Medicine and the Female Body: A Conversation with Heather Parry

8 Jun

“As a woman, you spend a lot of time thinking about who a woman’s body belongs to – is it the state? Is it her male family? These are the structures we still labour under.”

I’ve written questions about your wonderful book, Orpheus Builds a Girl, but I found it quite difficult to write them because there’s just so much I want to say and ask you! But I think to start, I’d love to know more about the experience of embarking on this project. The book takes inspiration from a true case, so could you tell us more about how you went from seeing a story that piqued your interest to building the story into a fictional book?

That is a great question. I would say I’ve always been interested in a real bastard of a character. I love Lolita; I love The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara – I read it quite soon after I lost my grandma to dementia, so everything about dementia and the symbol in the trees was very affecting. I love those books that make the reader complicit in a social ill by putting them in the position of that character. It really puts a lot of trust in your readers; it takes a lot of skill to pull it off in the same way that Lolita and others did, and I’ve always wanted to challenge readers in that way.

It was about 2017, and I was in my flat in Edinburgh listening to This American Life, you know the podcast – I used to be obsessed with it. It had maybe a ten or fifteen minute section on the real case that is Orpheus. The woman’s name was Elena Milagro de Hoyos, and the man was called Carl Tanzler, and it’s a very shocking, very gothic story in its details and facts. I listened to it and was completely engrossed, but the thing that really shocked me was that they talked to people from Key West, people who really knew her family, and they said things like, ‘Yes, but he just really loved her’ and, ‘At least he didn’t chop her up and throw her in the sea’ or, ‘Well, I’d give anything to be loved in that kind of all-consuming way’. And these were women saying these things.

So, I was really shocked; is the bar so low for male treatment of women that we see this kind of necrophiliac psychopath as some kind of romantic hero? And more than that, they do tours around Key West about this tale of undying love. I was so affronted, as a feminist. You just think, if someone murders me are they going to say it’s because he loved me so much? I don’t believe that is what love is.

I couldn’t get away from how disgusting I felt that was, and the layers of patriarchal abuse she suffered – even the section in Orpheus about the police putting her body on display is also true… So, after Elena had been through all that trauma, they took her body and they put it on display for the Key West public for money. And obviously, in the last few years, with the attacks on Roe v. Wade, as a woman, you spend a lot of time thinking about who a woman’s body belongs to – is it the state? Is it her male family? These are the structures we still labour under.

So, I wanted to queer that understanding of the story, in the queer as a verb way; I wanted to challenge the understanding of it. I wanted to implicate the reader in the story because, as a society that lets this stuff go on and lets these stories be told in this way, we’re all implicated. And I wanted to talk about the way that narcissistic, manipulative men achieve what they do and get away with it! As a writer, you find out something and it burrows its way into the back of your brain, and this story stayed there for a good couple of years, and then finally, Orpheus came about.

Fascinating! I really want to touch on what you said about the complicity of the people who lived in Key West because I’ve seen the character Wilhelm described as ‘well-intentioned’, and it reminded me of those headlines you still see now that say something like, ‘Loving Family Man Kills Wife in Shock Murder’ – where the murder itself is almost secondary to the fall from grace of the man who has just killed somebody. It reminded me of Wilhelm’s infatuation being given more value than his victim’s own body.

Definitely, and it’s usually white men who are described in that way. If it’s men of colour, let’s say in the context of a Muslim family, it is framed as a failure of the religion, in a way that you wouldn’t get if he was a Catholic, white Englishman. I do hate those headlines that essentially say something like, ‘Promising Young American Football Star Tragically Decides to Murder Wife, Ruining his Future Prospects’. And it’s like, were in 2023! You do see some backlash against these kinds of headlines, especially on social media, but it’s clearly making so little impact. Or the other option is that they know that this is a really fucked up way to report on these things, but they do it for clicks, which adds a layer of exploitation of dead women to the mix.

Yes, and that links back to the police putting the body on display because they know they will be able to make a profit from it.

Yes! And the real case was reported in papers in Key West that were very sensationalist and exploitative in the traditional sort of sense.

I wanted to talk to you about characterization, because you did an incredible job of building your characters, particularly Wilhelm, who’s obviously a horrible human being. Unreliable narrators always fascinate me, and I wanted to find out more about the process of building Wilhelm’s character?

Also, at the beginning of the book, you go into detail about his upbringing, much of which could arouse sympathy for Wilhelm before the story progresses. Do you feel there is legitimacy in the idea of feeling initial sympathy for the character?

I think that one of the hard facts of life is that people aren’t monsters; the people who do these deplorable things are human beings. And you know, we call people psychopaths all the time, but psychopaths are actually incredibly rare. And the worst thing to realise is that someone who murders someone has someone else that they love.

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Read the full interview in Issue 116, Light.

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