Sophie Mackintosh returns this month with her mysterious new book Cursed Bread, which is based on the real-life story of the 1951 Pont Saint-Esprit mass poisoning
, might guess that this strange story would capture her imagination. It seems to fit the author’s literary sensibility almost too perfectly – like a dark fable, it is suffused with surreality, violence, and the sense that the everyday world can be suddenly overturned and irrevocably altered.
It just sent me into a little wormhole. I kept returning to it, and wondering what I could do with the idea of this town that basically gets flipped on its head. When I was writing it, actually, [there was this feeling of] everything being tipped upside down, being turned on its head, and the sense of claustrophobia, this sense of not knowing what was real, this atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. I was like, actually [these events are] not massively different. And in the book, the shadow of World War II is always there as well, and the idea of this massive collective trauma that everyone has lived through already.
Elodie tells herself a story – she tells herself a story about falling in love with Violet, and a story about what Violet’s life is like. She’s just existing in her own little world, essentially. I was talking to someone recently and they said, “so did she hallucinate the whole thing? Did Violet and the Ambassador even exist?” And I was like no, they definitely existed, but it’s interesting that people would have that response.
SM: I wanted to tell the story of the town, but also knew that I wanted to look back from where Elodie is now. And in that way, sow little easter eggs, or breadcrumbs. It’s a weird space, because if you know the event, you know what happens and what the story is building towards. But then you don’t necessarily know everything, and you don't know what happened to the characters. So I wanted to slowly reveal that information while we’re also learning about the event.
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