Elizabeth Hall: On the Romance of Rat Life, Making it as a Twenty-Something, the Excavation of Fantasy, and Her New Novel ‘Season of the Rat’
I once dated a guy who had rats. It was South Florida. The rats climbed onto the roof via the palm trees and slid themselves into the crawl space above his apartment. It was my grad school boyfriend, and we were set to move in together that summer. It was spring when I heard the first rat, claws scraping against the insulation above, and I entered my own personal Hell.
The boyfriend did not want to do anything about the rats. He felt they should be granted the same access to our space as we were. I did not agree. I wanted them gone. I called an exterminator. It took multiple attempts and hundreds of dollars until one rat was caught in a trap. My ex was the one to climb up and retrieve it in a Publix plastic bag. He wore oven mitts as protection. I knew it was over but I stayed in that apartment until December. When we finally broke up, I read Lorrie Moore’s Bark. The short story “Wings” where the narrator finds a rat king in the attic of her rented home. Her own relationship fizzles out as the story progresses.
When I came to get the last of my things, I saw the palm trees had been encircled with sheets of metal. The rats would no longer be able to scurry up. The trees looked futuristic this way. But I knew that nature would not be able to take its course. I felt bad for the rats, for myself, for all of it. “It is true that I am easily confused,” says the narrator of Season of the Rat.
In Elizabeth Hall's book, Season of the Rat (C4g Books, June 2025), the narrator also finds a rat in her dwelling. The book is a hybrid work that blends memoir, cultural criticism, and queer history. When a singular rat races across a woman's roof, it stirs a restless unraveling of memory—one that winds through the shadows of her past and the longing for communal sanctuaries as a pandemic sweeps across the globe. Season of the Rat invites the reader to disembody and scurry across the surface of their own memories. I found solace in these pages, connected to the human thread of longing and suffering with pockets of joy and pleasure—meaningful crumbs along the way.
Brittany Ackerman: Congrats on this gorgeous book! I obviously have a personal connection to it because of my above stated rat situation circa back in grad school, but I believe anyone navigating the depths of young adulthood will appreciate this book.
Season of the Rat spans two sleepless years, many cities, and a colorful cast of characters. I usually hate questions about what “inspired” the book, but in this case, I am genuinely curious what the impulse of the book was. Did the rat come first, or the longing, or the obsession?
Elizabeth Hall: Longing, always. For me writing begins with desire. Whether it's the desire to communicate or find meaning. I usually begin a project from a position of lack. I’m searching. Even if I don’t know what I’m looking for.
The rats came later. Initially, my obsession with them was instinctual—know thy enemy, I figured. If I couldn’t eliminate the rat living in the roof, I could at least know everything about it. The belief that knowledge equals control is one of my pet delusions.
The more I read about rats, the more I began empathizing and identifying with them. This was my first sign that I was lonely. Here, rats offered me a new insight into my emotional universe. As an offering of gratitude, I began writing to and about them. Eventually the rats became a container for all my restless desire.
BA: Like the narrator, I, too, had a childhood obsession with Charlotte’s Web. In Season of the Rat, the narrator waxes poetic about the inevitability of death in the story and having trouble identifying with Wilbur’s “delusional quest to forestall his death through friendship and dazzling language.” The narrator, rather, relates more to Templeton and his mission of gluttony at the fair.
I agree that Wilbur’s hopefulness was annoying (lol), so I wonder if you can talk about why Templeton, as a necessary outsider, is more relatable and what symbolic role he plays in this children’s tale?
EH: This is such a good question! Outcasts are an important part of children’s stories. They offer representation but also insight into all the different ways people cope with loneliness, rejection, and isolation. In Charlotte's Web both Wilbur and Templeton are outsiders. Wilbur is new to the barnyard and under threat of death, which he copes with by cultivating hope and connection with his neighbors. Templeton, on the other hand, has lived there forever, but he keeps his distance emotionally. Like me, he prefers to cope with humor and cynicism. E.B. White’s great gift was letting me see both.
But, as an adult, what really intrigues me about Templeton is his bravado. In the 1970’s movie version, Templeton continues to brag about what a glorious time he’s having gorging at the fair even though his voice and body betray signs of discomfort. Bravado is sexy and charming in part because it carries the air of tragedy.
Rewatching and reading, I found myself wanting more of Templeton. So in early drafts of the book, I wrote several scenes from Templeton’s perspective, just riffing and shit. I loved imagining him slipping under the gates at the L.A. County Fair in 2025, belly full of melted Dippin Dots, puffing on an abandoned cotton candy vape.
BA: The book centers around so much romanticizing, longing and fantasizing. I think it’s really prevalent in our current cultural climate to “romanticize” one’s life—eating dinner, going to the grocery store, going to work, etc. I watched a video last night where a guy recorded his graveyard shift at Denny’s and I honestly was a little jealous because of how nicely he edited it all together.
