"There are a million quieter, smaller scale scenarios that can play out when men get power over women that isn’t theirs to take."
Sarah Zachrich Jeng is writing history in thriller form. Here's how.
Sarah Zachrich Jeng burst onto the literary thriller scene in 2021 with the release of her debut novel The Other Me (Berkley Books). We’ve spoken over the weeks after Sarah finished her follow-up novel. It’s been a ride.
Topics include: writing feminist speculative suspense, Mommy forums and TERFs, “unlikeable” female leads, writing worst-case scenarios into speculative fiction, “partners who act supportive on the surface while digging away at the foundations”, codependency in toxic relationships, AITA Reddit threads, nonstop drama in creative couples, Sarah’s riveting essay “I’m glad my husband is not a writer”, the shift from playing in rock bands to writing fiction, living in Florida, book bans, Moms for Liberty, and how easy it is “to get bogged down in things you really don’t have much control over”.
Let’s go.
Your updated biography reads, "writer of feminist speculative suspense". I'm always very keen on what people feel the need to put out first, as the most urgent or most important things we must know about them. What drives you to be specific about the literary genre you're active in, with a first novel released in 2021 (The Other Me) and the second on the way? And: how does the "feminist" adjective play as a determinator when it comes to speculative suspense? I would imagine it's more than shorthand for "Strong Female Protagonist".
So obviously “speculative suspense” isn’t a real genre. There’s no shelf for it in bookshops or orange banner on Amazon. But there is a niche for books that maybe don’t fit into traditional ideas of what a sci-fi novel is, while including elements you normally see in science fiction or fantasy. Like Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, or I’ll Stop the World by Lauren Thoman, which is still on my TBR but seems to sit at one of the exact intersections of my interests.
I grew up loving stories where the unexplainable happens in a world like our own, or where otherwise “normal” people have fantastical powers. So when I was setting out to write my first novel, it felt natural to write something like that. I wasn’t really thinking about how the book would be marketed. I figured if I ever got a publisher, that’s their job, right? (Cue Present Me cooing “Oh you sweet summer child” at Past Me.) But when I got to the point of querying agents, I wanted them to know immediately what they were getting into. I figured labeling it “speculative suspense” would convey that it was written in a fairly commercial style (what Max Gladstone might call aerodynamic) with a propulsive plot, and oh yeah, weird shit happens that doesn’t happen in our reality.
Once my debut novel The Other Me sold, it ended up being positioned as a thriller. And if you read Goodreads reviews (which I don’t for my own work, my creativity is fragile enough lol) you’ll see readers tend to be pretty polarized around things like ghosts or psychic powers or time travel in their thrillers. Some love it, but a sizable minority are actively pissed off. They think it’s cheating, especially if it’s not made crystal clear in the book’s marketing that wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff might be going on. I mean, just look at one-star reviews for Behind Her Eyes. (Uhh, spoiler, I guess?)
So maybe I wasn’t thinking specifically about what people on Goodreads would say when I started using the “speculative suspense” label, but the more I learned about publishing and the way bending genres is sometimes treated almost as a liability, the more I felt like it was a “good to know” thing for readers. I’ve had a number of readers tell me they don’t usually read SFF, or that they had my book recommended to them specifically as being not a sci-fi novel. But at least for the projects I’ve been able to finish so far, the speculative is an inextricable part of what I write, even when it’s a vehicle for a domestic suspense or a page-turner about toxic friendship.
And women have been writing worst-case scenarios into speculative fiction for years. (They’ve been creating more hopeful narratives, too, at least in the sense of their worlds not being as sexist as ours even if they’re dystopic in other ways.) You look at The Handmaid’s Tale, you look at The School for Good Mothers - books about sweeping changes that echo anxieties and practices that were already present, to some extent, when those novels were written. The twist is that the punishments are not being visited mainly on poor black and brown people, or people in other countries anymore.
