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- [00:00]
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Bridget Bergen
You're listening to ALL of It on wnyc. I'm Bridget Bergen in for Alison Stewart. Kirkus Review says the latest novel from best selling author Jessica Knoll put puts the erotic back in erotic thriller. It's titled Helpless. At the center of the story is Faye Heron, a successful writer and actor in Hollywood. She owes a lot of her beloved college screenwriting. She owes a lot to her beloved college screenwriting professor, a man named pt for helping her get started. Now PT has died tragically and Fay has returned back to college for the funeral. There she runs into her college ex boyfriend, a toxic character named Henry. Faye has won awards for a television episode she wrote about their breakup and Henry isn't happy about it. But when Faye and Henry meet again at the funeral, sparks fly despite the fact that they're both married. What Fay doesn't know is that PT's death might not have been an accident after all. And when she wakes up locked inside a remote lake cabin, she realizes Henry might have been playing her all along. Helpless is the fourth novel from Jessica Noel. She's also the author of Luckiest Girl Alive and Bright Young Women. Helpless is out now and Jessica Knoll joins me now in studio. Jessica, welcome to welcome to all of it.
- [02:32]
Jessica Knoll
Thank you so much.
- [02:33]
Bridget Bergen
So you wrote an erotic thriller. You know, what did you when did you know you wanted to write an erotic thriller?
- [02:41]
Jessica Knoll
Oh, I just wanted to make my family really uncomfortable. You know, I was, I was kind of the dawn of the dark romance trend. And I had, like, dipped a toe and I was. I was, you know, into romantasy for the first time. I had read the Acotar series, and the first book in the series actually is about a kidnapping, and it's about. About the character falling for her captor. And I just thought, oh, wow, that's really sexy. Why is that sexy? Why do we all find this so sexy? And it was that question of captivity and the kind of connection between desire and danger that drove me to write this novel.
- [03:32]
Bridget Bergen
So many of the sexual dynamics in this book are somewhat toxic. Some taboo. Fay, literally, as you said, is being held captive by this man, and yet she still desires him. So why did you want to explore those sort of darker corners of sexual desire?
- [03:52]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah, I mean, the helpless is really about, you know, how the banalities of everyday life and marriage and how that sets in for most of us at some point in life. And connecting with someone with whom you felt passionate and young and that, you know, that feeling of being so desired, it teeters on the edge of danger, you know, and that. That's sometimes a fantasy a lot of us nurture and think about. And Fae kind of gives in to. I mean, I don't want to say too much without giving away the big twist, but what Faye is kind of grappling with during her week in captivity is not only, what am I doing here? Why have you brought here? Is it about revenge? Or is it actually about this deeper, older mystery that she's slowly pulling apart? Or does it have to do with the fact that I can't let go of what we have or I miss what we have given? You know, just the. The day in and day out of everyday life. You know, it becomes. You become very habitualized to it. And I think we. Everyone can miss that period of life where things felt not so st. Yeah.
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Bridget Bergen
Let's talk a little bit more about Faye's character. You know, if Fay were describing herself, what would be some of the adjectives she might use?
- [05:21]
Jessica Knoll
Well, there's a line in the book where she says, I know there's no such thing as normal, but I don't know how to describe myself other than not so. She identifies as abnormal, first and foremost, ambitious, talented, hardworking, and, you know, someone with a very hearty sexual appetite.
- [05:45]
Bridget Bergen
Yeah, I mean, you have been described as someone who writes about a lot of ambitious women. Your female characters tend to be successful, you know, very driven, high achievers. You know, someone might say, and I think reviewers have said type A why do you think that's the type of woman you keep being drawn to in these novels?
- [06:06]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's because I identify with it on some level. I don't even know if type A quite captures it, because what. And what Faye experiences is a kind of functional anxiety and depression where the one thing that she's really capable of focusing on is her career and is her work. And other things fall by the wayside. You know, her friendship. She identifies as an isolated person. She's in a sexless and unsatisfying marriage that she feels trapped in. And counterintuitively, when she's locked in this remote lake cabin is when she feels her most liberated. And so, yeah, I think I'm just always grappling with that side of myself, and writing gives me the opportunity to explore it deeper.
- [06:59]
Bridget Bergen
Another parallel, in the last few years of your career, you've been spending more time working in Hollywood, writing adaptations of your novels, working on film and TV projects. This novel's already been optioned for television. Congratulations.
- [07:12]
Jessica Knoll
Thank you.
