A Conversation with
SUZ ANNE RINDELL Your new novel, The Two Mrs. Carlyles, takes place in San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. Can you tell us more about the book? It’s partly the story of a friendship triangle between three women; partly the tale of a young, naïve wife who isn’t sure she can trust her older, wealthy—and notably widowed— husband; and partly a ghost story! Before 1906, San Francisco was a rough-and-tumble city, a gold miners’ town. When the earthquake struck, it was horrible and deadly, and it meant that countless citizens had to completely rebuild and start over. We can safely assume most people lamented this terrible event. But I became intrigued with the notion that there might have been people (probably mostly criminals) who might have been relieved by how this natural disaster wiped the slate clean, so to speak. In a lot of ways, this novel revolves around characters that might have found relief in the earthquake. Secrets went into the ground that day, and as a result, Violet, Cora, and Flossie are able to start new lives for themselves. Similarly, Harry might have been glad to see secrets about his first marriage buried in the rubble. Of course, some of these buried secrets are more sinister than others.
Why did you choose to set the novel in San Francisco, and how does that choice advance the story? San Francisco has a unique combination of urban history coupled with a feeling of being in the Wild West. The city is densely populated and urban, and yet you still get stray mountain lions and coyotes in the center of town. The city itself is impossibly hilly and the surrounding nature is rugged; the coast is cold, steep, and rough—more like Ireland than Los Angeles. There’s also a kind of Gothic romance to San Francisco. Apparently it’s a mecca for ghost hunters, and it often has a foggy Victorian mystique otherwise reserved for cities like London. The San Francisco Bay Area was where Alfred Photo © Putnam Adult 2020
Hitchcock set a number of his eeriest films. Heck, the TV show Charmed was set here because you could picture witches living in these Victorian houses! After taking a tour of Alcatraz, J. K. Rowling found the island prison so creepy she decided to model Azkaban on it. Setting is a big motivator when I write, and being in San Francisco on a foggy day, listening to the seagulls cackle, the cable cars tinkle in the distance, and the ships blow their low, mournful horns . . . just makes you want to tell a ghost story.
“BEING IN SAN FRANCISCO ON A FOGGY DAY, LISTENING TO THE SEAGULLS CACKLE, THE CABLE CARS TINKLE IN THE DISTANCE, AND THE SHIPS BLOW THEIR LOW, MOURNFUL HORNS . . . JUST MAKES YOU WANT TO TELL A GHOST STORY.”
Are any of the characters in the novel based on real-life people? Only bits and pieces, and mostly those characters in the early part of the book that depicts life in the Barbary Coast. There’s a real glorification of the notoriously “bad” historical figures here. For instance, a figure named Shanghai Kelly tricked/kidnapped hundreds of men into involuntary service on ships bound for Asia (he even ran a saloon and a boarding house to ensure he’d always have plenty of victims) and yet he is kind of celebrated and there is a bar named after him. I read numerous accounts of swindlers and scoundrels, and bits of this research went into Tackett, the unscrupulous dance hall owner. I also read about several of the Barbary Coast’s most infamous prostitutes. Their jolly, over-the-top antics went into the character of Henrietta. What’s interesting is that these two characters were the ones most heavily influenced by historical accounts, and they were the ones that often risked being caricatures—I think this probably reflects a tendency among West Coast historians to relish big personalities and tall tales.
You’ve said that the San Francisco earthquake changed many lives. How does the idea of reinvention play out in the book? While San Francisco is still a very nostalgic city, the 1906 earthquake pushed the city into the future in a lot of ways. So much had to be rebuilt.
Similarly, the characters in the book are forced to look to the future and reinvent themselves as well. Violet, Cora, and Flossie go from being Dickensian waifs working in a seedy boardinghouse/dance hall to being young women navigating the early decades of a rapidly changing twentieth century. Suddenly, women could work as shopgirls (Violet), typists (Flossie), or even live as a kind of improvisational socialite “gal about town” (Cora). Of course, and not to beat a dead horse, but the key to reinvention is not to let your past catch up to you!
In this age of fake news, we certainly have a preoccupation with whom we can trust, and whom we can’t. Stories that explore these doubts within the realm of marriage are aimed at testing/playing out these fears in the most intimate relationship we as a culture can imagine—that of husband and wife.
Though the story is set more than a hundred years ago, do elements of it have contemporary relevance to the lives of women?
