On
January 22, 2023, I was able to chat to Grady Hendrix about his new book,
How to Sell a Haunted House while he was en route to his
performance in Savannah, GA.
Don’t
worry, I think we did really well avoiding any spoilers!!!
----------------------------
GH: Do
you want to dive in?
MS: Yeah, let’s do this! I guess we could start with a little
check-in, because How to Sell a Haunted House came out just a week ago. How’s it going so far?
GH: Pretty chaotic! I’ve been on the road, doing shows, and I’ll
be out here for about two more weeks, doing shows all through Florida, and
Texas, and up into Chicago and then Massachusetts. I’m on my way to Savannah right now to do one
this afternoon in a brewery. I’m driving
past a bunch of Jesus billboards right this minute. Yeah, it’s going great.
It’s
weird, because this is a book my editor and I really thought was going to be
sort of a miss. So it’s been nice to see
people respond to it. It was a really,
really hard book to land. There were
three radically different versions of this book before I got to the one that’s the
current version. My editor and I had a
pretty frank conversation. Both [of us]
felt like it’s a really weird book, it’s a really personal book, and we really
felt that – you know, it would be okay, but we’d do better next time. That’s what you’ve got to do, right? We were pretty prepared to write it off.
The
response has been really nice. And it’s really
nice to see people get invested in a book this weird.
MS: From my own experience reading it, yeah, it’s
a lot. It came out great!
How
did the book start? What was the little germ
that kicked it off and seeded it?
GH: It was definitely Covid. My mom had a couple of health scares, and I
was down in South Carolina, staying with her for a while in 2020. I think Covid really made a lot of us
hyper-aware of our parents’ mortality. I
was standing out in the garage, looking for something, and she has all this
junk out there. There were all these
garbage bags full of fabric scraps that she keeps saying she’s going to make a
quilt out of, for the last … twelve years?
Longer than that. And she’s never
going to make a quilt. She’s never made
a quilt in her life.
I was
just realizing, I’m going to have to sort through it all, and throw it out when
she dies. What do you do with all this
stuff? There’s the easy stuff, when
someone dies, and you’re cleaning out their house. There’s stuff that’s clearly garbage, and stuff
that’s clearly family heirlooms, but … there’s a lot of stuff that falls into a
gray area. There are clothes, there’s
shoes, collections they have that you’re not very interested in, and don’t have
much value.
It
just got me thinking about the weird kind of relationship we all have with
inanimate objects. We talk to our cars,
and we beg our phones not to crash, and we surround ourselves with dolls. With Funkos, and action figures, and… beanie
babies! Our kids have dolls, and our
dogs have dolls. It made me really
realize that we all have this strange relationship with inanimate objects, that
I hadn’t really seen many people write about.
And I
wanted to write about family, because that was a challenge. I hadn’t really written about a family with
siblings, and family stories are usually ghost stories -- are in general
haunted house stories.
All
those pieces started adding up. And that
was where things started rolling.
MS: In your own life, do you have any particular doll
or toy experiences from your own past that kind of drove Louise and Mark’s
experiences in the book?
GH: Oh sure, sure! I really had a lot of stuffed animals as a
kid, who I was very concerned with. You
want to make sure they’re comfortable, and not bored, and have something to do
when you go to school, and things like that.
Pupkin is definitely inspired by my wife’s childhood stuffed animal
Snocchio, who’s this guy who has been with her since she was probably two years
old. No one’s quite sure where he came
from, he kind of just showed up one day in her crib, probably a gift? He’s pretty terrifying, but he’s also – he’s
a cool guy, he just takes a little getting used to.
I
always feel like Toy Story, the movies that deal with this, really let
Andy off a bit too easy. The toys have
an obligation to him, but he doesn’t seem to have any obligation to the
toys. And that’s sort of what drives The
Velveteen Rabbit, and why I always found that such a horrifying book. These animals so want to serve this
kid, and the kid seems to care less. I
always thought that was such a crazy unequal relationship. The dynamic is so warped.
MS: In How to Sell a Haunted House, it
really struck me when Louise talks about how her stuffed animals were an early
teaching tool for how to care for and love other people.
GH: I think it’s really an interesting thing that
kids surrounded by things that seem animate, right? Stuffed animals! Yet they are enormously, immediately
empathetic towards them. They recognize
that these are smaller creatures than them, that they have a responsibility
towards. I think that’s enormously
kind. It taps into a real kindness from
kids that you don’t see sometimes when people get older. “These are smaller, and weaker than me, and I
need to take care of them, I need to explain things to them. I need to make sure they’re comfortable, and
all that kind of stuff” -- which I think is enormously empathetic, and seems to
occur naturally with kids.
MS: And it’s an organic process that you might
not necessarily immediately feel with your siblings, your younger siblings,
because you have to do that with them.
That’s a duty put upon you, but with the stuffed animals, it’s totally
voluntary.
GH: Right!
And also I think with a lot of kids, maybe not every kid, there’s also a
lot of projection there. You’ll interact
with your stuffed animals and they’ll interact back with you and tell you
things and talk to you about things, but you kind of create their point of view
in your head.
MS: It’s a really interesting little
dialogue. I have that with the books in
the shop too. [laughs] I talk to them sometimes.
GH: That’s what I’m saying. We all, even as adults, have these
relationships with inanimate objects. I
was talking to someone who was telling me that they didn’t. And I was like, “Yeah, but if you step on one
of your kids’ stuffed animals, do you just not say anything?” and she goes, “Oh
no, well I say ‘Sorry,’” so exactly. You
know?
MS: At the start of How to Sell a Haunted
House, some sort of very mundane, but creepy house moments occur. You talked about your mom having some house
scares [NOTE: I thought he had said
“house scares” earlier, but he in fact said “health scares,” ha!], and stuff
like that.
Are
there moments where you’ve experienced stuff that make you wonder if
something’s going on? Because How to
Sell a Haunted House rides a tandem track between all these toys and
puppets, and also the house, and what that means, the haunted
house.
GH: Absolutely.
It’s not even stuff that made me wonder.
I think everyone, to some extent, has experienced that feeling of being
in the house where you grew up, and it’s the afternoon, and maybe you’re home
from school early, or you come home and no one’s there, and … this feeling of
just… unease. You know?
You’re
all alone in that house, it’s afternoon, it’s getting towards evening, and the
house – you know, you definitely don’t feel like all the rooms are empty. You definitely feel like the house is
listening, and paying attention to you.
I think that’s a really common experience. My parents were divorced and my mom worked,
and so I’d come home and be alone until evening. My sisters were all older than me, and were
moved off to college, and living on their own.
There’d
be times I’d just leave the house and sit in the front yard and wait for
someone to come home because it got overwhelming. And I would be surprised to meet someone who
hadn’t had that experience.
MS: You’re a youngest child, yeah?
GH: Yeah.
MS: I think my youngest brother also had a
similar experience, which we, the older kids, didn’t have, because the house
was always full. That gives it a very different
feel.
Do you
remember any particular moments that sent you out into the front yard?
GH: Oh sure!
You’d hear things fall over in the attic… we definitely had squirrels up
there, but… so you’d hear that. Or it would just become overwhelming. The feeling of unease. Because I think it’s really hard to be
anywhere by yourself as a human being, and not start to populate it. Whether it’s hiking, or when you’re in the
woods on your own, or you’re in a house by yourself. Anything.
We just start to insert sentience into our surroundings. So for me it would hit a point where I just
couldn’t handle it any more, I would just have to get out of there.
MS: That shows a lot of wisdom, too, though. Knowing your limits. [laughs]
GH: Exactly.
And my limits were pretty low.
MS: [laughs more]
Which is ironic considering the stuff you write!
GH: At the same time, though, this is one of the
things that stands me in good stead – I feel like the job of a writer is to pay
attention to what’s going on around you and what’s happening, and I think that
feeling of unease probably stems from paying too much attention to the
house around you.
MS: When I read your books, I generally have to
take breaks, because it gets to be too much, you know? Not unlike you having to get out of your
house! And so I have to put it
down. But with How to Sell a Haunted
House, I got my review copy so close to when we were initially scheduled to
do this interview that my breaks – instead of being a few days, or a few weeks,
or a few months -- the breaks got shortened into an hour or less. I really had to jam it in there, really push
through it, and the whole thing that kept me going was “I know at the end of
Grady’s books he always pulls it all together, and it’s oooookay!” I mean -- it’s horrifying, but it’s okay. You know.
So I’m going to keep going, and I’m going to trust that he’s going to do
it again! And that was got me through it,
and once again it was totally worth it!
Because you really do – you push your readers to a real breaking point
right along with your characters sometimes.
You
said that you, as a writer, need to pay attention to the world around you, and
I think you have, very keenly, and all of that is embedded in the book
in a way that’s so real, that it absolutely cannot be denied. You know?
GH: Thank you!
I really appreciate that.
MS: Returning to writing – what is your process
like? I know it’s long. I also know you posted about your Wall of
Crazy which I hadn’t known about before, so – could you talk a little bit about
what your process is like, now that you’re through writing How to Sell a
Haunted House?
GH: I write a lot of drafts. And generally I’ll have a first draft, and
I’ll have a lot of stuff I want to get in there, a lot of set pieces, a lot of
moments. And generally that kind of
overwhelms it. So I’ll kind of drag
myself through that last third, and then I’ll put it aside a little bit. Then I’ll go back and do another draft. Really what it becomes is getting rid
of all this stuff I think is so cool.
And focusing more and more on the characters. And really narrowing down on them.
And
then I always have a big wall ahead of me [the aforementioned Wall of Crazy]
that has a lot of visual reference on it. Some of it is images that have stuck with me,
and some won’t even be for that particular book. There’s an image of a kid wearing an old man
mask, walking up a flight of stairs, and I’ve had that up since… probably My
Best Friend’s Exorcism. No – We
Sold Our Souls. I think that went up
when I was writing We Sold Our Souls.
In about 2016, 2017. And that
image is really part of the impetus for How to Sell a Haunted House. So its moment has come around.
But
the big thing with the wall is visual reference. Because I find it really, really hard to see
things in my head without visual reference.
I’ll
go to the neighborhood where something’s set, and take a lot of pictures. I just really need to see it. And that gets harder. Because I burn through a lot of the locations
that live largest in my head. The ones
that are most familiar, I’ve done. You
know? Mount Pleasant in the 80s, Mount
Pleasant in the 90s. LA. Places I’ve been, that I really see
clearly. I’ve done ‘em! So this one, Mark and Louise’s house is
actually my aunt’s house from growing up, which is always where we had family
events, and the house I like a lot. So
that loomed pretty large.
There’s
just so much reference. Especially with
a family story. A family story is all
backstory. So I have the family mapped
out, probably from the time Nancy, the mom, is 7 or 8 years old, all the way
through, year by year, all the way through the book’s beginning. That’s this massive, almost 30,000 word
document. But in doing that I needed a
lot of visual reference for the 60s and 70s and the 90s, especially. What were people wearing? What was her hair going to be like? So that’s a big part of it, just visualizing
what I’m seeing inside my head. Because
it’s very easy to get abstract, and that’s kind of death. You know?
To sort of like think that, “Oh, well the house had a bunch of trees in
the front yard.” Well, what’s a
bunch? 3? 2? 1? 11?
“She was short.” Well how short
was she? 5’1”? Was she 4’10”? Is she 5’3”?
I find getting those specific details really helps ground me.
MS:
And it’s not – one of the great things about your books is you don’t beat
people over the head with the descriptions.
It’s just there. It’s
embedded.
GH: It doesn’t necessarily have to be on the
page, do you know what I mean? But I
need to be seeing it really, really clearly.
One of
my big influences from a writing point of view is Elmore Leonard. And there are a couple other writers, like
Charles Willeford is one, George V. Higgins is another, Ed McBain’s a little
bit of one, in the sense that they really pare things down to the absolute
minimum. It’s more work to write the
minimum.
MS: [laughs]
It is! And people don’t realize
that.
So,
you mentioned writing multiple drafts.
Do you start from scratch for each one?
Or are you re-writing?
GH: It’s writing, and re-writing. The start of the book, that first chapter,
that really didn’t appear until Draft 3.
Probably? And so yeah, I’m always
rewriting, but trying to add things, and drill down on them a little more, and
really take out what doesn’t matter. But
with How to Sell a Haunted House, the last third of this book changed
radically. The first one took place in
Vermont, the second one took place in upstate South Carolina, the third one
took place in Charleston again, but it was way out on the highway, in sort of a
funpark.
MS: Returning to your Wall of Crazy, I notice it has
a lot of food on it for this one?
GH: Yeah.
Yeah.
MS: My friend Sharon that I’m doing a mystery
fiction blog with, she’s super food-obsessed, and she wanted to know if there
were any of those recipes or food-related things – if there was a recipe you
wanted to share that tied closely to the book.
GH: No, not really. I mean, those were all … me trying to get my
head around 90s food. For me, the way into Nancy, the mom, and her character,
was really the fact that she was a very enthusiastic but very baaad cook. And that’s always a Southern tragedy, because
if you’re a mom in the South, you’re expected to not only cook, but to love
it. And to cook a certain kind of food. I think there’s a lot of pressure on people,
on moms, for that. So that was why the
Wall of Crazy was so food-focused. This
idea of – she’s cookin’ and cookin’ and looking up new recipes, and getting exotic,
and experimenting, and treating it like this creative outlet, and the family is
just dreading eeeeverything she produces, because it’s awful. Those recipes were more like, “Let me get in
that headspace.” I would feel like I was causing a health hazard to share any
of them.
MS: With the exception of maybe My Best
Friend’s Exorcism, your covers don’t generally follow the Paperbacks from
Hell model, but have you noticed because of reading all of those crazy novels
from the 70s and 80s, especially horror novels – have the Paperbacks from Hell
influenced your own writing?
GH: Yeah, I guess they have, in two ways. One is – and mostly they’re examples of what not
to do – but the big thing I’ve realized is just how many of those books,
especially when you get to certain publishers like Pinnacle or Zebra, how much
those books were padded, and how much the cover was designed to sell the book,
but often had little to do with the interior.
And you realize that so violates the contract with the
reader. And you realize that some of
these books really get wild, in terms of what happens, but without being
emotionally engaged with the characters.
They
were all in an arms race, how to be bigger and more over-the-top and more
extreme, but they left behind the reader.
And since not much happens, in terms of scale, in How to Sell a
Haunted House -- there’s not a big body count -- but I found if you get
readers really emotionally invested in the characters, then even the small
things feel big, because they feel big to the characters.
I will
say the positive thing I got from the Paperbacks from Hell, is that there are
some writers like Elizabeth Engstrom, or Michael McDowell, who are really,
really good stylists. They really helped
teach me what I can get away with, and that’s always good to see.
MS: I was reading your little writeup you did on
Tor about the book and about ghosts. [Note: You can read the article here: https://www.tor.com/2023/01/10/how-to-sell-a-haunted-house-the-economic-realities-of-owning-a-haunted-property/]
I assume you’re always looking at ghost stories, in your work, as you’re
researching. Do you have a favorite
little tiny ghost story tidbit, a detail from a ghost story that is your
favorite thing?
GH: One of the things I love is Sir Walter
Scott. It was April in 1625, and he was
out riding in Highgate. It had snowed,
and he suddenly had this insight that freezing could preserve meat, and keep it
from rotting. So he found a chicken and
chopped off its head, and plucked it, and packed it with snow, to show that the
ice could preserve meat over a course of several days. And in the process of doing that he got
pneumonia and died!
To
this day, people believe that at Highgate they’ve seen the ghost of a plucked
headless chicken running around, roosting in trees and dropping down on people. It was seen in WWII, some of the air wardens
would chase it, thinking it was an escaped chicken they could catch and
eat. The last report of it was in the
70s, but I love the idea of this ghost chicken without a head, clucking its way
through Highgate.
MS: I do too!
[laughing] And Highgate is like a
high-strangeness nexus. Isn’t there the
Highgate Vampire and all that other stuff there? So there’s much more serious stories at
Highgate. And that’s a beautiful
complement to them!
I know
your family has teachers in it, and you’ve obviously grown up reading from a
young age. How did you wind up starting
to read as a kid? Did you have any
favorite early books that you started with?
GH: My family were big readers. All of them.
Even my dad, who only reads hardcover non-fiction about World War
II. He is always reading. And that probably comes from his family. He grew up pretty poor in upstate South
Carolina in the country. But his mom was
a schoolteacher, and so reading was always a big deal in that family, and
education. And my mom’s family – she was
a big reader from the time she was a kid.
So for
my family, from the time we were all kids, you always had a book with you, and
you weren’t allowed to be bored. If
you’re waiting in the doctor’s office, you’re expected to be reading. If it’s a long car trip, you’ve got a
book. To this day, my sisters and I
don’t go anywhere without taking a book, because you might wind up in line, and
then you’ll read!
As a
kid, magazines were fine, newspapers were fine, comic books were fine, books
that were kind of age-inappropriate – as long as it was reading. My parents were pretty permissive. I mean, I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated
movies, and we didn’t get cable until very late, but books, they really didn’t
care.
I
remember there were a couple of books when I was really little – Robert the
Rose Horse was one that I was huge on, I’d read that once a week,
sit in the library and read it. That was
really a big one. Library trips were a
big, big deal. I was big on knights as a
kid, so I read lots of books about knights, and I also had a thing about
underwater. I loved underwater. So if a book was a picture book that had
stuff underwater, I was all in. There
was a pirate book that had an underwater bit in it that I would read over and
over.
The real
big one for me happened because my dad worked in England in Guy’s Hospital for
about a year and a half when I was 6 turning 7, so we lived in Dulwich, sort of
south London, during that time.
And we
rented a house from these folks, and this was in the 70s, so this was very
brown corduroy damp London.
And the
library at this house had this big, black fake leather book, and it took me
forever to figure out what it was.
I
only learned it a few years ago.
It was
the Reader’s Digest book called
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain.
I
never want to see it again, because I’m not sure it would live up to my memory
of it.
As a
kid, I was fascinated by it. It was
heavily illustrated, it was full of really gritty gothic kinds of legends, and
it made England make a lot of sense to me.
There were pictures of witches being hung, and people in gibbets, and I
remember really vividly a woman who had her hands tied to the clapper of a big
bell, and it was being rung. All this
stuff! And I knew that I shouldn’t be
reading it, but I would take it and hide it and read it every chance I
got.
It just
really made England make sense. Because
my parents were really into the whole, “Okay, it’s the weekend, we’re going to
drive to this country home, or this circle of stones, or this church.” We were always doing these cultural things. Reading the book, it was like, “Oh, this
cultural home? It had priests’ holes,
where Catholic priests would hide, and then the agents of the queen would drag
them out and torture them to death.” Or
this circle of standing stones where druids would go. It just made the country seem not the gray,
rainy place I was looking at, but this place that had all of this amazing
bloodshed and history.
And
you know, it’s funny. I’m not sure
there’s such a thing as an inappropriate book for a kid, honestly. Unless it’s hardcore porn. I just feel like – I mean, I read so much
stuff that I’m not sure I’d be allowed to read if I was a kid today. None of it did me any harm. Even the stuff that upset me. Learning how to deal with the upset was
important.
MS: Digesting it, and learning what to do with
it. Yeah it’s true. I was constantly being told I was
reading inappropriate stuff, because I was reading at grade levels way higher
than I should have been, so I was constantly invading parts of the library
which had very serious or saucy material that I shouldn’t have been touching,
so I would get redirected constantly. My
references to that are probably a reflection of that constant pushback.
GH: It’s funny.
People talk about how boys don’t read, they give up reading around 12,
or whenever they get heavily involved with videogames, that seems to be the
time.
MS: It used to be sports.
GH: Yeah.
And I used to read so much adult sexually explicit material when I was
13, 14, and really violent stuff. I was
really big on men’s adventure fiction, military fiction. And really intense stuff. But that’s what I wanted at 14, and 13, and
12. I wanted that stuff! I wanted to read something more adult. And honestly, I really am not sure any of it
did me any harm. I mean even the
super-upsetting stuff. We used to have
those big bound volumes of Life Magazine photography. I was reading those from the time I was 8 or
9, and my dad was really into WWII, so he had the Time-Life series of WWII,
which has a whole volume dedicated to the Holocaust. So I was seeing pictures of concentration
camps and the picture of the girl with the napalm, and things like that by the
time I was 9 or 8.
They were
upsetting, but they were also – I don’t know – they made me feel like there was
a larger world out there, where serious real things happened, that maybe I
couldn’t process yet. I was fascinated
by the images but I didn’t want to know more about them. When I got older, I did. But it was the idea that there were things
out there that weren’t quite okay yet.
MS: I think that’s a very good point. I remember I would go through phases where I
would be really into stuff like that, and then I would step away from it and
refuse to look at anything like that for a while, and then I’d be curious
again. I think it also gives kids a
sense of – I don’t know – choice, and agency. At this point in your life, you can choose
whether you want to look at this stuff.
As an adult, you might not have that choice any more. It’s a rare moment in life.
GH: I think you’re right about the sense of
agency – I mean, there was stuff I read that was wildly inappropriate, and I
would recite the plot to my mom and dad, and it would be really violent, or
sexually explicit, because I had an adult library card from a young age. I’d be reading stuff like science fiction
that was really raunchy sometimes, and they would just talk it
through. I can’t imagine what it would
have been like to mention that to my parents, and have them react in a way that
made me think I’d somehow done something wrong.
That would have been weird, I would have really shut down.
MS: That actually touches on something about this
book, because there’s the terrifying things that happen, like I kind of want to
ask you about “the Inside Out Man who lived in the trees” but I also don’t,
because not knowing about him is somehow much scarier, I think. But the real horror story beyond the puppets
and the haunted house and the ghosts, is the horror of what families refuse to
talk about, and how that is inherited generation by generation by the kids, and
affects them, because of that choice not to talk about it. It sounds like your family communicated with
each other, which is wonderful.
GH: Yes and no.
My family was very locked down.
My immediate family. And when my
parents got divorced, I was around 12 or 13 years old, and after that – that
turned out to be a great thing, because that wrecked this illusion that we were
this perfect family, which my family worked very, very hard to project. Matching outfits, doing all this kind of
stuff. And after the divorce – and my
youngest sister was probably 19 when my parents got divorced – since then, my
sisters and I really have this sort of unspoken rule where we’ll talk about
anything. There is no such thing as a family
secret. Probably it’s an overcorrection
in the other direction?
Obviously
you’re not going to say anything that’s going to embarrass or humiliate someone
in public, but everyone has these issues.
These are all just human things. They’re
just life. And to treat them as
something that “shall not be spoken” I think just gives them too much
weight. So we’ll just talk about it
all. That’s something I was very
conscious of from a young age. And after
growing up with, “Oh don’t talk about this subject or that subject,” to have
that removed was so liberating.
MS: Out of all the things I can see in the shifts
of the last several generations, I feel like the current span of the folks
probably 50 down through 20s, is that hopefully there is a better culture for
that now, where you do talk about all that stuff because the weight it
carries when it’s not spoken about can heavily damage everybody. Worse than the hurt and shock you might feel
when you’re initially talking about it.
GH: Well and it’s also a two-edged sword. I’m writing a book right now about a home for
unwed mothers, back in the 70s. We have
people in our family who were “sent away.”
On the one hand, that was a horrorshow.
