I was born in Hungary during the Communist era. I still have old black and white photographs of myself playing in my grandparents' apartment in Budapest, where they had moved during the Second World War. My mother left Hungary with me and my younger brother when I was five years old. She was a research scientist who had been allowed to spend a year working in the United States, and she wanted opportunities that weren't available behind the Iron Curtain, for herself and her children. I did not go back again until I was a teenager.

Theodora Goss By Matthew Stein Photography

Theodora Goss By Matthew Stein Photography

English is my third language, after Hungarian and French. First we moved to Brussels, where I started primary school in French. Then we moved to the United States, where I became fluent in English, or at least the American version. Over the years, I forgot my first two languages. I was able to regain French by studying it in school, but I'm still trying to relearn Hungarian, which is very difficult. Sometimes, when I try to think of a Hungarian word, a French one will come out instead. The most important thing to remember about Hungarian, I've found, is that it's the complete opposite of English.

As I child, I loved to read about imaginary countries. My favorite book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was one of those shy, dreamy children who lived primarily in books. At lunch, instead of playing with the others, I would often read instead. It wasn't until much later that I realized why I loved Narnia so much. I had also lost a country--it was also filled with magical inhabitants and food I could not regain. I think this sense of loss is what originally drew me to fantastical literature.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a teenager. I read all sorts of books, growing up--I was a book omnivore. But what I loved best was fantastical fiction, with magic in it: George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien. At some point, I realized that I wanted to create my own imaginary countries, my own magical characters. I still have notebooks filled with the stories and poems I wrote back then. Some of the poems are about my high school boyfriends. They are quite dreadful.

I write fantasy--sort of. As I grew older, I started reading writers who incorporated the fantastic into their work in stranger, more surreal ways--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Angela Carter, Milan Kundera. In college, I studied English and American literature, but my favorite class was on South American magical realism. When I started writing, what I wrote was inflected by that sensibility--it came out fantastical or surreal. But I don't try to write that way--I think it's just the way I see the world. As a writer, it's actually quite difficult to be in that space between fantasy and realism. People don't know where to put your books . . .

After college, I became a corporate lawyer. That sounds like a plot twist, doesn't it? But it's the sort of thing that happens to immigrant children. I wanted to do a PhD in literature, but my mother urged me to do something more practical. So I applied to law school and got into Harvard, which was so prestigious that I felt I couldn't turn it down. I practiced corporate law for four years--my most memorable day was when a billionaire media mogul threw a pen at me, I'm not sure why. Then I went back to do a PhD. Now, at last, I would study literature . . .

I wrote a doctoral dissertation on Victorian monsters. Well, sort of! It was on late Victorian gothic fiction and anthropology, but that actually means monsters: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Beast Men of Dr. Moreau, Dracula. I also studied less well-known literary works such as Carmilla and The Great God Pan. That's when I noticed that mad scientists tend to create female monsters, and those female monsters always die. I wrote my novel because I wanted them to live and tell their own stories. I wanted to give them a voice.

I wore out a pair of shoes walking around London. I did a lot of research for the novel, in books and online, but the most important research I did was in London itself. I went to all the places mentioned in the novel so I could see how long it would take to walk between them, what the backs of the buildings looked like, what Regent's Park felt like on a summer afternoon. I also ate a lot--after all, I had to describe food accurately! Research is one of my favorite parts of writing. It's almost impossible to get everything right, but I wanted to at least try.

My idea of heaven is a garden. In addition to being a writer, I teach at a university, so I live in an apartment in Boston, which is an old American city with stone buildings and twisty streets. But if I could live anywhere, it would be in a Victorian house surrounded by a garden with an orchard and antique roses. Of course it would have a false bookcase and a secret passageway leading to a hidden study where I could write my books. That's exactly the sort of thing one should spend royalties on, don't you think?

I've already written the second novel in this series. It takes my characters, Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I wore out another pair of shoes walking around Vienna! Of course, I had to eat a lot of pastry as well. One must sacrifice for art . . . I really can't think of anything I would rather do than write stories about monstrous young women traveling around Europe and having adventures. I just hope readers like my characters as much as I do!