Julia Fine, the critically acclaimed author of What Should Be Wild, continues to impress with her sophomore novel The Upstairs House, a deliciously unnerving account of a postpartum woman’s encounter with the ghost of modernist writer Margaret Wise Brown.
The Upstairs House is a masterpiece of juggling multiple genres and themes while blurring the lines of reality that neither the narrator nor the reader can quite understand. Days after giving birth, Megan begins to hear and see Margaret Wise Brown in her apartment building. After her family dismisses her claims, she sets out to form a relationship with Margaret’s ghost. What follows is a carefully built narrative about femininity, motherhood, and high-stakes choices on both Megan and Margaret’s parts. When Margaret’s old lover Michael Strange (the pen name of the poet Blanche Oelrichs) creeps into the story, Megan realizes her new ghost neighbors might actually be a danger to her newborn daughter. What is it about these two women’s past that have brought them into Megan’s life? And what will send them away?
While not fully a ghost story, The Upstairs House is chilling in all the right spots and has sections of Megan’s all-but-abandoned dissertation interjecting throughout the book, creating a unique hybrid novel that intellectually unpacks a time in women’s lives far too often ignored in literature. Fine’s unapologetic presentation of female relationships and postpartum struggles makes The Upstairs House a novel you’ll think about for weeks after turning the last page.
Sara Cutaia
Can you talk a little about how the idea for this story came to you? Did you know much about Margaret Wise Brown before, or did the author of Goodnight Moon (and the book itself) warrant more investigation?
Julia Fine
I’d read Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny as a child, but it wasn’t until I started reading them to my own kid that I really took an interest. I was struck by how many times I could read Goodnight Moon in particular without losing interest. It’s a simple book, but deceptively so. At a certain point, I think I did a quick recon on Margaret Wise Brown, who was drastically different than I’d imagined her. Once I started reading her biography (Awakened by the Moon by Leonard Marcus), I knew I wanted to write about her. She was a rabbit hunter, she was bisexual, she died incredibly young—I got so much more out of her work once I mentally recast her, and I wanted to share the Margaret I’d found. At the same time, I was grappling with being a new parent, and the shock of the fourth trimester. I felt like I hadn’t seen much brutal honesty about the immediate postpartum period, and it felt like an area I could explore in fiction. With a bit of work, I combined these two interests into The Upstairs House.
Sara Cutaia
The parts of the book that explore Megan’s fear and desire for safety jumped off the page at me. Was fear a main emotion you were trying to tap into both for a “ghost” story and for a “new transition of life” narrative?
Julia Fine
I definitely wanted to build suspense. At first I envisioned this book as a Hitchcockian treatment of a postpartum mother, though once I added Margaret that obviously shifted into more of a ghost story. I do think that any major life transition narrative, specifically one about becoming a parent, is its own sort of ghost story. When you have kids, you say goodbye to the person you were before they were born, and no matter how much you love your new role, I think there’s always at least a bit of you haunted by who you might have been, and who you once were. I see this as a book about conflicting desires. I wanted to normalize the resentment and the exhaustion and the second guessing that we’ve made taboo when talking about early parenthood, and to show how it can and does go hand in hand with the love and the joy.
Sara Cutaia
I was very intrigued by the idea of lineage and the mother/daughter relationship. For nearly every female character, a link to her mother was pivotal to her identity. I also saw that in your first novel, What Should Be Wild. Are these relationships you’re naturally drawn to write about?
Julia Fine
I definitely gravitate toward mother/daughter relationships. The largest risk factor for postpartum psychosis is a family history of psychotic episodes, so the biology of that relationship was always very much in play for The Upstairs House. I consider myself a feminist writer, which to me means looking closely at the sociocultural influences that determine how women view themselves and the world around them. Mothers, even in absentia, play such a massive role in their daughters’ lives. I’m interested in what gets passed on to their daughters, and in turn how being a daughter functions as an identity.
Sara Cutaia
The somewhat hybrid nature of the book’s structure was so fun to read. At what stage did Megan’s dissertation, complete with footnotes, become a central part of the narrative?
Julia Fine
I figured out the structure fairly late in the game. I knew I needed to give my readers background on Margaret and her career and the literary world that she moved in, or else aspects of Megan’s story wouldn’t make sense. I had a lot of fairly dry, expository information to convey, and I experimented unsuccessfully for a while. When I landed on the dissertation, it worked perfectly because it was more than just info dumping—we get to see Megan’s world before she became a mother, and then watch her try to reconcile competing demands and desires after her baby is born. I had a lot of fun writing those sections, especially toward the end of the book.
Sara Cutaia
On that same note, the unpacking of language added such an intelligent and distanced lens to Megan, but also to the atmosphere of the book as a whole. When things began to get uncomfortable, Megan turned to the roots and origins of words. How do you see that relationship to words affecting all the levels: from writer to character to reader?
Julia Fine
My hope is that Megan’s attention to language throughout the book will prompt readers to think more deeply about words. Language is imperfect, but it’s by far the best tool we have to communicate ideas. I find etymology, as a sort of collective (if mostly subconscious) baseline, very useful as a writer—when you peel back layers of meaning, you can say so much with so little. Margaret clearly had an appreciation for words as well. Her work was based on the scientific research she and her colleagues did at the Bureau of Educational Experiments—because she was trying to communicate with young children, she approached language in the way a young child might. When you read her books, you realize she was juggling the usual tasks of rhythm and story, but also diction that would resonate with her readers.
Sara Cutaia
I’m personally dying to know: Are you as much of a fan of the modernist writers as Margaret and Michael were? And if so, what book would you recommend for readers who want to dive in more fully to that era?
Julia Fine
I think I’m too much of a Romantic to ever really be in the upper echelons of modernist fans. I’m drawn to Margaret because of how she blends romanticism and modernism. My appreciation for Gertrude Stein’s work is mostly sentimental—my grandmother was an English teacher and introduced me to “a rose is a rose” at a very young age. I do think Djuna Barnes (Nightwood) is brilliant. Like most teenage wannabe writers, I read Portrait of the Artist in high school and felt a lot of artistic angst.
FICTION
The Upstairs House
By Julia Fine
Harper
Published February 23, 2021
