I threw huge sheets of butcher paper on the walls, one for the husband’s story, the other for the wife’s. Though I caved, I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage by presenting wildly divergent perspectives from within a long union. I had been married two years earlier, under duress, because I hate the institution of marriage for its ingrained misogyny, but my husband was being made unhappy by my dithering. The fourth part of Arcadia was set in the near future of 2019, with a global pandemic and widespread environmental collapse, and when writing these imagined horrors became too devastating, I stopped working to dream of something that was in many ways the narrative’s opposite: a colourful, playful opera. Finishing this novel felt urgent but also staggeringly heavy. My misery was compounded because I was working on my second novel, Arcadia, a book that I undertook in order to wrestle with the moral implications of bringing a child into a world in which climate change was intensifying. My study at the time had been carved out of our rickety, uninsulated, un-airconditioned garage, and writing out there in 37-degree heat while enormously pregnant was excruciating physical work. I was in a strange liminal space between the spring publication of my first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and the birth of my first son at the end of August.
I began Fates and Furies during the long, hot Florida summer of 2008.
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