Emily: Welcome to Queer Girl Book Club, friends! This time, we’re talking about The Upstairs House by Julia Fine. This one was my pick, so let me tell you about it and tell you why I picked it. This book is described as Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening, which… ok. This is the story of Megan who has just given birth to a human baby named Clara, which is enough to drive anyone over the edge, right? On top of that her husband Ben is out of town a lot, leaving Clara alone to care for the baby most of the time. Thankfully, she has the help of her upstairs neighbor who happens to be the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown (yes, the author of Goodnight, Moon.) Oh, and her lover, actress Michael Strange. Strap in for a wild ride.

Spoilers to follow.

So anyway, Julia Fine is an author who has been on my radar since her book What Should Be Wild, which is not a book I have read, but it’s a book I’ve thought a lot about reading. So… basically the same thing right? Anyway, when I saw she was coming out with a new novel, I figured this was my time to hop on the Julia Fine train. Especially since it’s a sapphic ghost story. Sign me up! So was this one you were into based on description alone, Kelli? Or were you like, “Why is Emily going to make me read this?” Or were you somewhere in between?

Kelli: I was mostly on board, although I’m not always super into postpartum stories. It’s not something I dislike either, I’m just… neutral. Ghosts and lesbians though, absolutely. I also always think it’s interesting to see fictionalized versions of real figures inserted into a story that isn’t quite about them, and I enjoyed that element here.

Emily: I think postpartum and horror as a mix really fascinates me because I am horrified by pregnancy and motherhood in general. And I’m kind of of the belief that it’s impossible to be a mother without going a little insane in the process. Because like… how wild is it to have a full ass person inside of you as a part of your body and then have it outside of you? And you’re immediately supposed to love it and care for it? And put its needs above your own? Like all of that to me is really bizarre. So books that explore that and say, like, wow yeah, I understand that this is a part of the circle of life but also it’s really terrifying… I’m very into that. And unsurprisingly, a lot of horror stories explore that. 

Although I guess whether or not this is a horror story is debatable. And that was something I was thinking about as I was reading this book too. Is this horror? My thoughts on that changed constantly depending on what was happening in the book.

Kelli: I think I find pregnancy in general less terrifying as a concept than you do, though I don’t want to experience it at any point. I’m like, “that’s not for me,” but it’s not something that bothers or freaks me out when I read about it, which I know it does a little for you. I think the thing about motherhood that freaks me out the most, particularly brand-new-motherhood, is the idea that there is no escape from your situation, and that there is no opportunity for you to have a break. Something that always comes up in these stories is the pure exhaustion that new mothers experience, and as someone who values sleep over a lot of things, the thought of getting almost none is terrifying to me. Like, the thought “if I go to sleep, this thing that I’m supposed to be taking care of could die,” that scares me, because I am really bad at not giving into exhaustion.

As for whether or not this is horror, I also found myself going back and forth on what I thought. There are moments that are genuinely frightening if I imagine myself in those situations, like when the baby is literally hovering at the window about to be dropped, and it’s also scary to think about things in your house doing ghosty things, but ultimately I don’t know if I would call this horror. I think it’s like… a psychological drama with ghost elements? Although it doesn’t have much in common with it on a story level (other than the ghosts), I would compare it to something like The Sixth Sense, which is not a horror movie but has horror elements. 

Emily: See, I would call The Sixth Sense a horror movie, but I’m terrified of ghosts. So there’s that. 

Anyway, I think too the thing that books like this often point out is what babies can do to a relationship. Because we also have Ben who is just fucking absent as hell. And you’re talking about how Megan feels this unending responsibility that she can’t escape. But then on the other hand, Ben seems to be able to escape it just fine. 

Unfortunately this is the reality for A LOT of hetero couples after they have a baby. We talked about this recently when we discussed Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 on the podcast. Often it seems like men are helping out when they assist with the baby, but it’s the woman’s responsibility to be there 24/7. And this is absolutely bonkers to me. I don’t understand why, in 2021, this is still something we see happening. 

