Vendela Vida is beaming in by Zoom from a hot tub in San Francisco. Well, it's her office, which was formerly a hot tub.
"During Covid, I was writing at home but my kids and husband (writer Dave Eggers) were also at home and I was just making a lot of snacks and lunches and it was not conducive to work. So I got an office. It's a place you could rent hot tubs by the hour, but when Covid happened, they took the hot tubs out and made them into studios. The funny thing is I hate hot tubs. But I like my studio."
When a new Vendela Vida novel comes out, you ditch everything on your "to be read pile" and bump it straight to the top. Her last novel, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (2015), was a beguiling absurdist comedy wrapped in a mystery. Imagine if Patricia Highsmith novels were funny.
Her new novel, We Run the Tides, is a coming-of-age story set in affluent San Francisco suburb Sea Cliff in the mid-1980s. It's a love letter to San Francisco during a time of seachange for both the book's adolescent characters and the city itself, as it moves out of its idealistic hippie dream and into Silicon Valley's tech boom.
We Run the Tides started as a nonfiction book about lying, Vida beginning work on it the day after Trump was elected in 2016. "I became very obsessed with what happens to a culture when someone at the top is lying and is a sexist bully. And how it becomes poisonous and infiltrates the culture and pollutes it," she says.