The weather is getting colder, leaves are turning color, days are getting shorter; and with the crest of autumn comes the resurgence of Dark Academia season. Spend this Hallowe n with the author of one of THE most well-loved Dark Academia novels: none other than M.L. Rio. Grab a warm cup of tea and have a read through this chat about the inspiration behind her iconic novel: If We Were Villians, the formation of some of the most compelling characters we have ever read, and the Shakespearean aspects that make the story so special.
Mehreen: I always like to start off our interviews by asking how you’re doing. You have your Waterstones collaboration out, which has been so difficult to get despite the book having been released 5 years ago, and a film deal! How has it all been, any of it caught you by surprise?
M.L. Rio: Just to clarify, because there’s a lot of confusion around this, it’s been optioned, and that doesn’t mean it’s for sure being made. So what that means is we have a couple of different production companies who are on board and have bought the option to try and make this into a miniseries. So just want to put that little disclaimer.
And I think it’s very telling that of the people who are now involved with this thing, many of them are people with a stage background, like a theater background, as opposed to a film background. Because, so much of this is about onstage versus offstage, and backstage and the complicated dynamics between all of those things. So it was important to me to have people working on it, who get that, and we can finally find that team, I think so we’re really excited about the group of people in the room to work on trying to bring this thing to life, which also includes me, , I’m on board as an executive producer.
But to your question about, is it a surprise how this is sort of panning out at this point, yeah, it really is. What’s happening with this book is actually extremely unusual, to the point where my publisher doesn’t know what to do about it, or how to handle it. It’s that anomalous because it’s very unusual to see a book that’s been on the backlist for four or five years suddenly make a comeback and start doing real numbers. Which is what’s happened with Villains in the last couple of years.
The other thing that has happened — and I have to preface this with saying that this is pure conjecture, we have no data to actually back this up — we saw the numbers suddenly start to go up during the pandemic, so I think it was partly that people were just reading more during the pandemic because everyone got really tired of being trapped on their screens. But the other thing that happened is a lot of students and, exactly the sort of bookish nerdy students who this book appeals to were planning to go off to college in the fall, and then didn’t get to do that. So I think a lot of people turned to academic novels as a sort of vicarious academic experience to substitute for that real experience of going off to school. And, I have nothing to base that on, except, , the trends that we were seeing at the time that they were happening. So that’s my guess as to what sort of happened with this. And I really just been along for the ride since then. Which has been really interesting in a number of ways, partly because, I wrote this book when I was in college. And it’s really weird to get to be talking about a book that I wrote when I was so much younger because it does feel like it was written by a completely different person. The other thing that’s a little bit strange about it is Dark Academia did not exist when I was writing this book, we called it campus novels. There were a lot of campus novels, and most of them were written by straight white men, surprise. But, there was The Secret History in 1992, which was a big deal, so that’s everybody’s touchstone for this genre; it does go back quite a way. But the “Dark Academia” thing is relatively new. When I was writing this book in 2014, you could not buy a Dark Academia think candle on Instagram, that did not exist. So it was interesting in that I was sort of participating in a subgenre that has since come into being, and Villains just sort of happened to be there when people went looking for that.
Sanah: We were just talking about that actually. What do you think about this recent resurgence that’s come? People always reference Villains when they’re talking about Dark Academia as a whole. I feel like it was over the pandemic as well because everybody wanted escapist fiction, where they reached for If We Were Villains because I mean, there’s a connection of course, a lot of us were about to go to university.
