In Christine Murphy’s debut novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, Ph.D. student Sarah Common is struggling to complete her thesis and survive the last year of her academic program with few resources. In fact, Sarah has little support across all areas of her life. Her academic advisor doesn’t care and is possibly plagiarizing her students. The Title IX office has simply filed away Sarah’s rape accusation and the police barely investigated the allegations. She’s struggling to complete her thesis and survive with very little money in a city that’s choked by smoke from the Southern California forest fires. 

Amid all Sarah’s struggles, her only friend dies. To Sarah, Nathan’s death is suspicious but it is logged as another drug overdose in a university community where overdoses are increasingly common. While Sarah has her suspicions about who may have wanted Nathan dead and begins to look for evidence, the police aren’t interested in pursuing this angle. And Sarah has to ask herself whether her studies of Buddhist traditions support her desire for vengeance and revenge. 

I spoke with Christine Murphy about sexual violence, vengeance, escaping to a nunnery to write, and Buddhism. 

Donna Hemans: You have quite an interesting background, including spending a year in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies. How did you come to write fiction?

Christine Murphy: I am a curious person, and I pursue that curiosity. The Ph.D. in Buddhist studies largely came about after the year in the nunnery. After the year in the nunnery, I wanted to learn more. The nunnery actually came about because I wanted to take time to work on a novel. I had taught English for two years in Japan, and had saved quite a bit of money, and with that money, I backpacked across the African continent for a year, and then I did a Master’s degree, and I still had some money saved over from my Japan years. I was chatting with somebody, saying how I really wanted to take some time away outside of academia. She knew of this Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas where you could essentially concoct your own private retreat. So I reached out to them, and I expressly said, “I really would be coming to work on a novel as opposed to being a Buddhist practitioner. Is that okay?” And they were very welcoming and receptive. 

DH: Now that is a really good story about creating your own retreats. Most of us do a week here, a weekend there at a hotel. But this is quite a different story.

CM: Yeah. I straight up ran away to the Himalayas and the nunnery to work on a book. A lot of people think, Oh, wow, you must have been such a devout practitioner. No. 

My plan A was always to be a novelist. But I was raised by farmers and am a very practical person. So I jumped straight to plan B, which was to build a career that would allow me to write novels because, you know, nobody gets paid for novel writing. So my plan B was to be a happy little professor somewhere with my summers off to work on books. Hilariously, my plan B absolutely did not work. There are no tenure track jobs, and so my life advice is, probably don’t pursue plan B. I mean, give plan A a chance, like a solid chance, and then go to plan B.

DH: So where did the idea for this particular book come from?

CM: I was raped by a colleague during my first year of my Ph.D. I had literally just come out of a year in a Buddhist nunnery, and I had been thinking quite a bit about the core tenets within Buddhist traditions. One of the core ones that’s so well known in the West is this idea of non-violence. But Westerners don’t really understand Buddhism very well. Actually within the Vajrayana tradition, violence is quite common. The question is the motivation behind the violence. Sometimes, if the motivation is, shall we say pure, which in the Buddhist context we would refer to as “advancing their path to enlightenment,” then the violence could be perceived as a positive thing. Buddhism does not advocate for violence certainly, but what I mean is Buddhism, particularly by Westerners, is interpreted as a non-violent religion, and that’s just actually inaccurate when you look at the tradition, when you read the text. And there are multiple examples, and I put one in the book, the very sort of famous story of Buddha on the boat where making a choice to harm one person to benefit many others, is, in fact, considered a spiritually evolved choice. Now granted it’s not a coincidence that in that narrative, it is the Buddha and enlightened being making that choice. It’s not a regular person, and the idea being only a Buddha could make a decision like that. 

But I was looking at this in the context of sexual violence, which is so ubiquitous. It’s commonplace. It’s totally devastating, and very little is done about it. And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a character grapple with this question of when you have senseless violence, like rape, would the greater good be to just remove them from society. 

DH: So I want to shift a little bit to what the book has to say about violence against women and the difficulty of getting help. So, where is the safety net? 

CM: I don’t think there is one. For example, in this country, Donald Trump has over 20 credible allegations of sexual assault against him, and he was elected president, which means tens of millions of Americans either didn’t care about the sexual assault allegations, didn’t believe them, or thought they were great and want to see that in a leader. I don’t know the motivation of the people behind that particular political affiliation. Matt Gaetz was being run as another forerunner of our political system. He dropped out at the last minute, but he had allegations of sex trafficking and rape of a minor against him. It kind of boggles the mind that, when it comes to sexual violence, you can have the most heinous allegations against you and really have very little effect on your career. 

DH: And so how does Sarah’s studies help her to survive all of this—the rape, the death of her friend, her academic situation? How does her study of Buddhism help her?

CM: I think it gave her something to focus on. One of the themes I wanted to play with was this idea of finding yourself, trying to build a life in a world that becomes your known. So Sarah is not born to an academic family. She’s not born to the Southern California culture. It’s very clear that she is an outsider throughout the book. At the same point, she has been in that world a long time and so there is a degree of comfort in doing what you have been doing for a long time. And it’s clear that it is not a good fit for her. And so I think for Sarah, as for many people, it is important when you have trauma, which psychiatrists define as overwhelm, to find a lifeline, find a guiding light, which often is nothing more than just familiarity. Habits that you know, that you’re comfortable with, are really critical as a way to keep you afloat as you work to build yourself back together.

