build your house around my body by violet kupersmith

Some people come in and build a house from the ground up and some people just move the furniture around a house that’s already built forever. I love, I think it was Zadie Smith, who has a great metaphor about how story architecture is like building an actual house. The book is about how the past is never really dead, how everything exists on this extended plane, so the wacky timeline was informed by that. I don’t recommend that as a planning structure, but it is a time-bending book so it does make sense to me that I ended up writing it in this weird “time is a flat circle” spiral. Some of the storylines I did write chronologically and then some of them I was writing in reverse, but I didn’t know that I was writing them in reverse at the time. This final arrangement was definitely a last minute clicking of things into place. As you were building the story, did it come together in the order that I read it in or were there different narratives that developed in your mind and then you spliced them together? I love that because reading this novel felt like I was on that same kind of path of wandering and discovery. This strange tangled novel emerged from all of my story hoarding and ghost hunts and wanderings over the course of the following few years. My Vietnamese isn’t great so I think when a weird foreigner asks you if you have any good ghost stories you’re kind of free to chat. I was actively running around Vietnam looking for novel inspiration and amassing misadventures and following weird ideas about snakes and spirits, and honestly just talking to a lot of people about ghosts. After that was over I thought, “I guess I’ll stick around and write a novel,” and since I was 23 I went into it without a plan and just waited for the novel to bite me. After I graduated from college, I moved to southern Vietnam and I spent a year teaching English. I think that the roots coming out of the kernel started before I even thought I was writing a novel. I like that you used the seed metaphor because I do think this is kind of a tree novel.

What was the first seed of the idea for this book? What couldn’t you stop thinking about that led to creating this story? Each new character and timeline brings the reader from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts as they come one step closer to understanding what binds them all. Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, Build Your House Around My Body spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into the story of two young women who go missing decades apart, linked together by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Scott Williamson, Café and Bar Manager, interviewed Violet Kupersmith, author of Build Your House Around My Body, in celebration of being shortlisted for the 2021 First Novel Prize.

Build your house around my body by violet kupersmith