During her first year as a Yale student, author Leigh Bardugo '97 was walking home from the post office when she stumbled upon a mysterious, marble building across the street from Grove Street Cemetery. She learned the windowless structure, which was about the size of an apartment building and known to many as "the tomb," was the headquarters of the Book and Snake, one of Yale's secret societies.
"If you have any kind of imagination, it's going to spark something in you seeing this kind of architecture and this strange magical confluence," Bardugo said.
So much so that Bardugo joined one of these societies, Wolf's Head Society.
"I met people from all walks of campus life," she said. "I have maintained friendships with many of them, and I think it was an extremely good experience for me."
That experience in Wolf's Head inspired Bardugo's popular "Ninth House" trilogy; the third and final book, "Dead Beat," was published in September. (She has also published other bestselling fantasy series, including "Six of Crows" and "Shadow and Bone.") In the series, her protagonist, Alex Stern, who can communicate with ghosts, is offered a full ride to Yale. Once at the university, she's recruited into Lethe, also called the ninth house, where she monitors the other eight secret societies practicing occult magic.
"I wasn't interested in demystifying the societies," Bardugo said. "I wanted to hyper-mystify the societies."
In a Q&A, Bardugo discusses how life at Yale and in New Haven shaped her literary career, why she set the "Ninth House" trilogy on campus, and what she uncovered during the writing process.
How did your time at Yale inform your literary career?
Leigh Bardugo: Obviously, Yale became the inspiration for the "Ninth House" trilogy, but I was also fortunate to take a lot of very wonderful writing classes, literature classes, and poetry classes here. You can see that in my work, particularly the "Ninth House" trilogy, because these characters are in conversation with a lot of the same texts that I read when I was in school.
My memories around the specific classes are blurry, but the texts are not. I took a philosophy class with Louis Dupré. I remember him standing in front of the class and saying, "I don't read poetry so I can talk about it at cocktail parties. I read it because it's the last place where heightened language truly exists." That stuck with me always. Poetry has always been a part of my literary diet. There's a reason that I remember Dante, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Bishop, and that's because those stories and that language are heightened and spectacular in a way that I think invariably stays with anybody who loves language.
Your "Ninth House" series takes place at Yale and around New Haven. How did you come to approach them as characters in the books?
Bardugo: When I set out to write "Ninth House," I thought I was writing a campus novel. When I went on my first research trip to Yale, I actually stayed at [Grace] Hopper, my old residential college. I set out to research the campus and the architecture, and I did a tour of New Haven with a woman named Barbara Lamb [the former director for New Haven's Department of Cultural Affairs]. She sat me down at Yorkside [a pizza place on York Street] with a map of New Haven and showed me the nine square plan. We started driving around New Haven, and I realized I'm not just writing a campus novel. There's a whole city here that I have an embarrassing lack of knowledge around, and I need to remedy that.
For example, Darlington's character changed. He became the scion of a New Haven family, and that allowed me to explore New Haven history in one particular way. That initial research trip informed everything that I did after, and I think changed the shape and the trajectory of the trilogy in a pretty profound way.
Why did Yale feel like the right place for all this magic to unfold?
Bardugo: Yale occupies a very specific place in our cultural understanding. It's not like any other college. Its relationship to New Haven is a profoundly rich one and one worth untangling and exploring. I came to Yale as somebody who'd grown up around strip malls and the seedier side of the San Fernando Valley. To suddenly be in a place that looked like places I had read about, and that had this extraordinary architecture and these layers of history, was a truly magical experience. While these books are explorations of institutional power, they're also operating in the same wish fulfillment space that going to Yale occupied for me. This was not like the world I came from, and it felt transformative in a lot of ways.
How did you think about incorporating certain Yale landmarks like Sterling Library into the story?
Bardugo: I always wanted there to be this kind of friction between what was real and what was imagined in these books. It makes the fantastical seem so much real if it's grounded in real history and in real architecture. You certainly see that in [the first book] "Ninth House." I read a lot about Sterling when I was working on it, but there was no place for it in the first book. In the second book, "Hell Bent," I knew exactly what I was going to do with it [as the place through which Alex and others descend into hell via a portal]. It was about finding a way to build that into the plot in a way that felt satisfying.
While writing the series, you regularly returned to campus to conduct research. What did the process look like for you? What did you uncover?
Bardugo: What I learned was that if you're a woman walking with a cane, people will let you in places you're not supposed to go. [Bardugo has a degenerative condition called avascular necrosis or osteonecrosis.] Like, they see you limping toward them, and you're like, "Could you hold the door?" and they're going to hold that door. So, it turns out my cane is actually super useful for research purposes. I was also very lucky because early on I was connected to people like Barbara Lamb and Michael Morand [director of community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and New Haven's city historian] who then opened doors to other people who knew the city and were willing to sit down with me, give me a tour, or give me a couple of hours of their time, which is no small thing.
During the pandemic, I did a college tea for Pauli Murray College remotely over Zoom. During the Q&A, someone piped up and said, "I'm an archivist at Sterling, and we all fact checked your book." I felt my heart stop because you think, "Oh, no. What did I get wrong?" And she said, "No. You did a great job. If you ever need help, let me know." That person, Camila Tessler, ended up being a huge resource for the next two books. She is the reason that I was able to visit Sterling as the university was opening up post-pandemic. I was able to meet the college librarian. I was able to discover how to build the gauntlet [which is critical to the plot in the second book, "Hell Bent"]. As an introvert, it can be very scary to go out into the world and to knock on people's doors and send people emails, but you absolutely must. You don't know what wonderful things you may discover.