But there are a million quieter, smaller scale scenarios that can play out when men get power over women that isn’t theirs to take, whatever mechanism they’re using to do that. The Other Me is about a woman being gaslit about the truth of her own life. All of her life choices have been overwritten, and she has to figure out how to get her agency back. It’s complicated - I wanted there to be moments of ambivalence, where the main character thinks about how much easier her life is now, and is autonomy even that great anyway? Especially when your decisions haven’t gotten you where you wanted to be? This processing on her part evokes the way a lot of women give up their agency, or arrange their lives in ways that just happen to conform to traditional gender norms, and call it choice feminism. But they’re not taking into account that their choices depend heavily on individual men not being assholes.
Feminism itself has become a loaded term, and not just because of the backlash from the right. I mean, you have TERFs, you have people who don’t understand the need for intersectionality. These regressive impulses that either seem to be about treating power and rights as a zero-sum game, or just refusing to internalize that society changes. I’m a Gen X white cis woman, so in a lot of ways I embody the stereotype of a regressive liberal feminist, and I try not to fall into outdated patterns or assumptions in my writing. But like everyone else I’m still learning. I’m going to make mistakes.
I feel like the lowest bar to clear for a book to be “feminist” is that female characters are allowed to be as messy and complicated as male characters. People still seem to get really put off by women in novels who make choices they wouldn’t make, or act in ways they consider unwise or immoral. Let alone being “unlikeable.” With the book I just finished writing, I felt like I was performing a constant balancing act between conveying my main character’s justifiable anger and making her unsympathetic. I’m not sure that would have been as much of a consideration if I’d been writing a male protagonist.
Every time I have to pause and assess the reality of living in a world where TERFs are a thing, I flash back to an evening in 2018 when I was talking with a male colleague and I asked, "what would 'toxic femininity' even look like, and where would it come from?", and my colleague said something about Mommy Forums and Mommy Facebook Groups, and every time I pause and go "ah fuck he called it".
Oh yeah, the toxicity around parenthood and mothering specifically is unreal. When I was pregnant, and during my kid’s first year, I was pretty active on a forum that was, like, the anti-BabyCenter, for the progressive hipster mamas. I did find a lot of support and valuable knowledge there. But the utopianism of it was shattered for me when I discovered it had its own separate “snark” message board where regular posters would create alternate usernames and talk shit about people from the mom forum. People would be really open and vulnerable about their struggles (some champagne problems, but also wrenching stuff like divorce and miscarriages) and just get ripped apart behind their backs, like, “Doesn’t she have any friends in real life to talk about this stuff with?” It left a bad taste in my mouth.
I guess at least the hate wasn’t shoved into people’s Twitter notifications?
Let me get back to what you said about a character coming off as "unsympathetic" : there's been a ton of discourse around it, but when you get down to it, most readers (or watchers) want something they can hold on to, at least as an entry point, something human or compelling that justifies them getting into the story.
Right, and I do try to create little openings for people to relate, moments of humor or kindness or whatever. As a reader/watcher, if I’m spending however many hours with this character, I want them to entertain me even if I think they’re a terrible person and would never want to know them in reality. The neatest trick a writer can pull off is making you complicit, where you’re rooting for a character to succeed in their questionable endeavors. Being an underdog makes someone instantly more sympathetic, at least in fiction. I’m not sure it works that way in real life.
And about your second novel, there's something cool you shared in an essay:
I can't think of anything more common and more (sorry) relatable than this creeping doubt and the chill of the reveal - yes, actually, somebody was undermining you. How did you integrate this resource in a story? And how did you make sure you were okay, psychologically, as you delved into this territory?
Women being subtly undermined by the men in their lives is an everyday occurrence. A lot of this is systemic (gestures at persistent wage gap and lack of paid parental leave policies). We’re still stuck with this bullshit assumption that men are bad at housework and care work, so a lot of male partners don’t feel the need to step up, and all of that work takes time and energy that now can’t go to creative or professional pursuits. I feel like the expectation that women take on the supportive role helps justify the creepier, more gaslight-y forms of undermining, though. You’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, so I’m putting you in your place.
