Still in his 30s, novelist and cultural critic Daniel M. Lavery has a long list of achievements. He founded the website The Toast, had a five-year run as Slate’s “Dear Prudence” columnist, and published several books that retell classic texts from a humorous feminist perspective. Among them is The Merry Spinster (2018), which Kirkus, in a starred review, called a “wholly satisfying blend of silliness, feminist critique, and deft prose.”

In 2020, a hybrid memoir—that addressed, among other things, his gender transition—made a splash and received another Kirkus star. Of Something That May Shock and Discredit You, our critic enthused, “Everyone should read this extraordinary book.”

That same year, the one where we all stayed home, Lavery went deep into the reading that would lead him to write Women’s Hotel (HarperVia, Oct. 15), about a group of characters who live and work at the fictional Biedermayer Hotel in 1960s New York. We caught up with him over Zoom to discuss this latest Kirkus-starred feat of literary magic. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Women’s Hotel seems quite different from your previous work. Would you agree?

I think so. After the memoir, I was interested in writing something removed from my own experience—I wanted to write the kind of book that I had been reading a lot of. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time with books from an imprint of Dean Street Press called The Furrowed Middlebrow. They specialize in reprinting lesser-known British, Irish, and American women writers from about 1910 to 1960.

So classic—or at least existing—texts did play a role.

Yes, and I was also influenced by novels like Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I love the kind of book that describes a lot of little moments in the lives of quite a few people.

I had the feeling, reading Women’s Hotel, that it was not of the present time. It felt like something I dug up at a yard sale, a forgotten gem from another era.

I’m thrilled to hear you say that! When I finally got to see the cover of the book, I felt they got it just right. While it’s not ever totally possible to recreate a historical period that you didn’t live in, I tried to think about what novels from that era had to say about friendships and resentments and ambitions, and the way that people talked to and about one another. I gave my characters attitudes and perspectives that I could feel affection for but that felt totally different from [my own].

What other research did you do?

I spent some time at the New York Public Library gathering historical and architectural details and also found a few newspaper columns about life at women’s hotels. Three of the characters in this book are loosely based on real people.

Do tell.

Stephen, the elevator operator, is partly inspired by Stephen Donaldson, the first openly queer student to attend Columbia (it’s Cooper Union in the novel). Like his namesake in the book, Donaldson actually contacted the dean, via a social worker, after his acceptance and asked if they would register a “known homosexual.” He was told he could attend if he promised to enter psychoanalysis and not seduce the other students.

Lucianne is loosely based on Lucianne Goldberg, who founded the Pussycat League, a sort of tongue-in-cheek anti-feminist organization of the 1960s, although the connection there is much more tenuous. The glamorous character Gia Kassab, who comes to New York with the intention of marrying a man her mother dated when she was growing up, is inspired by Joan Brady, who ended up marrying a midcentury writer named Dexter Masters, whose work I happen to love. She published a beautiful piece in the Daily Telegraph after Masters’ death called “Why I Stole My Mother’s Lover,” and I just adored it. It was so frank and remorseless and libidinal.

The phenomenon of the women’s hotel is discussed in the foreword, advancing the idea that the thing the residents share is that they just don’t want to be home. That seems contrary to one of the most universal motivations in literature.

These are characters who, both for reasons they could articulate and ones they couldn’t, are avoiding living at home. Some feel they failed, some have been rejected, others have just sort of washed out. Because the book is set right before there’s a significant counterculture, they are waiting for a moment that hasn’t quite arrived—but when it does, it will help them make sense of their lives.

Are there characters you particularly identify with?

Yes—Katherine, Lucianne, and Ruth, though they’re all quite different from one another. With Lucianne, it’s the perverse desire to tweak things, to poke at situations sometimes to my own detriment. With Katherine, it’s obsessional worry about being rejected, which can itself become very selfish. And like Ruth, I know the feeling of sometimes just wanting to get out of everything and glom onto somebody else’s life.

Katherine is a recovered alcoholic with a story that seems straight out of the Big Book. Are you sober?

I am. I got sober in 2013. But alcoholism looks very different in Katherine’s life versus mine. I did read through the Big Book, and thought quite a bit about Alcoholics Anonymous. Here’s a midcentury institution that is actually becoming more and more influential, unlike the women’s hotel, which is on the opposite trajectory.

Katherine’s relationship to AA is meant to show that this is something understood at the time as brand new and transformative. This is the wave of the future. This is going to be the thing that actually helps people.

Speaking of the downward trajectory of the women’s hotel, let’s talk about one of the throughlines of the plot, the end of breakfast service at the Biedermayer. The first sentence of the book tells us, “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.”

I love books that are interested in food and creature comforts. I find that so much of my ability to be a convivial, caring person rests on when I get my little meals and treats. As long as I have them in exactly the right order and configuration, I’m a delight. When I don’t, my ability to be a person in the world often really falls apart.

When their free breakfast goes away, and the Automat is shutting down, and the availability of big, well-made breakfasts and lunches around the city is disappearing, everybody has different reactions to it. Lucianne tries to score meals from dates and former co-workers. Other characters start stealing. Others eat less. Some try to pretend it isn’t happening.

The Biedermeier is part of a class of institutions that grew up in the 1920s and ’30s— boarding houses, automats, kitchens and cafeterias serving cheap batch food—that supported the growth of an artistic middle class in major cities. As the book unfolds, that infrastructure is crumbling. My characters are living through this period of change. Because they are funny and interesting and resilient, they will make it through, and go on to live other ways—but it is, I think, a loss.

Marion Winik hosts NPR’s podcast The Weekly Reader.