Goodnight Mom: The Millions Interviews Julia Fine
Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House was published on Feb. 23. If ever there was a month to consider what it means to be inside, it was the February that came nearly a year into a pandemic that kept most people homebound. The novel’s protagonist, Megan, is a new mother who is homebound in the way all new parents are. She is tethered, physically and emotionally, to a newborn whose arrival has shrunk her world to sleepless nights and endless feedings. Except Megan isn’t alone, even when her husband returns to work. The ghost of Margaret Wise Brown, author of the children’s classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, is also at home alongside Megan.
Fine’s first novel, What Should Be Wild, was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award. In The Upstairs House, she once again returns to examining the world through a supernatural lens. We chatted about hauntings, motherhood, and how language can bring us both closer and farther from understanding.
The Upstairs House is a novel about a woman who is haunted by Margaret Wise Brown and , after giving birth. How did you approach the initial idea for the novel? Which or the ghost?
