The author’s debut novel, Mercy Hill, follows four sisters who grow up on the grounds of a state mental institution.
How did you come to write about a mental institution?
I grew up in 1990s Raleigh, N.C., the time and place where Mercy Hill is set. Back in the ’80s, my mom worked as a speech therapist in a similar institution, Dorothea Dix, that was near our house. She left it for private practice, but she’d always tell us stories about it and mentioned that some staff raised their families there. As I was growing up, I saw all these headlines about institutions closing. I started thinking about an alternate history that could have happened to a family like mine.
What misconceptions do you think people have about institutions like the one portrayed in Mercy Hill?
They play almost an outsize role in media. People have these ideas based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Girl, Interrupted. When I was doing research for the book, I was surprised to see just how large these institutions were. In the mid-20th century, there were thousands and thousands of patients and staff. Some of these places had their own commissary, their own post office, their own graveyard. A lot of people I’ve talked to since writing the book have said, Oh, I actually grew up down the road from a state institution like that.
You could have written this as a gothic novel, but you didn’t. Were you tempted to?
Not really. I think one of the reasons I didn’t lean into gothic is the way I think of myself as a not quite Southern writer. I grew up in Raleigh, but my parents are from Utah. I think a lot of Southern writers find themselves steeped in Southern gothic because their parents grew up in the South and their grandparents grew up in the South. They have a whole family history.
How did you decide to have four sisters at the center of the story?
For so many drafts of this novel, people were like, Can’t you cut it down to three sisters? Or two? It’s a lot to keep track of. I really did cling to the idea of four because it’s a way to show the breadth of experience people could have growing up in this situation. Early on, I experimented with a collective point of view, like The Virgin Suicides. I ultimately decided to focus on Denise, the youngest, who provides a point of view that is apart a little bit from the others.
The novel takes place over five years. Why was it important to you to cover a relatively long time period?
I think it was important for the scale of what was happening with both the family and the hospital. Not that a book told over one year can’t have a grand scale, but I did want to show the end of an institution in real time. Those things were not playing out over the course of a year. I wanted to make sure the novel conveyed a sense of change over time.
