Photo by Bianca Alexis
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is the author of the new novel Mutual Interest. She also has written the novel Glassworks. She lives in Brooklyn.
Q: What inspired you to write Mutual Interest, and how did you create your character Vivian?
A: I’m a lifelong devotee of novels of manners, and I was interested in writing a queer love story exploring that classic style and setting.
In Mutual Interest’s enemies-to-lovers plot, I was loosely inspired by the historical trivia that William Procter and James Gamble were professional rivals before they became (business) partners.
I knew I wanted to tell a story about a couple being swept together by a force of nature, and Vivian—ambitious, desirous, instinctive—was the character I created to fit that description.
Q: The writer Anna North called the book a “timeless queer love story and a meditation on power, capitalism, and the flow of history...” What do you think of that description?
A: Above all, I’m flattered by it! I love “timeless” as a descriptor of any queer historical fiction, an acknowledgment that these communities have always existed (and will always exist). I hope it indicates here that I’ve given my characters a complexity that makes them resonate with readers.
And in Mutual Interest, which has a highly omniscient narrative voice, I was certainly thinking about forces beyond individual human control, like capitalism—and the ways we often try to control those forces, anyway, including through the stories we tell ourselves and others.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: This novel is built around a business partnership that is also a romantic partnership—it felt clear from the beginning that the right title would be something that applied to both sides of that arrangement.
We went through a few options. Early on, I called the manuscript “The Syndicate,” a phrase that the characters use a few times in winking reference to their relationship. But that ended up feeling like too cold a title for what is ultimately quite a warm book.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I started with baseline research into my setting—New York City at the turn of the 20th century—including its material culture and queer community.
Once I had a solid enough sense of the world my characters would be moving through to begin, I kept up an ongoing practice as I drafted and edited, researching specific questions as I encountered plot or character needs.
For instance, when it came time to write a scene of dramatic emotional and physical confrontation about halfway through the book, I spent some time searching through museums and archives to find the perfect setting—settling on the New York Aquarium, located at the time (1905) in Battery Park at Castle Garden.
I was continuously surprised (and impressed) by how thoroughly documented some layers of New York history are, including many photographs and illustrations of empty rooms—to my biased eye, it felt at times as if the city and its archivists had been waiting for authors of historical fiction to come knocking.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Mutual Interest takes place primarily in New York City, and involved a lot of research into and dramatization of city life.
Though I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I grew up in a very rural area—and I found myself leaving this novel with an itch to explore the challenges and opportunities of desires and conflicts playing out in much smaller town. Lately, I’ve been working on something in that setting.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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