Rebecca Kenney is the author of the new novel Beautiful Villain, a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. Her other novels include the Wicked Darlings series. She lives in South Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to write this retelling of The Great Gatsby?
A: The glitz, glamor, and pathos of the original story always appealed to me, but I didn't like the fact that Gatsby dies at the end. I thought he deserved a happy ending, and that Daisy deserved more agency and power over her own life.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between your own fictional creations and Fitzgerald's original characters?
A: Gatsby is still a romantic and an idealist. He does very questionable things, even bad things, but he maintains a certain kind of innocent goodness about him nonetheless, because he's doing it all for Daisy.
While in the original, Gatsby's love for Daisy might be too idealized (which leads to his downfall), in my story he truly loves her for herself; she's a real person to him, not just an ideal.
Q: Why do you think the Gatsby story has remained popular a century after the book came out?
A: It carries universal themes of lost love and what might have been. There's a lot of passionate longing for a purer, better world and an ideal kind of love. I think that longing remains in a lot of us. Gatsby is described as singularly optimistic and hopeful. That's what he's so appealing, despite his faults.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: It combines the beauty of Gatsby's heart with the wickedness of some things he does. Plus it appeals to the target audience, which would be readers who love a morally gray love interest. It was a joint effort among me, my agent, and my editor, along with the marketing team who tested the titles with a focus group.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just wrapped up edits on the second book in this series, Charming Devil, which is a retelling of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. I had a lot of fun writing it!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There will be at least three books in this series (the Gilded Monsters series) and I'm very excited to take classic retellings and give them a Southern gothic twist while infusing Irish lore and a modern edge.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment