Paula Bomer is a writer who takes risks. Inspired by the likes of Anais Nin, serial killer documentaries, and the literary oeuvre that fearlessly documents evil-doing men, she doesn’t want you to read her brilliant new book The Stalker in your fuzzy socks, hot cocoa in hand, right before you dip into your nightly snooze. Like any captivating thriller, The Stalker is sure to keep you riveted; balancing the comedic with sheer horror, Paula’s latest novel follows a skillful, handsome young criminal with golden locks and a chipped tooth as he cons women in The Big Apple.
Paula and I met over Zoom, where the gods blessed us with a good technology day, and our animals were, well, mostly quiet. The Stalker is original and badass, like Paula herself. It is sure to ruffle some feathers.
How did you conceptualize Doughty’s character?
I’m a 57-year-old heterosexual woman. I’ve been around a lot of men, so it wasn’t really that hard. I’ve often written from the male point of view. I was a tomboy. As a little girl, I played with boys. I shot pool in a pool league, which was largely a bunch of dudes, in the early ’90s.
I had a revelation that I needed to write a book from the point of view of an abusive man rather than from the victim’s point of view. And then once I figured that out, Doughty’s character just came to me. That sounds magical, but it’s not what I mean. At least half of what I wrote for this book did not make it into the book (like always). So, it wasn’t this flawless moment, but you have these moments of connection. I thought a lot about Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley as well. I read The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist twice. And then I had a lot of other inspiration.
When I write, I just have a pile of books in front of me on my desk. There’s American Psycho. It’s not hard to find psychopaths in literary fiction. So many good books that delve into that subject matter.
Why did you choose to write from his perspective instead of opting for a victim narrative?
I like to go against the grain, but that sounds so intentional of me. And it really wasn’t intentional. I actually was trying for a long time to write a book called Gaslit. And it was going to be from the point of view of a victim. And I just got nowhere with it. It was unbearable. And yeah, once I got Doughty’s voice, honestly, it was a lot of fun.
Were you ever resistant at any time to writing from his point of view? Because I know, at one point, there’s the rape scene.
It wasn’t difficult to stay in his point of view, but I can’t say that I found it very fun to write that scene. That scene wasn’t fun to write.
Nine Months, that is written from the female point of view. That was the first book I did with Mark Doten. And it had been rejected for 10 years by everybody because they all were like, “She’s awful.” And also, it had been written from multiple points of view. A scene from Nine Months was published online at Nerve, a sex scene that was written from the male point of view. I’m just going to put this out there. Maybe it’s because women can easily disassociate during sex because we’re objectified. So, we objectify ourselves with performative femininity.
I remember when I first read Anaïs Nin when I was in high school, and it was like, “Oh, my goodness. There’s a woman writing about this.” So, again, I’m 57, and there were not a lot of books available by women writing about their sexual experiences when I was a teenager. For high school, I went to a conservative boarding school where in my freshman English class I read all of Shakespeare. That was amazing. Later, I was able to take advanced classes and I had, I think, a closeted lesbian for a teacher. We read The Canterbury Tales, which are very sexual, and we read—this was super radical for the time—The Color Purple. At this point, on my own, I read everything that Toni Morrison had published, which included Song of Solomon.
But I read a lot of books written from the point of view of men, obviously. So, it has an influence, too. That’s another kind of more literary influence as opposed to that deep stuff I just said about women being able to disassociate because we even objectify ourselves, which isn’t untrue.
I’m curious about his victims, Beata, a twenty-something nursing student who bartends, and Sophia, a forty-year-old editor at Little, Brown. What was the process of creating these characters?
There was not a lot of forethought, but there was definitely a lot of development. I waited on tables for a long time, and I was a bartender, so I was in the service industry for a long time. It’s literally stuff like that. I’ll make one of them in the service industry. I didn’t work in publishing for very long, but I knew the industry enough. But once I figured that out, I decided, I’ll make the other one older. I’ll make her more financially stable.