DH: Throughout the book, smoke and ash from the wildfires in California is present. And the title refers to surviving a fire. Tell me about the title and the influence of the seemingly endless wildfires. Is this also a nod to climate change and just how we need to take care of the environment? 

CM: The book really is about juxtaposition. So sometimes that is looking at hypocrisy and contradiction, but other times it’s just the uncomfortable juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate scenarios that we have to accept or live with at the same time. Southern California is very beautiful. It’s sort of this romanticized, idealized place. When a lot of people think about America, they think about Hollywood. They think of glamor and ritz. And I found it very interesting to play with that. At the same time, there are terrible wildfires that now ravage the state of California pretty much year round. When I was there, the wildfire season kind of stopped being a season. The reality is, it just happens year round. 

I really enjoyed playing with the dichotomy of being in America’s Riviera with human-caused disasters that are inescapable. Air pollution is considered the great equalizer, because, unlike water pollution, noise pollution, overpopulation, you can’t actually buy your way out of it because it affects you. It’s such an inequitable society, which Southern California is, which higher education is, which gender and sexual violence absolutely is the product of and perpetuates. Air pollution, like wildfires, is one of the few equalizers.

DH: How did you come to the title?

CM: The title was such it was a lot of work. The working title of the book originally was Carpet Bomb. And I had never heard that phrase until back in 2016 during the Republican primaries. It was Ted Cruz who used the phrase “carpet bomb” in reference to a question about what his policy in the Middle East would be, and he essentially said on stage, in order to win votes, that he thought the best approach would be to carpet bomb the Middle East. I thought that was the most horrifying thing I had ever heard in my life. I was shocked and appalled that anyone would say that publicly on camera. 

A few years later, a friend of mine made the comment that “carpet bomb” is actually a specific term that references one of the internationally forbidden behaviors of a government that is considered a war crime. He actually referenced a genocidal activity in his campaign for presidency. And so as I was tinkering with this book, I thought, Gosh, what’s a really disgusting title I could come up with? Because I’m really dealing with some gross things. We’re looking at climate change. We’re looking at sexual violence. We’re looking at the knowledge of evil. We’re looking at systems of oppression. And the word that popped to my mind was “carpet bomb.” Also, I knew I had a very angry protagonist, and I think Sarah has her moments where she wants to carpet bomb everyone around her. So I quite like that term. But it’s not the most marketable. And so my editors and I spent about a year coming up with other titles, and we settled on Notes on Surviving the Fire. 

DH: So except for Nathan, Sarah really has no friends and no family to speak of, and she seems really lonely. Is there a kind of loneliness in surviving a violent act?

CM: Oh, I think so. One of the greatest challenges of experiencing violence in particular, or great loss or grief, is this idea that your world is forever changed. It may even feel like it’s over and yet the world of everyone around you not only continues, but is largely completely unaffected. There is great loneliness in that. And I think one of the things that survivors learn is how to sort of navigate this duality where your world was completely different but the world around you isn’t. 

DH: The epigraph reads, “After it happened, a woman told me it doesn’t have to fuck you over. Her name is Betty. We are all Betty. This is for us.” I’m interested in the things we carry, the things that can indeed be our undoing. Sarah carried her rape and violation and university’s apathy. It weighed her down. Even Nathan she discovers carried a weight he didn’t talk about. Does vengeance help? 

CM: We all carry things, and we never know what others are carrying, and so much of our life is to unpack what in fact we ourselves are carrying—the assumptions, the biases, the expectations, the inherited grief, trauma, perceptions of the world that we come into through culture, through family, through lived experience. Violence, I don’t feel is helpful. Vengeance I feel is an emotionally charged impulse that lacks reason because in my mind, vengeance is the desire to undo the past. It is to break even. The goal there is not to hurt the other person. The goal is to erase your own hurt. But it doesn’t help in my experience. And when we look at the state of the world, we see that vengeance is not an effective way to get better. And so part of the question I was tinkering with, with Sarah’s desire to kill her rapist, was would it make her feel better? Would it help her psychologically? As I was working on the book, I really wasn’t sure. 

My second question was the question of moral balance. If we have this violent criminal who gets away with violence, and the system designed to stop his violence does not work, if you take someone who is able to stop his violence—albeit doing it through violence herself—would the socially responsible thing to do is remove him from society? That was the second question, stripped of all emotion, almost more of a mathematical equation. And the third question, though, was kind of going back to the question of would it help? Rape prevention narratives are quite common. I think they’re meant to be very titillating, and they presume quite a few things. And the biggest presumption is that if somebody hurts you or harms you and you hurt or harm them, then you are yourself no longer hurt. And that’s not a rational statement. It’s an emotional one. And I think if you look at the state of the world, I would just say vengeance doesn’t work. I understand where the impulse comes from. I think it’s very human. I don’t think it’s effective to get better on a personal or social level.