T Kira Madden on Finding a Safe Place to Land With Her Searching New Novel, ‘Whidbey’

There is, to put it simply, no book quite like T Kira Madden’s Whidbey, a literary thriller that braids together the perspectives of three protagonists—two survivors of childhood sexual abuse and the mother of their recently deceased abuser—with skill and astonishing empathy. If it’s short on facile platitudes about what it means to live through something awful, it just might reconfigure your expectations about what it means to live at all.

This week, Vogue spoke to Madden about moving from memoir to fiction, shadowing projectionists and gas station attendants to get a feel for her characters’ worlds, creating a mood board for her writing projects, and complicating our cultural understanding of abuse. Read that conversation below.

Vogue: How does it feel to be making the leap from memoir to fiction? How do the two differ for you in terms of craft?

T Kira Madden: It feels really good! I’ve wanted to be a fiction writer my entire life. I studied fiction, my MFA’s in fiction, and all my first failed books were works of fiction. My first published book happened to be memoir, but that was never the plan, so it’s amazing to finally publish a novel. Craft-wise, I would say I work pretty similarly, because with both fiction and nonfiction, I do try to write from a place of discovery and allowing the story to tell me where it wants to go instead of hyper-imposing a narrative or hypothesis onto the story of what I want to say. I always have a set of questions that I want to work with that feel unanswerable or prickly or complicated, as well as a list of scenes that I would really like to write. I was always excited by the filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s idea that all of your utility scenes should become scenes of desire. I kind of stand by that, and I have those images and scenes in mind, and then it’s just kind of the act of discovery and getting to know the characters, getting to know what the world of the story will be. Ultimately, that informs the shape and the style.

Can you tell me a little bit about the research that went into making your protagonists’ lives and professions so vivid?

I love characters with jobs. The book is born of some real life-trauma and experiences of being a survivor of early childhood sex abuse that I have written about, but I really wanted the day-to-day moments of these women’s lives to feel like a complete departure from my own, in order for me to feel like I could really access the fictional world and possibilities of the project. Linzie King is a former reality-show star who worked at a mall, so that’s one experience I do have; I used to work on film sets, never a reality TV show, but I understand a little bit about production and film and how that works. I’ve talked to many people over many years about the production of such shows and read every Bachelor Nation book I could get my hands on, including the memoirs of reality television show stars. For Mary-Beth Boyer, I talked to lots of both current and former gas station attendants—mostly at Stewart’s gas stations in upstate New York—who allowed me to kind of move through their day-to-day tasks with them. For Birdie Chang, who works as a film projectionist while digital is kind of taking over theaters, I worked with Lillian Hardester, a projectionist at Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park, and she let me shadow her. That really informed the story so much more than any other job, in terms of opening up the metaphors of film projection and damage inspection reports and how that might inform how Birdie kind of lives and thinks.