Female rage isn’t often explored in fiction, but author Ivy Pochoda does exactly that in her two most recent novels. “These Women” follows five different women who are endangered by one man. The latest, “Sing Her Down,” focuses on Florida and Dios as they are released from behind bars during the early days of the COVID pandemic, and they must come to terms with their rage and crimes.
“In promoting ‘These Women,’ I realized how gendered we treat violence. When a man is violent in fiction, or even in real life, we don't actually need a justification for that. We expect men to have a virile violent side to them … and that's totally fine,” says Pochoda. “But if a woman is powerful, or strong, or assertive, or aggressive, or violent, just because that's her nature, that's a crime worse than anything that society can attempt to reconcile themselves to. So I really wanted to figure out how to write about women being violent, without giving them a whole backstory that makes it palatable.”
Murals feature prominently in Pochoda’s novels. The Brooklyn-raised, LA transplant says they have always been an important part of her life, but took on a new meaning in Los Angeles, especially following the deaths of Kobe Bryant and George Floyd.
“Murals have always for me united Los Angeles, especially after Kobe's death too, you can just see a city coming together using murals. The murals in this book, in particular, are a way to animate and point to some of the unrest and social justice issues that background the book. And I wanted this final moment of the book to be captured in a mural because I liked the idea that my characters live on forever.”
Pochoda has spent more than a decade teaching writing to unhoused people in Downtown LA’s Skid Row, and she says that experience has hugely informed her craft. “I had this one vision of what homelessness was, and my workshop participants were way more educated than I imagined. And they had many more dimensions than just the circumstance of the way they lived. And it made me realize that characters in fiction have to be much deeper and more realized than … even the most thoughtful and creative and passionate authors even consider.”
Pochoda says she sees a bit of herself in all her characters, and acknowledges that readers can have trouble relating to violent criminals. Still, she hopes that bibliophiles can find resonance with Essie, a detective in “These Women” who appears again in “Sing Her Down.”
“She stands in … for all of the … patronizing, and all of the sexism and all of the small petty microaggressions that women endure on a daily basis,” Pochoda explains. “She's someone that we can all relate to, unfortunately, but also importantly, because I think we [women] just have made peace with the fact that this is the way it is, and we've accommodated ourselves so frequently, and made ourselves small so that men can feel big.”
The women of “Sing Her Down,” and all of Pochoda’s novels, are anything but small.