It's Frisson Summer! An Interview with Darrow Farr, author of THE BOMBSHELL

"My favorite reading experiences are the ones that make me want to put the book down and go live life."

Hi Blondies! This month’s AB post is particularly special, as it’s an interview with my dear friend and powerhouse AUTHORESS, Darrow Farr— whose debut novel THE BOMBSHELL has been called a “towering literary achievement,” (Adam Johnson), “effortlessly cool” (New York Times Book Review), and an “escapist, Hollywood-ready excursion to Corsica” (Vogue). I can confirm that all of these things are 100% true. See for yourself!

For June’s AB post, Darri and I chatted about the inspirations behind Séverine Guimard (teenage girl protagonist for the ages), the art of leaning into melodrama when writing literary fiction, why Gen Z readers are invoking One Direction in their rave Goodreads reviews, the canon of sexy kidnappers, and an exclusive scoop on what she’s working on next. (I’m beyond excited to dive into the oeuvre of the late actress-turned-YA-author, Barbara Wersba.)

Note: AB will be taking a summer hiatus, though we’re obligated to be on call for any Taylor Swift-related emergencies that arise (my insiders say a TS12 announcement is imminent). We have some exciting things coming in the fall, and as always, we encourage you to reach out with topic ideas! The elephant in every room is that we are living through a scary time in history, so please remember to take care of yourselves and one another. I hope your summers are as glamorous as Séverine’s, but a lot safer. <3

CD: We must start here: Séverine is an iconic annoying blonde. She is the epitome of one— and I love how committed the book is to her point of view. She often reminded me of some other literary ABs. For example: Harriet from Harriet the Spy. Both Séverine and Harriet are such charming, cunty biatches that say exactly what they mean. Jane Austen’s Emma, because she’s so righteous, and convinced that her way is the right way— and maybe even Lily Bart from House of Mirth because, as a reader, you’re watching her tumble towards this particular fate and the whole time you’re like “Oh, girl… I don’t know!” So my first question is: who did you have in mind when writing Séverine? How did you conjure her? 

DF: A huge source of inspiration for Séverine is Claudine from the series Colette wrote in the early 1900s: Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, et cetera, et cetera. She’s this spunky French schoolgirl who moves to Paris from her little countryside town, runs off with a much, much older man, and has all these lesbian adventures throughout. She maintains her fire and this impish, mischievous quality, even as she finds herself in these fraught, adult situations. 

Then, in a similar vein: the Radlett cousins from Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, which is about these aristocratic girls, Fanny and Linda, living through the period after World War I into World War II. British society is shifting all around them, war is on the horizon (then upon them), and they’re still having the best time. They just face everything with gumption and humor.

I think you picking up on the Harriet the Spy influence is pretty spot on. Even though it’s been a really long time since I’ve read that book, I remember loving it. There’s this YA writer named Barbara Wersba who was publishing mostly in the ’70s and ‘80s, and she was super influential on The Bombshell. 

One of her masterpieces is this series called Fat: A Love Story, which is about Rita, an overweight teenager who falls in love with Arnold, the local baker who’s twice her age. In the final book, they move in together, and Rita realizes Arnold is a total wreck. She has to come to terms with the reality that she’ll be sacrificing the prime of her youth to be with him. When you look up the premises of Wersba’s novels now, they sound kind of problematic, but the books were actually very sensitive. They take the adult desires of teenagers really seriously and are a kind of wish fulfillment— you get to live out your teenage fantasy, but you also get what you wish for. She didn’t condescend to her readers, which I always appreciated.

Wow. I’m Googling her now— I’m seeing a book called Just Be Gorgeous! Also her author photo is so glam!

She was an actress! She was so glamorous. That book is also amazing. It’s about this Upper East Side girl who hates her parents and befriends a homeless teenager who’s trying to get on Broadway... it’s incredible.

But yeah, her books were the ones that helped form my idea of Séverine’s adventures from the jump, before I even started The Bombshell. The Colette and Nancy Mitford novels, I didn’t read those until after I’d already completed a first draft. Finding those books during the revision process felt like this very mystical, benevolent gift from the universe. I think the books and movies that re-energize the story or the characters for you are just as important as the ones that initially inspire you.

What about Séverine as a character made you want to commit to her?

I’d been feeling frustrated with the teenage characters I was encountering in literature. Especially in, like, John Green books. They felt so cloying and childish, and not really interested in speaking to a young adult audience so much as giving the adult author a vehicle for being nostalgic about his youth. I felt like I needed to write a character in reaction to that whole development in YA.

And adults are some of the biggest readers of YA now anyway, right? So it weirdly worked—writing what I thought of as my YA book that was geared toward adults. But my ideal reader is still a precocious young person.