I live in Nob Hill, which is one of the more historical areas. As I did with my other books, I like to live in the city I’m writing about and walk around asking questions! I’ve learned exactly which buildings made it through the 1906 earthquake and which historical-seeming buildings are actually rebuilt replicas or else “new” facsimiles of older architectural styles. There are definitely two kinds of people in San Francisco right now—the tech kids who are very new to the city and fired up about making it their own, and old-school San Franciscans who are actually REALLY into the city’s history and always have been. The latter group is like an unofficial body of very dedicated archivists. If you want to nerd out over SF history, it’s not hard to find another San Franciscan who wants to do the same. Personally, this area’s history of earthquakes sometimes has me spooked. The apartment building I live in was built just AFTER the earthquake, on a site that was razed by the 1906 earthquake’s destruction. It has push-button light
Early on when I was writing this, my editor honed in on the “dynamic of three”—as in, the dynamic of three women maintaining a friendship. It’s complicated, and that much certainly hasn’t changed! Perhaps sadly, the story of thwarted women being forced to seize financial control of their lives in less than 100 percent legal ways still rings true in certain contemporary situations (the recent Jennifer Lopez film Hustlers, anyone?). And regarding the part of this novel that deals with marriage, and more specifically Violet’s paranoia about her husband’s past and what might have happened to his first wife, I feel like this dynamic has been very present in contemporary culture—I can’t begin to count the number of novels, movies, and TV shows that play with this theme right now. It is definitely hitting some kind of cultural nerve at the moment.
You now live in San Francisco—a city that has changed so much just in the last decade. What special research did you have to do to re-create this historic setting?
switches and ancient plumbing. We’ve had a few small quakes since moving in and when those come through, the building sways like crazy! But I try to comfort myself with the reminder: Even though it wasn’t tested by the 1906 quake, it was tested by the 1989 quake, so . . . it’s probably okay?
You have said that your debut novel, The Other Typist, was inspired by The Great Gatsby. In The Two Mrs. Carlyles, you are both paying homage to and inverting a certain type of classic literary story. What inspired this book? With this new novel, I’d been mulling over what I call “eerie dead-wife tales”— Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Hitchcock’s Vertigo being two of my favorites. I’ve always enjoyed the unsettling tension between man and woman (and ghost woman) in those stories, but this time around, I was struck by how expected it was that the female protagonists wouldn’t have any power or any machinations of their own. I found myself wondering, “What if the men weren’t the only ones with dark secrets?” And “In a period when a woman had less power than she would now, what if she contrived to take it?” The Two Mrs. Carlyles builds upon the mystery and atmosphere I love in Rebecca and Vertigo but keeps these questions in mind. In 1906 San Francisco, Violet is an orphaned waif before the Great Quake, and after, she becomes the bride-to-be of one of the city’s wealthiest bachelors, Harry Carlyle. There are rumors of how the first Mrs. Carlyle died, of course, and there are disconcerting happenings around the Carlyle mansion. But the novel engages (I hope) this trope in a larger conversation—one that includes the darker side of femininity, women who are more powerful than you might think, and the complex dynamics of female friendship.
Violet is subject to memory lapses and hence is not a completely reliable narrator. What draws you to these types of protagonists in your work? With The Other Typist, I think I was interested in inverting the classic story, as you say above. Fitzgerald’s novel revolves
around a man—Gatsby—who reinvents himself with lies. But at the same time, we (the readers) take everything that Nick, the narrator, tells us as gospel. I wanted to point out the ways in which millions of readers have come to this novel and put Gatsby under scrutiny . . . but never Nick! Why not Nick? How do we know that everything he’s feeding us is true and not distorted by bias? And so Rose, the narrator of The Other Typist, was born. And now, more generally, I realize that I love the role bias plays in any story. I like reminding readers we are always looking through a lens and playing with that lens. I like characters that have really wacky/distorted lenses! And this bias can also be self-doubt. I’ve mentioned Hitchcock because I love his films . . . and part of what I think I love about his films is the way in which his protagonists are usually a little damaged. Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) has had a near-death experience and is suffering from vertigo in Vertigo. He’s not a police detective anymore; he’s a reluctant private investigator who doubts himself to the point of believing that Madeleine Elster is actually haunted/possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes. He is, essentially, a private investigator who sees the investigation through the lens of his affliction. The suspense/mystery at play within the film doesn’t work if we aren’t seeing it through Scottie’s eyes—his psychologically damaged eyes—and piecing together the information as he receives and processes it. I’m drawn to the way Hitchcock uses this unreliability to give the story maximum impact.
