I’ve heard from her a couple of times. Or rather my voice mail has. She’s living in New York now, has a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village with a spectacular view of a brick wall, she says. She says other things, too. That I should come to the city for the weekend, stay with her, for example. Or fly with her to Paris next month where she’s been commissioned for a group show. I have yet to call her back. The truth is, I’m afraid to. Just the sound of her recorded voice produces a violent rush of need in me. A need to slap her. To spit on her. To gouge out her eyeballs with my fingernails. To throw myself in her arms. I don’t want to know what seeing her in the flesh will do and I don’t want to find out.
Still, I can’t bring myself to delete the messages.
The last time I saw Nica before I died—well, almost died—was the last time I saw Nica. Until today, I’m hoping. I want a final glimpse, for her to come back and haunt me one more time.
It’s the anniversary of her death. A year has passed. Damon and I are in the graveyard, winding our way through the rows of snaggle-toothed tombstones. When we reach the oak, he hangs back as I arrange daffodils, picked from my house, at its base, then drop down into its shadow. Feeling the soft, cool give of damp earth beneath my knees, the sharp, green scent of new grass inside my nostrils, I clasp my hands together. I close my eyes, hold my breath.
I wait.
It’s the first truly warm day of spring, hot almost, though dimmish and overcast, the sun obscured by a layer of thin gray clouds. I’m willing my body to stay still inside so I can attune myself to Nica’s presence, detect its movement in the air and in the spaces between the air. But I can’t. Hard as I try, I can’t. All I hear is scattered birdsong. All I feel is sweat pebbling my skin.
Finally, after several minutes, I open my eyes. Brushing off my knees, I stand and walk back to Damon. I’m smiling so he won’t see my disappointment, guess at its source.
Still, he looks worried when he says, “You okay?”
I start to say yes but am unable to get the word out of my mouth. I nod instead.
He extends an arm. I lean against his side, though am mindful not to put my full weight on him. “Come on,” he says, guiding me toward the entrance. “Let’s get out of here.”
I allow him to lead me for a few feet. And then, suddenly, the stirrings of a memory. I break away, run back to the tree. Trailing my hand along the trunk, I come to a split, a hole within the split. No, not a hole, a hollow, I realize with excitement, the one Jamie told me about, the one he and Nica used to store things in. Thrusting my arm inside, I feel around. Empty. Behind me Damon’s saying my name in a questioning way and my elbow’s scraping painfully on bark and I’m about to give up when the tips of my fingers brush against something hard and smooth, light nearly as air. I pull it out. Nica’s zebra-striped Bic.
A breeze starts up. Two clouds slide past each other, letting down a beam of sunlight. The beam strikes the Bic. It seems to come to life in my palm, and I’m momentarily blind.
“Grace?” Damon says. “Grace?”
I slip the lighter in my pocket. I turn back to him.
AN INTERVIEW WITH
Lili Anolik
What inspired you to write Dark Rooms?
I knew I wanted to write a book about people still in their teens, still in high school. (Grace, at the start of the narrative, has in fact already graduated from high school but only just, only by a few months, and has yet to move on to college.) To me, high school is the beginning of adult life. Suddenly, it’s on, all of it. Everything’s viable—sex, drugs, serious consequences. A lot of your firsts happen in those years. First love. First sex. First heartbreak. First disillusionment. (There are so many kinds of innocence to lose.) And there can be huge experiential differences without strangeness. You can be a virgin or you can have circled the block a few too many times and still fall within the realm of normal. That never happens again in life. By the time you reach your 20s, things have more or less evened out.
Your characters inhabit a privileged world that is at times both emotionally detached and pressingly claustrophobic. What drew you to this setting?
In ninth grade I switched from public school to boarding school. The atmosphere in these places—boarding schools, I mean—is cloying, claustrophobic, hothouse. It’s also totally exhilarating, totally absorbing. These schools are worlds unto themselves, and isolated and hysteria-prone, so when something happens to one person—a suicide attempt or a breakdown—it seems to affect everybody.
