Bookish Brews Snapshot
The Monstrous Misses Mai by Van Hoang
A determined young woman in 1950s Los Angeles walks a darker city than she ever imagined in a spellbinding novel about the power to make dreams come true—whatever the sacrifice.
💫 Atmospheric 🏙️ City Life 🧭 Immigrant Experience 🪄 Unique Magic
- Genre: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Interview with Van Hoang
Amanda: Hi Van! Thank you so much for joining me today. I can’t wait to talk to you about all the research you did for your adult debut, The Monstrous Misses Mai. But first, can you tell us about yourself and your book?
Van: Hi Amanda! I’m so happy and honored I get to be on your website! I’m an author of fantasy books featuring Vietnamese protagonists, mythology, and magic for adults and middle grade readers. My most recent book The Monstrous Misses Mai is a historical fantasy, which is about four young women struggling to pay rent in 1959 Los Angeles, so as a desperate move to achieve all their dreams, they accidentally become witches.
Amanda: Why did you pick to set your book in 1950s Los Angeles? What inspired you to write in that time period?
Van: I just really love the aesthetics of the 1950s–the hair and makeup, but especially the hats and dresses. I wrote the first draft of this book during the Covid lockdown, and I just really needed to escape to a different time. Traveling to the past felt so comforting to me, especially when I could pretend my worries away by picturing myself in an ice cream parlor eating french fries with milkshakes, wearing a pretty A-line dress with gloves and a matching pillbox hat. Maybe because the future seemed so uncertain and full of anxiety back in 2020. I’m glad I had this book to dive into and these characters to spend time with during a pretty isolated moment of my life.
Amanda: When beginning your research how do you know where to start?
Van: I’ll dabble in a bit of research as I’m brainstorming and creating vision boards before I start writing. For this particular novel, I focused a lot on the fashion of that time, so I pulled ads and magazine spreads to use as the aesthetic inspiration. But you don’t know what you don’t know, so to avoid doing more work than necessary or getting stuck in a never-ending spiral before I even get started writing, I’ll wait until after the first draft to do the more detailed, death defying dive into history.
Amanda: That’s a smart idea! Once you’re finished with your first draft, what does your research typically look like? How do you get access to resources that will help you?
Van: I’m lucky that I have access to some pretty good research databases as a librarian, so I mostly searched online newspaper articles from 1959, and combed through old photograph collections. I have a hard time writing descriptions in general due to a condition called aphantasia, which means I can’t really visualize something, so my solution to that was to create vision boards of all the places that showed up in the book. Living in L.A. means commuting in L.A., so I was pretty concerned about how the girls would get around, and printed out an old map to chart all the places they visited and figured out how they’d get there.
I was also fixated on getting the voice right, so I read books that were written during that time period. I also used a microfilm machine for the first time, which was super cool, but a lot of places are doing away with microfilms. Luckily there are so many archives available freely online. Also groundbreakingly, I watched the entire compendium of Mad Men, and of course, looked at old ads from that time.
Amanda: You mentioned that you picked 1950’s Los Angeles primarily because of the aesthetic, so I’m sure you grew up with a vision of what that time period looked like. How did that vision change (or not) in your head after you did your research?
Van: At first, Monstrous Misses Mai started out as a secondary world inspired by the 1950s mostly because I just wanted to focus on the aesthetics and didn’t want to deal with the historical trauma that most women of color experience in that time period. I love learning about history but stories of the past tend to reflect the abusive treatment that was done to us in some way, and I’m honestly just sick of hearing it. Yes I’m aware people were racist and still are. And I know that these moments were important to learn about, but we also deserve fun stories and adventure and pretty dresses with pockets.
After several drafts and conversations with my agent though, I decided to set it in “real-world” history, and adjacently though not directly address the racist trauma from that time. I don’t think the setting and visual imagery of the book changed much, except that I had to get more historically accurate about certain details. Most of my google searches during that time were things like “when was polyester invented?”
Amanda: I know you also live in LA, so I’m really curious. What were some interesting differences between 1950s Los Angeles and the Los Angeles we both know and love today?
Van: I had this romantic vision of 1950s L.A. as a thriving place full of people in beautiful outfits and wing-tipped cars, and while it can certainly appear that way, it was actually still quite grimy in that time. In fact, because environmental measures weren’t really in effect until the 1960s, smog was a bigger issue back then. Traffic was already quite bad, although streetcars at least allowed the working class to get around, though I can’t say that they were more effective than our current public transit.
One thing I was surprised to learn that remained the same was the sentiment that there’s no such thing as an L.A. native. Sure, you might meet the occasional person who was born and raised here, but for the most part, people transplant there from elsewhere to find themselves, struggle at first, and then suddenly like two years later, they’re Angelenos. There’s an old 1950 Pageant article that I really related to that addresses the idea that you don’t grow to love L.A. until you move there a second time, and in my personal case, this was very true, and I felt totally seen to learn that I’m not the only one who felt this way, even decades later.
Amanda: What was going on in Los Angeles at that time? Were there any significant events happening that were big enough they needed to be in your novel? Or even any less significant events that you added in anyway?
Van: To be Vietnamese is to be constantly reminded of the Vietnam War–so even though the U.S. didn’t technically get involved until after the book, I had to address it in some way. But again, my purpose in writing Monstrous wasn’t to discuss those issues, so I didn’t dive that deep into that topic. I also felt obligated to mention the Red Scare happening at the time.
The one thing that I did make the deliberate decision to include was the Dodgers winning the World Series in 1959. I’m not a sports fan in any way, and neither are the main characters, but my editors and agent pointed out this significant event, and it actually became a pivotal scene in the book.
Amanda: You mentioned that you fixated on getting the voice right. What were some difficulties you had trying to get it right? How did you balance it with your own voice?
Van: I wanted to strike a balance of the voice feeling like you were in 1959 but also contemporary enough that it didn’t get bogged down by old-timey language. I honestly love the classical voice of story-telling–a bit stuffy and boring yet somehow compelling and addictive. But I wanted the story to move faster than that while staying anachronistically true. I especially wanted the characters’ dialogue to sound historically accurate, even while I allowed myself liberties with the narrative voice.
To be honest, most of it was just instinctual after reading and listening to books written during that time to train my interior monologue to reflect the voice. And a lot of google searches like “Did people say this in 1959” or “when did this word become popular,” and then relying on my beta-readers and editors to fact-check further down the line when the writing started to feel like mush to my own brain.
Amanda: What would you tell someone who’s doing research on their novel who may not have access to as many resources as you do being a librarian?
Van: The best part about the library is that all the research resources I used are completely free and accessible to anyone! My only advantage is that I know about them. So here’s your PSA to go check out the databases available in your local community! Seriously, you can do it without leaving your house.
Most libraries, like the one I used, have online databases, and the L.A. Public Library has an entire photography archive if you’re into old stuff like me. If you’re willing to go in person, it’s even cooler to see stuff, like the time I got to visit Seattle and check out old archives of magazines, just there on the shelves for anyone to grab. You could consider paying to access an archive, but check your public library first–they’re there so that people like us can have free and equitable access to information after all, not just the privileged elite.
Amanda: Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and process surrounding the research that you did for The Monstrous Misses Mai! Before you leave, is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers here? (optional question!!! Feel free to skip if you don’t have anything)
Van: There are lots of pockets in my book, and if you’d like to learn more, I highly recommend the book Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close by Hannah Carlson. It’s about the history of pockets, of course, but also talks about how tracing women’s lack of pockets in clothing correlates with history’s oppression of us in general. This is the hill I will die on. Other than that, I hope you enjoy reading about the Mais!
