Ashley Winstead’s “Midnight is the Darkest Hour” is for the Misfits https://ift.tt/09TLqcS
When a human skull is found in the swamp outside of Bottom Springs, Louisiana, the town descends into terror and makes the obvious assumption of who is behind the murder. But in the profound, sophisticated way that has come to be known as her signature style, author Ashley Winstead explores the roots of good and evil in Midnight Is the Darkest Hour, blurring the margins of morality and justice to create a philosophical experience that examines religious extremism, misogyny, and other -isms that debase humanity. Don’t be surprised if nail marks show up in the pages from holding on too tightly to this wild ride.
Winstead writes about power, ambition and love across wildly different genres. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide and have been named Library Read picks, Loan Star picks, Best of Amazon picks and Best of Apple Books picks, in addition to receiving starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage and Library Journal. She holds a PhD in comparative American literature and lives in Houston with her husband and two cats.
Our paths first crossed as teenagers in the religious institution that inspired Midnight’s Holy Fire Baptist. This interview has been abridged for length.
I thought I was picking up a genre-bursting thriller that would be entertaining and beautifully written, and while it was certainly that, it was much deeper. I finished feeling vindicated – via Ruth – for a childhood suffering at the hands of organized religion. Did you expect this novel would be cathartic?
It’s funny because sometimes I worry that all my books are projects of catharsis for me. I don’t feel satisfied with a book idea or premise until I know what white hot painful, shameful part of me it’s going to zero in on and expose. I wrote books before I got published, and they were fun books that had action in the plot and things on the surface, and the books didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t until I wrote a book that zeroed in on something I felt deeply uncomfortable with (In My Dreams I Hold A Knife, which deals with toxic professionalism and jealousy) that people seemed to connect with my writing and it started going places.
This time, I told my agent I wanted to write a book that captures the feeling of being a teenage girl and being at once so powerful and dangerous and also so completely powerless in other ways and shackled and restricted, and that “burn the world down feeling” when you fall in love, often with a terrible guy – that seems to be a universal experience – and that sense of morality you’ve had for 16 years goes out the window and you would do anything for this person, against all logic and reason. I always knew going in that it was going to be a cathartic process, and I always hope it is for readers, too.
Ruth asks, “What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin?” What would be your answer to her? What would be your advice to your nieces/girls in your life who are coming up in a world where this unfortunately still occurs?
That sentiment is at the heart of this book, for me. To answer Ruth’s question, it’s that power that men so revile and fear about young women. It’s that implicit understanding and desire to diminish what’s powerful about them, what they want, that same principle of self-loathing in so many secretly queer conservatives who are behind anti-trans bathroom bills and then there’s some scandal that they’ve been in a queer relationship for years. All that self loathing is directed at young women and girls because there’s this implicit understanding that she could make him do things, because he’s attracted to her in ways that he doesn’t even realize. So it’s easier to control and create distance.
What I would say, to young girls, is to be most suspicious of the power part, the part where it feels like you’re in charge, because it’s just another part of the subjugation, because really you aren’t in charge you’re just playing into a system that predates you and real power is removing yourself from that dynamic, having nothing to do with men who want to control you. Don’t fall prey to what feels like a really tempting exercise to get what you’ve never had, which is power.
The story is told by Ruth Cornier, the preacher’s daughter sheltered from the world, and documents her coming-of-age, of which books played a pivotal role. I’m curious how books played a role in your life, and if you see the rise of book bans as a result of people in power identifying what Pastor James Cornier missed?
It was so central in my mind when writing this book. In my own experience I was terribly, terribly shy growing up and we moved around a lot for my dad’s job, but I was always a serious thinker and considered the bigger ideas thanks to the books I was reading. Books were my way of having a conversation with the world beyond the small naval bases and communities and classes where I didn’t feel confident enough to speak up with my teachers and fellow students. That is their power – this bridge building, this exposure beyond this small world that we’re all experiencing, and our worlds are so much smaller as we grow older. I think it’s always been recognized as a book’s power for fomenting revolt and revolution and dangerous ideas, ideas that people in power find dangerous. So it doesn’t surprise me that people in power in America are banning books. It’s disappointing. We seem to be in this retrograde state as a country.
