Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. It’s the inspiration for Vacca Vale, the post-industrial setting of her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, which tracks the entwined fates of a multifarious cast – including a man who paints his body with the liquid from broken glow sticks and a teenage girl aged out of the foster system who is obsessed with female mystics – over the course of a single summer. At its centre is a low-cost housing complex whose name provides the novel’s title. Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny, The Rabbit Hutch already counts Jonathan Safran Foer and Raven Leilani among its fans.
How did the novel begin?
I had just left the midwest, it was summer and I was living in Brooklyn and spending my time in Prospect Park. I would just take a notebook and some books and no electronics, and almost all the characters came to me then. It was so hot, I sometimes think they were heat hallucinations. They arrived with nothing but their most extreme qualities, and so the five-year task ahead of me was to make these eccentric behaviours not only believable but inevitable in these people.
