Natalia Theodoridou: On What It Means to Be Saved, the Power of Names, the Stories That Inform Our Characters, and His Debut Novel ‘Sour Cherry’
Language plays an important role in my household. My little boys do not play with water guns; they play with water blasters. They do not use triggers to see their rockets take flight, but launchers. I cannot prevent the exposure to what I deem an inappropriate gifted toy for my young boys, but I try very hard to shift the dialogue and diction of such “gifts” because it’s one of very few things I feel I can control as a parent: their stories.
What do we do with what’s been given to us? How do we prevent the formation of monstrous men?
These are some of the questions I obsess over as a parent and as a writer. They’re also the questions that attracted me to Natalia Theodoridou’s debut novel Sour Cherry (Tin House, 2025). His novel reframes the story of Bluebeard, an age-old tale of toxic masculinity, in a modernized narration that offers consideration for his victims. What happens if they stay? What happens if they go? Can the monsters we love be saved? Theodoridou challenges the way stories are told and retold in a way that’s so plain-as-day, it paradoxically feels too complex to grasp. But the response his writing evoked in me, his reader, was of curiosity and defeat but also determination. And maybe because it is a fairy tale, he made me believe: that defeat and curiosity and determination, when all wound up together, can be prerequisites for change. Together, these feelings beg us to explode the long-held perspectives we’ve inherited through osmosis. Sour Cherry is a gift you will treasure for its empowerment to reimagine the stories that have hurt us most.
Natalia and I had a generous conversation about reinventing ourselves and our characters, the power of names, our cultural spells and accidental influences, the confluence of interests that created his debut novel Sour Cherry and much more.
Ashley Rubell: How did you go from designing games to writing this incredibly smart novel and now, studying to become a therapist?
NT: I started in academia. My background is in drama and theater, then [I did] media studies and religious studies. I did a PhD on Balinese performance practices and spent fifteen months in Indonesia, studying Balinese performance and talking to people. And then I became a writer.
I guess writing actually predated that. I started writing when I was very, very young in Greek, my first language. Then I found it again during my field work, and started writing in English. And slowly, after I had started teaching critical theory to drama and musical theater students, I realized that I would much rather spend my time writing. That’s when I started writing in English. It was also a time when I realized you can get paid for writing things. And why wouldn’t I want to do that?
So short stories came first and poetry, then games and interactive fiction. That was a very interesting learning curve, because I felt I wasn’t good at writing long things. My mind worked in shorter narratives, so the longest thing I had written when I wrote my first game was maybe a novelette of 7,000 words, and my first game was 120,000 words, and the second one was 250,000 words. The third one was 300,000 words, so I had to teach myself how to write long. And how to plot, which I still don’t know if I’ve actually learned.
AR: That makes sense that those two things would go hand-in-hand, writing longform and plotting.
NT: Yeah, that was the most interesting thing with interactive fiction, where essentially, the reader is the main character of the story, and you have to give them a choice every two hundred to five hundred words. So at every point in the story I had to consider all the different ways the story could go and then write all of them. It taught me how to plot in the sense of considering all the different trajectories a narrative could take, and then choosing the one I felt was the ideal way to move through the story. It taught me how to think about narrative arcs and character arcs. In interactive fiction, you get personality stats for the main character. It’s like a role-playing game, right? So you have to consider what is within the range of what that character might do based on their character traits. And then, when they do choose to do something that’s supposedly out of character, that’s how you get a character arc—when people behave in ways you don’t expect them to, or they’re not conditioned to.
AR: How does your drama background influence your writing? And what led you to pursue therapy?
NT: Drama definitely [influences] the way I think about dialogue and plays a big part in setting the scene, thinking about how things are staged. I have to consider, where does the light come from? Where were people before they entered the scene? [How do those] people exist outside of the stage? There are a lot of theatrical references and intertextual references in Sour Cherry that all come from my drama background. I’m always very conscious of the artifice of the thing. And I'm also very interested in breaking the fourth wall and what that means in literature because a lot of my background in drama was also non-traditional. I was interested in site-specific performance in immersive theater, in playable shows, where you get to implicate the audience to work alongside your narrative. So all of that is definitely a big part of the way I approach things.
[As far as] therapy, it’s all about getting to know characters. Some of that thinking is that there are no villains. There’s only understanding someone deeply enough. Everyone has their reasons for doing things. They are informed by the background that goes back generations, possibly. I don’t remember who it was who said that in a well-written play everyone is in the right. That’s what generally attracts me to fiction, and to therapy—getting to know how people work. Everything that informs who they are, what drives them.
AR: Tell me about your first encounter with the Bluebeard tale. What inspired you to recreate the story?
