An Interview with Rachel Cochran, Author of THE GULF

​Matthew Turbeville:  This book--The Gulf—features a lot of representation I would have liked to see, especially together, in genre fiction as a younger person, specifically as someone who identifies as both Southern and queer.  What were the books you wanted to see growing up, and which books guided you and provided examples for the ways you wanted to write and see yourself in literature as an adult? 
Rachel Cochran: I think by definition, “the book you wanted to see growing up” isn’t something you could have named at the time, since so often books give us the language and the frameworks we need to navigate what we experience. I was such a lost kid—in terms of my sexuality, in terms of the abuse I was experiencing at home—it would have been immensely valuable to encounter a book that reflected my experience back at me and gave it a name. But those books weren’t really available to me in conservative rural southern Texas in the ’90s. As it was, I didn’t recognize myself in realist books, the kinds about girls who had sleepovers and gossiped about boys—though of course I enjoyed reading those books and learning from them in an almost anthropological light. Instead, like many outsider kids, I saw myself in fantasy characters. Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness books has Alanna, who was this girl who dressed like a boy so she could train to become a knight, since women couldn’t be knights. Like Alanna, I was short, and attuned to the inherent unfairness of gendered systems, and I think there was a part of me who also felt that, like Alanna, I was keeping this big, important secret about my identity from everyone around me, one that could get me in danger if it got out, even if I didn’t quite articulate that to myself at the time. 
 
MT: You write a story set in the 1970s about a war, a mysteriously dead woman, a secret same-sex relationship—as well as a number of other important, still-relevant topics today, especially dealing with issues of race and class in the South.  Why set the novel in the 1970s as opposed to today? What do you think are the benefits—as opposed to the difficulties—you faced when writing this novel in this time period? 
RC: As a writer of historical fiction, I’m mostly interested in using history as a framework to reflect on the current moment. I look for moments in history that help me see the present within a context, that maybe even help me read the tea leaves of what’s coming next. I think the early ’70s drew me because it’s what follows the ’60s—this teetering moment between the great spirit of progressivism and activism of the late ’60s into a sort of growing sense of disaffected cynicism and corruption and distrust of authority and systems, which reminded me of that queasy transition we’d experienced going from the Obama era into the Trump era, into #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and the highlighting of so many of the hidden abuses and inequities that have been built into the structures of our societies, and what it means for those things to come into the public conversation in the way they did. It’s not a perfect parallel, but it felt like an echo, and going into and learning about that period in history gave me someplace to focus my anxieties as a contemporary citizen. Also, there’s this troubling narrative I tend to encounter outside of those conservative spaces I grew up in, that these problems areconsigned to history and don’t still exist in the same way today. I’ve written nonfiction essays about my own upbringing and had readers express doubt that I would have experienced those kinds of regressive attitudes in the ’90s and ’00s. I think if I wrote a contemporary novel in which, for instance, the main character feels the need to hide her same-sex relationship from her family and community, I’d get a lot of privileged readers trying to cry foul, or even see it as a personal failure of the character—there’d be this expectation that the arc of the novel would be a coming out story. In a paradoxical way, I tried to use the historical framework to highlight the real human stakes of being closeted versus out, hopefully giving contemporary readers a depiction that will help them have compassion for those who aren’t or can’t come out even today depending on their home communities. 
 
