‘Sweet Fury’ by Sash Bischoff ’09
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‘Sweet Fury’ by Sash Bischoff ’09

‘None of these characters are black and white. I wanted everything and everybody in this book to live in the gray area, because that felt like life to me’

Elizabeth Daugherty
By Elisabeth H. Daugherty

Published April 21, 2025

Podcast
Body

On this episode of the PAW Book Club podcast, Sash Bischoff ’09 discusses her debut novel, Sweet Fury, a twisty thriller that plays with the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917 — his writing, his characters, and the way he painted Princeton as the setting of some of his most famous stories.

Join the PAW Book Club here, and get started on our next read, Lauren Ling Brown ’12’s Society of Lies.

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TRANSCRIPT:

I’m Liz Daugherty, and this is the PAW Book Club podcast, where Princeton alumni and friends read a book together.

Today, I’m speaking with Sash Bischoff from Princeton’s Class of 2009, about her debut novel and our latest book club read, Sweet Fury. From the very first page, Sweet Fury takes the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, famously of Princeton’s Class of 1917, and begins to play. A famous actress and film director, characters named Lila and Kurt, are collaborating on a feminist adaptation of Tender is The Night. Then into the mix strides a psychotherapist named Jonah, a character readers will recognize as awfully similar to one Jay Gatsby.

The story unfolds in some surprisingly dark directions, including one disturbing scene set at a Princeton eating club, and prospective readers should note that this podcast will contain spoilers as we probe the ideas and intentions that ran through Sash’s head as she wove this story, building up her characters — and destroying some in the end.

Sash, thank you so much for making the trip and coming here today.

Sash Bischoff ’09: Thank you. I am so honored. I feel like I love this podcast, and we have such esteemed alumni writers that have been invited on this before, so this feels like a huge honor and a gift.

LD: Awesome. Well, we got some great questions from our book club members. I’m going to start at the beginning and I’m just going to go through. First off, Edward McGrath ’85 asked: How did you come to choose this as a topic for your first novel?

SB: It’s a great question. My background is a little storied. I have multiple hats that I’ve worn over the course of my life. I grew up as a professional actor. I started acting at the age of 6 because I was an incurably shy child. My mom wanted this to change, and so she threw me into an audition for a regional production of A Christmas Carol. I did the show and it finished, and my mom said, “Great, you’re cured, moving on.” I said, “No, mother. I found my passion.” And so, thus began little Sara Ashley, as I was then, my work as a professional actor. I did a lot of work in regional theater and community theater and children’s theater. Then in high school, this is mostly in San Diego, I would, after school drive up to LA most days, which is about a three and a half hour drive, to do film and TV work as well.

When it came time to make the decision as to where to go to college, I was really torn as to whether I wanted to go the conservatory route or a more traditional academic setting, because I was so hell-bent on being an actor. I was so sure that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. But I ended up choosing Princeton because of its creative writing department. At Princeton, however, alums will probably know that you can’t just take a creative writing class, you have to submit. And I continued to be rejected over and over. Finally, I think it was after being rejected first semester of sophomore year, I wrote a letter to Paul Muldoon and said, “Can you please take pity on me? This is the whole reason I went to Princeton.” Thus he did, and I was accepted into a class taught by Joyce Carol Oates. Then my writing career began, but simultaneously I was still acting and I was still directing.

I had moved into directing as well because a mentor in high school had said, “You really have an eye for directing.” After college, I began a professional career as a director. I was directing on and off Broadway as well as directing smaller things regionally and in the city. I was working my way up in the Broadway scene, assistant director and associate director, and all the while continuing to write, but it was very much secondary to my directing career. From 2018 to 2020, I was the associate director of Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway and the National Tour, which basically meant that I was overseeing those productions. It was a huge job. It was an incredible job. But in 2020, March 12, whichever day it was, I was in the rehearsal room putting in an actor for the Broadway show that night, and we got the call that theater was shutting down and everything was going away. After my industry disappeared, I spent a couple of months moping and crying and walking my dogs and then realized, “This isn’t going anywhere. I need to do something about it.”