- [07:13]
Bridget Bergen
Faye is also in that world. She is of that world. So what were some of the aspects of your work in Hollywood that you wanted to capture in this novel?
- [07:22]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah, so I adapted my debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, for the screen. It came out on Netflix in 2022. And in that novel, the character is a survivor of sexual assault. And I have written how that scene in particular was inspired by my own assault when I was in high school. And something that I found while we were working on the movie, while I was writing, you know, many drafts of the script as it went through various stages of development, was that I was asked to put a lot of care and thought into how I depicted not only that scene, but my character, Ani, as a survivor. And it felt like what I was being asked to do, and especially when, you know, when the movie came out and we were doing press for it, I was being asked not to upset anyone. And that's a very difficult line to straddle when you're talking about something upsetting. And there is a very punitive nature, I think, to social media at the moment. And it just felt like a field of landmines. You know, potentially at any moment, I could step in it and say the wrong thing and offend people. And it was such a strange time for me because it was this collision of a kind of post. Me too. Awareness where we supported women and we believed women, but you better not say the wrong thing, or we're going to come for you with pitchforks. And I found that endlessly fascinating, and I was dying to write about it. And so I put that with. The place I put that was with Fay, because her episode that wins her a lot of acclaim and attention that she writes about her breakup with Henry has to do with, well, what the publicist refers to as coercive control. And there's all these kind of textbook and precise words that she's asked to use around the relationship when she talks about it in the press. And Faye is kind of sitting there thinking, you know, can we just focus on my talent as a writer? Why do I have to become a lesson? And why do I have to become this kind of North Star for other women who have experienced this? And it just felt like a lot of pressure that she noticed her fellow male nominees were not put under.
- [10:09]
Bridget Bergen
Yeah.
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Jessica Knoll
Yeah.
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Bridget Bergen
There's another interesting interaction that's kind of early in the novel between Fay and a current writing student, Emma, who's just dying for some mentorship from Fay. Faye is not very impressed with, I think, how Emma approaches her. And that interaction, really kind of a lack of professionalism. How does that interaction reflect maybe some of the generational divides or, you know, tell us a little bit about these two characters.
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Jessica Knoll
Yeah, it was definitely an okay boomer moment with me being the boomer. Yes. I think what Faye is. You know, how she puts it in the novel is that she notices Emma has a lack of fear, and she acts too familiar with her. And as Faye says, you know, a certain amount of fear in life is good. Fear has taken me far, and that's something I relate to because I've always done my best work, and I've always been my most productive when I am afraid, when I am afraid that my livelihood is going to be taken from me. I wrote my debut novel at my kitchen table at six in the morning before my work at a magazine where I was a editor and writer for five years. We had had a new editor in chief come in, which usually means clean house. And I was like, I gotta start on plan B, because I don't know what's gonna happen to my career. So I credit fear for a lot of good things that have happened to me in life. And I think that Faye was just trying to impart that wisdom on Emma that, you know, it's okay to show, to be deferential, although maybe that's not the way it has to be. Maybe Emma has something to teach Faye and has something to teach me as well.
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Bridget Bergen
Yeah, we have to talk about, of course, The Fae Henry dynamic. You know, it's been over a decade since Faye has seen him. Their lives have both moved on. They're both married now. But what is it about him that she just can't let go of even after all these years?
- [12:15]
Jessica Knoll
It's because she's able to bare her soul to him. And she's able to ask for of him things that she feels, if she asks her husband or anyone else that she's ever been romantically involved with, that they look at her askance. And Henry is the one person who has never done that. He's not afraid of her. And again, it's that playing with this idea of power that happens so much in this novel. And even the title itself, helpless, is a bit tongue in cheek because it's like, is Fae really helpless? Is she powerless? Does she have more agency than we're led to believe? Fay. Henry does not back down from Fay. And she assumed she would go out into the world without him and she would find a million guys like him. And what she discovered is there's only one Henry.
- [13:04]
Bridget Bergen
So we're gonna be very careful through this area of not, you know, revealing any spoilers. But as you mentioned, Faye has written this very celebrated episode of television based on her experience with Henry, that breakup. He does not come across looking great in that episode. Why did Faye wanna write about this incident from her past?
