Writes of passage

SHOCK TREATMENT Vida puts her characters in extreme situations.

Photograph: Heidi Meredith

Vendela Vida writes about what the poet Robert Browning once described as “the dangerous edge of things”: crisis, emotional ambiguity, the psychological aftermath of tragedy. “I’m not generally interested in describing someone going about their daily life,” Vida says, speaking from her home in San Francisco. “I’m more intrigued by events that catapult people into new experiences or states of mind.”

That interest is evident throughout Vida’s small but significant oeuvre. Her first book, Girls on the Verge, is an engaging and personal nonfiction study of young American women’s initiation rituals: sorority rushes, debutante balls, gang inductions.

Her second book, the critically acclaimed novel And Now You Can Go, also deals with a woman in transition—a young graduate student struggling through the existential aftermath of being held at gunpoint. Reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye and Didion’s Play It As It Lays, the fast-paced, finely observed novel veers between mordant humor and the dissociative despair of a fugue state.

With her new novel, the starkly beautiful and witty Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vida continues her exploration of women’s rites of passage. Its narrator, Clarissa Iverton, was abandoned by her mother when she was 14. The novel opens 14 years later, just after Clarissa’s father, who raised her, dies unexpectedly. Going through his papers, she finds her birth certificate, which reveals that he is not her biological father. Clarissa also learns that a number of people already knew the truth, including her fiancé, a childhood friend whose mother was friends with her own.

Stunned by the news and overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, Clarissa travels to Lapland, the region of northern Scandinavia shared by Norway, Finland and Sweden. It was here that her mother became pregnant while doing graduate work on the environmental battles of the Sami, the area’s indigenous people. Clarissa is determined to find her father—and, less consciously, to discover some sense of her own identity. But the mystery of her paternity turns out to be more complex than Clarissa suspected, and her quest develops an epic quality as she is joined by locals and fellow travelers who accompany her through stretches of her journey to the ends of the earth.

Vida drew inspiration from a number of sources, perhaps most significantly her own heritage. “My family on my mom’s side is Swedish,” explains Vida, who grew up hearing stories about Lapland. “My mom’s cousin married a Sami priest, and I remember seeing pictures of him riding into the wedding ceremony on a horse. So Sami people fascinated me from a young age, and their lives had an almost fairy-tale-like power over me.”

Personal exposure to the area and its cultures only increased Vida’s interest. “When I finally traveled to Lapland,” she says, “it was very much like I expected—little light in the winter, fields of snow, reindeer everywhere—but also very different. I wasn’t expecting that the Sami culture would be so vibrant, that I would see people wearing traditional Sami outfits in their everyday lives—in the grocery store, on the bus.” Whenever she got stuck writing the book, she would plan another trip. “Luckily, flights to that part of the world are not very expensive in the dead of winter.”

Vida says the similarity between her first and second novels is intentional. “I set out to write a trilogy about violence and forgiveness, to explore those themes through various angles and plots,” she explains. The third novel in the trilogy, already under way, takes place on a boat off the coast of Turkey and features a woman whose daughter has recently died of an overdose.

Such themes suggest a moral project or position, but Vida isn’t one for simple answers or totalizing solutions. “I don’t think books should prescribe exactly how to live one’s life,” she says. “I’d rather write in a way that raises the questions that might help us decide on a course. At the end of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Clarissa makes a decision that not everyone would make. But I don’t think that the expected answers to questions about right and wrong are very often practical. And the expected answers don’t interest me much.”

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name ($23.95) is out now from Ecco.