Sara Sligar on Modernizing an 18th-Century Literary Cult Classic

Sara Sligar’s second novel follows a trend in novels—reviving classic plotlines in contemporary settings. Vantage Point was inspired by a 1798 Gothic horror classic. “The germ of the idea was wanting to write a modernization of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” Sligar explains.

I was talking to a friend about how everyone keeps modernizing the same classic novels—not that there’s anything wrong with that, since the whole point of modernizing is that different authors bring different interpretations, but we agreed there should be more modernizations of lesser-known weird books. Wieland was the first book that came to mind. I had read it in grad school and loved it. Once I got the idea, it really dug its claws into me, and I started seeing a lot of parallels between the book and contemporary politics.

When did she first encounter Wieland, which is narrated by Clara Wieland and revolves around some of the same characters as Vantage Point, including Clara’s brother Teddy?

I first read it in my Ph.D., in a seminar about post-Revolutionary literature with Nancy Ruttenburg. I loved the book—it was so bizarre and so different than anything I had read from that time period. It’s often credited as the first American horror novel. It’s kind of a cult classic among literature scholars, though I think many people outside academia haven’t heard of it. I wanted to bring Wieland to the masses!

Unfortunately, I was so into Wieland that it took me at least one full draft to realize that the original novel does not actually have a coherent structure at all. I now know that this has been one of the common complaints about the novel basically since it was published. Plus, contemporary readers have very different expectations for narrative arcs and character motivations.

So I had to start over at the beginning—I threw out a few full drafts along the way—and completely re-do the plot. The finished product is very different from Wieland, although there are lots of Easter eggs for any Charles Brockden Brown fans. Clara and Teddy’s names are the same, but they have different backstories and motivations and character arcs, so they’re not really the same characters.

Our email conversation took place on the West Coast, in the span between my place in Sonoma County and Sara’s in Los Angeles, before the fires.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and political turmoil affected your life and work, the writing and launch of Vantage Point?

Sara Sligar: I initially got the rough idea for Vantage Point in 2016, which was obviously an extremely different world. I was really interested in the fake news and conspiracy theories that emerged during that presidential election. The 2024 election cycle felt like déjà vu in many ways, but also so much has changed. The word ‘deepfake’ only emerged in 2017 or 2018, and now it’s a pretty well-recognized idea. So because of the technology angle, I had to do a lot of rewriting and updating throughout the process, to try to anticipate what would feel current by the time the book came out. So I do think the political environment of the past few years is extremely present in the book. It’s baked into how I talk about wealth inequality and emotional isolation and the role of technology in politics, for sure.

Launch-wise, I guess I never really experienced the previous “normal” of the publishing industry. My debut novel, Take Me Apart, came out in April 2020 when we were all in lockdown, so all my events and plans for that book were canceled. It was really disappointing and confusing, and it means that I still have never had a real bookstore event of my own. So I’m really excited about the launch event for Vantage Point here in LA, at Skylight Books, though I don’t want to jinx it! [This launch has been postponed by the fires.]

JC: What brought you to call the novel Vantage Point, which refers to an ancestral estate on an island in Maine?

SS: I really see this as a novel about differences in perspective. Different people in your life see different sides of you. You perceive a situation differently based on your role in that situation. Two people can be in the same place at the same time and have completely distinct experiences. The different perspectives become very literal in Vantage Point, in ways I won’t spoil here, but characters are processing those differences even before that happens. So it’s about characters’ vantage points. And then Maine has lots of places called “XYZ Point” so there was a nice double meaning there, especially since the estate (which is fictional) plays a big role in the story.

JC: How did you choose your narrative structure—a story told through the points of view of Clara Wieland and her best friend since girlhood Jess Pleyel?

SS: I experimented with many different structures. At one point, there were four main characters and we saw all their perspectives. But that was very bulky and not all the characters were interesting. Then we had just Clara’s perspective. But that draft felt pretty closed and unsatisfying. I think it was my agent Danya Kukafka who suggested trying to add a new POV. And adding Jess’s POV opened up a lot for me. It allowed me to push the question of perspective way further and interrogate characters’ different realities. Teddy does get the short shrift in terms of POV, but I couldn’t add another POV and maintain the pacing. And to me, since the novel is about how little we know our loved ones, it felt right to limit the reader’s perspective on Teddy in a similar way—even if it’s frustrating to some readers.

JC: The Wieland Curse is central to the plot of Vantage Point. Clara, one of your narrators, and her brother Teddy are the only surviving descendants of the founding Wieland family. Other family members have fallen through the curse. When did you first hear of the Wieland Curse? Is it “real” in any way? How did you develop the Wikipedia thread that traces the Wieland curse through the generations?

