‘The Furies’ Author Elizabeth Flock On Violence, Vengeance, and ‘It Follows’
Author Elizabeth Flock does not write fiction. Her new book, The Furies, follows the lives of three women who used violence when institutions failed them. It sounds like fiction. It is not.
Embedding herself in the lives of the book’s subjects (a sexual assault survivor in Alabama who was not protected by the Stand-Your-Ground law, a leader of a gang in India dedicated to avenging survivors of domestic abuse, a fighter of an all-female militia that battles ISIS in Syria), Flock spent years documenting survivors of extreme violence. We spoke with the journalist about her well-received work, vengeance, and the one piece of horror ephemera she wants.
Dread Central: When I read the press for your book I thought it was for a horror novel. It’s so much more depressing that it’s not.
Elizabeth Flock: Yeah, it’s true. I feel like there’s a lot of feminist horror out there right now that kind of revolves around these themes. And I think it is out there because it lives in our consciousness. People are experiencing gender-based violence, like domestic abuse at home. It’s a really unseen epidemic. It’s like one in three people in this country, and people just don’t talk about it. And so I think it’s like, we all wish we could be them. We wish we could be the women who are fighting back. And so we watch these like vigilante movies and are fascinated by these stories because either we are them, or we know someone we’ve heard about.
I really wanted to find the real-life versions. Because if we’re going to watch all these people on screen, there must be real-life people out there as well.
DC: Your recent piece in Lit Hub, published well after you finished your book and the week it came out, talks about the messiness. The line, “These women were impressive and yet they were also vengeful and corrupt and went mad,” stuck with me. How much do you think the work might have changed if your deadline was six months earlier or six months later?
EF: Oh, my gosh, so much.
I started my career doing quick hit journalism. There’s a place for that, but it does a big disservice to just get to know things. People are really complicated. Obviously, I think people hide themselves, people lie. People don’t want to show the worst sides of themselves, we see the gloss. The longer I spend with these people, the more complicated they get. And even as a journalist, I didn’t want to see that side. I was like, you know, kind of blissfully wanting to write about these heroines that had all this amazing agency, and were fighting back and killing their abusers or defending themselves in these really heroic ways, but actually, the truth was a lot messier. The only reason I was able to find that was because I spent years with them. Only after spending a lot of time to get to know a person and see their dark, darker sides, that we all hide from the world.
DC: You wrote the New Yorker story on Brittany Smith in 2020, executive produced the Netflix doc State of Alabama vs. Brittany Smith in 2022 and she’s one of the subjects of The Furies. When you’re spending this much time with a subject, both mentally and physically, does it take a toll?
EF: Definitely. I had several, like, mental breakdowns working on this book. I think writing about darkness definitely starts to live with you, especially when you’re working on a project of this length and duration. And as someone who’s experienced that myself, I was also like living in that.
I remember the first time I came back from a reporting trip in Alabama, I just cried for four days.
It got easier over time because I learned how to have better boundaries and think about it more helpfully, and compartmentalized a little bit. If you take the case of the writer Michelle McNamara who tracked the Golden State killer for her book, we had the same editor. And she died, largely because of the darkness that consumed her from working on that project. That is really a cautionary tale for all of us who are working on projects that are really dark to take care of yourself while you’re doing them.
DC: It seems difficult to evolve for you or the subjects if you’re consistently revisiting the worst aspects of your life.
EF: Yeah, I think that’s why you have to practice trauma-based interviewing, where you don’t ask them to recount like, let’s say the rape or murder, over and over again. In the podcast I did (Blind Plea) I only asked the subject about it one time, later on, after we’d already talked for like a year. I just didn’t need to ask her about it 50 times. I mean, if you’re fact-checking something, sure. But you don’t need to dwell on it. You’re trying to also get to know every other aspect of that person, not just the moment of extreme violence.
DC: Why do you live where you live? Your subjects, a sexual assault survivor in Alabama, a gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, don’t live in the most progressive places but rather in places with, “cultures of honor.” So, why are you in Chicago?
EF: I’m in Chicago because I’m from here and my family is here. But I have spent a lot of my life in lots of other places, reporting and living. There’s a lot of talk about not reporting on places that are not your own. I think there’s so much value in people reporting on their own cultures. But there’s helpfulness in having an outsider’s perspective.
I tried to make this project stronger by relying a lot on local journalists who recorded alongside me and really taught me a lot about the places that I was reporting on.
DC: I apologize if this is a hack question but have your thoughts on any of these subjects evolved since becoming a parent? What about vengeance?
EF: No, it’s a cool question.
I think I’m probably less angry. Obviously becoming a parent shifts your perspective. It just feels like an earlier lifetime now. As a parent, you want to build and I mean, this might be cliche, but as a young person, you kind of want to tear down. And then when you get older, you kind of want to build, especially as a mother, who thinks generations ahead. You kind of want to find solutions. I think there’s a place for all of it. But it is interesting now to be talking about vengeance when I feel less that way.
DC: I’m acknowledging that it’s unfair for anyone to ask an author the question they set out to answer, but…is gender equality possible?
EF: Possible, yes. Nearby, no.
One thing that was interesting about reporting in Syria was the Kurds, the YPJ to the YPG, they really talk about how early cultures were matriarchal and how we only shifted to a patriarchy later. That’s something that’s contested by a lot of Western historians. They believe we were matriarchal before industry came along and goods and services and all these things that led to power wars and all that. And everywhere, we certainly were worshiping a lot of female goddesses and things like that. Of course, there’s a world in which equality is possible.
DC: Let’s end on a lighter note? Do any horror movies calm you?
EF: Maybe it’s obvious but I do love It Follows. I’ve watched it like five times. I think it calms me because it’s a parable about sex in a way that isn’t utilizing the female body in like, looking at dead women. There are a lot of horror movies that just kind of rely on the dead woman. It Follows is aesthetically beautiful. I want that Shell, little Kindle thing she’s reading. I want to live in that 90s-era Detroit that I grew up in, in the Midwest.
Categorized:Interviews
