Sour Cherry, the debut novel from Natalia Theodoridou, is an immersive reinvention of Bluebeard, the French fairytale wherein a repugnant aristocrat murders his wives, one after another. In Sour Cherry, the chronology of a man’s life is narrated to the reader, from motherless childhood through blighted adulthood. Theodoridou explores the Bluebeard figure’s lethal touch through the kaleidoscopic experiences of those caught in his orbit, including his wet nurse-cum-cook, wives, lovers, and children, revealing how harm envelopes both its perpetrators and victims. With every step, the man leads with destruction, leaving behind him a trail of tragedy: entire towns run dry, livestock poisoned from within, vegetation turned black, children and women left dead.
Throughout Sour Cherry, Theodoridou seamlessly shifts focus from the man to his wives to his children and back to build a gothic fairytale that speaks to the innateness of evil under a system of patriarchal capitalism and the power we have—as individuals and a collective—to excuse it, and what it takes to intervene against it. Part fairytale, part ghost story, Sour Cherry is a classic tale with a modern infusion. Theodoridou writes not so much across time and place, but in spite of it, showing that abuse of power is a forgone conclusion within the systems that create it. In doing so, he offers a future evolved beyond these cycles and systems, one characterized by understanding, empathy, and accountability.
Following the release of Sour Cherry, I connected with Theodoridou via email to discuss fairytales’ capacity to shed light on modern life, the humanity of survivors and those who harm(ed) them, and capturing the specificity of abusive dynamics and the systems that enable them.
Christ: The idea of “belief” is woven through the novel’s various themes and genres such as abuse, ghost stories, and fairytales. Can you talk about how the power of believing shades the stories being told in Sour Cherry?
Natalia Theodoridou: That’s such an interesting and unexpected question. Unexpected because I don’t tend to think in terms of belief, and I find people who have faith (religious or otherwise) deeply fascinating. Belief, faith, and conviction all translate as the same word (or words that are very closely related etymologically) in Greek. You are right that “belief” is woven through the novel’s themes; masculinity is not toxic inherently but as a result of people’s beliefs (and stories) about it. In a way, the patriarchy is a kind of religion.
I was recently describing the novel to someone and they asked if I believe in ghosts. I don’t. The question caught me by surprise because it had never crossed my mind that my belief in the existence of ghosts had anything to do with the centrality of their role in the novel. I believe victims (believe in victims?); victims and victimization are what haunts me. That’s how “belief” is important in Sour Cherry.
C: At its core, Sour Cherry is about power and masculinity. How do you see those themes intersecting with class, environment and community throughout the story?
NT: Sour Cherry is built around the themes of toxic masculinity, domestic violence, and cycles of abuse, and the Bluebeard tale was particularly well suited to talk about them not only because of the main plot of the story but also because of the supernatural element that is never explained: the man is not simply a serial killer; he also has an inexplicable blue beard. What is that about? It went straight to the core of my questions about violence and violent people: is it natural? Is it unnatural? Is it a choice? Can they escape it? Can Bluebeard be anything other than a guy with a blue beard?
Victims and victimization are what haunts me.
In Sour Cherry, he is literally toxic, he rots the world around him and makes people sick. Can he help it? Does he have agency? That’s the crux of the story for me, and it’s what allowed me to ask further, more complex questions: Whose fault is it—is it just him? How culpable are the rest of us, the society that enables him, the patriarchy that affords him his power, the class system that created him? The class aspect is crucial; it’s not an accident that Bluebeard is someone who controls wealth. He drains resources because that’s what his class does; he feels entitled to the land and the houses and the people that inhabit them because that entitlement is built into the virus that is capitalism, destroying one place and then moving on to the next to destroy that, too. The rot is structural; the ghosts turning that rot—slowly and deliberately decaying the furniture, peeling the wallpaper, dulling the spoons—into a means of storytelling, of speaking their truth, is a kind of class warfare. That is what makes them a community.
C: How does initially obfuscating the narrator’s identity speak to the novel’s themes?
NT: I’m curious which part you see as obfuscating the narrator’s identity: her insertion into the fairytale as Cherry Girl or her revealing herself as his latest victim in the contemporary narrative?
In a sense, her taking on a role in the fairytale narrative functions as both obfuscation and revelation. The speculative element allows her a degree of separation from the story she’s telling. It protects both the narrator and her addressee by introducing a level of unbelievability. This is a choice I make myself every time I write a story that is rooted in reality but also strange or magical in some way; I feel it allows me to speak more freely and, paradoxically, more directly about things that would otherwise be very hard, and possibly even cruel, to articulate. Saying “a true thing by a false name,” as the narrator says at one point. That obfuscation is the mercy of the fairytale.
