Inspired by nightmares and the work of surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection Mystery Lights seeks to explore women’s darker natures.
We meet a feminist filmmaker, who obtains strength at a pivotal moment from her fictional murderesses. In an attack on the domestic goddess trope, a young girl, recently returned from the wilderness, disrupts her whitebread family dinners by devouring chicken gizzards and emitting animal-like shrieks. Valencia takes the topic of female hunters to another level with a story about a health guru leading a group of lost souls on a cult-like experience under the guise of self-actualization and meditation. The most powerful story in the collection follows two #MeToo antagonists, both women, who prey on vulnerable women in their proximity in order to succeed professionally or romantically. In these stories, the underlying themes of deception and self-deception slither, snake-like, just beneath the surface, with teeth that gnash as tension builds, as characters snap or gain closure, each tale playing out with a subversive twist.
Lena Valencia, the managing editor of award-winning lit mag One Story, not only excels at writing with a wicked humor—she tackles these challenging topics with empathy and electrifying insight. We spoke over Zoom about subverting the female revenge plot, using lore in fiction and writing about self-deception.
Liv Albright: One of my favorite stories was “Dogs.” I found it interesting that the protagonist, Ruth, she’s a screenwriter, and she writes these films about women who are seeking revenge for things that have happened to them, and one of the messages she gets from her boss is that she doesn’t have enough of a traumatic backstory for one of her characters. So, she thinks up possible traumas—sex trafficking, child porn—to explain her character’s murderous rampage. In another one of your other stories—which I won’t name for spoiler reasons—you have a murderer, and she doesn’t have a traumatic backstory. She’s the one causing the trauma, which we find out through a flashback scene. How did you come up with this theme and how did this come to interest you?
Lena Valencia: I’ve always been into the female revenge plot, and I also think that it can be problematic as well, because usually you’re watching these women suffer some horrible indignity, and that gets complicated because in some ways it ends up fetishizing the violence or the trauma that’s happening to them.
So, I was thinking of a character who was writing against this. I recently came across this essay in Lit Hub by the writer Emma Copley Eisenberg about the female revenge plot and there’s this great moment in it where she says, “The revenge story I want is about a woman who hasn’t been raped or beaten or killed, but who rather has been disrespected subtly and discreetly over a period of many years.” And I thought that that was what the character Ruth was going for and what the studio was objecting to.
LA: It seemed like the character Ruth was trying to write would have a lot of reason to be angry and to maybe get violent, maybe not kill, but be violent. She has an abusive boyfriend, a boss that’s a creep.
LV: Yeah, totally. And I think that’s what Ruth was responding to. And then in the story itself, these themes and topics that she’s circling around in her screenplay come into her life in the form of these unpredictable animals, these wild dogs that chase her through the desert, and then this driver picks her up, and he’s totally gaslighting her, telling her that the dogs were nothing to be afraid of while he’s acting in this erratic, aggressive way.
There’s a line at the end of the story where Ruth thinks, “Nothing had happened, and for that she supposed she should be grateful.” She wasn’t physically harmed in any way, but she’s still dealing with this fear. In writing the story, I was exploring those feelings of fear and uncertainty without there being some physically violent act to precipitate them.
LA: You bring up an interesting question about how with women, there always seems to have to be an explanation for their behavior. Because guys, if they’re violent, well, that’s just men being men. Why do you think women need that kind of backstory? But in other thrillers, like The Talented Mr. Ripley and similar films, we have guys who snap, but we don’t need a backstory for them.
LV: There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers. Roles that aren’t inherently violent, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap. And I don’t think that men are perceived in the same way. So, it seems it’s more believable that men would become violent seemingly out of the blue.
LA: In the story, “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” you turn the tables on the topic of assault and focus on men who snap, or commit violence, specifically sexual assault. At the college campus where the protagonist lives, there’s folklore involving a mythological figure, The Trapper, that’s circulating around campus, and The Trapper actually, I think, turns out to be an acquaintance. How did you compose that juxtaposition?
LV: That was inspired by Twin Peaks. I’ve always admired how the director David Lynch overlays surrealist horror on seemingly everyday situations. So that was something that I was thinking about as I was writing this—that switch from the real to the supernatural and then back again. Lynch understands the language of nightmares and he’s been a big inspiration for my work. And I do think that these nightmarish situations are a lot easier for us as humans to understand when they’re packaged as the supernatural. Monsters are a lot easier to stomach when they’re monsters, and they’re not human beings, which is why I think this idea of this boogeyman or stranger danger exists.
