Caroline Glenn’s debut novel Cruelty Free publishes tomorrow, February 3, through William Morrow.
The novel follows a once-famous film star who returns to Hollywood ten years after the kidnapping of her young daughter, still carrying the weight of what was lost. On the surface, Cruelty Free plays out like a revenge story, unfolding through a series of carefully managed turns. Its deeper concern, however, is with grief and absence, and with what’s left when public sympathy has long since moved on.
As Ling Ling Huang, author of Natural Beauty, notes, Cruelty Free is “as much a novel about the fullness of grief as it is about the hollowness of vengeance.”
To mark the book’s release, we spoke with Glenn about writing grief as something subjected to public scrutiny rather than experienced in private, and about the ways mourning can be interpreted, reshaped, and commodified once it enters the public sphere. She also discussed her use of true-crime publishing and documentary-style elements in the novel, as well as her fascination with the fragility of loyalty surrounding public figures – particularly how quickly support can curdle once someone slips from the spotlight.
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