Rebecca Scherm reclaims the femme fatale in her first novel, a heist thriller with legs.

by Joanna Demkiewicz

In Rebecca Scherm’s first novel, Unbecoming (out today), we learn right away that something is eerily out of place in the life of our protagonist, Grace. She’s working off the books for a shady antique restorer in Paris, and she’s introducing herself as “Julie from California,” just one of the many masks she carries up her sleeve.

These “masks” are necessary to Grace, we learn bit by bit, starting from the beginning. As a young girl in her hometown, Garland, Tennessee, she is acutely aware of her unnoticed family’s place in small town social politics, and seeks to remake herself with the Grahams, a family with privilege and deep roots in the community. She and the youngest Graham son, Riley, begin a love affair that leads to a secret marriage and eventually, a heist gone wrong. Grace escapes to Prague, then to Paris, where she hides under the umbrella of her sham identity and repurposes beautiful antiques, a job with ironic access that gives her an undeniable high – perhaps the one true thing about Grace.

The story is deliberately built so we do not and cannot trust Grace; it’s not quite an onion when it comes to the layer metaphor – more like a baklava. Scherm has reimagined the old-time glamour and grandeur of heist stories – think Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief or the more recent American Hustle – and cracked open our viewfinder so we can see all the failures and betrayals for what they are, sometimes mundane, sometimes incomprehensible.

I spoke with Scherm about the making of a contemporary femme fatale, about puppy love, and about how her obsession with heists “became this psychological knot that [she] needed to untangle.” 

Joanna Demkiewicz: In the acknowledgments you say you are “indebted to Russian jewel thief Sonya Golden Hand” and that several of the heists mentioned in the book are based on actual news coverage. Can you tell me about your research process and what inspired you to write this story?

Rebecca Scherm: The first sort of inspiration is from way, way, way before I thought I would ever write a novel like this. When I was a little kid, I grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock movies and caper movies with my mom, especially the ones he made with Grace Kelly, who is definitely the namesake for the main character [in Unbecoming]. As a kid, I loved watching heist movies because they presented this fantasy world about a criminal life, but they never acted like it was bad. You would see people breaking the law, and stealing, and doing everything that I knew to be wrong, yet when we are watching it as moviegoers, we’re celebrating it. And as I got older, I started to think that was really strange, and I found myself reading heist stories in the newspaper; whenever I came across one, they were just magnets for me – I would just go right to them (and) find myself reading them like a moviegoer. Even though they were talking about real life, and real people’s possessions being stolen, and real crime, and real danger, and real morals, I would find myself rooting for thieves. I became really interested in why that felt allowed, when I didn’t feel that way about violent criminals or people stealing from the poor…why I gave that whole genre of crime a pass. It became this psychological knot that I needed to untangle. Like, what if I need to examine the underbelly of the femme fatale character in so many of these stories? What would it mean for me to look at a heist story through the eyes of someone who had seen those same stories – had seen the sparkling atmosphere of thievery as beautiful – and then really pushed her into it and make it a reality for her?

JD: That’s so interesting and leads to a question I was going to ask about the femme fatale, who is classically defined – especially in noir films – as the seductive woman who brings disaster to whomever she becomes involved with. And Grace actually refers to herself as one, sort of mid-novel. “I’m quite the femme fatale,” she says. “Always being around and whatnot.”

RS: Right. She makes a joke about it.

JD: Was it your purpose to create a femme fatale, and if so, why?

RS: Well, the reason is in part to explore a type that is very two-dimensional and also to dismantle it. When we think about a femme fatale from noir, we see that femme fatale through a male lens. And who knows how other women see the femme fatale, or if she sees herself that way…it’s sort of like, if men feel seduced by her and make terrible decisions because they feel seduced by her, they decide she’s a femme fatale. And I find that very interesting from a feminist perspective. I’m also always interested – in all of my work – in looking at something that is a type or a trope or a genre, and trying to push it to a sort of extreme reality. Like, ‘Well, ok, you’re telling me that a femme fatale is this type and we should recognize it. Well, I’m going to make a real femme fatale, and we’re going to see what really makes her tick.’ Or we’ll see how it holds up, as a type. That is something that interested me throughout the whole book.

JD: Right. And something I noticed when she is building her identity in Tennessee is that she doesn’t have any female friends. I’m wondering if that is purposeful on your part, or if it was necessary for Grace in becoming who she later becomes?

