Miciah Bay Gault
whose debut novel, Goodnight Stranger, will be published by Park Row Books in July.
Miciah Gault and I grew up in the same town on Cape Cod. We swam at the same secret beaches, rode the same ferry through the fog to Martha’s Vineyard, saw movies at the same local theater. Our mothers were pals, and Miciah was one of the first writers whose sentences I admired. We are both writers who heard our calling early and were lucky enough to have families and a community who supported our obsessions. A
graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University, Miciah now teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Montpelier. When I read an advance copy of her first book, Goodnight Stranger, I was mesmerized by everything I recognized: It is steeped in the textures and images of our hometown. Beyond that it is a captivating, character-driven thriller with dazzling sentences. I couldn’t wait to talk to her about it. One of the distinct pleasures of this novel—and there are so many—is your handling of the setting. Place functions as character in Goodnight Stranger, and the book is rife with evocative descriptions that seem to externalize so much of the story’s meaning, its symbols, and the characters’ interior states. It was also impossible not to see the similarities to the place you and I both grew up in. Can you talk a little about the importance of place in the book and how you developed it?
The book is set on a fictional island off Cape Cod, and the Cape of course is where we both grew up. I love its color palette, its textures, the sounds it makes, the way it smells. I haven’t lived there for a long time, but I still visit often. I sometimes experience this sense of longing for the Cape, even when I’m there. It almost feels like unrequited love, or maybe more like old love, love from the past, halfforgotten love. I think you explore this feeling a little
in Abandon Me: it’s an intensely physical experience to live on the Cape. The sand, wind, salt. You’re always in salt water, half the time naked, skinnydipping. You leave and the taste of it is on your skin, in your hair. So I wanted to set the book in a Cape Cod– ish place in part because I wanted to spend time there, smelling the salt and seaweed. The sensory nature of the setting made it easier for me to slip out of my present life and into that imagined world. An island setting also made sense for the story. My characters Lydia and Lucas are brother and sister, and live this very insular life, literally surrounded, bounded by ocean, their daily life circumscribed quite literally by water. That physical boundary was important—the safety, security, familiarity of the island, which they both resent and take comfort in, the way so many of us do with home. In the book a stranger shows up, and his presence shatters the familiarity, renders their home almost unrecognizable.
I am forever looking for novels with a perfect combination of propulsive tension, meticulously developed characters, and gorgeous sentences—so I thank you profoundly for delivering such a book. Did the novel start out as a “literary thriller,” or did the mystery elements emerge over time? Did you know the ending when you began, or did you write your way into it?
I had no idea what I was doing most of the time I was writing this book. I’m frankly shocked that I managed to write a book with “propulsive tension.” It definitely didn’t come easily. Most of what I write starts with a premise. I love a strange or unsettling premise, love the words what if. This book first presented itself to me as a what-if scenario: What if there were grown up siblings whose brother had died when they were babies, and they’d been haunted their whole lives by that loss, and what if when they’re twenty-eight a stranger shows up and he’s eerily familiar to them, and he knows about their lives, their home…. At first that was all I had. I saw the characters. I saw the setting. I knew the premise. The rest was a mystery to me. I 100 percent had to write my way into it.
Although the book didn’t start as a literary thriller, it makes sense to me now that that’s where it ended up—I wanted to write something the right readers could fall in love with, the way I fall in love when I’m reading: that infatuation, the pounding heart, dilating eyes. I think I was almost trying to trick readers into love—I wrote something scary, so their hearts would beat faster. I wrote surprises to make them catch their breath. I had no idea how the novel was going to end when I started writing it.
I know that this book has been in the works for a long time. Can you talk a little about your process and how it developed over the years?
This book took fifteen years to write. I did other things during that time— got an MFA, got married, had two babies, bought a hundred-year-old house, edited a magazine, helped start an MFA program. But always there was this book, and I wrestled with it all those years. I worked on it whenever I could, which often meant lunch breaks, nap time, dawn. Sometimes I’m amazed that I continued working on it for so long, but there was something in it that kept me interested. I’ve always believed that obsessions or preoccupations are good for writers, and I was pretty obsessed with this story—which I’m so grateful for. It would have been easy to give up on it years ago. In fact at one point I told my agent I didn’t think I had it