Let me tell you a little story. Once, at a writing conference in Muncie, Indiana, I was teaching a master class on revision. I had offered the entire room the chance to send me some pages for comment ahead of time. Right. That’s a lot of pages. I will probably never do that again.
But it worked out well for that group. Everyone got a little direct feedback on their project in progress, and everyone was happy. But maybe no one was happier than the young man I pulled aside at the end of the day and asked, “How much of this book do you have written? It’s really very good.”
That young man was—is—Victor Suthammanont, this month launching his debut novel Hollow Spaces, the story of a lawyer accused of murder who, in facing down the US justice system, wins but also loses.
Launching the publishing career I (pats self on back) predicted! One thing, though. I called this a little story, not a short story. Because, from Suthammanont’s perspective, it was anything but. The project he was working on at the time we met, as much promise as it held, never sold.
But Victor is really very good. And, importantly, determined to do the work. Since that long-ago writerly meet-cute, since that early praise from yours truly that probably felt great but maybe has seemed like a curse a few times since, Suthammanont has put years of effort into his craft, writing and discarding at least one complete novel before striking on the right story.
Hollow Spaces is the right story. It is ambitious, both gorgeously rendered and highly readable, and far too timely for comfort. It is accomplished. It’s a debut novel that stands on the shoulders of the work Suthammanont did and threw out—as good as it is probably because he dug deep and started over.
Writing novels is challenging, and there are no guarantees. Natural ability, whew, what an albatross. The real work is in, yeah, revision—in building the ability to see one’s own work clearly enough to make it stronger. And maybe the real work is also in revising expectations of how the work will go, how long it will take, how it will be received, in what success will look like, and in what will be gained, despite road blocks, despite what might look like failure from the outside.
Very talented people give up. I’m just glad, this time, I was right. But Victor Suthammanont worked really hard so that I could be.
I talked to Victor Suthammanont by email about his brand-new publishing career, craft decisions he made for the book, and about writing and not writing about race. And about, oh, right, revision. This conversation has been lightly edited, because that’s how we make our writing better.
Lori Rader-Day
Where did the story for Hollow Spaces begin for you?
Victor Suthammanont
It started with a very inchoate thought about inherited trauma and sibling relationships. I thought about how similar we are to our parents and siblings and, yet, the vast differences between us. Both our similarities and differences with our families drive both the love and conflict in families. I wanted to explore that.
Lori Rader-Day
John Lo is a law partner acquitted on the second degree murder charge of his colleague, Jessica—found not guilty. Not “innocent,” that’s not how the US justice system works. By which time, the court of public opinion has decided and John wonders, “Does the acquittal even matter?” He’s won, but innocence is no longer on the table. You’re a lawyer yourself. Can you talk about why you wanted to write about the US justice system in this way?
Victor Suthammanont
As a lawyer, and particularly as a government lawyer—which I was when I wrote the book—I recognized the imperfections in both the formal justice system and the “court of public opinion.” The “US justice system” really encompasses both.
Most legal stories end with a verdict—usually what we’re supposed to view as the truth “triumphing.” But I wanted to dig deeper. In real life, the verdict is rarely the end of the matter, if it even gets to the “truth.” So I decided to start a story with the verdict, particularly an acquittal.
Acquittals are both a victory for the system and a terrible tragedy. It’s a victory because we would rather the guilty go free than punish the innocent, which is why we require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But it’s a tragedy as well. Either a guilty person did in fact go free, or an innocent person was falsely accused and tried. But really, it may not be as binary as guilt or innocence. After all, a person is charged with specific crimes—sometimes because of strategic reasons on the part of the prosecutors. And so, maybe a defendant is innocent of the charged crime, but guilty of another, related, uncharged crime that the jury never gets to hear or decide. I guess what I’m saying is that, once you start peeling back the layers, few things are as simple as they appear.
Which brings me to the imperfections in the “court of public opinion.” The public, generally speaking, is never as informed as it thinks it is. Even good reporting is usually limited. For example, news articles often distill a lot of information, leaving out details that may be material to making a truly informed judgment about an event. And that’s in good, substantive reporting.
How many of us get our news through social media posts or just glancing at headlines? Not to mention from sources that essentially cater to our prejudices and predispositions? A lot of that leads to snap judgments about events that might be far more nuanced than they are presented to the public.
So Hollow Spaces is very much in conversation with these ideas. I hope that the folks who read the novel really consider what this all means—especially in this time when so many forces are undermining both systems of justice.
Lori Rader-Day
John thinks, even after his acquittal, “The children were lost to him.” He means his two children, Brennan and Hunter, who are young at the time of the trial. Brennan and Hunter end up growing up apart from their father, believing different versions of the story. As adults, they have been greatly affected by the accusation, as well as the fallout for their family. Tell us about some of the considerations you were making about these characters as you wrote, their personalities, who they became.
