Madelaine Lucas: On Trusting Your Impulses, Writing Through Homesickness, and her Debut Novel, 'Thirst for Salt'
Madelaine Lucas’ debut novel, Thrist for Salt, follows the fractured love affair of the 24-year-old narrator and Jude, the 42-year-old local she falls for on vacation with her mother at Sailors Beach. With breathtaking prose, this quiet novel is a masterclass on the meditations of relationships and intimacies, and power dynamics of two people in love. Prepare to lose yourself in the language from page one.
I spoke with Madelaine about figuring out a routine that works for her, learning to trust her impulses, writing through homesickness, unnamed narrators and her process for writing Thirst for Salt.
Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: I was completely engrossed in this love affair, and I’d love to know the genesis of this story. I’d also love to know your take on creating a quiet novel.
Madelaine Lucas: That's a great question. The seed of Thirst for Salt started about 10 years ago when I first wrote a short story about a young woman, her older ex-boyfriend, and their dog. Those characters were always part of this story from the very beginning. This was when I was still living in Sydney, before I moved to New York, and I was thinking a lot about the isolated coastal landscapes that I'd visited when I was growing up as a child in Victoria and New South Wales. After I moved away from Australia, I kept finding myself drawn back to those places and those people. In a lot of ways, I think of the novel as being generated by homesickness and my desire to immerse myself in those landscapes again. That’s maybe partly where the feeling of longing in the book comes from— from my own longing to touch a place that was no longer accessible to me.
KBD: I could definitely feel that as the reader.
ML: Originally, I was conceiving of the project as a series of interconnected stories. To speak to your question about quiet novels, I'm not super interested in elaborate plots as a writer. In fact, I kind of feel suspicious of them. If I read a jacket copy for a book and it has this very complicated plot, I think, well, how is there going to be room for reflection, for interiority, to learn about people, which is really what I come to literature for—and language too, of course.
I think naturally I was always really drawn to the short story form because I feel like you don't need to do as much work with plot. You can center on one quiet moment and concentrate on language. But as I kept working, I realized that there was one narrative arc, which was the story of this relationship, and to separate it all into these tiny little pieces just wasn't working in the way that I thought it needed to if that form was going to be effective.
KBD: You already touched on the sense of place, but you have this really amazing ability to ground us in that place. I've never been to Sydney or Sailor's Beach, but I feel very much like I have. You mentioned this coming from homesickness, but I was curious if you could speak about writing about this setting that you love and if there were any challenges along the way.
ML: Sailor's Beach is actually a fictional town, but it’s based on the south coast region of New South Wales where I spent a lot of time as a kid on holidays with friends and family. Once I was away from Australia, that landscape seemed to hold everything that I missed the most and loved the most—the smell of eucalyptus, the salt on the breeze, and being in proximity to the ocean. As I said before, I do think of it being charged by homesickness and living away from Australia for the first time, which made me newly aware of the things that are very particular about that environment that I think I maybe didn't notice or took for granted when they were right in front of me all the time. To be somewhere so different as New York, I realized, okay, birds don't sound like that everywhere, you know, the trees are very different. All of those things magnified in my mind.
KBD: How did you work on fleshing out your characters? Did it take multiple drafts, or did you do free writing exercises? How do you get close to your characters?
ML: I often say to my students that the relationships you have with your characters are like any other relationship in your life, in that you get to know them better the more time you spend with them. So, it was really through the process of revision and redrafting. I mean, I had the idea for these characters ten years ago. I wasn't working on the novel consistently for ten years, but these people lived with me in my mind for a long time. Then, in 2018, I started revising the stories I'd written with the intention of writing a novel and I worked on that consistently really up until now. It was a process of wading down deeper to understand them better. Characters are always a little mysterious, but I'm definitely the kind of writer that draws from people in my life. No character is one person, but they're amalgamations of different people's characteristics and patterns.
KBD: Yeah. Was there one character that took you a little bit longer or that maybe felt, I guess, a little more challenging than others?
