On an
island in the Caribbean, a young woman—unnamed and self-described as
“unremarkable”—lives a quiet simple life, working for a sailing company and
trying to pay her debts. Until a dashing older man, a recent widower and wealthy
senator named Max Winter, arrives in town and sweeps her off her feet. After a
whirlwind romance, she finds herself newly engaged and ensconced in a life of
luxury she never could have imagined. But all is not as it seems at Asherley,
Max’s opulent Long Island estate, and no amount of glitz and glamour can keep
every secret buried, or every ghost quiet.
Inspired
by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and imbued with a rich sense of
suspense, Lisa Gabriele’s novel, THE WINTERS (Viking; On Sale: October
16, 2018), is a page-turner about the seductive trappings of wealth, the
dangers of infatuation, and the impossibility of escaping the past. Gabriele’s
vivid prose brings the affluent Hamptons alive, and skillfully reveals the
darkness lurking just beneath the surface and the skeletons in every walk-in
closet.
Please
join me in welcoming author Lisa Gabriele to Thoughts in Progress as she talks
about her new release. Welcome, Lisa.
The
Winters begins like a lot of books, with a handsome man
sweeping a young woman off her feet. But at its heart, this is a story about
women—our unnamed heroine, plucked out of her quiet existence; Rebekah, the
dead first wife who haunts her dreams; and Dani, Rebekah’s vengeful teenage
daughter. Did you set out to write a story about female relationships, power,
and sexuality?
Lisa:
Yes. I’m
obsessed with female relationships, sex, and power, and how they intersect.
These are my favorite things to read and write about. The genesis of this book
began with me thinking about the women in Rebecca, and all the ways
modern female characters and a new setting would completely change their
relationship with each other. Suddenly The Winters became an exercise in demonstrating how much women
have changed in contemporary times, and how some men, especially rich and
powerful ones, really have not. I mean, think about all the
different ways patriarchy still shapes and molds our lives as women. My
narrator certainly has agency, she has a job of her own that she’s quite good
at, and a potential role model of a single working woman, but despite this,
she’s still deeply susceptible to the lure of a “happily ever after.” And with
Max’s daughter Dani, I got to play around with some of my worst fears around
young women and social media, on the difficulty of getting your new boyfriend’s
kid to accept you, and about feminism’s so-called generational divide. Dani is
15 going on 40, an heiress with a chauffeur, a tutor, and thirty thousand
Instagram followers. She isn’t going to make life easy for her new
stepmother-to-be. And what better wedge for her to use than the memory of her
dead (perfect) mother, Rebekah? The relationship between her and the narrator
was explosively fun to write. But this time, the primary question that hovers
over the narrator’s image of the dead Rebekah isn’t about her sexuality, but
rather her role as a mother—a much more loaded question these days.
The
Winters is inspired in part by Daphne du Maurier’s
classic novel, Rebecca—an instant bestseller, first published in 1938,
that has never gone out of print, reportedly selling 50,000 copies a year. And
it’s obvious you’re a fan. What do you love about it, and what made you use it
as the launching point for your novel?
Lisa:
Anyone
who knows me knows I’m a big fan of Rebecca. My mother, who died almost
twenty years ago, introduced me to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie first, and whenever
I miss her I reach for it. In the fall of 2016, in the despairing days of the
U.S. election, I bought some ice cream and threw in the DVD to drown out the
bad news. But this time, instead of comforted, it left me feeling deeply uneasy.
I had to remind myself that in Daphne du Maurier’s book Maxim de Winter
killed his sexually rebellious first wife, a fact that Hitchcock, due to
Production Codes at the time, erased. I suddenly felt this strong desire to
avenge Rebecca and punish Maxim. So I guess you could say nostalgia inspired me
to reread the book, but anger drove me to write mine.
Much of The
Winters is set at Asherley, Max Winter’s opulent estate in the Hamptons.
Why did you choose that setting?
 |
| Author Lisa Gabriele |
Lisa:
I’ve always
been fascinated with Long Island’s moneyed elite; a couple of my favorite books
are set there. I loved the storied Gold Coast of The Great Gatsby, and
the deceptively serene town in The Amityville Horror. I needed a place
that combined history and horror and the Hamptons seemed like a natural choice.
However, to pull off the violent conclusion, I also needed a location that
wasn’t only private, but remote. In the research stage, I visited the Suffolk
County Historical Society in Riverhead and read about Gardiner’s Island. It’s
one of the biggest swaths of privately-owned land in America, purchased by Lion
Gardiner from the Montaukett Indians in the 1600s, in exchange for a large
black dog and some Dutch blankets. Today it’s worth more than $125 million
dollars so keeping the island in the family has driven generations of Gardiners
to sometimes concoct nefarious plots. So Winter’s Island was born, as was a
motive for murder. I changed some geographic details, but the rest of its
history and topography, its dense forests, the old ruins, the private beach and
thick, marshy shores, are the same. Then there’s the mansion. I love a looming
turret, so I made Asherley a Queen Anne Victorian—spookier, in my opinion, than
the typical center hall design from the Gilded Age. Entering the house,
with its paneled walls, oak and marble floors and mullioned windows, the reader
falls back in time. The only modern touch is a dramatic, star-shaped
greenhouse, Rebekah’s pride and joy, lodged, incongruously and a little violently,
against the house, a constant reminder that this was once her domain.
