A Conversation With Margrét Ann Thors on Balancing Literary Depth With Narrative Propulsion (Killer Writers)

There’s a soft spot in my heart for Nordic psychological suspense. When I had the chance to sit down with Icelandic author Margrét Ann Thors, I jumped at it. Margrét’s debut novel, Freyja, immediately intrigued me with how it seamlessly combines Iceland’s haunting landscape, which I adore, with Icelandic folklore and the forward momentum of suspense. Not an easy feat.

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“Margrét, your prose comes across as superbly literary. But the book also has the propulsion of suspense fiction. Were you consciously trying to balance those two traditions?”

“Absolutely. I would say that I came more from the literary tradition, my education and the books I would seek out on my own. I had an elevated sense of what I wanted to read, and then accordingly, what I wanted to write. And then I became a mom. And suddenly, trudging my way through a super literary and cerebral and abstract book lost its appeal to some extent. And so I discovered writers who are beautiful storytellers, and their prose is gorgeous, and the emotional landscape is so deep and well-rendered, and there’s some engine that makes you want to keep moving. And that was eye-opening for me. It was a bit of a self-education in suspense and the mystery/crime genre, and how to create that tension and propulsion. Then I realized the literary stuff can still be there. I can still write pretty sentences, but also have something that makes people want to turn pages and figure out, ‘Oh, what happened here, what happened here?’ It exploded my imagination to realize that I could do both of these at the same time, and that many authors do this exceptionally well.”

“Your work has an incredible atmospheric feel to it. Let’s talk about Freyja, your current book. When you write, do you think first about the plot, the character, or the emotional atmosphere of Iceland itself?”

“A bit of each, but certainly the emotional and physical landscape of Iceland is a part of this story from the beginning. There’s no other place that I imagined it being set. The landscape was evocative for me. And the sense of darkness and foreboding and cold and extremes. The volcanoes, the glaciers, and the black sand beaches. All of it fed my imagination.”

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“How do you approach writing landscape not simply as a setting, but as an emotional pressure driving the characters?”

“A folklore element weaves throughout my work, and it’s so tied to the landscape for me. Especially once you leave Reykjavik, you leave the capital area, and it’s almost like you cross through a foggy veil and enter a world that feels a little different from the everyday world that many people and I are used to. This boundary between the natural and the supernatural starts to fray a little, or get a little thin. My current book is a dual-timeline novel: the childhood chapters take place in the countryside, and then, eventually, in the present, we enter the countryside as well. But something about the folklore, childhood, and the otherworldly countryside landscape all spoke to each other. One helped to animate the other.”

“The folklore and myth are woven into this novel without being overwhelming. It’s like a light sprinkling of salt. How do you determine where myth should enter the story and where restraint was more powerful?”

“The folklore element is another one where the dosage is something that I played around with a lot in the revision process.”

“Dosage?”

“Dosage, yeah, I like it.”

“A dosage. How much am I going to give you?”

“Exactly. I knew I wanted the folklore to be more than Icelandic vibes. I wanted it to matter to the actual story in a material way by the end. I also didn’t want this to be a sci-fi novel or completely outside the realm of what we consider real. My upbringing helped me, because folklore was part of this, particularly the story of the hidden people, these elves. This was just common vernacular in my household and with my family growing.”

“Have you ever seen them? The hidden people?”

“I have not seen them, but I’ve heard many warnings. When my dad was a child, he said that one time he was out in the countryside, banging a rock against a boulder, and my great-grandmother, his grandmother, came out, screaming, ‘No, stop, stop, stop, you’re gonna disturb the hidden people.’ These stories actually were a part of daily life for people, including me a little bit, growing up. Just being very deliberate about, as I said, the dosage. What do I need to make this more than the vibe, the atmosphere, but without going so far into the realm of we’ve lost the tether to reality? And I think something that helped with that is to have characters in the book speak skeptically about these beliefs, or roll their eyes at them, write them off. If readers are similarly, like, ‘What are you talking about, elves? Like, what does this have to do with anything?’ that some characters are expressing those similar doubts, but that ultimately, it comes to matter in the end.”

“The novel moves through the fragmented memory of one of the characters. What were the challenges of building suspense around what a character maybe cannot fully remember?”

“Anytime you have a narrator-protagonist who is delivering the story piece by piece to the reader, you never want it to feel ostentatious or showy withholding, so I had to do this in a subtle way to get to the revelation of what actually happened in the childhood. When I write, whenever I started to get a little bit lost, I would try to ground myself back into the main character and say, ‘If I were going through this, if I were trying to sort out what really happened, what would my next step from here be, and my next step, and my next step?’ It took trial and error to get the revelations correct, and the pacing correct, or to a place that I was happy with. It was kind of both those things: really trying to inhabit someone who truly doesn’t know whether they can trust their memory of what happened and is trying to sort them out in real time, and also then going back and doing a lot of revision. Then trying to imagine this, not only from the main character’s perspective but now from the reader’s perspective, what they might be thinking is going on at this point in the novel, and what they need to get to the next step.”

