Swarthmore Native Puts Local Touchstones in First Novel

Kyle McCarthy’s debut novel is “Everyone Knows How Much I Love You.” Photo: Patrick McCarthy

When novelist Kyle McCarthy was growing up in Swarthmore in the 1980s and ’90s, she used to take long walks around town. She loved recognizing faces even if she couldn’t always put names to them. “There are people you’d end up seeing a lot,” she recalls. “They would come to feel like characters in my mind.”

McCarthy’s first novel, “Everyone Knows How Much I Love You,” was published last summer by Ballantine Books. It focuses on an unhealthy, possibly dangerous friendship between Rose and Lacie, two women in their early thirties, both in the present and when they were teenagers. The story is set mostly in New York City, but crucial parts take place in Swarthmore, which the narrator describes as “a snow globe of tiny houses and yellow street lamps.” 

In the novel, Rose and Lacie grow up as best friends in the borough, and some of the book’s most haunting scenes take place there. The day that the Ingleneuk Tea House burned down, vivid in Rose’s mind, gets its own paragraph:

We all heard the sirens and ran, and our parents let us; our parents came too. Yellow flames jumped from the turret, and the firemen, burdened with tanks, forged through pale brown smoke … I thought, This is happening to me, and right there is the church where I was a flower girl, and next to the church is Borough Hall, where the mayor gave me a ribbon one Fourth of July.

When they’re a little older, the girls wonder if it’s possible to get lost in Swarthmore. “We rode bikes to Baltimore Pike and the college woods and the condos, to Chester and Media and back behind the community pool, but no luck: everywhere we went, we knew where we were.” 

They drink beer and get high in the Crum Woods. Something fateful happens on the curve where Yale Avenue crosses the Crum.

The novel is a work of fiction, but McCarthy is working in the territory of autofiction in which what’s real and what’s made up blend and blur. Like McCarthy, the adult Rose is an aspiring novelist from Swarthmore who graduated from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Like McCarthy, she is writing a book about an aspiring writer who grew up in Swarthmore. 

“When we think someone is telling us something true, we listen to it a little bit differently,” McCarthy says. “It feels intimate.”

McCarthy says it took her a long time to understand both her protagonist’s nature and the central subject of the story. Early drafts focused on Rose’s friendship with a wealthy high school girl she was tutoring. But eventually, it was the earlier friendship between Rose and Lacie that became crucial. As that happened, McCarthy began to see Rose more clearly. “She took pleasure in crossing boundaries,” McCarthy says. “She was sort of some of the darkest parts of myself, wildly exaggerated.”

Toxic Relationships

McCarthy has always been interested in love triangles. “There’s something about the geometry of them,” she says. “The way you might use a third person to poke a second person.” Her novel centers on two love triangles, one in the present that dangerously echoes one from the past. 

“I was interested in the idea of being compelled to repeat a mistake,” McCarthy says. The Hitchock thriller “Vertigo” was on her mind, as was “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith (later made into a movie starring Matt Damon). “The way Tom Ripley sort of becomes Dickie Greenleaf, and is so fascinated by him, and maybe has erotic feelings toward him — and also murderous feelings toward him,” McCarthy says. “There’s so much about putting on his clothes and imagining becoming him.”

In McCarthy’s novel, the adult Rose — who also likes to wear her friend’s clothes — can’t quite decide if she wants to be close to Lacie, be Lacie, or destroy Lacie. As for what Lacie wants, Rose can’t figure it out. “Lacie and I played a round of psychological warfare so excruciatingly subtle it resembled in all essential details normal life,” Rose remarks. “The only normal we ever had was when we were ten years old, infinite and bound to each other.”

McCarthy, who says she’s never considered plot to be her strength as a writer, has been surprised and pleased to see her book described by critics as a page-turner. “As unsettling as it is propulsive,” wrote “Kirkus Review,” adding, “With the acumen of the best literary fiction and the suspense of a psychological thriller.” Especially given the pandemic, McCarthy says, “If there’s a way for people to leave their lives for a little bit and get some escape, that seems good.”  

A Changing View of Swarthmore

Kyle McCarthy (left) at the Swarthmore Fourth of July parade with her friend Hadley. Photo courtesy of Kyle McCarthy

As a girl and later a teenager, McCarthy enjoyed wandering around the Swarthmore College campus. “Some of my earliest ideas of freedom were about being able to walk in the woods with my best friends,” she recalls. She attended on-campus events, including a Dar Williams concert (she snuck in) and thrilling early performances by Pig Iron Theatre Company. 

“Swarthmore College students were my babysitters and my student teachers,” McCarthy says. When she was in high school, her parents hired a Swarthmore student to be her writing tutor. “She read my poetry and my short stories and gave me Adrienne Rich to read,” McCarthy recalls. “It blew my mind.”

At Strath Haven Middle School, seventh-grade language arts teacher Mark Linkins was supportive of her writing, as was Catherine Dunn the following year. In high school, English teacher Emily Farrell was an influence. “I think she terrorized generations of Wallingford-Swarthmore students,” McCarthy recalls. “But I still hear her voice in my head sometimes. She was passionate and rigorous.”

It took a long time for McCarthy to imaginatively approach the landscape and experiences of her childhood. As a teenager, she loved the Beats and considered Swarthmore boring and conventional. In graduate school, it never occurred to her to write about the town. “I was surrounded by people from West Virginia and Montana and San Francisco, and these places seemed so particular, so romantic,” she reports. 

Eventually, however, McCarthy came to appreciate the particular culture of the small college town of her youth. Growing up, she’d enjoyed reading about local controversies in the Swarthmorean, like whether deer hunting should be allowed in the Crum Woods. “It’s easy to poke gentle fun at it,” she says. “But there’s something really moving about it. It’s about how you build a community and care for a particular place.”

Seeing the town in a new light, as a place where care and community are fundamental, helped make room for the novel to germinate. “It was a shift that allowed me to write about where I was from in a more particular way,” McCarthy says. “To realize the things that were special about Swarthmore.”