Let’s not forget his mother, who Doughty’s horrible to. The apartments that are described are all just from life. I had a boyfriend who lived in a loft on Mercer Street, so I just stole his apartment, things like that.
It’s all very seamless. It’s very believable that he’s able to con both of these different women.
He has no criteria. He’s like, “Well, if there’s something I can get from this person,” he literally cares not at all about anything but what he can extract from people. That’s the funny thing about the jacket copy, about how stupid he is and untalented, I mean, at first, I was a little defensive.
And the jacket copy’s great. It’s going to bring people in. But he’s really smart in his own banal way. I mean, he’s like, “Here’s this woman who’s from a lower-class family. She’s going to be impressed with me. I can manipulate her. I’m not exactly sure how yet.” And then with the older woman, yeah, that was just super easy for him. She has a horrible substance abuse problem. She’s lonely. He was like, “I struck gold again.” But he knows what he’s doing completely, and he does it very well. So, when they called him untalented and stuff—I mean I get it. He’s ridiculous for sure. And that grows as the narrative grows.
Early on in the book, he gives Beata this pseudo dental exam. And then throughout the novel, I noticed that teeth kept coming up as a motif—he often refers to this chipped tooth that he tries to hide. I was researching serial killers, and I found that some of them collect teeth. And Richard Ramirez, I was looking him up on Oxygen, and they said that because he had such bad dental hygiene, they were able to identify him and capture him because of his teeth. So, I was thinking, are any of my observations connected to the reoccurring theme of teeth throughout the book?
No, but that’s an interesting connection. It’s just I wanted him to have a flaw that he was self-conscious of. And then the mouth thing… I watched the documentary of Jimmy Savile, hence I used his last name, and changed it slightly. It’s a common English name, too, so that worked for Doughty’s background. The documentary is very lengthy because he lived until he was 84. And the whole time in England, he was a celebrity. And he had the best image management, which was that he gave money to or raised money for all these hospitals for poor children to get care, and so on. And then he would just go and horrifically abuse the children. And this went on for so long because England, well, not that our country’s that much better, but you know what I mean, they were like, “Oh, be careful of him.” But it was just a whisper network, and his victims were so extensive, and the abuse went on for so long. He met the queen! He was a philanthropist, and he was a hugely abusive psychopath. When he died, it finally all came out. There’s one woman who gets interviewed. She said whenever she knew she’d be alone with him, she put a tampon inside herself so that he wouldn’t mess with her vagina, but she found it more humiliating when he would stick his fingers in her mouth. Now, I’m not recounting the documentary perfectly accurately, so this is just the gist of it. But I still can see this clip from the documentary in my mind. It was so upsetting. Power by humiliation. A seemingly small thing, but so effective. So, I stole that. So, basically, I steal a lot of stuff. I did make it my own. And the mouth is an easier way to invade somebody than harder-to-reach places.
I watch documentaries about abusers too. I have rewatched the Ted Bundy documentary maybe three times.
I don’t know why I haven’t watched that one. That would have been a really good comp for Doughty.
I definitely recommend it because they film inside the courtroom, and what happens is fascinating. Bundy fires his lawyer, so he acts as his own lawyer. And he’s just completely grandiose, thinking it is guaranteed that he’ll be absolved from murder. He’s just like Doughty, in how he is so smart and strategic in how he manipulates his female victims, and, like Doughty, he has this hugely inflated sense of self.
Speaking of female victims, Doughty has some high expectations of women and the women he victimizes. He’s strikingly unflattering, the way he describes them. It’s such a realistic depiction of how an asshole guy would describe a woman. What was it like inhabiting his mind and describing women like that?
I mean, that’s just super easy. We do it to ourselves every day. We’re surrounded by it every day. Every day, we walk out, and we start looking at other women in the exact same way that men look at us.
Dolly Parton, she does all the surgical things to make her face look younger but she’s just a complete badass, a hugely talented, brilliant woman. And she looks nothing like she would look if she didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get all that work done. Other people are not going to do that. And even then, you don’t win. Nobody wins. Nobody’s going to win growing older and looking younger. I do not judge women who get work done, but it’s also OK to have problems with the large cultural issue of women as sexual objects.
