Margarita Montimore: On the Marginalization of Women in Magic, Losing Oneself in Research, Searching for Belonging, and Her New Novel, "Acts of Violet"
I had the pleasure of speaking with Margarita Montimore about her newest novel, Act of Violet, a brilliant, mind-bending journey through the highly unexplored world of women in magic while navigating the complexities of feminism, family, and sisterhood.
Margarita and I spoke about the marginalization of women in magic, the pleasures of losing ourselves in research for a novel, and the winding paths we take on the journey of writing a book.
Barrie Miskin: I was so excited to be able to read acts of violet. It was such an awesome book and it was such a brilliant idea – the disappearance of a magician. How did that idea come to you? How did you decide that Violet was going to be a magician?
Margarita Montimore: Very good question. It came in bits and pieces over the course of years. I finished Oona (OONA OUT OF ORDER) years before it was published – there was a long road to publication. And during that long road I started and stopped and kind of hit the wall for like at least six different stories. And when I say I wrote parts of six different novels, I'm not saying like I wrote hundreds of pages, it could be anywhere from a chapter or two. In one case I did write like 120 pages and then realized: this doesn't really have a hook. I can't do anything with it. But one of the themes that I saw coming up that I kept being drawn to over and over again, was this notion of, sisterhood and of a turbulent relationship between sisters and in which one sister goes missing mysteriously.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and I definitely have an affinity for true crime, but also for weird stuff like any unsolved mystery, anything a little bit paranormal, off the beaten path, unusual. So, it's in some ways a mash up of a lot of my different interests and on top of which I love a good showbiz tale. Give me the dark side of show business, give me the secrets, give me the nitty gritty of all the glitter and glam and all the unpleasantness! (laughs) I like to know what it takes to get to that glitter and glam.
So, I thought, okay, there are so many stories about missing sisters. There are so many thrillers. I don't write thrillers. I write stuff that, is not easily classifiable and then in terms of like the celebrity angle, I was like, okay, you know, we've got the musician stories, we’ve got movie star stories – and they’ve been done so well. Thank you, Taylor Jenkins Reid! (laughs)
Really, for me, it was becoming important to kind of find a new angle and a new entry point. It challenged me to expand that radius of what are creative fields that we don't read about or hear about quite as often. And as soon as I was brainstorming, and as soon as I landed on magician, I was like, oh my God, a magician who goes missing in the middle of a performance in the middle of a disappearing act. How perfect is that? And in the meantime, it was lock down and I was feeling like we all just, we need more magic in our lives. So, it was like that confluence of I will give them more magic. I will give my readers all the magic in every sense of the word.
BM: One of the first scenes, towards the beginning of the book where Violet is on a talk show and she shows her chrome manicure. And then she suddenly slices herself and her dress. It’s just so detailed, so visceral. Like I could like, see it, it was like watching this like imaginary TV in that scene. You must have had to do a lot of research on magic to get those details so precise. What was that process like?
MM: Oh, absolutely. And that's one of the great things about being a writer is that the homework that you give yourself is homework that you have fun doing. It’s usually topics that you're already passionate about or that you're so curious about that it's a pleasure to research. And for me, magic is definitely the latter, where I grew up being completely dazzled by it. I never missed a David Copperfield performance or really any kind of magic performance. I was always there for it. And I remember seeing magic in real life and the performances left me with just my jaw hanging open. It was very, very fun for me to research well for professional reasons. I needed to know how the illusions are done and I needed to know what that lifestyle is, what that career trajectory looks like. And when I was doing the research, the question I kept asking myself over and over again was where are all the women?
BM: Absolutely.
MM: They exist, but over 90% of professional magicians happen to be male. And that was when I felt like well, this is a way to put a spotlight on women in magic. Because historically, there have been just some really, really brilliant magicians who happen to be women.
BM: That’s so true. Honestly, when I think of magicians, the names that come to my mind are David Copperfield or David Blaine. I honestly don’t know anything about women in the world of magic. Would you be able to give me names of women who stood out to you in your research?
MM: Well, Dell O’Dell was one of the first magicians who was on TV. She basically revolutionized having magic be performed on television. She was a performer on stage on screen. And she hustled. Like, I was reading her bio and I wanted to take a nap! Honestly every woman, pardon the pun, kind of had the deck stacked against them.
Another woman that really stood out was Adelaide Herman, who was in a similar era as Houdini and should be just as well-known as Houdini, but just because of certain life circumstances and because of not having the same legacy she was forgotten. Just reading her life story, I was like, wow, somebody needs to write a screenplay and do a blockbuster movie just about her life. The best I can do right now is incorporate her, mention her in my story.
Part of my research process was interviewing this wonderful woman, Kayla Drescher, who is not only a career magician and was very generous with her time with answering every question I had about like the nitty gritty about that lifestyle and career. But also, she co-created this podcast called Shazam that focuses on what it’s like being a female magician. I've listened to every single episode. And it was a pleasure and opened my eyes to so many things.
I never would've thought about a lot of reasons that little girls end up giving up magic. For example, things like wallets or vests, they're very masculine. Like girls, most of their dresses and skirts didn’t have pockets - where are they going to put a wallet, right. Or the vests they're designed for a masculine form. They don't look good on women. So just even the basic tricks or accessories that are designed with men in mind are those little things end up kind of dissuading. They end up feeling like just another drop in the bucket of discouragement that eventually pushes them away.
