A Conversation with Krystelle Bamford
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions! We loved Idle Grounds so much and are so happy to be promoting it to our readers.
(That’s so lovely to hear—thank you!)
First of all, I’d love to know more about the process of writing Idle Grounds. Where did your initial idea come from? And how does it feel to be a debut novelist?
Idle Grounds is based on my childhood in New England, so it’s very much a write what you know kind of thing. I think the initial germ of a story came from my aunt: when she was small she was looking out the window in the middle of the day when she saw a raccoon walking across the lawn with a doll in its mouth, and it was staring right at her, and then it walked straight up the side of the house and disappeared—she was convinced, even years later, that it had come to collect her. Those things have such a huge impact when you’re a kid, and yet everyone’s like ‘uh huh, a raccoon, anyway...’ It makes you feel lonely, and also gives those memories incredible power. Idle Grounds takes place on a day when those sorts of phantasmagorical childhood experiences assume a life of their own.
And it feels completely surreal to be a debut novelist, or even really just a person who’s written a novel. I wrote poetry for years, with zero plans for trying anything else. That I’ve finished a novel, and moreover that it’s been published, seems literally incredible to me. My favourite bits so far have been having very smart people edit my work, and also the fact that the UK edition has lilac endpapers, which are so, so beautiful.
For our readers who haven’t yet read your book, how would you describe it to somebody who knows nothing about it? Or do you think it would be an improved reading experience if you go into it without any expectations?
I think the book definitely benefits from a run-up! Idle Grounds follows a group of young cousins on their search for the littlest member of their pack after she sees something inexplicable at a family birthday party, spooks, and bolts. The book takes place over one afternoon—you know from the start that something awful is going to happen by the time the party’s over. As the kids cross over the family property and then into the woods, their world becomes more deranged and family secrets are revealed. It’s been described as northern gothic, and I love that. Overall, though, it’s probably literary fiction about a family and their inability to let go of the past, as told through the eyes of the youngest generation.
I’m fascinated by your use of voice in Idle Grounds, and particularly by capturing a chorus of children’s voices. The voices also seem to slip between adult and childlike thoughts, and then there’s also an unnamed adult narrator added in – how did you approach this feat and was it enjoyable to step into that world?
At the risk of sounding mystical, the voice just kind of presented itself. Chapter 1, which centres on the children seeing something horrible from the bathroom window, was the first thing I wrote and has remained pretty unchanged. Writing the rest of the book just felt like chasing the tail of that voice. Because the narrator is possibly an individual hiding behind a Greek chorus and is neither completely childlike nor completely adult, there was so much freedom: to make mistakes and have huge knowledge gaps and indulge in casual cruelty. The narrator knows some things they shouldn’t know, and has access to a wide-ranging vocabulary, which they often misuse. It felt great to be so unencumbered, but there was also always a danger of slipping into parody when rewriting sections later on down the road. That voice is a strong flavour—I do worry sometimes that it’s really just, like, my id.
It struck me that, among so many other themes, Idle Grounds was really reminiscent and nostalgic of a time before phones, when it was a lot more likely that children would have their own adventures unencumbered by adults or technology. Was that something you consciously thought about and are maybe nostalgic about yourself?
I probably didn’t feel nostalgic as I was writing, only because to me there was this slow-motion tragedy in the background so none of it seemed particularly rose-tinted. But yes, looking at it now, there is absolutely nostalgia in there. Boredom and freedom (and, I guess, the freedom to be bored) were two things most eighties kids had in spades, and that kids now probably could use more of. We spent a lot of our time wandering around suburban woods in packs, unsupervised—that physical freedom was wonderful and really formative. It’s funny because the eighties in America was peak missing-girl-on-milk-carton era and every film seemed to be about kids being left to deal with unfolding disaster while their parents were caught up in parent stuff (Goonies, ET, Stand by Me, etc.), so there was obviously some creeping anxiety around it, but everyone was like, oh well, what can you do? Now that I have kids of my own, the risk seems lunatic, but I do kind of mourn on their behalf the loss of that freedom.
I read that Idle Grounds could be described as a book about both progress and stasis. If you agree with that description, could you tell us a little more about how and why you wanted to explore those contrasting ideas?
Definitely—for me, the tension between progress and stasis underpins the book. The kids are constantly distracted, or doubling back, or lost, while at the same time, a kind of invisible hand is pulling them along. The narrator is really preoccupied with fate, which makes sense in a book about parents and children—for better or worse, looking at your parents is your best chance of predicting where your life will go. And fate is such an atavistic thing—it just flies in the face of modern conceptions of fairness and progress, but it’s also so deeply ingrained that I feel like we always return to it. These kids sense that their parents are stuck in the past, and the family is fixed on this idea of itself, and that this stuckness is kind of poisoning them all, and they fight against it, a little, while knowing all the while that it’s their fate to become stuck too. I feel like I see that dynamic a lot—otherwise decent people knowing in a vague sort of way that they’re carrying on a legacy of unhappiness or unfairness, but the comfort and familiarity of it draws them back. I do it, certainly. It happens with people and it happens with cultures—I think we’re seeing that right now in America, though it’s metastasised into something more vicious.