NT: I can’t remember when I first encountered Bluebeard. It almost feels like one of those stories that you or I have absorbed by osmosis, almost like fish and water. I honestly don’t know when I first read it, or if someone told it to me. It feels like a natural thing for a wife to be murdered because she was curious or disobedient to her husband. That’s a thing that happens, and it’s alarming. I don’t know when I first encountered that idea.
AR: That gets me thinking about the narratives we inherit and I’m wondering if there are any narratives in your own life that shaped or shattered your past or present, that you’ve had to rewrite for yourself.
NT: Sour Cherry is a very, very personal story in many ways. I think all of my stories are personal in that way. You said something in your email about fictionalizing trauma and I was thinking about that. Do I ever fictionalize trauma? Is it something that can even be fictionalized? Trauma is always real, no matter the narrative that surrounds it. What’s the fiction of it? It definitely drives my need to communicate, and I think that’s what I do with both art and therapy. The fairytale and fiction are, for me, a general way to talk about things that I wouldn’t be able to talk about otherwise, that would feel too hard or too cruel to put into words. So it does become a vehicle, to almost speak, paradoxically, in a more direct way about things by writing about them obliquely.
AR: One of the things that really put a hook in me was in your letter to the reader at the very beginning of the book. You bring up the question, “Why don’t you just leave?” and I want to have a conversation about that. As an outsider myself, who has witnessed certain types of abuse, I have certainly asked that question. Some days I don’t understand why the person I love is harming themselves. Other days I have much more compassion for the complexity of what’s harming them. I want to discuss the implications of that question and what we outsiders might consider asking instead.
NT: This is at the heart of the book. People do ask that, and I understand why. It’s very difficult to sit with the discomfort of watching someone you care about being in a situation that is abusive and doesn’t leave. It almost feels like maybe they don’t want to help themselves, or they reject any help you are able to offer, and that can feel terrible. It’s a terrible place to be on the outside as well as on the inside. You invoke feelings of helplessness. If you are a professional dealing with someone in an abusive situation you might feel unskilled, helpless, hopeless, useless. It’s not a nice feeling to have, so I get the question.
It almost functions to relieve the bystander from any kind of responsibility as well, because it puts the focus on the victim who has to leave. There’s so much to say about this. One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I wanted that question to be impossible. The book is my answer to that question. If I could answer it in a more concise form, I wouldn’t have needed to write the book. I hope that the book illustrates some of the complexity around what makes it impossible to leave, and almost maybe hint towards alternative questions that people on the outside could ask. Like, What’s stopping you from leaving? Or What do you need in order to even conceive of the possibility of a life outside of this? Does that make sense?
AR: Yes, it does. But to me, that feels so devastating. When I think about this book as an answer to that question, what I take away is that it’s generational. And that even in the worst circumstances of victims trying to protect their kin, trying to offer something better, it’s incredibly hard to break a cycle. Am I far off?
NT: I don’t think you’re far off. What I would add to that is that people tend to forget what makes the abuse possible, and that is love. In domestic violence and domestic abuse with any kind of intimate partner violence, first comes love. Then comes the abuse. Love is what enables abuse, what allows it to take place. That’s what allows it to come, to continue. There is also another cycle. What is typical in domestic abuse situations is you have the relationship first and then the violence and then you have the honeymoon phase which is when the victim is soothed. The perpetrator is sorry. Everything is wonderful, and it's all very hard after having faced that kind of violence to say no to all the sweet things that come after it.
Sometimes I feel that question, Why don’t you just leave?, functions like a block of all the other possible questions that you might ask. Thinking more specifically about sexual violence, we have all these questions [culturally] that focus on the victim and how the victim can protect themselves or might have been able to protect themselves. We say, Don’t wear this. Don’t go there. Don’t walk alone. When what we could be saying is just Don’t rape people. That’s not for the victim. Why aren’t we asking more questions about the perpetrator? Up to and including what happened to you to lead you to that kind of violence. It’s not just about assigning blame. It’s not just, Why are you being violent? Why are you abusive? It’s more like, What drove you to this? What happened to you and to the people who raised you to get you to a point where this is the only way you can conceivably behave?
AR: Right. In American culture, ever since the #MeToo movement in particular, there’s been a lot of conversations about monstrous men. Something this book touches on is also that giant question of, Are monsters unsavable? Instead, as a culture, we are asking ourselves, Do we believe the victims?
NT: The difficulty with these questions is that I don’t know exactly what it means to be saved. That’s one of the problems for the characters in the book as well, when a monster is saved. What does that mean? Does it mean not being a monster? Not being loved?