Part of the horror of a toxic relationship is that it’s codependent. You can fight against the strictures of it, but for a while you stay, you compromise, because of your need for love or belonging, or your belief that this person has your best interests at heart, or that you’re responsible for holding them together. A lot of the time there’s no big explosive event that makes things clear, it’s more the building up of a pattern that you’re not even sure you’re seeing correctly. You feel like your intuition is broken, which makes it really hard to make any big decisions.
I can bring those feelings to my writing and feel psychologically safe about it, from the position I’m in now. I tend to ruminate a lot and pick apart things I’ve done or things that have happened to me. I mean, I wrote a whole book about how small decisions change the course of a life. So it’s all well-traveled territory, at this point. If anything I feel like I’m too analytical about it.
It might be different if I were writing memoir, or even fictionalizing events that were closer to my personal experience, but in genre things have to be punched up. So I’m subconsciously bringing my experience to bear, to make sure everything passes the smell test, but the shitty men in my books are very fictional. That distance is helpful.
There's something insightful you wrote in the same essay (“I’m glad my husband isn’t a writer”):
"I’m glad not to have a creative cage match going on in my house, but it still gives me a weird little tickle of shame when I come across mentions of other authors’ partners helping them brainstorm scenes."
Honestly, the situation itself seems pretty straightforward to me - some folks have cheerleading spouses, while others work with limited to zero involvement from their loved ones. And that's ok. Are we in a strange mini-bubble where a creator is made to Feel Bad for having a separate, normal life, as opposed to a nonstop "I hate you, I love you, you're the best, YOU SUCK" going on with a husband or wife ? (I mean, talk about toxic relationships.)
Nonstop drama is the WORST. Way more fun to read about than to live (and I get stressed out even reading about it). There are lots of couples who make it work in the space between complete separation and toxic creative codependence. Though as callous and nonsensical as publishing can be, it’s kind of great to have an escape in someone who doesn’t care whether I ever publish another book. Not in a “your ambitions don’t matter” way, but in a “this doesn’t affect how I see you as a human” way.
Some people might be like, “Whoa, I could not live like that, with my partner being largely unaware of this huge part of me.” I think that’s where the doubt comes in. I don’t feel like there’s external shaming going on, but as a society we have this idea of how relationships should be and how much knowledge couples should have of each other’s inner lives. We also tend to conflate writers’ work, especially women writers, with them as people. So my partner lacking a particular interest in reading my books becomes him lacking interest in what’s going on in my head, which is not the case. But I still have to refute this self-imposed feeling of, “Wait, am I doing it wrong?”.
And that’s even leaving aside the weird gender dynamics piece. We have the twentieth century stereotype of the white man writer whose wife quietly handled the admin (cooking, typing, stamp licking) so he didn’t have to sully his mind with non-genius thoughts, and that sounds oppressive to any woman who has creative ambitions for herself. Nowadays, few authors of any gender get that level of support from their partners. I mean, a nonworking spouse? In this economy? But that specter still hangs over the popular conception of the writing life, and we have to expect something of our men. So anything less than deep involvement is a bit suspect. But I actually feel like total devotion is a richer breeding ground for resentment (which is a theme I got into in the novel I just finished).
Your past as a rock musician seems to have influenced your second novel, but you've mentioned in other interviews you didn't have the drive to make it in that field. This is giving me pause, since writing novels and seeing them through the process - from edits to publication - requires A LOT of drive. What changed?
I mean, I got older. I was in my twenties when I was playing in bands, and in my particular situation it very much came with a young person’s lifestyle. So when I began to change my lifestyle (for example, getting a job whose hours made late-night practices exhausting) the music started to ebb away. And I grieved it, but I also kind of felt like it was time. Some good people and things remain consistent in our lives, while others have their seasons. That’s sad, but it’s also natural.
From a practical standpoint, writing fits into my current life in a way that music wouldn’t. It’s easier to do alone, and I’m good at spending time alone. I’m also more willing to do the work of getting better at writing. I don’t know if that’s just maturity (I certainly wasn’t that way with the few things I wrote during my twenties). I’ve been into both music and writing since I was young, and I’m more or less self-taught at both, but I probably started out with more natural talent at writing. There’s a higher ceiling there, whereas with music I figured out pretty early on that I was only going to get so good at it.