M.L. Rio: That’s been a very odd experience for me to get sort of grandfathered into the movement, just because Villains was already there. Another thing that I might point to with the surgence of Dark Academia in recent years, I think part of it also has to do with a whole generation of morbidly over-educated people coming of age to write these books right about now. I think partly what’s happening is, our whole generation got sold this narrative about how “Everyone has to go to college, and you have to go to the best college you can possibly get into because that’s how you’re gonna get a job.” And the part that they didn’t tell everyone was, you’re going to be morbidly overworked and graduate with $200,000 in student debt and be miserable for the rest of your life. So, , obviously, that’s very broad strokes, it doesn’t apply to everyone. But, it did apply to a huge number of people who are roughly my age and I think a lot of us are reflecting on how that has changed the landscape of what life looks like for us. It’s very different than what our Baby Boomer parents were looking at when they were our age. Education and the cultural master narrative around education, particularly in a country that has privatized education, has created a perfect storm, but at the same time creating a space for this genre to emerge.
Sanah: We’re gonna get into like, sort of content questions because we’re both huge fans of the book. These are a little bit nerdy. First off, does life imitate art? Or does art imitate life? It’s a significant part of the story and whether or not you have like an answer, per se, do you have any thoughts on that?
M.L. Rio: This is a book that’s all about ambiguity and gray areas, and liminal spaces; and in so many ways as regards to art, life, gender, sexual orientation, love and hate, friendship and rivalry, all of those things are muddy and difficult to separate. I think that art and life, are very similar things. I think there are many, many instances in a person’s life where you can say, “Oh, is the art that I’m making imitating my experience? Or is it sort of the other way around? Is my life following a pattern of things that I have been attracted to and am curious about in art?”
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot more about recently is in Renaissance studies, Renaissance scholarship, and early modern lit, we have this term, “self-fashioning”, which was coined by Stephen Greenblatt in the 80s. And this refers to this idea of creating yourself as a work of art, this idea of very deliberate self-presentation, sort of designing yourself in the way you are in the world. The older I get, the more I have bought into the idea of: one of your greatest art projects in life is yourself. Every day when you get dressed you’re making a decision about how you want to present yourself to the world. So in that sense, I don’t think there is a difference between art and life. If that’s how you approached it. And, maybe that’s not, maybe that’s not the case for people who don’t have strong artistic motivations. But for those of us who do, I think that line is, if that line exists, it is necessarily perforated.
Sanah: Amazing, thank you so much. More specifically, this story is based on Shakespeare, how did you go about choosing which specific Shakespeare plays to integrate into the story?
M.L. Rio: Oh, that’s a good question. When when I was putting this book together, I was a senior in college, I had been a Shakespearean actor for a long time, I was in my first Shakespeare play when I was 14, and after that, that was all I wanted to do. I did a lot of theater, but the only theater I really wanted to do was Shakespeare. I don’t know why that clicked in my brain, it was just a thing that for some reason, my strange little child’s mind latched on to it and was like, “Yes, this is what we’re going to do.”
But my senior year, I was working on my senior honors thesis, which was I did my own adaptation of all three parts of Henry the Sixth condensed into one play. I’ve been writing for a long time, but hadn’t really written anything good and couldn’t really figure out why. I finally went, “Okay, the problem is, you’re not writing what you know,” that is trite, but good advice. It’s very difficult to write with authenticity about things that you haven’t experienced. You can bridge that gap a little bit with certain kinds of research, but it’s very difficult to do that research when you are a literal teenager.
And it occurred to me, “You’ve never tried to write something about this very strange culty world of being a Shakespearean actor and working in a Shakespearean troupe.” So as I was crafting this book, I was really interested in the question of Shakespearean structure. So when I started writing Villains I had this concept of, the year of the comedy or the year of tragedy and just because of the way the story unfolds, obviously, it’s the year of the tragedy. I looked at the four major tragedies; Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Lear, and analyzed the structure of those four plays. What do they have in common? What are the different threads running through these plays? And then basically, I just begged, borrowed, and stole little bits of Shakespeare’s dramatic structure from all of those plays to mix it into something new. Part of it was I didn’t want to do a wholesale retelling of any one play, because if you just wanted to read Macbeth… like go read Macbeth. I’m not going to write a better version of Macbeth than Shakespeare did; ditto, Lear. So I wanted to take that raw structure of “What is the Shakespearean tragedy” and then build my own narrative around that.
