It’s OK, Lynne Tillman knows that you probably haven’t heard of her. When she published her first novel, Haunted Houses, in 1987 she had the same hopes and dreams as every debut novelist – that this novel would lead her to be “discovered”. When Haunted Houses came out to little fanfare (“I think there was one positive review”) Tillman decided to make peace with the fact she was never going to be a bestseller.

Instead, over the next 35 years, Tillman built up a reputation as a writer’s writer, an “if you know you know” novelist. In much the same way it is often said of The Velvet Underground selling few records but everyone who bought one formed a band, Tillman became an influence to a whole generation of writers and, in the process, became a totem of the New York literary scene. Her books now are plastered in blurbs by Hilton Als, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edmund White, Colm Tóibín, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis.

After the successful reissue of her early novella Weird Fucks in 2021, Peninsula Press have once again dipped into the Tillman font and resurrected Haunted Houses to see if perhaps the novel works better now than it did 35 years ago. The answer, in short, is yes. Telling the stories of three girls, Jane, Emily and Grace, from their childhoods into adulthood, Tillman convincingly captures the lives of these girls in a way that feels so contemporary to novels today. Reading Haunted Houses feels like happening upon the very source of the “sad girl” genre that is so popular right now, which perhaps positions Tillman herself as the godmother of sad girl literature.

I caught up with Lynne Tillman over the phone just before the release of Haunted Houses to discuss its original publication, her hopes of what the novel would achieve, and why her writing still feels so fresh after 35 years.

What has it been like to revisit Haunted Houses after 35 years? How do you feel witnessing its resurgence?

Lynne Tillman: Well, I like the novel. When I was writing it I didn’t intend it to be a throwaway, I don’t think anybody does. I was writing something that I felt was important, about girls’ lives in a way that they hadn’t been represented. I felt [that what it means to be a girl] was under-known in literature. So I had a great project in mind and I worked on it off and on for seven years. I had to figure out how to write a novel first, I didn’t take any writing classes and I didn’t get an MFA, I just did it my way. 

[Composer and author] Paul Bowles read Haunted Houses and we had a conversation through the mail – he always wrote on onionskin because it cost less to mail it from Morocco – and he said he liked the novel but he got the characters confused like Dostoyevsky [laughs].

The novel has an interesting structure. You follow the lives of these three girls, and you’d expect there to be a moment in the story where they all finally meet and it’s the great apotheosis, but that never happens. You keep all three narratives completely separate. 

Lynne Tillman: Well, I finished the first three chapters, one for each girl, and I said to myself, now they’re supposed to meet. This is a novel and characters are supposed to meet. But I couldn’t find a reason for them to meet. Maybe they’d meet at a party or they went to the same college or they knew the same people – but that all seemed phoney to me. I thought the novel is a container and the girls’ stories are contained within the novel, their lives are contiguous. They don’t know each other but they are living at the same time. And, of course, that probably was one of the many reasons why it was rejected by 18 publishers.

But it did finally, thankfully, get published.

Lynne Tillman: I didn’t know any better than to have faith in it. And every time you get rejected it gets harder, but I had such a strong belief in what I had done in Haunted Houses, which is kind of crazy because I am a deeply neurotic person with a lot of anxieties and insecurities. I have been in some form of psychotherapy for basically all my adult life and yet… I felt so strongly about this novel.

But to go back to the first thing you asked, how does it feel to see Haunted Houses out again, it feels good. Because I feel that what I was doing is now registering in a way that it hadn’t.

Does that feel like vindication almost? That you were right the whole time?

Lynne Tillman: Well, no [laughs]. I don’t believe in redemption or vindication. It feels good, it feels strange to have so many copies of Haunted Houses out there. When it first appeared in Great Britain in about 1998 there was almost no response, I think there was one positive review, but it didn’t make any mark on the consciousness of the people there. So now, I mean, what do you think? What’s going on? Why is this happening?

“I am a deeply neurotic person with a lot of insecurities. I have been in some form of psychotherapy for basically all my adult life and yet… I felt so strongly about this novel” – Lynne Tillman

I think it just is a very contemporary novel. Like you said, it’s a novel about the interiority of girls, and at the time that wasn’t a subject that was broached much in fiction. Whereas now, that’s one of the most common subjects; there are so many young women writing about being young women. So I feel in many ways a novel like this feels so of today, and like an antecedent of that current trend we see in literature.

Lynne Tillman: What younger writers here say to me about Haunted Houses, about Weird Fucks, was that my writing in general kind of paved the way for them. Because I, for lack of a better word, am an intellectual and I write novels that are both visceral and cerebral. For an author to do that, who is also a woman, it was seen as shaking things up a bit. 

I remember a reviewer [of Haunted Houses] discussed the “sad girls” and, at the time, that seemed to me a dismissal. Of course, now everyone is interested in so-called “sad girls”, but I didn’t think of them as sad. I felt they were rebellious and stuck inside a frame and structure they didn’t want to be stuck in. 

How do you feel about being known as a “writer’s writer”? Isn’t there a certain edge to that designation?

Lynne Tillman: It has its compensations, I guess. But the audience for good fiction, fiction in which the authors are really trying to advance the medium, is quite small. One of the things that happen when your first book comes out is you go into a bookstore and… it’s just a book, among hundreds and thousands of books. And it’s inescapable, the fact that your book is likely not to be recognised. I was very naive when Haunted Houses came out because I had no idea that [the publishing industry] wasn’t a meritocracy. I really did believe that everything happened because of the quality of your work. And, of course, that’s not true. 

But 35 years later, here is Haunted Houses again and it feels like it was written yesterday. 

Lynne Tillman: I know, I’m amazed to see it again!

Haunted Houses is published on October 13 by Peninsula Press