Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.” This intimidating warning is one that only a writer could deliver, and is precisely what the main (and almost only) character in Virginia Feito’s acclaimed debut novel fears has happened to her. Mrs. March is an unsettling psychological thriller that tells the story of the wife of a best-selling novelist. It is a book in which the reader accompanies the main character in a tale of suspicion, deceit, and growing paranoia.
GLOBAL success
Born in Madrid in 1988, author Virginia Feito is equally fluent in English and Spanish, having studied in Paris and London, and worked in advertising in New York. Before her birth, her parents had lived in Washington, D.C. for a time, and she was named Virginia after the US state.
Mrs. March was met with outstanding reviews across the English-speaking world. One of its biggest admirers was actor and producer Elisabeth Moss (star of Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale), who acquired the rights to turn the book into a film. Moss herself will star in the role of Mrs. March, and Feito is currently writing the screen adaptation of the book. Speak Up met with Feito. We began by asking her about the intriguing Mrs. March:
Virginia Feito (American accent): She’s an Upper East Side housewife, she’s married to a successful novelist, and one day she begins to suspect that he may have based this horrible, humiliating, pathetic character on her, and so she starts to spiral out of control. She starts to grow increasingly paranoid, she starts to suspect that everybody knows this, that her husband has humiliated her in public, everybody’s laughing at her behind her back... Because this is a woman whose whole life is based around appearances. And all she cares about really is the image that she projects on other people.And in fact, she doesn’t really have her own identity, which is why I don’t give her a first name until the very last —spoiler alert!— line of the novel. Imagine that one day one single comment confirms the thing that you’ve been fearing your whole life.
BUILDING SUSPENSE
The novel plays with the reader’s expectations, suppressing information and planting red herrings throughout the story. As Feito explains, the aim was to create a tense yet darkly-comic atmosphere.
Virginia Feito: I wanted to tease the reader a little bit. It has a little bit of metafiction happening, where there’s like a book within a book, and then there’s a fictional character inside a book with my fictional character reacting to that fictional character... It’s all very meta, which I think was my way of winking at the reader, like, “We’re in this together.” So it’s like an inside joke that the reader and I have against poor Mrs. March, who we are just bullying throughout the entire experience. But as a reader, I love when novels do that to me. So I personally... I’m not that irritated by it, but I’m so sorry because I know that some readers just couldn’t handle it, cause it was too mysterious all the time.
MISSING PIECES
The book features a murder, inciting the reader to look for clues to find the killer. However, much like real life, Mrs. March is not a typical thriller, where every piece of the puzzle fits into place.
Virginia Feito: It’s me teasing the reader throughout and wanting the reader to feel a little bit unstable. Like they’re not sure what’s happening, when it’s happening. So in the end, the thriller is her, it’s Mrs. March, it’s the character. I wanted to write a thriller that was like an anti-thriller. So I wanted to kind of go against the rules of how thrillers are always usually so beautifully explained in the end and everything circles back to everything else, everything makes sense, and there’s like a ribbon on it for the reader to just feel satisfied, which is a feeling we rarely have in real life. There are so many instances where crimes are never really figured out and in life, we don’t get the beautiful easy answers that we always want. I spend my life looking for clues and signs, and symbols, and then my hopes are crushed because nothing makes any sense and we’re all alone and we’re going to die. So... I guess I wanted us to remember that for one second.
RISE AND FALL
Mrs. March enjoys New York’s high life of literary cocktail parties, posh boutiques and hip restaurants, but when the seeds of suspicion begin to grow in her mind, her downfall seems imminent.
Virginia Feito: What most fascinates me above all things is the human mind, and how we build personalities from an apparently random set of circumstances and experiences that we go through, and how we react so differently to each thing, each of us. And so I could obsess over something, you could obsess over something completely different, and it all depends on… we don’t even know what it depends on, on a set of random happenings throughout our lives.
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Feito wrote the novel in English, she says, because that’s the language she has read literature in and watched films in from an early age. It comes very naturally to her, as she explains.
Virginia Feito: I was absorbing so much English culture since I was very little. So I always watched the Disney movies in English. I did not watch dubbed [movies], not very much. Then all the books I read, they were usually from British or American authors. As a very little girl I was already reading… ugh, I was such a pretentious child but I did read Dickens from a very young age, and my dad is a huge Dickens admirer, and he makes us watch A Christmas Carol absolutely every winter. My brothers and I we almost talk exclusively in film quotes. So we can have just one entire conversation completely made out of Friends quotes and never actually speak to each other. But I didn’t actually live in an English-speaking country until I studied for university. And by then I had already developed this entire literary world and also as a writer I had been training myself since a very young age to imitate my favourite authors. I think that’s how all writers start, copying their idols, and all my idols wrote in English.
NATURAL STYLE
Iconic thriller writers Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson were huge influences, says Feito, to the point that the rhythm and the style that she had in mind demanded her own novel be written in English.
Virginia Feito: I’ve always written in English since I was quite little. I was lucky enough that I learned English from a very young age and I really took to the language very easily. It’s a language that comes to me very easily, I absorb it very quickly and I find it a very playful language. The words are very short and they’re very easy to manipulate, kind of like Play-Doh. I feel like you can really play around with the language maybe more freely than I feel I can play around in Spanish for whatever reason, because maybe Spanish words, they’re longer and they have accents and then, like, inanimate objects have gender; things like ‘Why is it ‘la silla’, why is it not ‘el silla’’. You know? Which English speakers are always asking me and I can never answer and then don’t even get me started on complemento directo and indirecto. I just... I don’t know what’s happening!