Article contributed by Yakira Goldsberry
Raised in a cult that believes Outsiders are evil, Agnes is the perfect daughter, the perfect sister. What no one knows is that once a month, she sneaks out to meet an Outsider to get medicine for her little brother. Agnes is afraid of the outside and the pandemic that is sweeping the nation, but she is afraid of her little brother dying without his medicine so she must choose in Kelly McWilliam’s dystopian novel, Agnes at the End of the World.
Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Kelly about her novel, her inspiration, the oddities of releasing a book about a pandemic in the year 2020, and more!
Hi Kelly! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m a YA writer currently based in Colorado Springs, though I’ve lived all over. I have a three-year old daughter. When I’m not writing, I’m usually hiking or spending time outdoors.
What is the main message of Agnes at the End of the World? What would you like your readers to take away from it?
Agnes at the End of the World tells the story of a girl who escapes from a doomsday cult only to discover the Outside world has succumbed to a terrible pandemic. There’s some tragic irony involved, because even after Agnes bravely escapes from an oppressive fundamentalist sect, her fight isn’t over. She expected to find a better, more tolerant world on the Outside—a world where she and her brother can live peacefully and freely—but instead, she must struggle to survive in an apocalyptic landscape.
I sometimes say, only half-jokingly, that my biggest inspiration for the story came from the experience of graduating college in the midst of the Great Recession. I’d prepared myself to begin my life the best way I knew how, but it wasn’t enough. The sands shifted beneath our feet, and we all had to adapt. We had to learn, in fact, how to create the world we wanted to live in, and I think we’re still creating this better, more equitable world today.
Agnes and her band of survivors learn that faith is the antidote to despair. In the context of the story, it doesn’t really matter what you put your faith in, as long you put your faith in something. Agnes believes in a higher power, in God (though I’d argue that learning to believe in herself is just as important to her journey). However, Danny, Agnes’s love interest, is an atheist who puts all his faith in science and public health measures. He believes medicine will come to the world’s rescue, and so he, too, never despairs. Another character believes in the divinatory power of butterflies, and Ezekiel, Agnes’s eight-year old brother, puts all his faith in Agnes herself.
When we despair, we give up. When we hope, we keep going. Young people today are facing so much—political upheaval, economic uncertainty, climate change. If Agnes at the End of the World is a message-in-a-bottle to young people the world over, the message is simply that the world can’t end unless we let it. Yes, we may not like what we see of the world today, but a powerful vision can reshape the future. I wanted to embolden young people to dream their best visions of who we might be as a society, then fight like heck to bring those visions to life.
Publishing a book about a pandemic during 2020 must be pretty crazy! What was your experience releasing Agnes to the world like?
Agnes at the End of the World released on June 9, in the midst of a pandemic (I wrote a bit about releasing a pandemic book into a pandemic for Publisher’s Weekly, here). I was supposed to travel to Seattle for my first-ever book signing, but of course, the event was rightly cancelled. At first, I felt bewildered to see my best-laid plans dissolve so quickly, but these days, I’m feeling hopeful about the book world. I’ve had the immense pleasure of watching bookstores pivot to virtual events—I participated in about a dozen of these, at bookstores all over the country—and I was able to attend a festival that I couldn’t have made if I’d needed to travel. All the time, effort, and creativity book people have poured into reaching their audiences in new ways has been truly inspiring. We are watching society change and adapt in real-time, and in many ways, that’s what Agnes at the End of the World is all about. Just last week, I Zoomed into a high school creative writing class in North Carolina. Our new facility with virtual platforms made that possible, and in this time of heart-wrenching grief, meeting them is one memory I’ll treasure.
I admit, however, that releasing this particular book has been uncanny. My story is about a pandemic and a social revolution (after her terrible experience in the misogynistic, oppressive doomsday cult, Agnes essentially creates her own religion and starts a new society)—and, ironically, 2020 will be forever defined by the pandemic we’ve faced and the Black Lives Matter movement, calling for social change in response to systemic racism.
