build your house around my body violet kupersmith

And I do believe in ghosts, and I don't think I would write about them as much if I didn't. And ghosts and ghost stories was something that I just - I grew up with. KUPERSMITH: Oh, it always feels real to me. But I imagine that, in the moment, it felt very real. And you're saying the ghost was a vegetarian and upset at the offerings of chicken, which seems easy to laugh at. SHAPIRO: You know, you're sitting in suburban Philadelphia, and I'm in Washington, D.C. KUPERSMITH: And so that's why it was causing problems. And so it was upset at the offerings of chicken that was - that were being left for it. And the ghost, it turned out, was, like, a vegetarian. KUPERSMITH: But in real life, it was much less intense. Kupersmith told me she actually drew from the experience of witnessing a Vietnamese exorcism. The exorcism doesn't have crucifixes or holy water. But because this book is set in Vietnam, the forest is an overgrown rubber tree plantation. SHAPIRO: This is a sprawling novel that spans generations, and it has some set pieces familiar from Hollywood horror movies and Brothers Grimm fairy tales, like an exorcism and a haunted forest. And so the book was kind of my own way of performing an exorcism on myself. And I felt haunted when I came back to America after living in Vietnam for about three years, mostly by the violence that I saw against women being perpetrated against my friends, against me, the everyday misogyny that drains you. It's your own personal little ghost in the haunted house of your mind. KUPERSMITH: I wanted to explore the haunting of being hurt in any way and how it occupies a little corner of you. They're both Vietnamese American women of mixed racial background who moved to Vietnam in their early 20s. Winnie has a lot in common with Kupersmith. SHAPIRO: 'Build Your House Around My Body' begins with the disappearance of a young woman named Winnie. But with the novel, I was more attracted to the ghost as a way of getting revenge and as a figure who has this agency that was denied to them in life. VIOLET KUPERSMITH: When I wrote 'The Frangipani Hotel,' the short story collection, I was very interested in the metaphor of the ghost as sort of a stand-in for the immigrant because I thought, oh, it's such a perfect figure, the ghost, who is sort of trapped between worlds and doesn't really belong anywhere. So I asked Kupersmith earlier this year why the supernatural interests her.

She previously wrote a short story collection, and both feature ghosts. 'Build Your House Around My Body' is by first-time novelist Violet Kupersmith. Now it's Books We Love - hundreds of titles recommended by NPR staff and other reviewers, sortable with tags like The Dark Side or Tales From Around The World.īoth of those filters describe a book I chose this year. Today, NPR unveiled a tool that book fans look forward to every year.

Build your house around my body violet kupersmith