Material Girl Reads: Lisa Unger's THE NEW COUPLE IN 5B
An interview with the bestselling author about her latest thriller
In Lisa Unger’s newest thriller, The New Couple in 5B — the walls have ears, and eyes… and sometimes, even a voice that presents to its inhabitants as omnipresent voice that’s always a little too helpful over the building-wide intercom.
The book, which explores family, mysticism — and the cloying grasps of what results when the two coincide is a delightful thriller that lingers with you long after you’ve closed the last page. With hues of Rosemary’s Baby, The New Couple in 5B makes a strong case that few things are as evergreen — or as insidious — as the ways in which society gaslights women. As we follow Rosie through this gilded house of horrors, the rising tides of disbelief, doubt, and destabilization are palpable. You can feel the suffocating presence of the buildings inhabitants — sometimes saccharine, sometimes suspicious. Rosie spends most of the novel straddling world of mysticism and realism, desperately trying to decipher where the monsters really lie.
The book is as deliciously twisty as it is nuanced and meaningful; a pitch perfect thriller that whisks you away to the glamorous, insular world of a sought after New York City apartment building. In the first installment of its kind — Material Girl (me!) spoke with Lisa about her new book, why the supernatural and paranormal worlds are really just as natural and normal as the one we live in everyday, and what it means to write a strong female character.
CR: I want to talk about the way the supernatural is woven throughout this book – I’m Italian and it feels so true to the way a lot of Mediterranean cultures crossover into that realm, so to speak.
LU: I've always been very interested in sort of the other side of things. For me, the idea of being a so-called psychic, I just think – there's like a spectrum of people. There are more questions about the universe and about the human brain, than there are answers. And so in a very Jungian sense, I've always been very curious about the human brain and what it is capable of. Also about layers of experience, the psycho-spiritual and how Carl Jung was a big believer in psychic phenomenon. His mother was a medium. He himself had a near death experience where he believes he met his spirit guide.
So those are the kinds of things that interest me – how do they present in life? And then what type of person is open to those sorts of experiences? And what makes you vulnerable to a place like the Windermere, like in the case of Rosie? She comes from this traumatic past, she's run as far away as she can from her family who she thinks: they're liars, they're charlatans, her father claims he's a faith healer, her sister's a dreamer. Her mom reads tarot cards and she wants nothing to do with that. Nothing. But her father claims that she's a seer. She wants nothing to do with that either. She's in therapy to not be that person, to not be connected to that part of herself. And yet I felt that she was uniquely vulnerable to the Windermere and that the Windermere itself is a character in the story.
And when you talk about buildings dwellings – how are they not going to hold the energy of the deeds that occurred within their walls?
CR: I love that you said that Rosie was uniquely susceptible to the Windermere – and it was so fascinating to watch her interact with her therapist and her husband and these people around her who are maybe not as susceptible, but who are even inadvertently or intentionally gaslighting her.
LU: And that is kind of the question about her doctor. This book was loosely inspired by Rosemary's Baby – Rosemary in that story doesn't have any agency. And she's kind of like ping ponging between all of these really big forces in her life. Like we often are as women. Rosemary, she doesn't have a job – her life is to have this baby. She finds herself trapped in this building. The neighbors are gaslighting, her husband is gaslighting her. They've sent her to a doctor that's also gaslighting her. And l found that to be very current to that time. But as a woman to this day, there still is that sense that when you go to a doctor, or even a certain kind of therapist, that maybe they're not taking you completely seriously.
I didn't feel that way necessarily about her therapist in the book. But I just think that he had this cultural perspective that she wanted, which is basically like your family gaslit you.
CR: I feel like a lot of the book was sort of her grappling with, how do I live in that gray area of ‘I'm not my mother, I'm not my sister, I'm not my father,’ but I'm also not these people who don't see these things. I'm not these people who don't feel these things. And the people in the Windemere like Charles and Ellen, are almost like a mirror for that sort of experience to her. Because they so clearly were connected to the spiritual world in their own way.
LU: Isn't that what we do when we haven't done our work? When we, we come from something that we're trying to escape, but we haven't done our work. So very often when that's the case, we recreate that in our adult lives because that's what we know.
CR: Her relationship with Chad is so interesting to me because he doesn’t totally invalidate her, but without giving too much away – there’s something off there too.
LU: I think that we can be drawn to the things that hurt us. There’s something in the psychospiritual realm – we can be drawn to something that is unhealthy for us over and over again until we figure out what is wrong or what we need to learn or what, or how we need to grow. Or when that darkness no longer lives within us. When we say, I am a person who's deserving of love, when we finally figure that out, then we choose somebody who actually loves us.
CR: I think what makes this book and its use of the spiritual world so powerful is that it grapples with the reality that the real monsters, they’re usually human.
LU: A hundred percent. And I think that, that, for me, that's true throughout. I think almost all of my books wander into the supernatural. And some people are like, oh, I don't like paranormal. And I'm always a little bit confused by that because I just view it as like, this is the way the world is. It's not necessarily as heightened as it is in the Windemere, but I view the psycho-spiritual dimension as being normal. I don't view it as being paranormal.
Because you know that in any horror movie, there's this dread of, what is? The anticipation. Like what is the noise inside the wall? What is the creature in the woods? What is the alien in the spaceship? And then like that dread and the building towards that dread is so enormous. And then the creature comes and you're like, oh, it's a hundred percent less scary at that moment, when the actual threat is revealed.
I don't think the threat is ever really outside you. Sure, you can be attacked by a bear, by a killer and yeah, there is a person or a thing that's scary. But I don't think that's really what scares us. I think we’re afraid of what's within. And when you get to the end of one of my books, you’re not always going to think the bad guy got punished and the good guy didn’t and there was a hero and a villain – because that’s rarely true [in real life.] And it’s rarely true in my novels.
CR: I was also really taken by Rosie’s journey through trying to get pregnant; so, so often in thrillers it’s a trope that a woman’s pregnancy journey is sort of a breaking point – her husband leaves her, she “snaps”, like a villain origin story – but Rosie is so much more nuanced than that, she’s given so much more grace and realism.
LU: It's very demeaning to think that as a woman, you are defined by your ability to procreate. And that if for some reason, you find yourself unable to procreate that it will drive you to the edge of sanity. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that. That's another form of misogyny that we're so defined by our husbands and our role as wife and mother – that if we can’t get pregnant, then it's a reason for us to go completely ballistic, insane, and kill people.
I never saw Rosie that way. I saw her as someone estranged from her family and trying to heal from that trauma. And in her mind, part of healing from that trauma is to create with Chad, a family of their own – one that they can nurture and do better with their kids than their parents did with them. But only in the sense that it's something that she wants that perpetually eludes her. And, then how do we metabolize that? Because, you know, that's life. We don't, we don't always get what we want. And that's okay.
She’s strong in the way real women are strong. And if you think about the people in your life, the strongest people, you know, there's just a, there's a quiet perseverance to those strong women. Women are strong everyday in every way.