Instagram and TikTok makes us feel like everyone is doing life better than we are. But the narrator of SOTR finds small ways to romanticize her own life.
“Outside a restaurant, I eat lo mein in the car and watch the parking lot fill. My fortune cookie reads: Stop searching forever, happiness is next to you. The sentiment annoys me. What is happiness without the romance of the search?”
Can you talk about this—the romance of the search?
EH: I love DIML TikToks, not because they show real life, but because they reveal how people want to be seen. They’re documents of desire. I could cruise out all day on graveyard shift line cook videos.
Romancing my life is a way of infusing desire and meaning into the mess. Desire often implies suffering, but I hoped to show how desire can be generative. To me, searching is the hopeful side of longing. What you’re looking for might exist, and you’re open to finding it. Unlike desire, which can remain unrequited, searching offers agency.
BA: “My first year in California I drove over 100 miles a day. I was no Easy Rider…I was a grad student cutting through suburbs shadowed by rollercoasters. I was a weed delivery girl, weighing out bags in cul-de-sacs. I was a private tutor. A nanny who crisscrossed the valley. For many years, these commutes were all I knew of the city.”
This failure-to-launch, coming-of-age again in young adulthood, fear-of-complacency, resonates hard. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. As an Elder Millennial, I felt so much pressure to land a full-time, permanent job right after college, and that just wasn’t the case for me. I took so many odd-jobs like the narrator does here and cobbled together a life so that I could still write.
How does the desire to be creative, to be an artist, merge with our current times? I realize this is a big question, but I think it’s important to parse it out for aspiring artists, to be real about what this life entails (pun intended, hehe, tail).
EH: “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up” is so real! I think part of the reason is that we're always changing, responding to the world around us. What we want is shaped by what we’re offered. One thing I hope that changes soon is my desire to never work again.
Your excellent question made me think of Kathy Acker advising a young Kathleen Hanna that if she wanted to be heard as an artist she shouldn't become a writer, she should start a band. This is still wise advice.
As for me, I couldn’t not live close to books. Literature gave me so many tools for slowing time, shapeshifting, making sense of life. Back then I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing much by choosing art over a high-earning professionalized job, in part because I had low self-confidence and didn’t think I had enough skills to offer. I also didn’t realize it was possible to do both—be creative and still make a living. My models for the “artistic life” were Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. The fuck, edit, write, edit again protocol. It took me a while to realize there were other ways to be an artist.
Once everything blew up with my roommate, I was forced to confront how financial precarity had made me vulnerable to abuses of all kinds. I also felt a powerful sense of connection to all the other creative fools dreaming and cobbling. This part is still sacred.
BA: So many truly poignant questions arise in the book that offer the reader a chance to reflect on their own definitions of identity and self and past and family and community and love and friendship—things that are so complicated to define, yet as young people, we do it over and over again at each intersection of life.
Two larger questions that struck me were: What does it mean for a place or a person to be without a history? What does it mean for us to want this fantasy?
So, what does it mean for a place or person to be without a history?
EH: Ahhh, I’m getting to talk about all of my favorite things! That line was inspired by my friend's disdain for the dull architecture and beige aesthetics of Huntington Beach and greater Orange County where much of the book takes place. I spent a lot of time in the area, trying to steep myself in the landscape and culture as part of my research. Her visceral negative reaction intrigued me. I found myself spending even more time down there. I’m attracted to outcasts, remember.
I didn’t see the stucco-ification as destroying the city’s history so much as adding another layer. I wanted to chart its evolution from hippie haven to right-wind stronghold. The influx of stucco seemed as worthy an entry point as any other. Sometimes the most obviously boring things have the richest history. As I became more and more obsessed with rats, I discovered another lens through which to view the area's history: flora and fauna.
BA: And finally, back to fantasy—what does fantasy mean to you? How do you capture it in your art and why is it important to bring into the sphere of your story?
EH: For me fantasy is a realm of possibility. A space to imagine endless alternatives for myself and the world.
Fantasies also act like gossips: they reveal intimate details about us to ourselves and often other people. When I first moved to L.A. I watched a lot of classic black and white Hollywood noirs, the ones where women blow cigarette smoke in men’s faces to flirt. I loved these films primarily because they explode the myth of the “good life.” An amateur sleuth believes they can solve a local crime and avenge the victim, only to discover the system is rigged. The unraveling of people’s naivety is the main thrill of noirs, and also a core fantasy of mine: that illusions can be fully and finally stripped away.
Season of the Rat riffs heavy on noir because the genre encapsulates my twin impulses: to rid myself of self-deception and to cling to fantasy and romance as necessary life-giving forces in the face of hopelessness.
My favorite thing about fantasies is that they’re free.
*
Elizabeth Hall is the author of I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and Season of the Rat. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Bon Appétit, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, the Iowa Review, Pleiades Magazine, and elsewhere.