Victor Suthammanont
With Brennan and Hunter, I wanted to tell both an emotional and philosophical story. I thought about my brothers and my sons, and how most folks come from the same parents, same circumstances, have the same values and ideals, but end up sometimes as wildly different people with different viewpoints of what is “right” or what the “truth” is. Or how similar people can have divergent reactions to the same events.
So I tried to make the siblings very similar to each other in ways that also drive tension between them. For example, I made one a lawyer and the other a reporter—two professions that are supposed to care deeply about true facts.
That feeds into the emotional side, right? People care deeply about their versions of “right” and “truth.” It can push families apart, as we’ve seen with politics for example this past decade. I think there’s an underlying message here about how the search for an objective and emotional truth is difficult and can drive people apart, but if there is good faith, maybe there’s hope for healing.
Lori Rader-Day
The novel is ambitious with multiple points of view and essentially three timelines while John narrates the court case and its aftermath and also the story leading up to the murder he was accused of and the shared story of Brennan and Hunter as they investigate the truth. How did the structure of the story evolve over time? Or did it?
Victor Suthammanont
Honestly, it was very difficult. Mainly because I don’t outline, at least not extensively, as I write. Also, I wrote probably 85 percent of the book, including John’s whole story, without knowing the answer to the main question: Did he commit the murder? That was pretty difficult, but in retrospect, made it easy to keep the reader guessing. I mean, I was guessing, too.
Initially, I started the book writing back and forth across timelines, essentially the way the book is now. But it left me with too many questions, particularly in the present, as to what had happened. So I just wrote the entirety of John’s story, then the siblings’ story, then went back and mixed them together. I was lucky in that I didn’t have to do too much to make the transitions work.
Lori Rader-Day
You’ve written some themes into the novel having to do with the generational loss of culture and talked a bit about your own culture in the acknowledgments. How did you weave the characters’ cultural background, race, and experience of the world into the story? Can you talk a little about what it’s like to capture some of that in this book and why it’s an important part of the story?
Victor Suthammanont
I thought it was important to write an American story—in the broadest sense of the word. It was important to me to convey that an Asian American family, this story, is an American one. My goal—high level—was to write this story and make it feel like it wasn’t about race even though race is completely integral to the book. Basically, even though race is foundational to the story, I wanted the reader, by the end of the book, to become so rooted in it, they sort of lose sight that it’s there.
Because, to me at least, that’s what it’s like. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, I’m a mixed race Asian-American.” It’s part of who I am. It’s only when it becomes resonant—like, oh, yeah, my grandfather cooked like that—or discordant—like, wow, that guy really just used that slur against me—that it comes to the front of my mind.
I wanted the reader to feel that too—not just in the book itself and the plot, but also the preconceptions they bring to it. Why do the characters’ races stand out to you? When? What is it about that moment that made you notice it?
So, mechanically, conceptually, I focused the plot points in a way that the book could be about any family. From there, I simply wrote characters who happened to be Asian American.
Of course, once I did that, the story becomes about this particular family and these particular characters. I think, to me at least, part of the symbolism in that is very American. Everyone’s experience of it is both common to all, but unique to them.
Along those lines, I wanted to make the family’s story specific. And authentic. So yes, they’re Chinese, but more specifically, they’re Teochew, which is what my family’s background is. That said, I had to streamline a bit because my family’s immigration background is more circuitous than the Lo family’s in the book.
Lori Rader-Day
Hollow Spaces is part courtroom drama, part amateur sleuth investigation. How did your experience as a lawyer help you with writing the book? Did it hinder the writing in any way? (The way things are actually done can be such a bother to the novelist!)
Victor Suthammanont
Being a lawyer made writing the legal aspects easier, but it was difficult. From the start, I wanted to make the book as realistic as possible. Part of the whole point of the novel was to examine real-life tensions and issues in the justice system. And frankly, I didn’t want to look like I didn’t know the law, because I do, or have lawyers who might read it quibble with every little shortcut or streamlining of the way the law works. But I didn’t want to bore the reader with a legal brief or bog the story down in procedure.
Ultimately, I had to trust myself that I built the necessary context into the book for readers to understand the way courts work, what the legal and evidentiary issues are, how law firms operate, and then let it go and trust the reader to understand.
Lori Rader-Day
This is your first published novel, but I met you in—are you ready for this? 2016!—so I know you’ve been working on your craft for a while now. What did you learn about yourself over the time it took to reach this moment as a published author? What was it like to finally get that YES from your publisher?
Victor Suthammanont
I know! It felt like a long time—because it was!
I learned a lot about myself in the course of writing this novel. For one thing, there is a tremendous grief underlying the story. Part of that was losing my father during COVID. Part of it was looking at myself getting older, thinking about where I was in my life, what I had accomplished and failed at, and opportunities you lose as time goes on. I used to think that these things made me angry. And anger, if you can’t control it, it can infect everything and everyone around you. Not to mention your own well-being.
