A conversation with New York Times best-selling author and history-inspired creator Daniel M. Lavery on the intricacies of his upcoming novel release, Women’s Hotel

With his upcoming novel, Women’s Hotel, releasing on October 15th, Daniel M. Lavery shares his approach to the writing process, what inspired his interest in women’s hotels, and the details of his work’s pertinent themes. Read on to learn more about an exciting event, in which Lavery will be in conversation with Alexis Coe, on the day of the book’s release!

What is your background in writing?
I’ve been writing professionally since 2012. I got started writing for blogs like The Awl and The Hairpin and then ran a website for a few years called The Toast. My first book came out in 2014, so it’s been a little over a decade. I’ve written a book every couple of years, mostly nonfiction. This is my first novel, which is really exciting. My writing career has changed a lot, because the landscape for Internet writing changes significantly every couple of years.

Do you find that your past experiences writing as an advice columnist for Slate, co-founding the editorial site The Toast, and exploring other written fields, like your literary newsletter “The Chatner,” have shaped your writing journey or style?
I read a lot of advice columns before I got to write one, and I had a lot of fun getting to write one. In some ways, it felt easier to slip from reader into writer, and then back into reader again, than I might have anticipated. One of the things that I always loved about advice columns was this sense of getting a really brief but intense snippet into somebody else’s life, and then moving on. Writing a book about a residential hotel where there are lot of characters, some of whom come and go rather quickly, and telling a lot of brief stories, some overlapping, some not, felt, in a lot of ways, very much like the sort of voyeuristic pleasure that I get out of reading advice columns.

What sort of writing would you say you specialize in? Do you have a favorite genre or style?
If there’s any relationship between my books, it’s that they are often a short collection of things. I’ve still been working my way up to a sustained narrative. I like writing episodic pieces, although I hope that I’ve been able to sustain attention more with each book.

I feel very, very pleased to be in the world of the novel.

What inspired you to start writing Women’s Hotel? Why a narrative about women’s hotels? Was this always a historical interest of yours or did you encounter this topic more recently?
The idea for the book came from a couple of different places. A couple years back, my longtime agent, Kate McKean, mentioned a book about the history of a particular woman’s hotel in New York City. It’s by Paulina Bren. It’s about the Barbizon Hotel, and it really interested her.

We spent a day at the New York Public Library researching together, and that kicked off my interest.

There’s a publisher in the UK called Dean Street Press. They also publish new fiction, but they specialize in reprinting older 20th century fiction. They have an imprint called Furrowed Middlebrow that I’m just crazy about, which in particular specializes in lesser-known women writers from Ireland, the UK, and America from roughly the years between 1910 and 1960.

I just found these books so delightful, so contained, so compelling. I think that that also made me want to see if I could sort of try my hand at that kind of thing.

Tell me about your research process and approach. What type of source material and scholarly works did you draw upon? How did you keep track of what you found and learned?

In terms of trying to get the details, I did most of my research at the New York Public Library, and it was loose. I am not a historian. I’m not a researcher. I wanted to be thoughtful. I had made an attempt to understand a different time in history, but I also knew that any historical novel is at least as much about the time that you’re writing it as any other time, and so I didn’t want to get too worried about the details, because there’s going to be lots I get wrong, and lots that I imagine.

You know how jabberwocky gets translated into other languages, and they have to come up with nonsense terms in their own languages? I wanted to have “plausible sounding gobbledygook.” I think that’s a really useful goal when it comes to historical fiction.

In terms of how people might have spoken, I’ve read some lesbian pulp fiction from the 60s. Mary McCarthy’s The Group is a real favorite of mine. Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. I was trying to get some sense of dialogue along those lines and to think about what things somebody would be likely to say in 2024 that they would never have said in the 60s, even if they felt similarly.

Describe how your research translated into the writing process for this novel. How did you determine the nature of the plot? Did you have a specific approach to organizing the story?

The main thing that happens at the ending also happens at the end of The Group, The Best of Everything and Passing by Nella Larsen. Weirdly, there’s a lot of mid-century women’s fiction that ends the same way. I knew I wanted that to happen.

Similarly, in those books, the ending felt abrupt and sudden. I also thought about Jane Austen, who is obviously, like many people, an author I return to often, and the sort of pointed let down of almost all of her endings. In every one of her books, you get to the last two chapters, and she stops writing dialogue. She starts summing everything up. She withholds information about all the scenes that in another book you might expect to get now.

Because the phenomenon that I was writing about was something that faded out unexpectedly by the 70s and turned into condos and disappeared, I wanted it to feel a little bit like, “Is that it? Are we done?”

What was your approach to character building, especially because there are so many individuals woven throughout the story? How did you envision them all?

Most of the characters don’t have real-life analogs, and even the three that do pretty quickly move away from anything that those real-life people might have done.

I don’t know if other writers often feel this way; I have such a difficult time imagining things in three-dimensional space. I found at one point I had to keep a map of the building and try to remember, “Where is everyone in the building right now? Did I just put someone on the third floor who’s supposed to be on the eleventh?” and l have to go back like, “Did I just have someone close a door five times in a row when they’ve clearly already gone into the room?”

That was surprisingly challenging. But yeah, I try to remember: where did I last leave somebody? Where are they now, physically in space, and if they’re not where they need to be for the scene, how do I get them there without too much trouble? That absolutely required maps and notepads for me – and I don’t draw well!