ML: Yeah, that's a good question. I think the character that surprised me the most was Maeve. The narrator, her mother, and Jude were part of the story from the very beginning, and their characters were drawn from people that I knew personally and mixed together from experiences I'd had in my relationship with my own mother, or in my relationships with men. But Maeve appeared by surprise when I came across a photograph of a woman by Nan Golden of this very beautiful woman with a lot of silver rings on her fingers, smoking a cigarette. I guess the character of Maeve became a different way of thinking about the narrator's curiosity and hunger for experience. I wanted to show the way that can manifest in a relationship between two women as friends—and sometimes maybe as competitors— as well as in a romantic relationship between a younger woman and an older man.
KBD: That's so interesting. I love that.
ML: I'd never really written that way before, so it was a surprise.
KBD: I’m curious about the choice to leave the narrator unnamed. What was your thought behind that?
ML: I wanted to preserve a sense of intimacy between her and the reader, and for the book to feel like we were in her consciousness. Giving her a name didn't necessarily seem like how she would think of herself in her own mind. There is something as well, I think, about the anonymity that I felt would allow readers to bring their own experiences to her experience and see themselves in her, rather than being a more separate distant character. So that was the intentional answer. The other answer is just that I never found a name that felt right (laughs). It always just felt really fake. There was also something about the anonymity that had an interesting charge to me. Even though the novel isn't autobiographical, with a nameless character, it could invite that possibility or that speculation.
KBD: Yeah. What was interesting for me as the reader was that I didn't notice until probably like halfway through. To me, it made sense in her relationship with Jude, where he is kind of hands-off, keeping things at a distance. It made sense that you never heard him say her name. When someone you love says your name, it's that added layer of intimacy— the way that they say it. So yeah, it's interesting to hear your thoughts.
ML: That's a good point, actually. And I do think if she had had a name that he had used, it would've given them a sense of equality that I don't think is quite there in their dynamic, though the narrator wants it to be. It was really important to me to show that the power doesn't always go in one direction and that she has agency too, which I think is something we don't always see in stories about young women and older men. But at the same time, I think that it does kind of speak to her youth that we only hear her nicknames and not her real name.
KBD: What did your day-to-day process look like while you were working on the novel?
ML: I feel like so much of the process of writing a first novel is teaching yourself how to develop a writing routine and figuring out what your process is. Of course, I've heard writers say that the process is particular for each book. So, you know, I know that it could change again. But I was fortunate to be writing the early stages of this book while I was in graduate school. So I had time and support and flexibility to try out different ways of working and discover what the best routine for me was. I never thought of myself as a morning person but unfortunately for me, I found that writing in the morning is preferable. I think there's something about only being half awake when I come to the page I'm less critical of myself. I'm maybe still in that half-dream state, which can feel very generative. And then I also have the sense that I have the whole day ahead of me, so there's no pressure. It doesn't matter if I don't do my best work straight away. There were also periods of revising this novel during the pandemic when I was unemployed, and the thing I learned from that was that it's not sustainable for me to write all day, every day. I need to have something else. I found that I really did my best work in the first couple of hours in the morning, and then often, the afternoon was spent ruining what I had done when I started to overthink it. So I think that, right now, my balance is writing in the mornings when I can and also teaching writing. I feel really lucky to be teaching workshops right now because I get to have these conversations about craft with my students. So, I'm constantly thinking about these things. It keeps me in touch with other people, gets me out of my own head and makes me live in the world, which I think is actually really helpful. (laughs)
KBD: I agree. (laughs). So how did you know when it was done? Can you walk us through your publication process with Tin House and how all that worked?
ML: I was working on it the most consistently during the year of the pandemic. I had been in touch with my agent, but I hadn't signed with her yet because she sought me out many years earlier after I'd published an essay online at Catapult, but I didn't have a manuscript for a long time. I'm a really slow writer. She was incredibly patient with me, and I was really fortunate that we were able to keep in touch. When I felt like I had a complete draft I was happy with, I sent it to her. So, I didn't actually sign with her until 2020. I had a pretty substantial draft of the novel by then because I'd been working on it while I was doing my MFA, and then I spent about a year revising it afteward.
