With Kaylie Seed
Photo by Sarah Shatz
The setting within The Glass Hotel goes between Canada and the United States. What kind of research did you have to do to gain insight into all of the different places your characters find themselves?
I hold dual citizenship between the United States and Canada—I was born and raised in Canada, but my father’s originally from California—which makes crossing the border a fairly frictionless experience. I think that because I’m used to moving easily across that border, my books tend to do the same thing. I grew up on and around Vancouver Island, so I didn’t need to do much in the way of geographical research. I’ve been living in New York City for the past seventeen years, so I know the city very well, but something I tried to convey in the book is that people living at different income levels live in fundamentally different cities, so I did have to do some research into what it might be like to be a billionaire in New York City. (Things like the existence of house managers, and how many housekeepers you need per thousand square feet for your mansion, that kind of thing.)
The only setting that required sustained research was the container ship. I read a fascinating book on the topic—Ninety Percent of Everything, by Rose George—and spent a lot of time reading blogs and watching YouTube videos by seafarers.
There are a few different characters that the reader follows throughout The Glass Hotel. Can you tell our readers where your inspiration for Vincent and Jonathan came from and how you developed their distinct voices?
I’ll start with Jonathan. Every character in this book is completely fictional, but the central crime in the story is closely based on Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which imploded in New York City in 2008. I was fascinated by that crime, but the thing is, while the crime was interesting, the criminal was not. If you read prison interviews with Bernie Madoff, he’s an utterly uninteresting figure, just a garden-variety sociopath blaming everyone else for his downfall. So with Jonathan, I wanted to create a character who’d committed this horrible act, but who wasn’t completely two-dimensional. He’s a criminal, but he’s capable of kindness, and he truly loved his first wife.
Once I realized that the story was going to revolve around a financial crime, I realized that by default, I was writing about money as a theme. That became an organizing principle of the book: I decided early on that every section had to be about money in one way or another. I’ve always been interested in the phenomenon of trophy wives, these young women who monetize their beauty and make a very clear and mercenary choice in who they marry. I liked the idea of a wildly intelligent trophy wife, because that just wasn’t a character I’d seen before, and that’s where Vincent came from.
The Glass Hotel touches on some heavy topics including addiction. Why did you decide to explore this subject and what do you hope readers took away with them from your story?
I've known a number of people over the years with addiction issues, and have a lot of sympathy for their struggles. I didn’t write the story with a message in mind; I just hope that people find it to be an interesting book.
Writing a novel is challenging, particularly one of this caliber. What did you learn while going through the process of creating and writing The Glass Hotel? Either regarding the topics within your novel and/or about yourself as an author?
This novel was very, very difficult to write. My previous novels only took about two and a half years to write; The Glass Hotel took five. I learned a lot about perseverance. There were a couple of moments where I contemplated turning the novel into two unrelated novellas—one of them a ghost story set partly on a ship, the other one about a Ponzi scheme—because I didn’t feel like I had the skill or the talent to pull all of the threads together into a unified whole.
You have written a fantastic novel that has gained a lot of praise and attention: will there be another book from you soon and if so, can you tell us a bit about it?
Thank you for calling it fantastic! There will be another book, but probably not soon. I’ve been focused on a TV project lately, which I’ve very much enjoyed—I’m involved in adapting The Glass Hotel as a limited series.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors who are working on their first few novels and are trying to navigate the publishing world?
I think an important idea starting point is that you shouldn’t assume the publishing world is closed to you. There’s a false narrative out there that in order to be published, you have to live in the right place, or know the right people, or have the right degree, or go to the right parties. It just isn’t true. I mean, let's be clear, I assume those things don’t hurt, but I don’t have a high school diploma, let alone an MFA, and I knew absolutely no one when I was starting out. My first agent found me in her slush pile. I do live in Brooklyn, but to be honest I’ve never perceived any career benefit from this; I love living here because it’s an interesting and beautiful place, but also it’s an expensive place to live and even before Covid I wasn’t going to book parties (nine out of ten of them are super boring!)
Other practical matters: you will likely never have enough time to write, because you’ll need to fit your writing around the margins of your day job, or your childcare responsibilities, or whatever else life throws at you, so it’s important to be ruthless with your time. In the pre-pandemic world, when I used to see friends, I had a pretty firm rule that if I had lunch plans with a friend on a Monday, I probably didn’t have time to see another friend for at least a couple days afterward, because I needed to get some writing done. I mostly stopped going to book parties years ago, because like I said they’re usually boring, and also they take up too much time. Also I don't watch nearly as much television as I'd like to, because there just aren't enough hours in the day.
Related: if you tell yourself that you can only work under particular circumstances—e.g. in your home office, at a certain hour of the day, with a certain amount of time available to you to work, etc.—you’ll get much less work done than if you can train yourself to write anywhere, under almost any circumstances. (Can you write for a half-hour at your kitchen table with noise-blocking headphones while your kid’s watching Sesame Street? Or assuming this pandemic ends, could you grab 45 minutes at Starbucks on your lunch break?)
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
I think the books that have influenced me the most are Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. I find Mailer pretty hit-or-miss and dislike several of his books, but The Executioner’s Song has a clarity and lucidity about it that changed the way I write. Suite Française is my idea of a perfect novel; again, that quality of clarity and lucidity that I value so highly, and in a kind of deceptive simplicity that’s a pleasure to read and really hard to pull off. Await Your Reply changed the way I think about structure and point of view