Friday Fiction: Rachel Hochhauser's "Lady Tremaine"

What if the woman we've been taught to hate for six centuries was just doing what it took to survive in a world that gave her almost no options?

That's the question Rachel Hochhauser sat with long before she ever sat down to write, and it's the question that turns into her debut novel, Lady Tremaine, the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick that reimagines Cinderella's stepmother as a woman worth understanding rather than a woman worth fearing.

Rachel and I talk about how the idea found her at the hardest possible time, scrolling her phone in a hospital while her husband recovered from emergency brain surgery, suddenly a single parent overnight, when an image of Lady Tremaine stopped her cold. She walks me through the years she spent away from fiction after her first manuscript didn't sell, the puzzle company she built in that gap called Piecework, and what it meant to come back to her desk and have it feel, in her words, like coming home to herself. We get into her research process, including a deep dive into falconry that started with a pandemic hotel workshop and turned into Lucy, the peregrine falcon who becomes one of the book's most vivid characters. And we talk about Ellen, her version of Cinderella, and why Rachel chose to make her one of the more complicated, less immediately likable Cinderellas in the canon, and why that complication is the point.

We also get into the line Rachel calls her favorite in the entire book, the one she was writing toward long before she knew how she'd get there, and what it means that the book ends up being a message from a mother to her daughters instead of a fairy tale ending at all.

Share this conversation with the friend who still has strong feelings about Ever After.

“Goodness is always contextual.”

― Rachel Hochhauser, LADY TREMAINE

Connect with Rachel Hochhauser:

@hochhauser

Books Referenced:

LADY TREMAINE by Rachel Hochhauser

Support the show: