Q&A with Camille DeAngelis, author of Mary Modern
By Kristen Switzer, Handseller editor

Many people would jump at the chance to get to know a grandparent or great-grandparent. Did that desire influence the premise behind Mary Modern? What most would you like to know about your ancestors?
I know more than a lot of other people do about their ancestors, since I was lucky enough to grow up within a few miles of both sets of grandparents. I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who passed her love of good fiction on to my mother and me, and after she died I started writing as a way of dealing with my grief. So it was my grandmother who made me a writer, and Mary Modern is in part a paean to her.

Chapter 1 of the book begins with a description of the Celtic war goddess, the Morrigan, which is also the last name of Lucy and her grandmother. What more can you say about the Morrigan and how it is used as the family's name?
The Morrigan has got to be the creepiest figure in Irish mythology. The epigram explaining her--that she may be young or old, or appear as a triad of women, but whatever her appearance she heralds the death of a warrior--is actually fake, because I couldn't find a description as concise and to-the-point as it needed to be. As I see it, when the Morrigan presents a choice--flee this battlefield tonight, or die a hideous bloody death in the morning--the former option is unthinkable, so the "choice" is really more of a taunt. By appropriating her name I was trying to emphasize the panic and howling-out-loud frustration of being trapped by fate, which applies to the original Mary--widowed by the war--and even more so the Mary of 2009.

You say on your Web site that there are several similarities with Mary Modern to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. My favorite part is when you say, "What I really gained from Frankenstein, though, was how disinterested Mary Shelley was in the pseudo-science that enabled her premise. I saw the implausibility didn't matter in the least." Did it take a lot of guts to focus on telling a good story rather than making sure the science behind it was infallible?
I hadn't thought of it as being gutsy! I read a fair bit of fantastic fiction, and I take great pleasure in suspending my disbelief. Readers who don't enjoy that experience simply aren't readers of SF or fantasy. For me, it was more a matter of acknowledging in the beginning that some of the people who came upon Mary Modern in a bookstore would read the flap and mutter "pfft, this sounds preposterous" before putting it right back on the shelf. Your work isn't going to appeal to everyone no matter which genre you're writing in, so I suppose all fiction writers are gutsy in that respect.

At the same time, Mary Modern has a decidedly gothic feel. If you could somehow correspond or be friends with any gothic writer, who would it be and why?
Sheridan Le Fanu, for sure--his short stories were a significant influence. They say he was living inside his own nightmares towards the end of his life, holing himself up in his Dublin townhouse in a haze of paranoia. He only wrote after midnight, by candlelight of course, and his neighbors christened him "the invisible prince." So he's as fascinating a character as anyone he ever created.

Mary is alive and in her house, yet she is from another time. Do you see Mary Modern as a ghost story?
The Mary of 2009 is a ghost in the flesh--she hides in the attic of a house that's no longer hers, first angry and in denial, then mourning the life she's lost. I did envision the novel as a sort of ghost story--the house itself is the perfect setting, and I imagine a real ghost would react to his or her new situation in the same way Mary does.

As a new fiction author, what would you like the world to know about you?
I'd like to plug my alma mater! I wrote the first draft of Mary Modern in the M.A. writing program at the National University of Ireland, Galway. If they hadn't let me in I'd probably still be on page 70 right now.

What are you working on now?
I'm working on a new novel and a handful of gothic stories. I've always found short fiction daunting--my fiction teacher at NUI Galway likened the writing of it to keyhole surgery--so actually finishing a draft of a story and getting enthusiastic reactions from my friends is rather disproportionately exciting for me.

Handseller is all about books. What are some of the titles that have meant the most to you over the years and what are you reading now?
My favorite book is still Anne of Green Gables. I come back to it every couple years and love it as much as I did when I was 10. The writers whose work I've been addicted to lately are Jim Crace (his latest is The Pesthouse), Angela Carter (Wise Children, and I'm also in the middle of The Bloody Chamber, which must be rationed because the stories are delicious but the book is short), and Diana Gabaldon (the Outlander series is, thankfully, far from short!).