Nothing is more compelling than obsession. In About Yvonne, by Donna Masini, a Manhattan woman named Terry becomes convinced that her gallerist husband, Mark, is having an affair with a woman named Yvonne. Acquaintances remark on the physical similarities between Terry and Yvonne, and Terry soon learns that they have more subtle characteristics in common too: they are both professors of poetry, both admirers of W.B. Yeats. Snooping in Mark’s desk, Terry obtains a key to Yvonne’s apartment and begins letting herself in when Yvonne isn’t home. At first Terry is careful not to leave any sign of her presence, but later she wears Yvonne’s clothes and lingerie, reads her books, and listens to the messages on her answering machine. It’s increasingly unclear, to both Terry and the reader, whether she wants to be Yvonne or to harm her.
Without giving too much away, part of the pleasure of the novel consists in the fact that About Yvonne doesn’t hit all the beats we might expect from domestic suspense. Terry is a complicated, passionate character, and though her obsession drives the narrative, she has an interesting and fully realized life outside her identification with Yvonne.
This novel was recommended by the writer William Boyle, author of Gravesend, Shoot the Moonlight Out, and the forthcoming Saint of the Narrows Street, as well as several other novels. Boyle’s work has been nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the John Creasey CWA New Blood Dagger Award. He teaches at the University of Mississippi and for the Center for Fiction (where I’ve had the opportunity to study with him). Like About Yvonne, Boyle’s work challenges the conventions of the genre and gives readers a new sense of what crime fiction can be.
Why did you choose About Yvonne by Donna Masini?
Timing-wise, it was perfect. When you asked me to do the interview, I’d just recently read this novel for the first time, and it blew me away. It’s a book that checks all my boxes as a reader.
I actually discovered Donna Masini just a couple of years ago. I was searching for Italian-American writers from Brooklyn, which is something I often do. Despite my last name, I grew up with the Italian side of my family in Brooklyn, and I’m always looking for writers who have explored that experience and not finding a whole lot out there. Masini is a poet, primarily. I found her first book, That Kind of Danger, and read it and really loved it. Then I picked up this book, which is the only novel she’s ever written, and I kind of became obsessed with it, appropriately enough.
What is it about the novel that appeals to you?
For me personally, it’s definitely a certain kind of writing about Italian American recovering Catholics in New York City. Even though the main character’s background doesn’t factor a ton into the present-day narrative, it’s always present in the way she thinks about sin and guilt and sex. It’s also a great New York novel, and that’s always something I’m searching for and not finding a lot. There are a million writers who live in New York, but not many of those who write about the city are actually from the city and see it through that lens.
My neighborhood in Brooklyn has changed a lot now. It was a thriving neighborhood in my grandparents’ generation and my mom’s generation, but by the time I was coming of age, a lot of people were leaving and moving to Long Island and New Jersey and other places. It felt like coming in at the end of something. Now it’s a thriving working-class neighborhood again, but the ethnicities have changed, so it’s primarily a Chinese American neighborhood. That’s a long way of saying that I’m always looking for work that reminds me of that New York and Brooklyn that I knew, and that was how I discovered Masini’s work. Her poems, especially in that first book, are largely about her family and their history. It’s a really profound story of that experience.
I also love it when poets write novels, especially crime novels. I like the psychological thriller elements here. In a lot of ways, it’s a book about paranoia, and that’s one of my favorite themes. You know, you often see “literary” writers trying to write crime fiction. And I don’t want to stereotype, because it depends on their purpose and motivation and how they feel about genre, but sometimes it will sound as if they’re writing down to try to make money. If I hear a writer who is writing crime fiction but seems condescending about the genre, I tune out right away, I have no interest in their work. But if someone coming from outside the genre has a genuine love of it, like Denis Johnson, or if they’re not necessarily thinking about it at all, then it can work. I don’t know that Donna Masini was setting out to write a crime novel, or a thriller either—I think it was just the way she told the story. So there’s a sincerity there, because it’s not just somebody trying to write a thriller to sell books.
I hate to ask this question, but I was wondering if you liked the narrator. I’m familiar with the debate about unlikeable female characters, and I’m definitely in favor of complicated women in fiction, but here I couldn’t tell here whether I was supposed to like or sympathize with Terry.
Well, I’m more drawn to unlikeable characters generally, so I love how complicated and messy and oftentimes ugly she is. There’s a lot of class stuff going on in the book that I found really interesting. She’s an adjunct professor; she’s from a working-class background in Brooklyn but lives in Manhattan now. Her husband owns an art gallery and they’re part of this bohemian community, but she seems to feel conflicted about those elements of her identity. I think it’s right to think of her as ultimately unlikeable, but that’s part of the draw for me. Maybe I like her unlikability because I do have a lot of common ground with this character, but I also like that she’s messy and complicated—paranoid and maybe even worse than that in some moments.