Sanah: So would you say that it’s the Shakespeare that came to you first? Were you making the story before the characters?
M.L. Rio: Yeah, it absolutely started with Shakespeare just because I was so up to my eyeballs in that world. I have always referred to my writing as what’s called “upmarket” in the industry, which means it’s halfway between Literary Fiction and Commercial Fiction. In Literary fiction, generally, the emphasis is on character. Commercial fiction is the opposite, where it’s very, very plot driven. So I was trying to slide right into the middle of that, where you’re getting something where, sometimes who the character is, is determined by what needs to happen in the plot and what they need to do. Other times, what happens in the plot is determined by who that character is and what they would do at that moment. And I’ve worked with so many different theatre companies that as I was flushing this out, I sat down and went, “Okay, if you were to walk into a room where any random Shakespearean troupe was rehearsing, what are the types of people and the types of actors you were going to find in that room? Who do you need to put on a Shakespearean play?” They all sort of fell into place naturally after that.
Sanah: So when it comes to writing the dismantling of those archetypes [within Shakespeare], specifically with Meredith being like the temptress, is that something that like you initially wanted to do?
M.L. Rio: Absolutely. That was always very deliberate. And what’s really funny is some people totally grok that and some people totally don’t. Sound people are like “She’s the worst!” And I’m just like, y’all are missing the whole point of her entire character arc. But, that’s the risky run with writing in a somewhat ambiguous style that relies on a lot of interpretation. So, in keeping with the theme of art, life, and narrative ambiguity, Meredith makes the point of “If you treat a girl a certain way long enough, that’s how she’s going to learn to act.” And that’s true on stage and off when we are cast in certain roles in life, whether in a theatrical context or not, we do learn to tailor ourselves to that narrative.
Sanah: What was it like integrating Shakespearean dialogues into the story? And how did you figure out how each character would speak lines, obviously written by the same man, but also what keeping their individuality as a character?
M.L. Rio: A lot of people read this book, and they’re like, this is so unrealistic, no way would anyone ever talk like this. The funny thing is… I do know people who do that. I was part of a group of Shakespearean actors for a long time where those words stick in your brain, and they are leaked from your lips in moments where they’re relevant. So for me, it was really a matter of if a quote is jumping into my brain at that moment because it feels like the right way to express a specific thought. I did let most of that stuff just bubble to the surface naturally. Some of it was my own brain going, what would come to mind here, and some of it was me going, which character is playing which role? And is that going to be a little bit closer to the surface? I’m thinking of that scene where James and Oliver are standing in the refectory looking at the poster of Richard from Caesar, and they’re both spinning out random lines of their own. Oliver has a line that’s totally not sequential, with whatever the line that James says, in terms of where it comes into play. But in the context of the book, it actually it’s a very different conversation if you jump over a bunch of that text. So sometimes it was more deliberate in me getting in there and making a like Frankenstein’s monster out of Shakespeare’s text in my own. There wasn’t a lot of rhyme and reason to it; I guess you could say there was some method in the madness in terms of trying to make sure that what I was using was somewhat relevant, but mostly, I just let it happen.
Sanah: This is my last Shakespeare question. Is the way you begin the story with us knowing where things end up based on Romeo and Juliet? How we start the play knowing that the characters die?
M.L. Rio: It’s not specifically based on Romeo and Juliet, because Shakespeare does this in a couple of plays. And it’s quite common in early modern theatre for there to be a “prologue” that basically lays the whole plot out for you. And the other thing is a lot of the stories that Shakespeare is writing, he’s talking [in terms of] English history. In all of it, his plays are based on English monarchs; I think they actually talked about this in one of the gallery scenes. But even something like Macbeth is loosely based on history from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which is where the names come from. Audiences in the early modern period would have known the ending of a lot of these plays.
