Hybrid Interview: Diane Josefowicz
Essay by Shara Kronmal •
I first met Diane Josefowicz through Necessary Fiction where she serves as book reviews editor when she edited a review of mine. Diane is one of those editors you love to work with, one who finds just the right tweaks to make your writing that much stronger. That interaction encouraged me to write more reviews for Necessary Fiction. More recently, Diane and I have worked together at The Adroit Journal, where she is translations editor and I am a submissions reader. Not long ago, I read and enjoyed Diane’s novella L’Air du Temps (1985) and was excited to have the opportunity to review her latest novel The Great Houses of Pill Hill.
When I picked up Pill Hill, I was surprised that it was a mystery novel, since her previous writing has been scholarly or literary fiction. Reading a mystery altered my expectations, and in the process of preparing this hybrid interview/review, I realized I have tended to take mystery stories for granted. Mix up a crime (often a murder), a setting (the more atmospheric the better), an inspired amateur or professional detective, a panel of suspects, and move on to the inevitable conclusion. Throw the main character into a bit of peril for added excitement. I wondered what the creative writing literature has to say about the composition of a good mystery.
Writing advice sites don’t entirely agree on the number of principle elements of a typical mystery story. Some list seven, some five, some ten, but there is considerable overlap. Here are the essentials as I choose to condense them:
- a crime
- a detective (not necessarily a professional)
- clues and red herrings
- suspects (ultimately means, motive, and opportunity are required of the suspect)
- setting and atmosphere
- an investigation
- a resolution.
I might add to this list a panel of secondary characters, some of whom are suspects and some not. Although a careful review of mystery literature may well reveal mysteries lacking one or more of these elements, these are the basics that are incorporated into most conventional mystery novels. As a reader of mysteries, I tend to be invested in character and setting. Others may be more interested in the who of whodunit or possibly in the why (the motive). In a thriller, danger to the main character or their friends and family may take center stage.
Josefowicz incorporates all these elements into her mystery. There’s a crime, an investigator, a surplus of clues and red herrings, ample suspects and secondary characters, a vivid setting, and of course, a satisfying conclusion. There’s more than enough plot for any reader, but a good mystery does more than just check the formulaic boxes. It also must incorporate the elements of most good novels: convincing characters, compelling language, an interesting setting—all the ingredients that make a reader continue to the next page.
In The Great Houses of Pill Hill, Josefowicz reveals in the first chapter that a murder has occurred, but then the novel moves back in time, and the backstory begins to unfold. The novel introduces its narrator and main character, Hannah “Cookie” Cooke. She’s struggling to keep her business afloat (an interior design firm called Ministry of the Interior), taking care of her mother who is in a nursing home after a fall, trying to make it as an artist, and floundering in her love life. Chuck, a neurosurgeon, and his wife Lana, owner of a luxury textile business, hire Cookie to renovate their historic home. The renovation is nearly complete when Chuck is murdered.
Pill Hill is full of side trips and misdirection. There’s a lot going on, and who killed Chuck and why can feel secondary to Cookie’s complicated life, the remodeling process, Cookie’s artistic sideline making dioramas of crime scenes, a teaser of Egyptian arcana, a glimpse into the workings of a psychoanalytic treatment, and more. Chuck and Lana’s house and the fictional New England town of New Preston where the story takes place are nearly as full of surprises as the house’s owners. Cookie describes her hometown, saying: “This is New Preston, where rules exist to be interpreted, and interpretations must serve the needs of the moment. See no evil, and all that.” Of the people of New Preston, Cookie says: “We use things up; we wear them out. If there’s a wound, we salt it.” Not quite what one usually expects from small-town New England. But then again, Lizzie Borden, the famous axe murderer, apparently lived just down the road from where Cookie lives in the novel.
Inherent in the word mystery are things not understood and concealed. Characters are not who they appear to be. The villain is often said to be “unmasked.” In Pill Hill, Josefowicz is conscious of the masks people wear as defense mechanisms. In flashbacks to her art school years, Cookie hides who she really is even from her closest friends: “I had grown up lost, deep in a shell I carried with me everywhere like a makeshift home,” a state she blames on New Preston. Homes and marriages also have their hidden aspects: “No matter how carefully a façade is maintained, sooner or later, cracks will appear. That’s simply how façades work,” Cookie thinks about her clients, their marriage, and the house she is remodeling.
There is an important subplot in Pill Hill involving psychoanalytic psychotherapy, its practitioners, and their patients. This form of therapy seeks, in part, to bring the unconscious mind to conscious awareness, another form of unmasking. The therapist’s personality is expected to be hidden behind a neutral mask or façade, allowing the patient to freely project their expectations onto the therapist. Pill Hill includes a fictional psychoanalytic case study of Dr. X (who is clearly Chuck), in a therapeutic setting that is full of evasion, avoidance and, in the case of the therapist, clear boundary violations. The case study itself is a revelation of the secrets behind the therapeutic curtain.
