“Hollow Cast” explores sharing the dark things inside us and having them accepted by the select few who understand, shown through the lens of discarded toys in a garbage heap. What was the seed for this story and its imagery?
Oh gosh. What quantity of vulnerability is appropriate for a public author interview? How deep can we go before we end up on the wrong side of a rabbit hole?
I can tell you the image that sparked this story, to start—and believe it or not, it predates the Barbie movie.
I’ve never owned a home and have no aspirations to do so. Apartment living, however, invites high turnover. People lose jobs, end relationships, get evicted, jettison their futons and Instant Pots and threadbare, pink cat trees on curbs or alongside the dumpster.
The most heartbreaking part, for me, is the boxes of children’s toys. Kids tend to bond with their belongings; they don’t just color in the coloring book, they practice writing their name, they draw their hamster under a palm tree. They scribble Christmas wish lists on multiplication homework. They give Barbie the hairstyle their dad won’t let them have. They name their teddy bear after their best friend from the last apartment complex they left on short notice. Often those objects are the only fragments of the world that truly belong to them.
It’s a rough thing to see, a child’s budding sense of self left in a cardboard box in the rain.
But the thematic inspiration . . . I need you to know how much I despise pop psychology. There’s a financial incentive for the self-help industry to provide chirpy quick fixes that fit neatly into a trade paperback. Gratitude! Optimism! Happiness is a choice! Find your love language! Change your attitude, change your life!
Hell, apparently you can even progress methodically through crushing existential grief in stages, like a video game.
I’m cynical and I can be a bit of a bitch, so I tend to think that if your problems can be fixed by taping affirmations to your mirror, you don’t really have problems to begin with.
That’s especially true of trauma. It sticks to your bones, shapes your gait as you move through the world—sometimes literally, depending on what exactly you survived. With time and really, really good therapy, some people manage to shove it aside and get on with a semblance of life. Mostly. Other people never quite manage—or the events underlying the trauma have changed their physical body in ways they can feel, constantly, or that everyone else can see.
But because it doesn’t yield to glitter-pen platitudes, trauma can become a social taboo, a topic you’re not supposed to raise in mixed company. It can leave you feeling damaged and unknowable, like you’re forever on the outside. You tend to evaluate new acquaintances based on whether they can handle what you haven’t told them.
That’s what I had in mind: the long-past but personally devastating secrets so many of us conceal, that we’re constantly burying under a bright garden of capability and self-awareness, and whacking with a shovel when it rises again—if we’re fortunate enough to have a shovel on hand.
If that’s not horror-story fodder, I don’t know what is.
The story begins by stating all the toys here are equally unique, with the tone that this is acceptable and even preferred. As we get to the end, we learn New Girl is also unique, but excessively so. Her uniqueness is ultimately not tolerated, except by one. Belle, whose initial response was both welcoming and frosty, comes to be her defender at the end, recognizing something of herself in New Girl. (Perhaps not so unique after all.) What were you hoping readers would take away from Belle’s journey with New Girl?
To carry the metaphor above: It’s good to have friends with spare shovels.
The uniqueness offered in Sunnyvale is a chirpy platitude. It reflects more of a commitment to inflexible optimism and community than genuine individuality, while leaving just enough latitude for personal history or expression.
Enough to be interesting without being a problem.
Belle is a survivor. She sees through Sunnyvale’s cheerful façade—they’re all abandoned toys, after all—but like many people who’ve seen some shit, she recognizes the necessity of community. This isn’t a group that can handle what happened to her; they look askance at her arm and her attitude. She contributes, though, and she’s not unkind, and so the others accept her, even if they don’t—and can’t—understand her.
Then the New Girl arrives. She pushes far beyond the acceptable boundaries of uniqueness, bringing out both the best and worst extremes of Sunnyvale. Like Belle, she wears clues to her trauma on her body, forcing everyone to glimpse it immediately, even if they quickly look away. But the New Girl’s “uniqueness” is far more comprehensive than Belle’s, and the sight generates a collective unease that divides the community. She still gets a bubbly welcome, of course, but she also unearths the nasty, passive-aggressive reality of conformity.
In return, Sunnyvale breaks her.
But when that happens, the community has no choice but to see the New Girl fully, feel what happened to her and to the child that owned her, and understand.
Up to that point, being understood—being witnessed—wasn’t something Belle dared to believe was possible. Not without being cast out, cast aside. Holding the New Girl’s past without flinching allows Belle to let down her armor, just a bit, in return.
You explore quite a bit in this story, from New Girl’s slow revelation of self, to Belle’s shift from aloofness to protective acceptance, to even the small moment of Christine’s origin story and what toys can mean to us when we’re young. Is there anything else about this story that you want readers to take away?
All this talk of trauma, right? Here are a few lighter but nevertheless relevant thoughts.
Community is important—essential, even—but community is built on patience, tolerance, adaptability, generosity, understanding. Conformity shatters too easily. Don’t build community on conformity.
Everyone has a story. Sometimes it’s a true story; sometimes it’s a story they’ve crafted for themselves, to help make sense of a broken world. Occasionally it’s just a heap of self-serving bullshit. You aren’t required to listen, but in some cases, the story—and the person behind it—might be worth your time and care.
On the other hand, if someone insists on being alone in their mini-fridge, give them space.
Play makes life brighter. Sparkly dresses count as play. You can almost certainly make a sparkly dress out of empty Cheetos bags, among many other things. Try it! Send photos!
And, obviously, don’t drive too fast. Especially in a convertible.
What are your primary sources of inspiration? What do you find yourself coming back to, in order to help you create?
I told a friend recently that I often wish I was a ghost—not the dead kind, because that doesn’t sound like much fun at all, but the kind that can move effortlessly through the world, observing everything, unperceived. I love wandering and I love people-watching, and I find both tend to reveal the unexpected.
I’m fortunate enough to have a career that meets all my financial needs, so I travel often, which begets all kinds of unforeseeable adventures. Most recently, an old friend and I were trapped at the top of the third-tallest structure in the world for hours after the elevators broke down. There is no faster way to catch up on twenty years of separate lives than shared captivity. I also accrue art museum memberships and community college credits and beginner-intermediate language fluency like a grade-schooler chasing Skittles on Halloween.
And, of course, I read.
Everything.
Constantly.
Do you have anything upcoming for our readers to look forward to? Where can they follow you to find more of your work?
Like most people these days, I’ve grown wary of the digital realm. I’ve shuttered almost all my social media and online accounts and, as much as possible, am planting my roots deep in the nourishing loam of the analog. I even have a wind-up watch.
However, my full publication history, including upcoming work, is available on my website, sarahgrey.net, and if you’re patient, I can often be reached by email.
I’ll also be at assorted conventions this year, including Worldcon in Los Angeles and World Fantasy in Oakland. I would love to share some unforgivably fruity cocktails and hear other people’s stories.