She definitely encouraged me to take some greater risks with the plot than I was inclined to originally. I don't want to give too much away, but there's a reproductive event in the novel, and I'd shied away from going too deep into that territory. Even though it was in my original draft, I'd taken it out again later, and so I liked that she helped me go to places that I'd been hesitant to take myself.
We did a lot of work with the plot, which, as I said before, is not really my area of expertise. Then we also did a lot of work thinking about how to clarify where the narrator was looking back on events from because I hadn't really solidified that in my mind.
So really, the beginning and the end of the book changed quite a lot during the process of revising it with her. Then about six months later the book was sent out. My book went to auction in Australia within a week, which was really exciting, and then it sold in the UK. In the US, it took a little longer to connect with the right editor and I'm so grateful that I ended up with Masie Cochran at Tin House. She was such an insightful reader for this book, and she really loved it as the book that it was and found ways to make it stronger.
KBD: And the cover is beautiful too.
ML: Thank you. Yeah. I'm so happy with it.
KBD: I’m so curious about that process. I mean, there is always a chance a writer won’t like their book cover, right?
ML: Something my editor said to me early on was that no one is ever prepared to see their cover. Like, regardless of whether it's good or bad or they hate it or come to love it, I think it is the first time that you really see your book as an object that has different kinds of goals to your goals for it in terms of marketing, finding the right reader, and getting someone to pick it up in all kinds of venues. So, I think it can be a little bit of a nerve-wracking moment for sure. But I love the design and I think that Tin House has done a really wonderful job at making sure that everything about the novel is directed at my ideal reader.
KBD: Was there anything you needed to work through or overcome in your creative life or process while writing your first novel? And that sort of segues into my next question, which is, what advice do you have for debut authors?
ML: Something I had to work through was that I had an idea about what this project was going to look like when I started it—I'd pictured it as a short story collection. I think part of what was getting in my way of turning it into what it needed to be was my fear that I didn’t have it in me to write a novel. If I were to give anyone advice, I would just say to take the time to make the thing that you want to make. Publishing is so fickle and it takes such a long time to write a book, and then the process of putting it out into the world also takes a long time. If you’retrying to make something that you think is going to appeal to a certain market or a certain readership or speak to a particular moment, there’s guarantee any of that will still be the same by the time your book comes out. I think the only thing that you can really hope to do is to write the book that you want to see in the world. In that way, I really believe in trusting your impulses.
KBD: I love what you said, too, about your trusting your impulses. I was just talking to my writing partner about how I feel like the last few years of writing my book has just been an exercise in trusting myself. I can have this thought, but it could take months to put it on the page and to get it right. So you have to trust that all that work that’s going into it will be worth something at the end, for lack of a better way to say it. Trust is a huge thing.
ML: I think for a lot of writers, writing doesn't always feel pleasurable or joyful, but I also believe in trying to find the pleasure in the actual work. The time that you have when the book is just yours is very precious. Don't rush this process. This is the best part.
KBD: Ugh. I know. It’s so hard when you see it, and you just want it to be more of a thing that you can hold. But I've heard so many people say how the process in between is really a great time.
ML: I guess this is something else I had to work through. I'm a really impatient person. The world that we live in doesn't necessarily encourage patience and deep focus, but I think it is one of the great rewards of the writing life.
KBD: Are you working on anything now, or are you just enjoying being a published novelist?
ML: I‘m definitely getting creatively restless. Part of putting a novel out into the world I think is really exciting, but to me, it's also a process of letting go of this thing that I've lived alongside for a long time and has been a huge part of my life. Not to be depressing, but there's a feeling of loss that comes along with that as well. I think it's going to take time for me to build those relationships with a new set of characters. I do have an idea for a new novel, but I'm just enjoying letting it percolate in the back of my mind right now. I know that it’ll be there when I'm ready.
Madelaine Lucas is the author of the debut novel Thirst for Salt and a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog.
