The myth seems such an obvious parallel to not only individual identity construction but the contortions women have historically had to perform to be acceptable to men. To be intriguing and endlessly alluring but never threatening. There are so many stories that have been told—and that women have participated in telling—about what defines womanhood, what comes naturally to women. And this very need for constant storytelling, this feverish stitching together, this performance, reveals the fact that at its center is empty air. There is nothing that defines a woman, just like there’s nothing that defines a man—“essential” gender truths are in reality arbitrary stories repeated over time until they’ve concretized. The more I thought about Scheherazade, the more I became obsessed with the idea of a different ending: Scheherazade not just tricking the king into marrying her, but taking a more radical—if more violent—freedom and power for herself.
Don twists feminist principles to his own advantage as he courts Shay, Clem, and Laurel. How did their upbringings make this possible?
What makes Don good at being a cult leader is that he can ferret out people’s vulnerabilities and use them to manipulate people into doing what he wants. And so he’s able to home in on each of the girls’ needs, fears, and desires and hooks them in tailored ways. For Laurel, who grieves the loss of her father specifically and a parental authority figure more broadly （her mom abandons this role as a consequence of her own grief）， Don offers himself as a father figure. He gives her comfort and attention, but also acts as the disciplinarian, playing on her trauma and fears about the world, and especially her guilt, offering her punishments in exchange for redemption. He also understands Laurel feels inadequate compared to Shay and Clem, and so by giving her a leg up and preferential treatment, he makes her indebted to him.
With Clem, he attacks her autonomy and iconoclastic instincts—the very things that make her a powerful force of resistance to him in the beginning—by twisting them into flaws. He plays on Clem’s pain over being so different from her family growing up, and her residual fear of being ostracized, to manipulate and bully her into submission. For Shay, Don uses the fact that she’s high on her own beauty and influence, her own sense of power, to make her think she’s in control of their relationship, that he’s in thrall to her. And by the time he pulls back the curtain to show it’s the opposite, that he’s been pulling the strings the whole time, it’s too late. Shay’s already done things she can’t take back, and he’s already wedged himself into her brain. But of course Don couldn’t have even gotten that far if he hadn’t been so successful in the beginning, luring them in by exploiting tensions within feminism over what makes good and bad feminists. Ironically, attending a progressive school like Whitney, where they were taught to think about such things, made them primed to be hooked.
Which character surprised you the most as you wrote The Last Housewife?
Two characters: Nicole and Don. Don ended up being cleverer and more in tune with current conversations than I originally imagined him. When I started writing Don, I envisioned this man who exulted in antiquated worldviews and mannerisms and social dynamics. But as I started to write him, I discovered how clever he actually was, the ways he and his Paters could twist contemporary feminism and debates over ideology and community—concerns about alienation and rising rates of depression and identity politics and safety and new forms of “us vs. them” debates—to their advantage. And of course this is what so many skilled cult leaders are able to do: they meet people where they’re at.
Nicole surprised me by how sharp-tongued she is, and how funny—in essence, how self-aware. It took me several rewrites to really understand that what keeps her attached to the Paters isn’t that she’s brainwashed or not seeing clearly but actually that she sees all too well. Because of the experiences she’s had being taken advantage of and mistreated in every aspect of her life—from family to religion to romantic relationships and on—she’s jaded. She sees through the layers of bullshit coating everyday life and polite society and decides “normal life” is so similar to life with the Paters that she might as well try her hand with them. She thinks at least the Paters are honest and there’s some possibility of elevating her position, creating the kind of comfortable, cared-for life she doesn’t believe she could have access to otherwise.