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WORK TITLE: Bright Objects
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WEBSITE: https://www.ruby-todd.com/
CITY: Melbourne
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COUNTRY: Australia
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Holds Ph.D.
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CAREER
Writer and educator.
AWARDS:AAWP Chapter One Prize, 2016; Emerging Writer’s Contest award for Fiction, Ploughshares, 2019; Furphy Literary Award, 2020.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and websites, including Crazyhorse, Guardian, LitHub, Overland, and Ploughshares.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Ruby Todd is an Australian author of existentially charged fiction. She holds a doctorate in writing and literature. Todd made her debut in 2024 with Bright Objects, which revolves around the rare re-appearance of a comet. She was inspired by the Hale-Bopp comet of 1997 as well as the Heaven’s Gate cult that arose in its shadow.
Asked by Barnes & Nobles interviewer Isabelle McConville about the societal impact cosmological events can have, Todd remarked: “I think that’s one of the potential marvels and powerful aspects of experiencing the arrival of a bright comet, a total eclipse, or any relatively rare celestial phenomenon. It’s not only the potential to have communion with the otherworldly, but also the potential to have a collective, shared experience.” Sourcing the idea of the sublime to philosophers Burke, Kant, and Schopenhauer, Todd noted that they “apply this idea of sublime experience to various phenomena, often nature, including cosmic or celestial experience. It’s this idea that we are these finite, small creatures, and we’re able sometimes in life to have these encounters with the vast, unknowable mystery of existence beyond us in a very palpable way.”
Bright Objects is set in 1997 in the small town of Jericho, New South Wales, which is poised to be the epicenter for viewing a comet discovered by amiable American astronomer Theo St. John. Many of Jericho’s residents are primed to search for meaning in the comet’s appearance. Grieving her husband’s death in a car crash two years earlier—and searching for the hit-and-run driver who caused it seemingly in vain—Sylvia Knight is ready to give up. She is counting the days at her funeral-home job when Theo shows up and happens to arouse her interest. With local mystic Joseph Evans engaged in arranging his mother’s funeral, Sylvia discovers that the one witness to the car crash is among Joseph’s acolytes. Sylvia thus recruits Christopher’s mother, Sandy, to investigate, but Theo has reservations: Joseph has engineered a doomsday cult around the comet, and Sandy is at risk of getting sucked in. Sylvia’s life, as well, hangs in the balance.
A Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Bright Objects as a “lushly detailed” debut whose “noir edge combines with a tone of mystical fatalism to make for a disorienting” narrative. The reviewer summed the book up as a “heady look at the influence of the heavens on a small patch of earth.” In the wake of successful—and melodramatic—cult-centered documentary TV series, New York Times reviewer Ivy Pochoda appreciated that Todd has opted for a “quieter and more unusual route toward understanding the extremity of belief.” Pochoda observed that Todd’s prose carries a “soothing, near-mystical quality”—“a sense of being borne along on unseen currents. … What is on the page holds up a mirror to what is in the sky—luminous, unusual, unexpected.” Concerning the denouement, Pochoda declares that Todd has a “brilliant trick up her sleeve,” bringing the novel to a conclusion “as unexpected as it is poignant, and more original and human than any conventional cult story.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer echoed that Todd “skillfully ratchets up the suspense on the way toward a stunning climax. The result is a lyrical and inventive literary mystery.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2024, review of Bright Objects.
New York Times Book Review, August 18, 2024, Ivy Pochoda, review of Bright Objects, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, April 8, 2024, review of Bright Objects, p. 51.
ONLINE
Barnes & Noble website, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/ (July 18, 2024), Isabelle McConville, “Mysticism and Mass Hysteria: A Q&A with Ruby Todd, Author of Bright Objects.”
Ruby Todd website, https://www.ruby-todd.com (September 10, 2024).
Ruby Todd is an Australian writer, creative arts researcher, and teacher, with a PhD in Writing & Literature. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2020 Furphy Literary Award, the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest award for Fiction, and the 2016 AAWP Chapter One Prize. She has completed residencies at The Wheeler Centre and La Trobe University, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Guardian, LitHub, Crazyhorse, Overland and elsewhere.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, her debut novel, Bright Objects, is out now through Allen & Unwin (ANZ), Simon & Schuster (US), and is forthcoming through Éditions Gallmeister (France).
