters. The book follows multiple timelines, and also has quite a few characters, but everything fits together so seamlessly, what was planning all of that like? Or was there planning? So that’s what drew me to it originally and there’s just the delicious opportunity with speculative fiction to kind of – you have all this extra margin room to just play with things and do different things when the physics of the regular world can get bent a little bit. Because I grew up with those stories, and it felt like uncharted territory in a genre that felt kind of saturated with stories where people drew on their own experiences and I didn’t have the experience of being a refugee, in my first collection when I started writing about the Vietnamese diaspora. Just for me personally, it felt like a way into the material, into the subject of Vietnamese Americans, and war trauma, and just my way of writing something that hasn’t really been written before, in a way that only I really felt like I could do it. Is there something about those genres that you feel is particularly apt at conveying the stories you’re trying to tell?Ībsolutely.

Here, Violet discusses books, writing, and ghost stories.īoth your first book, The Frangipani Hotel, and your new novel, Build Your House Around My Body, use elements of horror and the supernatural.

The novel jumps from one time period to another and back again, as the reader discovers the mysteries surrounding each of the characters and how they all connect, creating an engrossing novel that’s furious, shocking, and poignant. A large cast of characters that includes angry women, vengeful spirits, ghost hunters, and ambitious Frenchmen, are all woven together to form a sweeping story that covers decades of Vietnamese history and confronts topics from misogyny and colonialism to family and trauma. As the reader uncovers what’s happened to Winnie, they’re taken on a whirlwind, hair-raising adventure through time and place. Winnie is a young American woman, aimless and living abroad, when she suddenly disappears without a trace in Vietnam. In her debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith manages to do so much and to do it all so well.

A story of possession and consumption, of loneliness and rootlessness, of anger and revenge.

Build your house around my body violet kupersmith