Molly Lynch on Canadian Wildfires, Greek Mythology, and Her Debut Novel, ‘The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman‘

In The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman, Molly Lynch’s debut novel, mothers are walking away. They are leaving their homes and minivans, missing school pickups and dinners—first a few and then dozens, across the United States. The news on the radio is the soundtrack to this mass-quitting, and it’s a ticker tape of climate disaster—waters polluted through deregulation, and fires raging in Western Canada, not unlike the fires that are raging this summer. And now the local NPR station is reporting that Ada Berger, a 39-year-old university writing teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is the mother of a little boy, went to a little wooded park in town and disappeared, her husband—also a professor—distraught and confused, with no apparent foul play to blame. In the opening pages of this meditative climate-crisis thriller, Ada, who was raised in the western woods of Canada, feels lost in the chaos of a gunned-up and over-incarcerated U.S. Shortly before she vanishes, she meets another writer, asking, “Have you noticed how you can’t see the future and that makes it hard.”

It is not a spoiler to say that capitalism is running amuck, and through Ada’s disappearance, Lynch’s sharp eye takes us takes us into dark territories of metamorphosis that seem otherworldly but are, terrifyingly, here. “More mothers are leaving,” an FBI agent desperately tells Ada. “There must be a bigger problem,” Ada replies. “Can your agents handle bigger problems?” The bigger problem, as Lynch said when I spoke with her on the phone the other day, “is a civilization in which the destruction and mistreatment of land goes hand in hand with the abuse of all bodies.” In Lynch’s tale, these missing women make the news in a way that, Ada notes, indigenous women and women of color do not. But what’s so hard for the cops and everyone else to understand is why the women who are perceived to benefit from this civilization choose to walk away. When I called her up, Lynch was in Ann Arbor, and the fires from Eastern Canada had just descended on the U.S.’s East Coast, so I asked her about fires where she grew up.

Molly Lynch: I am originally from the West Coast, and fires have just become such a normal part of life there. The smoke just completely consumes summertime; [there is] smoke that just invades. And so, yes, it’s been kind of interesting to see that happen on the East Coast, and see how people experience something that has become increasingly quite a normal part of summertime over there—and a horrible, horrible part of it. You can’t not look at it. It’s in your view. It’s all around you. And the smoke, of course, is connected to much bigger problems.

Vogue: Forests and trees are everywhere in the novel, as expansive and seemingly powerful woods, but also as smaller patches that are in cities but feel equally expansive. We learn that Ada grew up in the woods, in the west of Canada. How about you?