“There’s this strong psychological tension throughout the book between guilt and truth. How did you decide how much information to withhold from the reader at any given moment?”

“This was something that I would say, again, really got fleshed out in the revision process. I’m revising my second novel and dealing with precisely this issue of how much to reveal and when to reveal it. I’ve fallen into a bit of a conundrum where, according to my outside reader, I am revealing things too late, which is withholding them for too long. I think I have this tendency to want to build suspense by withholding, withholding, withholding, but then that can work against me, not only for the plot, but also for the emotional investment of the reader. It’s a delicate dance: learning when and how much to reveal. And one thing in the revision process for Freyja that my agent helped me with was to really, in each scene, or at each turn in the story, to think about ‘What does the protagonist know and believe at this point, and what do you want the reader to know and believe at this point?’ Because those aren’t always the same. So beat by beat, going through that and making adjustments as needed, was a demanding aspect of the revision process.”

“The childhood memory plays a major role in the novel. What interests you about the way childhood experiences become distorted, fragmented, or mythologized over time?”

“It’s interesting that you say childhood experiences, because I was thinking of it more as traumatic experiences, but unfortunately, these things sometimes overlap, and this mythologizing and misremembering applies to both, right? The memories from childhood and traumatic memories in general. With trauma, the memory of the experience gets coded differently than the memory of what you had for breakfast this morning, assuming that there was no trauma around that. In some ways, the sensory memory can be dialed up a bit, and it’s as if time slows down, and you see this, and see this, and hear this, but there’s a warped sense to it, and sometimes there can be a gap, which is what this main character experiences. Part of what put this traumatic memory on my radar was that about 10 years ago, in the U.S., in Colorado, I was in a mass shooting. I was not physically harmed. And then a few years after that, I wrote about the experience as part of an essay, and in the editorial process before publication, there was a stringent fact-checking that went on. The story had been picked up by national media, and so there was a New York Times article about the mass shooting, and it had maps and diagrams. I had to face this reality that the way I remembered it, which to this day is so clearly—I would bet my life on these things that I wrote—and then to have the factual record and try to reconcile these two things in these moments of intense emotion and potential trauma that something strange happens to memory. And so that’s what I was exploring with this character in the novel. But also, childhood. There’s this hazy partial memory. Some things stand out in my mind so clearly with no rhyme nor reason, just these random things that I remember, and others are stories I’ve been told, and then those become quasi-memories, or I see a photo from childhood, and construct a memory around it. This slippery memory terrain is interesting to me.”

“In this essay that was later fact-checked, did you leave it as is, and say, ‘This is how I remember, this was my experience,’ or did you go with the fact checker?”

“I had to revise the essay. I think it made it better in the end, because, not that I directly addressed the misremembering, but it required me to go a bit deeper into some of the ideas I was exploring. In some ways, it felt like a re-traumatizing experience, because I’m telling you, this is what happened to me, and you don’t believe me. But then having to confront this evidence to the contrary, or evidence that’s slightly different from what I remembered, was quite an experience.”

“The emotional stakes feel intensely purposeful in Freyja. Even while the mystery is expanding outward, how did you maintain intimacy while still delivering that narrative momentum?”

“What I’m learning now, writing my second book as well, is that there’s emotional truth in my fiction, and so the emotional journey and the intimacy of that comes naturally for me to conjure, because it’s close to my heart. The external story is where I have to make everything up and fit those pieces together. I think some of it is understanding, and this is why being a good reader is so critical to being a good writer, the reading experience and when you need a break from the go-go-go of the external plot to dive back into the more emotional terrain, and particularly when these two things collide, when they start to intertwine. In my book, it’s no longer like there’s single-mother emotional terrain here, and then this investigation going on here. These things collapse and are actually now completely entangled.”

“Now that you’re moving into that second book, what did writing Freyja teach you about yourself as a storyteller that you didn’t know before beginning the novel?”

“Before I began the novel, I had no idea anything about structure, plots. This sounds crazy, because I went through an MFA program, but we never learned about that. We learned how to write strong sentences and scenes with some kind of emotional heart. But I had no idea how to structure and sustain a story over 80,000 words, or whatever it is. And so, after my MFA, when I decided that I wanted to write a book or try my hand at this, I had to undergo a whole other education, a self-education, on how do you actually do this? I was so resistant to it because I never wanted to follow a formula or anything like that. But I also needed some sort of guideposts along the way to structure the story, and that has been hugely transformative to my writing.”

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Margrét Ann Thors is an Icelandic-American writer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She received her MFA from Columbia University and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the English department at the University of Iceland. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Storychord, and other outlets. Freyja is her debut novel. https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/freyja