The Responsible Party

Claire Carusillo, a writer from Illinois whose work has appeared in *Gawker, New York Magazine* and *Elle* visits Writer's Voices to discuss her debut novel, *The Responsible Party.* Set in the Chicago area, the story centers around Claire, an unemployed former skincare influencer who is approached by the police about a 1970s murder that her mother, Kath, may have a connection to. As she seeks answers from Kath, information begins to unravel regarding the family legend about her great-great-grandmother Fanny Mounsey and her daughter Sarah who both survived separate shipwrecks. Concerning her protagonist, Carusillo created a fictionalized version of herself partly because the legend of the Unsinkable Mounsey Women is based on her own family history. According to Carusillo, "The narrator was unnamed for a very long time... so I decided that because this character Claire shared a pretty similar backstory to me in terms of myth-making and in terms of what she did for a living, that we would just try it and have her be Claire and that did unlock a lot for me... I think that there is something funny in this book that is about myth-making and about discovering untruth, and discovering the way that people posture in order to secure a legacy that I, sort of, gave this more epic story to a character named Claire Carusillo that is not necessarily a story that I've lived."

When it comes to her unusual writing style, Carusillo credits author Virginia Woolf for inspiring her storytelling. Although Woolf passed away long ago, Carusillo still draws from her modernist influence. She noted, "There are a lot of illusions in this book to Virginia Woolf. I'm not at all comparing myself or my writing style to her... I guess her modernist style was so groundbreaking to me when I was in college, even though I was in college in 2009 to 2013... the way that Virginia Woolf just absolutely broke down what it was to be a novel and, in some ways, I try to emulate her stream of consciousness style...*To The Lighthouse* is a big inspiration for this book and not just because we have a character going to the lighthouse, but because of her total breakdown of what a novel is supposed to be, so I would say she's majorly someone who's been an incredible influence on me. She did it like no other and there will never be another Virginia Woolf for sure."