The One Tree Hill alum sat down with Scary Mommy to talk about her first novel, The Betrayal of Cora Wexford, and why the Victorian era isn’t as far off as we’d like to think. Bethany Joy Lenz didn’t just write The Betrayal of Cora Wexford. She painted it, which feels especially fitting for a novel about a woman who is an artist in that very medium.
Lenz is a longtime hobby painter (she does it for the joy of “slapping around on a canvas”), not a portraitist of the dead like her heroine, but she says the process gave her a window into Cora’s head: getting lost in meticulous work, where every stroke matters. That attention to detail runs through the whole book, Lenz’s first novel after her bestselling memoir Dinner for Vampires. Set in 1888 London as Jack the Ripper terrorizes Whitechapel, it follows Cora, 38, single, childless, and running from her past, as she’s commissioned to paint the forgotten women whose deaths the city keeps shrugging off.
All the while, her own relationship with a charming stranger named Miles starts to hint that darkness could be closer to her door than she even imagined. The Ripper may dominate the headlines, but Lenz is just as interested in the unspoken violence happening in living rooms everywhere, and in the people who look the other way. When Scary Mommy caught up with the One Tree Hill alum, she opened up about everything from gaslighting and the psychology of looking away to why 45 feels like the most settled she’s ever been.
Scary Mommy: Which came first, Cora or the Ripper? How did you land on telling the stories of these "invisible" women against the backdrop of Ripper lore? Bethany Joy Lenz: Cora was first, absolutely.
The only reason I set it in Victorian times is because every time I thought about the story, that's the only way it would manifest itself in my brain. Probably because one of my favorite suspense films is Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. So I wanted to set something in that world that maybe is like a companion to Gaslight.
It's not the same story, it's not derivative, but it lives in that world and there are a lot of similar notes and themes. Once I realized that's where I wanted to set it, I actually picked 1888 because I wanted it to be around the World's Fair and the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Then I realized there's no way I could set a story in London in 1888 that's a suspense and not talk about Jack the Ripper.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
