In his new book, Lone Women ($27, One World), author Victor LaValle transports readers to the desolate plains of 1915 Montana where Adelaide Henry tries to outrun a secret that would rather not be contained. LaValle describes his writing as “taking the real world and putting it through a very weird blender, adding in fantastical things so you can understand it better.” It’s an apt description—though it’s set more than a century ago, this eerie story of a haunted would-be homesteader cobbling together a life she doesn’t want to escape from feels both prescient and modern. Here, we talk to LaValle about casting off curses, crafting complicated monsters and the beauty of interdependence.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
I was in a bookstore at the University of Montana and I found a book called Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own. I’d never heard of women homesteaders who came to the territories totally alone. What made me say, “I want to write about this,” was the first time the author mentioned a Black woman who owned land and had a home that is now a historical landmark. It became more interesting when I also saw there was a Chinese population and Japanese folks out there making homes. Then, of course, there was the Native population who had long been there. The more complicated the picture became, the more I said, “Maybe I could tell this story.”
We’ve recently seen some major setbacks to women’s autonomy. Why was it important for you to write about these exceptionally independent women right now?
The funny thing is, the first version of this book was a story from 2014, and it felt vital and important then. But when I came back to it in 2018 to expand it into a novel, it was a different context, a different time. All but one of the things the women in the book experience are…
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