Let me begin with a disclosure: Providence is my favorite city. I went to college there, cried the whole way down 95 when I moved. Part of that was about graduating, sure, but Providence isn’t a city you’re supposed to leave. You see it on bumper stickers all the time there. This car never leaves Rhode Island. The local beer’s slogan is Hi, Neighbor!
The ethos of community in Providence is unbeatable. It’s part of why there are so many artists there, and so many activists. It’s why families stay for generations. It’s also why Providence is an awful place to move if you want to live a private life, but that’s exactly what the protagonist of Caroline Kepnes’s thriller Providence does.
Providence opens in Nashua, New Hampshire, with two preteens falling in love. One, Chloe, is pretty and popular; the other, Jon, is a loner who has to cut through the forest to avoid bullies on the walk to school. He’s in the woods one day when he encounters a strange substitute teacher, someone who’s always made him nervous. He runs, the sub chases him—and then he wakes up years later, a grown man, alone.
Jon quickly discovers that the substitute has left him an unbearable parting gift, torn from the pages of famous Rhode Islander H. P. Lovecraft. When Jon feels a strong emotion towards somebody, the person gets sick, or dies. He sucks their life force unstoppably away. To protect his parents and Chloe, he leaves home, disappearing to Providence. It’s Lovecraft’s home, he reasons. It’s a place he can find answers. But soon he’s got a Providence detective, Eggs DeBenedictus, on his trail, and twin yearnings for Chloe and for community that he can’t erase.
Providence isn’t only about Providence, but it wouldn’t work anywhere else. It’s a story about nosy neighbors and supernatural villains, a police procedural mixed with a superhero tale mixed with a young-adult romance. It’s a little bit of everything jammed into one tightly written book—a lot like the city itself. More bang for your buck than you ever expected: that’s Providence, and Providence.
Lily Meyer: It seems to me like the fundamental question of this book is who is a monster, or whether a person can be a monster. Is that fair?
Caroline Kepnes: I think so. I think it’s a question of knowing what you want, in a selfish way, and then knowing whether to act on it. We all have the potential to be monsters, and have to deal with that potential. The moment you value your own interests more than another person’s life, that’s when you become a monster. We all become monsters like that sometimes, of course. We can’t help ourselves.
The monster here is Roger, the teacher who kidnaps Jon and gives him this terrible power. I tried to write Roger’s perspective, but it took something away from the story. It’s better to just understand that Roger thinks he’s doing a good thing by giving Jon these powers, but he’s valuing his own desires over Jon’s actual life. That’s monstrous.
LM: It sounds like the fundamental question to you is really how we should deal with the monstrous sides of ourselves.
CK: I think a lot about that question, certainly. The way people always put it is, “How do you sleep at night?” It’s like the scene in The Office when Angela is having the affair and someone asks her how she sleeps, and she goes, “Well, I have two pillows…”
And it’s not just Roger who is monstrous, too. There’s something a little monstrous in the way the adult version of Chloe treats her boyfriend, Carrig. Maybe not monstrous, but it’s narcissistic to want one person to love you when you’re in love with somebody else, and she knows it. She doesn’t sleep well in that section.
LM: I’m very interested in the Jon-Chloe-Carrig love story, and I want to talk about it in terms of genre. The book’s not YA, but that plotline has very clear YA hallmarks, especially the fact that Jon and Chloe can never have sex. What’s going on with that?
CK: The genre changes are me keeping myself engaged. I love so many different kinds of books, it’s part of my DNA to jump between all the genres I love. As far as Jon and Chloe not having sex—I was very interested in that. We so often judge people who don’t physically come together, but I wanted to explore love and the online world, where people are together without being together.
We live so much in our phones and on our computers these days. It can feel like that means humans are growing apart, but I wanted to use Jon and Chloe to explore the ways we use technology to actually sustain and deepen a connection. In a way, the love they build by texting and messaging is a heightened version of what we do every day.
LM: You do a great job integrating texting and social media, which few writers have done, I think. The only other examples I can think of are Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact, which, interestingly, is YA. From a craft perspective, how did you work Internet communication into your prose?
CK: That felt really natural. You know how you establish an online rapport with someone? You create a language, and it was so fun to create that language for Jon and Chloe. Chloe’s a more social person, so she has a language and rhythm with everyone. Jon just has that one rhythm with Chloe.
“School follows you home, into your bedroom. I can’t imagine growing up like that. It was so much easier for me to distract myself when I was a kid.”Part of my interest in writing the YA parts of the book, too, was writing about social media. The way kids are integrated into each other’s lives now blows my mind. School follows you home, into your bedroom. I can’t imagine growing up like that. It was so much easier for me to distract myself when I was a kid than it is for Jon and Chloe.
LM: I’m very interested in the bit of the book where Chloe goes dark on social media. It’s a big plot moment, since in that period Jon is observing her, but not communicating. How did you come to that choice?
