Rebecca Scherm's new suspense novel, UNBECOMING, was called "startlingly inventive" by the New York Times, and is available in stores and on Kindle now.
Thanks for answering some questions about your new book,
Rebecca.
First of all, the title is great. It goes to the heart of the main character’s
issue with an unraveling identity, but it also suggests pretense and the adopting
of false, “unbecoming” personas. Did you
think of the title before you wrote the book?
No, the title came late! I tried quite a few titles, some
okay and some terrible (awful puns with ‘gilt’). My husband thought of
“Unbecoming” one night. It just popped out of his mouth, and that was it.
You live in Michigan, but the parts of the book
set in New York made it seem that you knew it well. Have you ever lived
there? And have you, like your
character, ever lived in Paris?
I lived in New York for seven years, but I’ve never lived in
Paris. I was incredibly fortunate to get a research grant to visit for
research, though, for five days in 2011. My plan was to stake out Grace’s
places—the neighborhood where she works, where she lives, etc.—and to finally
experience Clignancourt, which I’d been reading about for years, for myself.
Nothing was what I expected, and I was able to channel that loneliness and
disorientation into Grace’s experience.
There's the power of place and setting, and a lesson to writers to experience their settings firsthand.
Grace, the main character, is quite young, but the
narration makes her seem older. Was this a way of emphasizing her
otherness? Did her isolation bring a
forced maturity?
The close-third person point of view allowed me access to
her thoughts, but still gave me enough distance to occasionally see around her
a little. The span of time covered in the novel also afforded me narrative
distance. I think you’re right that her loneliness as a child and her
observational, evaluative habits make her feel separate from the people around
her, and we feel that in the tone of the narration.
Grace is adept at restoring antiques, and you
provided fascinating, in-depth detail about this art. How did you go about
researching the valuing and refurbishing of lovely things?
I read and I imagined! I read books about antiques
restoration, jewelry making and repair, and antiques identification. Often, I
made up methods—the dental tools swabbed in cotton, for instance, may not be
accurate, but they are evocative. I spent many hours on websites like 1stdibs
trying to understand the way antiques are bought and sold, and of course I
spent valuable time in Clignancourt.
Grace falls under the spell of not just her
boyfriend Riley, but of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Graham, and their perfect
house. In fact, the Graham House looms over her actions and her consciousness
like a modern Manderley, and through her narration it has a similar brooding
feeling. Are you a Daphne du Maurier fan?
Oh, yes, and Rebecca
is both a conscious and unconscious influence. For instance, I realized Grace
shouldn’t have a last name—the absence of which implies that she has no family-
when I was rereading Rebecca. I’m so
glad you mentioned her!
You did a good job evoking the du Maurier mood, especially with the ending, I thought.
Grace decides when she is very young that she is
a “bad apple,” but it’s never clear whether it is nature or nurture that makes
her see a badness in herself, something that she needs to conceal. There is a continual tension between what
Grace believes about herself and what the audience must try to determine about
her. Was this the most difficult part of writing this book?
I see it as a continuous feedback loop—the coldness from her
mother makes her see her regular childhood transgressions as “bad,” which makes
her sure that she’s bad, which gives her this sense of shame and sense of permission to do worse
things. Keeping that line of tension was very difficult, and I teased her back
and forth many, many times over the years. I had some very good reader friends
helping me get that right. But the hardest parts of the book to write were
about Grace and Mrs. Graham. I never wanted to make the importance of that
relationship explicit, but I found some of the scenes between them very painful
to write-- the scene where Mrs. Graham confronts her about the money,
especially.
Your book is compelling and very difficult to
put down. Did you find that you wrote
whole scenes at one time to maintain this sense of tension?
I do write in whole scenes, and often it takes me days to
gear up for a “big” scene—I edit, I shuffle things around, I obsess over small
word choices while I’m getting ready for something that will be emotionally
difficult to write, but that I know I’ll have to write all at once. I wrote the Berlin hotel scene from the
passenger seat of our ancient Corolla on a road trip. I’d been thinking about
that scene for days, and when I was ready, I had to do it, despite the fact
that we were barreling down I-75 at the time.
Who are some of your favorite writers?
In fiction, I have deep love and admiration for Kate
Atkinson, Susanna Moore, Charles Baxter, Elena Ferrante, Lydia Davis—I really
could go on forever. Some of my favorite books from the last couple of years
have been Jaime Quatro’s I Want to Show
You More and We Need New Names by
NoViolet Bulawayo.
My website, rebeccascherm.com, has events, press, and other
updates, and I also post on a Facebook author page. I tweet from @chezscherm.
Thanks for sharing, Rebecca, and for the great read.
Thank you!
