Christopher Bollen: Get Outside of Yourself

Christopher Bollen is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lost Americans, A Beautiful Crime, The Destroyers, Orient, and Lightning People. He is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and Interview. He lives in New York City. Follow him on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Christopher discusses how sheer excitement about the subject matter took what he thought would be novella and turned it into his new literary thriller, Havoc, his advice for writers, and more.

Name: Christopher Bollen
Literary agent: Bill Clegg
Book title: Havoc
Publisher: Harper
Release date: December 3, 2024
Genre/category: Thriller/Literature
Previous titles: The Lost Americans, A Beautiful Crime, The Destroyers, Orient, Lightning People
Elevator pitch: An old woman and a little boy meet in a grand hotel on the Nile during the pandemic, and quickly become, not friends, but bitter enemies. It’s a war between generations, the old versus the young, and they will stop at nothing to destroy each other.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

Right after the pandemic, I was taking a boat up the Nile, from Luxor to Aswan, and happened to stay at a beautiful old hotel, The Winter Palace (where, incidentally, Agatha Christie stayed). While eating lunch in the back garden one day, I noticed an old American woman berating a waiter about how she liked her food. And the story just came to me all at once in a blind rush. I would write about an old American woman who takes up residency in a historic hotel and causes absolute chaos.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The idea came to me in April 2021 and now it’s publishing at the tail end of 2024. That doesn’t seem so fast, and yet I wrote the first draft rather quickly once I got started. The voice of Maggie just rolled out of me. Three and a half years.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Actually, one wonderful lesson that I learned involves the length of the book. Initially I only thought of Havoc as a short story or novella. By sheer excitement for the material, it expanded into a novel. But I found not thinking of it in that daunting way of Oh, this is a novel, so it must have a wide panorama, to be extremely liberating. I could just get lost in the material at hand, in Maggie and her quest to murder a little boy, and not worry about the big-picture business that often end up weighing novels down.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

In my previous novels, I’ve always written about young people—very different kinds of young people, but all with young people problems and desires. I was surprised how easily I slipped into the voice of an 81-year-old widow, how naturally it felt to exist on the other side of the age spectrum. I think I learned that I often write best when I’m not burdened with drawing from my own experiences, but rather connecting to more fundamental human emotions‑fear of death, fear of pain, fear of the loss of our loved ones.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

The very young and the very old are two groups that are overlooked, the two people in the room whose opinions matter less, who are disregarded of feeble mind. The joy of Maggie and Otto lay in bringing these two overlooked characters (so easily written off as harmless innocents) to the fore. I think of this book as so much having to do with age. And also, it’s very much about loneliness, the effects of losing all you built to save you, and how sustained loneliness and disenfranchisement really can make a person go mad. I suppose I hope to make readers contemplate age and time passing and the transience of all we think we know and love. It’s a story with seasons, spring and winter.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Everyday. You need to work on the piece of writing every single day. Even for an hour. Even if you are in no mood for it (especially if you are in no mood for it). Because it’s work. And the pleasure comes, I promise, in the salt-mine day-to-day struggle. Also: Get outside of yourself. I don’t believe you have to write what you know. Don’t listen to that. Write a character utterly unlike you. Go from there.