RS: It was absolutely intentional, and I’m glad you noticed that. I think that having female friends growing up helps us see ourselves, and they help us consider what it means to us to be female. We compare ourselves to each other, and we grow together. I grew up with a very close-knit group of friends, and we were all very different, but we would have friction with each other – especially entering our teenage years – and there was a lot of jockeying and confusion about what it means to be female. I think you have to have female friends to work that out with yourself. And so, for Grace to not have female friends, is for her to make herself into this type. She is someone who is working very hard to feel less complicated, and I think that’s part of her downfall. She’s very frightened by complexity and darkness within herself. So if she surrounds herself with boys, she can always see herself comfortably through a male lens. I think that becomes a crutch for her, or more comfortable for her, in a tragic way.

JD: That’s fascinating. Also, from the first line – “The first lie Grace told Hanna was her name” – we know we are meant to distrust Grace, who is also our protagonist. There’s a lot of general discussion in media about “likable characters” and whether or not readers need one to engage in a story. What about Grace do you think engages with a variety of readers?

RS: For me, she fascinates. I don’t want Grace to be my friend or my sister or my roommate, or anything like that. I want to understand her. I think a lot of us have people in our lives who make these decisions that seem incomprehensible to us – often people that we love [or] people that lie to us or betray us in some way. I think that that’s reality – that there are people in everyone’s lives, close to them, or who we encounter at work or at school, who feel like villains. I wanted to understand the villain by getting inside her head to the point where she didn’t feel like a villain to me. She would feel like the anti-heroine. It’s funny that, you know, the unlikable characters – especially unlikable female characters – I sort of naively thought when I finished this book that that debate was over [laughs]. I was talking about this with a mentor of mine, Eileen Pollack, and she was like, ‘Uh, no. You’re in for a wild ride with this one.’ But that’s all right, because it’s something I really like talking about…the importance I see in characters that do bad things and make us examine our own darker impulses.

JD: Even though while I was reading, I was always aware, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, she does bad things,’ there were times when I understood her. And other times I didn’t understand her. But that’s ok. That’s normal.

RS: There would be times writing Grace when I was really rooting for her, and I felt deeply for her, and I really wanted her to win at the expense of others. And there were other times I was writing her, I was so angry with her, and I really wanted her to make a different decision…It’s very tempting as a writer to relate too much to the character. But Grace and I are so very different, and I was always trying to understand someone different from me, so it became very important to remember that she is not me.

JD: That small scene where she and her mom finally talk about their issues – that was a scene when I didn’t understand her. Because I was like, ‘Yes, finally, talk it out,’ but she was so cold about it. That felt like a really important scene to me.

RS: It is. And I look at the marketing of the book, and it doesn’t say anything about mothers, and so much of the book is about Grace’s troubled soul and her relationship to mothers – her relationship to Mrs. Graham and to her own mother. At the time, when we were making all these decisions that felt really intentional, I didn’t want to give the reader – I didn’t want the reader to go in with that. I wanted them to just discover that for herself or himself.

JD: I have a question about flashbacks and flash-forwards. They help guide us through the story, and they help us pick up clues at certain moments. Did you use the flashbacks as a device to create suspense, or what purpose did that style serve?

RS: In all my different drafts of this book – I tried a lot of different structures; most people do – I didn’t always know it would be this way. I often picture a novel in terms of actual shapes, visual shapes. I think about it in novels I’m reading and things I’m working on. It took a long time for me to understand that this is a zipper. Once I understood that what I was writing was a zipper, and I thought about how a zipper works – you need the left side to link with the right side, one tooth at a time, for either side to make sense. Once I had that metaphor, I understood the pieces I was working with…I realized that if this book is really going to be about [how] this particular woman became herself, we needed to start from the beginning, and we needed to see the end in the beginning. And this would be a story of how she got here. That’s when I started thinking about the zipper.

JD: Interesting. I’ve never heard of a structure described that way.

RS: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve heard of any other writers describe their work in terms of shapes. Maybe because I used to be a visual artist, I feel I need those visuals to make my plan.

JD: That makes sense. I didn’t know you used to be an artist, and in terms of – we talked about the research process a little bit already – but there are a lot of interesting details about art and antiques in the story. Can you touch on the art-specific research process as well?

