Q&A with Emily Dunlay

 

 

 

Emily Dunlay is the author of the new novel Teddy. She is originally from Dallas and she lives in the Middle East.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Teddy, and how did you create your protagonist?

 

A: I would say the protagonist inspired the book: I first wrote a character similar to Teddy as an exercise long before I had the idea for the novel fully worked out.

 

I initially wrote a single scene of a woman getting ready for a party, agonizing over her hair and makeup, trying to make sure everything was right on the surface because she felt she had something to hide underneath.

 

As I continued to play around with this idea, the character of Teddy became more fully developed, and the 1960s seemed like a natural fit as a setting for her. Standards of behavior for women were beginning to shift at that time, but there was still a very limited range of acceptable social choices for many women.

 

And I couldn’t resist the appeal of Rome as a setting: it was really the birthplace of modern celebrity culture, and a character like Teddy would be forced into confrontation with herself in a world of paparazzi, movie stars, and Cold War secrets and lies.

 

In my research, I learned more about the many political scandals of the ‘60s and ‘70s involving women; for example, the Profumo Affair and Martha Mitchell’s involvement in the Watergate scandal.

 

I noticed that invariably, these women were characterized in the media as bimbos, dumb blondes, or otherwise foolish and morally suspect. The truth is always more complicated than that, I wanted to give Teddy back some of that nuance.

 

Q: The Booklist review of the book says, “Revealed through tantalizing flashbacks, brimming with a delicious sense of malevolence and unease, Dunlay’s deeply atmospheric debut conjures the decadence of Rome, the duplicity of government officials, and the conflicting expectations of a young woman trying to come into her own.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m very honored by it! And I love that this description mentions a sense of unease in the book.

 

A crucial part of Teddy’s struggle is that she doesn’t have all the information she needs: she believes she’s up against one set of obstacles, with no understanding that it’s actually another set entirely—she can’t see the full chessboard, and political games are being played all around her.

 

I wanted to convey that feeling in the experience of reading the book—the sense that something is wrong, or not quite as it should be, without the relief of visibility of the full picture (at least until the end!).

Q: Can you say more about how you researched the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: I did quite a bit of research to get the historical details right—my own travel to Rome was helpful to set the scene in a general way, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which restaurants would have been popular in Rome in 1969, which shops, and so on, and confirming even seemingly small details like whether a certain restaurant would have had its logo stamped on the brim of the plates at the time.

 

Teddy’s shopping map is a real item that I found on eBay—a lot of my research was finding contemporary advertisements and tourist materials, like Alitalia ads and guidebooks.

 

The scenes set in Dallas were much easier, as I grew up there and my family is from there, but there was still a certain amount of research necessary to get the details of Teddy’s daily life right—etiquette guides, articles about Dallas society at the time, restaurant menus, and so on.

 

I also checked the U.S. National Archives and other resources to find details about American expatriates, particularly within diplomatic circles, in Rome at the time.

 

One of the first female U.S. ambassadors, Clare Boothe Luce, was appointed to Italy in the early 1950s, so learning about her helped me to add more nuance to the roles of women in Teddy’s world.

 

I wanted to acknowledge this in the book through the characters of the other women working in the embassy: on the one hand, women were generally constrained and limited by social expectations, particularly coming from Teddy’s background, but on the other, some women had begun to reach positions of real power.

 

That said, the female senator mentioned in the book is fictional, but there really were only two women serving in the entire Senate in 1963, and only one in 1969, so it was still very much a man’s world.

 

Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I had the most dramatic of the final scenes in mind from the beginning, but the path to getting there changed quite a bit through each draft.

 

And several of the reveals at the end only came through late in the process, so there are a few things Teddy learns at the end that surprised even me as I wrote them!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently wrapping up a draft of what I hope will be my next book. It explores many of the same themes as Teddy, following American expatriates involved in an international scandal, but is set in Geneva in the 1920s.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb