Jac Jemc Discusses Her Latest Book, The Grip of It

By Timothy Moore

Jac Jemc’s recent book The Grip of It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) was on the preliminary ballot for the 2017 Bram Stoker Awards, a finalist for Goodreads Readers’ Choice Award in Horror, and a Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award. Timothy Moore from Unabridged Bookstore, Chicago conducted an interview with Jac Jemc to discuss her writing practices, obsessions, and the importance of rethinking and redefining genre in one’s own work.

Timothy Moore: How was it transitioning to writing horror for The Grip of It? Was it fun, a challenge? Or was there, perhaps, not much of a departure in your process? 

Jac Jemc: I feel embarrassed to say I don’t really think about what it is I’m writing when I’m writing—as in, I don’t think, “This is horror. How do I write horror?” Instead, I wrote, as I normally do, and thought, “Okay, what can happen to these people that makes them distrust themselves and each other? How can I turn even really everyday events into something unnerving?” It let me play with suggestion and connotation in the language in a really pleasurable way. It was fun because it was a challenge. Basically, it was my same process, but I had a prompt for each chapter: How do I set up what happens later without giving too much away? How do I keep the reader moving forward and destabilized?

Timothy Moore: What I loved about the book was this strained relationship between Julie and James and how the events of the novel really push them, and these issues they already have with each other, to their limits. You write with both characters’ perspectives, show their love for each other, but also their fear, anxieties, and insecurities. Can you talk a little about the importance of fleshing out these characters? How did you make the decision of giving both Julie and James a voice? 

Jac Jemc: Yes! Moving between their voices was one of the only things I knew about this book from the start. I knew that I wanted to play with the way that their view of the events could contradict each other, allowing the reader some agency in determining who to trust, when and why. Neither James or Julie is completely trustworthy. They have very different anxieties and ways of coping with what happens. I tried to give them separate vocabularies of what they noticed about the world, and how they talked about what they noticed, while also trying to explore that idea that two people who know each other well and are around each other all the time, might start to mimic each other’s speech patterns or adopt each other’s interests, while also becoming familiar with the bad habits of the other, and always trying to thwart those bad habits. Allowing them to have different experiences of the same events also allowed me to amp up the creepiness factor, too, of course!

Timothy Moore: I love what you’re saying about these characters and how they know each other so well, but also experience the world in such a different way. I feel like the same can be said, somewhat, about this house they’ve moved into, their strange neighbor, and the small town itself. James and Julie try to learn about and fit in where they are, but try as they might, there’s something unknowable, in this case, also terrifying, fighting them back. Do you find yourself interested in these disconnects? Is that the real horror behind this story? 

Jac Jemc: Yes, those moments where connections miss are one of my obsessions, for sure, especially between two people so close, but, yes, also between people who don’t really know each other. I’m slowly getting better about this, but I used to hate it when I could tell that someone didn’t like me, or even when someone wasn’t that interested in getting to know me. I took it really personally. I’d fixate on what I was “doing wrong,” but now I can see that that is an insane way to live. I’m still curious about the times when this happens, and elements of that come up in my fiction all the time, but it seems like a very reasonable reality of being alive, that you don’t have to be friends with everyone. 

I haven’t talked about this much, but the root of this book comes from an unknowability surrounding our physical wellness, and how I expanded that dynamic to a physical location that stands in for the body. I had a family member become suddenly, chronically but not mortally ill and the process of even realizing he was sick, and then finding a diagnosis was very distressing and absolutely unsatisfying. It’s a form of a disease that doesn’t even really respond to treatment for the most part, and so I was thinking about what it means to name a problem, but to have no way to solve it. In some ways it feels worse to know what is threatening you, but to have no control over it.

Timothy Moore: That’s so interesting, especially the idea of the physical location standing in for the body. Writing a haunted house story seems like the perfect vehicle to explore these issues. Did this come naturally to you when you started? Or was it difficult to find the right medium to explore this particular horror? 

Jac Jemc: I don’t know that the realization arrived at all in drafting, honestly. It’s a hindsight sort of realization to look at what was going on in my life at the time and to see all of the resonance between that and the book. Once I knew it was there, I started looking at what happens to bodies in the book and what happens to the house itself, but I didn’t want to make it obvious. I didn’t think, “I want to write a story in which I explore the uncertainties around human health in a metaphorical way.” I started writing, and this subject preoccupied me, so naturally this topic bubbled up on its own in my writing. 

Timothy Moore: As a bookseller myself, I was really excited to learn that you’ve worked as a bookseller too! Has bookselling changed the way that you look at books? Has that experience shaped or guided your writing? 

Jac Jemc: I’m so grateful for my time as a bookseller, and honestly, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I loved that job maybe more than any other in my life. I don’t know that bookselling changed my writing, but it did help me in countless ways as a writer. Because of bookselling, I understand more easily how books get into stores, and don’t take it personally when I don’t see my book on the shelf somewhere. There are so many books in those catalogs! If something doesn’t get bought right away, it can get buried. If it sells really slowly, it can fall off future orders. I understand the enormous value of a single bookseller who loves your book and picks it to handsell to customers. From having hosted a good number of events as a bookseller where 2-5 people showed up, I have zero interest in setting up a reading in a city where I don’t think I can draw a crowd of 20 or more. I understand the difference between publishers and distributors and what’s happening when a book is temporarily unavailable and the tremendous amount of effort by booksellers it takes to stock small press titles that aren’t available from Ingram or Baker & Taylor.

There are so many small tasks that keep a bookstore running, and every single independent bookstore in the world is a small miracle to me. I’m sure there are a million more things I learned while working in bookstores, but there’s so much functional information about the selling of books that comes from working in that environment that I’d be lost without now. 

Timothy Moore: I think it’s very valuable, as a writer, to have this extra insight. On the same subject of books, what books did you read, or perhaps avoid while writing The Grip of It? What books are you reading now? 

Jac Jemc: For the first draft, I mostly avoided reading books in the genre. I figured I had enough impressions from previous haunted house reading that I’d be drawing from. 

For revision I read a pile of haunted house books to look at pacing and structure: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, John Boyne’s This House is Haunted, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Kelly Link’s stories and I revisited Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Kathryn Davis’s Hell and all of Poe. 

I just finished Jessica Anne’s A Manual for Nothing and I loved it. What a twist of a book! It surprised me in every way. The language and the way she develops patterns to build resonance and to draw the reader through: top notch. Last night I started Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom – a tight little whirlwind that I should have just finished in one night. I also read Colin Dickey’s Ghostland, a nonfiction book about hauntings in America and it was a lot of fun. I’m trying to save a little of my reading time for some fun spookiness, and that one hit the spot.