Margot Harrison is the author of the new novel The Midnight Club. Her other books include the young adult novel Only She Came Back. She lives in Vermont.
Q: What inspired you to write The Midnight Club, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: When I started writing the very first version of this novel, in 1987, I was a college student who wanted to make a big literary statement about my generation. That was before the "Gen X" label was even used, but I kept seeing negative portrayals of people my age.
Media commentators would say that we were "empty" and "soulless" because we'd been raised on TV, that we had no commitments. It irked me, and I wanted to show that our irony was a coping strategy and not just a sign of numbness.
I struggled to find the right vehicle for my story, though. I knew my main character had had a jarring experience that left him with amnesia and a sense of being "empty inside," but I wasn't sure what that experience was—until 1992, when I read neurologist Oliver Sacks' New Yorker article about a patient who couldn't stop obsessively dreaming about his childhood memories and depicting them in artwork.
I knew then that my novel would be about a memory drug and people who were addicted to reliving their past. I've always been one of those people who can't stop dwelling on memories—a retrophile, I call them in the book. Even as a child, I felt nostalgic.
I think there are some generations that feel the weight of the past more than others, and Gen X is one of those, because we grew up in the long shadow of the 1960s and the cultural sea change that came with it. Everywhere we looked, there were boomers mythologizing their past. But would we ever have a past worth mythologizing? We weren't sure.
As decades passed, my college story turned into a story about middle-aged people confronting their past—which has more resonance, I hope—and my original main character, Hayworth, became a supporting character. Some of my current main characters appeared in all the drafts; others I created from scratch later on.
In the end, the passage of time gave me a perspective on my own college experience that allowed me to write about things I wouldn't have known how to describe at the time, such as Jennet's mental health struggles.
Q: This is your debut novel for adults, after writing for young adults--do you have a preference?
A: I love writing for both age groups! I've been reading YA since I discovered Judy Blume at age 8; there's just something about coming-of-age stories, a protagonist developing a sense of identity, that appeals to me. I feel like that process is never really over for any of us, so a good YA novel speaks to adults as well.
My YA novels were mostly for older teens, with a lot of dark themes, and I very rarely felt like I had to censor myself to write YA. I did learn a lot about picking up the pace and shortening my paragraphs and chapters to appeal more to "reluctant readers"—all techniques that have been useful in adult fiction as well.
But I do enjoy having a little more space just to explore the characters and their relationships without worrying about moving the plot along.
I've been keeping the two categories separate in my head by writing adult in third person, while my YA is in first person. So the YA has more of an immediate feel, like the character is speaking straight to you. But I think that can also be appropriate for adult fiction, if you have a story that needs a "voicey" quality!
Q: The writer Lev Grossman said of the novel, “The Midnight Club is a strange, riveting, brilliant fable about smart people seduced by the darkest, most forbidden fantasy. Like a fever-dream of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” What do you think of that description?
A: I'm honored and thrilled! I aspire to have everything I write be a bit of a fever dream for the reader.
Now here's some more irony: In 1992, when The Secret History was published, I instantly recognized it as having certain similarities to the book I was trying to write. Both are about smart, painfully self-conscious students doing shady things at Vermont liberal arts colleges, and a death is involved.
I ran out and bought a copy of The Secret History, but something stopped me from reading it to the end. I still haven't! Maybe I was afraid of letting it influence me too much.
Much later, when I started showing the manuscript that would become The Midnight Club to readers, they made the same comparison. I can't say how accurate it is, but I'm certainly flattered by it, since I'm in awe of how Donna Tartt's book has continued to gather new readers over the years, speaking to multiple generations.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: It's interesting, because when I started the book, the message was really just "Stop judging my generation; we're people with complexities, too!" It was valid, but it was kind of whiny and adolescent. In its final form, the book is less about my generation specifically and more about how people in general relate to their past.
I'm haunted by the question the Talking Heads ask in "Once in a Lifetime": "How did I get here?" We all have the person we aspire to be, and then there's the person we end up being instead, and often we're not sure how that happened. Where did we go "wrong"? How did we fall short of our dreams for ourselves? Somewhere in middle age, people tend to confront these questions, and my characters are no exception.
What the memory drug ultimately teaches them is a tough lesson of acceptance. Even if our lives came with infinite do-overs, we would never be satisfied.
At some point we have to come to terms with the fact that this is the only life we have, and we can still choose to enjoy what it offers, regardless of whether it fits some ideal template. We can define success and happiness on our own terms instead of letting other people define them for us.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm drafting a novel about a special library with a touch of magic, and two people who go on a quest to find a book that is reputed to foretell the future. On a deeper level, it's about book love and how the books we read shape our sense of ourselves, for good and for ill.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Please visit me at margotharrison.com for more about my books. And if you're interested in unlocking your own memories of childhood book love, watch my retro YA book reviews on TikTok at @margotfharrison! I'm all about Gen X nostalgia there.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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