I didn’t really notice the class thing until she went to a party with her sisters, and she mentioned that if she hadn’t tried so hard to lose her Brooklyn accent, she’d sound just like them.
I love that. I had a thick Brooklyn accent when I was in high school, and I remember so desperately wanting to lose it and separate myself from my neighborhood. That theme of escaping is so powerful for me, but of course Terry doesn’t escape very far. It’s the same with the church stuff that’s always present. She’s always kind of punishing herself, and Catholicism informs everything in her life. It’s kind of a curse in the way it hangs over her. One line I copied down was, “Catholics have a habit of doing things exactly the same way every time,” which really resonates for me. Even the small things she does have an element of ritual, of the sacramental.
Terry is often told that she resembles Yvonne, and she certainly comes to resemble her more when she starts stealing Yvonne’s clothes. Can you talk about how this novel plays with and/or subverts the doppelganger trope?
That trope is something I’ve always been drawn to. In terms of film, I saw Vertigo when I was young and it had a major impact on me. I love David Lynch too, and almost every one of his films involves a doppelganger. In this novel, Terry and Yvonne both teach poetry, they go to the same gym, they sort of look alike, and then Terry starts using Yvonne’s name when she goes to Al Anon meetings. But there’s also an implication that Yvonne is from a wealthy family, while Terry is from a working-class background. One of my favorite moments is when Terry breaks into Yvonne’s apartment and finds a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and is disgusted that Yvonne hasn’t made any notes in it. I love that quality, where she’s providing this running commentary on Yvonne’s life and what she thinks of it. She doesn’t like it that Yvonne doesn’t have books everywhere, she doesn’t have music everywhere. In a way it’s kind of a traditional set-up for a doppelganger narrative, but it doesn’t go to the places that Vertigo or Mulholland Drive go.
This is a book that’s much more about identity and memory than it is about dramatic actions on the part of the characters.
I have a very broad definition of what gets classified as a crime novel. Anything with a desperate character in a desperate situation seems like crime fiction to me, and I do think that About Yvonne might be rediscovered and embraced if people looked at it as a thriller. It fits right in with a certain strain of literary suspense from the last ten years or so, even if it never goes to those twisty places that more conventional thrillers go. The first time I read it, I think I read it in a day and a half. It has that thriller pacing.
The reader does finally learn the truth about Mark and Yvonne, and we also get a (partial) answer to our questions about Terry’s sanity. What did you think of the ending?
I like that ending a lot. It feels really purposeful to me, because there’s so much throughout about mystery and uncertainty. Not knowing has been the driving force of the book and the thing that made her go off the rails so dramatically. The whole book is ultimately about being in your head too much, in a way that’s peculiarly informed by this Italian-American-recovering-Catholic-from-Brooklyn stuff. She says at one point, “Temporary insanity is normal, given the way we live.” And I think that’s a line that could sum up a lot of this book.
The word “cinematic” seems like a blurb cliche now, but I found it very easy to picture these scenes, and since I know you think a lot about the language of film, I wondered if you did too. Could you imagine About Yvonne as a movie?
Definitely, and I can think of a lot of films that cover similar territory. Barbara Loden’s Wanda is a reference point for me, and in terms of tone, Persona comes to mind. John Cassavetes is one of my heroes, and it’s got that sort of feeling to it too. I rewatched A Woman Under the Influence a couple of weeks ago, which is one of my favorite movies, and I see similarities there. It’s got that quality of being really close up to people, and the tension that comes from the messiness of human relationships and the way we interact with each other. And obviously both A Woman Under the Influence and this book are centered on characters who are in crisis and going through some kind of mental collapse. I also love the movie Georgia, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, which is about another potentially unlikeable character, where you’re watching her struggle and break down. About Yvonne also has a lot in common with Robert Altman’s Images and 3 Women, two films I love deeply—I imagined it looking very much like those films, in particular.
Would you say that in terms of crime fiction, you’re more drawn to inner conflict than outer conflict?
I guess I like violence okay too, but mostly the human drama is what it’s about. I’ve never been as drawn in by, for instance, cop stories as I am by small lives lived on the ropes.
Has the novel influenced you stylistically or in terms of craft?
Like I said, I love the way poets write novels. The way they use language is so effective, and you can feel that in almost every line of Masini’s book. I can’t remember the last time I copied down so many lines from a book that I loved.
