Melissa Faliveno is a longtime Debutiful favorite (listen to our 2020 conversation with her). Her essay collection, Tomboyland, was one of 2020’s best debut books, and now Faliveno is debuting in fiction.
In Hemlock, Faliveno brings readers to a cabin deep in the Wisconsin woods, where a sober Sam has a sip of a beer. As the quick cabin getaway turns south, the woods around her close in, her dependence awakens, and she begins a battle she isn’t sure she can win. It’s a deeply moving book, and the more I sit with it, the more convinced I am that this isn’t just a book of the year contender, but a book of the decade contender.
Faliveno answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Oh man, there were so many! I’m honestly not sure which was first, but as an Xennial there were several requisite series I read pretty much every installment of, like Goosebumps and The Babysitters Club. There was also this strange anthropomorphic western/mystery series I loved called Hank the Cowdog, about a ranch dog who solves crimes. (And actually, one of the first “series” of “novels” I wrote as a kid was a spinoff, about Hank’s nemesis, Pete the barn cat—who in my stories was the actual hero. I’m much more of a cat person.) But I think the first standalone book I was truly obsessed with—and haunted by—was Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. That’s the one that probably had the deepest and most lasting impact on my brain and heart.
What book helped you through puberty?
As is perhaps no surprise, I love horror, and when I was going through puberty, in the mid-nineties, it was such a good time for YA horror: There was nothing like Fear Street, everything by Christopher Pike (but especially the Last Vampire series), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and its lesser known but even more terrifying compatriot, The Scariest Stories You’ve Ever Heard, to really get a weird kid through the monstrousness of middle school.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. I didn’t find a copy of it until I was in my thirties, and I sometimes wonder what I might have understood about myself and the world had I found it sooner. But I also believe that books find you when they’re supposed to, and I was very glad I found it, or that it found me, when it did. Also, I think I wrote my first book, Tomboyland, in part because I wished I could have read something like it when I was younger. I’ve had a lot of young people (and not so young people!) write to tell me that that book meant a lot to them, that it was the first time they really saw themselves represented in a book, and that honestly means the entire world to me. It’s really why I do this. I feel very glad and lucky to be able to tell stories I didn’t have access to, and didn’t know I needed, when I was younger.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I’d like to think that most classes I teach could steal this title, so I’ll tell you what I teach from most often (keeping in mind that I mostly teach nonfiction): Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Melissa Febos (literally everything, but recently Girlhood and Body Work), Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, Mary Oliver’s Upstream.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
There were a lot! But in particular, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, which I read twice while writing and revising Hemlock, was a real north star. I also watched the HBO series twice, and I think both are brilliant. It’s a story that does such a good job of depicting alcoholism and self-harm, the way our pasts can haunt us, and the unreliability of an altered narrator. The dreamy nightmarishness of that story, the importance of place to the narrative, the way each scene drips with those Midwestern/Southern Gothic vibes—it was a real mood board. I also returned to Stephen King’s The Shining, to which Hemlock pays some homage; Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties; and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Megan Giddings’s The Women Could Fly, and the aforementioned Stone Butch Blues were also influential. Two craft books also helped a lot, especially in revision: George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Okay, admittedly, my nightstand stack is ridiculous. A real tower of books, including finished, in-progress, and TBR that threatens to fall and crush me in the night (if you’ve ever read Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, it’s like that). But I just finished Heartwood by Amity Gaige, and absolutely loved it. I just started The Girl on the Train, which I’ve somehow never read. A few I’m making my way through: Jared Lemus’s Guatemalan Rhapsody, Tove Jansson’s Sun City, and Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person is the Only Self, which I like to dip into between books. A few others I’ve recently finished but haven’t yet shelved: Ilana Masad’s Beings, Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Natalie Boukopolis’s Archipelago, Joy Williams’s The Pelican Child, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, and two forthcoming novels from Tin House: Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, and Claire Fuller’s Hunger & Thirst, which I devoured.