C: There are multiple instances in Sour Cherry where the past comes up to and spills into the present in ways that were both thrilling and satisfying for the reader. What opportunities does the collapsing and subsequent revelation of time offer stories of abuse?
NT: This is the thing I love the most about ghosts: They are the present past. They force us to confront what happened, to measure ourselves against the consequences of our actions, the legacies of our natural and unnatural disasters. Cherry Girl at some point says that, with stories of abuse, “the people are us, the time is always.” The flattening of time in this way enables us to speak to the commonalities in stories of abuse without erasing the singularity of each one. Isn’t this what allows us to see ourselves in stories in general? I’ll probably never see myself reflected in a story exactly, but with enough commonality, and if I squint a little, the right kind of spillage can happen that will allow me to say, “I’ve felt this, too.” I have found comfort this way, and maybe the darkness wasn’t exactly lightened, but at least I knew I wasn’t alone. If I can do that for even one other person with this story, my work is done.
C: In multiple instances, Sour Cherry emphasizes the impossibility of knowing another person entirely, in its narration, the character study of the central male figure, and in partnership. In doing so, the book does a razor sharp job of making observations without judgements of its characters. What’s to be found when people are positioned in this grey area between “good” and “bad”?
NT: I don’t think people are “good” or “bad.” I think the same person can do good things and bad things in different circumstances (and let’s not even get started on how the same action can be good or bad relative to different value systems—let’s just assume we’re talking about something as black and white as killing your wife, a very bad thing). What I’m interested in is understanding what motivates people to behave in the ways they do: what leads someone to act in ways that are harmful, to be complicit in the harming of others or themselves, to not be able to even see that there are different ways they could behave, or to see all the other options available to them and still choose pain and destruction.
What would be the point of judgement? Maybe in court, but in a book? It wouldn’t make it easier for anyone to spot or understand abuse; worse, I think the easy judgements lead to uncomplicated stories that misrepresent the power dynamics that make escaping abuse so difficult. Monstrous, simply bad characters are easy to condemn, punish, and escape. Any good person in their right mind would just leave. Right?
C: How did the forest become so inextricable in the formation of the man in the story? Is it a coincidence that he is seen at his happiest in the city, removed from it?
NT: I love that question; I had not considered the man’s happiness in the city in these terms, but of course you’re right. It’s not a coincidence. The forest is this man’s fairytale setting; the storytelling tradition that endows him with his mythical power, the harmfulness he fails to escape. The story doesn’t really allow him much, and the little it does he finds too difficult to embrace, so in the end he accepts the forest as an aspect of himself. He’s not just a man who is meant to do bad things in the forest; he is the forest. He is evil itself. That’s what the story tells him.
Removed from this fairytale setting, it’s the first time he glimpses a different existence for himself, freed from the shackles of his story (his narrative-inherited villainy). I think Cherry Girl taking that from him is the cruelest thing she can do, and the thing closest to punishment (albeit ineffective) that the man experiences in the story. She forces him to face up to who he’s always been, not because the story left him no choice, but because he never found it in himself to choose otherwise.
C: Can you speak on the feminine loss of identity in the forest of toxic masculinity as represented by the narrator, the ghost wives and Agnes/Cook?
NT: Many of the characters remain unnamed or start off with names and eventually shed that part of them. Agnes and Eunice have names and later lose them. They are the only ones who know the man as a boy, before he abandons the realm of names entirely and everyone in his life becomes a means to an end. It’s not just women, either. The Shopkeeper is a function, as is Cook; these people have taken on the roles assigned to them by the primary force of this fairytale. However, it’s not the absence of a name that seals that power dynamic. Kate Bernheimer in her essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale” argued that the “flatness” of characters in fairytales “functions beautifully; it allows depth of response in the reader.” I think the absence of names functions in a similar way. So I think the loss of identity is not specific to feminine characters. In fact, the Bluebeard man doesn’t have one either. In letting go of proper names and retaining only their functions, the people in this story do two things: one, they expose the utilitarian way in which Bluebeard relates to them. And two, they relate in a less context-bound way. This is precisely what the fairytale style of naming (a King, a Hunter, a Woodcutter) does, and it is part of what makes fairytales resonant in a wider variety of contexts. This story could be anywhere, any time.
I don’t think people are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ I think the same person can do good things and bad things in different circumstances.
