When It Turns Out You’re Foreign – GUEST POST by Jennifer Thorne (DIAVOLA)
We’re very excited to welcome Jennifer Thorne to the Hive!
Jennifer’s Italian supernatural thriller Diavola is out this week from Titan Books, and to celebrate, she’s written a guest post about tackling becoming the Other when abroad. Before we hand you over to Jennifer, let’s find out more about her latest novel:
White Lotus meets Hereditary in this uproarious and unsettling dissection of a dysfunctional family and their ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. Perfect for fans of Grady Hendrix and Ronald Malfi
Anna only has one rule for the annual Pace family vacations: tread lightly, and survive.
It isn’t easy when she’s the only who doesn’t seem to fit in. Her twin brother Benny goes with the flow so much he’s practically dissolved, and her high-strung older sister Nicole is so used to everyone-including her blandly docile husband and two young daughters-falling in line that Anna often ends up chastised for simply asking a question. Her Mom is baffled by Anna’s life choices (why waste her artistic talent at an ad agency?), and her Dad-well, he just wants a little peace and quiet.
The gorgeous villa outside a remote Tuscan town seems like the perfect place to endure so much family time-not to mention Benny’s demanding new boyfriend, Christopher. If her family becomes too much to handle, then at least Anna can wander off to a wine tasting or lose herself in an art gallery. That is, until strange things start to happen-strange noises at night, food rotting within hours, dreams that feel more like memories. Then, the unsettling warnings from the locals: don’t open the tower door.
But Anna does open it. And what she releases threatens to devour her family-that is, if her family doesn’t tear itself apart first.
Diavola is out tomorrow, 26th March, from Titan Books. You can order your copy on Bookshop.org
When It Turns Out You’re Foreign
Jennifer Thorne
Nothing undermines your sense of self quite like traveling abroad. Whereas at home, you’ve built routines and structures around yourself, perfectly suited to your own personality quirks, sensory and aesthetic needs, and life priorities, you toss all those trappings aside when you set off for a trip to another country. It doesn’t matter how much luggage you bring along, you’ve left the weightiest baggage behind when you step into a different culture: normal life.
For most people, this abandonment of the usual can be disconcerting. Feeling an alien energy around you, a new flow of traffic. Hearing in every direction a different language from the one you usually speak—even if you’re top of the Duolingo diamond league, there’s a mental adjustment to make. Dining at a later hour, making sense of odd graphics on street signs, navigating labyrinthine streets and subtle cultural nuances and do you tip or not tip and will everyone hate you if you get it wrong? Few things have left me more unsettled, for example, than walking into a completely empty restaurant in the hopes of a spontaneous meal only to be met with a stiffly polite, “Have you made a booking?” in another language.
You can be footloose, fancy free, having a simply marvellous time, but there is still no escaping the truth. You feel it in your gut within minutes of arrival on new shores. You’re a foreigner here. You are not normal.
Now, for those of us already well-accustomed to the sensation of being the weirdo in the crowd, this is perhaps an easier transition to weather. But for those who, at home in the United States, are confidently, solidly secure in their sense of who they are and what they want and what a life well-lived looks like, dammit, this assault on their identity winds up creating that most iconic and obnoxious of traveller types: The Ugly American. (See also, its only mildly more palatable cousin: The Brit Abroad.)
In my horror novel, Diavola, some of the book’s tension stems from a malignant, centuries-old ghost with a propensity for stealing souls, yes, but most of it emanates from the Paces themselves, an upper-middle class American family visiting Tuscany en masse. The best traveller by far among the bunch is our protagonist Anna, the outlier among the Paces, and therefore the family’s black sheep. On a daytrip to Siena, she observes the way her family interacts with the Italian city around them.
“Anna loved the dreamlike feeling of being somewhere new, striding forward into the unfamiliar. It was pleasantly unsettling. Pleasant to her, anyway—she suspected it was that same feeling that made Americans get louder abroad. Her family, for example. They were covering over their disorientation with the familiar—their own language, their own voices.”
This is my perhaps overgenerous explanation for why Americans in other countries are so damn loud. Being the Other feels especially unsafe to people who are usually the majority. There’s an overcompensation that occurs, a bravado that makes the visitor feel insulated even as it announces their presence from blocks away. This is how most of the Pace Family travels, with to-the-minute itineraries and guide books for the art and piles of napkins to prevent gelato drips. Bubble-wrapped in the familiar.
Anna, by contrast, is marked as our heroine because she is naturally suited to travel. She stands apart from her family, in part, through her malleability. She makes a concerted effort to correctly learn the language—including the accent, which Brits Abroad frequently make a great show of ignoring. She blends in without fear of being subsumed, goes with the local current, takes her time, and experiences all she can as fully as she can without forcefully imposing her own sense of self upon the experience.
And, as it happens, it’s those very traits that best set her up to face down a ghost. A haunting, after all, is very much off the planned agenda for the Pace family summer vacation. Why would you leave your expensive rental villa, when you could simply ignore the existential threat and continue to get your money’s worth? To find out exactly why, read Diavola.
In the meantime, here are some “Ugly American” sins the Paces commit over the course of the story. If you’re honest with yourself, you may have fallen foul of some of these yourself. I certainly have!
- Treating Your Destination Like a Culture Buffet – You’ve come for the art, food, and architecture, and you’re going to experience it all in the next three days or demand your money back. It all exists for the tourists. No other reason.
- Judging the Locals—Trust me, you don’t know more about their economy and political issues than they do. No one cares about the Nicholas Kristof op-ed you just read. Share it when you get back home.
- Being Yourself, But Bigger!—You honestly do not need to become the life of the party. And everyone in this restaurant does not need to hear you laughing. (This one is me.)
- Unwillingness to Adjust Plans—You may have memorized verbatim the Travel and Leisure article on 36 Hours in a particular city, well done, you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t deviate from the script.
All of the above, by the way, can be distilled into one piece of advice: loosen up! What is the point of travel as an endeavour if you undertake it with a closed, fixed mind? It is natural and probably helpful to enter a vacation with some expectations about what the experience will bring, but meeting surprises with either disgruntlement or the wilful dismissal of reality in favour of your Instagram-ready perfect plan leads to no delight, no awe, no personal growth at all.
And, much like in fiction, it’s not actually a journey if you’re the exact same person at the end of it.
Diavola is out tomorrow, 26th March, from Titan Books. You can order your copy on Bookshop.org
Jennifer Thorne is an American author of books for adults and young readers who writes from a nineteenth-century Cotswold cottage in the medieval market town of Minchinhampton alongside her husband, two sons, and various other animals.
Published as Jenn Marie Thorne, Jenn debuted in 2015 with The Wrong Side of Right, an acclaimed YA contemporary novel set in the world of presidential politics. Two YA novels followed, advocacy comedy The Inside of Out, and classical musician romance Night Music, as well as picture book Construction Zoo, inspired by playtimes with her two imaginative young sons.
In England, finding her footing as an expatriate among the rolling hills and roving cows of Minchinhampton while a pandemic closed borders around her, Jenn wrote Lute, her first horror novel and first work for adult readers.