Set in the universe of a Manhattan co-op building over the course of a day, Lee Conell infuses her debut novel The Party Upstairs with a distinctive panache and contemporary twist that upends the upstairs-downstairs trope. Told from the father-daughter perspectives of Martin, the live-in super, and his jobless, diorama-making art history major Ruby, moves back home to the building where her childhood friend lives in the penthouse apartment. Winner of the 2016 Nelson Algren Short Story Prize, Conell may draw upon her past as the super’s daughter in her debut novel, but she reimagines it with such keen wit, psychological insight and sharp radar for class sensibilities that she elevate The Party Upstairs to a suspenseful, wonderful social novel. Conell talked to The National about her writing process, pretending she had a color-coded outline, and pandemic-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Q: Fiction really does anticipate life -- this pandemic has landed so many young people at home with their parents, which happens in your novel which announces from the outset that 24-year-old protagonist Ruby has returned to her childhood apartment.

A: I started this novel (not anticipating it would turn into a novel) back in the fall of 2012, a little bit after many of my friends had moved back home with their parents due to the recession. I certainly wasn’t guessing Ruby’s move back home would resonate with what’s happening right now with the pandemic. I think there’s often such a strong mantra in this country about controlling one’s own destiny, and when there are these big disruptive events, that story of what success looks like—or even just what adulthood looks like—gets altered in disorienting ways. Which makes space for different stories, maybe.

Q: You’ve lived in Japan and Nashville as an adult, so did it take going away to write about New York, specifically an apartment building not unlike where you grew up?

A. I don’t think I would have started this novel if I had been living in New York City. First of all, I just wouldn’t have had the desire—living away from New York for the first time in my life made me homesick for it, and that made spending time there again through the novel a special kind of pleasure (even though the city in and outside of the novel can cause its fair share of aggravation). Being away from New York also gave me the imaginative freedom I needed to make things up, to push beyond what I knew about the apartment building where I grew up. Memory is often faulty, which makes it a great fictionalization device!

Q: Let’s talk structure. Compression! The Party Upstairs takes place over the course of one day, in one apartment building, yet somehow it felt roomy and expansive with complicated and nuanced characters. How did you develop that structure?

A: Originally, The Party Upstairs was a novella. I felt emboldened to take on all sorts of different technical challenges because the shorter length seemed to allow for that. Then I put the novella away for a couple years and worked mostly on short stories. Over time, of course, I realized that there was just so much more I wanted to explore about this building and in the lives of these characters, particularly the way money and economic status shaped the way they treated others and thought of themselves. When I returned to the novella for further edits, the word count kept growing. The structure of a single day was a piece of the novella’s DNA that traveled over to the novel and just seemed to linger there, no matter how I wanted to get rid of it.

Ultimately, the time frame really helped focus the characters’ energy (and I guess my energy as well!). I’ve also been a fan of quite a few novels that take place over a day, which was useful in some ways, though distracting and intimidating in other ways. Once I knew the structure of the novel, and had written some of the main events, I was able to think about other pieces of these characters’ days and filled in some of the gaps. It wasn’t the most organized drafting process. I had a separate document (maybe multiple separate documents???) to keep track of times and what different characters were doing when, but I also didn’t want to be too awfully literal about the whole single-day thing. Sometimes when I felt stuck, I would look up whiteboards online and imagine drafting a beautiful color-coded outline. I never got the whiteboard or drafted that color-coded outline, but it was soothing to pretend I had.

Q: You’re married to a scientist who specializes in DNA repair, which I imagine requires dedication to experimentation and failure before finding success. Does that sound familiar for writing fiction?

A. So familiar! So much failure! When I first started dating my husband, I was at first a little worried about how our fields seemed so different. I can’t tell you how wrong I was about that. There’s a lot of experimentation in fiction writing, as you mentioned, and even when a story or a scene doesn’t quite work out, there’s always some new bit of knowledge to be gleaned from that “failure”—as there often is in experiments that don’t work out. Both of our work involves picturing or imagining shapes that nobody else has quite seen in a specific way (my husband’s work involves visualizing protein structures), and then working toward figuring out how to understand that shape a little better, how to bring a piece of it out of what we imagine and into the world. So much of staying with the work—whether in writing or in science—involves figuring out ways to stay both openminded and curious.

Q: In the process of writing The Party Upstairs you were thinking it would be a novella, so how did it morph into this robust novel?

A. I know I mentioned earlier that the novella just kept growing and I wanted to keep exploring the building space, but I think a big part of that morphing process occurred when I realized some point-of-view things. The novella version of The Party Upstairs was just told from Ruby’s perspective, and for a while the novel version was like that too. But the novel just didn’t feel nuanced enough that way. Eventually the book evolved to include Martin’s perspective, and that felt like it allowed for a lot of new layers and folds—and for a different kind of energy, too. Martin also brought to the novel such an in-depth knowledge of the building, and I think that allowed me to play around with the building’s space and histories from different angles.

Q: With Ruby in the basement and her privileged friend Caroline in the penthouse, the upstairs-downstairs theme is a prophetic metaphor about our age of inequality.  You evoked that fraught friendship was so deftly, but tell the truth: Weren’t their moments when you wanted to slay Caroline?

A: I’ve been rewatching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately, so slay is a charged word! When I’m writing, I’m so deep in the mind of whatever character is the “point of view” character, I’m not as fully engaged with my personal rage-feelings toward the other characters. They’re not the ones I’m paying attention to as directly—or if I am, I’m trying to see them largely through the eyes of whatever characters’ mind I’m hanging out in. I’ve often found it’s my protagonists who I’ll have the most emotional response to. Maybe this is because they often seem to be the ones most immediately capable of change, which is partially why I choose to write about them in the first place. That said, Caroline can definitely be deeply insufferable at times. Did I want to slay her? Not so much. Does Ruby? Well, that’s one of the questions she’s grappling with!

Q: Fast forward 50 years: Will the penthouse still exist, and where do you imagine Ruby and Caroline?

A: New York City right now, in the mess that is 2020, is so different than how I would have imagined it when I was writing the book! So I’ll just opt to go full-on science fiction here: I’d like to say that in 50 years, Ruby has relocated to the moon, where she is creating tiny dioramas of life on earth for the moon’s first real museum. The penthouse apartment is entirely inhabited by pigeons. Caroline has left the city, and is living in an underground bunker. But it’s an extremely fancy bunker. I imagine she still manages to throw parties there, with even nicer cheese.