On the other hand, they wouldn’t have gotten a fair shake if they’d
stayed in their communities. You stay
home and you have a baby when you’re not married and you will be ostracized,
and the rumors will ruin you. So not
talking about it was a bit of a mercy.
At the same time, you had someone mothering, giving birth to a child,
that they then give away and never talk about again.
There
is no right or wrong there, they’re both wrong.
It’s a really weird thing. I’ve
definitely seen the older members in our family as they got older, both of them
have passed away now, but when they were older sort of come to terms with that,
and have that become something that they were comfortable talking about. It really was amazing to see. It was sort of like watching someone solve
the problem of their life. They just
became very different people. In a good
way.
MS: Yeah, it creates a sea change. It’s like a tidal shift that affects
everything as it runs into your future.
GH: But at the same time, in 1962, how would you
have gotten married if people knew you’d had some other man’s baby? It would have been almost unthinkable, except
for a few people.
MS: At the time, that was how it had to be
done. That was the safest way to do
it.
For my
very last question, and then I’ll let you [laughs] continue on your route to
Savannah – As I was reading the book, I had moments where I was just like, “Oh
my gosh, he’s putting me through the wringer, I can’t handle this, AAAHHHHH!!!”
One of those points happened when I was reading the parts where the possibility
of possession is examined, and I actually scribbled down on my scratchpad,
half-angry, half-exasperated, half-genuinely-wondering, “Do you ever get
possessed by your books as you’re writing them?”
GH: Um, I wouldn’t say “possessed,” but when writing
a book, you focus very intently on something entirely made up, and bunch of
imaginary playmates, and you do that for 10 months, 12 months, 13, 14 months. There does come a point where that, and the
stakes of the book, seem a lot more real than the world around you. The book becomes the lens you see the world
through.
It really
does become this strange and difficult-to-describe process where there’s a back
and forth between the book and your life.
When I wrote My Best Friend’s Exorcism about those high school
friends who disappear, my best friend from high school out of the blue got in
touch with me. We hadn’t spoken in
fifteen years, maybe longer? We see each other a lot now.
We
Sold Our Souls,
which is sort of the book about not giving up and keeping going, was really
around the time I was thinking about quitting writing. It was just not going well. And that book, writing that book, really got
me through that.
Writing
How to Sell a Haunted House got me through the pandemic. I was away from my family, I missed them, and
so I had an imaginary family I could spend time with and think about, and focus
on. My parents both had really serious
health scares, and my siblings and I, as I was writing this book, hit a point
in our lives where we had to sort of start figuring out, “What are we going to
do when our parents die?” Do we stay a
family? Do we stay in touch? Do we … what do we do? How does a family look after that?
Every
single one of these books has been such a part of my life that it would be very
hard to give that up.
MS: Talk about a sea change, right? Each one has an effect…
GH: Well you know, it’s funny.
I wrote
These Fists Break Bricks with
this guy Chris Poggiali.
It’s a
non-fiction book about kung fu movies coming to America, and that’s very much a
story about black martial arts and Latin martial arts and Asian martial arts in
America, and what that meant in the 70s.
Chris and I were doing the most amount of writing on that book during
the George Floyd protests.
So it was
like we were back in the 70s and watching that history still moving around
us.
It’s
such a huge part of my life now, I’d have a hard time giving it up. These books are me.
MS: Well I hope you never do, because after you
write them, they become part of our lives, and we get to partake in that too,
so … thank you! Thank you for writing,
and thank you for putting them out there and getting them into our hands.
GH: Oh yeah!
Well I love it.
MS: Thinking in terms of your new show, do you
have any warnings or promises for the audience of your April talk here in
Portland?
GH: All I’ll say is that it’s going to change
your life. It will supercharge your
selling abilities, and you will really, really come away from it knowing that
if a situation arises, you will be fully capable of putting a haunted house on
the market.
MS: Hey, everyone should join us! Grady will be coming back to Portland, Maine,
to appear at SPACE Gallery the evening of Wednesday, April 26. Keep your eye peeled for event info! And meanwhile, if you haven't yet, you should grab a copy of How to Sell a Haunted House and read it for yourself!
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