Kelli: I think part of this is the expectation that mothers be breastfeeding always. Like, there is this weird societal thing where if you aren’t breastfeeding you’re not “doing motherhood right,” and I know that there is a lot of shame and guilt that comes along with that, and that mothers often feel like they have to be the one to get up in the middle of the night because if they don’t, they’ll miss out on forming that bond with their child that is supposedly formed through breastfeeding but which is maybe not actually scientifically sound? But I’m not about to write a research paper about this so I could be totally wrong. Anyway, I think that is part of this especially at the beginning stages of parenthood and might be what is setting this precedent, or at least contributing to it. And also men are lazy. Lol jk. But am I jk? 

I also think it’s interesting to talk about what having a child does to a relationship like this one, which doesn’t seem like it was particularly strong to begin with. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Megan feels like she never has had/never will have a “great love,” that Ben was reliable and a generally decent person and that was why she chose him. But if you don’t have that foundation of love, and the person you thought to be reliable turns out to actually be a person you can’t count on, I imagine that would make it really hard to want to be with that person at all. 

Emily: Okay so let’s talk about the relationships in this book, yeah? So I think we have to look at Ben and Megan’s relationship in comparison/contrast to the other big relationship in the book: Margaret and Michael. While this is Megan’s story, we get flashbacks to Margaret and Michael’s story throughout the book, and of course we get Margaret and Michael actually showing up (or not so actually?) in Megan’s life. As ghosts. 

So I think it’s really clear Julia Fine wants us to compare these two relationships. But… and I can’t think of a better way to ask this: What do we make of Margaret and Michael?

Kelli: So, obviously this is not a healthy model for a relationship, lol. First of all, there is a skewed power dynamic, and although that dynamic seems to change over time as Margaret and Michael get older and Margaret comes into her own power as Michael’s star begins to “fade,” at the start, Michael is the one in control. She’s sort of a mentor to Margaret, and she takes advantage of that mentorship and of Margaret’s fascination with her. She is at times incredibly cruel to Margaret, insulting her work and her choices in life, and then she’ll turn on a dime and tell Margaret she needs her, expecting Margaret to drop everything just to come to her aid. 

From Megan’s perspective, especially as she thinks about herself and Ben, she sees the Margaret/Michael dynamic as something almost enviable, because they are basically obsessed with each other, and they have that kind of passion that Megan has never had with Ben. But also, how much of the passion that Margaret and Michael share is about love, and how much is it about power? Of course, I don’t know how much of this relationship is written from actual texts about things that happened between these women in real life and how much of it is Julia Fine’s interpretation of it, so what I’m talking about here is strictly the women that we see in the book. And it seems clear to me on the page that Margaret loves Michael, but Michael… I’m not sure how she feels about Margaret, if what she feels is genuine care or if it’s just a reflection of her feelings about herself. She has some real narcissistic tendencies.

Emily: I think one of the things we were talking about earlier when we talked about heterosexual relationships and roles within the relationship might be at play here. If Megan is feeling unsupported by her husband at this point in their relationship—perhaps in no small part because he is a man and the traditional male role in child-rearing is a bit more hands-off—then it might make sense for her to romanticize a sapphic “love story” and think that a woman might be more supportive of her in this extremely frightening and vulnerable time in her life.

On the other hand, I think from very early on, it’s also clear that Megan sees Michael as the “evil ghost,” right? Like, Margaret is the one who is going to help her with childcare, and Michael would be the one to come in and fuck everything up.

Kelli: I don’t know why she thought trusting either ghost to watch her baby was a good idea, but you do you Megan.

Emily: LOL RIGHT! That part was actually really funny to me. When she comes back from having drinks with her sister and Margaret isn’t there watching the baby, Megan’s like, “Well, shit I guess I should have checked her credentials. Or, like, made sure she was real.”

In terms of how much Michael and Margaret are like their real-life counterparts, I also want to state that I’m not sure. It does seem to me like Julia Fine researched their history quite a bit for this book, but of course that doesn’t mean she didn’t feel free to take some artistic liberties with their portrayals to better suit Megan’s narrative. Especially since these are imagined versions of Margaret and Michael in Megan’s head, ultimately. Or at least some of it is.

I also want to note that as I’m writing all of their names, I keep almost accidentally writing the wrong name for different people. And that’s because they’re all M names, and that feels very intentional. 