I decided this is my decision, this is my chance to really give writing a go. At the time, I was working with an agent, and I pitched her five ideas, one of which was the book that became Sweet Fury, to which she said, “That’s the book I never read before. That’s the book you need to write.” At that time, I only had two ideas with this book. I knew that I wanted to document the relationship between an actress and her therapist through the session notes together, and then I knew the big final twist at the end, but I only had the beginning and the ending, and I didn’t yet know how to get from A to Z, so then I had to figure out the rest of the book, but that was the initial idea.

LD: Lucia Bonilla Fridlyand ’06 said, “So many of the characters in this book are so complex. Did you see yourself in any of their stories or what happens to them throughout the book?”

SB: The storyline, the plot is not at all autobiographical. Of course, people in my life want to see themselves in some of the characters. My parents, for sure, were so certain that some of the things that happened to some of the characters had happened to me. No, I regrettably, none of those things. Or maybe not regrettably, those things did not happen to me.

But yes, I feel like as a writer, how can you not, how can part of yourself not be put into each one of these characters, whether or not it is conscious or subconscious? I think I made the decision to write about the film industry and the dynamics between an actor and a director and a writer. It’s very inside baseball, and all of those things were pulled very much directly from my own past. As I mentioned, I have experience as an actor and a director and a writer. For me, the way I look at it is, I look at acting as one piece, one very important piece of a puzzle and directing, your job is to put all of the puzzle pieces together. Then, these are elements, levels of control. Writing is just a further step and more control where you’re building the characters and the story and the world of the book.

Working as a professional director, I already had built into me an intimate understanding of pacing and tension and motive and action and conflict, and theatricality and drama and stakes. All of those things helped me immensely as I taught myself how to build a suspense novel.

In terms of the actual content, this book in some ways is a #MeToo book. I will say that both as an actor and as a director, I witnessed and was subjected to prejudice. I think it’s common knowledge that for female actresses in both theater and TV and film, there’s an emphasis placed on being young and beautiful and small and thin. And when I was acting professionally, that was very much my experience. I was growing up and as a teenager and navigating my own body changes, and that constant judgment on my physical appearance was a huge source of anxiety and insecurity for me growing up, and it’s ultimately one of the reasons why I chose to leave acting behind.

Then when it came to directing, I think most people know that in the film and TV industry, it’s very much an old boys club, but this is still unfortunately very true of the theater world as well. There are, thank God, a handful of female directors that have made their way to the top, and some of them are incredible at helping other women, and there are some out there that have a reputation for going out of their way to do just the opposite.

I found oftentimes in these various productions that I was working on, I’d be at the head table and I was usually the only woman there. I had to get very good at shape-shifting and transforming myself in order to get ahead, which is obviously should not be the case, but I felt that it is what I needed to do, and it worked, sadly. Sweet Fury pushes that idea to the extreme, exploring the dangers and the consequences of that gamesmanship.

LD: We have more questions about the #MeToo movement later on, by the way. Yeah, that was a big topic for our book group, was clearly really interested in that part of it. But first, Grace Ni, ’23 is also on the PAW staff, she asked, “The usage of therapist notes,” which you mentioned, that’s Jonah’s notes as he’s writing about his sessions with Lila. “The use of those notes to further the plot line of the novel was really cool. What inspired you to use this form of literary style as a tool to develop each character more deeply?”

SB: I don’t know if I have a great answer to that, because as I mentioned, the way that I get ideas for books is just, it comes in a flash, and that was one that just came in a flash to me. But working backwards, the structure of this book was very important to me and to delving into one of the major themes of the book and the therapy notes are one aspect of that. Sweet Fury is in some ways an epistolary novel. I have all of these various formats. I have the therapist session notes, I have Lila’s journal entries to Jonah, there is the film within the book.

My intention there is I feel like we as human beings are limited by our subjective experience. I wanted there to be what, to me, feels very true about life, is that things are not often black and white. They often live in the gray area. The idea of doubt, can anyone ever be sure of what truly happened? With the structure, like with the session notes, for example, I wanted to give the reader glances or angles into a situation rather than giving them the broad, full, unadulterated truth so that it puts the reader, it forces them into a more active position where they are playing detective and trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together in this book. They’re getting all of these slashes at, and trying to uncover the truth of what is at the core of this book, but it’s up to them to put the pieces together.

