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In Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel Thirst for Salt, an unnamed woman reminisces on a seaside love affair she had when she was 24 with a 42-year-old man, Jude. Theirs is an atypical love story that, in Lucas’s hands, is richly imagined, lyrically rendered, and stunningly sensuous. I chatted with Lucas by phone about the challenges of writing sex, the politics of telling women’s stories, and where she’s found unconditional love.
Ariél M. Martinez: Sex is incredibly hard to write well, and your novel is so beautifully erotic. Can you talk about writing the physical vs emotional aspect of desire?
Madelaine Lucas: It was a journey because I wasn’t much of a sex writer before I wrote this. In my early stories, I had this tendency to cut to black like in an old-fashioned movie, and I feel like that’s partly because a lot of the language for writing about sex is quite ugly. So there was a resistance to not knowing how I could make sentences still be beautiful while writing about desire in a way that felt visceral.
But at the same time, on a deeper level, as a young woman I didn’t know how to write about sex and desire in a way that felt true to me. So much of my early reading had been steeped in the white male gaze with the woman being an object of desire rather than an actor of desire. It was reading queer writers like Maggie Nelson, Garth Greenwell, and James Baldwin that influenced me and my approach to writing sex because they showed me a way to write about it that was outside of a classic straight male lens. It took a while to feel like I could write about sex and desire in a way that felt true to my narrator.
I also took an influential class with Elissa Schappell, who was one of my professors at Columbia. On the first day of workshop, she gave us a prompt: write the worst sex scene you possibly can. And then she made us read them out loud. She said that now nothing you write will be as bad as that. I was like okay, that’s the worst thing I could possibly write so it can only get better. She revealed to us the way that sex can reveal character. People aren’t always having sex for the same reasons; they come to it with different intentions or purposes. I feel like there’s been a lot of conversation recently about what is the value of a sex scene. That’s such an insane question because sex is a huge part of life, and it reveals psychology and vulnerability. In fiction and in art it’s indispensable. You could argue, what’s the point of writing a fight scene or a conflict scene? It’s another way of revealing character and their interiority and inner world as well as their physical world.
AM: Jude represents a particular kind of masculinity. What kind of archetypes did you have in mind as you wrote him?
ML: I was interested in a certain kind of reticent Australian male that can feel similar to a stoic American cowboy but has its own tonality. Part of that is his relationship to the natural environment and how he feels a sense of ease or ownership in the natural world that the narrator doesn’t. I was also thinking about the narrator’s background: her parents separated when she was small and when that happens, I think there’s a way that the masculine world and the feminine world—if you have heterosexual parents—get split in two. I wanted Jude and his house to represent all of the elements of a life with an absent father that she was missing in very physical ways. That was a breakthrough when I was writing: realizing that for someone who grew up with an absent father, being immersed in this world of man’s things would be rich and interesting.
AM: The book offers a very textured, deeply sensual reading experience, and I think one of the ways you accomplished that was through the use of music. I’m curious if there are other ways that you felt you brought dimension onto the page.
ML: All the art I’m drawn to is very textural and very layered. It mainly came through the novel in terms of writing about landscape. I was writing about Australia when I was living away for the first time in New York and that made certain things crystallize. All of the things that I missed about the place, like the call of morning birds or the smell of salt and eucalyptus in the breeze or that proximity to the ocean—part of this book is inspired by my own longing and desire for this place and wanting to touch it again via the page.
AM: Another horizonal longing is the narrator’s desire for motherhood. Did you see that in tandem with the coming-of-age aspect of the book?
ML: I think the idea of motherhood was influenced by the narrator’s relationship with her own mother because a lot of your coming of age as a young woman is influenced by the choices that your mother made at that age. The narrator’s mother had her at 24, the same age that the narrator is the year the book is set. The influence of our families means there can be both a desire and a fear to replicate the patterns that we’ve seen from our parents. Motherhood is a rich literary subject. but it’s not often given that literary or philosophical weight. I think the question of whether or not to have a child is deeply existential and so I wanted to deliberately write into that desire. I think for a lot of women, maybe especially in heterosexual relationships, it can be a real source of shame and something you have to hide from a male partner, at least in that younger stage of your life when maybe those questions aren’t coming up as obviously as when you’re a little bit older.
AM: Did you see the abortion in the book as the narrator breaking the patterns of her mother?
ML: Yes, in some ways it was a realization that she has the ability to make different choices. It was something that I went back and forth about. I knew I wanted there to be a reproductive event in the book to dramatize a lot of the things that were already there. It was in my original draft, and then I felt myself back away from it because I was afraid of melodrama. I’m so glad that the encouragement of early readers and my agent pushed me to go back to that territory. Now I think about that and—aren’t we so often told that women’s stories are melodramatic? These things happen and just because we’ve heard this story before doesn’t mean it’s not urgent and doesn’t have value.
AM: Did you consider including the abortion to be a political act?
MT: It’s always political to talk about women’s experiences. Any choice to have a child or not have a child, especially in America right now, has a political element to it.
AM: What’s your favorite part of the book? What are you most proud of?
ML: I feel really happy and grateful that I took the time to make the kind of book that I wanted to make. I very much write what I like to read and want to see more of in the world, and I know that I’m not alone in the things that I love, so I try to find comfort and confidence in the fact that there are other people out there who might like what I like too. If I have a favorite part, it’s the character of King, the dog. One thing I wanted to explore was the idea of love—not just romantic love, but what it’s like to have a loving but complicated relationship with your mother, or maternal feelings towards a much younger sibling. And to me the love of a dog is the closest feeling I’ve had in my life to unconditional love. I think we learn so much about how to love each other from our relationships with animals.