The thing I was good at was sports. So when I was freshly fourteen (August birthday, I didn’t even have all my adult teeth yet!), I was on teams with girls who were seventeen, eighteen and nineteen—a jaded seventeen, eighteen and nineteen. All of them, it seemed, were from New York or L.A., and were just unbelievably fast and sophisticated and decadent and stylish. These girls weren’t just having sex, they were having sex on top of sex. They were having affairs, sometimes not even with boys their own ages but with actual grown men, friends of their fathers and things like that. I’d be on a bus with them, en route to an away game, listening to their bored, rich voices telling stories that were absolutely wild, absolutely filthy and my middle class suburban-kid eyes would be getting bigger and bigger in my head. These older girls—the older boys, too, I just had less exposure to them—represented all beauty and glamour to me. I was fascinated. Every day of my freshman year I was exhausted by dinner time because I paid attention so hard at school, just not to the school part of it.
Nica and Grace seem like such binary opposites at the start of the book – Grace: an achiever, naïve, the ‘good’ sister; Nica: rebellious, knowing, disdainfully aloof. Yet by the end, you’ve shown the reader how alike they are. Did you always envisage this transformation, or did the characters take you there on their own? And what does the relationship between sisters mean to you?
I was attracted to the idea of using sisters because—at least in the context of this story—sisters represent two versions of the same self, variations on a common theme, separate people but with a shared face, are each other’s double and opposite and doppelgänger. Nica is dead at the start of the book yet Grace sees Nica everywhere: in the mother’s photos, in other people’s memories, in her dreams, even in her reflection. It’s like Grace is living in a house of mirrors, only the image that is being split and multiplied and bounced back to her belongs to her sister rather than herself.
Secrets play a large role in your novel. Under what circumstances is secret-keeping necessary?
Secrets—at least certain secrets in certain circumstances—are unequivocally necessary. Secrecy can be synonymous with privacy. Can you imagine going through life Baring All, just revealing everything to everyone? Secrets also, though, can have a corrosive effect, especially on the person keeping them. And the most corrosive kind of secret, in my opinion, is the kind of secret you keep from yourself. That, to me, is Grace’s biggest problem at the beginning of the story: she can’t admit to herself that she knows what she knows.
The book feels very filmic – if it were to be made into a movie, who would you like to see play the lead characters? And would you give yourself a cameo and who would you be?
My dream cast would be Chloë Moretz as Nica. She’s got this hip, knowing quality—like going too far is, for her, the only way to go—that’s rare in someone so young. I don’t know who I’d pick for Grace. Amanda Seyfried? (Amanda and Chloë look so much alike: silky, slinky blondes with fishbowl eyes. Too bad Amanda’s crowning thirty.) If not Amanda Seyfried exactly, someone who is Amanda Seyfried-esque, someone with a soft, wide-eyed, ingenuous quality. I’d want Nicole Kidman for the mom. No one’s better at playing seductive monsters.
No cameo for moi. If I was in the movie—even for two seconds— it would kill the experience for me. Or rather, it would prevent me from even having the experience. I couldn’t just watch. I’d be staring at the screen, waiting for the moment I appeared and then cringing at how weird I looked and/or s
ounded.
You have created a family who appear to have been perfect on the outside before tragedy tore them apart, but gradually, through the prism of Nica’s death, Grace’s recollections show us that her family had always had a dark mark on its soul. How did get inside the skin of these characters? And did you always know that this family had such twisted secrets or did they reveal themselves to you as you wrote them?
Well, I have a favourite quote from Diane Arbus: “All families are creepy in a way.” Diane could not be more on the money as far as I’m concerned. All families are creepy in a way. And the agonies of family dysfunction—family creepiness—is what Dark Rooms is all about. The relationships in these little self- contained units, particularly the relationships between parents and children, are so primal, so powerful, so intense that distance or detachment is impossible. I don’t know how anyone wriggles free from his (or her) family’s grip psychologically speaking. Maybe no one ever does.
Nica and Grace’s mother is very hard to empathise with and comes across as very unmaternal. Was she a difficult character to write?
