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SenLinYu on Alchemised
In they own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A grandmother’s erasure, a question that wouldn’t closeThe book began with a family history that most of the people around SenLinYu had never thought to ask about. Growing up, she watched peers describe American WWII history as a clean moral triumph while remaining entirely untroubled by the internment of Japanese American citizens, including her own maternal grandmother, a US citizen imprisoned without cause. That gap between what people celebrated and what they ignored became the engine.
The inspiration was very personal. My maternal grandmother and her family were US citizens who were interned during WWII because they were Japanese. Growing up, a lot of people I knew were self-describedly ‘obsessed’ with US WWII history as this sort of ultimate Good triumphing over Evil moment in world history, but most of them were either oblivious or indifferent to the Japanese internment. It made me realise how curated historical memory is, and so I started to look for what else was being left out.
The personal grievance sharpened into a structural question about how heroism gets manufactured. The spy at the novel’s centre is not merely a thriller device; she is a test case for what any society quietly authorises in order to produce the figures it wants to celebrate.
The initial question I wrestled with was the ethical trolley problem that spies represent; the question of what’s an acceptable loss or atrocity to maintain a cover? That was where I started. But then in the process of delving into the brutality of war without all the gilding and lionizing of traditional heroism, the premise evolved into questioning how societies make heroes. When you start poking at that, you start seeing which nuances get erased by flattening the narrative into a neat dichotomy and realise that countless people have to disappear for the heroes to be shaped into these near-mythic figures.
The magic system arrived from an unexpected direction: a personal disagreement with a friend. SenLinYu found herself unable to dismiss the friend’s visceral refusal to donate her body after death, even though she couldn’t share it. An ethical position that resists rational override, she realised, was exactly the kind of moral trap a war story could be built around.
The initial idea about necromancy/reanimation came from a conversation with a friend about organ donation.
That conversation gave the novel’s central practice, necromantic reanimation, its moral weight: the body is not a neutral resource, and the book forces every character to act as though it is.
How they wrote it
Triptych structure, four rewrites, and a Shirley Jackson houseBefore a single scene was drafted, the shape of the whole was decided. SenLinYu’s frustration with mystery novels that save the inciting event for a closing monologue drove her toward a form borrowed from painting: a three-panel structure where the middle panel illuminates both ends. The decision to tell the story out of order was not an effect added in revision; it was the first architectural choice.
From the very beginning I conceptualised the story structurally as a literary triptych. A triptych is an art format that has three parts or panels, and the centre panel is the context for the first and third. So it was always imagined as being told out of order.
Research preceded writing by a long stretch. SenLinYu’s Substack post catalogued a reading list that ran from Lawrence Principe’s history of alchemy to Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of Soviet women in WWII, from St. Augustine to a spy biography of Christine Granville. David Graeber’s concept of schismogenesis, the way groups define themselves against each other and become mirrors of what they oppose, lodged so deeply that it shaped the world’s fundamental architecture.
I proceeded to inhale every book I thought might conceivably contain relevant information until there was enough primordial ooze in my brain to birth a universe... or rather a continent and a few odd city-states.
The adaptation from Manacled, her Harry Potter fanfiction that had accumulated over twenty million downloads, into a fully original novel took two years and four complete rewrites. What she expected to be the most constraining part of the process turned out to be liberating.
It was a little bit like putting two puzzles together: a 5000 piece puzzle over here, and then having another 5000 piece puzzle and trying to splice them together somehow. After the initial drafting process, it was a trilogy. I ended up condensing it down into one standalone work and writing it several times over in order to try to find which parts really spoke to this story the best. It took about two years and four full rewrites.
Gothic literature gave the novel its register before a single setting was designed. SenLinYu had grown up reading the genre and understood it as a vehicle for something specific: the experience of a woman whose grasp on reality is questioned by the world pressing down on her, which is precisely Helena’s situation for most of the book.
I really love Gothic literature and I feel like it tends to capture a lot of the themes of a sort of a feminine experience in a constraining society. Gothic literature often has this element of claustrophobia and a force of the world kind of pushing down on this particular character, people are questioning their sanity and they don’t always know what’s real. [paraphrased from audio]
Spirefell, the novel’s central estate, required a specific literary model. SenLinYu turned to Shirley Jackson to understand how a building becomes a character, but the more she read, the more a second, older text kept surfacing. Mary Shelley’s biography, bereaved mother, daughter of a feminist philosopher who died in childbirth, rewrote how SenLinYu read Frankenstein: a novel consumed with creation and rejection that contains almost no women at all.
