“Something Just Beyond Words”

An Interview with Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi, who is not yet thirty, published her fifth book, Boy, Snow, Bird, this past March, which wrestles Snow White into mid-20th century Massachusetts. I first came to her through White Is for Witching, her third novel. It’s a haunted house story, but what a house: this Dover bed and breakfast speaks, and when it does it reveals a profoundly racist, misandrist agenda. It will, if you let it, eat you alive.

You may have noticed a pattern already, and you’ll find it echoed across her other works. Oyeyemi takes an old story and she guts it. The reworking is often violent, but it’s profoundly satisfying, and makes thoroughly adult, thoroughly literary books out of conceits that are often reserved for children’s, or genre, fiction. She finds in these stories a radiating core of truth, one that speaks more directly to contemporary issues than we may have assumed. What is Snow White about if not whiteness; Bluebeard, if not misogyny; a haunted house, if not the living sins of the past. Though she traffics in folklore, Oyeyemi concerns herself with the raw stuff of life.

I saw her read twice during her short time in the United States promoting Boy, Snow, Bird. (She currently lives in Prague.) We spoke a little at both, and then continued our conversation via email. Be warned: we talk about the entirety of Boy, Snow, Bird—even the end.

—Molly McArdle

I. WHETHER WE WANT THEM OR NOT

THE BELIEVER: You’ve explicitly made clear that Boy, Snow, Bird is grounded in the story of Snow White. You’ve also talked a little about how navigating the histories of these stories, moving through their permutations, is kind of like a maze. As I was reading the book, I was reminded of different versions of this story: the first edition from Grimm has Snow White’s mother, not stepmother, do the deed; as well as the variant story in Grimm about Snow White and Rose Red—a story of sisters! How much did you draw upon these nonstandard Snow Whites?

HELEN OYEYEMI: Ah, Snow White and Rose Red and their bear! I didn’t read alternative versions very closely—this was different from all my Bluebeards and foxes for Mr. Fox—I knew the flux in this book would be less drastic in terms of identity, and so I just went for a takedown of “fairest of them all.”

BLVR: Though they’ve been recorded by men, fairy tales are essentially women’s stories. While this novel is clearly a story about women, do you feel like it is a women’s story?

HO: I...