It’s also a book about parenting through hardship. Though Agnes is only 16, she’s responsible for her eight-year old brother. This summer, I had the incredibly weird experience of looking to my own character for parenting advice. How do I comfort a small child in the midst of chaos? How do I get my family through this unforeseen darkness? How do we, as individuals and as a culture, manage our fear, our grief for those we’ve lost? I certainly never imagined that Agnes’s lessons would apply so well to my own, lived experience.
What was the main inspiration for your novel? How did the world of Agnes come to be?
Agnes at the End of the World is a genre mashup: a cult escape novel crossed with a pandemic novel. I was inspired by a pregnancy dream, a vision of a young girl crossing a desert landscape carrying a young child. I decided she was running from a cult, because cults were quite common where I grew up, in the Southwest desert. Back in Arizona, I lived fairly close to a real-life cult as a child—in school, we constantly talked about that particular sect, whose Prophet is now imprisoned. I remain fascinated by cults and the horrific damage they do to a person’s identity, their very soul. I tend to write about what scares me; sort of like dreaming awake. So, I think I chose to write a cult escape novel to process some of those unresolved childhood fears.
As for the pandemic aspect: Toward the end of my pregnancy, the Zika virus became a global concern, and I happened to live in Honolulu, a tropical landscape that was a home to the mosquitos that transmitted the virus. Sadly, Zika has a catastrophic impact on fetuses. Though Zika ultimately never took hold in Hawaii the way it did elsewhere in the world, the local NPR station began warning pregnant women to stay away from standing bodies of water, and television hosts advised us to wear mosquito repellent at all times. I caught a chilling glimpse of how life could turn inside out, all because of a tiny organism, invisible to the human eye. That was three years ago—I had no idea how the novel coronavirus would eventually change all our lives. Once again, I was dreaming my deepest fears—my worst-case scenarios—in my writing.
Agnes and Beth have to be one of my favorite sister duos. They are so different, yet so alike in many ways. What was one of your favorite things about writing them?
I often joke that while Agnes wants to save the world, her sister (and co-narrator) Beth mostly just wants to get a lower-back tattoo. But I don’t really mean to minimize Beth’s desires. Our so-called “selfish” wants are also valuable, because they’re how we define ourselves as people; they’re how we assert our very freedom.
Both Agnes and Beth grow up in the same family, in the same cult, but their personalities are incredibly different. Agnes is who I want to be on a good day: selfless, brave, with an unfailing moral compass. But Beth is closer to who I really was as a teenager—and to how most people really are, especially at a young age! She wants the freedom to dress as she pleases, a boyfriend, and the love of her family, and all this makes her so relatable. She makes a lot of mistakes, but I always enjoyed writing her perspective. Because she wasn’t a superhero, like Agnes, I had room to play—sometimes, Beth made me laugh aloud! I feel quite lucky, because I got to write a superheroine and a “normal” girl; I got to capture what seems to me the duality of desires that live inside every young woman.
The way you wrote the pandemic in your novel was both beautiful and terrifying. What was the main inspiration for a disease that turned animals/people into “nests”?
You know, to this day, I have no idea exactly where those Nests came from! I think they call back a bit to Lovecraft’s brand of horror, and to some of the work of Stephen King that influenced me so much as a young person. There’s an element of The Walking Dead in there, too—my own, odd version of zombie fiction.
But I think, on a deeper level, the Nests are a metaphor. My book is about a cult, which represents the unhealthiest form of human connection, but it’s also about a band of survivors who come to love each other tremendously. Whenever people come together to form religions, governments, or social groups, there is a threat of disaster: Over the course of history, human beings have joined forces to create truly monstrous regimes. The red Nests, where essentially zombified people twine their limbs together to form these horrible, crystal-red statues and completely lose their individuality in service of the group, reflect monstrousness. On the other hand, people need each other to survive, and when we come together we also have an opportunity to make something truly beautiful.
