Laura Brooke Robson is the author of the new novel A Curse for the Homesick. Her other books include the young adult novel Girls at the Edge of the World. She lives in New York.
Q: What inspired you to write A Curse for the Homesick, and how did you create your characters Tess and Soren?
A: I had (have?) a fraught relationship with my hometown. I grew up in the mountains of Oregon, which is an exceedingly beautiful place—but I was one of those high schoolers who couldn't get out of town quickly enough.
A Curse for the Homesick is about that feeling. Tess, like me, feels claustrophobic in the place where she was born. She worries she'll be trapped by the place, trapped by limited opportunities, and trapped by the expectations for women on the island.
I've always been of the school of thought that the best works of speculative fiction are the ones that use their fantastical premises to make the metaphorical more literal.
In A Curse for the Homesick, women in Stenland are occasionally cursed to turn anyone they see to stone. This is magical, of course, but it captures a very real feeling I had growing up—that by being a woman, I had unwanted punishment and power thrust upon me.
I was afraid of being confined into a domestic space by virtue of being a woman—which is exactly what happens to cursed women in Stenland.
But then as I wrote Stenland, I found myself writing from an unexpected place of love. Because though I couldn't leave the mountains of Oregon quickly enough, I also love that place.
Tess and Soren sprang out of these dueling parts of myself. Tess is preoccupied by her fear of Stenland; Soren is preoccupied by his love of it.
Q: How would you describe the relationship between Tess and Soren?
A: Tess and Soren fall in love with a number of people a number of times over the course of this book, but they love each other first. They're home to each other—with all the baggage that comes with home.
I hoped to write two people who wanted to be together for all the right reasons—that they were their most genuine selves around each other, that they believed deeply in their love story—and yet who were separated by something sad and possibly immovable—that he does not wish to leave home, and she does not wish to return.
When writing a love story, there has to be conflict. It's tempting to make that conflict something easily fixable, like a lost letter or a miscommunication. But I think it's more satisfying to let the characters be honest with the readers and each other.
Q: The writer Ava Reid called the novel a “lyrical, melancholy, and deeply moving story about the people we love and the places we long for, even when we know we shouldn’t.” What do you think of that description?
A: Incredibly lovely and incredibly flattering. Ava is such a talented writer—and it's such a joy to see someone you admire pick out the theme you most wanted to capture.
Q: You’ve also written for young adults--do you have a preference?
A: I sold my first published novel, Girls at the Edge of the World, when I was a senior in college—and extremely self-conscious about anyone realizing that I was very young and foolish.
It made sense, then, for me to write about being 17—an age that felt recent enough to be interesting but far enough that I felt I had something of use to say.
Now I am 28 and (for the time being) interested in slightly different questions and slightly older phases of life. So A Curse for the Homesick is about being in your early 20s.
This is all just to say that I love both YA and adult, but I tend to find it most satisfying to explore the age I just left.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A love story about technology and music and the evergreen question of how you know whether your relationship is good or not. It's weird and funny! More soon.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I talked a lot about the romantic love story of this book, but it's also a love story about friends. It's a book that would not have been possible without my friends, and I hope it's a book that you want to share with yours.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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