We chat with co-authors Robyn Barrow and Alex Cronin behind the pen name Quinn Connor about Your Beloved Remains, which sees fascination turn to obsession where two women drag each other into an academic horror of forgery, murder, and rage, destined to be devoured by readers of Plain Bad Heroines and If We Were Villains.
Your Beloved Remains follows archivist Celia Kiel on the remote Arkansas campus of Basin College. After finding an unfinished manuscript, she attempts to save the legacy of her literary hero 19th century writer Beatrice Donahue. After Celia reluctantly joins forces with her professional rival Joan Harriot, the two embark on a dark collaboration wrapped up in the dangers of obsession. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write this story?
Robyn: We really wanted to write a book about collaboration. “How do you do it?!” is one of the questions we get most often about our co-writing, and we thought it would be exciting to imagine how a similar relationship might become toxic.
Your Beloved Remains also came from my complicated feelings about being a graduate student in the humanities for eight years. As I was getting close to finishing my dissertation, all the resentment and complication of being a thirty-year-old eternal student boiled over. Especially as colleges and universities were capitulating to financial pressures from the government and trustees, I wanted to explore the dark side of higher education — from the inside. A lot of “Dark Academia” is written with less experience of the university than I have, so I think we bring a whole different perspective to the project.
With the story’s setting, could you talk about your relationship with writing stories in Arkansas? What connection do you feel to Arkansas as a setting in your stories and how do you feel that comes to life in your novels like Your Beloved Remains?
Robyn: I am from Arkansas and have very deep roots in a home that usually seems to be either underestimated/ridiculed or totally defined by its extremely conservative government. But Arkansas is beautiful and complicated, full of untold and alternative stories. As queer people from the South, we love to write about queer people with sharp edges navigating life in the South. In Your Beloved Remains, we dive into the interesting collision that is a liberal arts education in the rural South (we met at a liberal arts school in Memphis, TN). We also wanted to pay homage to histories of Southern literature, so the book is full of little Southern gothic easter eggs.
While Your Beloved Remains shows the struggles of Celia and Harriot working together in academia, you are also an author duo that met in an academic setting. Can you talk a bit about what it’s like to work together as a duo on books like Your Beloved Remains? How do you feel that spirit of collaboration has allowed you to understand the dynamic between Celia and Harriot in the novel?
Alex: Creative collaboration like this is inherently vulnerable. You’re asking someone to accept your ideas at the most fragile, raw and unrealized state, and not to crush it. The biggest lesson that Robyn and I have learned is that above all, you have to care about your relationship with your collaborator above the project, and about the project above your pride.
Characters are often vessels for bad ideas, taking us to extremes we’d never go to ourselves. We’ve experienced enough hurt feelings over 13 years writing together to understand what can go wrong. Celia and Harriot are what happens when you can’t establish those creative boundaries or shelve your pride. They’ve been a wonderfully unhinged chance to follow that seed of emotion—wounded pride—to its absolute end.
Their toxic collaboration is only fun to write because ours is so safe.
Though Celia and Harriot’s relationship puts them at odds through their own veneration of Beatrice, they also hold a lot of passion for each other. What does it mean for you to be able to depict the stories of queer women in the south?
Robyn: There are so many vibrant LGBTQIA+ stories held in Southern soil. Being a small part of that legacy is a real joy for us. In Your Beloved Remains, we explore multiple kinds of queer dynamics, with Celia and Harriot, but also with Beatrice Donahue and her lover Roland.
We found each other at a southern college and fell in love there by writing together. That was more than a decade ago now and, for a long time, it felt scary to discover these queer identities. Before we were ready to admit that our relationship was more than friendship, telling stories together was a conduit. That context made Celia and Harriot’s venomous, sexy relationship so much fun to write! And—Alex and I were absolutely flirting with each other while we were writing it.
The anchor of the novel is Celia’s reverence for Beatrice Donahue. The narrative really portrays how this reverence crosses over into something more sinister and akin to obsession. How would you describe the characters’ idolization of Beatrice and what they are willing to do in her name? What do you think of obsession and the role it plays within the horror genre?
Alex: Horror lets us process the awful bits of being a human being, and it’s most effective when it’s rooted in real truth: grief, loss of self, trauma. Obsession is a part of the horror genre because obsession is about control, and control is about fear.
As Celia tells it, she was a lonely child with neglectful parents, who grew up totally isolated.. Beatrice was her childhood imaginary friend. Finally as an adult, Celia is the keeper of her legacy and her archive. She has built her entire life around her loneliness and the one balustrade that she felt kept her safe: this imagined, idealized version of Beatrice.
Ever since, Celia has been locked in a cycle of denial and fantasy. Even though it has ruined her ability to live in a normal world, it offers her safety and control. But as she grows up, it is becoming harder to maintain.
Celia is deeply afraid. Idolizing and keeping Beatrice feels to Celia like a matter of life or death, but no one else understands it or cares. In Celia’s perspective she is screaming for help from inside a burning house and being ignored. So her fear grows until there is nothing she won’t do to survive.
Both Celia and Harriot ultimately engage in some nefarious choices that truly make them such interesting characters to follow. What intrigues you about writing villainous women in horror? How do you feel Celia and Harriot fit within the broader landscape of how women are depicted in the horror genre?
Robyn: Broadly speaking, we’re seeing a major rise in villainy among women characters, especially in horror. The female rage is raging! Celia and Harriot are in great company. In Your Beloved Remains, we wanted to write anti-heroines that even readers aren’t totally on-board with. Misbehaving women that readers might have complicated feelings about. Harriot, for instance, is stuck in this bizarre conflict between her own second-wave feminist values (the book is set in 1984) and the internalized misogyny she’s absorbed in the university. It makes her pretty insufferable. Meanwhile, Celia experiences such a sharp and alarming descent into her worst instincts and emotions. Femininity is so often about women controlling themselves and their emotions so having women that are able to be unrestrained to the point of horror is really fun and freeing. I hope both characters will bring something slightly new to the page for readers!
Without giving away any spoilers, what was one of your favorite scenes in the book to write?
Alex: The cave. The cave! Celia and Harriot descend from campus into Hogscald Hollow in an attempt to understand Beatrice’s state of mind as she was writing her lost masterpiece. They discover a spring hidden inside a cave and take a drink …
What books are currently on your nightstand?
Alex: The Pecan Children and Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves, by Quinn Connor; The Likeness, Tana French; It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror; and The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin.
Robyn: Taiwanese Travelogue; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; Japanese Gothic; and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Lastly, we have to ask – what are you working on next? Without giving too much away, can you give readers any hints as to what they can expect from your next book?
Alex: Another Quinn project is always on the horizon (probably a serial killer thriller about alpine divorce), but this summer I’m also deep in the swamp of drafting my solo debut! It’s a horror comedy where a college student struggling to belong discovers that strange creatures are invading her campus. Under the guise of rightwing morality, they start enacting jarring changes — but their real goal is more sinister. And only Cheri and her secret dorm cat can stop them.
