MOLLY DEKTAR: AN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE ASH FAMILY

Jennifer Kain

Molly Dektar has a sense of collective when it comes to her work. The Ash Family is her first novel and it speaks to a generation who grew up in the southern lands of the mountains and spent summers on the water with trees and sweet tea. As I travel and live all over I’ve noticed that the Southern lifestyle is slow paced, but in the “big” cities are crazy no matter where it is. The older I get the more I want to live in the country where it’s quiet and simple. This book was a lot of things to me, but I loved it because Dektar it took the simplicity of nature and threw it together with a coming of age story about a young woman to redefines what it means to live for herself.

Molly Dektar - Photo from author

I will say this book had a slow rise for me because I couldn’t understand why the main character a bright young girl that is off to college makes a turn to join a co-op group. Many would say it’s a cult and how did she get lured in? The mystery unfolds as each season takes place. In every season the main character “Harmony” or her “fake world name” Berie fell deeper and deeper into the trap of this community that lived off the land. The tag line is that people start to disappear with no explanation. Read the book to find out more about this crazy world Molly has created.

Here’s my incredible interview with Molly Dektar author of The Ash Family

To find more out about the book and Molly click HERE

WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU DO?

I’m a novelist--my debut novel, The Ash Family, came out in April. I’m a North Carolinian living in Brooklyn. I also direct the editorial department at an applied research institute.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT WRITING?

I naturally feel the need to document and record. Memory is extremely important to me. At the same time writing massively improves my life because it forces me to do things. But maybe what I love most is the mindset that writing puts me in. Graham Greene writes, in The End of the Affair: “One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words came as though from the air.” I love that writing is my activity, goal, and companion no matter what I’m up to. It feels like a way to honor being alive.

WHERE DO YOU TYPICALLY WRITE?

I used to write in coffee shops and other public spaces, but now, for the first time in my NYC life, I live in a studio apartment alone, and it is fantastic. I write at my table. The quiet and solitude are much better than a coffee shop.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE ABOUT THE ASH FAMILY?

I’ve always loved nature and cared about it, but I didn’t know how to care. Climate change is just too enormous to contemplate. After college I got a grant to work on farms in Italy and Norway and talk to farmers about their experiences with climate change. I did a lot of shepherding and lambing and living off the grid, and I wanted to write about that. In a way, the cult is an outcropping of nature. The cult is generated by the format of the novel. The main character, Berie, needs to commit more and more of herself, and learn and be drawn in, and Dice, the cult leader, is the tempting voice of nature itself.