LD: That’s really interesting. Bob Garthwaite ’83 asks, “Is there a true hero or heroine in this story?” He says, “Both Lila and Jonah are pretty messed up, complicated, deceiving, manipulating, et cetera. What would you like the reader to take from this book and these characters?”

SB: No, there is not a true hero or a true villain. I think I touched on this before, but this is one of the most important things to me in writing this book, particularly as it relates to the #MeToo movement, but that none of these characters are black and white. I wanted everything and everybody in this book to live in the gray area, because that felt like life to me. I think that was something in writing a thriller. I wanted to make sure that it didn’t have that black and white quality. I wanted it to be maybe more troubling to read, because you don’t have any true, clear answers. Nobody is a hero, nobody is a villain, but they are all, they are all limited and flawed human beings. When I chose the title of the third section, it’s a quote taken from Tender is the Night, “We must all try to be good.” I chose that for many reasons, but one of which is that everyone in this book is trying in their own limited way to do the right thing.

LD: And look at what happened.

SB: Yeah.

LD: Well, that was... The gray that you’re talking about. Of course, there is this sexual encounter that is so core to the book where you have two characters who walked away from it with completely different ideas of what happened. One thinks it was the most incredible night of his life meeting his soulmate, and the other one thinks it was assault. That is just a powerful gray area, which brings me to this question, of course, we knew it was coming, but it’s double because we have so many people who wanted to know about this.

June Wispelwey ’81 said, “How did the #MeToo movement influence this story?” She was talking about the movement itself, and then Johannes Hallermeier ’16 said, “It’s impressive that the author delves into the subtleties of truth, justice, revenge, et cetera, regarding the #MeToo movement. Should we understand the novel to suggest a viewpoint on those matters? Or does it mostly aim to explore the complexities?”

SB: I think the latter. I did want to set this purposefully in the film industry, because that is the industry where the #MeToo movement blew up most publicly. Obviously, it’s a problem that is present in almost every industry in our country, but that was where it was most prominent, I think in particular, because America has this obsession with fame and celebrity.

In terms of my feelings about the #MeToo movement and sexual assault, you know, I don’t know what the answer is. I think our country’s justice system is deeply flawed. Some might say it’s broken, but I say that because you see that men, because in most cases with sexual assault, it’s men, continue to get away with these crimes over and over again. It continues to happen. They continue, in some cases, to be promoted to positions of power and influence and respect. And because our society reveres fame and wealth, oftentimes people that shouldn’t do get a pass.

But in pushing this idea further, this book takes place in the post-Me-Too world. I wanted to push that movement to the extreme in sort of, how far can I push it? One of the things that I was exploring here is misogyny in our culture is so pervasive, it is in the air we breathe. Sometimes a woman, living within our culture’s pervasive sexism can be guilty of condoning or even perpetuating this misogyny, perhaps to climb her own way up the ladder, or to protect her own tenuous hold. Under the right circumstances, perhaps a woman might be capable of committing atrocities just as terrible as those a man might commit, or maybe even worse.

LD: That’s really interesting. Well, and you had this other character, the man in the situation, who didn’t even seem to know that he had committed a sexual assault, which made me wonder if he was so blinded by those larger forces governing his thinking that it didn’t even occur to him. Which is incredible.

SB: And I think the Fitzgerald of it all ties into this as well. Jonah is someone who is obsessed with Fitzgerald. He idolizes Fitzgerald. In drawing his character, I pulled a lot from my research on Fitzgerald to create this man. He is, Jonah is very much a romantic. In the book, obviously there are for Fitzgerald’s fans, there are at least hundreds, if not more, of Easter eggs in this book. In that Princeton flashback chapter, I do something pretty deliberately. The style of the writing changes slightly, and I’m trying to write in a very Fitzgerald-esque manner to paint Princeton, not necessarily the reality of Princeton, that was my experience, but the Princeton that is the Fitzgeraldian Princeton, the very romantic version of this world. In that scene of assault, I deliberately take rather large chunks of quotes from This Side of Paradise, his first very autobiographical novel, The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby.