As our
narrator spends more time at Asherley and begins to discover her new family’s
dark secrets, The Winters becomes a gripping slow-burn thriller. What
are your tricks for building suspense and keeping the reader on the edge of
their seat?
Lisa:
E.L.
Doctorow said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only
see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” With The
Winters I never set out to “write a thriller.” I just metaphorically made
my headlights a little dimmer and the road ahead a little snakier, but kept the
speed the same, (barely) avoiding smashing through the guardrails. Also, the
whole story is told from one POV. The narrator’s. We are only in her head. We
only know what she knows. And she’s fed different versions of the same stories.
So who to trust? You can also use short staccato sentences. They ratchet up the
tension. Sometimes.
Like many
fictional politicians—from House of Cards’ Frank Underwood to the
Senator in Joyce Carol Oates’ Black Water—Max Winter is powerful,
charismatic, and fiercely ambitious. Why did you choose politics for Max’s
career, and what made you want to dip into that world?
Lisa:
As I
mentioned above, the 2016 U.S. election consumed me, and the subsequent
presidency has upended all norms. It’s been a struggle to keep up with the
controversies, the news being, for this former journalist, a constant
distraction. But it’s also a source of inspiration. So I stopped fighting it.
Since I couldn’t get away from the news, I folded some of my current fixations
into my book. I didn’t want to date the book, or bog it down in current
affairs, but divisive politics, and the corrosive effects of both social media
and (questionable) Russian money on modern American life all make cameos.
Presciently I finished the book at the start of the #metoo movement, which,
like my book, demonstrates how important it is to believe women.
You’ve
been a journalist and an award-winning producer, in both radio and TV, for more
than twenty years. When (and how) does your journalism background seep into
your novels?
Lisa:
It always
does, sometimes subtly and sometimes more obviously, but I am first and
foremost a journalist. The books I write require research to get the settings,
tone, and era right, but it’s my favorite part of the job. And for me it’s
unavoidable. My characters tend to arrive almost fully formed. So when the
unnamed narrator of The Winters insisted she worked on boats, and Max
decided to run for reelection in Suffolk County, I had some research to do.
Learning about politics at the state level and proper boat terminology was
interesting and fun. But I also consult experts. I reached out to a PhD in
mortuary archeology to confirm how many years it would take for a body buried
in a shallow grave to completely turn to skin and bones. And, thankfully, one
of my best friends is a family lawyer, so I ran by her all the details about
conservatorships and inheritances. The hardest part was trying to understand
the murderous lengths to which some people will go to maintain their wealth and
privilege, but one need only turn on CNN these days for that kind of research.
The
Winters takes many of its cues from classic novels—a
plain unassuming heroine; a dashing older gentleman; a lavish estate; an
inconvenient first wife. But the ending is decidedly more modern—even feminist.
Without giving too much away, can you speak to how you went about crafting a
contemporary version of these kinds of novels?
Lisa:
Writing a
modern book that that still pays tribute to a beloved classic is a tricky
balancing act. I am a huge fan of the ones done well: Jane Smiley’s King
Lear redux, A Thousand Acres, Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea
(which is actually a prequel to Jane Eyre, which du Maurier herself
retold with Rebecca), Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible (a hilarious
retelling of Pride and Prejudice), and Joanna Trollope’s Sense and
Sensibility. The best ones preserve the original’s landmarks, though the
terrain is completely different. They’re written in a contemporary style,
though a sharp-eyed reader will spot my own iambic hexameter. And while the
characters feel familiar, they’re not facsimiles. No character embodies all of
these ideas more than Dani Winter, a 15-year old girl with all the traits of
the average Millenial, minus any disadvantages. She has everything a girl her
age could want, plus total freedom and the run of the house. She plays with her
mother’s clothes and makeup, and the stories she tells about her run completely
counter to her father’s. This presents a very current dilemma for our narrator.
Does she believe the man she loves or his bratty kid? Dani becomes, then, a
reminder that we longer live in an era where stories men tell about women take
primacy over the ones they tell about themselves, as the #metoo movement is
proving. Women just aren’t having that anymore. I know Dani’s generation isn’t.
Finally,
considering the evocative setting of The Winters, where do you think is
the best place to read a book like this?
Lisa:
You
should read The Winters at one of my favorite hotels, The Chequit Inn,
on Shelter Island. You should be sitting on the deep front porch that overlooks
the Peconic River, sipping sweet tea. Funny enough, in a very early draft I
wrote a scene where our teary, breathless narrator, running for her life,
bursts into the lobby of The Chequit Inn demanding to use their phone. They let
her. They get her a glass of water and calm her down. They offer her a chair.
In the end, the incredible staff at even my imaginary Chequit Inn sucked the
tension right out of the scene, so I had to redirect.
Lisa,
thanks for joining us and sharing this insight into your story. Being a fan of
REBECCA, your book sounds intriguing and one that would become a favorite read
too.
Thanks
everyone for stopping by. Are you a fan of REBECCA and if so, do you look for
similar books for your TBR list?
For over
eighty years, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has been
attracting readers with its haunting story of a young woman’s fairy tale romance—and
how it’s upended by the ghosts of her husband’s past. The book has never been
out of print, and has inspired countless remakes and retellings, including an upcoming Netflix movie starring Lily James and Armie
Hammer. With Lisa Gabriele’s THE WINTERS (now available in paperback
from Penguin Books), fans of the classic can indulge in a sharp and suspenseful
tale that’s both inspired by Rebecca and a compelling page-turner all on
its own.
