In the winter of 1951, a feral adolescent girl is found living in the woods surrounding a federal penitentiary on Elita Island in Puget Sound. Language acquisition scholar Bernadette Baston is invited to consult on the perplexing case and becomes deeply invested in uncovering the secrets that led to the girl’s presence on the remote island. As a single mother and adjunct professor, Bernadette must navigate midcentury societal pressures as she strives to maintain her autonomy and protect the girl.
“Elita” (TriQuarterly / Northwestern University Press, Jan. 15) is the debut novel by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum. This dark and gripping mystery is rooted in the Pacific Northwest landscape, and the book’s namesake is based on McNeil Island. During the COVID lockdown, Lunstrum’s family sailed in South Puget Sound, an area unfamiliar to the author until then. “Suddenly I could think about the island’s history and its hauntedness, and from there, Elita really materialized,” she explained.
A Lynnwood resident, Lunstrum is known for her short fiction. Her most recent collection, “What We Do with the Wreckage,” won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The author recently spoke with The Seattle Times over Zoom about her debut novel. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Elita” is billed as “Nordic Noir, imported to the moody shores of the Pacific Northwest.” Why did this genre appeal to you?
My introduction to Nordic noir was Peter Høeg’s “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” which I read in the winter before COVID in 2019. I’ve always loved mysteries but this one felt different in that the landscape was so present. In my short fiction, I often know where something is set far before I know who the characters are or what the plot will be. So I was drawn to the way that novel picked up on the omnipresence of landscape as an element of drama and tension between characters. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s dark for much of the year, it’s wet, and yet, it’s stunning and beautiful. And we are ingrained in our landscape in a way that isn’t true for everybody around the world.
This novel offers a feminist approach to a genre that has historically traded in violence against women. How do you see “Elita” fitting into the canon of crime fiction?
It is taken for granted that if you have a mystery, often a girl will die. “Elita” is about a kind of violence that men perpetrate against women, but I didn’t want to allow real physical harm to come to my female characters. I wondered, could I write a mystery in which no girl died? I feel really strongly that mysteries can exist that don’t hinge on dismissing the power of women or erasing women’s bodies. I want to undermine our assumption that women must be disposable in that way to create dramatic tension, but I also want to empower female characters. I experimented with making emergence rather than disappearance the central core of the novel.
Motherhood is the heart of this story. Bernadette is ruled by her love for her daughter, Willie. Several other characters navigate maternal duties. How did this theme influence your storytelling?
I am the mother of two teenagers. The phase of motherhood that Bernadette is in with Willie, who is very young, is far in the past for me, but the experience of motherhood has been revolutionary to me in all senses of that word. My writing radically changed when I became a parent, and I understood myself and the world so differently once my lens had been altered by parenthood. In Bernadette, I funneled a lot of my own experiences of motherhood, that sense of deep love and care. But the other side of that coin for me was this constant pressing tension that I was losing agency. I wanted Bernadette to experience that tension, that complexity of the maternal against the individual, and how sometimes defining yourself in one of those states requires a negation of the other that is really difficult.
This book is set right after World War II, and the war’s trauma hangs like a specter over the story. Why did you choose this time?
I was writing “Elita” while we were enduring the pandemic and its closures. I would call my grandmother and we would talk about what her childhood had been like during the war. I think I was calling her for a sense that we would get through that time period. I was reading everything I could about the war, and I wasn’t finding much about the window after it. What happens after the moment when we’ve all survived? In what way does trauma linger? How does that shape the choices that people make following whatever crisis they’ve navigated?
The time also predates the women’s liberation movement, and Bernadette embodies the sociocultural shift that brewed then. I was struck by this novel’s relevance to current conversations about women’s rights and bodily autonomy.
Topics of women’s agency are always close to my thoughts. In my household from the time I was very little, we talked about women’s rights and medical and reproductive rights in a very open way. I’ve always written about these issues. Sadly, there’s never been a moment in which talking about women’s rights being under threat hasn’t been relevant. I don’t think any of the challenges Bernadette faces as a woman in the workplace or as a mother are gone now, but they were more on the surface in 1951, and Bernadette’s lack of reproductive agency became braided with the themes in a way that serves the novel.
The underlying theme of this novel seems to be confinement — from the literal prison on Elita Island to the oppression of the patriarchy, to the isolation of island life to the cages that loneliness or lies might confine us to. Would you agree?
I think that is a beautiful reading of it. When I was writing “Elita” during lockdown, we were thinking so much about isolation versus society. I’m exploring in the book the tension between agency and entrapment over and over again, in lots of different ways. One of the central questions that Bernadette asks is, what is the cost of freedom, and the inversion of that, what is the cost of conforming? To what end does that serve you or limit your possibilities and your agency? My female characters are all confined in certain ways by the expectations they have to submit to in order to be acceptable to society, and they make different choices about what they will accept and reject.