At its core, Lindsay Hunter’s Hot Springs Drive is a novel about a tragic and violent crime that rocks a community, wrecks two families, and rends to shreds the close friendship between two women, Jackie and Theresa, in a small community. In Hunter’s capable hands, however, this story grows and pushes against the boundaries of crime fiction. I spoke with Hunter about true crime, impossible choices, and how reading begets writing.
Stephen Patrick Bell: This is a book about two women and their friendship, but there are many other observers, many other voices, many other lenses the reader gets to observe them through. How did you decide which characters you wanted to have speak before and after the murder?
Lindsay Hunter: As I was drafting this novel, I was thinking of it as almost a shattered windshield, or a crazy quilt. Something made of shards but that, together, was a whole thing. Initially, I had Jackie in both first- and third-person narration. I wanted readers to have access to her story, the way she’d tell it, but also glimpse a more objective truth about her. I thought that was pretty clever. Huge red flag for a writer, when we think we’re clever. As I revisited the novel in the editing process, this fell flat. It just seemed like I’d forgotten to choose a perspective. I chose to stay with first person because I needed people to get really, really close to Jackie. Uncomfortably close. I wanted readers to see her. Jackie is, in my opinion, a reliable narrator. She just chooses what to tell you. She gets as close as she can to facing herself, but she never quite goes all the way. That kind of narrator was huge for this novel. She was truthful, but the truth she was telling just wasn’t the whole story. What she isn’t telling you, what you don’t see, that kept me obsessed as I wrote. That’s what keeps me obsessed when I think of crimes like this, the people involved in them, the aftermath.
SPB: The ghoulish excitement that surrounds the true crime genre and certain functions of the criminal justice system play a huge part of Hot Springs Drive. What shapes did your research journey take when working on this book?
LH: I would say that the research was all said and done by the time I began writing this book. I’d been consuming true crime for decades at that point. I felt a mild shame about it—queuing up Cold Case Files while, honest to god, wrapping Christmas presents. Just a lovely, cozy evening with eggnog and Bill Kurtis describing the worst day of someone’s life. Why did I keep returning, again and again? Why did I inhale every good—and not so good—true crime podcast I could find? I have tried to consider this as a human and as a writer. I think of the time when I was a child and a man removed the screen from my bedroom window, crawled in, and began searching my room for something to steal. I woke up to a flashlight sweeping my room and someone rummaging around on my dresser. I assumed it was my father. “Dad?” I whispered, and the flashlight swung around into my face. At that point I knew it wasn’t my dad, or anyone else I knew. I rolled over onto my stomach and squeezed my eyes shut. The man approached. I felt his hand pat my bottom. “Good girl,” he said. Somehow, I fell back to sleep. In the morning, my mother’s purse was missing, found later with its contents strewn across a neighbor’s lawn. What stuck with me, what sticks with me, was the terror I felt, the horror at his touch, the relief that I’d done something to please him, that he didn’t hurt me.
True crime, I think, offers a way for me to understand terror on a human level. To search for clues, for something recognizable. I think that is how most writers—and readers—approach life. We are looking for a way in, a way to see with eyes very different from our own. I have, however, come to despise true-crime pop culture that lauds the serial killer, that holds him in awe. Much more meaningful to me is the kind of true crime that examines the community, the families, the time period, the reverberations.
SPB: The incomprehensible nuggets of terror in our lives so often become the nuclei of our obsessions. I think you’re right about how this gives true crime a certain pull. I think Hot Springs Drive does a great job of underlining the ways in which violence is a community issue; there is a victim and a perpetrator, but they were members of an entire community that is rocked by the murder. We get a few key moments looking at the crime scene from the perspective of journalists and law enforcement, people less grounded in the community where the crime takes place. How did you intend for the ways they experience the crime scene and the surviving family members to change the way the reader views Jackie and Theresa’s stories?
LH: I very much wanted to give space to the outside observer in something like this. The investigative reporter isn’t so “outside”; it’s literally his job to research the family and to peer at each of them closely and analyze every little gesture, but I wanted some way to show how the outside world processes something like this. Or doesn’t. It also lends itself to the banality of violence, the way it is happening all the time all around us, that it is as human (or animal?) an act as childbirth in some ways. Rage, violence, harm, murder. Family, home, love, safety. They co-exist. As an outside observer to the crime this novel was inspired by, I think I was trying to make the world of the book even larger, more encompassing, more whole, by giving voice to the characters less grounded in the community.