So much of the narrative takes place through careful examination of the characters’ pasts, views, personalities, and approaches to situations. How were you able to conceptualize these various experiences while ensuring that they would progress the plot of the novel?

It worked pretty intuitively. A lot of those books that I took as touchstones, like The Best of Everything or The Group include this question of what any given character’s relationship is to conformity or to the social group around her. Does this character mostly get along with other people? Do other people look up to her, or do they find her difficult? Do they find her a drain on their resources? Do they avoid her, or do they fight with her? That was often the primary question I had about each character: how smoothly do they get along with other people? The ones who get along most smoothly have really different stories from the people who stick out. And even the two characters that stick out the most, Kitty and Ruth, stick out really differently.

The Biedermeier is the common thread and glue of the story, acting almost as a character in its own right and bringing together all of the characters of the novel. How did you “world-build” to make the Biedermeier a tangible, vivid place?

I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, but I wanted to get a sense of what it looked like, so I did a little bit of research on the architectural history of some of the other women’s hotels and some of the other buildings in the area, as well as a little bit about zoning laws that made certain types of building necessary in that era.

The biggest heyday of the women’s hotel was the 1890s to the 1930s. Even for this particular hotel, it was never the Barbizon, but its heyday is also 30 years in the past. It at its best is already well over. It’s not exactly faded glamor, because it was never quite glamorous, but whatever proximity to glamor it ever had has definitely faded.

Did anything else from media, your own life experiences, or other findings inspire you throughout the writing process?

It was really fun to write a book that was like, “This is not very much like my own life, and I can really just unleash pure, imaginary freedom.” That’s the advantage of writing about something that didn’t really stand the test of time. By virtue of choosing, not even just a women’s hotel – of which there are no longer very many – but one that was worse than the Barbizon, which is the one that, if you’ve heard of women’s hotels, that’s the one you’ve heard of, you get a lot more freedom, because this place is made up.

What do you think women’s hotels symbolized for women throughout their inception and heyday? Did this significance change or evolve over time?
I think it was a way to try to look at fragmentation that often exists underneath perceived or projected solidarity or a sense of similarity. In some ways they were this really interesting utopian idea that hovered between luxurious dorm-style living for urban professionals versus a real opportunity for affordable housing for single people who don’t want to marry into a family and base their housing on that.

Once living with your friends or living with an unmarried partner became more common, once more women had access to credit cards in their own name, and once it became more usual to see women living alone under their own steam, most people preferred to do that rather than live in a hotel that also had a weird hangover from days where women weren’t supposed to be doing too much socially unchaperoned.

In many ways, the novel paints a picture of severe economic hardships, while highlighting a variety of gender-related struggles and general societal expectations. How does this novel encounter and respond to these?

I wanted to show a wide variety of ways that people related to institutions. One of the things that’s great about a residential hotel is that everyone there is meeting at the same place. Some of them are very much on their way down, and some of them are on their way up. You can be almost on the same floor, nearly the same room, but still feel really different in terms of your momentum, or what kind of social or economic backing you might have outside of this place.

It’s a little bit about mid-century institutions. By the 50s and 60s, AA was becoming an incredibly and increasingly popular American institution, and one of the ways that people could join an institution and gain personal support, psychological help, social interactions, but it didn’t have the same ties or pressures that joining a community church might have. In some ways, it was more invasive about your personal life, and in many other ways, it’s much less invasive.

Why is Women’s Hotel’s queer representation and exploration of sexuality a pivotal component of the novel?

It’s something that’s just really interesting, that is sometimes siloed off in literature from that decade and is sometimes present.
There were out people in the 60s. People knew them. Sometimes they were surprisingly relaxed about it. Sometimes they were unsurprisingly homophobic about it. But they were there, and they’re in the literature. I wanted to show both the ways in which everybody would be unsurprised and relaxed and also ways in which they would be totally dismissive, or like, ‘well, of course, she’s a lesbian. She’s not beautiful,’ in a way that would just feel really jarring, because a few pages earlier they were having a pleasant conversation.

And again, that was something that I really appreciated about the group in my book: the way in which friendship and cruelty existed side by side, and also ways in which certain kinds of queerness were more easily tolerated than other kinds.

What about this novel do you hope readers take with them in their everyday lives as they navigate today’s world?
I think it’s always difficult to think about, “what do you want somebody to do in addition to reading your book?” The idea that people would read it at all just feels pretty exciting. Beyond that, it can be difficult to imagine. I think the thing that I most wanted or hoped to produce if people read this book was for them to feel that they had been genuinely diverted, by which I mean, shunted out of reality into a world that felt real and that enabled them to think about other people and what it’s like to live around other people in a way that felt meaningful and fun.

Daniel M. Lavery’s novel, Women’s Hotel, will be released and available for purchase on October 15. For more information, please visit danielmlavery.com.

Also on October 15, at 6:30pm, Lavery will be in conversation with Alexis Coe in an event hosted by Oblong Books in partnership with the Morton Memorial Library and Starr Library. It will be held at Morton Memorial Library, 82 Kelly Street in Rhinecliff, NY. For more information and to register, please visit oblongbooks.com/event/daniel-m-lavery-womens-hotel.