‘There’s So Many Wonderful Ways People Can Bother One Another’: Daniel Lavery on His New Novel, Women’s Hotel

It also felt like a sort of microcosm of maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when people on Twitter would talk about, you know, “What, if we all rented a farm together?” And there was enough of that that eventually, there was a backlash of, like, “Well, we wouldn’t be good at farming. We all grew up in the suburbs. What if, instead, there was a beautiful, truly walkable city?” This feels a little bit more in that vein of, What if there was one building in Manhattan that you could potentially live in that was a sort of world unto itself?

Tell me about populating the Biedermeier. Was there any resident who showed up first in your mind, and how did the rest come about?

I started with full names for everyone. One of my favorite things about a lot of 19th-century novels is how you often get a really comprehensive sense of what a person is like based on their name, so I started with that. Katherine Heap and Lucianne Caruso, I feel like those two names, you get kind of a sense of who might struggle to make her presence felt in a room, and who might be a sort of charismatic, work-avoidant party girl. It felt sort of like getting to populate Gilligan’s Island; you really just need, like, seven to 10 personalities. Not that everyone’s going to be completely defined by one or two words, but we have somebody who’s a New York-native political radical, somebody who is socially adept and tries not to work too hard, somebody who’s a little bit of a sponger, somebody who’s a little bit of a recluse, and working from there, I think in the final count, roughly three of the characters are loosely based on real-life personalities. Nobody remarkably famous, but, you know, local personas in New York in the middle of the century, and then the rest were completely made up from whole cloth. It was fun to think about, all right, I’ve got somebody who works at a bunch of defunct, radical, left-wing newspapers. How do I come up with somebody who would find that kind of person totally uninteresting, or who would bother that person, and what would she look like? So often, if I would feel a little bit stuck, I would just try to think of, how can I make things difficult for the character I just invented?