The Companion, the latest historical crime novel from Kim Taylor Blakemore, follows Lucy Blunt, a woman in 1855 New Hampshire who is set to hang for a double murder she claims she didn’t commit. As Lucy reflects on the events leading up to her imprisonment, she tests the limits of our trust in her retelling, and the mystery that unfolds is as intoxicating as it is dreadful.
I had the immense pleasure of speaking with author Kim Taylor Blakemore about her interest in historical fiction, her writing process, and how she eventually found her way to The Companion. Plus: Kim’s thoughts on the future of Gothic fiction, an extensive lesbian romance reading list, and, of course, pet talk.
(Some spoilers for The Companion to follow.)
Kelli: The Companion is your first adult fiction novel, but you've previously published two YA books, Bowery Girl and Cissy Funk. What signals a YA book to you, and what drove you to switch categories?
Kim Taylor Blakemore: When I wrote Cissy Funk, I knew it was YA, and I wanted it to be. I knew that was where it was going to land. When I wrote Bowery Girl, I didn't think it was YA at all because it's pretty gritty. I had an actual scuffle with my agent at the time. He was a YA agent, George Nicholson (he's since passed on), and he was absolutely adamant it was a YA book, and I was absolutely adamant it was not. He said, “Listen, let me tell you my definition. When you have a character that's 16 or 17, their worldview is very different than that of an adult, so the worldview of the book is different. It's smaller.” That's what he said, but you know, I see Katniss Everdeen and I don't think that. But this was a while ago, maybe 13 years ago or something, and YA has changed dramatically.
But the funniest thing is, when I did the book launch party, it was at the Tenement Museum, and they called my editor and said, “We're having a fight over here, we don't know where to stock the book. One half of us say adult, the other half say YA.” So my editor said, “Why don't you just put it both places? Stop arguing!” I continued to believe Bowery Girl was not YA, and when I got the rights back, I marketed it as women's fiction and it got more traction that way. Now, I just figure it sits in both categories and that’s fine with me.
Anyway, I had written that, but I didn't want to continue to write YA; I was really not interested in writing it. So I said, well, what am I going to write instead? I want to write for the adult mainstream market, and I still like writing historical fiction. So, I wrote a book set after World War II in Monterey, and it was about an affair. I considered it a romance! But some people I know who read romances, they told me, “You can't have an affair in a romance.” And I'm like, why not, come on! But I wrote it, and it was so pretty and beautiful - with no stakes. It was kind of ridiculous. So I ripped out the characters that were interesting, kept the setting, and rewrote it. But I only got to Chapter 10. For two years, I was on Chapter 10, because I was just rewriting it and making it prettier. And then I realized I'd edited the life out of it.
So then I asked myself, “What what category am I going to write in?” I had this image of a woman in a cell. There was a super high window and the light coming through it was really bright, really sharp and cold. She was sitting in a chair. And she said, “Stories move in circles.” And I was like, “Who are you? I must talk to you right now!” I started writing about her, and another image came of a woman leaning over another woman on a bed and strangling her with some pearls, which is of course is not in the book, but it certainly signaled to me that romance is probably not my category!
Kelli: Right — very dark imagery. Do you find that when you write, the ideas usually come in images?
Kim: They do. I really get a lot of them as images. I see them almost like watching a film. Generally it's like that, and then the characters are different. Because my background is theatre and acting, the characters themselves, I approach them more like an actor would.
By the time I got to The Companion, I didn’t know what to do with it. I don't know what it was. I only had 10 pages. But there was something about it. I literally made up the cast and had the cast list on my wall over three moves of houses, even though I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I’d go to workshops and try to write little scenes, and I thought, “I'm not a good enough writer yet for this book.” So I just put it away. Then I said, “Okay, what are you gonna do? Because you can't just sit around doing nothing. You already trashed two books!” Which I'm fine with, because I don't find my words precious. If somebody else says “This will make it a better story,” I'm like, “Okay!”
In October of 2018, I attended a writing workshop at the Oregon coast, and I was fully prepared to write a novel. I had gotten back the rights to a short story about an all-female jazz band in the 30s, and I thought it would be super fun to expand it. I had everything ready for it, sat down for the first prompt of the evening ready to write about the female band leader. And out came Lucy Blunt — she literally poured out the whole weekend. And I knew it was time to write that book.