Another theme that comes up is the idea of inheritance and privilege, but it’s suggested in a very subtle way. Was this always a theme you wanted to discuss, and was there a reason this theme was explored in quite an implicit and vague way?
That’s such a good question. For me, any ideas of inheritance in the book are mostly to do with inescapability—so less what you’re inheriting in terms of money or characteristics, and more what you’re inheriting in terms of trauma, I guess, the stuff your family can’t get over, and so they pass it down to you, and you pass it down to your own children, and it becomes something that resembles fate. You can try and get out of its way, but it will find you, eventually. In the book, Aunt Frankie’s house is basically a shrine to the late grandmother, just full of furniture and artwork that belongs in a much grander house—it’s pretty awful, most of it, and the kids don’t want it, but they accept that eventually they’ll have to take it on because they’re part of a family. It’s that passivity, which to me is the most disturbing aspect of the book.
The storyline with the eggs really pulled my heartstrings! I loved it so much, and I’d be so interested to know how that detail came about and whether it was representative of anything specific to you?
Ha, thank you, I love the eggs too! Honestly, the eggs come from such a basic place: we were visiting family and my son, who was maybe three at the time, was encouraged to crawl inside their giant, multi-level chicken coop, and he was just sitting there, like a skinny little chicken, and he looked so vulnerable to me. But he wasn’t nervous—in fact, he seemed totally at home. And in the book, I really wanted there to be something more at stake than just the kids themselves. I was hoping the reader would be watching those eggs with bated breath, like you watch an egg and spoon race. There’s something so unbelievably tense about those races—I guess because eggs represent life to us, and promise, and the idea of one splatting on the floor without fulfilling its egg destiny feels wrong. So yes, Owen gets to carry two eggs with him for most of the book, and I hope it allows the kids to show a better, nurturing side—a sign of them growing up a little, maybe, in the acknowledgement that there’s something out there even more precious than themselves.
Some readers might be hesitant to read books that don’t follow a more traditional plot-driven, action-driven storyline. What do you think are the most effective ways to capture the reader without relying on big climactic moments and intricate storylines?
When people ask me what my book is about, my first, and probably most honest, instinct is to say: ‘Idle Grounds is about kids walking in a circle over one afternoon.’ Because, in terms of plot, that really is it. The drama hopefully comes from a couple of different sources: the first is real-world—the reader knows that something bad happens, that not all of the kids return intact, and that a small girl has gone missing on a large property with woods and roads and a river. The second sense of jeopardy resides in the kids themselves—there’s something stalking them across the estate, throwing obstacles up and turning them against each other. I thought about it like a kind of daft Odyssey in miniature—the kids are tested at regular intervals by their environment, which for them has gone sinister and glitchy, tests which they often fail. And the third strand of drama comes from the mystery surrounding their grandmother’s death, the answers to which are revealed in glimpses by the narrator as the story goes along.
It’s a tiny stage and an unconventional cast, but like the eggs in the book, the reader should ideally care about what happens to these kids almost from a place of dream logic—that the small dramatic arcs are compelling even though they’re often nonsensical.
Even though the setting is so vividly captured, there is a dreamlike quality to the whole novel - I think one reviewer described Idle Grounds as having a near-psychedelic vibrancy, which I thought was great! What narrative elements did you rely on to create that atmosphere?
I wanted the book to feel like those nightmares where you’re getting ready to perform in a play, and the lights in the theatre are down, but you keep doing things like taking out the trash or going to the library, and even though you have these sudden jolts like ‘oh no, the audience is waiting for me and I’m miles away returning overdue books,’ you get distracted again. Your sense of time and real-world time are out of sync, and you have these moments of knowing that there will be serious consequences, but it’s not enough to get you over the line. Shirley Jackson’s short story The Demon Lover captures that feeling perfectly. I think kids’ realities align much more with that split timeframe—there’s what the world feels like to you on one hand, and what the world is asking from you on the other, and they often don’t match up. As you get older, you learn to ignore the first in order to get on with the second, and you lose some intimate connection with the world’s strangeness in the process. In the book, I think the disconnect between what the kids say and what they mean, what they know they should be doing and what they do, that all adds to the hallucinatory quality, where one reality is kind of transposed on the other.
That being said, my editors and agent were really instrumental in keeping the book tethered to reality—they were like ‘Right, where are we? How far past lunch is it? Can you see the house through the trees?’, which was so helpful because if there’s no real world, you lose any sense of consequence. Right near the end of the editing process, I added in a digital watch that the main character is so overly proud of that she keeps announcing the time. The idea of her being officious about her watch made me laugh, but it was also super handy just to give readers a steer.
And last but not least, do you judge a book by its cover?
Um, yes! I’ll happily read a book with a less-than-beautiful cover, but good cover artwork is a joy. And at the risk of being a brown-noser, I used to work in foreign rights, and I’d get to see all the amazing artwork for the foreign editions, and I still think that UK covers are total world-beaters.
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