Kelli: I think it helped that we got sections that were pretty obviously from Megan’s thesis, things that had footnotes and seemed to be written in academic speak, versus some of the private moments between Margaret and Michael in the past that don’t seem like they could have possibly been recorded unless Margaret or Michael at some point recounted those specific moments in letters or something. Again: I’m not sure. But there were things that seemed very obviously researched and that I could accept as fact, and other things that seemed like interpretation, and it felt pretty clear which was which, which seems important when it comes to writing about real people and respecting and honoring those people and their legacies.

You do make a good point about Megan romanticizing the idea of having a woman in her life as a supportive person, but it’s funny because so many of her antagonists in this book are also women. Her mother, her husband’s mother, her sister—all of these people fundamentally misunderstand her and she doesn’t feel like she can trust any of them with the truth about what is happening to her. 

Additionally, she does make Michael out to be the evil ghost and Margaret to be the good ghost, but as we referenced, Margaret ditches the baby and then basically ghosts (lol) Megan for a good chunk of the book. She doesn’t actually seem like that great of a person here either—or rather, her feeling is, “this is not my problem,” which honestly, fair. But that begs the question: What are Margaret and Michael doing here, haunting Megan and Clara? Is it just because Megan is writing her thesis about them, or is it tied more specifically to Clara as the ending implies? What did you make of all that?

Emily: Actually, right before we started working on this blog, I went back and read the epilogue again because I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. After the epilogue in an author’s note, Julia Fine says part of the reason she wanted to write this book is to talk about post-partum depression and bring awareness to the treatments that are out there. Which… if that’s the case, I don’t know where the ending fits with that? Like, before the epilogue I feel like we get a strong sense that all of this was Megan’s delusion, brought on by exhaustion, depression, and dissertation-writing, right? But then this ending seems like kind of a way for Julia Fine to be like, “Or was it?” Or that’s how I took it anyway. What do you think?

Kelli: I do think that is a possibility. There’s another way to read it, too, which I think is the idea of Megan passing on her mental instabilities to her daughter—another terrifying thing about parenthood that we have not yet touched on. I think the ending pre-epilogue leads us to believe that Megan got the help she needed and that her life returns to a state of somewhat normalcy, but she also mentions being put on a lot of drugs, which… I’m not totally sure what to make of that, other than exploring the idea of what is real and what isn’t. Like, are these drugs just making her not notice the stuff that is genuinely there?

But anyway, the fact that there is an acknowledgement that Clara is the one opening the door, that she sees what is happening, yes, that could mean it’s real, or it could mean that Clara is now in on the delusion. And I think a lot of this book is about the fear of being a bad mother, of causing irreparable harm to your child because you didn’t stack up. Clara ends up losing the tip of her finger because of frostbite, and Megan makes a point of letting us know that that is the only thing she really suffered from this entire experience. Babies don’t remember stuff that young, do they? Or can trauma like that significantly impact their growth? Or does she not remember it and the mental illness is simply part of her genetic coding? Or are there actually ghosts??? I don’t know what to think.

Emily: Yeah, and I guess that’s part of why I kept coming back to thinking this book was in fact horror in the end. Because we are left with this unsettling ending where even if things are “better” now, there’s this underlying threat that something could go wrong again or that some things can never be totally undone. And if it is an issue of mental health, we know that for many (or maybe most) people struggling with mental illness, you don’t just go to treatment and get better. It’s a constant battle, and it’s something that can flare up if an event triggers it. And, yes, like you mentioned, it’s absolutely something you can pass on to your children. Which you’re right, I think, that is what is being implied in this epilogue. 

But yeah, part of me was thinking, “Wow, I think I would have understood this book a lot more without the epilogue.” But also like… maybe we would have had less to talk about? I’m not sure. 

I’m still so frustrated with this Ben character and the fact that he was SO ABSENT from Megan and Clara’s lives that he didn’t even realize anything bad was going on until, first, Megan’s sister pointed it out to him. And then, second, when Megan and Clara were in the actual hospital. Like what the fuck, Ben. Men need to learn how to be better about intuiting people’s feelings. Yes, all men.