Thank you for telling me about Barbara Wersba, I need to read her ASAP. This is actually a perfect segue into another question I had, or something I wanted to ask you about. I know you don’t read your Goodreads reviews (inspiring), but in prepping for our interview, I did a bit of a survey and read most of them. They’re overwhelmingly positive— and what I found most interesting was a pattern I noticed in how people were responding. It made me think about why this book feels so irresistible to a specific kind of young reader. A lot of the positive reviews mention that it reminds them of Wattpad-era One Direction fanfiction that they used to love reading when they were younger.

That's fascinating. What does that mean?

So, I guess there’s a One Direction song called “Stockholm Syndrome”... I think we both missed the Wattpad fanfiction moment by some years, but the more I thought about it, the more I get the connection. I think what’s so irresistible about The Bombshell is how much of a fantasy it is, in the sense that everything unfolds according to the laws of Séverine (well, almost everything). The novel fully commits to the exploration of this idea, that youth and romance can actually topple world order. And there’s also this running thread about how power can be usurped and found through vengeful or even selfish vendettas, which is such a major mode of teenage thinking.

There’s that line Petru says— “You let a high school girl into your cell, you get high school drama”— which reminded me a lot of that Taylor Swift lyric: “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”

So I wanted to ask you if you could speak to the genre of the book. It’s a literary thriller, but it’s also a romance, and— like I mentioned— in its way, it’s also fantasy. 

That [Taylor Swift lyric] is a pretty good line. Okay so, the teenage wish fulfillment aspect of the book that was inspired by Barbara Wersba is definitely YA. I’m glad the girls on Goodreads have picked up on that. At the same time, I’d initially wanted to write a black comedy, in the style of Pedro Almodóvar, or Todd Solondz, or John Waters. I wanted it to be kind of over the top, to have this frightening teenage girl character who wrests power from her kidnappers and then wields it against all the people who have wronged her in her life. I think some of the melodramatic aspect of that remains, and hopefully some humor remains. 

Definitely. It’s interesting that it started as a black comedy. 

That was the initial idea. But almost immediately after I started writing, I realized I had to recalibrate— I’d accidentally made it way too serious, especially the kidnappers. I think I was over-relying on the Patty Hearst memoir as a kind of template. Then I remembered, wait, I don’t want this book to be that grim. 

The tone settled into place after I watched Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! by Almodóvar. The kidnapper in that movie does things that are pretty despicable, but he’s still so fucking hot. Like, it’s young Antonio Banderas. Even when he hits Victoria Abril or attacks Rossy de Palma and steals her drugs… your stomach turns, but there’s still this undeniable, baked-in sexual tension. That fantasy or kink element just can’t be separated out. So I started channeling that while I wrote Séverine’s interactions with her kidnappers—especially Bruno. Even when he does questionable things [like locking Séverine in a closet], there’s still something magnetic between them. 

I also watched Buffalo ‘66, which has a completely different kind of erotic charge, but there’s a similar structure— two lonely people brought together through violence. Christina Ricci’s character starts to care about Vincent Gallo and wants to save him, eventually realizing he’s like, this fragile person.

I think we’re coming out of this era in art where problematic sexual dynamics were either sanitized or condemned outright. The reigning discourse seemed to be that the thrill people get from these kinds of relationships is inherently bad, or people don’t really understand their own desires, and if they did they would renounce them. But that’s the whole essence of the frisson—it’s meant to be complicated. I wanted to lean into that.

Another word that came up in the positive reviews is the word “unhinged,” which I took to mean both Séverine’s personality and how she drives the plot.

One of the genres I was responding to with this book was that wave of completely aloof, numb female protagonists who are stuck in a state of anhedonia. That’s been the dominant mode in female-centered fiction for the last, I don’t know, maybe ten years. I think it’s a symptom of one really interesting book [My Year of Rest and Relaxation] inspiring an entire cohort of women writers. That kind of “lazy girl” energy… I found myself getting more and more bored with that mode. So I decided to go in the total opposite direction. I was like, let me do a full 180 and go whole hog with an incredibly active female protagonist, someone with burning desires who’s willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. I think Andrew Holleran gave us all a huge gift with [his 1978 novel] Dancer from the Dance— in that my favorite reading experiences are the ones that make me want to put the book down and go live life. I wanted to write a book that was like that.

So this book felt, at least the way I experienced it, very self-aware in its sensationalism. It’s written in close third, but there’s still some ironic distance between the narrator and Séverine. But then the time jump happens and the irony disappears, which I think does a really interesting job in reframing the One Crazy Summer-ness of the first part. Pulling us out of 1990s Corsica creates this exciting shell-shocked feeling. There is still this air of sensationalism to Part 2, but it feels different; it’s old-fashioned, like romanticism-esque or something... I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what it reminded me of...