I was also always looking for new ways to see the characters. The older I get, the more I understand that perception is fluid, that memories change, that people adapt to the situations they’re in, to the people around them. I’m always looking for what’s “true” in any interaction, but that would be my perception of “true.” Still, it’s meaningful. It’s information.
SPB: You mention Jackie’s foothold in the world. In the book, her thoughts come at us like water from a firehose: long sentences that make palpably real the despairing kind of ennui specific to overwhelmed mothers who lack support at home. In 2023 I read mostly queer literature—I haven’t been bothering myself so much with the concerns of straight people—so Hot Springs Drive was a sobering reminder of all the ways heterosexual pairings can seem designed to breed the sort of desperate domestic tensions that could lead to murder. Jackie’s issues with food and sex lead her to test the boundaries of the world she feels trapped in, ultimately placing her at the center of the speculation around Theresa’s murder. I want to ask you a bit of a loaded question: what could Jackie have done differently and what did she need to make better choices? Who in her circle failed her?
LH: Man. I don’t even like thinking about that question because it makes me sad. In one sense, I don’t like letting her off the hook so easily. At a certain point, in your adulthood, you either take responsibility for yourself, or you don’t. But in another sense… I was just at the post office, and a young family was there getting their passports. The father held a toddler and the mother held a newborn. The newborn began to fuss, and then to cry, and then to wail, all while the family was patiently waiting for all the paperwork and processes and oaths they had to get through to get their passports. The mother remained very calm, took the newborn over to a corner, where I believe she thought a bathroom was, maybe to nurse the baby. But there was no bathroom, just a locked door, and she calmed the baby with her face, her voice, strapping her child into the baby seat and rocking it, then rushing back to the counter to take her oath, at which point the child began wailing again. Then the toddler started to cry. The parents remained calm, loving. But I remember times like that. I remember the heat creeping up my body, settling in my face. The guilt I felt because I couldn’t soothe my child properly, was unwilling or unable to take out my breast in front of a dozen strangers. My knowledge that the people around me were trying not to react. I thought to myself, I should walk over and offer to hold my jacket out, shielding her from everyone else’s view, so she could nurse the baby. But surely I’d look like a crazy person, cutting the line, rushing the small family, holding out my coat like strange wings. I teared up, there in line. It’s just so hard, I thought. And no one gets to act like it’s hard.
That, to me, is parenthood, is motherhood. I think affairs can be a split decision borne of desperation, loneliness, the need to be desired, desire itself. Murder can be a similar decision. Simple problem-solving. It’s human to want to feel human. For Jackie, her existence was defined by her marriage, then her children, then her new body and her affair, and then, finally, she was free of it all. Exposed. She failed and was failed in all the ways lots of us are. She just made different choices. Her fatal flaw, to me, was the conversation she had with Douglas, the one you see at the very end of the book. Of everything she did, that was her monstrousness laid bare.
SPB: Jackie’s relationship with food is rather dysfunctional. How much power does food hold in your writing?
LH: Food is a constant. I am a child of nineties diet culture, of learning to hate my body because society told me I should hate it until it was perfect. At which point, what? I’d magically love it? I fought anorexia in high school and college. I simply was not hungry. I could go for days on a slice of American cheese and green tea. It was power for me, control, at a time when my life felt very out of control. And I was praised for my slim body, for the way I was disappearing. I don’t think I’ll ever shake those feelings. Logically, that way of thinking is wrong. Logically, I know that my body has done amazing things, and that I am so strong. Logically, I know my self-perception fluctuates daily, almost hourly. But instinctually, those tendencies remain. I will never stop examining them. Always, I’m obsessed with joining my mind and body, with the ways in which we refuse to do that, and how it seems to be getting worse. I want to inhabit my body. Embody my body. But it’s never, ever easy.
Food, like sex, is information. What is being eaten, how much of it, what is being held back, who is indulging, who is depriving, and where, and how, and why—that’s useful information about a character. It’s tension, conflict, comfort, release.
SPB: I appreciate the way you draw a distinction between a writer and a human, between the writer and the reader. Which of those are you most of the time these days?
LH: I am mostly human/reader these days! I have started a few projects but am focusing on other things as I wade through book publicity / get my mind re-centered / remember who I am and what I do. I believe in breaks, in fallow periods, in getting one’s bearings. But reading is my constant. I feel bereft in those brief moments between books, adrift. I must always be reading a book. I learn and relearn how to write as I read. That was one of the best things I learned in grad school, perhaps the most useful thing: When you want to write, read.
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