Q&A: Tara Isabella Burton, Author of ‘Here In Avalon’

We chat with author Tara Isabella Burton about her latest release Here In Avalon, which is a New York City fairy tale about two sisters that fall under the spell of an underworld cabaret troupe that might be a dangerous cult—but one that makes the materialist world left in its wake feel like a sinister cult itself.

Hi, Tara! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I’m a novelist, theologian, and culture critic living in New York City.  Most of my work, fiction and nonfiction alike, deals with the hunger and hunt for transcendence and enchantment in what seems to be a secular age.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

I’ve never not wanted to be a writer — if you go far enough down the Google rabbit hole, you can probably find the self-published “novel” I wrote when I was a preteen (I don’t recommend doing this, though, it’s not good!) When I was younger, I also wanted to be an academic theologian — I got my master’s and doctorate in Theology over in Oxford — but during my graduate studies, realized that I preferred writing for a wider general audience than to a narrower academic audience, and that I wanted the geographic flexibility that came with a freelance life, so I moved back to NYC and took a job as the staff religion reporter for Vox.com, leaving to write my first nonfiction book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. For me, my fiction and my nonfiction reinforce each other: they help me explore the ideas that obsess me in different forms. But at heart, I’m a novelist first and a culture critic second; my truest love is telling stories, and I think novels allow us to wrestle with the tensions and contradictions of faith, doubt, and the ways the stories we tell inevitably diverge from a truth we can never fully understand.

With it being the new year, are you setting any goals or resolutions for 2024?

To be less online, for sure — it’s a resolution I set (and break) every year. But I want to live a life where I’m in control of my Internet usage for limited professional and personal ends, and spend the rest of the time being fully present: reading print books, being with the people I love, cultivating my faculties of attention, which have unfortunately been eroded by too many years of scrolling Reddit on the subway. I’m also trying to be more open: to set fewer formal goals and expectations for myself, and for my life, and to approach it instead with a greater spirit of curiosity and receptivity. We’ll see how those two go.

Your latest novel, Here in Avalon, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

New York Gothic cult fairytale.

What can readers expect?

For me, Here in Avalon is a cross between a literary fairy-tale, a “puzzle mystery” about an apparent kidnapping, and a story about what may or may not be a cult: the story of two very different adult sisters who fall, one by one, under the spell of a mysterious New York midnight theatre troupe — or something that seems to be a theatre troupe — that only appears to the city’s lost and loneliest souls, and who destroy — or transform — their very different lives as a result. It’s very much set in the real New York City of 2023-4: albeit a slightly skewed, perhaps a little bit enchanted version of New York — an enchantment that comes less from the supernatural than from the way its characters come to view it. The Avalon is at once the fulfillment of every disaffected theatre kid’s childhood dream, and also something much darker and more dangerous — a tension that always appears when we try to escape from reality.

Where did the inspiration for Here in Avalon come from?

I was a huge fan of Sleep No More, the immersive/interacting theatre show by Punchdrunk, in my early twenties — there was a time where my entire New York social life revolved around going to the show, obsessing about interacting with its characters, wishing I could live in that alternate reality: itself a sort of mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the 1930’s, and a Hitchcock film. When we couldn’t afford the show itself — which was quite steep — my friends and I would wait at a 24-hour diner until 2 am, when the weekend late shows finished and the show’s Art Deco bar area would open up to the general public for a late-night cabaret. I wanted to write a book that captured the hunger I felt then — and many times since — as well that capacious feeling of being with chosen family, of feeling like you’ve finally “figured out” the whole world, that you can somehow solve your life and everybody else’s by living in this dreamlike, enchanted way. But those moments, inevitably, come to an end.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

For me the hardest but more rewarding character to write was Paul, Cecilia’s estranged, acerbic, and stubbornly loyal husband. After Cecilia’s disappearance, he and Cecilia’s younger sister Rose team up to solve the mystery of the Avalon to find her — finding themselves drawn together in the process. A frustrating character, as in love with the idea of Cecilia as with Cecilia herself, Paul needed to simultaneously be deeply flawed and yet compelling enough for us to understand why Rose would find herself questioning her whole life after knowing him. He changed a lot from draft to draft of the novel, but ultimately, I hope, ended up an infuriating yet deeply human character.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

• The first book you ever remember reading: Not counting picture books? The Emily of New Moon series — I always preferred mournful, mystical Emily to Anne of Green Gables, although I’ve come to appreciate both series with time. As a teenager? The Picture of Dorian Gray — the first book that really transformed my worldview (or at least, transformed me into some kind of obesssively aesthetic theatre kid aching to live life as art).
• The one that made you want to become an author: The two novels that made me think most seriously about the moral business of writing a novel — what art is really for — are George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: probably two of my favorites to this day. Both books are simultaneously incredible novels and invitations to think about what storytelling does — and, no less importantly, what it cannot do — when it comes to helping us understand the world and each other.
• The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Magda Szabo’s The Door. A disturbing Hungarian novel that’s stuck with me a disproportionate amount of time…

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a nonfiction history of magic and modernity, to be released by Convergent in 2025 or 2026! And I’m working on a fourth novel, too, but that’s top secret for now.

Lastly, are there any 2024 book releases that you’re looking forward to?

I am very excited about  The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo: a historical novel with fantastical elements set during the Spanish Golden Age.

Will you be picking up Here In Avalon? Tell us in the comments below!