In her speculative YA novel There Is a Door in This Darkness, Kristin Cashore—the author of the Graceling Realm novels and Jane, Unlimited—draws from personal experience to chronicle a teen dealing with chronic pain and processing grief amid the Covid crisis and the 2020 presidential election. Following the death of Wilhelmina’s aunt Frankie and the start of the pandemic, her aunts Margaret and Esther move into her family’s Boston apartment. Wilhelmina also begins having bizarre visions and soon realizes that she’s not the only one—her friend James is contending with these otherworldly events, too. Via alternating chapters that move back and forth in time, readers follow Wilhelmina as she struggles to make sense of this strange new magic. Cashore spoke with PW about her experience crafting her second contemporary novel and how she uses her writing to cultivate peace among the chaos.
On top of navigating grief and chronic pain, Wilhelmina experiences challenges stemming from global events. How did these factors help you shape There Is a Door in This Darkness?
When I was brainstorming this book, I knew I wanted to write something that had magical interconnections between people that extended back in time. As the election approached, I wondered, “What if this actually took place now, during this week?” The book was never going to be about the election. But what if it was happening in the background while the main story is taking place? I think this was just my writerly approach to dealing with a really stressful time in my life. How was I going to get through this election? One way was for me to treat it like a writing project: “I’m just jotting down everything that’s happening because I need to write a book.” Thinking like that gave me a bit of distance from everything and made that week a little easier for me to get through. In a way, the book became a lens through which I watched everything, and a comforting way for me to process everything.
So many other interesting things happened around that time for me. The Friday before the election—the day before Halloween, rather—there was this beautiful snowstorm. I went to Harvard Square to pick up a pair of glasses and then I went for a walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Nothing special happened, but the snowstorm itself was completely magical. It was an early snowstorm—one of those wet, fluffy snowfalls. I thought to myself, “This is how the book begins.”
It was really cool to plan the book this way: “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’ll just wait and see.”
In an afterword, you discuss how Wilhelmina’s experience managing chronic pain relates to your own. How did your own understanding of your diagnosis inform how you approached Wilhelmina’s story?
I think if I had written this a year or two later—after I had gotten my new diagnosis and discovered I needed brain surgery—I might have written disability out of the book entirely. I think it would have been too soon for me to process my own situation to then weave it into Wilhelmina’s experience. It would’ve also made her disability a much bigger and more complicated element than this book could withstand as it was. I feel like that would’ve been a different book. But I would also have been sorry to lose that aspect of Wilhemina, so I’m not entirely sure what I would have done.
How did you go about layering all the varying points of conflict that Wilhelmina encounters?
I didn’t worry too much about how these major events fit in; I just wrote them how they were because they were happening in the background. But because it was taking place during those events, I was able to connect the experiences she’s having—of being a person who doesn’t want to look at something because it’s too painful and of being a person who isn’t necessarily seeing everything that’s happening in front of them—with the realities of living through the pandemic and witnessing certain behavior during the election that was so hard to understand.
I let Covid and the election become the backdrop and found places to weave them in with Wilhelmina’s story because I didn’t want to write a book about the election or the pandemic. I wanted to write a book about Wilhelmina.
Your Graceling Realm books take place in an entirely fictional fantasy world. Have you encountered any challenges in writing outside of the fantasy genre?
One of the challenges that springs to mind right away is technology. There are a lot of annoying things you have to write about if you’re writing about the modern day, like cellphones and the internet. I think I’m more comfortable writing about young people who aren’t of this place in time, because then I have more room to make them however I want to make them. If I’m writing about a young person today, I feel this pressure for them to seem like a young person today, and I am not a young person. I’m almost 50.
When I’m writing my fantasy novels, it’s not exactly easy. But a funny thing happened while I was writing Jane, Unlimited. The book is written in five different genres. I wrote a mystery and a spy story and a horror story and a science fiction story and I found each of them quite challenging. Then I got to the fantasy story, and something about finally getting back to familiar ground made it come together so much quicker and so much more easily than the others.
What made you want to write a contemporary speculative novel rather than a realistic one?
From the beginning, I wanted there to be a little bit of magic. The reader gradually comes to realize that Wilhelmina has been crossing paths with James for her entire life. Sure, that could happen realistically, but I think themes of change can lend themselves to a more magical type of story. I also love the idea that Wilhelmina thinks that her aunts are just regular people who are a little bit weird and a little bit odd and, at the moment, intentionally irritating because they’re two more people now living in her too small space, making her feel trapped. But there’s something really special about these women. I liked the idea of raising the plot just a notch to a place where there’s this intentional perception of magic and the unreal. I did a lot of research into the meanings of different tarot cards, and I found the meaning of temperance [balance, patience, and moderation] to be so, so lovely. To me, it was this idea of, “Let’s live a life where we’re thinking about what is actually real and what is actually happening, but also what could be and what could happen.”
What’s next for you?
There’s more Graceling Realm coming.
There Is a Door in This Darkness by Kristin Cashore. Dutton, $19.99 June 11 ISBN 978-0-8037-3999-4
