The last time I saw Steph Cha, she was spooning my dog, Daisy, and talking about her (seriously gorgeous) new book, Your House Will Pay. Along with our shared love of basset hounds, we talked about her hopes for the novel, and how it was the hardest she’s written. Before this, Cha wrote three books in a series with a Korean American heroine, Juniper Song, based in LA, where Cha lives (and where House is set). She is also an impressive Yelp reviewer and frequent contributor to the LA Times book and food sections, as well as having my old job of Mystery and Noir Editor at the LA Review of Books. I mention this because along with being a crack crime writer Cha is an excellent critic, a trait I see explicitly in House, which is unlike most crime novels in its focus not on the crime but on the aftermath. It’s easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.
I spoke to Cha on the phone—no dog cuddling, alas—and we discussed the book, her new foray into TV writing, and what’s next.
LISA LEVY: Let’s get into the book just because I literally just finished it this morning. I kept putting it off as a treat. New book, everybody says it’s amazing, and then I moved and a million things happened, and I was like, “I’ve got to get the book done.” But it’s amazing.
STEPH CHA: Thank you.
It feels like a book that’s been inside of you a long time. Is that true? Do you remember the real case?
No, I don’t. Not from when it happened certainly. I knew about the early ’90s in LA as a time period, and some of the tensions that went into that, but I hadn’t really done a deep dive. And I kind of just understood it in the way that you understand it when you grow up in LA. But the Latasha Harlins story in particular, I didn’t hear that until 2013.
I’ve never heard that story before. It feels like if it happened today it would be a very big story.
I think it was a big story at the time, a huge story. I also have found that when I talk to people about this book, they might not remember her name, but when I say the case details they recognize it. Especially people in LA.
What would you say are the case details?
Well, it’s interesting because I feel like … Did you know going in what it was all about?
No. I didn’t know anything.
It’s been interesting talking to people who didn’t know the Latasha Harlins story and didn’t know … I guess something that I didn’t necessarily think I could count on was that some people will read this book and not know the background, and so the connection between the two families is a surprise. And I did it so that it would kind of play both ways. I needed it to be interesting to people who already knew the history, but I did play it so that you kind of find out information as Grace finds out. I think that it is the most famous of the Korean shopkeeper kills black customer at South Central liquor store stories.
Isn’t it horrible that there’s a category of stories like that?
Yeah. I think there is also a category of stories that is Korean liquor store owner in South Central is killed by a customer. There are both categories, but I think the most famous one was this one because it was so terrible, and because of the outcome which is that the shooter didn’t even go to prison. I think it’s symbolic of the tension that existed at the time, and it became this flashpoint that really brought those tensions to a head, and people paid attention and got angry. Rightfully so.
What’s interesting is that if somebody asked me, “Oh, is Steph’s new book a crime novel?” I would say, “Well, it’s a novel with a crime in it, but it’s really about two different families.”
Yeah. And I think that’s how I conceived it. I think of it as a social crime novel.
You’re in a long tradition of people who have been critiquing culture through crime fiction.
I think because I come from a crime background, it’s easier to see it as a crime novel. I think if it were a debut, I feel like it would be pushed as a literary novel, you know? Because it’s somewhere in the middle. I think it does what a literary novel does, and I think it does what a crime novel does, too. At least the ones that I gravitate towards. It’s not a mystery, but I definitely didn’t want to minimize the crime element of it because it’s all about the aftermath of these two crimes. And that very much interested me. The people who are left behind, and how they deal with the fallout.
As I was writing this, it occurred to me that that Sean and Grace, who are the main characters in this book, in other types of crime novels Sean and Grace would be the side characters that the police officer talks to for a part of the chapter to ask what’s going on? What was your relationship to the victim or the suspect? And they’d be kind of color, and then you move on. So, it’s interesting to kind of flip it so that you’re spending all your time with these characters while the police detective and the journalist are these two white dude characters in the background coming in and out.
