Elisabeth Thomas’s debut, Catherine House, is a modern take on more traditional stories with a gothic feel. Set on the campus of a mysterious, elite liberal arts university, this novel follows a cohort of students across three years of studies as they slowly learn there is a dark underbelly just below the surface of the school’s beautiful facade.
Read on to learn more about how Thomas’s personal experiences influenced the development of the story and setting, her work as an archivist at the Museum of Modern Art, what song makes her “snap to attention” every time she hears the opening guitar, and much more!
First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily! To start, tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your debut novel, Catherine House.
It’s my pleasure! My name is Elisabeth, or Lissie for short (the S’s are pronounced like Z’s). I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where I still live and very happily so. Catherine House is a gothic literary suspense novel about a young woman who goes to a mysterious cult-like college, where she finds dark secrets lurking beneath the school’s promise of prestige. I wrote the first draft soon after graduating college myself. Now, all these years later, it’s so thrilling to welcome readers into my world.
Catherine House was partially inspired by your time studying at Yale University. I understand that both your father and grandfather attended Yale as well, however they had much different experiences than you. Could you talk a bit about these experiences and how they influenced your novel?
My grandfather graduated from Yale back in the 1950s, when he was one of three black men in his class. His experience there was difficult, to say the least. His son—my dad—ended up going to Yale too, and had a similarly poisonous experience; he ended up taking a mental health leave and then dropping out. When it was my turn to apply to college, my dad said, “You can go anywhere you like, as long as it’s not Yale.” I like to say that going to Yale was my big teenage rebellion, but mostly it happened to be a practical choice. So I went. And I was excited to get a good education, but I certainly felt no tenderness for “Good Old Yale” the way many of my classmates did. I thought of it as an old, racist, antiquated institution that had hurt my family. I just wanted to get my degree and get out.
But I ended up having a great time at Yale. How could I not? The campus was gorgeous; the classes were challenging and thrilling; there were thirteen different dining halls serving feasts of grass-fed burgers and wood-fired pizzas. And my friends were always so close, hanging out in the dorm down the hall or studying in the library carrel next to mine. I realized that since my dad and grandpa’s days, expensive private colleges like Yale really have to sell themselves on happiness, on quality of life—and they’re good at it. I still feel no affection for Yale as an institution, but I will happily sing the fight song at a football game. I find that cognitive dissonance so interesting, and I wanted to explore it through this story.
There are many elements woven together in Catherine House — a Gothic feel in a non-traditional private school setting, plenty of suspense, and the conundrum that is coming-of-age, just to name a few. Aside from your experience at Yale as discussed above, what other influences led to the idea for this novel?
Growing up, I liked classic Gothic novels like Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Frankenstein, and fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard. With Catherine House, I wanted to play with some of the tropes from those stories—the haunted houses and damsels in distress, the strange labs with dangerous secrets—but create something that felt contemporary, lively, and realistic in its own twisted way.
As indicated toward the beginning of the book this story is set in 1996, which is a choice I absolutely love. Why did you choose the mid-’90s as the right time period to set this story down in?
That was a tricky decision. I wanted the story to feel modern but somewhat outside of time, both for readers and the characters, the students at the school. But in a logistical sense, it couldn’t have been contemporary. Students who go to Catherine House are asked to give up all connection to the outside world, and I don’t think kids these days would go three years without an iPhone, no matter how good the school. That’s just too far-fetched. So already I was thinking it had to be set some time before your average teenager had a laptop and cellphone. And then to keep it feeling timeless, I didn’t want the turn of the millennium to happen while they were at school, or September 11th. So there I had it! The story is set from fall 1996 to summer 1999.
Catherine House has a much more diverse cast of characters than the reader may expect based upon traditional novels with a Gothic feel or those set in a “private school” setting. What do you hope the reader will take away from this diversity?
There was no doubt in my mind that I would cast Catherine House with a diverse set of characters. First of all, my family, friends, and communities are so diverse in so many ways—race, gender, sexuality, class—and I will always write stories that ring true to my experience of the world. That said, I also wanted to play with the idea of creating a fictional environment that’s diverse but surreally frictionless in its diversity. At Catherine, students of all different races sit together at the same table in the cafeteria. I don’t think that’s realistic, or at least that hasn’t necessarily been my experience in life. But that’s part of the Catherine dream world.
Your novel is as much, if not more, about Catherine House itself as it is about those who inhabit the house. Without giving any spoilers, can you talk a bit about how you use the house as a character, a tool, in the story?
From the beginning, I wanted this novel to tell the story of a girl who falls in love with a house. In romances, tales of great love—both real and fictional—love is pleasurable but dangerous, and perhaps pleasurable because it is dangerous. Catherine House has those pleasures and dangers, but Ines, our main character, is not falling in love with a person, but a house as a time and place in her life that is so vivid and poignant.
The themes of identity, feeling lost, and trying to find one’s place in the world are explored throughout your novel. There is also a unique desperation to many of the students who attend Catherine House. They often have nowhere else to go; they feel enamoured by their unique situation, yet also feel tethered to it or restrained within the confines of the house. Why was it important to you to explore these themes?
I think I’m attracted to these themes because they’re so universal. Everyone goes through periods of feeling lost, of not knowing who we are, where to go, or what to do next. But even though we all have those moments, we feel so lonely when they’re happening. And they make us so vulnerable. When we’re desperate for any sense of belonging, any sense of a sure way forward—sometimes we ignore warning bells that we really shouldn’t.
Talking about the past is not allowed at Catherine House. The school seems to acknowledge how the past influences who the students have become, but focuses on moving them away from these experiences and memories. Could you talk a bit about this choice and how it fits into your overarching goals with the novel?
In designing Catherine House, the school, I did some research into the workings of cults and similar social groups. I learned that many of these groups promise that once you’ve joined, you’re a new person. You let go your dysfunctions, your traumas, your memories, maybe even your name, and become someone completely new. For some people, that can be a very attractive promise.
At Yale you studied art history and you now work as an archivist for The Museum of Modern Art. The narrator in Catherine House, Ines, also chooses to study art. Could you talk a bit about the connection between your love of art and your writing interests, how these things worked together for you?
I grew up surrounded by art; my mom is an artist, a painter and collagist. But I never wanted to be a visual artist, and appreciating art never came as naturally to me as loving books. I think that’s why I studied art history in college; it’s something I admired but didn’t quite understand, at least not in the way I understand writing. I did end up falling in love with art history, as a field, and now love my job. But in terms of my writing career, I think the best thing about it is that it’s a perfect nine to five. I love the museum, love my coworkers, and love my work, and at the end of the day I love that I have time and energy to go home and write.
I’m curious about your process of writing this debut novel. How long did it take to complete? Are there certain techniques or processes you used to create the unique setting and atmosphere of this tale?
It took me about four years from the earliest draft to signing the deal with my publisher. It feels both longer than shorter than that! In terms of creating the Catherine House setting, a lot of it came very naturally to me. The house is in rural Pennsylvania, a place I spent a lot of time in as a child, and I could draw on my own college experience for the school atmosphere. For Catherine’s architecture, I pieced together some research into glamorous estates like the Biltmore and Whitehall. But after a certain point—it was pure imagination! And that was very, very fun.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: Probably the Boxcar Children books, the Baby-Sitters Club books, Little House on the Prairie… anything I could buy at the Scholastic Book Fair.
- 3 books you would take on a desert island: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, to remind me of home.
- Movie that you know by heart: The Last Unicorn. I watched it at least once a day as a kid.
- Song that makes you want to get up and dance: Honestly, I love dancing, so it doesn’t take much! But I’ll say Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” That opening guitar always makes me snap to attention.
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: The ocean.
- Introvert or extrovert: An introvert, absolutely.
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Tea! A mug of PJ Tips with sugar and a splash of half-and-half, every single morning.
- First job: Babysitting, I suppose.
- Person you admire most and why: My grandparents, for more reasons than I can say.
