Jacqueline Faber was a young girl when she had an experience that she would revisit while writing her debut novel, “The Department.”
The author was 7 years old when she went with her family to visit her mother’s childhood home in Salinas, California. She was sharing a bedroom with other family members when she heard something frightening.
“I remember waking up — I am a really bad sleeper — and I was awake, lying there,” Faber says. “I remember hearing a woman scream, and I looked around the room and no one stirred, no one moved. I remember thinking, ‘If she screams again, I’m going to wake somebody up.’ But she didn’t scream again, and I didn’t wake anyone up.”
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The experience stayed with her. Later, she would become interested in the 1964 Kitty Genovese case, in which a woman was murdered outside of her New York apartment. At the time, the New York Times reported that 37 people witnessed the attack, but none of them called for help — reporting that has since been debunked.
Kitty Genovese was on Faber’s mind when she wrote “The Department.” The novel follows Neil Weber, a philosophy professor at a Southern university who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a student, Lucia Vanotti. The book switches perspectives between Neil and Lucia, both of whom are haunted by their own traumatic pasts.
The academic setting was a natural for Faber, who earned a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University, and who taught in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, before becoming a full-time writer.
Faber talked about “The Department” via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q. You left the world of academia to write full time. How did you make that decision?
Before you get on the PhD track, there’s this narrative in academia where they’re trying to dissuade you. They’re like, “If you can do anything else, don’t do this.” It’s like you have to choose this life of struggle. I remember when I chose to get my PhD, even at that point I was like, “I don’t know if academia is where I belong ultimately, but I am going to get paid to read and write and learn how to think better than I already think.”
I got a grant to finish my dissertation in Berlin. I was so immersed in the work, but some part of me was putting feelers out into the world: What else might there be for me? At the same time, I’m watching all of these absolutely brilliant colleagues of mine go on the job market and not get jobs. Then I met this woman there who was a writer who worked for an innovation consultancy group, and she brought me on to some of their projects. I honestly believe if I had met anybody else out the gate, I might’ve just tried to stay in academia. But because she told me, “You can do this,” it made me feel like my instinct for storytelling and my love of language could have different homes. I wasn’t even thinking about becoming a novelist. I just thought, “I like words, I like stories. Where will this take me?”
Q. How did the initial inspiration for this story, which is set in the academic world, come to you?
I had this very strong visual image of Lucia’s face on a missing person poster. I felt almost haunted by it. I didn’t know anything about her or the story. I just was like, “Who is this girl, and why does she keep surfacing in my mind?” Initially, I thought I would just write about it from Neil’s perspective. He’s this guy who’s down on his luck; his whole life is sort of imploding, and how does this girl give him a reason for being? As I was writing him, and he was trying to investigate her life, her own voice was intruding in my mind, and then it became really clear that I needed to write her perspective as well.
The first thing that interested me about academia [as a setting] is that college is this space with such a unique dynamic, where you have these young people coming, and they’re away from their parents usually for the first time. So they have no parental figures, and their professors become both stand-ins for that sort of authority, but also they’re exposing them to these new ideas. It feels like this radical place where boundaries are really complicated.
Q. And Neil’s such a messy character; his life is basically in shambles.
I love Neil. He is challenging; he is messy in so many ways. He is messy in his inability to leave the woman who has left him. He is messy in the way he’s constantly fudging these boundaries. He’ll lie to people even as he’s like, “I want to do the right thing, and therefore I can justify this lie that I’ve been called upon by the provost to conduct my own investigation here.”
But his swings and his obsessions were fun. Lucia was hard. They were both hard in certain ways; they both feel so real to me, and I feel such deep empathy towards both of them, and I wanted to be respectful of both of them. I have a deep belief about human beings, that we are very complex, contradictory things that move through the world, and we don’t hold one belief. We can hold conflicting beliefs all the time, and we can behave in ways that run counter to the way that we’d imagined we’d behave. That feels really interesting to me. That’s what I’m chasing.