MT: I’m really interested in stories about homecoming, especially in crime fiction.  In The Gulf, it’s interesting because Lou, the protagonist, isn’t exactly the fish-out-of-water, new to returning to smalltown life—it’s Joanna who returns home.  Still, I think the same elements of homecoming stick here—returning to a person or place that’s somehow foreign to the protagonist, forcing to relate to and understand past traumas, uncovering small town secrets, lies, deceptions—while it isn’t Lou who is coming home (at least literally, in this novel), she does have her own sort of homecoming in a way.  Can you talk about this a little bit? 
RC: I adore this question, and I think I could read an infinite number of novels featuring a protagonist who returns to her hometown and solves a mystery there--Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn and Tana French’s In the Woods were both big influences on me as I wrote The Gulf, and more recently books like Flight Risk by Joy Castro, The Good Ones by Polly Stewart, and I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai do this so well too. I think the thrill of these books is the sense of rediscovery, of revisiting old truths with new eyes that force you to see them differently. But you don’t have to leave and come back for a rediscovery to be triggered. I think every single Kazuo Ishiguro book—all of which I adore, by the way—is evidence of this. Lou has reached a moment in life where so much has been horribly shaken up. A storm has torn apart the only town that’s ever been a stable home for her, and now her family is pressuring her to leave. Her surrogate mother figure has died in this brutal, violent way, and no one else seems to care. And now one of the most important people from her past, whose betrayal has left this open wound that’s been festering for fifteen years, has come back into her life. All of this acts as a catalyst for Lou to look back through things she’s known, or thought she’s known, for years and years. But for the first time, the stakes are high enough that she’s finally willing to question the assumptions she’s made that have kept her safe from the real knowledge, the dangerous knowledge that was staring her in the face all along. One of the hallmarks of a homecoming novel, too, is that the protagonist is confronted by the often unpleasant reality of who they were and how they were perceived by others in the past, which can cause some painful identity reckoning, and we see Lou do that in The Gulf too. 
 
MT: What makes Joanna so alluring to Lou, especially now that Lou seems to be so settled into her own way of life finally? There’s this sense that Joanna represents the toxic loves so many of us have faced in the past, especially in queer communities, and especially in the South, where so many people are forced (or believe they are forced) to be closeted.  What drove you to write about this sort of relationship, and how did you work to make it understandable for readers? 
RC: There are Gothic undertones in the book, where the pull of obsession and curiosity and extreme human emotions like rage and desire outweigh reason. There’s also something about the femme fatale in Joanna—maybe not inherently, but in the way Lou perceives her. So, from a genre perspective, that’s why Joanna is able to disrupt Lou’s stability so dramatically. As far as a full psychological profile of Lou, I’d add that Lou has an outsized sense of both connection and repulsion toward Joanna. Lou’s settled into her life, sure, but she definitely hasn’t moved on, and everything’s so unresolved that it bubbles up with such brutal force when Joanna reappears. I wanted to depict this because I think a lot about those furtive, deeply damaging relationships that we fall into when everything has to be so underground, unspoken, unsupported, and in denial—as you say, the “toxic loves” a lot of queer folks experience. In terms of making it understandable to the reader, I think probably there are going to be a lot of readers who don’t understand why Lou is acting the way she is—I had a feeling from the beginning that I’d struggle with the “likeable female character” problem here—but crime literature in particular is full of messy male characters who act in self-destructive ways, so my hope was to make Lou an extension of that, but still worth loving.
 
MT: I loved this book because it was so many things I love in one place: beautifully written, involving mystery, a possible murder, queer (and, therefore, forbidden) romance—so many wonderful things in the same place.  What brought you to write a book like this, and what are the books that you feel have combined a lot of the things you (as a reader) have always been interested in seeing together in new and visionary ways? 
RC: Every time I come up with a novel idea, I’m secretly challenging myself to write something as good as Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, which I think is one of the most marvelous love stories, crime novels, and historical novels all rolled into one. It made me gasp at almost every page, and that’s the reading experience I’m dying to give my readers. To some extent I’m also trying to add queer identities more explicitly—or more centrally and favorably—to some of the literary-quality genre fiction I’ve always loved, where queerness is often a rather cheap reveal, or unfortunately tethered to sinful associations or motives for murder. In addition to Fingersmith, I’ve really enjoyed recent novels like S.A. Razorblade Tears—which, for all its focus on queer trauma, takes homophobia more seriously than I often see and is all about examining its roots and its consequences. Another recent stunner is Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House, which is Gothic and speculative, structured like a thriller, with this perfectly messy, queer protagonist. Rosalie Knecht’s Vera Kellybooks are wonderful in a similar way. I’ll add another favorite: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which is so formally absorbing, multitextural, and strange that it ends up reading like a mystery, as well.
 