What’s interesting is it doesn’t unfold as an investigation. That’s one of the definitions of a crime novel is that something happens, and then somebody spends a whole lot of time figuring out how and why that thing happened. It’s dealing with themes that are much deeper than that. When I wrote down what I thought the themes were for this novel, I had things like judgment: what is judgment and who gets to judge? What is guilt? What’s atonement? What’s grace? I think grace is a big theme in the book, as well as a really important character. Because I felt like I saw the situation through her eyes the most clearly.
Those are definitely a lot of themes I was working with. I think I was interested in particular in the way that people who are from minority backgrounds or tight knit ethnic communities process things like guilt, but also atonement like Grace. I wanted to write about the way that your identity can become wrapped up in the things that other people who are like you or who are in your family are or do. And I was interested in that for both sides of the story. The way that anger and shame become inherited. I was just kind of fascinated by that. It’s all very biblical.
The naming of Grace was definitely intentional, although I felt like it’s such a common Korean girl first name for Korean American women my age, but I was like, oh, I can just get away with this. It’s not even that cute because she would totally be named Grace.
No, but I feel like it makes it 20% more likely to be assigned in classes now.
Oh, I hope that’s true. That was a very smart move on my part then. What is the significance of the name Grace?
Yeah. That is high school English right there in a nutshell. But I think that the book is really getting at some deep stuff. You wrote a Shakespearian book, Steph.
Good. I’m glad you say that. I wanted to write a Shakespearean book.
From the title which sort of has a Shakespearean ring to it… It’s about rival families and murders between rival families, and that’s what, 30% of Shakespeare?
It took forever to come up with that title, but it comes from a 1980s LA hip hop song.
Oh really?
Yeah. Called “Batterram.” And when I came across the title, I wrote it down. I had a couple working titles, and I put it on a list, and I ran all the titles by my husband, including some shitty ones, and that was the third or fourth one that I mentioned, and he’s like, “Yeah, that one.” I was looking for something biblical or from LA area hip hop from that period. I’ve read every Ice Cube lyric from the early ’90s, and just nothing quite worked. The working title for a long time was Black Korea. But yeah, when I landed on that, I thought, this feels Shakespearian. That was actually one of the things that made me go with it.
It works really well. And it also puts the book into a certain light. It’s the most banal thing in the world to talk about books’ titles, but I get a lot of books in the mail with very unmemorable titles.
Yeah, me too. Same with covers. I feel like when you get sent books every day, having a title and a cover that stand out is super helpful. I honestly feel like that’s part of why I’ve gotten so much press for this. I think this packaged very memorably.
To me it really rung true that you have such vivid descriptions of people’s jobs in this book. It’s part of what grounds it. These are working people, and you’re going to moving jobs, and going to pharmacies. Were you very conscious of getting those details right?
That’s funny that you say that. I wasn’t thinking especially about the jobs, but I was thinking very much that was part of my overall goal of writing this novel was to make them feel very grounded. I wanted to write a book about these normal people who just have a lot of shit going on in their own lives, and who would rather not have to deal with other shit.
These are characters that definitely lean out from the violence as opposed to a lot of crime fiction you read where something horrible happens and everybody’s mobilized to deal with that horrible thing. These are people who have had enough of horrible things.
I really wanted to write this book about people who are not exceptional people. I feel like a lot of crime fiction, a lot of fiction in general, the people will be exceptional. They’ll be super smart or super noble. And I read those books, and I like them, but I didn’t want to do that for this book. I wanted to write about two people who are not engaged. It’s more understandable for Sean because the reason he’s not engaged is because he’s just had enough and he’s exhausted. But I also I just know a lot of people who are too busy with their own shit to pay attention to politics in any meaningful way, or to be that curious about the world around them. And I find that if not sympathetic than very recognizable.
So, I wanted to write a book about how you don’t always get to choose whether to be political or to pay attention. How sometimes the political becomes personal, and it just comes right to your door, and you don’t have a lot of say in that. Particularly, if you are a black person in this society where violence can just visit you, or if you have this legacy that is built on violence, and that depends on something you got away with. If I had to describe the project of the book, that’s a large part of it.