RS: All of the antiques in the book are specific pieces. There’s nothing general or made up. I would start with a metaphor that I wanted – a beautiful box with a secret compartment or a cage of some kind. Then I would wonder, ‘Well, does that actually exist.’ And I would find objects, usually on internet auction sites like 1stdibs, and I would go deep into that object and learn much more than I needed to and much more than I used. That’s the click hole of research. I probably spent weeks and weeks and weeks of research that was more than I needed to know. But I don’t regret it, because it gave me a sense of authority with the material.

JD: I’d love to talk to you about how the love story element drives the plot as well. Grace creates an identity that she believes Riley could never not love. How did youth, love and lust – especially youth – eventually influence each character’s intentions – Grace, her boyfriend Riley, and his best friend Alls?

RS: That’s a great question. Something I was interested in is the idea of puppy love as being this sweet or precious thing. I think a lot of teenagers look back on their first loves as a harrowing and confusing experience; it’s something else that we tend to romanticize in the past. But especially for Grace, who feels so profoundly alone in the world, and everything she’s doing is imitation. She’s faking it until she makes it in every moment of her life. For her, to meet someone like Riley, who’s really her opposite – as sure of himself as he could possibly be. His family had made him incredibly secure, emotionally, financially and socially. He never feels like he’s faking it. He probably doesn’t know what it feels like to fake it. To throw them together like that and have two people who really believe they love each other, but who fundamentally can’t understand each other, that, to me, is a love story that most people are familiar with…I think there were three love stories in the book. There was Grace’s love story with Riley, Grace’s love story with Alls, and Grace’s love story with Mrs. Graham [Riley’s mother]. I’m very interested in talking to readers – I have to ask you – what love they think is the most real.

JD: That’s a really good question. I think, for me, the answer is Alls. Because early on, her observations of Alls to herself are the most honest. And when she observes Riley and Mrs. Graham, she wants something from them. But when she’s observing Alls – even in the beginning, when they are just friends – it’s like she’s looking in a mirror, but she’s won’t admit it.

RS: That’s such a great answer. I love what you said about wanting something and that making her observations less honest.

JD: I think that’s a reflection of what you created. Their love is a messy love; it’s definitely not beautiful love. They had something genuine, even though they shared so many ingenuine qualities.

RS: [Laughs] This was never going to be a fairy tale.

JD: Right. I’m glad you asked me that. From your perspective, from readers, would you rather hear a million different answers or –

RS: Oh, I don’t know. I think I would be really bummed if I only heard one answer and it was one I did not agree with. But any other choice sounds good to me. Like any question, it’s more interesting to hear why people think what they think or why they read it that way.

JD: What would you say Grace’s strengths are?

RS: I think that her strength is that she is a chameleon. And that wasn’t something I knew while I was writing. I was finding out how she became this woman, but I didn’t know what the tools would be. I knew there would be a lot of failures. And at the end of the book, there’s a desire of any reader to feel like they have solved the character, and Grace will never tolerate that. She won’t tolerate someone solving her or getting to the heart of her. But, in the end, what I discovered was that I wasn’t going to be able to solve her, either. Not all the way.

JD: That’s a great way to end – a bit of a cliffhanger. Let’s turn to you. What’s on your bedstand right now?

RS: Ok, I have some new readings and some re-readings. Right now, my new readings are Almost Famous Women, by Megan Mayhew Bergman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride. I’m also reading a sociology text that my husband recommended to me called Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education, [by Annette Lareau] and that has to do with my next project; just educating myself there. I’m also re-reading right now – In the Cut, by Susanna Moore, which no one should read before bed [laughs].

JD: What does your next project entail?

RS: I’m working on another novel, which I started last summer after I finished the final edits for Unbecoming. And I was so grateful – I had the idea all at once, in a day, and I started in right away. On the surface, it seems very different. It’s about an American family ten years in the future, who goes to live on a private space station. In some ways, that seems very different, but as I was working on it a couple days ago, I realized the ways in which it’s very much from the same concerns. It’s about secrets and lies between people who think they are very close. It’s about identity. The parents in the family are scientists, and they go to this space station because their lives have become mundane, and they want to be the heroes they thought they would be. These conflicts about identity and feeling like you’ve fallen short – my husband says, ‘You and your liars.’ I think I’m seeing myself work through these concerns from a different angle.

JD: Those themes sound familiar.

RS: [Laughs] Oh, God, I hope not too familiar. It feels like I’m working on something very different. But who knows, maybe I’ll be one of those writers where that’s my thing. We’ll find out.

Photo credit: Myra Klarman

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Joanna Demkiewicz is The Riveter‘s co-founder and features editor. Find her on Twitter at @yanna_dem.