For those readers who believe nothing original or new is being written these days, check out and marvel at Jen Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos, a shapeshifting, powerhouse novel that balances explorations of history, myth, identity, and monsters.
Fawkes’s novel, told in letters and a variety of forms, tells the story of Sylvie Swift as she makes her way to Nashville to learn more about a mysterious script that she receives. From here, Sylvie’s story takes off, and we are along for a fantastic–and fantastical–ride.
It was my pleasure to be able to talk with Jen Fawkes about Daughters of Chaos
Bradley Sides: Hey, Jen. It’s good to be able to chat with you.
Mannequin and Wife, your first book, was released in 2020. You followed it up with Tales the Devil Told Me in 2021. For readers who are new to your writing, these books are both story collections—and great collections, I must say.
I’m curious what it was like for you to move from writing stories to writing a novel?
Jen Fawkes
Jen Fawkes: This move was excruciatingly difficult. Before trying to tackle a novel, I didn’t draft; I taught myself to write stories by moving from start to finish with no preplanning. I’d work on the first couple of pages for some time—until the voice felt right—then allow that voice to carry me through to the story’s end. Whenever it became apparent that I’d gone off-track, I’d back up to the place where I last felt certain and move in a new direction. It was generally around the ¾ mark that I would catch sight of the story’s ending; this is how I wrote every story in my two collections.
I tried working on several novels the same way, but this proved to be impossible. Turns out I can hold a whole story, even a long and complex one, in my head, but a novel is simply too bulky for me to suspend, fully formed, in my mind. In addition, my story-writing method never involved much revision, so my first attempted novels remain in first-draft form to this day, as I was too daunted by the notion of trying to open them back up.
With Daughters of Chaos, I worked on the manuscript for two years then put it aside for three years. It seems that this critical distance allowed me to re-see the material and discover the book’s final form.
Bradley Sides
BS: There are three things I look for most often when I’m selecting a book to read. One or two is usually enough, but you manage all three in Daughters of Chaos. You place readers in the South. You have monsters. AND you have lots of lots of experimentation with form.
Let’s talk about the form. You use letters to guide the book, but there are also encyclopedia entries, translations of plays, and news articles.
Will you talk a bit about why you decided to add in these kinds of approaches in telling the story?
JF: I’ve always been a sucker for experimentation—with form, with point of view. I grew up reading Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales cover-to-cover repeatedly, in addition to everything by Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Tom Robbins, and V. C. Andrews, among others. My mom was a voracious reader, reading everything from realism to wild experimentation, while my father, who I saw only occasionally, read more genre work. Do I write the way I do because of the texts I encountered when I was a still-forming creature? Or did I choose the books I pulled off my parents’ shelves because I have an experimental nature? Who knows?
After I’d put the novel that’s now Daughters of Chaos aside for three years, I reread Lysistrata for the first time since undergrad, and I realized what my first attempts at the book lacked: overt intertextuality. Many of my favorite texts (Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, among others) make use of a variety of forms, so this was an approach I’d been unconsciously considering for decades.
As a reader, I’m primarily interested in work that surprises me, and in work that is varied, multifarious, motley. If a text is interested in only one subject, one voice, one question, one set of circumstances, I can get bored. Writers write the work they want to read, so here we are.
BS: I really enjoyed the author’s note at the end of the novel. In it, you detail the history that inspired Daughters of Chaos, and you tell us readers about how adding in some of your favorite things, including monsters, helped the book find its final form.
Why monsters? What did they give your story that it might’ve been missing as you were working on prior drafts?
JF: In the first three drafts of this book, there was a villain—an unhinged fellow murdering Nashville prostitutes, a sort-of Jack the Ripper figure, and he was one reason I was unable to make that version work. An agent who signed me for the novel before I’d written a word wanted a highly commercial book; trying to fulfill someone else’s vision proved to be not only a huge mistake, but also entirely impossible.
It turns out that I can’t write a villain, in the “black hat/white hat” sense, as I don’t believe in villains any more than I believe in heroes. I DO believe in monsters, however; I am one myself, and so are you. Every human being is capable of any act, however shocking, however horrific, however gruesome. Arriving at this understanding helped me grasp why monsters have always engendered a feeling of camaraderie and affection in me.
People keep telling me that “monstrous women” are having a moment, but that’s not true. In our world, women are, always have been, and always will be the most terrifying “other” around. Our deepest mysteries are tucked within the female anatomy; is it any wonder we’re so detested, so vilified, so reviled? Collectively, men hate women because we can do what they can’t, and creating the shape-shifting female monsters in Daughter of Chaos was one of the greatest joys I’ve known.
BS: I have to ask this now: Who or what is your favorite monster?
JF: I’m not the sort of person who picks favorites; my tastes are simply too broad. But I’ll say Medusa, who embodies the complicated business of being a woman—she is the most horrific, after all, and therefore the most powerful.
BS: The author’s note tells how the story came to be. Now I’m really curious to know about Sylvie, the protagonist. Where did you find her?
Jen Fawkes
JF: In my first conception of this book, the narrator was a mute boy being raised in a brothel (Apollo in Daughters of Chaos), but the first agent who signed me insisted that the protagonist be a young woman. Having never before attempted to write from the POV of a young woman, I gave the mute boy an aunt, and I named her for Aunt Sylvie from Marilynne Robinson’s brilliant Housekeeping.
In Sylvie Swift, I set out to create a character who feels true to the lived experience of a woman of her time and place—one who exists at the whims of male relations, who lives daily with loss, who must fight for herself (and other women) in indirect ways—but one who, in spite of being buffeted about by the winds of change and fate, also feels curious, capable, and strong. There are pieces of me in Sylvie, of course, as well as my sister, my mom, and other women I’ve cherished.
BS: By writing a novel with so many historical elements and connections, did you ever find history to be kind of limiting in where you could take the narrative? Or did having that background just enhance the imaginative possibilities of where you could go with everything?
JF: I generally find restrictions to be more freeing than limiting. Because I’m so open, so interested in so many subjects and angles, I’ve always been overwhelmed by a multitude of ideas. For me, imposing barriers beyond which I cannot move always helps me world-build, and I LOVE engaging in research—even my strangest stories are quite heavily researched.
BS: I was quite moved by the ending of the book, especially in this section:
“Do not let your lives–your stories–be written by a third party, my daughters. Women are patient, crafty, and strong, but few comprehend how strong. Your strength, Brigitte and Marina, Marina and Brigitte, is beyond imagination, beyond invention, and if you take nothing else from the motley pages your mother has assembled for you, take this: “Your lives are yours for the telling.”
Stories really are everything, aren’t they?
JF: I’m so glad you were moved, Bradley. I cry every time I read the ending of Daughters of Chaos, and I hope I always will. Human beings believe we’re the most powerful, brilliant, fortunate creatures on earth, that we exist at the top of some fictional pyramid, but the truth of the matter is that human apprehension is quite limited. The narrative mode—event following event, linked by causation—is the only way we’re capable of thinking, so everything we’ve produced, everything we’ve spawned, IS a story—society, history, identity, science, politics, mathematics. We’re eternally surrounded by the inexplicable, the unknown—chaos—but we are incapable of following anything that isn’t structured as a narrative.
Stories are everything; this is why it’s so difficult, and so baffling, for me to contend with our species’ diminishing comprehension of their importance.
BS: Thank you for talking with me, Jen! You’ve written a wonderful novel, and I enjoyed every page of it.
Leave a Reply