It's been a tale as old as time. One of Houdini's contemporaries, Minerva - and this is a story that when I came across, I was like, I have to incorporate this into my book - she did the water barrel escape that Houdini did except she did it with more chains and more restraints. And basically, she upped the ante. However, the thing that was discussed the most when she performed was how her wet clothes clung to her body when she escaped the water barrel. And you know, that's the kind of thing that is so maddening and, you know, it's still something that women have to navigate today.
BM: So how was the process for writing ACTS OF VIOLET different than writing OONA OUT OF ORDER?
MM: In the very kind of early days, I would say that it felt more like an uphill battle. The first draft of Oona came out very, very easily and then it was a complete uphill battle revising it. When you do time travel with no outline and then have major revisions, guess what? It's not going to be easy or simple in the slightest. Get out those, those spreadsheets and, you know, start doing math of ages and years! (laughs)
With Violet, I would say getting to the concept and nailing down who the central characters are and the format that took longer. And that was a longer process. But then once I had the first couple of chapters going, I reached the point where I knew I had a lot further to go, but I could see all the different places that I could potentially go. It just went much faster once I got going. And the revision process was so much easier and went so much more smoothly because I wrote it with a lot more intentionality and I feel like I edited it a lot more as I went.
BM: What is your writing routine? Do you have a writing routine? (laughs)
MM: So funny because I literally just had lunch with an author friend of mine. We were talking about this really wonderful writing seminar that we went to in Philadelphia. I wish I remember the author who said this because it has stayed with me since. It was the notion that to be a real writer, you have to write every single day and you have to have this routine and bottom line is it's different for everybody. And for many writers, myself included, it comes in kind of phases and cycles and waves. Right now, I am in the promotional cycle. My book comes out a week from today and I am in the midst of doing a lot of interviews, a lot of social media and written content. So, in order to be fully present in that, there isn’t a lot of room left for writing something original. So, when the ideas come to me, I jot them down, but it isn't going to be probably until later this summer when kind of the promo for Violet quiets down that I'm going to go into my kind of phase.
And for me personally, I would say that I do better writing in the afternoons and evenings. I find when I'm less disciplined, it helps me to do writing sprints with fellow authors to keep me accountable. That was a huge, huge, reason that Violet got written as quickly and kind of painlessly as it did. My writing friend, Michelle Hazen, God bless her, she got me away from my writing insecurities and was just like cracking the whip of like, let's do these sprints, let's do these sprints. So, I just had that consistent output. So that's something that helps me. But I have a feeling with this next project I'm really, really excited to write it. I'm not feeling scared or nervous about, is it going to get done? Is it going to get finished? I have so many ideas that I'm excited to have that block of time to dedicate myself to it.
BM: So how did you come to writing full time? I know you used to work in publishing. How did you make that move over to writing?
MM: I worked in publishing and then I worked in social media. I was very fortunate to work at companies like Marvel and Google and sounds awesome. But then I was managing a whole team of social media managers and I was just burning out. And at the time I was engaged to the man who's now my husband who was living in south Jersey in the suburbs, in his own house. And when we were going to get married, the original plan was for him to move to New York. And you know, he does graphic design and our illustration. So, he was going move to New York and we'd get a place together there. But the more he saw how kind of just as my career progressed and I was doing better in my career, I was also becoming more and more stressed out and unhappy.
Just really, I didn't know how much I had left in me. And he said: Look, your dream is to write books. I already have a house down here. If you're willing to leave Brooklyn and your city life and come be a suburban mouse then come write books. And for me that felt like being handed a lottery ticket. I really didn't think I'd have that opportunity until I was retired! So, I did freelance editing and wrote three books in three years. The first one I self-published the second one I shelved. And then the third one was OONA OUT OF ORDER.
BM: The last question I had for you is just out of my own curiosity. ACTS OF VIOLET is a really at its core, a story of family and the complex relationships that like familial love brings. How did your own experiences growing up affect the family story in this book?
MM: I did actually want to pay tribute to my family history. I was born in the Soviet Ukraine -back then it was all collectively Russia. My first language was Russian and I was raised with this Russian Jewish culture. A whole other set of customs and traditions and superstitions and the superstitions. Just the Yiddish slang and all this stuff for me, it's so enriching. And it also created a curiosity of like, so I always felt like I don't quite belong here. So, to some extent there's always going to be that part of me that feels a little bit like the misfit and you have to create and seek out your own sense of belonging.
In terms of family, I'm an only child. My father passed away over 10 years ago. It's just me and my mom. So, it's always been a matter of found family for me. So, I think that's why in what I write there is always that element of like family versus found family versus the things that bring us together that aren't necessarily blood. And also, that feeling of searching for home, searching for that sense of belonging. I think that carries through as a thread through everything that I write.
Margarita Montimore is the author of Acts of Violet, Asleep from Day, and Oona Out of Order, a USA Today bestseller and Good Morning America Book Club pick. After receiving a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, she worked for over a decade in publishing and social media before deciding to focus on the writing dream full-time. Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, she currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and dog.
About the Interviewer
Barrie Miskin is a teacher and writer whose work has appeared in Hobart, Narratively and elsewhere. She recently completed her first book, HELL GATE BRIDGE, a memoir of her journey through maternal mental illness. Barrie lives in Queens, New York with her husband and daughter.
