Malinda: First, I just want to say, Lois, I’m such a big fan of yours. I read all of your books that I could find when I was a teen!
Lois: Thank you.
Malinda: DAUGHTERS OF EVE is an incredible book. When I read the original version I thought it was really an amazing portrait of a specific time in U.S. history: the late 1970s, when the women’s movement was pushing so many boundaries everywhere in our culture. I don’t believe that sexism has been totally vanquished today, but now it’s often a lot more subtle than it was back then. So when you were updating this story, how did you deal with the differences in sexism between now and then?
Lois: This was the hardest one of my novels to revise. As you say, the original version has to be viewed in the context of the time in which it was written. DAUGHTERS OF EVE was published in 1979 when the feminist movement was just taking hold, and girls of that generation, including my own teenage daughters, were very confused about what was expected of them, and what their rights were, and what they really wanted out of life. Men and boys were equally confused about the new social roles that women were trying out. Everything was in chaos and people were acting out their fears and resentments in sometimes inappropriate ways. That’s what the story portrayed; it was a slice of social history. In revising it I had to keep making reference to the fact that this little rural town was sort of a throwback. In the words of Irene Stark, it was a town that was “stuck in a time warp.” That’s the only way I could handle the situation.
Malinda: Everybody’s actions in this book are so complicated, and nothing is black or white, not even the ending. I’m really curious to know what inspired you to write this book, since it’s really quite different than the other suspense novels you’ve written.
Lois: It is very different, and I was inspired to write it because I wanted to write something different. I don’t like to write the same book over and over again. The idea I got was that I would have a fanatical, charismatic adult exerting influence upon vulnerable kids who looked up to and respected that adult. I wanted it to be in a setting where other adults, such as parents, wouldn’t be aware of what was happening. So my first idea was to have it be a church youth group with a charismatic, male Sunday school teacher. I actually wrote five chapters and it was going pretty well, and then I thought, Oh, my lord, this will be banned everywhere. School librarians will be afraid to put it on the shelves because all the fundamentalist parents will be furious. You have just got to stay away from things having to do with religion. So I started over and I used the same theme, but I made the adult a vehement feminist female.
Malinda: It’s funny that you say it would be banned everywhere. Did this book get any sort of push back like that when it was published?
Lois: Oh, yes. I keep being informed by kids that it was banned here and there. But the author is the last to know when a book is banned.
Malinda: Did they tell you why it was banned?
Lois: I think all the feminists think it’s antifeminist, and all the antifeminists think it’s feminist. I was trying to walk a nice gray line, but people who feel very strongly about a subject don’t want a nice gray line. They want it to be all black or all white.
Malinda: I felt that in the original edition, Irene Stark really did walk that gray line, but for some reason setting it in 2011 seemed to turn her into more of a caricature of a feminist—like a feminazi. Do you think changing the setting changed Irene’s character a little bit?
Lois: I think it might have, yes. I can’t pinpoint how. But I think it did and I think she became nastier in the second version. But also, I think her cause was justified; she had been misused by a man she trusted and by an employer she trusted. But she took it too far and went over the edge.
Malinda: How do you feel about Irene as a character?
Lois: I think Irene is a very bitter woman and has reason to be, but is also probably unstable. And when she becomes a fanatic, she goes all the way.
Malinda: Well, another one of the really interesting changes you made when updating this book was that you really intensified the actions the girls take when they assault Peter and when they break into the science lab. The things they do in the newer version are much more violent, I think. Why did you choose to do that?
Lois: My editor wanted me to do it. Today’s teens are so conditioned to violence from movies and video games that she thought they would find the acts of vengeance in the earlier version of the book ridiculously tame. So I made those changes reluctantly, and then I realized she was right. But I didn’t go so far as to have real physical violence. What was done to Peter was worse than what happened in the first book, but nobody did him any real physical harm.
Lois: There’s a mob mentality here, too, and that applies to women as well as men.
Malinda: In one particular instance you changed one word that I thought was very, very telling. You changed the word “communist” to “terrorist,” and it really made me think that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
Lois: I think you hit it. That’s exactly what it is. You can always find villains in any era—or people who are regarded as villains. One group might be regarded that way in one era, but somebody else takes their place in the next one.
