Q&A
Q: Where did you grow up?
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. I was lucky as a kid to spend a lot of my summers with my grandparents in the Sierra Nevada (near Lake Tahoe) at a small, rustic log cabin, accessible only by boat, with no electricity. It was the perfect place to run wild as a kid, and it is still my favorite reading spot in the world.
Q: Where do you live now, and what do you do there?
I live in Los Angeles with my partner Blake and our two cats Dash and Jenova, who sit next to me while I write in the morning.
When I’m not writing books, I work as a film and television producer, which essentially means I work with screenwriters and filmmakers to develop ideas and help bring those to the screen. Some of the movies I’ve worked on include the Academy-award nominated film THE BIG SICK written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon (in which I have a small on-screen cameo!), the Emmy-Award winning HBO documentaries THE ZEN DIARIES OF GARRY SHANDLING and GEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICAN DREAM, TRAINWRECK starring Amy Schumer, THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND, starring Pete Davidson, POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING starring Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island, the the HBO TV series GIRLS, and the films MACHETE, and SPY KIDS 4.
Q: What inspired you to write THE SECOND DEATH OF EDIE AND VIOLET BOND?
This story was inspired by my great-grandmother Edith Bond and her twin sister, Violet, who were both life-long Spiritualists. I never met the real-life Edie & Violet, but as a kid I was a bit obsessed with a rather haunting photograph of them as teenagers that lived on the bookshelf of my childhood home. I always wanted to write a story about Edie and Violet, but it wasn’t until a few years ago when I was researching the Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century that lightning struck and the puzzle pieces for the idea that became this book slid into place.
The entire history of Spiritualism is deeply fascinating, but it was the work of writer and scholar Ann Braude that truly opened up Edie and Violet’s story to me. In her excellent book, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Braude sheds light on the intersection between early Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century, and I was so interested to discover that in many ways, Spiritualism became a loophole through which women were able to publicly make their voices heard.
This was an era in which women were rarely encouraged to speak publicly and were instead expected to cultivate a nature that was pure, pious, passive, and domestic—qualities which effectively barred them from leadership roles. But the invention of the spirit medium neatly got around all of that. It gave women a socially acceptable way to speak in public. As spirit mediums and trance lecturers, they could travel the country, get up on stage and simply accept messages from the spirit world as passive vehicles.
Suddenly, teenage farm girls were traveling the country as trance mediums, seemingly unconscious on stage as spirits spoke through them about everything from women and children’s rights to marriage reform, ideological individualism, dress reform, socialism, labor reform, and religious freedom. In fact, many women who developed their oratory skills on the Spiritualist circuit later went on to use those skills to become influential women’s rights advocates. Laura de Force Gordon, one of California’s first female lawyers, is one example of this (and she makes a small cameo in the book)!
In this story, Edie and Violet are runaways who join a traveling Spiritualists show. Edie gives trance lectures on stage, as many mediums did during that time, and Violet conducts séances. They are joined by a found family of other young female mediums, all of whom were inspired by real-life Spiritualists of that era, including a medium who performed spirit poetry and another who attributes her musical talent to the spirit world.