Plus the opportunity for earning a decent income playing music is almost non-existent. I guess publishing is headed that way, but it isn’t quite there yet.
Okay, I’m gonna ask you about FLORIDA. As a non-resident, I feel I have zero ground to stand on when it comes to the place and the abrupt political changes it's going through, book bans included. Is your life as a Florida resident influencing what you produce as an independent writer in any way?
We do know it’s not just Florida, right? Is that something people realize, or are we just going to keep tweeting gifs of Bugs Bunny sawing Florida off the country until Ron DeSantis gets elected President? As far as having ground to stand on, I think anyone with an interest in preserving democracy and social progress - not to mention safety and freedom for anyone who’s not a white cishet Christian man - can claim that ground. I’d sure as hell rather see that than people telling me to abandon my home to the bigoted assholes. Fuck that, we’ve got amazing weather!
With the book bans, it’s discouraging that so few people have been able to cut off access to books for so many kids. The Moms for Liberty contingent (sarcastic yay for that gendered language) is working off a playbook where a few people flood school districts with book challenges (non-paywalled excerpt) and that seems to be very effective in getting the books on their hit list off shelves. Districts are understaffed and overwhelmed, they don’t have the tools to deal with the onslaught. Though the one hopeful note is that a small group of people can make changes in the other direction too.
If I were going to write for younger readers, censorship would definitely be a concern. Not that I think I’m “protected” because I’m not writing YA or because I’m a white author. We’ve seen how the right wing’s success has emboldened them to extend their reach ever further into our culture, and I don’t expect that to stop. And to be clear, it’s not just the reactionaries who can affect what kinds of books get out there. The publishing industry sues school districts over book bans, but they also tell authors to whitewash mentions of atrocities. They’re trying to make money and that makes them a little too eager to avoid controversy.
I have a couple of ideas I’m kicking around for books set in Florida. They don’t directly address the situation here, though I’m sure subplots and details would emerge during the writing process that reflect the reality and try to change it. I have little interest in writing a dystopia (though that could change; ideas tend to crop up and take over my brain very quickly). Overtly political writing doesn’t always do what the author hopes it will. There’s that story about how The Jungle didn’t get people worked up because of its depiction of labor abuses, but because rats were being ground up into the sausage.
My writing on Substack isn’t all that focused, which is by design. I specifically came over here because the more traditional author newsletter I was doing felt like homework, and I don’t want this to feel like homework. Obviously my personal situation and what’s going on politically in my environment will affect what I’m thinking and writing about, however. A friend recently described her feelings about Florida as grief, which for me feels really apt.
I started this project once I fully appreciated my overall frame was (still is) "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at your books and your life so far, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath ?
Oh man, life is full of those moments, isn’t it? Being a published author is just one of them after another. When you’re writing a novel you have no idea if it’s even good, let alone if anyone will want to read it. So the whole time I was working on my debut I was thinking that if I managed to get an agent, that would be enough validation even if it didn’t end up getting published. But of course that’s bullshit. You’re always looking ahead to the next step, and the higher you get the more people you see around you who are better writers and/or more successful than you, by whatever external measures. You’re not seeing the losses and rejections that have come along with their wins; you’re only seeing your own. It’s easy to get bogged down in things you really don’t have much control over.
The lesson I’m continually having to teach myself is that I got into this because I love to write, so my highest priority is to preserve that love. Like, it gets stressful and frustrating on deadline, especially since I have a bunch of other responsibilities and can’t cloister myself in some mountain cabin somewhere, but I still can’t imagine not doing it.
Sarah has been a generous guest and the least you can do is act on the good feeling you probably have right now, so:
Buy Sarah Zachrich Jeng’s books on Amazon
Buy Sarah’s books on Bookshop
Read Sarah’s newsletter, All Possible Futures
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