Spotlight & Giveaway: The Absolutes by Molly Dektar

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Molly Dektar to HJ!

Hi Molly and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Absolutes!

 
I’m so happy to be here.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

This book is about a woman who falls in reckless, passionate love with a married Italian aristocrat.

Nora first meets her love interest, Nicola, when she’s a teenager living in northern Italy.
They part quickly after their meeting, but she sees him by chance in college and then reconnects with him when she lives in New York. She is fascinated by him—and joins him in a transgressive, extramarital love affair. Nora gives up more and more of herself to pursue his love, though she knows it will break her heart.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“I wondered as I did so often whether he was finding me or inventing me.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I lived in Italy for my sophomore year of high school as an exchange student, and the beginning of the book—an Olympics bobsled race and a ride on a gondola lift — is from real life. That moment stuck with me over all these years for reasons I can’t quite say, and I started to wonder, what if that were the most important moment in someone’s life? That’s how I started writing this book.
• I included so much of my favorite Italian food in the book — especially ricotta with honey (it’s amazing when you can get ricotta fresh from a cheesemonger), and, croissants filled with apricot jam.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

In the gondola lift, Nora has a panic attack about how high up they are and how she can’t escape. Nicola likes her because she is unusually transparent about her emotions, and he sees how he can help her. Nora likes him because he comforts her.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I wrote so many sex scenes and each one definitely made me blush LIKE CRAZY. I know I wanted the book to “go there,” but now that it’s being published I feel extremely embarrassed.

“Now we sat in silence. He stood up and walked toward me. I became extremely warm. My body was flaming. My bones were starting to melt like wax, my head to fall to the floor with the density of a white dwarf star. No, he was only going to get himself a bottle of water from the sideboard. Acqua Panna. He walked behind my chair returning and my body had so much blood close to the surface I could feel him move. Complete attention. I felt like an animal.”

Readers should read this book….

If they want a confessional, dark, psychological, no-holds-barred exploration of obsessive and self-destructive love.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on a novel about a woman whose brother dies, prompting her to go on a quest to understand him better. She ends up meeting a woman from his past, and they form an unlikely family. I still haven’t shown it to a single person yet—I like to get to a point with a novel draft where I’m so completely confused I just can’t continue, and then I show it to my agent.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 2 finished copies of the Absolutes by Molly Dektar

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What is the difference between having no agency in a relationship, and seeking to give up agency? Does Nora retain as much control as she thinks she does?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from The Absolutes:

Federica and I sat on the bench on one side, and he sat on the other side. He had an intelligent face, baroque, used beauty. There was something examined about his face, adored. I had the sense lots of people looked at him. It was an agile, active face, or it was carrion, picked over, it seemed to me, even in those first moments. The face showed that everyone wanted to know what he thought all the time. He had smoking green eyes.

“Ciao, Fede,” he said. She later explained she’d met him at a few parties. He was famous around Turin and good with names.

“Ciao, Nicola,” she shot back, with a note of contention in her voice.

Down we floated in our white globe, glass circle in the white world. The gondola was even farther from the trees; we’d drifted over a crevasse. The poles holding the wires were as tall as skyscrapers. We rocked back and forth as we parted the snow. The sun was bristly between the flakes. I was worried I was having trouble breathing; my heart was beating arrhythmically. I watched her for clues about how to behave. I reached for her hand. He smiled at that; he kept his eyes on my hand when he said, in Italian, “And your friend, who’s she?”

I was terrified of him and what he might see about me and Federica. He could tell I depended on her. I tried to tell my- self, Don’t worry, he can’t look into your mind. I didn’t know whether he was good—responsible, sincere. I later learned that many people found him arrogant, he was so knowing.

Federica took my hand off hers. I wanted to grab it back, but I was afraid I’d fall apart if she refused me. My shame ricocheted within me, getting stronger. My ears rang, and hot queasiness squeezed at me from the inside. Meantime, the gondola went falling at increasing speed through the air. I was worried I would throw up. I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand under my coat and pinched my waist trying to ground myself, but my body was disobedient. Stop it, stop it, I either thought or said; I was rocking and grimacing, and I had to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. Silence rolled over me, my pulse was overflowing and escaping. My heart hastily counted down. I was aware that I could keep breathing, but my heart was going to stop and there was nothing I could do about that. Could I do my own chest compressions? We were so far from a hospital. I never found out how Federica answered “Who’s she?”

“Are you afraid of heights?” he said. His voice was far off. He spoke to me in English with a formal, old-fashioned American accent. I couldn’t lift my head. “We’ll be down soon.” It was like hearing a painting speak.

He stood, crossed the flying space in one step, and knelt in front of me. He put his leather-gloved hand on my shoulder and neck. His touch was a shock. In the black midst of my panic, it thrilled me. No one had ever touched me there or in that manner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

“A tremendous, discomfiting book charged with both the volatility and indelibility of desire. With vision, courage, and distinctive sorcery, Dektar plumbs richly layered worlds of feeling; the results left me rearranged.” —Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue

For fans of Emma Cline and Garth Greenwell, an arresting, seductive novel about one woman’s headlong dive into a reckless affair that leaves her teetering on the edge of sanity.

“In truth, the idea of evil didn’t worry me at all. There were all these checks on it, of romance and restraint. In such a context, evil was intriguing.”

When Nora, a withdrawn American teenager, is sent to live with relatives in Turin, she meets Nicola, the enigmatic son of the most powerful aristocratic family in Italy.

Years later, the two reconnect in New York and begin a heated affair. Propelled by disorienting desire, Nora quickly becomes entangled in Nicola’s insular, menacing world of old-world luxury and family secrets. When she suspects she’s being used in a secret plot to overthrow his corrupt father, Nora willfully turns submissive to Nicola, pushing against the boundaries of her own moral limits until she finds herself spiraling on a path of self-destruction.

The Absolutes is searing, subversive examination of manipulation, obsession, and sexual desire. With unsparing intrigue and ferocity, Dektar proves herself to be one of the most ambitious writers working today.
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Molly Dektar is the author of The Absolutes and The Ash Family. A graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, she is the recipient of the Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, n+1, Fence, Harvard Review, and The Sewanee Review. She lives in Queens.
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