AR: When I think about the fairytales—mostly Disney movies, for me—that I grew up with, the answer is always love. It’s the kiss that wakes the sleeping princess, the change in a character’s heart that breaks the spell. But you’re pointing out that’s where the problem begins.
NT: In therapy training one of the main questions we have to ask ourselves is Who am I not able to work with? Everyone has boundaries, everyone has limits. The answer might be, I can't work with perpetrators of sexual violence, for example, or people who target children, and I get that. It’s really hard to do. But I think part of the answer is that it has to stop somewhere. And it doesn’t stop with the victims. It’s not just learning to have self-worth, to protect ourselves, to build networks of support, to be able to leave abusive situations. It’s also about working with the people who do the damage. It has to stop somewhere. That’s how you save the monster, I suppose. By helping it. I don’t know.
AR: I have two boys under the age of five and they often hit one another. And I’ve heard myself say to them, hurt people hurt people to explain that their sibling is reacting from a space of feeling upset. But what a weird cultural fable to pass on… I mean, we’re all hurting. So now instead I just say, It doesn’t matter who started it, it matters who ends it.
NT: Yeah, I also don’t want to feed into the myth that people who are abused go on to be abusers. Even though a lot of people who do abuse have been abused themselves, most people who are abused do not go on to do that. That’s just not true and it’s very damaging. I do think that not punishing but rehabilitating is part of the answer.
AR: There’s a sentence in Angela Carter’s book The Bloody Chamber that says “love is desire sustained by unfulfillment,” which feels so relevant to everything we’re discussing. After reading Sour Cherry I read The Bloody Chamber immediately after, for the first time. When I got to the story about the Erl-King I thought, I know this character! How directly would you say these books are in conversation with each other?
NT: I love that quote. I think most people assume the influence is more direct than it actually is, I haven't read a ton of Angela Carter. I really have not. I have [read her] since writing the first iteration of the novel, because it has gone through many [iterations], so there is an influence, but it came after. Angela Carter is one of those things that one absorbs by osmosis. I think Carmen Maria Machado is a more direct influence. Helen Oyeyemi is a more direct influence. And a lot of theater, like Heiner Mueller. Bausch is a much more direct influence, Brecht, even. One of the things I love about writing and reading is finding those conversations going on in the background. Sometimes they’re intentional and sometimes they’re accidental. And even when they’re accidental— because the reader is, I think, the one who completes a book, they’re always part of the work already—it doesn’t matter what the author intended. It’s a co-creation, a dialogue. I don’t know if that satisfies you…
AR: It does! I recently workshopped an essay and someone said to me, This reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s column she wrote about parenting. I’d never read any Shirley Jackson before. I bought the recommended book, flipped through its pages and found a sentence that was almost verbatim what I had written in my essay, a sentiment I thought was so creative and original. So I completely understand what you’re saying about being in conversation with other work by accident. How many different drafts or iterations did it take to complete Sour Cherry?
NT: It started as a short story which I wrote at the Clarion West Writers Workshop. The workshop takes place over six weeks and we had a different instructor every week. We had to produce a short story every week to be workshopped by our peers and I wrote this one from Karen Joy Fowler’s week. There were no ghosts. There was just this Cherry girl and the man and Cook. And Karen Joy Fowler was like, I’m very interested to know more about Cook. And that was the prompt that created the rest of the novel. After I had what I thought was a complete manuscript, there was no contemporary element. It was just a fairy tale in the fairy tale register from different points of view, but there was no narrator. When I queried agents, Danya Kukafka, who is now my agent, responded to me, and she said Okay, it’s a fairy tale retelling. But what else is it? That’s what prompted the whole contemporary framework. It’s what gave me the key to understand what the book was really about. It’s about the stories we tell, how cultural narratives around cycles of violence and abuse inflect the ways we can actually relate to each other. And how do we teach the next generation the complexities around these issues? How do we move on when we are already trapped in those cycles? Is there any breaking out of these cycles? So there were three main stages the book went through. And then of course there’s been a lot more editing with my editor at Tin House and Wildfire in the UK. I might be off about this, because some of it took place over the pandemic so my awareness of the passage of time during that is a bit warped, but I think I had the first draft of the novel in 2020 and then the second one in 2022, and we sold the book in 2023.
AR: Did you query agents with the first version of the draft?
NT: I had a different agent at the time and we figured we couldn’t work together on this book. It wasn’t a good fit. And that was ultimately a good thing because it allowed me to find someone who was perfect for it. Rewrote it in 2022, sold it in 2023 to come out in 2025.
AR: Always such a long process. I would love to talk more about Cook. So much of this text is about the confines and burdens of a name and I’m interested in the way language fails us with names in particular, if you’d be willing to say more about the influence there.
