A story of possession and consumption, of loneliness and rootlessness, of anger and revenge. In her debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, vmkupersmith manages to do so much and to do it all so well. bookstagram currentlyreading
A story of possession and consumption, of loneliness and rootlessness, of anger and revenge. In her debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith manages to do so much and to do it all so well.
Well planning was a mess [laughs]. Originally I pictured it as a kind of tryptic, with three novellas following these similar characters. And then when I started interweaving them, that’s when the story felt more like a novel instead of three poorly connected novellas. I describe the process as kind of trying to do a crossword puzzle, like trying to construct one. Little connections would kind of write themselves, which was fun. It does ask a lot of the reader, there’s a lot to keep track of.
I wanted women’s anger to be at the center of the story, and for the novel to shine a light on the everyday misogyny that happens to women in Vietnam, [to] women everywhere. And it was important to me that there’s not – I hate perfect victim narratives. [The characters are] real to me, and I wanted them to seem real to other people.
Yeah, well I think – I wrote a lot of it when I was hungry too [laughs]. I was living in England and I had just moved from Vietnam and I was just really hungry and trying to recreate it. I loved how you described that kind of fine line, because that’s what I wanted from all the description of consumption, and egesting, and just the way the book treats the body as like a really gross, but extraordinary thing in different ways.