SEPT OCT 2019 58Q&A TÉA OBREHTAMY GALL’s writing has appeared in
Tin House, Vice, Glamour, and the
anthology Mapping Queer Spaces. Recycle,
her book of collage and text coauthored
with Sarah Gerard, was published by
Pacific Press in 2018. She is currently
working on a collection of linked essays
about queer bodies and pleasure.
Book Award and became the youngest
winner of the Orange Prize (now the
Woman’s Prize for Fiction), among
many other accolades.
Obreht has said that The Tiger’s Wife
took less time to write because the
inciting incidents of the novel were
pulled from the pages of her own life.
It was set in Belgrade, in the former
Yugoslavia, where Obreht was raised by
her mother and maternal grandparents
until she was seven and civil war broke
out. After fleeing the country, she and
her family spent much of her child-
hood in transit, living for brief periods
in Cyprus, Egypt, and eventually the
United States. Obreht was very close
to her maternal grandfather, Stefan.
Because her father, as she stated previ-
ously, was “not in the picture,” Stefan
served as the main paternal figure in
her life. His death in 2006 inspired
Obreht to begin work on The Tiger’s
Wife—which centers around a relation-
ship between a young woman, Natalia,
and her grandfather—as a way to stay
close to Stefan and grieve his loss while
also processing her own mortality. Ste-
fan was a great storyteller, and though
both Natalia and the grandfather in the
book were fictional, Obreht wove many
of Stefan’s tales, sometimes almost ver-
batim, into the narrative.
Inland is far less autobiographical
but continues to mine the themes of
impermanence, upheaval, and belong-
ing. In a stark departure from the post-
conflict Balkans setting of The Tiger’s
Wife, Inland brings the reader into the
inhospitable and drought-ridden Ari-
zona Territory of 1893. The book ex-
pertly weaves together two seemingly
disparate narratives. The first is that of
Nora, a frontierswoman awaiting the
return of her husband, who has gone
in search of water, and her two oldest
sons, who disappeared seemingly with-
out a trace soon after. Nora’s only real
company is her youngest son and her
husband’s inept cousin, both of whom
keep swearing they’ve seen a terrify-
ing beast roaming the land around the
house. The second narrative follows
Lurie, a former thief and outlaw who
has spent most of his adult life travel-
ing the West, often in an attempt to
outrun the spirits of dead people who
haunt him at every turn. Both Lurie
and Nora are trapped in their own
ways, but one of the biggest strengths
of the narrative structure is its deft il-
lustration of the relative freedom and
choice white men had in shaping their
own lives and how often they used that
freedom to control the lives of every-
one else.
T he book a lso ex a m i ne s “t he t r ut h,”
both the importance and the impossi-
bility of it, as the many lies Lurie and
Nora tell themselves and others even-
tually intertwine—with devastating
consequences. But what makes Inland
so successful is how two individual’s
stories point to the greater lies that
America was and is still telling itself:
that natural resources can be endlessly
exploited, that the more you have the
more you deserve to have, that fear is
power.
I spoke to Téa Obreht shortly before
her book’s release about why history
repeats itself, the complicated meaning
of home, and, of course, camels.This book takes place nearly a century and
a continent away from your first book. How
did you even begin to enter into it?
I was working on a different western
entirely when I heard this podcast
about an Arizona campfire story called
“The Red Ghost.” Two women are
home alone; one of the women goes
out to get water from the well, and the
other one watches her get trampled to
death by a huge red horse with a demon
rider on the back. Accounts of this red
horse showing up in random places
kept happening for years, between