The Nests are like a warning sign to Agnes, who’s seen the damage a cult can do, and is trying to decolonize her own mind. She must learn how to grow a community where people relate to each other in healthy ways. Really, that’s the challenge we all face, all the time.
In your book, you incorporate religion as a theme. What led you to adding this as an important element in your story?
Two things. First, religion and spirituality aren’t well-represented in young adult literature, for one very good reason: No one wants to preach to young people through their stories! However, most Americans grow up with religion of some kind, and often, we have to decide if that religion is really suited to us. There are fundamentalist strains of thought in mainstream religions, too, and every day teenagers make the painful decision to leave the only spiritual home they’ve ever known to protect a part of their identity that their practiced religion seeks to belittle. It’s so important we talk more about religion—both its positives, and its negatives—because it’s a crucial part of social life for many. We have to talk about what’s toxic in a religious setting, and we also have to talk about what’s valuable.
Second, I incorporated religion because, as it turns out, cults are very hard to escape. I learned early on that I needed to provide Agnes with a very deep well to draw strength from, and in her case, that’s her belief in God—though it’s not necessarily a form of God most religions would recognize. Agnes believes everything on earth has a soul, a song. Because she believes this in the depth of herself, it follows that she too has worth, and deserves better than a demeaning life in an oppressive polygamist cult. It is Agnes’s deep spirituality that gives her the strength to leave her religion, and to dream of the better, more inclusive religion she goes on to create.
I am in awe of faith, and the strength that it imparts—the sense of self-worth, of direction. And yet, I’m also wary of faith, because it can be quite quickly turned against us. We must be discerning, critical, and outspoken in our defense of what we know is right. Religion should never make you feel smaller; it should never tear you down because of who you are. Quite the opposite: your spiritual life should uplift you. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to start asking some hard questions.
Writing about a cult must have been both interesting and eye-opening to research. What were some interesting things you learned?
Fascinatingly, I learned that most cults operate in basically the same ways. For instance, they all overload their followers with work, which restricts sleep and the ability to think critically. They all have a tendency to throw one hundred and one constantly-changing rules at their followers, to keep them off-balance and uncertain. Many of them specifically target women for oppression and designate certain cultures or races as inherently evil; there’s nearly always an outsider vs. insider mindset, an insistence on “us” against “them.” In addition, malignant cults all commit what seems to me one of the greatest possible evils: They turn a human being’s natural impulse toward faith, a belief in something greater, against them.
Most people think that they couldn’t be hoodwinked by a cult, but that simply isn’t true. People don’t succumb to cult influence because they’re weak; they succumb because cults know how to control the human mind. Protein deprivation, sleep deprivation, repetition of key phrases—for instance, “perfect obedience produces perfect faith”—and painful physical trials all impair your ability to think clearly, and that’s never an accident. We should never, ever look down on cult members or cult survivors, because really, it can happen to anyone. People in malignant cults, like victims of domestic violence, are truly victims.
Everything about your book, to me, was beautifully written, and I have many favorite scenes. Do you have a favorite scene you wrote?
I do have a favorite scene, but I have to attach a spoiler alert! While Agnes is able to escape from the cult, her sister Beth doesn’t make it out in time. She winds up imprisoned in a doomsday bunker, where everyone is quite likely going to die. Beth has to dig deep down into her soul to discover her own will to live, and when she does, it’s like she’s reborn. I loved capturing that transformation, the horror and beauty of it. I felt so proud when I finished that scene, because I really felt I’d hit on something true. When we’re all alone in the dark and trapped, possibly, with something monstrous, how do we defeat our fear? After we’ve suffered abuse, how do we decide that despite what the world tells us, we, ourselves, are worth fighting for?
And lastly, what can you tell us of any future projects?
I’m working on a YA historical fiction novel called MIRROR GIRLS. It’s the story of Black twin sisters born in the Jim Crow South. One is light enough to pass for white, but the other is obviously Black. They’re separated at birth after the murder of their parents, and must reunite as teenagers, to bring the truth to light.