Ruth is such a dynamic character, and so much that is wrong in the world is exposed through her eyes. She acknowledges her desire to “kiss people who could hurt me, kill me…” was because she “wanted to drink their threat, hold that volatile substance in my chest. Swallow their danger and become the danger myself.” What do you think our responsibility as women is to ourselves and each other to investigate and purge this patriarchal bargaining?
This is the thing that I feel like I’ve been grappling with in almost every one of my books – trying to imagine power for women outside the models that we see or that were handed to us, outside this patriarchal model. Ruth taking this power of being the king and deciding who gets to live and die and experience violence at her whim, it’s really hard at a young age to envision what power could look like outside the authority figures that are modeling it for us. This is what she knows about power, so to this extent I wrote this book to be a tragedy, which is why it kind of ends like it does. And I wanted readers to think about if there were other options. It’s really hard to imagine liberation and power outside of what you’ve just seen demonstrated. It requires imagining a whole new world.
What was it like for you to end the book as you did?
I knew it had to happen. I always know my endings from the very beginning, so I knew that this was a tragedy that I was writing, that there was no way that I could have Ruth and Ever, as righteous as their anger was, as righteous as their violence was and as deserved as it was, that they could escape into a life in which they’re living happily somewhere, killing all the bad men across the country. I wanted readers to take over that space and put Ruth and Ever where they deserve and do what’s normally the job of writers – we get to be the god of our world as we’re describing conditions we don’t have control of. I wanted readers to be that god, and allow Ruth and Ever to exist in limbo, so they don’t have to face that judgment. They get to exist forever in between.
Twilight is Ruth’s roadmap for love. On the surface, it could be pegged as silly or immature, and her mother essentially tells her such, calling it “sickening.” But, as Ruth explains, when love has been withheld, as it was by her parents, it’s impossible to draw a map to a place you haven’t been. What responsibility do you think the art community – film, TV, literature, etc. – and society as a whole, have for creating these road maps for those who are in such situations?
I do think art has a responsibility. Not to say I think art that is simply fun and enjoyable and entertaining and creators’ personal expression isn’t just as valid as more Serious Art, (“capital S capital A”), but I do think at the same time so many artists do feel a responsibility. Even if it’s not asked of them, it’s a thing that you feel. And part of that comes from the fact that art is this thing we all do to find and make meaning and make sense of the world, make sense of ourselves and our relationships and responsibilities to other people. It’s almost endemic that there will be lessons and road maps for whoever is consuming the art.
One example is early queer literature and what a gap that filled in the market. Even queer literature that wasn’t particularly well written, a reparative reading would see how powerful it was getting it into the hands of a young queer man living in the rural South who had no other access to seeing other characters looking like him and living like him.
The book’s theme of good and bad and repentance has a very personal tie for you. You dedicated Midnight to your uncle and godfather, who you credit as having played a pivotal role in helping you develop your own moral compass. Could you share a bit about how his influence brought you to telling this story?
I really loved exploring in this book the tension between morality, a compass which is often a very subjective thing, and justice, which is the socially agreed upon, sanctioned version of what’s right and wrong that is completely shaped by who’s in power. I loved exploring the ways that justice and morality don’t map onto one another and that what is morally right is not always just or what’s considered by a religion or a church to be moral. My uncle took it upon himself to provide little glimpses of the world outside of suburbian, white, cis, het life that we had growing up, especially as my parents dove deeper into church life and the rules for what was good and bad grew stricter and more rigid. My uncle was always there to say that’s not necessarily true, there are many other moral compasses.
Humans have imagined all these arbitrary systems of what’s right and wrong, but when you turn to nature and see the natural world operate without these systems, to some people it looks like liberation – you just have to let the soft nature of your body love what it loves, just like the geese know to migrate. There’s something so comforting about that. And then some people find it terrifying. Wrestling with that is something my uncle has always brought to my life and my worldview, and I know part of that is his artist mind and the way he sees things, but it’s also that as a queer man he’s had to find that space outside of what traditional religion and law and morality has said is good and right. Midnight is for misfits, and people who live on the outside of those kinds of traditional and moral justice systems.
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