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Rachel Lyon’s Fruit of the Dead follows a young woman, Cory, on the cusp of adulthood when she signs the paperwork for a job as a nanny for the children of Rolo, a wealthy pharmaceutical executive. She is soon whisked away to his remote island where she regularly samples his company’s latest mind-altering painkiller in between caring for his children. Meanwhile, Cory’s mother, Emer, has been in China where her life’s work—bioengineered rice—has failed spectacularly. Emer is on her way home when she loses contact with Cory, now on the island without internet access.
I first met Rachel some years ago in Brooklyn, where she lived at the time and cofounded the reading series Ditmas Lit with poet Sarah Bridgins. I attended frequently and she eventually asked me to read. She has since moved from Brooklyn to Western Massachusetts. I caught up with her on Zoom to talk about her new novel.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Ian MacAllen:
Motherhood is at the forefront of this novel. Different types of motherhood are depicted. Cricket’s motherhood is mostly unseen in the text; Cory, while technically not a mother, is mothering throughout the book; and then there is Emer. The novel is really about her finding her child. Was that something you were thinking about examining when you started this novel or this something that was a natural evolution?
Rachel Lyon:
I’m really into the way novels implicitly track the life of a writer for the few years it takes to write them. When I started the book, I didn’t have any intention of writing from Emer’s perspective. I was curious about the power dynamics of a love affair between a very powerful older man and a younger woman who doesn’t come from great means—as well as all the thorny ethical and emotional questions it might introduce. But as I kept writing, I got pregnant. I had my first child. Eventually, I had a second child. The process of writing was really affected by the events of my life over the course of those four or five years.
Ian MacAllen:
You bring up that Emer wasn’t a perspective, initially, but she’s a narrator, and she’s the only first-person narrator—Cory’s sections are told from a third-person perspective—so, in a way, Emer is the narrator of the book. How did you come to that decision?
Rachel Lyon:
I love that reading of it. I don’t think it’s necessarily that Emer is narrating Cory’s sections, because how could she know what’s going on for her daughter when she isn’t there to witness it? But I like the idea, and I did think about that while making that decision as to whether to write her in first person or third person.
On one hand there was a really sort of mechanical, practical reason for switching from third to first, which is, for me, when I read novels that alternate perspective, I often get confused by who’s doing the talking in a given section. I wanted a way to really distinguish between the two voices, beyond the inevitable, tonal, and aesthetic shifts in voice.
But there was also the question of character. Cory is a teenager. She is using substances. She’s not a reliable narrator of her own experience, to any degree. And I started feeling, as I worked with her story and her voice, that the reader needed some grounding. We really want an extra pair of eyes, looking in with us, to help mediate her experience, and question her judgment, and worry about her. Emer’s perspective functions as a vicarious reader.
Ian MacAllen:
You bring up Cory as unreliable—she is described by her own mother as a C student, with a laundry list of mistakes she has made throughout her life. Was it difficult to write from the perspective of a character who is constantly making bad choices?
Rachel Lyon:
[laughing] No, that was not hard for me.
I was really reflecting on my own youth, and the messes I’ve gotten into over the years. Substance use and, without getting too specific, I’d say, the consequences of impulsive or feelings-driven decisions. All this difficult stuff that young women are faced with—in a different way, I think, than young men. It’s hard to be young, whoever you are, but I think an unfortunate truth of young womanhood is that one’s vulnerability is baked in. The dramatic irony being that a condition of youth—you know, famously!—is this feeling of invincibility. I became aware of my own vulnerability only after the fact. It was only years later—only, really, as I began to work on this novel—that I began to understand the degree of the danger I once put myself in.
Ian MacAllen:
Cory eventually moves to Rolo’s island where there is no internet. That lack of internet becomes a plot point—but it also seemed a convenient way to shift away from the cellphone narrative. Was that part of the goal, getting her isolated so you didn’t have to worry about internet culture?
Rachel Lyon:
Yes, for sure. You hear writers griping about this from time to time. It’s annoying to craft a plot that relies on the problem of finding someone in an age when you can track anyone’s whereabouts in a moment. That’s referred to in the book. A secondary character does say something like, you can find out everything you need to know about someone in two minutes.
So, again, practically and mechanically, I needed Cory to lose her phone. But I also wanted to physicalize that feeling of isolation when you are high and alone and young and unattached and in a totally unfamiliar environment. If she could easily disconnect from the reality of her loneliness, and lose herself in the virtual social world on her phone, there would be no story; there would also be no stakes.
Ian MacAllen:
The fact that she can’t be found immediately creates that sense of danger because Emer is looking for her and can’t find her. And, to be honest, until Emer was trying to find her, it didn’t strike me, as a reader, that Cory was in danger.