SS: The Wieland curse is not real at all. It’s loosely inspired by the Kennedy curse, or other prominent families who are said to be cursed in some way. Several Kennedys have talked about how their real curse is that they’ve had to process their grief in such a public way, and that was very interesting to me—the psychological toll that it might take on a person, to have millions of people expecting you to die or suffer. I don’t remember exactly when I got the curse idea, but I know that was the motivation. The Wikipedia articles were really fun to write. I guess I really enjoy writing found documents; Take Me Apart is half found documents. Inventing the grisly deaths was very fun. The deaths are all fictional, except that the steel mill death is inspired by a real death from the early twentieth century—a real steel worker who got pulled into the machine and rolled out the other end.

JC: Your timeline jumps from present to past, looping back to revelatory scenes—Jess’s meeting Clara, their relationship in grade school, then boarding school at the Halpern School in New Hampsire, then college and later as sisters-in-law. How did you weave together these timelines?

SS: A lot of revision! Take Me Apart also had alternating timelines, and both times I’ve only been able to manage it through writing a lot of drafts and moving pieces around. I am trying to get better at outlining, but it’s hard with timelines because you want the emotional notes to hit at certain places. And then all of the present day needed to fit into the span of a single month. My poor copyeditor had to break it to me that I had given the month of April, like, eight Saturdays. So then I had to move things around to make it work on that level, too. It was not an efficient process.

JC: Your scenes also track the evolution of Jess’s relationship with Teddy, from knowing him as Clara’s brother around the Wieland family estate to the initial attraction, which happens as the two of them are bringing a twenty-something Clara to Marien, a plush clinic for mental health issues including anorexia, through their wedding, honeymoon and married life. How did that narrative of their relationship evolve?

SS: When writing any romance, I try to think about what would draw the characters to each other, which is really a question about character desire. What does a character want and why do they think this person will give it to them? At the moment when Jess and Teddy get together, Jess really craves stability and security, and Teddy wants someone who knows him by more than his money or power. So they can give each other what they want. But of course, people’s desires change during the course of a marriage, and sometimes what you feel you want isn’t what you actually need. That’s what they’re wrestling with throughout the novel.

JC: In the contemporary timeline, Teddy is running for Congress, Jess at his side, and a team of consultants to help. An explicit sex tape identifying his sister Clara goes viral on the internet, undermining his campaign and opening the spillway door for a flood of  disinformation and deepfake videos. What sort of research went into this “revenge porn” thread of the novel?

SS: Carrie Goldberg’s book Nobody’s Victim was very helpful to me. She’s a revenge porn lawyer, probably the first person who really made her career defending women against nonconsensual pornography, and her book really helped introduce me to the scope and extent of the problem. I also read a lot of news articles, a lot of laws and legislative bills, a lot of psychological studies—both about revenge porn and about deepfake technology. The laws and discourse around nonconsensual pornography are changing very fast, and the laws and discourse about nonconsensual deepfake pornography are changing even faster, so there’s a lot to stay on top of. But at its core, the invasion of privacy is a human experience, so I really focused on imagining how Clara specifically would react to that sense of violation.

JC: Early on Clara notes, “I’m looking out at the yard without really seeing it when suddenly there’s a flash of movement, a dark shape jumping across my vision. I can’t tell if it’s past the window or inside it or inside my head. I only register the motion and the way I reflexively shrink away from it.” She has similar glimpses, glimmers, shadows that influence her actions and even seem involved with the tragic death of her parents. She sees eerie images of her parents beckoning to her. Later she videotapes them, revealing them to be holograms. She has a tenuous grip on reality. But later she suspects she also is dealing with a person who is intentionally doing her harm. How did you research and interlace the supernatural elements of your Gothic tale with the technology that allows someone to “game” Clara?

SS: Writing a novel about technology is very hard, because it takes so much time, during which the technology is changing and you’re racing to keep up. There were a lot of instances in which the real world started to imitate what I was writing about, which is upsetting because the technology in the book is pretty dark! When I was working on the book, my editor and I were calling it speculative fiction, and it gradually became much more like realism. There are some speculative elements in the novel that some readers really don’t like, because they feel like it’s too insane.

But actually a lot of the technology does really exist. It’s also interesting to me that people are more willing to suspend their disbelief about ghosts than about technology. I think it’s partly because we subconsciously know that technology is really scary, and what’s scary about technology is how little we understand. So to me this novel has a lot of the classic elements of Gothic horror, like family curses and confined spaces, but the source of the horror is technology.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

SS: I am working on my third novel. It’s about the pharmaceutical industry and revenge and anger. But also has a slightly more comedic tone? We’ll see! I’m about a third of the way through my first draft.

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Vantage Point by Sara Sligar is available from MCD/FSG, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.