Mysticism and Mass Hysteria: A Q&A With Ruby Todd, Author of Bright Objects
By Isabelle McConville, Ruby Todd / July 18, 2024 at 1:49 am
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Ruby Todd joined blog writer Isabelle McConville to talk all about her debut novel Bright Objects. Read on for an exclusive author Q&A where Isabelle and Ruby dive into the intricacies of grief, mysticism, mass hysteria and more.
Bright Objects
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Who hasn’t looked to the stars for answers? Prepare to be surprised by what you learn in this novel that explores mysticism and cynicism, love and heartbreak.
IM: Can you set up the story and give us your of elevator pitch of the novel?
RT: Bright Objects is set in the small fictional town of Jericho. It follows the story of Sylvia, who is a young widow mourning the death of her husband, Christopher, two years prior to the novel’s opening. It’s about what happens when Sylvia’s life is upended by the arrival of a rare long-period comet that’s very bright, and that hasn’t been seen since the time of pharaohs. It’s also about what happens when her life collides with the lives of two very different men who believed very different things about the comet. One being the astronomer who discovered the comet, and the other, a local meditation teacher who believes that it’s a divine sign. Nothing is the same again after the comet’s arrival.
IM: And neither is the reader. The characters in this book are all so vibrant, alive, and compelling. We have our protagonist, Sylvia, grieving the death of her husband and searching for his killer after two years, even after the cops have let the case go cold. We have Theo, the charismatic American astronomer that she strikes up a friendship with. And then we have Joseph, the local mystic, grieving the death of his own mother in very unconventional ways. How did these characters come to life for you? Who came first?
“What does it mean to be here on Earth, amid this wider cosmos and perhaps finding comfort in the vast infinity and unknowability of that wider cosmos.“
RT: Sylvia came first, being the protagonist and narrator. She emerged simultaneously with the first little seed of the novel’s idea that came to me. I still remember it really vividly — I was on a train, reading the news on my phone, and I started to daydream after coming upon an article about a comet that was supposedly soon-to-be visible to the naked eye for viewers in the Southern Hemisphere, which is where I am. I don’t know if it ever was visible — I don’t think it was, comets are often disappointing. I’d had this vision as I was looking at the window of a bright comet, and wondered what it would like if it appeared above a small town. What might it mean to a particular young woman who was at a loss in her life, mourning someone who she loved and reckoning with a question of how to survive that loss and how to move on? What does it mean to be here on Earth, amid this wider cosmos and perhaps finding comfort in the vast infinity and unknowability of that wider cosmos. That was the start.
It wasn’t until I felt like I had access to Sylvia’s voice that I started writing first pages. The voice came quite immediately, possibly because it is in some ways similar to my own. I envisioned Sylvia as a character who sometimes grappled quite profoundly in her journey with distinguishing the boundary between fantasy and reality, sometimes between even sanity and madness. That’s part of her struggle, as she comes back to life, in a way.
The central triangle of characters is formed between Sylvia and two diametrically opposed male characters who draw out the tensions she feels internally between science and mysticism, rationalism and longing for some higher order of reality. I knew quite early on that I wanted a character who was a scientist — that character quickly became Theo, the astronomer who discovered the comet. He is very aware of the potentially dangerous and seductive qualities of comets, as someone who studies them. Then we have Joseph, a local landowner who has a lot more in common with Sylvia then first meets the eye. Not only is he someone who is also experiencing the throes of grief, but someone who shares quite a romantic sentiment and is prone to flights of fancy.
IM: It’s so easy to get swept away in this novel because of how relatable Sylvia is. I think we’re all searching for greater meaning, asking ourselves those big questions and being pulled between what the manifestations of Theo and Joseph represent. I love the juxtaposition between them because one is so grounded, and the other extremely spiritual, but they both take it to two different extremes. Did you write this sequentially? What did the writing process look like for you?
“I experimented with a creative form of outlining, but still invited surprise into the process.“
RT: I really experimented with Bright Objects. I had been a pantser before, just following the unconscious stream, letting the discovery happen and creating glorious messes that were not necessarily so glorious. With Bright Objects, I really wanted to try something new, so I experimented with a creative form of outlining, but still invited surprise into the process. I found that it worked for me so much better because I had this loose structure that I pinned down. This allowed me to really work on a macro level while I was researching, dreaming up the characters and doing that developmental work. There was more freedom to relax into the process — it was a lovely balance for me.