CK: It felt true to her in the sense that when you’re constantly performing for someone and they don’t reach out, eventually you need to shut down. Chloe’s protecting herself from the rejection of Jon constantly not trying to connect. But poor Jon, having that window to Chloe and seeing it close!
LM: You create a great contrast to Jon and Chloe with Eggs, the detective, who’s so adult. Where did he come from? And—I have to ask—why the name?
CK: I kept wondering what an adult would think of Jon and Chloe. I didn’t want him directly commenting, but writing him was a way to get into the nitty-gritty crime piece of the story. And because he’s a local and a cop, his perspective on Providence is so important. It’s his town.
And then there are the perspectives on missing. Jon has the experience of going missing and then returning, and going missing again. Chloe has the experience of missing him, not knowing where he is or if he’ll ever surface, having to protect herself from missing him. And Eggs has a son so deeply autistic that he’ll never be able to communicate, and he, Eggs, misses that. He misses what he never had. He latches onto the mysterious deaths Jon causes as a distraction. He needs another problem to solve.
As far as the name—I don’t know! I knew someone with the last name DeBenedictus growing up, and then I thought, why not? Eggs DeBenedictus? It’s just that. Ridiculous.
LM: His plotline is classic genre, in a way. He’s a damaged detective, a bit emotionally stunted, very Chandler. Was that an intentional homage?
CK: Yes! It’s so fun to write that kind of guy after reading and watching so many. Though I got so into his home life, I kept having to remind himself he was a detective. I cut pages and pages of backstory.
LM: I imagine that writing a three-voiced thriller must have been quite the feat of plotting and editing. What was your process?
CK: Oh my God, yes. I had to figure the characters out, then figure out what actually pushed the story forward. I tend to write fast and long for my first draft, and then cut. As far as plotting, I write in chunks. Each one has a goal, and a feel. Beyond that, the more I figure out each chunk, the more I make mistakes and then find the mistakes. Lots of fixing.
LM: How did you figure out Jon’s power?
CK: It started with the phrase heart attack. It would never occur to anyone that your heart could attack other people, but imagine it! Seriously, try walking down the street imagining that somebody else’s emotions could kill you, or that yours could kill another person.
“Seriously, try walking down the street imagining that somebody else’s emotions could kill you, or that yours could kill another person.”So I had that thought, and then someone told me about the idea of psychic vampires, who are people who are exciting and engaging to be around, but they’re stealing your life force. After you’re around them, you get depressed and dizzy; you feel depleted because they’ve depleted you. That was knocking around my mind for years, and eventually the two ideas combined.
LM: If there were people like Jon in the world, it would be terrifying to go outside. You’d depend entirely on those technological connections we were talking about earlier.
CK: Yes, yes, yes. And we’re almost there! You can do anything in your house. Watch this, read that, talk to anyone. We live in this other dimension now, and use our bodies in such new ways. But that can’t be everything. When Jon’s in Providence, his whole life is online, and it’s deeply isolating for him, to the point where he becomes somewhat less a part of the human race. All that keeps him tethered is wanting to be loved by Chloe, his bright star in the distance. She’s so special to him, she reminds him that other humans can be.
LM: Do you think Chloe is inherently special, or only special to Jon?
CK: She questions whether she’s special, certainly. To me what’s interesting about her is mostly that she fulfills herself. She holds onto Jon, but not too tightly. She’s not willing to be the girl who’s just pining. She goes to New York City and becomes an artist, and that, to me, is what’s special about her.
LM: Another interesting function of hers is bringing a bully into the plot. Carrig, her boyfriend, bullies Jon when they’re kids, and the idea of the bully and the bullied recurs in the novel. I’d love for you to talk about that a bit.
CK: The baseline story is this: here’s a girl who gets along with the world, and knows it. Often, girls like that are depicted as shallow and snaky, but Chloe’s not. Jon recognizes that she’s not, but also that he, Jon, will never have a life like Chloe’s. What he can’t understand, though, is that she enjoys being around Carrig, and that it’s hard for her to balance the sides of herself. It’s hard to accept that she likes the bully, and yet she truly does.
LM: Chloe is clearly an object to Carrig. She enjoys being his trophy, it seems—she’s seduced by that. But is she an object to Jon, too?
CK: No. I think he truly knows and sees her, but I think that’s part of the process of the story. As he detaches from the human race, she becomes larger than life to him, but by the end, they grow up enough to see each other. He learns not to put her on a pedestal as he learns to understand who he is. There’s less fantasy; they never get to be together. Chloe will always have more of a footing in the real world, and be more seduced by it. The novel ends with both of them accepting that fact. That’s growing up, right? Chloe has to accept that she’ll always be susceptible to the world around her, and Jon has to accept that he’ll never belong.
