Writing What Haunts Us: Penny Zang on Friendship, Loss, and the Making of Doll Parts

with Lauren Nossett

Penny Zang is an English professor and holds an MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Louisville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her husband and son. Doll Parts, from Sourcebooks Landmark, is her first novel.

Doll Parts is out now!

Penny, I first cracked open your book while sitting in an auto mechanic's waiting room, and as I got lost in the stark opening lines—"How to write about a dead woman: first, confirm she is dead. Dead enough not to mind"—the other customers, the cracked leather seats, and the wildlife show on the overlarge TV all faded away. I was completely engrossed. Did you always know this book would be, in addition to a compelling mystery, a story about grief and memory?

Oh, I love that image of you reading in the mechanic’s waiting room so much. Thank you for the kind words. The short answer is yes, I always knew this was a story about grief, in particular, as well as a story about friendship. At the heart of Doll Parts is a woman grieving the loss of her best friend. For her, this grief brings up memories she thought she had buried. Her memories of her friend and who they used to be together really haunts her.

The longer answer involves my own personal experience. In 2016, one of my closest friends passed away, though in a situation very different from my characters, Sadie and Nikki. My own grief was so close to the surface (it still is, if I’m being honest) that I don’t know if I would have been able to write a book that wasn’t full of mourning.

At first, I wrote as a way to process my grief in the midst of daily life, parenting and teaching. I wrote small pieces about the parade of dead women marching through my dreams each night. I wrote about funeral dresses and ghosts. In that way, Doll Parts emerged like a eulogy to my friend. Though this novel changed a lot through multiple rounds of revision, grief and friendship were always there.

When Sadie returns to Loch Raven College twenty years after she was a student there, she says: “I had been wrong before about not missing this place. It was the girl I had been here who I missed.” For me, this observation answers the question I’m often asked about the popularity of dark academia right now—namely, a kind of nostalgia for college years and the latent possibilities of early adulthood. But I’m curious: Do you have your own take on the genre’s appeal, and what drew you to this particular setting?

What a great question. I have certainly found myself drawn to stories about transition periods in a person’s life such as the time between adolescence and adulthood. Now that you mention it, though, perhaps part of the appeal of dark academia may be a sense of familiarity with academic settings, whether from one’s personal experience with school or from movies/TV, and also a longing to understand the secrets and the strangeness of those transformative years.

Dark academia, as a term or an aesthetic, wasn’t on my radar when I started writing Doll Parts. I actually attended a Catholic all-women’s college like the characters in the novel. And though I only attended that school for two years, it left such an impression. It’s a setting ripe for mystery and drama, and for me, lots of ghost stories, too. I now work as a college professor and I joke that every day in higher education feels like dark academia.

Loch Raven College is an all-women’s school haunted by the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding sad freshmen and alleged suicides dating back to the sixties. However, Nikki resists the culture of sadness and the fetishization of female death, insisting on understanding the women’s individual personalities and rejecting the common tendency to group them together. This seems to be a larger commentary on legacy—that a person’s death should never eclipse the life they led. As a professor, mother, and author, do you often think about your own legacy? If so, what kind of legacy do you hope to leave?

I don’t think about my own legacy often if I’m being honest. I love that my written work will live on (or so I hope) long after I’m gone, but beyond that, it is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of my own legacy. I’m going to have to reflect on why that is!

Part of the legacy I was specifically thinking about when I started writing Doll Parts was that of a graduate school friend, the author Molly Brodak, who died in March 2020. In the aftermath of her death, I found myself delving into all of the work she left behind, beyond her brilliant poetry and memoir. This included everything from social media posts and recipes published online to Pinterest boards. In that way, legacy encompasses so much.

I know I’m not alone in being disturbed by society’s obsession with dead women. Sylvia Plath is the ultimate example of this, but as my characters even learn about in their classes, there are so many others, from Marilynn Monroe to Billie Holiday.

Given the significance of Sylvia Plath throughout the novel, there’s a strange—and I think intentional—parallel between Sadie moving into Nikki’s home with Harrison, Nikki’s grieving husband, and Assia Wevill moving in with Ted Hughes after Plath’s suicide. I’m curious: Did you plan this similarity from the start, or did this connection emerge as you were writing?

Yes, this similarity was definitely intentional. As I researched Sylvia Plath, I fell down an even deeper rabbit hole about Assia Wevill. Her story and her life haunted me as much, if not more, than Sylvia Plath. When Assia moved into Sylvia’s house, she reportedly called it the “ghost house.” It gave me chills to imagine it. I couldn't get that phrase out of my head. Ghost house. Everything I was writing took a different turn based on that phrase alone.

For so long, there wasn’t much known about Assia Wevill at all, but through the work of writers such as Julia Goodspeed-Chadwick, Emily Van Duyne, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, among others, I was able to learn so much.

Love the Doll Parts playlist—Hole, Tori Amos, The Cranberries—such a vibe. Did you also listen to these songs while writing? Can you tell us a bit about your creative process?

I have been listening to this playlist on repeat for so long, I can’t even count how many times. Even my son knows all the songs by now. Even though I certainly listened to a lot of 90s grunge, in general, while I wrote, a lot of the music vibes emerged in the revision process rather than the first draft. Once Doll Parts became the title, I went all in on the music as a way to set the atmosphere.

My creative process tends to involve a lot of this kind of layering. I write one draft and then decide what feels true to the story, before weaving in more of a certain element (or removing it all together if it doesn’t quite work). It’s a lot of gut instinct. I’m always trying to find new ways into a story: podcasts and library books for research, a corkboard full of quotes, plus a Pinterest board of images, and, of course, a good playlist to get me started. This same process has helped me as I write Book 2, which is set in the 80s.

Penny seeing her debut in the wild for the first time!

We're all about the thrills here at Thriller Thursday. What has thrilled you lately?

As I write my second book, I’ve been thrilled and inspired by all things related to Edgar Allan Poe, haunted house stories, 80s music, and Hitchcock (Hitchcock’s Marnie is thrilling to me because of my Baltimore roots). I am especially thrilled by “The Black Cat” by Poe, a story I hadn’t read until very recently. It might be my new favorite.

I love the range of the thriller genre, how the borders can blur with horror and mystery and true crime. I’m always reading thrillers and the most thrilling lately have been The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb, Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker, and Count My Lies by Sophie Stava.

What are you reading?

So many books! The stack on my nightstand just keeps growing, in the best way possible. I have a long list here! Two books I can’t say enough about are The Gallery Assistant by Kate Belli and Where He Left Me by Nicole Baart, both of which come out this fall.

I am prioritizing 2025 debut novels this year, across all genres, since it is my debut year, and here are a few that I just finished: At the Island’s Edge by C. I. Jerez, Kaya of the Ocean by Gloria L. Huang, and Serial Killer Support Group by Saratoga Schaefer.

It’s a good year for books. Next up: Again, Only More Like You by Catalina Margulis, Julie Chan is Dead by Liann Zhang, Somewhere Past the End by Alexandria Faulkenbury, and We Don’t Talk About Carol by Kristen Berry.

Question for our readers. Answer in the comments for a chance to WIN a copy of Doll Parts!

Penny’s Question: On a playlist of your life, what would be the very first song?

Congratulations to M.E., who won the signed copy of LEVERAGE by Amran Gowani! Want your own signed book? Stay tuned for more giveaway opportunities!