Seeing Triple: An Interview with Debut Novelist Tennessee Hill
Girls With Long Shadows is a Southern Gothic-tinged, coming-of-age tale dissecting small town life and the push-and-pull tensions of sisterhood.
Identical triplets Baby A, Baby B and Baby C Binderup grow up in Longshadow, Texas, spending their days working at the decaying golf course owned by their Gram, swimming in the murky bayou and struggling to grieve the mother they never knew.
At 19, the Binderup triplets attract attention from the boys and men of their small town—whether or not they like or want it. Baby B struggles to distinguish herself from her sisters, watching along solemnly as the rebellious Baby A and introspective Baby C find matches—until the town’s golden boy sets his sights on her. But when one of the boys kisses the wrong sister, their journey to becoming individuals is upended, sinking the girls into the turbid waters of jealousy and deceit and leading to a shocking act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Girls With Long Shadows, the debut novel of Houston-based author Tennessee Hill, was published on May 6. Hill, a BFA and MFA in poetry, currently works as a high school teacher. She was the Adroit Journal’s 2022 Gregory Djanikian poetry scholar and has been published in Best New Poets, POETRY, THRUSH and elsewhere. Abigail Charak interviewed Hill about her new book, a Southern Gothic-tinged coming-of-age tale dissecting small town life and the push-and-pull tensions of sisterhood.
Abigail Charak: Congratulations on the publication of Girls With Long Shadows, your debut novel! How did your background in poetry influence your approach to writing a full-length novel?
Tennessee Hill: When I graduated, I wanted to write, but I was poem-ed out, so I turned to fiction. I was always reading fiction and thinking about it, but when I became a student of poetry, I was thinking so deeply about the line unit and the space of a line, the weight of a title, the weight of a word, just the smaller landscape of the poem. So, when I returned to fiction, I was more preoccupied with the beauty of the sentence. The joy of writing [fiction] for me is in crafting the sentence, because crafting the line has always been the joy of poetry for me.
AC: What were some of your literary and artistic reference points for this novel?
TH: I think it very clearly stands on the shoulders of the The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. When I read that book for the first time, it changed everything for me in terms of what a novel could do. Their Eyes Were Watching God was something that I came back to again and again, which I think is really evident in those front porch courses. This is maybe really out of left field, but I read Edinburgh by Alexander Chee. The tone in that book is very strange, very eerie, and I really struggled in fiddling with tone with this. I reread bits of The Secret History quite a few times, particularly the prologue. I just printed it out and had it next to me for a really long time.
I still leaned on the poets, particularly the southern poet Claudia Emerson. [Emerson] is my favorite poet of all time; she’s very narrative.
AC: Can you talk about how your growing up as a triplet informs the novel? I’m especially curious as to how your personal experience shaped the dynamic between the Binderup sisters.
TH: I have two brothers, which I think is a very different experience. I’ve never had a sister, which is part of the reason why I wanted to write sisters, because I was curious about it. There is a really interesting thing that happens in your brain when you grow up as part of a unit; being part of a family or any kind of sibling or friend unit means your identity is kind of shared between you and those people. And I never resented that. I always really enjoyed that. I love my family, and I was never made to feel like my being part of a unit was reductive to my identity in any way.
My parents talked a lot about what it was like for my mom to be pregnant with triplets. We were, in gestation, referred to as Baby A, Baby B and Baby C. Those were our names—to medical professionals anyway. I tried to take all of those moments that I experienced as a multiple that could have gone awry. My brothers and I shared birthday parties. We shared a cell phone; we shared a car. Sharing those things wasn’t my preference, but we were able to navigate it well.
I just tried to take what I had experienced and be cognizant of the way that my parents went above and beyond to make sure that we felt like individuals, and to try and investigate that as a writer. How can I make this interesting? How can I make this tense?
AC: The Binderup sisters have what might be called “triplet-sense”—a visceral connection through which they physically feel each other’s pain and pleasure. Have you personally experienced or felt such a phenomenon with your siblings?