Rachel Lyon:
I really am interested in that gray area of whether she is in danger. She’s taken a job with an employer. She’s signed some paperwork. To a degree, she’s fine. Emer, as the vicarious reader, is our invitation to suspect something is amiss. And then, of course, something does end up being amiss. I kind of like that, both as a narrative trick and as a kind of commentary of the experience of fiction and reading. We only have our own perceptions.
Ian MacAllen:
There are a lot of contemporary themes—the billionaire oligarch, dangerous pharmaceutical companies, bioengineering, the American industrial complex and its relationship to China. You have a very grim view of the world, with the near future being very dark. The obvious question is: are you hopeful for the future? Do you see the future as going down a dark road?
Rachel Lyon:
I do. But—I don’t think that precludes joy and love and all the good things of life, things like delicious food, community, and so on. I don’t think that I was intentionally trying—I’m not an expert or a policy wonk—I’m just a consumer of the newspaper like everyone else. But it’s hard to read the paper. Especially right now. So, while I wasn’t trying to make some high-level commentary on the state of the world, I think, increasingly, for me anyway, it feels really hard, if not impossible—if not undesirable!—to write in a vacuum. Literature that doesn’t at least touch on some of our contemporary difficulties, even or especially in a slightly satirical or funhouse-mirror kind of way, has a bit of this feeling of having been written in, I don’t know, some perfect world that I’ve never been to.
Ian MacAllen:
You set this world up with these existential threats. Motherhood, and parenting generally, looks to the future—having a child is about the future. Was that part of the reason all these issues came up? That threat to motherhood within the novel?
Rachel Lyon:
You really have to reckon with that when you become a parent, don’t you?
I’ve been really interested in the generational differences between women of my generation and women of my mother’s generation. There are differences in how we talk about sexual assault or don’t talk about it, and how private we are, where we draw the line between our personal and professional lives. As a working artist in the eighties and nineties, my mother felt she had to conceal or downplay or at least really compartmentalize her identity as a mother in order to be taken seriously. Today, I feel like my work and I are just a small part of a really rich, multidisciplinary dialogue about what it looks like to be a parent and a working artist, to hold many identities simultaneously.
Emer is a character who is older than I am, but who isn’t quite my mother’s generation, and Cory is younger than I am, but they have their generational differences; at any rate, there are important things about Cory and Cory’s experience that Emer really doesn’t understand, and vice versa. There is only so much we can know about the future and how our kids are going to understand it, right? We are so limited by our own experience, socialization, and culturalization. I am really drawn to the tension between these inevitable limitations and a mother and daughter’s intense love.
Ian MacAllen:
With Emer, her life is devoted more or less to bioengineered rice, and then it’s this huge failure. It just doesn’t sprout. Is this parallel to her own daughter who fails to sprout?
Rachel Lyon:
There’s definitely a cute little parallel there. I didn’t notice it myself until an early reader in a workshop noted that Emer’s frustration about the rice is really a metaphor for her disappointment in Cory. This failure to sprout, as you say.
Ian MacAllen:
Emer is presented as someone who is an overachiever. She ran this company, she ran the program. Even though it fails, she ran it. That’s very different from Cory. Was there an intentional desire to create the dichotomy between mother and daughter, to show different ambition levels, and success and failure?
Rachel Lyon:
Not exactly, but I think there’s a parallel or echo there. I think they are both in a kind of paralysis. Emer has been working really hard her whole life, she’s a perfectionist, real independent woman, you know, and this is a career-ending failure for her. And I think that failure is the inciting incident, as they say—it’s what gives her emotional license to kind of drop everything and go as nuts as she goes. Whereas Cory has spent her life trying to achieve to please her mom, and failing to. So, they are both at these critical junctures: Cory because of Emer, and Emer because of her work. And while Emer is increasingly in kind of a nihilistic space, Cory, from the opening of the book, is in a place of recklessness.
Ian MacAllen:
The moment I became a parent, I felt I understood a lot of narratives about parent-child relationships. Did you feel that changed the way you contemplated characters and how they interact with each other, having become a parent?
Rachel Lyon:
Yes, definitely. I have found that to be true in my personal life, and I definitely read differently now that I’m a parent, too. Having begun this character Cory before I became a parent, and then completing the book after, I did have this strange shift in perspective with her. I began very much in this young woman’s experience—not nostalgically, but in it, you know. I was doing this very thoughtful, recollective work. Then, looking at her as a parent, suddenly I was like, oh my god, this poor kid. You learn to care for your characters differently, which is a strange and sweet experience.
FICTION
Fruit of the Dead
By Rachel Lyon
Scribner Book Company
Published March 5, 2024
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