The Everlasting
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Alix E. Harrow on The Everlasting
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two decades of barnaclesThe book started not with a single idea but with a genre Harrow spent her childhood devouring, one that offered a specific kind of power to girls who felt locked out of the heroism on offer everywhere else.
It’s kind of a girl’s coming-of-age narrative where she specifically studies or obtains this particularly violent power of some kind. Like she’s a knight, she gets armor, she gets a sword. She becomes powerful in a really particular way that hit for me because it was definitely a gendered type of heroism that I felt was a little bit inaccessible to me that really fulfilled a specific dream of mine.
That childhood hunger never fully faded, but it did accumulate detail over the years. When Harrow finally named the specific books that seeded the project, she also named the mechanism by which the project arrived.
Inspiration never strikes, like lightning — it accretes, like barnacles. The Everlasting has been accreting in the back of my brain since middle school, when I first read all those girl-with-a-sword books: The Song of the Lioness, Crown Duel, The Blue Sword, Sabriel.
A master’s degree in history from the University of Vermont, where she studied how empires sustain themselves through official histories, did not deepen her affection for the knightly ideal. It destroyed it, and from that wreckage she built the book.
The romantic medieval image of the knight can’t survive contact with a history degree. This book is a product of the tension between knights as they existed in my childhood imagination (noble, loyal, heroic, hot), and knights as they actually were (violent enforcers of state power, deployed later as propaganda).
The villain’s scheme, in which Una’s legend is weaponized to determine who holds power and who belongs, was not invented from whole cloth. Harrow was drawing on named historical patterns she had spent years studying.
I do think I was intentionally mimicking real-world examples of states or empires employing particular mythological histories to justify their present-day actions. Like what the British Empire did with the Arthurian myth cycle. Like what present day American fascists do with their need to control a specific vision of American history, right? Like they’re telling a really particular narrative that will justify who’s in power now, who’s not in power, who belongs and who doesn’t belong.
How she wrote it
Pages of charts and no floor to stand onEvery previous Harrow novel had actual history as a skeleton beneath the fiction. With The Everlasting, a fully secondary world meaning no real geography, no real record, no real kings to borrow, she had to build that skeleton herself, which sent her ranging across centuries and continents for material that had nothing to do with a single time or place.
I’d never actually created a fully secondary world before, and working without the comfort of actual history was terrifying. In the end it took just as much research as historical fiction, except that I got to roam more widely. I could read about the deployment of Joan of Arc in Vichy France and the experiences of Antonio de Erauso (trans ex-nun, conquistador), and the use of medieval imagery in the Confederate South, and it was all equally relevant.
The time-loop structure, in which the protagonist Una repeats events with small, consequential variations, looked elegant on the page and was brutal to engineer. Harrow’s warning to the Barnes & Noble audience came from hard-won experience.
If you or anyone that you know or love is working on a time loop book, I want you to stop now. You can stop them. You don’t have to do that... it was a real nightmare to plot out. And I had just like pages and pages of charts trying to keep track of like what’s repeating, what’s repeating with small variations, why are the variations happening? And then if you make a little edit, you’re like, ‘Oh, I should have had this happen.’ It echoes at least six times through the whole book. [paraphrased from audio]
The romance between Una and her companion was never going to write itself. Harrow had assumed the emotional logic of pairing two people would be the easy part of the book.
I think we all have this slightly rude assumption in our heads that like, ‘Oh, you could just write a romance in there. You could just put in a love story.’ But it takes a lot of thought about making two people that have significant barriers to being together but also make sense and inevitably will come together.
Harrow set herself a deliberate challenge with the body: she wanted the physical dimension of Una’s world, both its violence and its pleasure, to carry weight that her previous novels had left to abstraction. The Arthurian scaffolding (Owen Mallory is the love interest’s name, and she was not trying to be sneaky about it) gave her a ready shorthand for the idealized legend; what she added was its opposite.
I got to make this book more about the body and the physical than any of my other stuff... both in the sense of like warfare and violence, but also in like pleasure and sex. I wanted to do both of those things more intensely than I had before, because it’s a little bit about finding the site of resistance in each other and in our physical bodies as opposed to like these big ideas like nation and empire. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Fixed futures and women who are not victimsHarrow finished the book before she understood what the time-loop device was doing to the reader’s nervous system. The realization came after the fact, and it reframed for her what kind of story she had actually written.
I only realized later how inherently optimistic time travel is as a device. I think in a story this violent and grim and dark, time travel was my way of whispering to the reader (and myself) that it didn’t have to be this way, that the future wasn’t fixed.
The book refuses the idea that empire is built only by men, and Harrow was direct about why that refusal mattered to her. She wanted readers to see the women who keep the machinery running, not as its casualties, but as its operators.
The other part of the project of Empire that I really finally got to dig my teeth into in this one is the way that gender roles must serve Empire under imperialism. So like each person has their role to play and that means that women at the top of the hierarchy, white women, women of privilege, women with wealth, are participating in the project of Empire. Not just as like handmaidens, but as generals, you know, and they’re making this whole thing function, often to serve themselves. [paraphrased from audio]
The antagonist Vivian Rolfe is Harrow’s argument against a political logic she watches operating in the present. She built Rolfe to show where that logic ends up, and the observation behind the character is one she clearly wants readers to carry out of the book.
I struggle in our current moment of this sort of narrative of permanent victimhood for white womanhood, that I think is really dangerous, actually. Because once you’re this victim, once things have been taken from you, once there’s injustice against you... then you can’t do anything really evil. Everything is just getting back and getting yours. [paraphrased from audio]
The book asks readers to hold that argument in mind alongside Una’s loop: if the future is not fixed, neither is the story about who gets to claim victimhood and use it as cover.