MT:  What books were most interesting to you in your formational years, and which of these books continue to bleed over into your current reading and writing habits?  What are the books you feel you enjoyed most when you were younger—or even recently—but feel enough people don’t know about, or should get more love in general? 
RC: I became obsessed with Mary Renault in high school, particularly her novel The Charioteer and all of her queer ancient Greek stories like The Last of the Wine and her Alexander the Great books. I feel like she isn’t studied and celebrated as much as she should be as someone who wrote about queer love before that was in any way widely accepted. Other subversively queer mysteries are the playful, campy, borderline-Wodehouse whodunnits by Sarah Caudwell, which I adore, and all of which deserve more attention. Amitav Ghosh’s The Ibis trilogy, which I encountered as an undergraduate, are also all-time favorites and absolutely breathtaking achievements of polyphonic historical fiction, including exceptional research and plotting. None of these books are obscure, exactly, but I feel a special connection when I encounter someone else who’s read them. All of these books gave me a new sense of what fiction could do, and how it could do it. I don’t really write like any of these writers, but every time I open any of their books I find I’m learning something entirely new.
 
MT:  This book qualifies as a work of historical fiction, but it’s also about a lot of things that might not have been traditionally written about in 1970s Texas.  What are the issues you feel we face today which not enough people currently write and read about, which you think will be written about prominently by future generations who aren’t afraid to tackle tougher, more difficult topics? What are the things you still want to write about yourself? 
RC: I think we’re living in an interesting age where people can and do speak directly and openly to their personal experiences, and find a platform doing so, more than ever before. So I’ve found my way into a nice digital echo chamber where what I consider the most important topics are written about and discussed, often and with great depth, nuance, research, analysis, and care. Sometimes I forget the algorithms’ role in all this when I talk to people who are outside of these spaces—how little understood fatphobia and ableism, for instance, are within the larger cultural context. Or the experiences of trans and nonbinary folks, particularly trans people of color, especially the correlation between the individual and systemic violence these communities face and the ways they are being scapegoated by public figures in harmful culture war fearmongering. In terms of literature, traditional publishers need to continue to work to center these voices, not only in what they publish and the sorts of stories these writers are permitted to tell but also in their own ranks. For myself, I want to continue to write stories that explore the imbalances of power that have affected my life—the ones I’ve been on the disempowered side of, as well as the ones that privilege me and people like me. In order to do this well, I’m going to have to continue to listen to and learn from writers and artists from all over. Luckily, there’s so much vibrant work out there now if you go looking for it.
 
MT: What came first for you? The mystery, the characters, the setting? What comes last for you when writing, and what do you feel is the most important part of any particular novel? 
RC: With The Gulf, what came first for me was the setting, then the mystery, and then I discovered the characters and all their interconnected depth as I went along. With other projects, I’ve found slightly different variations on this sequence, though I do think setting is always first, since the time and place we live in so deeply shapes who we are and how we behave. Even so, I’m not sure there’s a single most important part—each novel is going to demand a different approach. As far as books I’ve read, there are mysteries I love where I couldn’t tell you where they took place—for instance, the work of Megan Abbott. I find her characters so vivid, but I’d have to look it up to name a specific state any one of her books took place in. In her case, it’s the milieu that’s so important, like the world of ballet and the world of competitive gymnastics and so on. For other mysteries, the time and place are everything, like with the Easy Rawlins books, or The Name of the Rose, or The Historian, all of which are all about their specific moments in history and their unique geographies.
 
 
MT: What’re you working on now, if you can give me any insight into your current work in progress at all? Can you give us any hints as to what your next great novel might be, where it might be set, what it might be dealing with, and if it’ll still be a work of crime fiction? 
RC: I have a couple of different projects at various stages of development. One is a Victorian Gothic set in a finishing school on a remote island, where the sudden disappearance of one of the students throws everything into chaos. Another one is a sort of jaunty noir—think The Thin Man—set in a Depression-era sorority. As you can see, I’m interested in communities of girls or women within larger patriarchal contexts, and I’m also interested in the campus novel as a general concept and how institutions of learning end up reinforcing the power structures of the societies that create them. There’s some element of crime to all my current projects. It’s a genre I adore reading, and it nearly always finds its way into my work.
 
MT: Thank you so much for allowing me to pick your brain for Writers Tell All.  I really loved the Gulf and hope that all of my readers will go out and pick up a copy immediately.  Thank you so much again, Rachel. 
RC: Thank you for these generous and marvelous questions!

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