TH: I never experienced it with my siblings, but the women in my family on my maternal side have always had that ‘mom’ sense. One time in college, I had an asthma attack—I almost died. I was really far away from [my mom]. And she was like to my dad, ‘Something’s wrong with Tennessee. Something is wrong.’ He was like, ‘she’s fine.’ When I called her the next day, she was like, ‘Oh my god, I knew it!’ So, even though sibling-sense, or sensory sharedness, is a stereotype, it was more about the intuition of a woman than it was about there being multiples.
AC: The Binderup triplets are legally named Baby A, Baby B and Baby C. Some readers might find it hard to believe Gram never gave them names, or that they didn’t choose names for themselves later. Could you share your thinking behind this decision and what you hoped it would convey?
TH: That was the first decision that I made when I sat down to write a novel project. So much of the plot crafting was to justify that decision, because I was very cognizant that it is so annoying to have an unnamed narrator, or a name that feels like a joke or like it’s trying to be smarter than you.
As I wrote, [their names] became about grief. They became about, in some ways, honoring their mother. Their journey in the book is so much about not being easier for the people around them to understand. I think they made conscious efforts to not concede to the wants or the needs of the people around them. It felt like they became justifiable, because it’s about grief and it’s about them continuing to demand that people do hard work to understand them, and that felt really powerful to me. I know some people don’t love it, but it was never something that I felt would make me or hopefully anyone stop reading. I am so excited to see how other people interpret it, or what it comes to mean for them.
AC: I am curious about your choice to tell this story solely from the point of view of Baby B, the triplet who has the most trouble distinguishing herself from her sisters. Why was it important for you to tell the story through her eyes as opposed to anyone else’s?
TH: I am just a first person kind of writer, and I wanted to be easy on myself this time, because it was my first crack at a novel. I really wanted to spend my time as a reader and a writer in one space, in one voice, in one brain that I could understand. I was also thinking about three-person relationships. I think women discover this very young: If you have a group of three best friends, it never works. There’s one that has to be flexible, so there’s always one that is moving between the two, and it’s very rarely evenly split, and that’s how I thought about their dynamic. I was like, this is going to be a three-person girl relationship. One of them has got to be the middleman, and it felt like it could be her.
AC: My favorite parts of the novel are those that depict the fetishization of the Binderup sisters by the boys—and men—of their small town. What inspired these sections, and how did you approach them?
TH: I grew up in a small town my whole life, and my parents both grew up there. Both sets of my grandmothers lived there. So I knew what it was like to grow up around the same people, particularly the same boys, and to learn who was a threat to me and who was safe to me—and to also learn that those things could and would change. Men that I felt safe around when I was in middle school, I did not feel safe around when I was in high school.
I think all women learn that men are scary. It is fair for us to be afraid of all of them, even like cousins, even like neighbors. So really, the men in the novel were about this constant negotiation that women have to do. Who is safe? Who can I trust? If that changes, how am I going to be able to recognize it? And if you’re around the same people for too long, does that part of your sensibility erode? Because I think we’ve all seen a relationship happen and go awry, and the people around knew that it was going to and didn’t say anything. And that’s part of why that town’s point of view was so important to me. The front porch courses are all about withholding, and that’s so problematic.
AC: Because Deep South celebrates Southern literature and writers, I would like to know how your relationship with Southeast Texas, and the South as a whole, influences your work.
TH: I think that Southeast Texas is such an interesting place. There’s so much oil, and I think the book is thinking about oil refineries a little bit. That idea that you graduate high school and then you go work in a refinery, and it’s very dangerous. But then there’s also NASA engineers down the street. I’m always really fascinated by those Southern towns that are the middle point between a large city, because it feels like this melting pot of people that you have to kind of make work.
I think there’s so much about Southern literature that I love. I tried to be a little ghosty in some bits. I think Southern literature loves to think about its ghosts like its historical ghosts, and then people as ghosts. And what does it mean to linger?
AC: Lastly, can you tell me what’s next for you? Is there an upcoming project you’re working on or anything else in life you’re looking forward to?
TH: I’m tinkering with a second novel. I’m also always reading and writing. I’m in my like, reading season right now, which has been really lovely. I’m a full-time teacher as well. I teach high school. So, the summers are really interesting times where I’m trying to rest, but I’m also trying to work. I’m trying to read a lot and glean as much as I can.
Girls With Long Shadows is one of our 2025 Summer Reads. Find the full list here.