The book does feel like a reckoning, and it brings a time alive which feels distant but not so distant. Not distant enough. Does the last Juniper Song book, which was about the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, lurk behind this book?
That was my third book, Dead Soon Enough. When I was writing that book, I had just been thinking a lot about these issues of legacy, and dealing with the history of a family, and harms that happened before you’re even born. And so, that’s something I was thinking about pretty actively for the year-and-a-half that I was writing and talking about Dead Soon Enough. Those ideas were very present in my mind when I was like doing a lot of the reading and research for this book, and when I first encountered the story. I feel like each of my books has led into the next one in some way. Thematically thinking about the Armenian genocide and the people who feel so strongly about it one way or another because a lot of people are very invested in claiming that didn’t happen. That got me thinking.
It’s really fascinating that that’s part of the background of this because we are actually talking about, as you know, a genocide in America. I don’t want to get into misery politics, but you are thinking about a lot of the same issues. That makes total sense that you would go from writing a book on the Armenian genocide to one about Koreans and African Americans in LA. World’s the same everywhere. All right, so your new job.
Yeah. I’m in a writers room. It’s fun. It’s very different. It’s great because it’s writing which is one of the only things I’m good at, but it exercises totally different muscles, and it’s all consuming in different ways. I think part of it is I’m not used to sitting and working for eight to ten hours at a time. I’m just not. So, that’s different. However, the work itself is less draining because you’re not alone doing it. It’s nice having coworkers again. I can imagine that if you’re in a bad writers room, the experience is miserable because you are with the same people for most of your waking hours. But I really like it.
When you’re working on a novel, you’re the person who controls everything, but you’re also the person who has to solve everything. You have to work out the structural kinks, you have to work out every beat, and every plot point, and no one’s going to help you. You can have readers who help you, but it’s your project. And it’s kind of cool to be talking about a story and be like, “Ah, it needs something for this,” and instead of just stopping work, and going and doing something else, and hoping you’ll be able to untangle it over the next several hours or days, somebody else might just chime in and solve it. So, you get through a story very quickly in a way that I find fascinating.
That’s great. And what’s the show about?
It’s about a married couple who are forensic consultants. It’s called Crime Farm. That’s the title, and it’s going to be on the Warner Brothers streaming platform, HBO Max. It’s very, very loosely based on a real married couple who are forensic consultants, and they’re working a serial killer case while also figuring out the ills in their marriage.
And how long have you been doing it?
Just since June. And the room ends in another month and a half.
And then, do you have a book to go back to?
Nope. Yeah, 2020 is I don’t know what I’m going to be doing. It’s a good feeling. When I finished the edits on this book back in May, I decided first of all I was going to take a few weeks to just chill. I didn’t want to do shit. I’ve been working on this book for so long, and it was just so consuming, and I decided I was going to take a little break. And then, since I only had the summer before my book came out, and I knew I was going to get busy going around promoting it, I kind of decided that I wouldn’t start a new novel before this one came out. Which is different because with every other novel by the time that it’s come out, the next one is well underway. But I decided to hang back, give myself a break. This is my first time not actively working on a novel since I started Follow Her Home in 2009, so it’s been ten years since I have not been working on a novel.
I was planning to work on other, smaller projects maybe over the summer, and then this job came up, and it was kind of perfect timing. Once this job is over and once my book tour is done, then I can kind of reevaluate. I’m looking forward to having every option available to me. I can write about anything I want next, you know? So, that’s kind of cool. Hopefully this next book doesn’t take five years.
Well—
But you know what? Maybe it will because at the end of the day, I’m happy with this book, and I feel like the work shows.
It does.
If I’m able to do that again and it takes five years, so be it I guess.
Well, if you were a “literary novelist,” nobody would balk at five years.
Yeah. No, that’s true. That’s definitely true. It’s just coming from that book a year schedule–
Yeah. But we give Jeffery Eugenides an awfully long time between books.
Yeah, true.
I’m so excited for you about this book.
