Why did you decide to include Cal in Shay’s life? How did her marriage change the way the story developed?
Cal is the bridge that connects the extraordinary misogyny of the Paters to the ordinary misogyny of everyday life. To back up, he’s part of the life Shay’s built for herself that she thinks proves she’s moved on and put the horrible tragedy of what happened in college behind her. Her job writing for The Slice, her nice home, her ability to write full-time, her marriage: these are all markers of success. She’s living the life of privilege her mother could only dream of, and she should be happy. But of course Shay’s not happy, and all of it, including her marriage, is a shield, a way of saying Look at me, a normal woman with a normal life; nothing to see here. It’s a long, protracted performance.
The moment the reality of her past crashes into her safe new life with the news of Laurel’s death, Shay begins a process of awakening that starts with looking around her house and thinking about her marriage to Cal and realizing it all feels suffocating, though she can’t put her finger on why. Throughout the story, as Shay comes to understand herself better and confront what drove her to Don, she starts to see with horror that Don and Cal exist on a spectrum, and in many ways she’s only repeated her past in building her life with Cal. With both Don and Cal, Shay is initially drawn to them because they are important men who, if conquered, will prove her power. The fact that this is a fantasy is revealed when both relationships pretty quickly show themselves for what they are: with Don, a tyrant-subject relationship; with Cal, an imbalanced marriage where he, the husband, holds the hard power. Both men dissemble to justify themselves and keep this status quo: Don through his teachings, Cal through his insistence that what he’s doing with their credit cards and acting as Shay’s social director are normal and there’s no such thing as a power hierarchy between a married couple.
For Shay, just like Don and Cal exist on the same spectrum, so too does the Pater-Daughter relationship and marriage. Once she begins confronting uncomfortable truths and her eyes open, she can’t help but feel all the ways being married to Cal is too close to being yoked to Don. I hope when readers encounter Cal they think he’s normal and horrible at the same time, because in a sly way I wanted to shine a light on the gendered power dynamics still baked into the institution of heterosexual marriage. While there may not be a lot of Dons out there, I think there are a lot of Cals, and that’s almost as upsetting.
Shay has a hard time identifying the feeling of power, because for most of her life it’s been blurred into one kind of submission or another. If you had to pick a moment in the book where Shay was most powerful, what would it be?
This may be the obvious answer, but I wrote the scene where she beheads Don as the moment when she is the most untethered by anything she should do and instead does the thing her heart and gut tell her she needs to do to feel safe, at peace, and like she has achieved some semblance of justice. Shay doesn’t listen to the FBI （authority figures） or Jamie （a person she loves） or the law （what society demands of her） or morality （what she knows people expect from a good person）。 She chooses herself above it all, come what may. And that action represents both an old definition of power in the sense that it’s the power sovereigns have historically wielded—they are the one person above the law and the one entitled to mete out executions—and a personally meaningful kind of power, as Shay is a woman whose life has always been shaped by other people’s power over her.
Is it tragic that Shay believes her only avenue for true freedom and power is through this act of violence? Absolutely. Is she right? I think readers should decide for themselves, but for me, yes. Of course, right or wrong, Shay’s power is short-lived. After she kills Don, she’s arrested and exists at the mercy of her forthcoming judge and jury, as well as the public. Where once she was performing the story of herself for men, now she performs for a public who holds her fate in their hands. Just like she says to Jamie during one of her interviews, she’s always taking one step forward, then two back. But, as Jamie points out, what else can we as human beings do other than try our best again and again, hoping it won’t turn out to be a Sisyphean exercise.