NT: I think there are two things around names. One is that fairy tale thing where people are defined by their functions. We have King, Queen, we have Cook, Shopkeeper, Woodcutter… It can function both as a restriction of how much these people can be within the narrative but also, for people like Cook for example, it did offer some kind of freedom. She could be herself within that role. It gave her a purpose. It allowed her to know her place in the world and to find herself through the function that was assigned to her. But it can also be, for someone like the Bluebeard figure in the book who doesn’t have a name until he gives himself a proliferation of names, a vehicle through which he dehumanizes others, makes them conform to his own narrative and to exist in service to his needs and power. I do think that names have power. Naming something, in lots of different narrative traditions, is something that gives you power over the thing. Like finding out the name of a demon to control them, to exorcise them, to command them.
But then there’s the other aspect of it for me as a trans person. I have a really loose relationship with names. Even before I realized I was trans I had a tendency not to name characters in my stories, and people always found it difficult to relate to those characters because they didn’t know their names, which was very baffling. It was baffling for me because I realized later I didn’t have such a strong attachment to my name. I’ve burned through several names at this stage myself, like Natalia is not the name I use in my everyday life. So I wonder if it’s a trans thing as well. I know a lot of my trans friends have also changed names multiple times over their lifetimes, not even across genders, but within gender as well.
AR: There’s a big opportunity here, to consider the incredibly restrictive use of binary thinking in names and gender. It makes hardly any sense to me, but is also very weirdly disorienting because I find myself operating within it. What you’re saying about the detachment to names is how I personally feel about place, setting. I love an opportunity to go somewhere new, start over, reinvent myself. To be known by new people for who I want to be and not who I’ve been. It’s empowering.
NT: There’s something performative about it. Like presenting something to the world and making a claim of some kind.
AR: And if you don’t take that claim over your own life, it’s almost like you’re letting the rest of the world decide your fate for you. It seems to me like the antithesis of our own self-will, of what we’re supposed to be doing here. It’s denying ourselves from our own capabilities, our own magic powers.
NT: There is a burden that comes with naming, though, right? It’s something given to you, usually by parents, and it comes from their own baggage and cultural nuances and implications. In Greece for example, we usually name children after their grandparents. Natalia is the name of my great grandmother who was a refugee from Georgia. She didn’t speak a word of Greek when she came to Greece. So there is that connection to generations that came before. It’s very heavy and can be somewhat deterministic. In rejecting that, in shedding that and choosing something different for myself, I do think there is an aspect of self-determination, and like you said, spell.
AR: Here in the U.S. it’s common to take a man’s surname. I planned to do it when I got married, but I’m so happy I never got around to it. Because I would have been participating in a culture that values the act of erasure. My father’s family is from Mexico and I remember them explaining to me how culturally, they collect family names. They keep both surnames that perhaps become middle names, or they’re named after their ancestors but go by their second or third names instead. Their names are a tribute to their lineage, like a map. I’ve only gotten to know them in the recent years of my life, when my youngest son was a newborn and I had just given him my surname as his middle name. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time but I felt in meeting this side of my family, I was participating in a culture that was natural to me, not nurtured into me. This has me thinking a lot about one of the themes of your book which, I think, was so much about possession.
NT: I think that’s really accurate. Again, about names in Greek, female surnames literally mean of [the man’s name]. Like in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, “of Richard.” It’s literally a possessive noun.
AR: As if women are land to be seized.
NT: Quite literally, yes. Women especially have been a currency for many, many centuries. So it makes a lot of sense. It becomes very obvious when you think about it in these terms.
AR: In your Author’s Note you wrote that as a person early in their transition, the question of masculinity was central for you, to figure out the kind of man you’re becoming.
NT: Yes, the question of, What makes someone a man?A monster? Is it testosterone? Is it nature? Nurture? The question is still really central for me as someone who literally started taking testosterone to be more masculine. There’s this cultural myth again around testosterone being monster juice. I came of age in the nineties where there was this whole talk about ‘roid rage.’ It’s often in transmasculine narratives as well. We have the narrative of the werewolf, the transmasculine werewolf for example, we shoot T and the beast comes out. So I guess I exist in this book in both the Cherry girl who is telling the narrative and the boy who is supposed to listen to this narrative and become a better man than his father was. I think that’s at the heart of my motivation for writing the book. Time will tell. I don’t know if I will ever become the answer. One can only hope.
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Natalia Theodoridou is a queer and transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in venues such as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the 2022 Emerging Writer Award from Moniack Mhor & The Bridge Awards, and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award multiple times. He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from SOAS, University of London. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK.