Or Joan Rivers. Part of her stand-up was making fun of how she couldn’t feel her face because she just was addicted to plastic surgery and stuff. And then the documentary on her reveals emotionally unkind relationships with men and never being happy with the way she looks. She never loved her face, her body for what it was. She was constantly trying to look better. And did it make her feel better? I mean, maybe for a little while.
It used to be older women, primarily, who got surgery. That’s what you think, older women who want to look young. Harper’s published a statistic explaining that the vast majority of people who are getting fillers and so on are women under the age of 35. I don’t know what that says other than maybe it’s just this mainstream thing, like dyeing your hair, or maybe that it’s just never going away. This idea that we need to look a certain way because we want to be loved.
I’m really interested in plastic surgery, specifically plastic surgery addiction, and the TV shows that broadcast people getting these procedures done.
Those I have not watched because I can’t watch medical procedures. But we all have our thing that we watch. I watch a lot of documentaries. I watched the Gabby Petito one.
I watched that one too.
So, here’s the thing about that. What is most interesting is that they only gave 10 minutes to the fact that there are 43 people of color in her area that are missing, and local law enforcement hasn’t even begun to look for them and there is a huge expensive manhunt for this one pretty white girl. How messed up is that? But what I liked about the storyline is that Petito was actually a happy, self-confident person. We want to have this idea that victims of intimate partner violence are weak. But there is no perfect formula for the victims of intimate partner violence.
Some of them are incredibly strong, I would say Gabby Petito was one of those. I think what it also really demonstrated well was that he had so much control over her way of thinking. And then the violence is so secondary. She’s not just some meek person. And then also, when it is a meek person, does that make them less of a person? Then it’s okay to victim blame?
I think she was inherently joyous, but she was susceptible to being manipulated, as many of us are when we are young. She was very creative. She was an artist, a very talented artist.
Absolutely. Her parents loved her. And I think maybe that’s why people find it fascinating, but that’s not why I find it fascinating. I find it edifying. It’s like, “Yeah, we all look different, but we’ve all experienced it.” That’s why I even find it tedious, to even focus on the victims, because then the minute we focus on the victims we’re victim blaming. We want to know, what about them makes this happen? But really it was inept, really just stupid police, and a family in denial. The whole world is in denial. That may not change in my lifetime.
And I think with this book, you really bring to light a man really behaving badly. And I think by focusing on his inner thought processes, you really show who’s to blame. Because if it was what you’re saying, if it was focusing more on the victims, then he would be more of a side character. His behavior would be bad, but it wouldn’t be at the forefront. So, by making him the forefront, you’re making him the major problem.
I think that in The Stalker you have women who are victims, but who also have so many strengths. I see them as successful women. Beata is a waitress and a bartender. She works hard. She goes to Pace University. Sophia is an editor at Little, Brown. And I think the contrast between these successful, intelligent women with Doughty—it really shows his lack of substance, his lack of strength, his lack of drive, and his delusion. I am curious about your writing process. What does that look like?
So, I was a domestic worker, and I raised my two children, and then I would just squeeze time to write. As they got older that became easier. Basically, I’ve been writing every day for a very long time, and like most people a lot of what I write is bad and goes nowhere.
My writing process is just to make it a part of who I am. With The Stalker, I made it a shorter book than I originally planned for it to be, because I couldn’t stand being in his head anymore. At first it was fun, and then I was like, “I hate this guy. I cannot continue.”
The book of mine that no one’s read that came out during COVID, Tante Eva—that was a completely different experience. I love Graham Greene, I’ve read tons of Graham Greene. I read his end-of-life memoirs. I don’t really read memoirs, but I read sometimes when an old person writes what they did their whole lives. When The Paris Review asked him, “How does a writer write?” he said, “I write 500 words a day.” And then he said, “And now basically I’m older, so I write three 350 words and then later I go over it in the afternoon.” But he worked from 8:00 to 9:00 in the morning and he’s insanely prolific. And I’m like, okay, I can do this. Tante Eva was written slowly, and it involved a lot of research, like The Stalker. Funnily enough, that is something the two novels have in common.