I also really love the technique of using lore in fiction, creating these stories within stories. And then deciding which characters believe in it, which characters don’t, and who’s telling the story—it adds another dimension to the narrative.
LA: It also seems like the mythology of the lore, The Trapper, inspires violence because when the group of boys are trying to catch him, they use another student as bait, and they tie her to a tree, and then she’s gone. The Trapper takes her. It almost permits them to behave in that way. In another crime-infused story, “Vermilion,” the legal system appears to permit themselves to act on appearance biases, rather than viewing every life as worthy of saving. In the story, a woman, Nancy, laments the fact that her daughter who disappeared, her case was ignored by the police. The story opens with a podcast about another disappeared girl, Max, who won police attention because she was pretty, vivacious. You describe the woman’s daughter Esme as overweight, angsty, with heavy makeup. How do you think beauty factors into deciding whose lives matter?
LV: I think Nancy believes Max’s beauty plays a role in the way her story captured the attention of the media, and she resents that her daughter Esme didn’t get the same treatment.
When Nancy’s going through the reasons her daughter didn’t get the same attention as Max, she’s grasping at anything she can to explain the unexplainable. She never found her daughter and so long as that remains the case, I don’t think there’s anything that law enforcement or the media could have done to make her feel like it was enough, though she’d never admit that.
There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap.
Throughout the story, when confronted with her daughter’s disappearance, Nancy is telling herself, “I’m over it. I’m over it. I’m okay.” And she’s clearly not, but she hopes that if she keeps telling herself this lie, it will come true. A lot of these stories are about self-deception. And I think that self-deception is really horrible to deal with in real life. But in fiction, I find it incredibly fascinating to read about and to write about.
LA: The theme of self-deception and deception reminds me of your story “The Reclamation,” where a group of entrepreneurs attend a cultish wellness retreat. There’s Brooke, the wellness retreat leader, and she’s not living in a bus, but she’s pretending to. There’s the main character, Pat, who is ultimately is inspired by Brooke to act in a violent way. And then there’s Celeste who is all gung ho about the retreat, and she doesn’t do well in the meditation exercises and gets angry and thinks that Brooke is a phony, which is true. What inspired you to write this story?
LV: I was thinking a lot about wellness culture and I have mixed feelings about it, because I do think a lot of aspects of wellness culture can help people in many ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily all bad. I know there are all kinds of send ups of it everywhere. I wanted to write about a situation where someone was listening to the platitudes and clichés that are associated with self-help and wellness and interpreting them in the worst possible way.
There’s a great book called Cultish by Amanda Montell. It’s about the language that’s used in actual cults themselves, but also in multi-level marketing communities and in wellness culture and gym and fitness culture. So, I was thinking about all that and the effect that kind of language has on how a person behaves. I think that certain aspects of self-help and wellness culture have become this one-size-fits-all approach to something like therapy, which is not one-size-fits-all, at all.
LA: Do you think that Brooke believes what she’s putting out? Or do you think it’s complete strategy?
LV: I think it’s probably a combination of both. I think at her heart, she’s a businesswoman, and she’s a hustler. These con artists have been around throughout our history and Brooke is another one of those. So, I don’t think she intends to harm people per se, but I don’t think she’s coming from a genuine place of wanting to help them either. I think she’s in it for her own gain.
LA: You delve into exploitation, in a different way, in “Bright Lights, Big Deal.” The protagonist, Julia, acts in her own best interest at the expense of her friendships. When she moves to New York, she founders, and she watches her friends succeed. Her best friend, Rose, there’s some jealousy there, and Julia publishes a story about her and her boss. And Rose responds with something like, “This was not your story to tell.” Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the ethics of authorship and storytelling and how that story came about?
There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, ‘Oh, that’s just part of life.’
LV: I think it would be different if Julia had fictionalized that story that Rose told her about this creepy experience that she had with her boss. I do think that that would be a slightly more ethically gray area. But her reporting something traumatic that had happened to her friend without her permission, and also using that for clout, I think that’s very unethical. We talked a little bit about self-deception, and I think this is another story where the character, she’s definitely duped herself into thinking she’s a crusader for justice.