However, the question that is really more interesting is, how do you get there? And also, how do you undermine some of those expectations? The example that I’m thinking of is Lear. Shakespeare’s King Lear is not the first; there’s another play called King Lear, which is really quite different, and it’s not nearly as good of a play. The original King Lear play has a happy ending. It’s really interesting at the end; Cordelia survives, Edgar and Cordelia get married, and for some reason they just sort of forget that Cordelia has already been married off to the King of France. So can you imagine being an audience member going to see Shakespeare’s King Lear and expecting the ending to be this happily ever after? What a move on Shakespeare’s part and it’s the greatest tragedy he’s ever written but like, talking about upending expectations. Yeah, so I’m interested in both expectations and subverting expectations in a lot of ways in this book.
Sanah: So did you know how you were going to end the story when you first were starting it? Did what you were going to do to James? And what you were going to do here readers by doing that, too? [everyone laughs]
M.L. Rio: Yes, I did. I’m a very thorough outliner. This whole book was based on Shakespearean structure, so I did have that firmly in place from the beginning. So I did know how it was going to end, but it was a little bit of a mystery how I was going to get there. But I had it all loosely blocked out by acts and scenes, and then just filled in the actual prose itself. That’s just part and parcel of the way I work, which I think come from my theatrical sensibility, it’s sort of the Chekhov’s gun of creative writing. If you’re going to put a gun on stage and act one, you should have used it by the end of Act Three. At the same time, it’s very difficult to pace a novel well and set all the props correctly, if you don’t know how it’s ending.
Sanah: My next question was actually about foreshadowing, because the first time I read it I noticed that Oliver says, our tragedy is similar to Lear’s, because you think it’s going to end happy until you reach the very end. But there’s so much foreshadowing that I didn’t really notice until I went back and reread it. So that’s why I asked if you knew what the ending was going to be like when you started writing it?
M.L. Rio: Yeah, I did. And some of its accidental, I’m trying to think of the little bits that are unintentional. In the very first scene when Alexander is taking bets on all the casting and says, “Well, obviously Richard will be Caesar.” And it’s James who says “Why? Because we all secretly want to kill him?”
Sanah: Has there been any fan reaction or any reception to certain characters that surprised you?
M.L. Rio: I don’t know if it’s surprising, but the amount of vitriol directed at Meredith I find very interesting. There are a couple of reasons for it, I think. One of which is, readers see Meredith as an obstacle to something they want, which is, they want that love story for James and Oliver, and they don’t want it to be more complicated than that. They don’t like that she’s in the way of that. So she ends up getting blamed for a lot of what goes wrong. And what’s interesting is, Meredith tends to get really, really crucified for behavior that is no more manipulative than the stuff that James does. Actually, a lot of the stuff that James does is really significantly worse. But what’s interesting is many, many readers are willing to just give James a free pass on the stuff that he does, that’s deeply problematic. Whereas, Meredith gets tarred and feathered for it.
I have noticed something very interesting in that regard, which is that the readers who tend to be very hostile to Meredith tend to be younger. And I don’t know why that is. I have some theories. Again, I don’t have data to back this up, but my guess would be, there is this toxic competition that is ingrained in young women from a very young age. Young women who are really beautiful and tend to get a lot of attention from members of the opposite sex; we tend to vilify them. One thing that I’ve noticed is that older people, and older women in particular, have a lot more sympathy for Meredith. I think it’s because having gotten past that adolescent phase where you are feeling so insecure and so competitive with all the people around you, they can see that she is the way she is because she’s been slotted into that role and she’s doing her best responding to the position she’s been placed in.
Another thing that’s really interesting that I’ve noticed is a lot of people are not satisfied with Richards’s motives. There’s this idea that all villains have to have an origin story that makes their villain-ness somehow comprehensible. I’m thinking of someone like Richard the Third, where we can really understand that he is the way he is because he is disabled and he has been vilified for being disabled his entire life. So he says, “I was not made for these piping times at peace, I will be a villain because that’s what I am good at.” But the thing about a character like Richard is, abusers don’t need a reason to be abusers. They don’t need a reason. And I think anyone who’s been on the receiving end of that would grok that pretty quickly. The other thing is, he is a straight white man of a certain persuasion, who has gotten very used to getting exactly what he wants all the time. And when that changes, he doesn’t handle it well. I did find that surprising.