With Nine Months, I had a weekend alone once, and thought, I am going to try to write the second half of this quickly. I had the first half, and I just powered through. The thing about powering through is that the whole time you have to tell yourself: I can change it all. If it’s shit, I’ll revise it all.
That can be hard when you don’t feel like it.
That’s about half the time at least. It’s just basically… It becomes a part of your life. Writing is like life, which is half the time you’re just like, “Here I go. Can’t wait for the day to be over.” With the first draft of The Stalker, I was pretty high on it, though once I found the voice, because it had been so frustrating not to be able to write Gaslit. Now here’s the thing though, there’s so many books about women writing from the point of view of victims. Those books have come under fire by critics. The “trauma plot” is being treated like here we have this glut, that this is a problem.
You don’t want to be pigeonholed. I don’t really want to be pigeonholed, and I don’t want to be associated with the work too closely. So, I tend to make my narrators very different from who I am. And then that helps me. That actually is probably, to me, the best advice for writing fiction is to have that distance, to give yourself that distance, and then the real stuff can flow out, and you don’t have that judgment over your head.
Most importantly, you just have to keep reading. Just be a big reader. Find things that interest you, then become obsessed, and read everything you can about your obsession.
So, writers tend to face a lot of rejection. Well, at least most of us. What has that experience been like for you?
Oh, my goodness. My first book was published when I was 42, and I’d been writing literally since childhood. In high school during my junior year, I got to take a senior class on creative writing, and it was amazing. I’ve been writing my whole life.
Everything was just rejected constantly. And then Baby and Other Stories was published by a 25-year-old in the indie lit scene, Jackie Corley, who was brilliant. She published not just me, but she published Nick Antosca. She published Roxane Gay in her online magazine. Caroline Kepnis. Then she published Baby, and it got a lot of attention. And then I met Mark Doten, I want to say through Gian, who had published a story of mine in the New York Tyrant, and Doten loved Sonia, the narrator of Nine Months. He was the first to love her.
Before that, Nine Months was rejected a million times, and always because, “Oh, she’s awful. Oh, you can’t write a character like this.” And now obviously the world is full of bad mom books and there’s even a movie called Bad Moms. But whatever. So, it was really a late in life thing, and people are always like, ” How did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you give up?” And it’s just what I do. I will be writing on my deathbed.
I definitely did not have a very good career plan. I like being in the alternative crowd. And when online magazines started up and you could just submit something, there was this one woman, she actually has a book out called, oh, fuck I can’t remember. But she started an online magazine. She’s like, “I will publish everything submitted.” We were a funny group of people.
So, definitely I had a whole outsider thing going on. It was not the, “Go to Columbia, get your MFA, get an agent, teach” plan all along. That’s great, but that wasn’t going to happen to me. I just kept doing it because I love it. And because I was ambitious. Don’t get me wrong, it was a matter of a very long time to find the true believer.
In fact, Nine Months I dedicate to Mark Doten, my true believer. So, you find your people, you find your way. It took forever.
Well, I love this book. I read a lot of bad fiction. When I came across this, I was like, “Finally something where somebody’s taking a risk and it’s actually something I want to read.” Because so much of fiction I think has been repeated, and people don’t always push the limits. And I think with fiction, you should take risks, you should go all the way. And that’s what you do here.
I hope I do, I try to do that. And I’m 100% in agreement with you.
One of the reasons possibly why it was hard for me to get published is because I am absolutely not trying to make the reader comfortable. I’m trying to face some really ugly dark matter all the time. I try to deal with what’s wrong with the world.
What advice would you give to young writers who are starting out?
Write when you’re uncomfortable about things that really bother you, and make writing a part of your daily life.
Photo: Jason Rice