Each of those chunks are describing a scene in those books that between hero and heroine and various parts of a consummation of their love story. I’m using his language deliberately to paint Fitzgerald’s version or Jonah’s version of this romantic encounter. Then flipping it on its head to show, well, what if this were told from the point of view of a woman? Is there a darker side to this than the romantic idealized view that is coming from the man? Which I think is one of the things I’m tapping into and trying to comment on with Fitzgerald in this book is, as I did all of this research on Fitzgerald, I came to understand his failings as a man. To be specific, I take issue with the sexism, the classism, the racism, the homophobia, the antisemitism, all the isms. Sweet Fury only addresses the misogyny in his work.

This is a question that I think we deal with constantly in literature, is that he was writing a century ago, he was a product of his time, but does this mean that we should just blindly give him a pass? Should we continue to revere him as the great American writer? Or should these failings in some way be addressed? I am trying very much to do that with Sweet Fury while continuing to celebrate his place in the American canon.

LD: It’s quite the line to walk.

SB: Yeah.

LD: It’s quite the line to walk. Well, speaking of Jonah, Bob Garthwaite also asked, “Please talk about the challenge of taking on male voice, persona, psychology of Jonah, especially given such a difficult subject of rape and sexual abuse.”

SB: Yeah, I think it was really difficult, and I think especially because I was teaching myself how to write a suspense or thriller novel for the first time, my process was very much overwriting and showing my hand as a writer. Then, once it was all out there and I had laid all the breadcrumbs for myself, I would have to pull them all away, take away as many clues as possible once I had that map laid out for myself. I think when I initially wrote Jonah in early drafts, he was much more vilified. But actually that was true of Lila as well. In early drafts, Lila was much more of a vigilante black widow. They were both much more black-and-white characters.

The job, for me, the challenge, the exciting challenge was to humanize each of them and to draw, to pull back on the sociopathic, the rapist tendencies of Jonah and increase the sympathetic romantic in him, which is very much there. My hope with each of these characters is that even as they increasingly do horrifying things, that the reader can always still empathize, still understand at least why they’re doing what they’re doing because of what has happened to them in the past.

LD: Now, Johannes Hallermeier ’16, again, this is a big question. You ready for this? This three parts, so interesting. He says, “An obvious but important question. The story raises questions about Princeton and specific parts of its culture. Example, St. A’s,” which was the secret society, right? “Are we meant to read the book that way? First, that lots is wrong with the Ivy League. Second, that lots of it has been wrong for a long time. And third, that writers like Fitzgerald probably got it wrong by telling fairly positive as well as male dominated stories.”

SB: That is a really big question. No, that is not my intention. It’s a fear that I’ve talked to other writers who have dealt with this as well, writers that are alumni of Princeton that have written about Princeton. My experience with Princeton was really wonderful. I also was not a member of St. A’s. I wasn’t quote, unquote cool enough to be asked to be in St. A’s. I have no idea if anything is even remotely close to accurate. This is all a work of fiction.

I do think that it’s a very obvious thing that everybody knows is that the University is grappling with the traditions of the past, holding onto the traditions of the past versus making sure that they, they’re moving forward in the modern world and are not being limited by those traditions. But my book is not meant as a commentary on Princeton at all.

Princeton, it really came into this book, Fitzgerald came into this book, actually secondarily to the plot. When I had written the first draft, the film that’s being made in this book was not a Fitzgerald story at all. I had made up this story that I knew was a placeholder, and a dear novelist friend and a Princeton graduate said to me that the ideas, and the themes, and the subject matter of this book are really reminiscent of Tender Is the Night. That’s how I made my way into Tender Is the Night. I’d only read The Great Gatsby of Fitzgerald’s work up until that point. I went down the Fitzgerald rabbit hole because of that and realized that, “Oh, this book actually should be in conversation with his work as a whole.” Through that, it really was an aligning of the stars that Fitzgerald is a Princeton graduate, and the Pump and Slipper and St. A’s, and all of these tie-ins that worked so well for me and for the purposes of this book really came secondary to the initial plot. None of this is meant as commentary on the University.

LD: Fitzgerald came in and then with Fitzgerald comes Princeton, right?

SB: Yes.

LD: Yep. You know about Princeton?

SB: Yep.

LD: There we go. Here we have another double question. This is about the ending. Lucia again, Class of 2006 says, “I have to ask about the ending. Did you know how you were going to end Jonah and Lila’s story when you started writing it? Or how did it come along?” And Susan Salberg, who is a friend of PAW through one of our staff members, says, “They are bound for somewhere new, a place that has been her destiny? Why provide all these details and yet leave the ending so inconclusive?” Why did you decide to do that and drive us crazy with the inconclusive?

