Grace Byron on Her Debut Novel and Cultural Criticism

Grace Byron’s debut novel, Herculine, follows an unnamed narrator who, after experiencing the trials and tribulations of making it as a freelance writer in New York City, flees to a trans girl commune in a desolate patch of Indiana. But what seems idyllic at first soon reveals itself to be sinister and demonic. The novel explores the lasting impact of religious trauma and the false promise of utopia. During our interview, Byron described her twisted horror romp as “trans girl Buffy.” 

The novel is imbued with elements of a pulpy, supernatural thriller. However, it also explores compelling questions about finding camaraderie as a marginalized person. Herculine’s blending of genres is ambitious, but that’s to be expected from Byron, whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Cut, and many other outlets. Byron’s incisive voice is grounded in an optimism for a better future and often brings a broader societal critique.

In recent weeks, Byron has weighed in on two works that contemplate the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: Ari Aster’s film Eddington (a pan) and Patricia Lockwood’s novel, Will There Be Another You (a rave). Though I personally enjoyed Eddington, I appreciated Byron’s argument that the film’s message is aimless and muddled. That’s what compelling criticism can accomplish: It’s an opportunity to see what you might have missed and reassess your perspective, even if you disagree. With Goodreads and Letterboxd, there’s a temptation to fire off a quick take without really digesting a novel’s or film’s complexity. It’s reassuring to see a writer delight in illuminating an artwork’s nuance or lack thereof. 

On September 12, Byron will be teaching an one hour class on the mechanics of criticism for Study Hall. 

I caught up with her to discuss the story behind Herculine and cultural criticism.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity. 

Can you tell me about the writing process for Herculine? How did your novel originate and go from idea to execution?

Honestly, I became a freelancer by accident. When I started writing in a serious way, I was intending to become a short story writer or a novelist, and so I was always writing fiction. But that is just not lucrative until you land a book deal. My friend Erin Taylor became the arts editor at Observer, and on a whim, I started writing about books for them. But that whole time, while I was reviewing novels and eventually nonfiction and [reporting], I was writing stories and fiction and trying to one day get a book out. I don’t know the exact ingredients, but there was sort of a coalescing of ideas in 2022.  I wrote what started as a short story, but I realized that there was a really intense voice there. I was in a workshop with Tony Tulathimutte, and everyone was like, ‘This is a novel; you should finish this.” [From there], I expanded it into a novel over the course of a few months after that workshop, and then I revised it for a year before I got an agent.

Herculine is a cross-genre piece of fiction. To get an agent interested in a work, you have to present your manuscript as a potentially marketable product. How did you go about pitching a work that is both literary and horror? 

I feel lucky because I had a clear vision for how I thought it fit into the literary landscape. I also think the agent I work with, Julia Masnik, is a really incredible champion of hybrid work and really interesting writers. She also represents Imogen Binnie, Brontez Purnell, and a lot of other great writers. I leaned into presenting it in terms of magical realism. Only later down the line did it become apparent to me how many different genres it was really dabbling in. You could say there’s an internet novel component, a New York literary realist component, and a horror component. I tried to not think too hard about that while writing it. When querying, I [provided] some comps and let the genres of those comps speak for themselves. (Comps are books you compare your own manuscript to when pitching it to agents or publishers.)

Another big one that I said is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just because I think saying [the book is like] trans girl Buffy is a really easy elevator pitch. It’s kind of funny, kind of dark, kind of gritty. [Buffy] is a genre show, but it also transcends its genre in a lot of ways. In early reviews [of Herculine], that is something that is getting a lot of attention. People are like, ‘This isn’t quite a horror novel, or this isn’t quite literary fiction. It’s kind of doing a weird thing.” That remains to be difficult in terms of marketing the book in some ways, but it also felt important to the book’s DNA to lean into that.

The unnamed narrator in the book really wants to be a successful writer. It’s interesting that she’s so fixated on what she calls “hot freelance girls,” who are glamorous and have it all figured out. There’s a media party scene where you really nail how those networking gatherings can trigger this unholy cocktail of jealousy, resentment, and ambition. What was it like satirizing the media industry during this moment of precarity?