The link between interior decorating and constructing miniature crime scenes lends insight into Cookie’s personality: “I do like those unsettling things, the unnoticed parts of ourselves we leave in our most private spaces.” Like crime investigators (and psychotherapists), interior designers are allowed entry into some of those most private spaces, and immersion in the minutiae of decorating may reveal the proclivities and secrets of married couples. Mix in a murder, and blood spatter and paint chips somehow become part of the process.
Cookie herself is a disaster in the making. She refers to the crime victim in one of her dioramas as a “woman who has pitched the tent of her life on the precipice of catastrophe.” Later, she realizes that “I did not consider that I might be talking about myself.” Sometimes her friends even egg her on as when her assistant, Fiona, says: “Get out there. Find the trouble that’s looking for you.” No worries about that. Cookie always manages to find her trouble. By the time Pill Hill ends, one can’t help but hope for a sequel in which Cookie finds (and creates) yet more trouble for herself and those around her.
All the elements are in place in Pill Hill: crime, detective, clues and red herrings, suspects, setting, investigation. As for the resolution? Let’s just say, it’s complicated. Similar to Cookie herself. Pill Hill is a twisty novel, fun to read and puzzle over. Like the best of the genre.
Many thanks to Diane Josefowicz for agreeing to participate in this interview via email. In this interview, I discuss with her some of her craft choices in the creation of this mystery and how the author’s own interests and background appear in the novel.
Shara Kronmal: Cookie is such a great character and narrator: snarky, defiant, impulsive, vulnerable, and creative. Tell me how you found Cookie’s voice. Did you set out with her character in mind, or did she announce herself to you as you wrote?
Diane Josefowicz: The book’s first line—“My real name is Hannah Cooke but no one ever calls me that”—came to me fully formed and loud in my ears. For a long time, I was just tuning into her frequency and taking dictation.
SK: I’m curious about how research was incorporated into the novel. Cookie and her assistant, Fiona, go to local archives when investigating the Halsey House. Cookie also has studied the works of Frances Glessner Lee who made crime scene dioramas back in the mid-twentieth century. Did you consult historical sources? I can readily imagine you digging in some dusty old archives for some esoterica about New England.
DJ: I did a little research in order to write about the Halsey House with more authority. I knew what the house looked like, but I don’t know much about architecture, and I didn’t have the words to describe its elements. I needed a specific architectural vocabulary.
I also did a lot of research on impostor syndrome, and the book includes an author’s note outlining the materials that informed my decisions about character in this regard.
My mother-in-law, Linda Josefowicz, deserves the credit for making me aware of Frances Glessner Lee. At the time that my daughter was getting into dollhouses, Linda had given her one as a present. She’d also given me the book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by the photographer Corinne May Botz, who has photographed Glessner Lee’s crime scene dioramas with enormous sensitivity and verve. This twinning of gifts was such a sly joke—like, these harmonious little family scenes are fine, but we all know what really goes on in the dollhouse.
SK: I’m fascinated by all the little details in the novel: a beehive oven, Egyptian figurines, Lizzie Borden, psychoanalytic practice. Did you plan to insert these details into your story, or did they emerge as you wrote?
DJ: The details just showed up. Typically I’d be stuck, and then I’d take a walk or a shower, and by the time I was done, some fresh detail would have arrived. These little moments of stuckness are like signals to move or stretch, to do something to break up the fascia in my imagination and get it moving again.
SK: You have an eclectic background of interests and training. You’re a writer and editor and have also written books about Egyptology. You completed a PhD in the history of science and edit a website about the Victorian era. In Pill Hill, you include a brief author’s note (which I encourage readers to read after they’ve finished the book) and there you mention some of your influences, but can you tell us more?
DJ: My first training was as a historian of nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on scientific culture, and I gravitate toward the decades just before and after the turn of the nineteenth century. These years were strikingly hospitable to the one-off types I love: Blake, Wordsworth, Stendhal, Keats. I completed a dissertation in 1999 on the study of the earth’s magnetic field during this intellectually fulminant period.
I set the dissertation down after that. I didn’t think I’d continue as a historian. I had family commitments that made it impossible to leave the East Coast, and the few jobs that might have been possibilities for me were simply out of reach due to this geographical constraint. I’d had some small success publishing short fiction, however, and so I kept on with that in between gigs as a freelance editor in New York.
As I was finishing my MFA, my dissertation advisor, Jed Buchwald, told me about a scandal that had roiled France in 1821, when a massive Egyptian temple ceiling arrived in Paris and touched off a controversy about the age of the earth. He invited me to collaborate with him to write a book about it. That book, titled The Zodiac of Paris, was published in 2010. The Riddle of the Rosetta, a new history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, followed in 2020, again a collaboration with Jed.
