Matthew Aquilone is the author of the new novel The Stager. He works for the staging company Vesta, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Bellingham Review. He lives in Brooklyn.
Q: How much did your own experience in staging inspire your new novel?
A: Ironically, I started this book before I ever staged an apartment. I was working for an interior decorator who was designing model apartments for a new luxury high rise.
That's similar to staging of course, but it wasn't until I began to work for an actual staging company that I saw what the industry itself was like. It's nowhere near as idiosyncratic (or expensive!) as full interior design.
Fundamentally though, the idea is the same: to give a human presence to an otherwise unoccupied home, and to give the prospective buyer a chance to imagine themselves inside it.
Of course, my background in design - as a stylist, window dresser, showroom designer - played a big part. For years I had wanted to write something that touched on that other part of my creative background.
Q: Why did you decide to set the novel during the Covid pandemic?
A: The pandemic provided the perfect vehicle in which to let Maya's character play out - her insecurity, self-delusion, denial, as well as her optimism and persistence all got flame tested in her isolation.
Also, The Stager is a real New York story, and we were hit in a particularly hard way by the pandemic, but we also came together in unprecedented way. I wanted to show all that too.
Q: How did you create your character Maya?
A: I knew I wanted a character who just wouldn't give up, although I wasn't going to make it easy for her. Framing the book in the first person really helped. Let's face it, Maya lives a lot in her head. Once I put myself in there with her, she just blossomed.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I didn't have the ending until very late in the process. I wanted Maya to be transformed by the end and I knew that she and her friend Clarissa were going to have to come to terms with their broken friendship.
So I knew generally where I was headed but I made a lot of changes along the way. It was so much fun following Maya and watching as she made decisions good and bad.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am finishing a novel based on my experiences in the fashion industry. It's centered around another female protagonist, a fashion exec who is confronting life choices as she balances motherhood, middle age and a changing industry. It's another New York story, funny and satirical.
I am also continuing work on a memoir project based on the AIDS crisis and how it affected my family. It is a story of our Brooklyn brotherhood.
I had a writing residency this summer in Connecticut. I had a lovely little cabin beside a pond. It was the perfect environment to concentrate on challenging material like this, and to recharge my creative energies.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The Stager is the tenth book that I've written and the first to get published. I had a lot of close calls along the way. If I'm like Maya at all it's that I've learned that maybe the biggest part of success is just refusing to give up. If you believe in your work and in yourself you're 80 percent there already.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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