LA: I think self-deception is particularly evident in one scene where Rose tries to apologize and make things right. And then Julia’s thought process is that Rose is ungrateful, and Julia shouldn’t spend time dealing with her. Apparently, Julia and her family had Rose over for Christmas and meals. So, she’s twisting the narrative a bit.
LV: There’s this class situation at play. Julia doesn’t have a whole lot to lose because she’s coming from this very privileged place where if she doesn’t make it in New York, she has a very comfortable upper-middle-class suburban home to go back to, and that’s not the case with Rose.
LA: Julia doesn’t seem to recognize her privilege. She acknowledges she has an emergency credit card, but part of what helped her rationalize sending out that article was because she thought about how Rose had it so easy, she’s able to go off with bartenders, and she just has a way with people, with men, that I think Julia doesn’t have. And Julia’s envious of that, and she doesn’t recognize that maybe these are things Rose had to learn because she didn’t have the privilege to fall back on.
LV: I think that’s a great reading of the story. Absolutely. I think the story is also about the ugliness that this misogynistic culture creates in these relationships to the point where Julia is jealous of the fact that Rose had this awful, icky, creepy experience with her kind of hot boss, and well, Julia just had some creepy experience with this ugly older man during a job interview. So, it gets into some pretty dark places there.
It was interesting to look back and write this historical fiction that was set in the relatively recent past of 2009. I think someone in my writing group called it “PreToo,” as in pre-MeToo. There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, “Oh, that’s just part of life. That horrible, sexist behavior is just something we should come to expect in the workplace.” I think there’s obviously a lot of work to be done, but there’s also a lot that has changed since then.
LA: When Julia offers the writer the story of Rose and her boss, the response is something to the effect of, “Well, this isn’t news. This happens all the time.” You also explore this theme, and the dynamics of class, privilege, and men using women to their advantage in “The White Place.” We have these two women, Sandra and the painter, with differing amounts of agency. Both are sexually involved with Mike, the painter’s handyman. The painter, even though she is renowned and rich, still seems to be controlled by Mike’s flattery. Sandra, on the other hand, as the daughter of the painter’s cook, isn’t in a position of privilege, has little self-confidence, and both factors cause her to believe she has no agency. What was your thinking behind creating this dynamic between the two women and their relationship with Mike?
LV: I do think that in many ways the painter is a reflection of the world that she lives in, which is a world that’s not kind to women. And I imagine her as someone who’s built a shell around herself in order to survive in the competitive art world, so that’s not necessarily going to lead to someone being a generous person. She’s really just out for herself.
And in thinking about the power dynamic, Mike and the painter, they both ascribe a large amount of power to Sandra, but she’s just a teenager. She’s just a kid and is trying to assert whatever agency she has in these moments, like when she gets cash from Mike for an abortion and gives it back to him. And then at the end, she’s finally backed into a corner, and she’s given this chance to leap into the unknown and takes it because she feels like it’s better than whatever she’s being given in her life in reality.
LA: Sandra’s knowledge of the abortion process is limited. Like a lot of young women, she’s scared, she’s heard horror stories about bleeding to death. How do you think her experience reflects a lot of other girls who may not have all the information?
Monsters are easier to stomach when they’re not human beings, which is why this idea of the boogeyman or stranger danger exists.
LV: The story was set intentionally pre-Roe and so the only information I imagined that she would’ve had would be probably from other women in her life. And also for most women who had abortions, there would’ve been a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. I think we have much more information accessible to us now, and there’s been a lot of work done by activists to destigmatize abortions. But the stigma definitely still exists, which was something that I was thinking about as I was writing the story, even though it’s set in the ‘70s. As to access to the actual procedure today, we are very much backsliding as a country, which is terrifying and upsetting.
LA: As the story wraps up, Sandra tells the painter she will attend boarding school, but at the very end, a curious thing happens—a mystical, luminous orb appears outside Sandra’s window and she walks into the brightness, “granting her own wish.” What does this mysticism signify in terms of Sandra’s capacity for developing an agency, and choosing or not choosing to get an abortion?
LV: Sandra wants more than anything to escape her situation. And the orb—this totally mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon—is a chance for her to do just that. Throughout the story, she imagines what her future will look like based on the various options she’s been dealt—futures that, to her, seem pretty bleak. In the end, stepping into the orb is the only option where she can’t envision an outcome, and for this reason she chooses it. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the ending is hopeful, tragic, or maybe a bit of both.