You know what? I actually know what you’re trying to say— because in forming this question, you're bringing my attention to something. If part one was Claudine at School and Barbara Wersba, then part two is D.H. Lawrence— Lady Chatterley’s Lover, specifically, which I also read while writing The Bombshell. I was like, wait, I need to figure out how he's writing these sex scenes.

In part two, I felt like the sex had to become this spiritual communion. It didn’t feel as relevant to the pure pheromone, apocalyptic sexual energy of part one. But the sex in the flash forward needed to feel like a literary climax— infused with meaning, soul, sadness, with the emotional detritus of the last twenty years Bruno and Séverine had been apart, grappling with what they’d done. The only sex writing I found that captured that was Lawrence’s. The ending of Lady Chatterley’s Lover always brings me to tears.

Lady Chatterley and her lover, Mellors, are forcibly separated, but they’re trying to find their way back to each other. And…sorry, I’m having all these realizations [because The Bombshell also shifts into Bruno’s POV for the first and only time near the end]…it shifts into Mellors’s point of view for the first time, in a letter he’s writing to her. He’s trying to comfort them both, and there’s this line, “We fucked a pure flame into being.” It always brings me to tears.

That’s so beautiful.

It’s so beautiful! 

I was listening to an interview you did recently-- 

Writers on Writing with Barbara!

Yes! Where you said that the first chapter of the book pretty much stayed exactly the same since you first wrote it. I wanted to ask you about the second part-- at what point did you know what was going to happen after she gets on the boat? 

I knew that she was going to make it to LA, and I knew that she was going to be in the TV industry. I didn’t think she could be an actress like she had wanted to be…though maybe that was my initial thought, because I was thinking about Patty Hearst [who has acted in a handful of movies/shows]. I knew she was going to have a daughter, that she’d have to confront her past, but beyond that…

I was like, maybe there’s a trial? But there was absolutely no way I was going to write a legal thriller. The first draft [of the novel] actually ended with Bruno seeing Ramona and Petra from his balcony. I knew that wasn’t the real ending, but I truly had no idea what to do after that. It wasn’t until I wrote the next draft that I moved past that point. I’m trying to think now about the timing of it all— because I may not have written those last chapters until I actually met [my bio dad]. So maybe once I had the confidence to write this first encounter scene, which I had to find just by living it myself, the rest kind of fell into place. Writing Bruno and Séverine’s reunion then came naturally.

But yeah, I was very indulgent with these characters. I was just like, Bruno and Séverine should have the chance to have sex again. I just don’t see the use in not giving people what they want! Like, I’m part of the people! Is it going to make it any more of a serious literary work to keep them apart?

I feel like a lot of times the greater challenge in writing is to go toward melodrama, the corny, the spiritual—whatever it is—and try to make it good. So of course they had to have sex again. But I couldn’t take the happily-ever-after too far. There are limits imposed by their circumstances.

One of the Book of the Month Club readers DM’d me— she was super cute, she looked like she’d maybe just graduated from college and had some kind of fabulous PR assistant job— she DM’d me and said, “Please tell me that Bruno and Séverine actually stay together!” I was like, “You know, your guess is as good as mine!” 

Can you please tell the people what you're working on next? How will it be different from The Bombshell, and how will it be the same? 

Okay, thank you for asking, because I feel excited about this book even though I’ve only just started it.

I want to write something that’s very loosely based on— maybe this will be my annoying thing that I say over and over again throughout my career— very loosely based on the friendship between Madonna and Debi Mazar, and their mutual come-up when they were young. I want to write about a female friendship that persists over the years despite its ebbs and flows, as both characters become successful in their own fields. One becomes a wildly successful musician, and the other becomes a substantially successful stylist and actress—you know, with those slight degrees of separation— and that affects the dynamic of their relationship. 

I also want to write about the scene in which they get their start. I was inspired by that little resurgence of nightlife during COVID— like when everyone got that first dose of Pfizer and was feeling really good about themselves. I personally had some great nights out that summer! So I want to write about a made-up club scene that pops up in Philly during that time, and its accompanying retail scene.

I’m really fascinated by the symbiosis between certain clubs and stores that we’ve seen throughout history. Like the way Fiorucci dressed Studio 54, or the way Liquid Sky dressed Limelight, or how American Apparel dressed the Misshapes. This next book isn’t going to have a thriller element, or necessarily be extremely plotty in the same way as The Bombshell. So I’m going to try to hold the reader’s interest, but in a slightly different way. We’ll see how that ends up working out! ✪