I was specifically interested in reading Jackson’s depiction of the house. I had a very strong desire to depict the house in Alchemised as a character, to give it that sense of presence.
Frankenstein’s absence of women became something she couldn’t stop turning over when thinking about Helena, a woman at the centre of a creation story the world would rather erase.
The personal thread
Portland winters and a grandmother’s silenceSenLinYu’s own circumstances while writing shaped the novel’s sensory texture in ways that went beyond atmosphere. Living in Portland without a car, in an old brick building with ancient radiators and no air conditioning, she developed a habit of writing temperature as an index of feeling.
I didn’t have a car and live in an old brick building with ancient radiators and no AC. The temperature a character experiences in relation to another person is often the first indicator about how they feel towards that person, or how their feelings are beginning to change.
Helena’s relationship to natural space also draws on something biographical. SenLinYu spent years foraging in the Willamette Valley woods as a child, and that childhood gave her protagonist a specific quality the novel uses with purpose: Helena moves freely in natural environments in a way she cannot move anywhere else, because wilderness is the one space in the book that does not architecturally contain her.
I really love Gothic literature and I feel like it tends to capture a lot of the themes of a sort of a feminine experience in a constraining society. Gothic literature often has this element of claustrophobia and a force of the world kind of pushing down on this particular character, people are questioning their sanity and they don’t always know what’s real. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Three scales of forgetting, one unresolvable trolley problemHelena’s amnesia is not simply a plot mechanism; it is the novel’s argument made concrete. SenLinYu designed it to work simultaneously at three scales, each one a version of the same act: the deliberate erasure of what is inconvenient to remember.
Memory loss is explored on this intimate level with Helena, where her amnesia distorts and alters her understanding of the world and is ultimately both a weapon and a shield. Then if you zoom out, the story is also about memory loss on a historical level, how the victor’s version of history and all their omissions distort and alter everyone’s understanding of the world, how that shapes the identity of an entire country and creates the circumstances that cause the war. And then on a structural level, when you reach the end of the book, the cycle of historical memory loss is threatening to begin again, and no one notices because omissions are things that society is trained to overlook.
The moral choices the book puts before its characters were designed to resist the reader’s desire for a verdict. SenLinYu was not interested in whether the choices were right; she was interested in the cost attached to every available option, including the option of refusing to act.
When writing Alchemised, I wasn’t interested in readers agreeing with the characters’ choices because it’s intended to be another trolley problem. I wanted to show there’s a cost to choosing one way or the other, and there’s also a cost for refusing to choose. The lack of a perfect, moral solution is the point.
The depiction of war in the novel is deliberately unglamourised, and SenLinYu was precise about why. She did not regard the darkness as an artistic choice to be justified; she regarded the sanitised version as the distortion that needed correcting. Her benchmark was not the conventions of dark fantasy but the historical record.
I don’t think that the reality of war should be limited only to historians and military history hobbyists, while everyone else only knows Hollywood spectacle. Honestly, everything I depicted in Alchemised pales in comparison to the real world war crimes that come about from dehumanisation; Alchemised is still a very softened depiction of it.
What they want us to sit with
What keeps being left outThe hope SenLinYu articulated for the book is not an emotion but a change in angle. She wants readers to leave the novel doing something they were not doing before: noticing the shape of absences rather than just the shape of what is present.
My hope would be for readers to see the world from a slightly different angle after reading it; to question why so much of our lives gets pared down into convenient narratives and wonder at what keeps being left out.
Helena’s profession as a healer in a war setting was a deliberate counter to the ‘strong female character’ archetype SenLinYu grew up reading. That archetype required women to prove heroism by performing masculine acts. Helena’s alternative is harder to see, because the culture around her is designed not to see it.
A healer, but not because she’s just so tenderhearted and pure (both qualities associated with femininity), but because she’s calculating, and rational enough to choose a role that she knows she’ll be derided for because she can comprehend how vital and undervalued it is.
In a Writers’ Digest piece, SenLinYu turned the book’s central preoccupation into advice for writers, but the warning also describes the trap her novel is built to expose: when you suppress what makes you distinct in order to appeal to everyone, the people who needed specifically you cannot find you. The same logic applies to history.
Don’t try to be for everyone. As writers, finding the balance between writing as a craft and writing as a job is a constant struggle, and it can feel necessary to be as broadly appealing as possible in an attempt to ‘find’ your audience. But if your passions suppress what makes you unique as a writer, the people who would be uniquely passionate about your writing won’t be able to tell you apart from everyone else.