It's time to read "Catherine House" 🏯

William Morrow Books

👋 Hello readers!👋

It's July, which means it's time to start reading Catherine House. Elisabeth Thomas’s speculative Gothic thriller is about a prestigious school that offers free tuition plus room and board to students who, in return, essentially cut themselves off from the outside world for the three years they are enrolled. Ines, our narrator, is more than happy to leave a past trauma behind her, and isn’t eager to get out into the real world — but the further she gets in her Catherine House education, the more apparent it becomes there’s something sinister underneath it. It’s an electrifying update on gothic horror, evoking haunting institutional imagery and weaving in “psychosexual” experimentation and power imbalances.

Read the first chapter here.

I've been so into audiobooks this year, especially as the weather is getting nicer. When I'm home, it's so hard for me to focus — there always seems to be something else I can/should be doing (this thing often involves keeping my almost-one-year-old from eating everything) and my books get pushed to the side. Now, I try to carve out time every day to pop the little guy in the stroller, grab my headphones, and listen while walking for an hour. I listened to Catherine House and honestly I would just circle the last block over and over until I finished whatever section I was in. Highly recommend it! And if you go that route — check out Libro.fm. This is #NotAnAd, they just support indie bookstores and I love them.

Happy reading,

Arianna

📚 Behind the Book 📚

We asked Elisabeth Thomas to tell us a bit about how Catherine Housecame to be. Here's what she had to say.

Catherine House began with one sentence jotted in a notebook amongst many other idle scribblings: I want to write a story about a girl who falls in love with a house. I’d written the note after visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a palace of sunlit stone, glittering glass roofs, and balconies full of tumbling nasturtiums. But the more I turned over the idea in my mind, the more I thought about college.

I had recently graduated and was feeling rather lost. I was unhappy, mostly for reasons unrelated to graduation — but in my unhappiness, my college years took on a kind of mythic glow. I felt so empty, and those years on campus with all my friends had been so full, so concentrated, so poignant. The nostalgia I felt was warped, I could tell, but powerful — and powerful because it was warped.

I decided to play with this idea of a girl falling in love with a house: a house both as an institution and as this particularly vivid, mystic time and place in her life. Ines, the Catherine House protagonist, arrives at the house on the run from a dark past, and Catherine soon becomes the only home she’s ever known. Ines loves the house in all its details, from the perfumed gardens to the shadowed ballrooms, the peeling paint to the clouded windows. But as she falls deeper and deeper under Catherine’s spell, she sees that the house’s beauty may be concealing some dangerous secrets — and realizes that when we’re in love, we sometimes forgive things we shouldn’t.

Wrapping Up: Anna K

@thebelovedbookshelf

Points of Inspiration 💡

Jenny Lee on what she was thinking about while writing Anna K

@thelostlibrary

The first inspiration was of course, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, a novel that I read for the first time when I was a teenager in high school and again in my early 30s. It was one of my favorite books then and it still is. Anna K was never about me “rewriting” Tolstoy (I could never, and I would never dare such a thing) but more to reimagine it in a modern day setting with teenagers dealing with their first experiences of love.

Working Titles Film

The second inspiration which became my “a ha!” lightbulb moment was seeing the 2012 movie adaptation of Anna Karenina with Keira Knightly and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. I walked out of the Ziegfield theater in New York City where I was spending the Christmas holidays with my mother. We had a lively discussion about the tragic fate of Anna and talked about how women have come a long way since the late 1800s, but also how in some ways they haven’t made as much progress as they should. Anna was ruined in society after her, albeit, large mistake, while her lover Count Vronsky was not judged for his part of the indiscretion at all. I came up with the idea for Anna K right in the middle of the night after the movie in the drawing room of the St. Regis Hotel lobby. I thought the story of Anna Karenina would make an excellent young adult novel, and that perhaps I could give my Anna a better and more just ending. I emailed my book agent at three in the morning about my idea, and she responded right away and told me I needed to “write it now!”

HBO

I didn’t write my book seven years ago, though I made a few attempts. It’s obviously not an easy undertaking to take an 800 plus page story with a huge cast of characters and condense it down. But in 2017, I had another creative spark which helped me. When I was recovering from minor surgery I watched all seven seasons of Game of Thrones for the first time (I hadn’t been watching because I wanted to read the books first, and I hadn’t had time to read the books yet so I kept putting it all off). I of course got obsessed with the show and immediately picked up the first book, and was surprised to find out that the TV show was very much a close adaptation of the book. And then I realized I needed to put my 10 years of TV writing/producing experience to work, and decided the best way to write Anna K was to think of it in terms of scenes. I started writing immediately and the book poured out of me from seeing it in a new perspective.

UMG

There is a very important plot point that takes place at Coachella, so I talked to a friend about her Coachella experience and I looked at so many pictures of it online to inspire me. (Before the book went to press, I had a chance to go to Coachella in 2019, and I went back into that chapter and added even more details.) I listened to a lot of 90s rap music as there is a Sweet Sixteen 90’s hip hop club scene in the book, and my husband is a huge fan of 90s rap. I listened to Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Adele, and a lot of contemporary female pop music, as I wanted my book to be not only a fun soapy read but also to have a strong undercurrent of female empowerment.

I will say my biggest inspiration of all for the book was my husband John. I dedicated the book to him, and it really wouldn’t exist without him. He encouraged me to write it from the get go, he was my first reader and editor of my early drafts… and it was our own love story (we had met in 2014 and eloped in 2015) that really helped me channel those super intense teenage feelings of falling in love. Love should never be underestimated, and neither should one ever underestimate a smart teenage girl.

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