Kelli: LOL, yeah. It was definitely frustrating. And it also just made me wonder about Megan as a character. Like, why did she choose this life for herself? Obviously she has her own stuff going on, she’s getting her degree and she mentions that at one time she lived in New York, and that she was a different person and there were other things she wanted… she didn’t imagine herself in this scenario, and yet, here she is, and it doesn’t seem like it was necessarily out of desperation but more out of choice. I sometimes found myself having a hard time relating to her. To be fair, I am not a parent, so those parts I can understand why I didn’t understand. But the fact that she was so adamant about not telling anyone what was going on was confusing to me. There wasn’t a moment when she even tried to actually show somebody what was going on, she was just immediately like, “no one is going to believe me so I’m not going to try to explain it.” Not to let Ben off the hook at all, but it would have been easier for him to understand what that something was going on if she’d said literally anything to him about any of this. I can’t help but think that if I was in that position, I would be telling every person I talk to on a daily basis about it and asking them directly if I’m crazy, lol.

Emily: Right, like, she says outright that she lies to Ben all the time. So on the one hand, you want Ben to be better, right? But on the other hand, you can’t expect your significant other to read minds. It’s like if you fake orgasms with your partner every time you have sex and then get mad they’re not giving you orgasms. Bitch, they think what they’re doing is working, so why would they do anything different? The moral of the story is don’t lie to your partners. 

Or like… if you feel like you have to lie to your partner, maybe it’s time to reassess the relationship.

This has been couples counseling with Kelli and Emily.

Kelli: As a person who has been mostly single, I am uniquely qualified to help in this situation.

Emily: Do we have anything else we want to say about Margaret and Michael, since this is a queer girl book club and we’ve mostly talked about these straight people? LOL.

Kelli: Yeah, that’s definitely something I would have liked more of, and I think it’s telling that we mostly discussed the straight couple despite choosing this because of the lesbians. Margaret and Michael served as thematic representations for sure, but I would have liked more of their story, I think. Or maybe a story completely about them. Maybe I just need to read one of their biographies. I found them really fascinating, and there is something particularly intriguing to me about women who were in the public eye who were secretly (or not so secretly) involved with each other during a time when that wasn’t considered acceptable. It’s just nice to be reminded that there were so many queer people existing in the world back then, that there always have been, and that their stories are often hiding just out of sight. I appreciate that this book taught me about them, because I am eager to seek out more about them and their work.

Emily: I agree. I just finished this book earlier today, so I haven’t had much time to do some Googling or anything about that. But I do see myself going down a Margaret/Michael rabbit hole later on today. I appreciate that this book brought their story to my attention because I am very curious. On the one hand, I wish we’d gotten more of their story in this book. But on the other hand, I realize that that’s not the purpose of this book, and I understand why their story was presented the way it was for the purposes of this particular narrative. I think Julia Fine did a good job of showing Michael and Margaret had a complex and real relationship with one another. It was enough to spark my curiosity. 

Should we rate this?

Kelli: Yes. I gave this book four stars. Really, I think it was more of a three and a half for me, but I rounded up because I appreciate how weird this premise is and the ideas it presents are super interesting (and obviously gave us plenty to talk about). I don’t really have issues with this book so much as I felt like it kept me at a bit of a distance, despite how involved we were with Megan and how much we were in her head. I don’t know if this is a fault of the writing or if it’s just me having a hard time being empathetic, lol, but I felt like I was never quite emotionally invested in Megan and her journey, and as a result that made me less interested in the book. But I don’t think the book is bad at all, and I appreciate it. I’m just not quite there emotionally.

Emily: I think we’re pretty much on the same page. I gave it a four also (on Goodreads), but I also think it’s rounded up from a 3.5. I appreciated the writing style and thought this was a really fast read. And there were moments that were creepy, moments that were weird and surprising, and moments that were legitimately funny. So with all of that, I would say I generally liked this one. I also just felt that emotional distance, and in the end, I was unsure of what to take away from this story. 

Kelli: Yes, agreed!

Next time we’ll be reading You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat. I am excited about this one because it has been described to me as “very bisexual.” 

Emily: That’s all we need to know. SEE YOU THEN!