Nghi Vo is the author of the new novella Don't Sleep with the Dead. It focuses on the character Nick Carraway from F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby. Vo's other books include The Chosen and the Beautiful, which also relates to The Great Gatsby. She lives on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Q: What inspired you to write Don’t Sleep with the Dead, and how do you see it connecting with The Chosen and the Beautiful?
A: Don’t Sleep with the Dead came to me title first, and I thought “what good advice.” Then I distinctly remember wondering who needed that advice, and the answer came, “Oh, clearly, Nick Carraway in the years following the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful.”
This novella looks in on Nick Carraway, heartbroken paper soldier and bystander in his own life story, two decades after the death of the most important man in his life. In a world on the brink of catastrophic war, Nick reckons with old ghosts and old love and what happens when you don’t put them to rest.
Q: What initially intrigued you about The Great Gatsby, and why do you think it still captures so many people's attention a century after its publication?
A: So the day we started studying The Great Gatsby when I was in high school, I nearly got run over by a car in the student parking lot. It really managed to bring home some of the themes about the lives we choose to lead, careless people, and vehicular manslaughter, let’s say that!
Honestly, I think the things that intrigued readers back then are the same things that intrigue us now. The Great Gatsby is a big story in 42,000 words. It’s ambition and love and wealth, and it’s the toxic intersection of all three. It’s a mirror of the American Dream, and when it ends with a smashup leaving three dead and one lost, well, that’s a story we know.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between your own versions of these characters and Fitzgerald’s originals?
A: Hmm, I’m really bad at balance. I think the way it should go is that you read The Great Gatsby, and then you read The Chosen and the Beautiful and Don’t Sleep with the Dead.
Maybe you start thinking about the way we tell stories, why we tell the stories we do, and what those stories look like when the narrators and the authors are so different. Maybe you think about a story you want to tell and what it’ll look like when you’re done. That’d be pretty cool.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “It’s an unadulterated joy to return to Vo’s queer, phantasmagoric take on Fitzgerald’s world.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think Publishers Weekly is very kind! Honestly, what it comes down to is that Don’t Sleep was unabashed fun to write, and I really hope it’s fun to read, too. That’s what I hope for all of my books.
Q: What are you working on now? Will you return to the Great Gatsby universe?
A: At the moment, I’m working on a novel set in the Gilded Age, and I’m at the stage where it all feels a bit like a sack of screaming potatoes. I assume this will pass. You can’t live in a sack of screaming potatoes forever. Probably.
And at the moment, no plans on the world of Chosen and Don’t Sleep, but you never know! I mean, I sure don’t.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Ooh, how about the fact that Fitzgerald was once invited to a theater performance of The Great Gatsby? Turns out, it was actually a local college doing a reader’s theater performance, and while Fitzgerald was maybe expecting something grander, he was incredibly gracious and appreciative about the whole thing. I thought that was pretty great.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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