Malinda: How do you think women’s roles have changed, or not changed, since you first wrote DAUGHTERS OF EVE?
Lois: I think women today have a lot more opportunities than women did at the time I wrote DAUGHTERS OF EVE, as far as careers go, but there has been a painful trade-off. There is one indisputable fact that can never be changed, and that is that women are the ones who have babies. That triggers women to want to build nests and to see to it that those babies are well cared for and happy. So women are torn, because they have only so much energy to give, and to invest yourself full-time in a demanding career and at the same time be a fully devoted mother is very hard. So in some ways women’s lives have changed for the better, and in other ways they haven’t, because so much more is now expected of them than used to be expected of them.
Malinda: That’s true. There is one line in your book where one of the girls is talking to her mother and her mother did say that the reason men do things is because they can’t have babies. I thought that was really poignant and a very deep moment in the book. Thinking about teen girls today reading DAUGHTERS OF EVE now, why do you think girls will still identify with this story?
Lois: I think the characters are believable in whatever era they’re presented. I don’t think that the personality of those girls would be any different back when I wrote the book than they would be today; it’s just that the pressures upon them might be different. I think that if you look at this many girls, you’re going to relate to somebody.
Malinda: Well, I know that every girl in this book had a certain aspect of her personality that I definitely related to. Is there any one character in the book whom you felt most like when you were growing up?
Lois: No, I don’t think so. Not one particular one. I think aspects of myself are in every one of them, except perhaps Jane. Because it’s very hard to write about a character without some part of yourself creeping into that character, just out of your subconscious, because that’s what’s familiar to you. And that’s what makes characters real.
Malinda: Unlike some of your other books, there isn’t just one central female protagonist—there are ten girls here. Why did you decide to write the book from each of their perspectives instead of just focusing on one?
Lois: I wanted the challenge of trying to write from that many viewpoints, and it was hard, because I think perhaps I had too many characters. But you can’t have a club with only three characters in it, so some of the characters I used just as foils, while I let the stronger characters—or the more dramatic characters—carry the brunt of the story. But I wanted to at least show glimpses of the others, to fill it out.
Malinda: Let’s talk a little bit about this idea you had of a charismatic person leading these teens into dangerous fanaticism. You said your original idea was the charismatic Sunday school teacher, which is so fascinating. And then you have Ms. Stark here, who is really making a huge impression on the girls she teaches—they’re so susceptible to her teaching. Just as a teacher has a responsibility to guide his or her students in their education, do you feel any similar responsibility as an author?
Lois: Yes, I do. That’s one reason that I have set some standards for myself that I try to stick to. My novels don’t contain sensationalized violence or graphic descriptions of gore and horror, and they don’t contain explicit sex scenes. In this book, Ann does get pregnant, but that happens offstage. The reader doesn’t watch it happen like a voyeur. And Jane’s act of violence at the end is very played down. She commits the act, and it’s shocking, not entertaining, and then it stops and the reader doesn’t wallow in a vivid description of the aftermath of it.
Malinda: Do you think that’s part of the reason you decided to write for a young audience? To tell these kinds of stories without resorting to more graphic language?
Lois: I started writing for a young audience because I was so young myself. Teen issues were all I knew about, and when I got one book published, the publisher optioned my next book, whatever it would be—but it had to be a young adult book. So I wrote another one and they optioned my next one. I got into the genre because of my own age. I was writing pretty much for my peers. And then later, when people kept trying to get me to write for adults, I realized that I didn’t want to have to go into sensationalized violence and explicit sex. This way, writing for teens, I could still write about all of the subjects that interested me, and I still could write with suspense and write an exciting story, but I would not have to write about things that made me uncomfortable. So I was happier staying there, and although I have written in many other genres as well, this is the genre that I’ve had the most success with.
Malinda: Even if you don’t describe them in detail, the violence and sex, I feel like your books have scared me more than a lot of YA books.
Lois: I think some of the gory scenes are totally unnecessary. The book actually can be scarier without them, because the readers have to use their imagination.
Malinda Lo, a former entertainment reporter, is the author of Ash and Huntress, two young adult fantasy novels. She lives in Northern California with her partner and their dog. Her website is www.malindalo.com.