I FOUND MYSELF WONDERING, “WHAT IF THE MEN WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES WITH DARK SECRETS?” You have been drawn to character triangles in the past. What about this dynamic appeals to you? Who are the three women at the center of this novel and what do they mean to one another? Triangles are always interesting and full of tension. I knew I wanted the girls in the boarding house and the secret that gets buried in the rubble of the earthquake to play a big part in the novel. When my editor was interested in emphasizing three women as being particularly close for the plot/pacing of the story, that clicked with me. Almost every girl has been part of a friendship triangle at some point. When three girls are friends, the alliances often shift—two are closer and one is on the outs, then a different
two are closer, etc. The constant shifting can really mess with your head! And, um, I also happen to be one of three sisters, so. . . .
Each of your novels has been set in a different decade of the twentieth century. Is there a thematic arc to the historically based stories you are telling? Someone pointed out that there is a kind of focus on opposites and twins in my books. In The Other Typist, Rose has an obvious twin in Odalie, who is initially an opposite/foil to Rose, but as their identities start to merge, they are mistaken for each other and their murky backstories begin to swirl and blur together. In Three-Martini Lunch, Cliff steals and plagiarizes Miles’s manuscript . . . only to have Miles “steal” the narrative in the sense that Miles steadily becomes the main focus of the novel in a meta way. In Eagle & Crane, Louis and Harry have a kind of “fox and hound” friendship (opposites who are expected to be enemies but become friends), their stunt planes are named Castor and Pollux, and there might be a body switcheroo at play in the book’s central mystery (which alludes to twins, in the sense of a substitution with bodies perceived to be identical). In The Two Mrs. Carlyles, the twins are right there in the title! And I was thinking it could be interpreted in more than one way, too. Who are the two
Mrs. Carlyles? Is it Violet and Harry’s first wife? Is it Violet and her unreliable “other” self? There are other twins and substitutions in the book, too, but I can’t list them without giving major spoilers!
You have a Ph.D. in literature. How do you balance your “academic” appreciation for literature with good storytelling? You know, it’s been interesting straddling these two worlds. During grad school, I only read “classic” books by dead authors. Then I went to work in publishing and spent several years reading only the latest titles. I’ve come to realize that (a) there is nothing truly “new” in storytelling, but (b) what I like are authors who, through hard work and ingenuity, are able to make it new—invert a classic trope, offer a line that makes language itself do new work, reinvent identity through a character. . . .That’s a modernist idea—“make it new.” A phrase coined by Ezra Pound. But I think it accurately describes something I still get excited about when I read a book worthy of admiration, regardless of where that book fits into the canon.
Are you working on a new novel? I am! I always am; I write the way I read books—at least two or more stories at a time. But it’s too early to talk about just now.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1
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On page 4, Violet says, “It was then that I realized most of life is divided up into a series of ‘befores’ and ‘afters.’” Do you believe in this theory? Do you have instances of “befores” and “afters” in your life?
As Violet settles into her life as the new Mrs. Carlyle, she begins to see and hear things that hint that the first Mrs. Carlyle might still have a presence at the mansion. Do you believe in spirits or ghosts?
2 Violet formed a sisterhood with two of her best friends. Which character do you relate to the most—Cora, Flossie, or Violet?
3 Cora, Flossie, and Violet were faced with a difficult decision when they found Mr. Tackett. What do you think you would have done in that situation?
4 When Violet and Harry meet, is it love at first sight? If you were in Violet’s shoes, would you have agreed to marry Harry?
5 How did you feel about reading the perspective of an unreliable narrator? In your opinion, does this add or detract from the story?
7 Discuss how you think class and gender play a role in the novel. What do you think defined being a woman in 1906 San Francisco? Would this story be possible in the world of today?
8 How did Cora’s, Flossie’s, and Violet’s upbringings shape each of them as they matured into adulthood and who they ultimately became?
9 Discuss the different representations of how love is shown in the novel. How do you think those characters developed their sense of how to love?
10 What was your interpretation of the ending?
THE PISCO PUNCH “The Golden Punch of the Golden Gate City”
INGREDIENTS: 2 oz pisco ¾ oz pineapple gum syrup ¾oz lemon juice
INSTRUCTIONS: Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake, then double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a lemon twist.
“THE NAME SOUNDED LIKE A DELICIOUS TREAT— SOMETHING TO DRINK IN ALONG WITH ALL THOSE FUNNY FRUIT JUICES.” Recipe credit: liberandcompany.com