So I also thought Persephone was definitely about me.
I was going back and forth between my dad - who lived in Seattle, where it’s cold and dark, and I was there for the winter - and then in the summer I was with my mom, in California, where it was warm and bright. It was not an entirely good situation with my parents and all of their conflict, and I was going back and forth between my mom and my dad. When I was a kid, Snow White seemed like a documentary of my life. It’s so natural to me that I have to go back to my childhood, to the fact that I was raised by a stepmother. What draws you to that approach to storytelling? Catherynne Valente The first thing I think about when I think about a Catherynne Valente book is that you’ll be taking this archetype that I did not even know I knew about and then ripping it into little shreds. On breaking down archetypes and building a voice Constance Grady This conversation been lightly edited for length and clarity. Over the course of our conversation, Valente covered everything from the feminism of Red Sonja to the suppression of women’s writing to the ever-vexing question of whether Elizabeth Gaskell is overrated. I sat down with Valente at this year’s Book Expo to talk about her latest books: Refrigerator Monologues, which is a kind of Vagina Monologues for the comic book heroines who have been “fridged” (i.e., killed as part of the hero’s tragic backstory), out in June and The Glass Town Game, a middle-grade novel in which the Brontë children are drawn into the imaginary world they created, out September 5. Whatever source materials her books draw from, they’re always witty, sparkling, and a delight to read.
Elsewhere, she’s remixed Russian folk tales and turned Snow White into a Western. She’s best known for her Fairyland books, a middle-grade series that takes the tropes of Victorian children’s stories and twists them around for the 21st century. Valente is the kind of writer whose books shout out the pleasure of the cultural remix.
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