But someone asked me once, Are you angry or are you sad? It really changed my whole life. It changed my relationship to my family and everyone I knew. Really just the way I thought about myself. And I think John Lo’s story is the story of someone who never gets to ask himself that question, who doesn’t learn to confront his own grief with knowledge of what that is, so all he’s left with is his anger.
Getting the offer of publication felt amazing. But also weirdly not as thrilling as I would have guessed before getting the offer, mainly because I’m sort of a task-oriented person, so getting the offer immediately led me to make the to-do list of what came next. That said, as the process went on, I was genuinely elated. But what was nice about it, was that a huge part of the joy was vindicating people’s belief in me, like my agent at the time, Maddy Burt, who really believed in me and this story. And, frankly, you!
Lori Rader-Day
I always believed!
Victor Suthammanont
Since then, I’ve really focused on experiencing the positivity of each moment through the debut process—even the little wrinkles and setbacks that pop up along the way. For example, my first agent left to go in-house at a publisher a few months after we sold the book, but my current agent Ellen stepped in and it’s been wonderful to work with her. And I have to say that my editor, Dan Lopez, and the whole team at Counterpoint have made the process so enjoyable.
Lori Rader-Day
We met when you took a session I was teaching on revision. How’s your relationship to revision these days?
[That session was four hours, as a reminder. I hope it helped.]
Victor Suthammanont
I remember the session if not the details! But I took the session because I honestly love revisions. As a lawyer, I am constantly revising and being revised. With my fiction, I feel like more than half of the art comes in the revision stage, once I have the bones done. So I do a lot of revision work, even as I’m drafting the initial draft. I just want all of the work to be the best it can be.
That said, with this book in particular, I was going in circles a ton, just continually revising what I had already written and making no progress. Sometimes that was fine, you know, if I was stuck on a part. But ultimately, I had to make a rule for myself, which was that I could only revise the last two pages I drafted. After that, I only allowed myself to make forward progress. If I hadn’t made that rule, Hollow Spaces might never have gotten done.
Lori Rader-Day
That’s a good rule. I will never follow it, but it’s great advice. Who are your influences… other legal thriller writers? Other writers of color?
Victor Suthammanont
Gosh, probably too many to name. And I’ll disqualify you because you’re doing the interview and I don’t want anyone thinking I’m trying to get you to go easy on me.
One person who stands out to me is Tom Lin. I read The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu when I was writing this book, and it is gorgeous. I cannot recommend it enough. I think reading his prose gave me the bravery to stretch what I was trying to do with mine. I also liked how he handled contextualizing race in that story. It’s absolutely integral, but he’s trusting the reader. It’s not heavy-handed.
In terms of trying to dig deep, you know, to get to the emotional core of the characters—and myself—and please don’t laugh, but I think Graham Greene. His stories are so deeply interior to his characters, particularly The End of the Affair. I wanted to challenge myself to get as close as I could to that sense of interiority for my characters. I figured if I got ten percent of the way there, it would be an accomplishment.
In terms of process, Stephen King’s On Writing was really influential and a great book. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is another good one.
Lori Rader-Day
Those are the books I would have recommended, King and Lamott. I think I’ve read Bird by Bird ten times.
You’re new to this side of things, but has anything been surprising to you about publishing so far?
Victor Suthammanont
Honestly, I was preparing for this for a long time as you mentioned. So a lot of it was expected—at least in part. From my perspective as a lawyer, I was surprised at the contract process. My poor agent really did her work there to keep me from over-lawyering it.
But the process, fingers crossed, for me has been luckily pretty smooth. And for that, I thank my agents and Counterpoint. Maybe that’s one other thing I was surprised by, just the level of support I’ve gotten from everyone there. You hear stories about authors and books getting lost in the shuffle, and they’re busy folks, but they’ve been fantastic.
Lori Rader-Day
What’s your best advice (so far!) to other writers who are struggling to either finish a draft or find a publisher for a manuscript?
Victor Suthammanont
My first piece of advice applies to both finishing a draft and finding an agent and then a publisher. Persist. And I don’t mean that in the sense of being stubborn. I mean that nothing guarantees success, but quitting guarantees failure. So for me, at least, that meant I continued making progress on my work, both in terms of word count and craft. Continuing to evaluate feedback and improve my work and my craft. Moving on from things that were not working (or not selling). Learning to deal with rejection and disappointment. Maintaining positivity. Finding those things that brought me joy in the process and not necessarily the results.
Lori Rader-Day
That is expert advice. And from a rookie! Congrats, Victor. I’m just really happy for you.
FICTION
Hollow Spaces
By Victor Suthammanont
Counterpoint
Published August 5, 2025
