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In The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman, Molly Lynch’s debut novel, mothers are walking away. They are leaving their homes and minivans, missing school pickups and dinners—first a few and then dozens, across the United States. The news on the radio is the soundtrack to this mass quitting, and it’s a ticker tape of climate disaster—waters polluted through deregulation, and fires raging in Western Canada, not unlike the fires raging this summer. And now the local NPR station is reporting that Ada Berger—a 39-year-old university writing teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is the mother of a little boy—went to a little wooded park in town and disappeared, leaving her husband, also a professor, distraught and confused, with no apparent foul play to blame. In the opening pages of this meditative climate-crisis thriller, Ada, who was raised in the western woods of Canada, feels lost in the chaos of a gunned-up and over-incarcerated US. Shortly before she vanishes, she meets another writer, asking, “Have you noticed how you can’t see the future and that makes it hard.”
It is not a spoiler to say that capitalism is running amuck, and through Ada’s disappearance, Lynch’s sharp eye takes us into dark territories of metamorphosis that seem otherworldly but are, terrifyingly, here. “More mothers are leaving,” an FBI agent desperately tells Ada. “There must be a bigger problem,” Ada replies. “Can your agents handle bigger problems?” The bigger problem, as Lynch said when I spoke with her on the phone the other day, “is a civilization in which the destruction and mistreatment of land goes hand in hand with the abuse of all bodies.” In Lynch’s tale, these missing women make the news in a way that, Ada notes, Indigenous women and women of color do not. But what’s so hard for the cops and everyone else to understand is why the women who are perceived to benefit from this civilization choose to walk away. When I called her up, Lynch was in Ann Arbor, and the fires from eastern Canada had just descended on the US’s East Coast, so I asked her about fires where she grew up.
Molly Lynch: I am originally from the West Coast, and fires have just become such a normal part of life there. The smoke just completely consumes summertime; [there is] smoke that just invades. And so, yes, it’s been kind of interesting to see that happen on the East Coast and see how people experience something that has become increasingly quite a normal part of summertime over there—and a horrible, horrible part of it. You can’t not look at it. It’s in your view. It’s all around you. And the smoke, of course, is connected to much bigger problems.
Vogue: Forests and trees are everywhere in the novel, as expansive and seemingly powerful woods, but also as smaller patches that are in cities but feel equally expansive. We learn that Ada grew up in the woods, in the west of Canada. How about you?
I grew up in the Kootenays, in interior British Columbia. My parents were back-to-the-land hippies, and they went there with a lot of draft dodgers—although my dad grew up in Dublin. But there were a number of Europeans out there in the woods too, buying land and cutting trees to build houses. I grew up with two dogs and three sisters, and we were out and about in the forest all the time. Then I spent my teenage years in Dublin, where there are no forests or—well, there was Phoenix Park, but really, wherever I’ve lived in urban spaces, I always find the forests. And the ones that are described in the book are ones that I continue to frequent. Eberwhite Woods is a little patch of forest in the middle of Ann Arbor, and then there’s the arboretum, which kind of extends out into some other forested wilderness areas. The mountain that Ada visits in Montreal was the mountain that I lived right beside from 2000 to 2009, and I would just, like, go up the mountain all the time, into these spindly kind of woods. I know them well.
How does the myth of Artemis figure in the novel?
The terrifying woman in the title is her. But I didn’t intend to write a myth. The myth started happening as I was writing. Ada has her encounter with something—this strange vibe, in a gorge in Greece years before the action in the book takes place. But there’s a way to think about the wild through the mythology. Artemis was revengeful toward anyone who trespassed in wild nature, and trespassing could mean neglect, like not paying your dues. And thinking about our current roles—what is our relationship to the earth? What is a relationship with the environment in our capitalist societies?
Are we guilty of neglect toward her realm?
Yes. If we were to think about Artemis in those terms, then we might imagine the activities of the climate almost as revenge. However, I am super wary of that kind of personification. It sort of separates us from everything around us. When we personify, we are sort of saying that we are dominant. And at the same time, we also have this problem of elevating nature into this good or other or better realm, something I’ve become very wary of growing up in British Columbia. That can be problematic, where people have their own pure connection with the natural world. I’m more interested in the question of how do we live as humans—as super-messy humans?
The idea of nature, or what we think of as nature, isn’t static in the book. How do you explain that?
Nature takes a few different phases in the novel. When Ada plays with her child in the woods, nature is this place of imagination, very free. That’s something that I relate to. That’s where I learned to play, and that’s something I feel—that it’s beautiful, and when you’re playing, the adult, grown-up human world doesn’t feel like that’s the only possible world…surely, we can create other ways. But there’s also the threatening nature that plays out in the background, on the news. Nature as the force that can destroy us. And then there’s this tempting and seductive nature that Ada gets drawn into. She goes there because she’s part of this strange thing happening to mothers, that they are walking away. She follows that temptation, and then later that nature becomes something that terrifies her. And it terrifies her because what does it mean to go off and merge with the natural environment and give up your subjectivity? It is a kind of madness. It would be terrifying.
Ada agrees to appear on a podcast to attempt to explain the almost unexplainable—that is, what is going on, as mothers continue to disappear from various capitalist nations. The host is a sort of star academic. Can you hint at their discussion?
The interviewer is a contemporary feminist theorist. Part of what she gets into is thinking about the role of motherhood as distinct from the act of caring for someone—that act that’s not about fulfilling a historical, social, cultural role. And in the novel, I’m offering that as something for us to consider as we try to interpret the overall thing happening in this book, which is that there appears to be this mass abandonment of society by mothers. So it’s not just mothers walking out on their families; it’s mothers walking out on the world. The book is putting that to us so we can imagine what such a phenomenon would show us about our society. We’re very familiar with the taboo of a mother leaving her child—the idea that there is nothing worse for a mother to do, that she will always be blamed, even now. But importantly, women who become mothers have internalized that taboo, so it’s really hard to be like, “You know, this isn’t working. I can’t do this.”
How does society’s job description for mothers change, considering the earth’s shifting or collapsing ecological systems?
Part of the dilemma that Ada feels is that part of your role as a mother is to raise a child for the future, but when you cannot see the future, or when the future looks crazy or looks like it’s not working, or when the current moment is so full of destructive forces that you are like, Where is this going?…when that happens, you are faced with this ethical dilemma of having to say, “Here, child, come into this world and be part of your own destruction.” And that’s what I am trying to confront. How do we live with that dilemma? There’s absurdity but also this existential problem. It holds up that taboo about motherhood against a larger calamity. So it’s not just one woman you can villainize when there is a mass movement of mothers doing the same thing. The idea is that it might get us to look at the bigger picture.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