- [13:24]
Jessica Knoll
Well, I think it's a multitude of reasons. I think it's because it's what she knows. You know, it's an experience she had that stuck with her, what she writes. Um, she was on her way to Los Angeles for an interview, and Henry essentially tried to prevent her from going. And she was afraid in that moment that he might do something to harm her. It was the first time she was really physically afraid of him. And it rattled her and it stuck with her. And so, you know, anything that kind of impacts you to that level, as a writer myself, I know, like, I've got to find a place for that. I think the other side of it, which is maybe a little less noble, is at the time that she was writing on this show that she was a part of, it was very much in vogue for women to share a lot of their own life experiences. And if that meant it was exploitative, so be it. And so Fay knew what she was getting into by doing that, by revealing this part of herself. But she also knew that she might get a lot of attention for it. And so now she has to grapple with the consequences of that, you know, and deal with how the fallout of how she feels about it as well. You know, she did want to write this true thing that happened to her, and she wanted to write about it in an honest way. And the experience was kind of taken from her and twisted and it was made into this kind of lesson. And she ended up resenting having to, you know, speak on this as though she were an authority figure, where she's like, I'm just a woman sharing my experience with the world and nothing more, nothing less.
- [15:11]
Bridget Bergen
So Fay is really, you know, the star of the story. She's our main character. But Henry is so compelling and yet very difficult to pin down. You know, you start, you meet him and, you know, he's married, he has children, and yet there are scenes where he's frankly kind of scary.
- [15:29]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah.
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Bridget Bergen
Why did you want to make this character so opaque?
- [15:35]
Jessica Knoll
Well, I wanted to, I, I want, I, I, I mean, ambiguity as a writer is always a very tantalizing kind of character quality because you get to play with the reader's expectations of, you don't know what they're going to do next. Is this a good person? Is this a bad person? Is, are there shades of gray? Are they A little bit of both, which I think we all are. Henry, most of all, I think he's probably the most well developed male character I've ever written. I, I, you know, in my previous novels, I don't think I've seen spent as much time thinking about my other male characters, backstory and formative experiences and even trauma that might have occurred to them. So I really spent a lot of time on Henry and thinking about who his parents were, what, you know, what his experience was as a child, and developing a kind of standout moment that explains a lot of his need for control and why he is, you know, quote unquote, the perfect fit for someone like Faye, who also wrestles with her own control issues.
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Bridget Bergen
Yeah, I mean, the dynamic between the two of them is, you know, very sultry. This is an erotic thriller. There's even a reference to 50 shades of grey in the book as well
- [16:58]
Jessica Knoll
as in the Cut by Susanna Moore, which was very, very inspirational to me as I was writing this.
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Bridget Bergen
I mean, talk a little bit about the tropes in erotic stories and how you were thinking about that in this book, you know, what it reveals about desire and how you wanted to tackle some of that.
- [17:17]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah, well, I think it's this idea that what we fantasize about or what we long for in our heads is often very different than what we would ever want in real life? There is something. There's something a. A conflict, I guess, within me, myself as a feminist who maybe does have fantasies of, like, someone wresting control from you. And why is that? And that's a very common fantasy that's well studied. I have my own. I have lots of theories about it, but one I've really been thinking about is when you have these fantasies of a man coming in and, you know, taking control, in a way, you are exercising total control because you're directing the scene within your head. You get to say exactly how and when it happens. So there is maybe some performance there in, like, reclaiming a measure of control that maybe in real life was. Was taken from us.
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Bridget Bergen
You sort of teased at this, but why did Helpless seem like the right title for this novel?
- [18:36]
Jessica Knoll
Yeah, well, it's the tongue in cheek thing, and it's the question that I want to leave the reader with at the very end, which was like, who. Who was actually helpless?
- [18:44]
Bridget Bergen
Yeah. You know, it is a very compelling read. It's very provocative. Do you think that there's something about the process for writing and plotting a novel like this with all these sort of twists and turns? Did you have to have it figured out going in, or was this something that you explored through the writing process?
- [19:09]
Jessica Knoll
It was something that I explored through the writing process. I'm not an outliner. I've tried. It seems life would be easier if I was. But yes. And the twists and turns in this one are. Are deliberate decisions that kind of support the big twist at the end. Like, why are there so many, almost to the point, unbelievable twists? And yes, I won't say too much more because I don't want to give anything away. Well, we won't give away the spoilers,
- [19:45]
Bridget Bergen
but my guest has been author Jessica Knoll. We've been talking about her new novel, Helpless, an erotic thriller about a Hollywood writer kidnapped by an example boyfriend who might be involved in a murder plot. It's out now. You're gonna tear through it on the beach, I promise. Jessica, thanks for joining me.
- [20:02]
Jessica Knoll
Thank you so much.