Is there something uniquely feminine about the loss of identity in this story though? I think so. But I also wonder if there’s an aspect of freedom to it, too, something gained, not only something lost. The loss of a name or an identity can create a vacuum to be filled by something new, and anything at all; perhaps it can be the beginning of radical self-determination. The characters in this story don’t quite get there. The ghosts use their identity emptiness to make their demands; the narrator goes as far as fantasizing about becoming a King of her own making—I think that’s the closest I came to a trans/gender feels moment in this book. I guess loss of identity can either make you a non-person or more yourself, which is no loss at all.
C: I loved how the beats of the story were so shaped by its surroundings. How do experiences and stories of isolation, blight and abuse shift when it moves between city and country settings?
NT: What a beautiful way to ask this question. It takes me to lyrical places: loneliness in the forest is texturally different to isolation in the city, isn’t it? Not least because are we ever truly alone in the country where so much is alive around us? Unless, of course, the land is blighted; unless our very existence is the thing that blots out life and renders the forest a bleak, decaying place. Isolation feels to me different in the city because it seems so much easier to be lost in it, be one among many, lose name and identity in the preoccupied crowd, the grey anonymity. Abuse in the rural settings of the novel happens under cover of darkness and distance and a culture of silence and deference to power; in the city it simply fades from view because it’s so common, red on red or grey on grey, it just doesn’t stand out.
C: The phrase “If you leave you die. But if you die, you stay” comes up multiple times throughout the story. What does that mean to you beyond the context of this particular story?
NT: I wanted to capture how abuse can feel like an inescapable trap. It’s a fact that in domestic violence and abuse, the victim is most at risk of being killed when they try to leave the abuser. So, “if you leave, you die” can be literally true. And if you die, well, you haven’t left, have you?
But beyond that, I think this sense of being trapped, the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”-ness of it is what makes a lot of experiences of power imbalance both unbearable and difficult to describe in a way that will be intelligible to someone who hasn’t had that experience, or who is structurally unlikely to have it because their identity shields them. It just sounds so implausible, you know?
C: In many stories, accepting ourselves or others as we/they are is contextualized to be positive. In Sour Cherry, it appears as resignation. Is there a version of this story where the baby could grow up to become a different kind of man?
NT: I think there’s a difference between accepting ourselves as we are, with all our flaws and shortcomings, and absolving ourselves of responsibility for the harm we cause to ourselves and others as a result of how we respond to these flaws and shortcomings. Self-acceptance and self-love, extending ourselves empathy and understanding, are definitely positive things because they allow us, theoretically, to own our choices and take responsibility for our actions. This is incredibly hard to do. And, unfortunately, in my experience, what most people call self-acceptance is actually resignation; an attitude of “well, this is who I am,” and an acceptance of the impossibility of change. This is certainly what the Bluebeard figure in Sour Cherry is guilty of. People tried to show him how to be vulnerable, how to allow himself to be loved; the Shopkeeper even modeled for him a masculinity that is both tender and strong. He chose not to listen; chose what was familiar. He embodied the myths he had been handed and that he had a hand in shaping. I understand why he chose the way he did, and I find it sad; but that doesn’t mean he’s not responsible for making that choice. So yes, of course the baby could grow up to be a different kind of man. People do it all the time! People with much harder starts in life than him, even, and in much more challenging circumstances.
C: In ways that are compelling, confounding and frustrating, Sour Cherry’s characters and their choices and stories defy a completely discrete victim/villain dichotomy that is at times fatalistic from its characters’ perspectives. What is to be made of a world where pain is everywhere and accountability is rarely seen?
NT: I think you are right to spot the fatalism in the characters’ perspectives, but I see that fatalism not as a position (certainly not my position, or my belief, to come full circle in this conversation) but as a symptom, a reaction to a wound, a trauma response; I understand why a victim might find it less painful to resign and accept their “fate.” It’s not unusual for traumatized people (and animals) to prefer the familiarity of the trauma to the terror of the unknown because it’s easy to mistake what is familiar for what is safe. Being treated differently is unthinkable. It can even be a sense of optimism, hoping to do things differently next time, hoping the abusive other will change, or that they’ll finally get to have a reparative experience if they persevere long enough.
Unfortunately, what most people call self-acceptance is actually resignation.
I hope that what’s to be made is a greater understanding of how cycles of abuse are perpetuated; more compassion for survivors; a greater willingness to hold people accountable without losing sight of their humanity; and, maybe, because we understand things in context and not just in isolation, tackling the larger structures that enable harm: the forest that the man in the novel is.
In a way the book has two distinct addressees: the people who’ve been there, on the receiving end of this kind of harm, and the people who haven’t. To the first it says: I know. I get it. There’s no judgement here for you; only solidarity. To the rest it says: This is what it’s like for some of us. Now what will you do?
