Are there any parallels between Taured and Rainy’s grandparents? Why or why not?
What did you make of the ending?
Author Q & A
1. What inspired you to write this book?
A need to read it. I was thinking about the many male-driven movies of the ’90s like Face/Off and Con Air and I wanted to translate that into a female-driven book.
2. How did Rainy’s character evolve? Did the character come first and lead you to the story, or did you build the story around this character?
As I was finishing up The Wrong Family I began to see a woman in the recesses of my mind. She was urgent and she had long dark hair, and since I was still writing The Wrong Family I tried my best to ignore her. So I’d say in this case the character drove the story all the way.
3. What research did you do for this book?
I started with psychological research for the villain of the story. What type of personality disorder was I dealing with? How does my villain manipulate and why? I watched just about every documentary on serial killers and cult leaders that I could find.
4. Why the Vegas setting?
I was writing the final chapters of The Wrong Family when the pandemic hit and we went into lockdown. And if you’ve read that book you know it takes place in an old, dark house. My brain needed a vacation from not only pandemic gloom, but the setting of my last novel in general. So, I decided to set the next book in Las Vegas…and what do you know? It rains while they’re there. Sorry, not sorry.
5. You write about strong, complex women who are flawed in a very human way. Can you speak a little about the book’s feminist themes?
To me, that is all women: strong, complex, organically flawed. What I like to examine in my books are the ways our complex personalities overlap in society. In my last two books I wrote about how they overlap in a negative way, so this time I went in a different direction. I wanted to showcase a female bond that surpassed circumstance and situation. There is a choice being made in this book to do what is right regardless of how dangerous it is.
6. We see a lot of similar behavior and beliefs from men who lead cults. Was Taured inspired by anyone in particular, either from real life or fiction, or is he more an amalgam of these kinds of men?
Cult leaders of the ’70s and ’80s never seemed to plan ahead; their impulse-driven personalities were the draw to many of their followers. So, I thought: What would happen if there was a cult leader playing the long game back then? Taured’s goal was to raise the children in his cult to be his true loyalists. He was working with progression, not against it, which makes him a different kind of ’80s or ’90s cult leader.
7. Lorraine, Rainy’s mother—while only in the “Past” sections, nonetheless looms large in this story. Talk to us about her character.
Lorraine escaped her controlling religious family only to walk into a different type of controlling religious family. She represents the cycle women become stuck in. She was always willing to take action to change her circumstance, but she was often forced to make decisions out of desperation. No matter her mistakes, she loved her kid. She was a doer, and that’s what Rainy absorbed from being around her.
8. For you, what is the most important thing for readers to take away from this story?
Strength.
9. Your characters’ names are always so interesting and memorable. How do you come up with them?
I named Rainy after Mt. Rainier in Washington State. My own name means tower or hill in Gaelic and I wanted her to be a mountain of a force. Braithe was a shortening of the last name Braithwaite, which I thought was beautiful. The rest just fell in my head at the right time.
The Wrong Family
by Tarryn Fisher
1
JUNO
Juno was hungry. But before she could eat, she had to make it to the fridge without cutting herself.
She eyed a safe-ish route through the largest shards of glass that led past the island. She wore only thin socks, and as she stepped gingerly from a black tile to a white, it felt like she was playing a human game of chess. She’d heard the fight, but now she was seeing it in white porcelain shards that lay like teeth across the floor. She couldn’t disturb them, and she definitely couldn’t cut herself. When she rounded the island, she saw a green wine bottle lying on its side, a U-shaped crack spilling wine in a river that flowed beneath the stove.
Juno eyed all of this with mild curiosity as she arrived at her destination. The old GE hummed as she opened it, the condiments rattling in the door. The shelves were mostly empty—clean, but empty, Juno noted, the essence of this house and everything in it. Except today, she thought, looking back at the slaughtered dinnerware. She pressed two fingers to her lips and sighed into the fridge. They hadn’t been to the market. She tried to remember the last time they’d come home with bags of groceries, Winnie’s reusable sacks sagging as badly as Juno’s tits. They’ll go soon, she told herself. They had a child to feed, Samuel, and thirteen-year-olds ate a lot. But she was still worried. She pulled the only two Tupperware containers from the shelf, holding them up to the light. Spaghetti, three days old. It looked dried out and clumpy: they’d toss it tonight. She set that one on the counter. The other contained leftover fried rice. Juno held this one longer; she had smelled it cooking last night from her bed, her stomach grumbling. She’d tried to name the ingredients just by their smell: basil, onions, garlic, the tender green pepper Winnie grew in the garden.