El Paso author Eugenie Montague believes the luckiest among us will have our lives upended by things we can’t control.
That’s one of the themes in her debut murder-mystery novel, “Swallow the Ghost,” the latest selection of the El Paso Matters Book Club. The three-part story follows three intertwined characters dealing with uncertainty, fear and grief when their lives are forever changed after unexpected events.
Jane, a marketer who’s helping her friend and author Jeremy put together a story about a fictional girl’s disappearance. Jane is murdered, and the story turns to Jesse, a journalist who ends up investigating her death as he deals with caring for his ailing mother. Jeremy is back at the center of the story in the third section, describing his life after Jane’s death and dealing with rumors that he killed her.
“Swallow the Ghost,” was published this fall by Mulholland Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group and Little, Brown and Company.
El Paso Matters asked Montague about key themes in her novel, the significance of the book’s title, her experiences as a writer – and what other books by local authors she would recommend. Here’s what she had to say:
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m originally from New York, though I have lived in many places. I moved to El Paso from Los Angeles about nine years ago because of my husband.
We have two kids, both born here, and a dog, a transplant from L.A. In addition to writing, I’m a lawyer, and I work for a plaintiffs’ firm.
I’m a big fan of book clubs and reading with people, as well as reading alone, walking around cities, hiking in the mountains, and game nights. I’m also the weak link in a local tennis team that plays other teams from El Paso and Juárez.
What are some key themes you would like readers, particularly El Pasoans, to take away from your book?
I think one key theme centers around the shapes of stories and how that affects us. If meaning is essential to human life, which I believe it is, there’s always been a question for me about whether we find meaning, or we make it. If we make it, the kind of stories we tell ourselves — that we’re surrounded by — are of fairly critical importance, and so are the structures of those stories.
There’s the famous graph of the story arc, rising tension, climax, resolution, but there are also conventions in different genres. And then there’s the medium of the novel, and the market, and now the internet, and they all have their own structures, conventions and limitations that influence the shape of stories. These shapes put certain pressures on characters just as, in the real world, there are systems and structures that put certain pressures on us. At the same time, people are always pushing back against structures and conventions—on the internet, IRL, and in the novel. There’s a relationship there.
I think of “Swallow the Ghost” as a hybrid novel, or a novel that mixes genres, and I do think that might resonate in particular ways in El Paso. The borders between genres are real in certain ways; they place limitations on the kinds of stories we are able to tell. If you place the same character in one genre versus another, it’s my opinion they will be changed.
But at the same time, these borders and boundaries aren’t real — they’re created or imposed. And they are not firm. There’s a fluidity there, and there’s something that happens in that space where you can see the border, where you live near it. Lots of people way smarter than me have written about this in terms of border cities like El Paso, the possibilities inherent in liminality, of being at the in-between place.
Can you talk about the significance of the book’s title and how it reflects the story or the themes within?
Most broadly, I think it relates to the book’s relationship, and the characters’ relationships, to uncertainty, to control, as well as to the related emotions of fear and grief. There is joy in this world, but the luckiest among us will have our lives upended by things we can’t control and didn’t see coming, will experience grief that feels hard to survive.
There’s this impulse to push away sadness, loss, fear, to push them away or explain them — an understandable impulse, but one that has consequences. I see all three main characters as attempting to find a narrative framework in which they can interpret the events of their lives, but I don’t necessarily think all stories are equal. Some are more harmful, to themselves and to others.
Your protagonist is deeply complex and layered. Can you share your process for developing such intricate characters? Do you draw from personal experience or observation?
I think it’s fairly both. Certain characters have at least some of the same questions that I have about the world and art and other people — though their personalities and the path they take trying to answer these questions may differ.
But people are endlessly fascinating to me so a lot is observation. I am always trying to understand people. Sort of, how the first time you come to the knowledge that not everyone does the thing your family did, that things you consider normal might be considered strange by others. Once there’s that crack of light under the door, I just want to open it all the way and learn everything. The internet, for all its faults, is great for observation.
El Paso is a unique city with a rich history and culture. How has the experience of living here, or the city itself, influenced your life and writing?
In so many ways — many I probably won’t be able to articulate. El Paso is a place that really gets inside you. For me, it was immediate. I remember driving here for the first time and seeing the tiles on the highway overpass, walking around downtown, the people I met, the dust, the art, the sun. Though I am not very good with the heat, I love the desert (especially in winter). It does something to you, this high desert.
I’ll combine this and the next question and say that I am working on something that takes place here, and the process of writing a story set in El Paso has created this new way of being here, where it feels like there’s this continuous looping between the city and the page.
Asarco, or the art deco buildings downtown, or the border, language, the desert. The sun. These are things I always knew about El Paso, that I noticed or that were part of my life or that pulled at me in different ways. But when I write about the city I live in, this thing happens: either I realize something I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew; or I suddenly see a gap, something I hadn’t noticed or thought about too deeply—why is it this way? What is the origin of that? Why are there palm trees and evergreens here? I read books, I ask my friends questions, I observe, and it feels like I see the city better than I did before, and live more inside it.
What three books by local authors would you recommend to our readers?
Well, I won’t name other El Paso Matters’ picks, because the readers here will likely have read them already—though I could and I’d certainly urge those who haven’t to go back through the previous books and make sure to get those.
I’ll start with “The Automatic Detective” by A. Lee Martinez because it’s a hybrid novel that merges sci-fi and the detective genre together. It follows accidental detective Mack Megaton, who was designed to be a killing machine but, for reasons no one can explain, he is much more than that. It’s a really interesting story about what makes us human, about where we come from, about how we are in community with one another — and it is also a great mystery with the worldbuilding of the best sci-fi.
I picked up Dagoberto Gilb’s newest book of stories, “New Testaments,” from Literarity, and I read it in about 24 hours. I kept saying, ‘I’ll just read one more story, one more.’ Francisco Goldman, on Gilb’s work, noted the “reverb” — and I think that’s exactly right, and it’s what I go to short stories for most of all: this hum beneath the words, a life force. It’s a miracle, really. I remember reading “Prima,” on the edge of my seat, waiting for something bad to happen. And then something does, there is an incident. But the story is really happening somewhere else, on another level, and when I got to the final line, I burst into tears in my kitchen.
“Tuneful Tales” by Bernice Love Wiggins. It was published in 1925, and it’s apparently one of the few books published in Texas by a Black writer during this time period. There’s such range in this book – of experiences, of characters, of tone, which shifts from spiritual to laugh-out-loud funny to angry to mournful. She turns her eye towards so much. According to the introduction, she moved to California shortly after this and the historical record is silent about what happened to her; if she ever wrote more, we can’t find it. In fact, the introduction notes that copies of the original book were thought to be in a house that was destroyed in the building of I-10. To make this new edition, they had to borrow a copy from a resident. Speaking of poetry, I just took out “Elegies in Blue” by Benjamin Alire Sáenz from the library. It was published by Cinco Punto Press, and I noticed there was an essay dedicated to Bobby Byrd at the back. Sáenz writes that one of his “obsessions is to be connected to the world that invented me.” I am going to be thinking about that for a long time.
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