Sanah: Did anything specifically influence the setting of your book or did you just know you wanted it to be on campus?
M.L. Rio: Oh, yeah, totally. Dellecher is an interesting sort of amalgam of a bunch of different places that I knew and loved and worked in my life. One was a summer camp that I went to for like 10 years and later was a counselor there, which had the same sort of weird insular culty vibe. I did not go to a conservatory school, but I had many friends who did, So I actually spent a significant amount of time at [one] when I was in college. Also, when I was a junior in high school did this thing called Governor’s School, which was basically a voluntary summer school program for extremely bright, nerdy, kids who wanted to go spend six weeks in school for the summer. We did have different disciplines and most of the Dellecher disciplines are based on Governor’s School. I went for acting and we were the smallest discipline so it was extremely culty. The Starry Night with sidewalk chalk, the Ship of Theseus thing, that’s all based on stuff that we did at Governor’s School. It was a very interesting, insular environment that did get highly competitive and a little bit toxic. But interestingly, I’m still friends with many of those people who I met when I was like, sixteen.
Sanah: Yeah, it sounds amazing. I know at one point Oliver sort of mentions, how he realizes that they’re all isolated and it’s like something that he didn’t really register before. Was that important for the themes of your story — the fact that you gave them that sort of isolation?
M.L. Rio: Absolutely. [In relation to the isolation], the age that the characters are is actually really important. They are technically old enough to be responsible for their own actions; at the same time, they are still young enough to make really stupid mistakes. And that is the essence of your early 20s, I think that happens to everyone. The way that you learn to be a responsible adult is by really fucking up a couple of times. And, hopefully, your fuck ups don’t end murder, like, but this is the extreme version of that. So that’s another liminal space that became really important to me; is that liminal space between childhood and adulthood where you are legally and morally responsible for your actions, but you’re not really. You don’t have enough life experience to be making good decisions all the time.
Another thing that people point out, [is how things would not] ever escalate like this. And one thing I tend to point out to people is, to think about how much these characters are drinking. Think about how many drugs they’re doing. Anytime that things escalate to violence in the book, it is very directly connected to substance abuse, and that was not an accident. And that’s not to, vilify all of them, I spent a lot of time on Instagram talking about whiskey, all things in moderation. And when you’re 22, you have not learned how to do that yet [moderation]. So age was significant, both for the basic structure of how the story had to work and also in that liminal gray area sort of way.
The offshoot of that, this goes back to your first question about why this is having a moment now; it’s very rare that you find a book that’s about somebody who’s 21 or 22. For a while, there was a thing called New Adult, but that just like didn’t really take off. Instead, the industry was basically asking readers to make this huge leap from YA to suddenly reading a lot of literary fiction about middle aged divorcees. So this was not something intentional. But because I was that age when I was writing the book I was like, “I’m writing a book for me for people my age, because there’s an audience for this, and nobody is supplying that demand.” So that was an accidental, other liminal space that got engaged in the process of writing this book.
Sanah: It’s such a plus point for whenever someone recommends this book. Everyone talks about how these characters aren’t actually 16 or 17 like they usually are. Do you have anything coming up that you would like to let the world know about — like your signed Waterstone edition with amazing illustrations?
M.L. Rio: That’s the big thing happening right now. And the thing that kills me is that it’s coming from my UK publisher. So readers gonna get them before I do. Like, I don’t have a copy and I haven’t seen it in person. Besides that, stuff is happening, stuff is coming.
Pick up a copy of M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villians, in stores wherever you buy books (but our POPTIZED team always suggests supporting your local independent bookstore!) Signed Copies of If We Were Villains – 5th anniversary signed and illustrated editions are still available in a limited quantity at Waterstones!