So that's how that got there, and then I just love Gothic fiction. I love dark historical fiction.
Kelli: I was looking at your website, and I read your piece that you wrote for CrimeReads about the New Gothic and the role of women throughout Gothic literature. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly the New Gothic is, and where you think the genre is headed?
Kim: That's a really big question for a little writer! I just like those books I listed in the article, and hey, all of them have scary-ass women in them and I think that’s where the New Gothic is going. But I think that Gothic itself continually has the same tropes that get twisted around, right? So you have the naive character, whether it's the man in My Cousin Rachel or the woman in The Woman in White. Those tropes, and the isolated houses and the families with secrets and some body in a casket somewhere, those are all there, all the way through all of it. Like Laura Purcell's books, I don’t know if you’ve read them — The Silent Companion, that scared me to death.
Kelli: I have not read her, but I'm always interested in things that are going to scare me to death.
Kim: Oh my god, it's creepy. She’s fabulous. She just takes every one of the Gothic tropes and amps them up completely. So, I don't know, I think that there’s a lot of Gothic fiction that’s more modern now, like Wendy Webb and Emily Carpenter—they both write modern Gothic. I just think that we're in a time where with Gothic, at least what I've seen — there's just a broader range. We don't just have the naive young English woman who's on the moors anymore. I think it's more diverse, and I hope it gets even more diverse.
Kelli: What themes would you say you're most interested in exploring through the lens of historical fiction specifically?
Kim: I really, really like looking at women in history, what they do and how they survive. And then I really like looking at the people who are not the queens, not the princesses, not the upper class — but everyone else, and how they get through life with their wits.
Kelli: What was behind your decision to make this story a mystery? What draws you to mysteries?
Kim: What I liked about this story was that you knew what happened, but not why. And that really interests me. Gothics do that more than whodunnit mysteries, and whodunnit mysteries are totally awesome, but I like the ones that are completely psychological, where I don't trust anybody. That draws me into those stories. Lucy herself is not very trustworthy.
Kelli: Yeah, I was wondering as I was reading it, is this a reliable narrator? And am I going to be surprised with the way that things ultimately end up happening? Because I didn't trust her—even when, at the end of the day, she is innocent.
Kim: She may or may not be innocent.
Kelli: True — the whole story is told from her perspective.
Kim: Right, and she contradicts herself within the story. I think what draws me to her as a compelling character is that every decision she made was the right decision for surviving at the time, even though most of them were terrible decisions in the long term. So by the time she's at the end, she's lied her way to stay alive for so long. All of those decisions became her noose.
Kelli: Yeah, definitely. The whole build-up of her realizing that people were going to figure out what she had done, and her trying to send those letters and trying to time things exactly so that she could leave before anyone got back... it was so stressful reading!
Kim: It's all the little things that create that sort of dread and tension in books. She's sewing everything into her dress: she pricks her finger. Or somebody’s playing the piano: it suddenly stops. Those are really from film. I totally grab those things from film.
Kelli: So, let’s talk about Lucy and Eugenie. Basically, there's — I hesitate to call it a love story at the center of this novel, but there is a romance of sorts, which we discussed earlier.
Kim: I tried my hardest!
Kelli: It's funny, because it is a love story from Lucy's perspective, but it's hard to know, because, again, Lucy is unreliable. It's hard to know how Eugenie feels because we're not getting her perspective. But did you know from the start that you wanted their romance to be central to the story?
Kim: That happened organically. Some things I don't plot, they just happen the way they happen. Oftentimes when I'm writing, the only thing I know is the end. So I've set up some characters, and I say, “here's the characters I know, and here's the end. Get me there.” And then as I go along I'll write big scenes, signposts in a way. But I could see Lucy being very enthralled with that woman, so I just let it go.
Kelli: In that vein, how do you approach writing LGBTQ stories in a historical fiction context when so much of queer history has been erased?