The mother is my favorite character in the book. She was certainly my favorite character to write. Of course she’s awful, a borderline monster, not even borderline. But she’s a wounded monster, too. Her life hasn’t worked out the way she wanted it to, so there’s this note of pathos. And there’s an integrity to her, as well. She’s an artist before she’s a mother, before she’s a human, really. In a perverse way she’s admirable. Perhaps because she’s so purely what she is, so purely hard and selfish. Plus she’s physically beautiful, which never hurts.
The book leaves you guessing right until the end. How did you do that? Did you change your mind throughout the writing process about who did it or did you always know?
I had trouble with the ending—had tried multiple different ones, none of which worked—but that’s because I was having trouble with something earlier in the book. (I didn’t realize I was having trouble. My editor, Kate Nintzel, had to point it out to me. Once she did, though, it seemed duh-duh obvious.) And when I straightened out the first trouble, the ending was a snap. By which I mean, I no longer had to think about possible endings because there was only one possible ending. Then all I had to do was write it.
What does the title, Dark Rooms, mean to you? Was it always the title of the book, or did it change at any point?
I came to the title late. Originally the book was called Nica’s Dream, the name the mother gave to the first important photo she took of Nica, the first important photo she took as an artist. (Incidentally, it’s also the name of a terrific Horace Silver tune.) The taking of that photo is such a pivotal moment. Not just for the mother, but for Nica, too. When Nica becomes her mom’s model and muse at age eleven her fate, in so many ways, is sealed. My editor, though, talked me out of the idea. She believes titles with the word “dream” in them are the kiss of death. Who wants to hear about somebody else’s dream? she asked me. I decided she had a solid point and went back to the drawing board.
I came up with Dark Rooms pretty quickly. The double meaning of it appealed to me. A dark room is, of course, the place where a photographer develops his or her photographs. A dark room, too, is a place where dark things happen—secretive things, mysterious things, disturbing things, sexual things; things, basically, that can’t bear the light of day.
Tell us how you wrote the book and came to be published. And what was the biggest challenge when writing the novel?
This story took a long time to tell—more than six years—and for me Dark Rooms is a personal obsession as much as it is a novel. So I suppose the toughest part of the process was the hanging in there part. Just sticking with the book and not giving up on it, doing rewrite after rewrite.
As for getting the book published, well, that was all the work of my excellent agent, Jenn Joel.
Which writers inspire you? And if you could have written any novel, which would you choose?
I’m drawn most deeply to stories that are heavy on mood and atmospherics, that are sly and seductive, that are spooky and have a fairy tale quality—books that get under your skin, in other words. Dickens’ Great Expectations was an early favorite. So was The Magus by John Fowles. And, more recently, I flipped for Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park. It’s a real oddball of a novel, a complete hodgepodge—a faux-memoir-slash-heebiejeebieville-gorefest-slash-surprisingly-moving-story about fathers and sons. There’s no way a combination like that should work, but somehow in Ellis’ hands it does. All three of these books are also, at their hearts, mysteries—for me the most seductive genre, hands down. A mystery functions like a magnet. Whenever there’s something that’s unknown or unresolved, it has a very strong pull to it. And finding out can become this fanatical thing, this impulse you have no control over.
Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch are huge influences, as well. Their movies (my two favorites are Vertigo and Mulholland Drive) are so gripping, so obsessive, so unrelenting—stories of love that are every bit as much stories of hate, mysteries that are never ending, characters and narratives that suck you right into the vortex.
What do you want the reader to take away from your novel?
Well, the book, as I said, was an obsession for me, and my hope is that the obsession is contagious. So, reader, get ready to embrace infection!
Acknowledgments
This book had been in the works a long time and I’d like to thank those who not only put up with me as I wrote it but helped me along the way: my mom and dad, Margie and Bill Holodnak, my agent, Jennifer Joel, my editor, Katherine Nintzel and her assistant, Marguerite Weisman. Also John Zilliax, Allison Lorentzen, Patrick Hunnicutt, Olette Trouve, Leslie Epstein, David Freeman, Dustin Thomason, John Searles, and Ike-0.
Above all, I’d like to thank my husband, Rob, who has read this book more times than anyone should ever have to read anything.
About the Author
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Elle and The Believer. She lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons and this is her debut novel.
Follow Lili on Twitter @LiliAnolik – she would love to hear from you.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
The Grip Lit Collection Page 91