At this time, I was teaching at Boston University, and I developed a course for first-year students, mostly pre-meds, on the clinical encounter. It is not really a coincidence that there are a lot of doctors in The Great Houses of Pill Hill. During the first phase of writing, I was deep in the literature of the doctor-patient relationship. Most relevant to Pill Hill was Michael Stein’s The Addict, a beautiful account of his treatment of one survivor of the opioid epidemic. I taught the book many times just because my students loved it so much.
I found writing as an undergraduate at Brown. I arrived after Angela Carter had her fellowship there, but she cast a long shadow. The first novel I read as an undergraduate was Love, which is about a marriage that, like an ouroboros, basically swallows its own tail. After that, I was hooked. The Lizzie Borden thread in Pill Hill is inspired by Carter’s short story “The Fall River Axe Murders,” which she wrote while living in New England. I’ve also been deeply influenced by Rikki Ducornet. The Fountains of Neptune, her beautiful and strange novel about a psychiatric clinic in a watery and vaguely French interwar dreamworld, is one of my “desert island” books, one of a dozen or so that I would always keep with me if I could.
SK: You include in the book a (fictional) psychoanalytic case study. I’m curious why you chose to add that twist. What purpose does it serve to move the plot along?
DJ: Plot is a mechanism for releasing information. It’s discovery on a slow drip. With an amateur sleuth as a protagonist, there is a special problem: How is that amateur going to make the discoveries that drive the plot? Someone like Cookie has no access to criminal records or forensic databases. Even if she did, she has bills to pay. She doesn’t have time to do freelance detective work. I needed to find ways to deliver information to Cookie. Putting a couple of psychiatric professionals in the mix enlarged her access to rumors swirling in and around the local hospital, which for various reasons is key to understanding what’s really going on in New Preston.
As for the case study in Pill Hill, I do love an artifact. My story collection Guardians & Saints contains a couple of stories that read as psychiatric case studies told slant. My first novel, Ready, Set, Oh, about a pair of star-crossed lovers at the height of the Vietnam War, contains a pamphlet about space exploration as a geopolitical imperative. I like to place these elements toward the end, where they can offer the reader an opportunity to reflect on the story so far, to see it from another point of view.
SK: I just reread your novella L’Air du Temps. It is quite different from Pill Hill, but I noticed that marriages feel central to the plots of these two books, driving some of the action and definitely driving a lot of the internal tension. In Pill Hill, Cookie comments on Chuck and Lana’s relationship: “Their marriage was like their house: full of secret passageways lined with signals that were indecipherable, at least to me.” Is there something about the state of being married that draws you to it as a topic for your writing?
DJ: Thank you for taking so much time with my novella. It’s close to my heart.
I’m generally interested in relationships that put pressure on the self. Marriage certainly does that, but other kinds of relationships do too. In L’Air du Temps, the romance between the parents fascinates the teenaged daughter whose consciousness governs the book, but she’s also enmeshed in a tricky sibling bond. This sibling relationship is at least as important as the marriage, and it exerts its own distinct pressure on Zinnia’s development.
What I find so fascinating about these relationships is how, as people become closer, the shadows and reflections thrown off by one sometimes fall on the other. If the relationship is sticky, is persistent, then the other person might start to do something with these images—to put them on like a coat, for instance. To identify with them.
I can tell you from personal experience that this is not much fun, but it is rich material for storytelling.
To give an example: I was once close to a man who had a habit of saying, “Now, what I’m about to tell you is going to make you mad.” Wouldn’t you know it, no matter how tranquil I felt in the moment, as soon as he said that, I was furious. Not for anything he was going to say—his opinions about my flaws were fairly anodyne—but for the way he needed me to be angry. In those moments, I struggled to hang onto a sense of myself as an autonomous person with a distinct point of view who could accept even unwelcome news with equanimity. The experience forced me to change, to come a little closer to that even-keeled person I was in my imagination.
I guess what I’m saying is that these relationships can give rise to change, and that seems like one kind of a good story, to follow characters as they change.
SK: I wanted to ask you also about place. You live in New England, and you write about the region. Pill Hill feels very location-specific, as if this mystery could not have been written about anywhere else. I looked up the term “Pill Hill” because the name seemed vaguely familiar. It turns out a number of cities in the US have a Pill Hill. The name itself (which even rates a Wikipedia page) refers to a neighborhood that has a concentration of medical people and/or hospitals and is generally affluent. Chicago, where I live, has a Pill Hill even though there is a pronounced shortage of hills in the city. I’d like to hear more about how you found your way into this particular setting.