Kim: Well, it was interesting to me to put this in the right context. Once I knew that was the central relationship, that it wasn't Lucy and Mr. Burton, I had to decide where to place it in time. Because by placing it in the 1840s or 1850s, you're sitting in the part of New England where Boston Marriages were fairly common. Because the story is a murder mystery, and it's a forbidden love story, but not forbidden in that way — It's about the class and the power — and I wanted to really, really be able to hone in on that. So I'm like, okay, you have to set it in the 1840s or 1850s. Because once you get past the Civil War, there starts to be all that stuff where being homosexual is “terrible”, and Havelock Ellis has come out with his book Sexual Inversion and etc, and then you run into a different set of issues, structurewise and storywise. I really wanted to tell a very clean Gothic that didn't involve that.
Kelli: Oftentimes when I read a story with a gay character, I'm so used to there being this whole part where it's like, “Am I gay?” or “What are these feelings?” and it was so nice to just skip over that part. It's so nice to read something that isn’t calling those feelings into question at all. It's just straightforward. Like, we are into each other. This is happening.
Kim: Right? Exactly. There are enough stories about that. And they're interesting, and there are good ones, and that's totally fine—but I agree with you. And I think that also lends itself to Lucy, because she was in love with the male mill manager too, right? So for her, it's not at all about the sex of the person.
The other thing that I really wanted to do is — Eugenie's blind. My background is teaching orientation and mobility for the blind. That's my master's, that's what I taught for years with blind and low-vision adults. I had always seen representations of blindness like Wait Until Dark, where a character’s blindness is used as a plot point. So it was actually a very intentional thing that I wanted to do, because I hadn't seen it in many books. Where someone is just blind and their impairment isn’t used as a plot point. It's like their relationship — that's just their relationship in the story. And it doesn't, as you said, have to be all this other stuff.
Kelli: Yeah, it's so important to see more representation overall. Along those lines, do you have any books that you consider to be required reading for anyone interested in LGBTQ stories throughout history? Nonfiction or fiction or whatever? Not to put you on the spot...
Kim: Well, let's see. I love Jeanette Winterson's books. The Passion is an amazing book, and Written on the Body is fabulous. It's contemporary, but with the most beautiful language. I've read it five times, and every time I'm like, the language is sex. It's so amazingly visceral. Another author is Sarah Waters. Everyone loves Fingersmith, but I love Tipping the Velvet — I think it's slyer and a little bit more fun. Emma Donoghue is also great. Her very first book, Stir-Fry, is about some women in Ireland who are lesbians, and then she has another one, Landing, a really sweet romance about two women. She's just an amazing writer, her historicals are so complex - Frog Music is amazing - so anything she writes is great. I’m so grateful she endorsed The Companion. I’m a bit of a fan-girl, so that meant a lot.
Here's someone I adore if you want just really good straight-up lesbian historical romance: Lily Hammond. Her books are fabulous. She also writes terrific fantasy/sci-fi under the name Kate Genet, but for historical, the Lily Hammond ones are really good.
Kelli: I am very excited to add all of these to my list. In BSG tradition, before I let you go — please tell me about your pets!
Kim: We have all rescue animals, of course, because my wife is a veterinarian. So, when I wanted a Cavalier King Charles — that's not allowed!
We have three cats. So we have Lila, a cat that's very old now and lives in one room because she doesn't want to come out, which is fine. We have Tuffy, a cat who is blind that came to their clinic in a car accident. He had lost both his eyes in the accident and his jaw was crushed, so they repaired the whole thing, and now he runs the house. And then Chester was another rescue cat; he was in a car accident and his leg was broken, so we brought him home.
Then the dogs: we have small, medium and large. Rocky is the big dog. He's a Shepherd Doberman mix. The medium dog is Naomi, this super old dog who now has one eye. She's very cute, but we help her down stairs because they scare her now. She's probably 16 or 17, we don't really know her age. And then a little teeny white dog who's two years old - that’s Calvin.
Kelli: Amazing! Well, I appreciate you talking with me so much. I'm really excited to check out all of those recommendations, and to read more of your work as well.
Kim: Thank you so much. You all are awesome!
Kelli: Thank you!
You can learn more about Kim Taylor Blakemore at her website, https://www.kimtaylorblakemore.com. Follow her on social media @kimtaylorblakemore on Facebook and @blakemorekimtaylor on Instagram. The Companion is out now from Lake Union Publishing — buy it here (or on Amazon if you MUST).