I did write sequentially. I have quite the editorial agent, which is great. I ended up writing chapters in batches, and then sending them to her. She would provide me feedback as we went, so by the time I’d finished each batch they were quite polished. I learned a lot from Bright Objects. It was really satisfying in that way, although also full of challenges.
IM: The comet in the novel is based on a real comet in 1997. What did your research process look like and how did you know that you wanted to write a story about it?
“People were living their lives under the beacon of this bright object in the sky.“
RT: There are a lot of parallels between the fictional comet of the novel and the real Hale Bopp comet that also appeared in 1997 for a similar period of time. I wanted to retain the creative license and freedom to change details and to have this fictional comet be really bright in the Southern Hemisphere, which Hale Bopp really never was — we didn’t have the same experience as North American viewers did in ‘97. I was imagining a slightly altered parallel reality in which Hale Bopp didn’t happen and St. John did instead. It was visible to the naked eye for Northern Hemisphere viewers, and it accompanied people for over a year. People were living their lives under the beacon of this bright object in the sky.
There was this particular atmosphere that emerged in that time, where there was a lot of enthusiasm for space. Around that time, there was the fledgling internet, chat rooms, and amateur astronomers all coming online to share their snapshots, data and excitement over the comet. There was also this mounting anxiety over the end of the millennium, and what became y2k panic after the comet had left. Then, of course, there was the tragic response to the comet on the part of the Heaven’s Gate sect. I found that really compelling on a psychological level and as a cultural watershed moment. There are certain precedents for reactions like that to comets in history as well. There’s a point in the novel where Joseph says that no matter what we believe about comets, we can agree on the fact that they are always inspiring passionate responses. It seems to be true, particularly if they’re visible to the naked eye, whether you’re a scientist or a rationalist, a cynic, a romantic or a mystic.
IM: When I read this novel, it was actually around the time of the recent total solar eclipse, and I noticed how a lot of what you wrote about plays out in real life. I particularly enjoyed how you write mass hysteria, people falling into a frenzy over their obsessions, and the things that utterly consume us. For instance, I know people who traveled to get to the path of totality, and once everything blacked out, they described it as if it was a spiritual experience, even bursting into tears. In the novel, Theo says that with every comet comes a prophet, and I think that’s so interesting and very true. I love how you write the ways that we experience things as a collective, whether it be obsessions like music, artists, movies we love, or a giant, historic comet streaking across the sky. What made you want to write about that?
RT: I think that’s one of the potential marvels and powerful aspects of experiencing the arrival of a bright comet, a total eclipse, or any relatively rare celestial phenomenon. It’s not only the potential to have communion with the otherworldly, but also the potential to have a collective, shared experience. One of the best frameworks I’ve read that explains the nature of this is the concept of the sublime, which was developed by Edmund Burke, the English philosopher. It was elaborated upon by Immanuel Kant and Schopenhauer; they apply this idea of sublime experience to various phenomena, often nature, including cosmic or celestial experience. It’s this idea that we are these finite, small creatures, and we’re able sometimes in life to have these encounters with the vast, unknowable mystery of existence beyond us in a very palpable way. That could be experiencing the sudden darkness of a total eclipse, or it could be standing under the spotlight of a comet that you’re experiencing in connection with your town, your community, maybe the whole world. In Sylvia’s experience, for example, this has always been the case of bright comets. She’s constantly thinking about what it must have been like for the ancient Egyptians when they experienced this same celestial body centuries ago. It connects us in a really tangible way to our ancestors.
In terms of mass hysteria, even those of us who might fancy ourselves to be really rational, grounded people always have an edge, and I wondered what could bring us to that edge. In stories, that’s part of where the juice is, placing characters under pressure to see what they’re made of. That’s Sylvia’s trajectory, where she discovers that she’s stronger than she thought she was.
IM: My next read right after Bright Objects was Cultish by Amanda Montell, which touches on a lot of what you write about. What do you think draws us to these cultish stories and why?
“Who can really say that they’ve never nudged up against madness?“
RT: I think so few of us are able to even get halfway through our lives without having some kind of reckoning with disaster. On a personal level, if not, on a more shared level. Life is constantly presenting us with tests, isn’t it? Who can really say that they’ve never nudged up against madness? This is a question that I’m constantly grappling with. You can be living a privileged life and be grappling with internal conundrums and frailties that might have to do with mental health, losing someone you loved, and you just don’t really feel like you can survive, or some other kind of enduring sadness that makes you feel like you can’t go on. Who gets away with not grappling with these challenges? That’s life. Whether we’re reading fiction or nonfiction, whenever we feel connected with an honest voice that’s somehow speaking from felt experience is kind of the heart of fairy tales. They’re cloaked in allegory and symbolism. It’s like we’re imbibing the potential clues for how we might survive similar tests in life and how to be strong. How to cope with loss, failure, uncertainty, brutality — all these things life throws at us. In some ways, writing is the answer to that. I write to try and answer questions that I can’t otherwise.
IM: When it comes to these cultish stories, I think people can fall down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos, podcasts, and books about these very real events like Heaven’s Gate, and I wonder why we’re so interested in these things. I think part of it has to do with fear and curiosity. You might think, ‘Oh, yeah, that happened to those people, but it could never happen to me, right?’ The way you write Joseph is very similar to how Amanda Montell talks about cult leaders, and how charismatic they are. Sylvia immediately feels comfortable opening up to him, and that’s very calculated. I think that we’re drawn to these stories because we wonder, even if we don’t want to admit it, if any of it could ever happen to us.
RT: It’s such a fundamental aspect of why we read — to not feel so alone and to feel like there’s some hope.
IM: Lastly, what can you tell us about what you’re working on next?
RT: Yes, it’s another novel. It shares with Bright Objects a certain sense of obsession, which seems to be unavoidable for me at the moment. It’s a story of a female friendship that takes place in the international art world. It has to do with questions of loyalty and reputation, as well as some through lines with Bright Objects, like dealing with grief and surviving losses of various kinds.
IM: I’m very excited to read that, and I know readers will be too. Thank you so much for joining us today.
RT: Thanks so much.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Bright Objects
Ruby Todd. Simon & Schuster, $28.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-6680-5321-8
A young widow, a mysterious astronomer, and a doomsday cult collide as the arrival of a once-in-alifetime comet transforms tiny Jericho, New South Wales, into a global hot spot in Todd's intoxicating debut. As grieving and guilt-stricken narrator Sylvia Knight approaches the second anniversary of the car crash that killed her husband, Christopher, and left Sylvia seriously injured, the only thing keeping her afloat is finding the hit-and-run driver who shattered their lives. But a seemingly chance encounter with Theo St. John, the charismatic American discoverer of the impending comet, at the funeral home where she works, surprises Sylvia by stirring her interest in him--and perhaps even her attraction. She has little bandwidth, however, to dwell on those feelings between planning the grand funeral mystic Joseph Evans wants for his late mother and doggedly pursuing her hit-and-run investigation with the help of Christopher's cop friend. When Sylvia and her mother-in-law, Sandy, attend a meditation group Joseph runs, she discovers that Danny Ward, the only witness to the crash, is among Joseph's inner circle. Sensing a lead, Sylvia encourages Sandy to continue joining her at the frequent, increasingly intense sessions, despite strong warnings to the contrary from Theo. As Sandy is sucked into Joseph's orbit and her own feelings for Theo grow, Todd skillfully ratchets up the suspense on the way toward a stunning climax. The result is a lyrical and inventive literary mystery from an author whom readers will hope returns far sooner than any visiting comet. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Bright Objects." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 14, 8 Apr. 2024, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799269916/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38dac9a1. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.
Todd, Ruby BRIGHT OBJECTS Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $28.99 7, 16 ISBN: 9781668053218
A small town in Australia is the setting for a lushly detailed debut novel starring a comet that puts Halley's to shame.
Among the watchers of Comet St. John in 1997 is Sylvia Knight, a 32-year-old funeral home worker who two years earlier was the victim of a hit-and-run crash that killed her husband. Since then, she's been doggedly but unsuccessfully searching for the driver of the car that caused the crash. The comet--which is due to make its first appearance to the naked eye in January, a few days after the novel starts, and to grow more prominent in the sky through August--has a special meaning for Sylvia: "The date St John would show itself in the sky was the date by which I'd given myself permission to finally leave this planet." Life, however, interferes with this plan, as Sylvia becomes unexpectedly intrigued with a mysterious stranger who shows up at the funeral parlor and turns out to be Theo St. John, the pensive young American astronomer who first discovered the comet. Then Sylvia feels compelled to rescue her gullible mother-in-law, Sandy, from the local doomsday cult that's sprung up around the comet and is planning a festival with an ending that doesn't bode well for local residents. While the mystery of who was driving the car that killed Sylvia's husband falls flat, with a conclusion that many readers will anticipate, Sylvia is a compellingly contradictory narrator, drawn to both stability and risk, and Todd places her in an equally complex community, a small town thrown off balance by its placement at the epicenter of comet viewing. The novel's noir edge combines with a tone of mystical fatalism to make for a disorienting reading experience.