I wrote that scene at such a different stage in my career.  When I wrote that, it was three-plus years ago now. I was at the bottom of the rung and didn’t have any cool bylines or really great clips. I could still feel that way. It’s an industry that’s designed to make you feel less than and just sort of grind you down into accepting whatever shitty amount of money people offer. 

[The media party scene] is about a person who’s precarious and is looking at other people who are maybe a little bit less precarious, and sort of idolizing and idealizing them. There’s a way that you can look at that narrator and see the cracks in the facade of the people that she’s interested in. But I think it was fun to write. I’ve described Herculine as kind of a bitter novel. I think it’s [easy to feel] bitterness about being a freelancer or about being a minority [in the media industry]. Increasingly, very few people outside the bubble of the literati, like the sort of anointed people, are getting real jobs. Bari Weiss has so much money and too much power. Some of that frustration and resentment and bitterness ended up in the narrator’s voice, and that is a big propulsion of the early part of the novel. 

In Herculine, the narrator reflects on her own experience with conversion therapy. You’ve written about your experience in a personal essay for The Cut. Can you share some insight into approaching this topic in two different forms? How did a more surrealist medium help illustrate parts of this experience?

I think it felt sort of necessary. For a long time, I was trying to write a memoir [and] knocking my head against the wall. The essay that is in The Cut is a chopped-up, shortened version of that. I wasn’t in the right place in life to write a memoir when I was really trying to write a first book. A novel can be really expansive and playful and let you rework things and think through things with a bit more of a surrealist lens. That gentle touch just allowed me to explore this issue in a more nuanced, interesting, and fascinating way.

I really tried to ride into the fear in a way that would have maybe not felt possible if I were just sticking to the truth or sticking to my own life. I feel like I was able to access some deeper nightmares and hopes and fears, and it was just sort of the right path for the book. It flowed in a way that writing a memoir didn’t at the time. 

I’m excited for your course about the mechanics of criticism. What should people look forward to with this course?

Trying to write book reviews or art reviews of any kind can feel really opaque and mystifying. But in reality a good pitch has a cadence to it, and it’s almost like a mathematical formula. Similarly, querying an agent is A + B = C. You can pitch criticism, and there is, like, a way to do it. And there’s a way to climb the ladder of bylines. There’s a strategy to it. But maybe people don’t think about it, and it’s easy to be like, “I want to write a piece for The New Yorker.” It’s much harder to be like, “Where do I start to get there?” That is a long road that requires a certain amount of work and dedication. 

So I’m excited to talk about pitching and how I have previously done it and what is different about trying to pitch reviews, rather than just sort of like straightforward journalism. [I’ll also discuss] etiquette and timelines. I know a lot of people who are like, “I want to pitch a review. The book is out in a week.” And for most places, that’s going to be too late. So, [I plan] on talking about things that I wish I’d known, [as well as] which places pay and which places don’t.

There’s been some discourse because of Kelefa Sanneh’s essay about the dire state of music criticism and how critics fear backlash from fans and so avoid negative reviews. What is your approach to writing a negative review? Do you ever fear backlash? 

Sometimes. A good pan is so delectable. It is a rare thing that people get to do. If you’re Andrea Long Chu, Lauren Oyler, or Brandon Taylor, you get brought in to be the big guns and assassinate someone. But that’s a privilege, it’s not a given. I think a lot of editors are shy about negative reviews for understandable reasons. 

You have to go in with a careful touch. I have heard of people getting negative reviews killed for some reason. So I think it’s tricky. I [haven’t] in recent history had a negative piece get killed, but I have certainly pitched pans and had them turned down for whatever reason. Nobody wants a negative review of their book, of course, but it’s still a valuable part of literary community and discourse. I have panned books. I will pan a book again. I have at least one or two pans in the works. But I do think it’s oftentimes a harder beast to tackle than a gushing, positive review.

Sign up for Byron’s course on cultural criticism (Study Hall subscribers check your latest email from us for a discount code)

Herculine is out October 7.