Over the course of his career, Victor Lodato has transitioned from an actor to a playwright to a novelist. His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and Best American Short Stories. His latest novel, “Honey,” centers around 82-year-old Honey, the daughter of a notorious New Jersey mobster. As a teenager, she escaped her father’s violent circles, moving to Los Angeles and reinventing herself in a world of art and beauty by working for a high-end auction house. At 82, she’s finally returning home to confront her past. Writing about challenging family structures is familiar territory for Lodato, whose debut novel “Mathilda Savitch” is about a 13-year-old girl trying to find the truth behind her older sister’s death, and whose second novel, “Edgar and Lucy,” centers an 8-year-old boy on a journey to understand his family’s past. “Honey” came out April 16, and Lodato speaks at Porter Square Books on May 3. We interviewed Lodato on April 4; his words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come up with the idea for “Honey?”
Honey appears in my last book, “Edgar and Lucy,” she’s in one chapter. I’ve never taken a character from a play or a book and brought them forward into a new piece of writing, but when I was done writing “Edgar and Lucy,” I just kept thinking about Honey. The character was very much on my mind, and mainly it was her voice. That’s really how I start any book – not with an idea or theme, but with a character’s voice in my head. Honey’s voice was really strong, so I just ran with it.
Why the interest in the New Jersey Mafia as the anchor of this story?
I didn’t really set out to write a book about this woman who comes from a mob family, but in “Edgar and Lucy,” I mentioned that she grew up in a mob family, so I tried to figure out what that was like for her. Without going into too much detail, I grew up in a working class family in New Jersey, and some people in my family worked at a very low level for people in the mob. Writing this book wasn’t a matter of research; living in an Italian American community in New Jersey, I was surrounded by people who were in that world, so that was drawn from my personal experience. Honey, like me, is a person who grew up in that milieu, but then fled, and doesn’t come back until years later.
Many readers can probably relate to this disconnect between the way they grew up and the way they’ve lived the rest of their lives. What inspired this reckoning?
During the pandemic, like a lot of people, I was feeling very nostalgic. I think the world has changed so much in the last handful of years, and a lot of people I know, myself included, feel like there’s this world that doesn’t exist anymore, and we’re yearning for it. So that kind of nostalgia was on my mind, which I think is why “Honey” became this homecoming story. The book is about returning home after being away for almost your whole life – Honey doesn’t return home until she’s 82 – and I wanted to examine that. Part of the tension of the book is whether she’s going to come to peace with her family or if her return is going to lead to even more violence.
What interests you most about families and their dynamics?
I feel like it’s hard to write a novel that isn’t about a family, whether they’re a biological family or a created family. A lot of the books that I write, and a lot of the books that I love, are about a created or newly made family outside of the biological family. I think that’s true for so many artists. That’s what we all do: We all leave our families and create a new family, so we’re part of two worlds, when we look at it that way.
What was it like to write “Honey” from the perspective of an older, female protagonist, especially after writing such young protagonists in your other books?
I have tended to make my main characters female, even in my plays. I consider myself gender fluid, so embodying female energy doesn’t feel like a strain for me. But I think it’s also because growing up, the men around me were kind of these mumbling shadows, but I had very, very formative experiences with very strong women in my family. When I think of my memories of my family and my childhood, the people who come forward into the light are women. I was very lucky that I grew up with both my grandmothers, my Polish grandmother and my Italian grandmother, in the same house, along with my mother. On Sundays, all my aunts and my great aunts were there for traditional Italian Sunday dinners. So I think strong women are very much in my body, and throughout my life, I’ve continued to have very strong, older female friends. The book is kind of a tribute to them. Some of these mumbling, shadowy men were bullies when I was growing up, and these strong women that I’m talking about protected me, as Honey protects some people in the book.
- Victor Lodato speaks at 7 p.m. May 3 at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Porter Square, Cambridge.
This post was updated May 14, 2024, to correct a sentence saying work was a matter of research to saying it was not.
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