A heady look at the influence of the heavens on a small patch of earth.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Todd, Ruby: BRIGHT OBJECTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332732/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c28b50f4. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.
Set among the fevered residents of a remote Australian town, Ruby Todd's debut novel considers how grief can draw people to extreme beliefs.
BRIGHT OBJECTS, by Ruby Todd
HBO's Covid hit series ''The Vow'' unleashed what has become an almost insatiable appetite for cult documentaries -- the more extreme, the more addictive. By now we are all but inured to the wild things people do to belong: drinking colloidal silver, getting branded, stalking their supposed ''twin flame.''
Because Ruby Todd's debut novel, ''Bright Objects,'' is loosely based on the Heaven's Gate cult, whose members, with the help of phenobarbital, imagined they could hitch a ride on the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997, you might expect some of the same emotional pyrotechnics and bizarre antics you found in 2023's hottest cult documentary series, ''Love Has Won'' and ''Escaping Twin Flames.'' Instead, Todd has chosen a quieter and more unusual route toward understanding the extremity of belief.
It's 1997 in the small Australian town of Jericho. A newly discovered comet, St. John, is approaching Earth -- its impending arrival summoning fevered responses from the town's residents, most of whom are searching for outsize meaning in the sky. One of these searchers is Sylvia Knight, whose husband, Christopher, was killed by a hit-and-run driver two years earlier. Tortured by the fact that the killer remains at large and unwilling to live without Christopher, Sylvia has set a date for her own death.
Before she can carry out her plan, she finds herself torn between a surprising new lover, Theo St. John, the astronomer who discovered the comet, and Joseph Evans, a local mystic with increasingly fatalistic notions about the comet's approach.
At the outset Sylvia tells us that she has died twice within two years -- the first time after the car crash that killed her husband. The second, well, those of you familiar with Heaven's Gate will be able to guess what's in store for those in Joseph's orbit.
''Bright Objects'' is not a rapid-fire page-turner or a wild freak-fest: It is instead a slow-burn meditation on grief, hope, mortality and what Joseph promises are ''the laws of cosmic synchronicity.'' Sylvia vacillates between quiet rage at the man she believes killed Christopher and an almost preternatural calm as she considers the world she is about to leave -- while also trying to make room for her feelings for Theo, who provides her with the ''opium of intimacy.''
There's a soothing, near-mystical quality to the book's language, a sense of being borne along on unseen currents, especially where Sylvia's new lover is concerned. ''I knew that should anything happen to break the motion of what our bodies were doing,'' she thinks, ''the atmosphere we'd entered would lose its blind logic, we'd question the terms of our surrender, and arrive in the room self-conscious and separate again.'' What is on the page holds up a mirror to what is in the sky -- luminous, unusual, unexpected.
And yet, when it comes to weighty prose, there can be too much of a good thing. Too often, Todd breaks the spell and stops the story. She describes rooms ''holding themselves discreetly, as if attesting to the inherent rectitude of the lives lived there.'' The comet pilgrims stand ''with appurtenances of greater seriousness.'' What's more, Sylvia's obsessive observation of every door, hand gesture and fleeting thought kills the vibe.
Still, a less daring and more conventional writer would have exploited and exaggerated the weirdness on display here. But Todd seems to understand that, at core, all cults and their leaders are the same -- insecure, exploitative, duplicitous and a tiny bit boring. What's more interesting is what attracts people to them, what compels them to believe, to relinquish their grip on reality and, even more fascinating, what inspires them to withdraw and return to the world.
A less daring writer would also have played Joseph's endgame and his cult's kookiness for maximum effect. But Todd has a brilliant trick up her sleeve, something more shocking than Joseph's deadly agenda -- a feint that brings ''Bright Objects'' to a remarkable conclusion as unexpected as it is poignant, and more original and human than any conventional cult story.
BRIGHT OBJECTS | By Ruby Todd | Simon & Schuster | 352 pp. | $28.99
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Pochoda, Ivy. "A Comet Is Coming." The New York Times Book Review, 18 Aug. 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805153640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dea61ed5. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024.