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At the center of Hot Springs Drive, Lindsay Hunter’s latest novel, is a horrific murder in a suburban block of a Florida town. The reader enters the story from the point of view of the house in which Theresa is murdered; the novel then spirals out to explore who she was, both as a woman in her own right, and also in relation to other people. We’re privy to her friendship with Jackie, the struggling mother of four boys who lives next door, and the devastating consequences of Jackie’s corrosive but all-too-understandable affair with Theresa’s husband. We get glimpses of Theresa’s marriage to Adam and daughter Cece’s adolescence, as well as the chaos of Jackie’s home life as she struggles to root herself while being attuned to her childrens’ needs. We watch as her eldest, Douglas, tries to attend to his mother in unhealthy ways—to disastrous effects. What struck me most is how whole each character is: from their anxieties and insecurities around parenthood and adolescence to their compulsive use of sex as a means of escaping their own self-perception, the author revels in all their pained and messy glory.
Hunter describes Hot Springs Drive as a crazy quilt. Each chapter is a patch composed of someone close to the crime’s point of view, and we’re left holding a quilt that is vintage Lindsay Hunter: wacky, colorful, and completely unique. Lindsay and I met on Zoom to discuss the wellness-ification of diet culture, her I’m A Writer But podcast, and the paradoxical pressure on women to be perfect while accepting their flaws.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Eva Dunsky
You often write about deep female friendship, but also in Hot Springs Drive about how these friendships can be affected by the strictures of motherhood, as women enforce impossible expectations on each other. It’s like this panopticon of modern womanhood where you’re both observer and observed; it’s a complete nightmare, and you portray it with so much nuance and careful observation. I’m wondering how you developed these characters and plots to contain that complexity?
Lindsay Hunter
I wanted the reader to be able to view the events of this novel in any order, because I think what’s true about motherhood is that time overlays on itself and you’re in every moment of your life at once. Then when I went back to revise, I saw that what I had most was Jackie’s incandescent hate and rage—I wasn’t seeing Theresa at all, so a lot of the revision involved making her into a whole person, and not just the True Crime “vaunted victim” narrative we often resort to. I wanted her to have her own life in the novel, which hopefully made their friendship more realistic and nuanced. I think that was how I did it—I wanted everyone to see Jackie from all these different perspectives, but then I realized there’s another person that really matters in this narrative. And seeing her clearly will make the final form more meaningful.
Eva Dunsky
The cascade of damage from the fallout of Jackie’s decisions is so well done, and so is this exploration of culpability: when do parents stop being responsible for their children’s actions? How do you separate a parent and child? Can you? I’m wondering how you managed to tell this story while leaving these questions open to interpretation.
Lindsay Hunter
The book stems from a podcast episode of Dateline NBC, which left me grappling with what parent/child relationship could have led to something like this. Is she the type of mother who can’t handle stress? Is she incredibly depressed? I still have these questions to this day. I know I could read more about the real-life case on which the book is based, but that truth wasn’t as meaningful to me. I didn’t want to write a scene where Jackie says “here’s the crowbar, do what you have to do or you’re out of the house.” Instead, I wanted to show glimpses of Jackie and Douglas’s relationship, mostly through the lens of the other children, to help understand what would inspire a teenage boy to do such a violent thing. I felt like if I spelled it out for people, it would take away some of that magic.
Eva Dunsky
Speaking of True Crime, I remember your interview with Alia Trabucco Zeran on your I’m A Writer But podcast. Her book, When Women Kill, seems interested in subverting the rhetoric around violent crime in similar ways. I’m wondering what other books were influential to you as you were writing?
Lindsay Hunter
At a pivotal moment in my revisions, I read Oh Caledonia!, which opens with a murdered girl and then tells you the story of her whole life up to the murder. In the opening scene, she’s laying dead in the stairway of this beautiful home, and the author Elspeth Barker describes how the light is hitting things. It inspired me to write the opening part with Theresa’s body in the garage, which was my way back in. That opening scene in Oh Caledonia! helped me reassess what story I was telling and who these people were.