DJ: Cookie’s neighborhood is called Pill Hill exactly for that reason. It has a history that’s connected with medicine and doctors. I confess the name came to me very late, but I’m attentive to place names generally. Growing up in Rhode Island, I was immersed in Narragansett toponyms from the jump. My mother’s parents lived up Neutakoncanut Hill; my father’s lived off Meshanticut Parkway in Cranston. All these names have meanings. When I submitted the book to my editors at Soho, it even had a subtitle: Little Place of Departed Spirits. That’s how you translate Chepinoxet, which is a real place in Rhode Island, but is also the name of the river that runs through New Preston.
You’re right to say that the book is very location-specific. One of my earliest readers remarked that the events of the story could only happen in a place that’s geographically bounded and socially close-knit, but not so far out of the way that strangers—like the Halsey couple in Pill Hill—never arrive to stir the pot. A small town, in other words.
I do love a small town, so long as it’s connected to other places. Providence, where I live, is like this—geographically small but densely populated and in striking distance of Boston and NYC. This combination of features has economic consequences that are important to note. People move here when they’re priced out of the larger cities, which creates opportunities but also pressurizes the housing market and drives up rents. This tension—gentrification, in a word—is something I explore in Pill Hill. Cookie remembers a time when New Preston was not as prosperous, and she brings that perspective to her work with clients. Her ambivalence about development is important to the choices she makes.
SK: When I heard you had a novel coming out, I wasn’t expecting a mystery. You’ve also written another novel, a novella, and a collection of short stories. What inspired you to write a mystery?
DJ: I’m not sure I set out to write a mystery, but I had fallen under the spell of Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, which is a densely atmospheric historical mystery set in seventeenth-century Oxford. Pears tells the story from several points of view that, taken together, don’t add up. The earliest finished draft of Pill Hill was also told from three perspectives, of which Cookie’s was just one. What that draft taught me was that Cookie really was the central figure, and that to portray her fully, as a person whose present choices are informed by past experience and memory, I was going to have to give her all the space on the page.
At this point, the novel became distinctly character-driven, and my challenge was to balance that quality with the plot’s intricacies.
I didn’t expect to write something so twisty, and I might not do it again. I’m not the most organized writer. I have trouble keeping track of details like eye color and who’s wearing what from scene to scene. In the final phases of publication, one of my editors sent me a chronology of everything that happens in Pill Hill. I thought, Gee, if I’d had this from the beginning, the writing might have gone easier.
SK: Are you a reader of mysteries? Do you have any particular favorites or influences in the genre? There is a genre of feminist mysteries—I can think of Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Janet Evanovich—where a tough and usually single woman is running her own business and solving crimes. Cookie isn’t a detective or professional crime solver, but I can imagine her involvement in more mysteries. Is there likely to be another novel featuring Cookie?
DJ: The comparison with Janet Evanovich is something I get a lot. I do think she has done something wonderful with Stephanie Plum. I like spending time with her, but those books read so quickly. I like a slower burn. I like to carry a story around for a week or two.
Tana French is probably my favorite mystery writer because she is unafraid to layer her stories, to use atmospherics to convey larger themes. Broken Harbor is a mystery novel that’s also a portrait of Ireland in the throes of an economic boom that’s leaving huge swathes of society out in the cold. Maybe that sounds familiar. There’s this indelible scene of an investigator monitoring a luxury development from a tumbledown tree house. Talk about being out in the cold. French never says anything about this, of course, but if you say her books are only about crime and detection, that’s like saying Georgia O’Keefe just painted some nice flowers.
As a decorator, Cookie is also perpetually outside and looking in. She has a unique access to people’s private lives, entering their houses and remaking them. She’s also unable to afford the upscale renovations that she produces for others—another way of being outside looking in. With her love of miniatures, of what are essentially doll houses, she is continually staging this drama of being outside looking in.
SK: To end on a silly note, I read in an interview you gave with the Chicago Review of Books that you have had recurring characters in some of your works. In a flashback in Pill Hill, Cookie’s friend Harry drives a silver sedan with keyhole covers shaped like Playboy bunnies and more bunnies on the mud flaps. Those unforgettable details also appear on a car in your novella L’Air du Temps. Is there an intentional tie-in there? Is Zinnia Zompa, the main character of L’Air du Temps, destined to meet Cookie Cooke?
DJ: That car certainly gets around, doesn’t it?
SHARA KRONMAL is a physician, writer, and translator from French to English. She is associate editor for creative nonfiction with CRAFT and translation reader for The Adroit Journal. Her translations, creative writing, reviews and interviews have appeared in Hunger Mountain Review, MAYDAY, CRAFT, Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere.
DIANE JOSEFOWICZ is the author or co-author of six books spanning history and fiction. Her latest novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill, was published in May by Soho. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is at work on the first English translation of La nouvelle espérance by Anna de Noailles (1873-1922), a confidante of Proust who was also a leading literary figure of the Belle Époque. Find her on Bluesky @dianejosefowicz.bsky.social.