SB: Yes, yes. It’s been really interesting hearing readers reactions to the ending. The ending. Yeah, so I always knew the big twist, meaning the twist that Lila has been the mastermind behind all of this and was seeking revenge on Jonah. That was always there. The whole Celia piece of the puzzle actually came in a later draft that came out of a discussion with my incredible agents who basically said that the Lila twist wasn’t enough, “you need a twist on a twist.” That part of the ending was rewritten very much. Writing and crafting the end of a thriller is a nightmarish process. It took me many months, and I don’t even know how many dozens of drafts to get there, but in terms of the very ending, the coda of the book. I wrote, I think, four different endings to this book before ultimately settling on this one.

Some readers really love it, and some readers are driven crazy by it because of how murky it is and that it doesn’t have that clean, satisfying ending where you can just snap the book closed and understand it and feel satisfied by that. I personally like that. I think that that is going to be the case in my work going forward, because I like those murkier endings where the reader needs to take from it what they will. But yes, there used to be an epilogue that was much longer, that was, I think, a five part of found documents from various characters putting all of these puzzle pieces together, and it was now then condensed into a little more than a page.

LD: So you did want to drive us crazy.

SB: Yeah. I have the explanation for all of the ways in which all of those beats landed and what’s actually happening behind the scene of the three women, which I can explain to you.

LD: No, that makes sense. Yeah. It’s in keeping with the gray areas in the book and the guesswork and what really happened, you get to the end and you’re like, “Well, what really happened?” There it is again. So it’s consistent.

One question left. Catherine Mallette ’84 asks, “What was the most surprising thing about the publishing process as a debut novelist, and what can we expect from your second novel?”

SB: The most surprising thing, there have been so many surprising things, but I will just say the thing that comes to the top of my head right now, because I’m still swimming in it, and I’m very much, the book came out in January, so I’m still processing what it is to have a book out in the world.

It’s interesting, five years ago when I was first beginning this book, I would’ve killed to have a book published. I would’ve paid for somebody to want to publish my book. Then I was in this incredibly fortunate position, which was not an easy road, but I was given this path where I’m being published by Simon and Schuster and all of these countries around the world. It’s a dream.

And it’s all going really well, but I also have this feeling in me of, “OK, now what?” I don’t think it’s just me, I think this is a human tendency that might be, could be in any industry that if Sash from five years ago could look at where I am today, Sash would be thrilled. For me, I’m like, “OK, but I’ve got to keep going and got to focus on what’s next.” That feeling of, “Oh, you’ve never made it.” I think even probably even the most famous authors out there, the most highly respected authors out there, probably still, they have some version of that as well. I think it is just the human experience.

What’s next is I have a two-book deal with Simon and Schuster, and I’ve written a first draft of my next book, which is a mess. But I’m in revisions and I’m really excited about it. It is a much bigger, more sprawling piece. It is less of a thriller, more literary suspense told over the course of multiple generations from about present day and then forward into the future. It takes place on an island off the coast of America. It looks at this island as a microcosm of our country and how our country is dealing with or failing to deal with the climate crisis. It is also a modern feminist adaptation of a Greek tragedy.

LD: Yes! Which one?

SB: I can’t tell you because it’s a twist.

LD: No! Well, we are going to look forward to that. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you want to say?

SB: No, this was amazing and I am thrilled by these smart questions that are clearly such close reads of the book. It just feels like an honor, and it means so much that so many Princetonians read my book. Thank you so much.

LD: Well, thank you for being here. We really appreciate it.

The PAW Book Club podcast is produced by the Princeton Alumni Weekly. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. You can read transcripts of every episode and sign up for the book club on our website paw.princeton.edu. Music for this podcast is licensed from Universal Production Music.

1 Response

Maria V. Arnold ’01

3 Months Ago

Ending of ‘Sweet Fury’

Regarding the ending, she said, “I have the explanation for all of the ways in which all of those beats landed and what’s actually happening behind the scene of the three women, which I can explain to you.”

So please explain for those of us who do not like murky endings!

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