Eva Dunsky
How has your writing around intimacy and bodily functions evolved as you’ve gotten more books under your belt?
Lindsay Hunter
The body, disappointment in the body, and trying to meld the mind and heart and body is everywhere in my writing. Jackie’s quest to lose weight is ever-present in this book, which I think comes from growing up in the 90s with a mom who was constantly exercising and putting us on diets. I also have an older sister who is a genius at descriptions and loves grossing people out, so I grew up with these two mentors—my mother in her quest to be perfect and beautiful, and my sister who could describe the feeling of peeing out her tampon. She always finds perfect, viscerally gross descriptions, which I love. All my favorite writers are like that. I don’t know if this tendency in my writing will ever go away—if you look at Don’t Kiss Me stories and you look at Jackie in Hot Springs Drive, there’s less in-your-face blood and guts and boogers, but it’s still there. I still love it so much.
Eva Dunsky
I think it’s one of your great strengths. Speaking of dieting, I really admire how seriously and earnestly the book treats Jackie and Theresa’s weight loss quest, and Jackie’s eventual compulsion around it. I’m wondering how you think the food and eating compulsion plot influences the way Jackie and Theresa’s relationship evolves.
Lindsay Hunter
For Jackie, dieting is her way of discovering control and power again. She gets a taste of it when she watches her body literally change, and the further she takes it—Jason [her son] sees her chewing and spitting out her food—the more extreme it gets. Theresa, on the other hand, wants to lose five to ten pounds and is happy to do this thing with her friend. It becomes a way for Jackie to see she’s “winning” at something. I think it’s all too easy in any kind of relationship, female friendships included, for the scales to tip a little bit and things to start changing. Dieting starts out as a way of relating to each other and ends up as something that makes Jackie feel more powerful. She allows her desire to become her reason and excuse for taking that initial step with Adam. And it snowballs from there.
Eva Dunsky
Speaking of Adam, I feel like Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize win ushered in a golden age of horny writing, and specifically, yearning after some guy. Jackie uses Adam as fodder for fantasy, but he’s also a person in his own right, as is Nick (Jackie’s husband). I’m wondering how you wrote the husbands: did you write them in relation to the women?
Lindsay Hunter
Back to my editor Roxane: she had a real issue with Nick at first, and she was correct. In the draft she saw, he was very one-note, and it made sense that Jackie would run off to sleep with someone else. Roxane didn’t want that to be the end of the story, and when I really started looking at their relationship, and thinking about a marriage with four sons and his stressful job, it allowed me to write him as more of a round character. You see them having good sex, so she’s not unfulfilled per se, but she’s not being seen. She’s known in a rote way in her family, and what she’s getting when men look at her, and when she starts her affair with Adam, is a different way of being seen and known. I wanted the men to be as knowable as any of the characters, and it took Roxane encouraging me to take another look before I realized we still had work to do. In that moment where Adam and Jackie are first coupling in the closet, I wanted you to be able to see yourself in that situation. You could see how easily the dominos could fall.
Eva Dunsky
I want to ask about your I’m A Writer But podcast, because as you know I’m a huge Buthead (read: fan of the show), and appreciate how it asks the questions I really want to know: how did you put this together? With what time? How was your submission process? I think it’s a major public service, and it’s been so edifying for me. Has coming up with interview questions and chatting with all these wonderful authors influenced your writing process at all?
Lindsay Hunter
As I’ve talked to more writers—people with big followings like A.M. Holmes, Lisa Taddeo, and Samantha Irby—I’ve heard over and over again that they’re doing all the same stuff we are. You get a range of stories, and it’s affected my writing in that when I start to hear those same voices of self doubt, I understand it’s part of the process. It’s something I now talk about with my novel-writing students: I’ll never be able to give them the right answer or the prescription or the list, but I can talk to them about what it feels like to do this. It’s given me more belief in myself, and it’s broadened my community in such a meaningful way. I’m expanding my reading to books I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise, which feeds my writing and gives me the permission I’m searching for.
FICTION
Hot Springs Drive
By Lindsay Hunter
Roxane Gay Books
Published November 7, 2023
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