The name Medea has been tied to darkness, murder, witchcraft and revenge for as long as her story has been told by ancient poets and playwrights like Euripides and Apollonios of Rhodes. A talented sorceress, Medea was invaluable to the Greek hero Jason as he sought to reclaim his kingdom by finding the Golden Fleece. When he abandoned her to marry a princess of Corinth, Medea gruesomely murdered their own children and Jason’s new bride.
Even to the Greeks, Medea was a complicated figure with prized traits like intelligence and cunning (then more associated with masculine characters) as well as a witch’s control over nature. Euripides depicted her as a woman with strong maternal instincts, which ultimately fell in service to her devastating revenge.
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Now, “Medea,” a new mythological retelling by Los Angeles-based author Eilish Quin, dives into Medea’s family history to examine the complexities of her character. Quin’s debut novel, out Feb. 13 from Atria Books, envisions Medea’s forbidding, power-seeking father, the son of a Titan and a sorcerer himself, and her beautiful, detached mother, a sea nymph who only wants to return to her ocean home.
Talented but “different,” Medea grows up in the shadow of her more conventional and popular siblings. Her independent streak leads her to learn Pharmakon, or plant magic, normally forbidden to women. That same independence becomes a target for men like her father and Jason to subdue in order to use her skills for their own glory.
In “Medea,” Quin explores the influence of generational trauma and oppression on a woman whose actions would make her name infamous for millennia. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Q. How did Greek mythology and classics lead you to this book?
The Greek myths were some of the first stories that my mom would read to me before bed when I was very young. These stories fascinated me because they were thrilling and brutal and poignant at the same time, in a way that felt very enticing to a child’s mind.
There are so many stories from Greek mythology that have become ubiquitous, like Medusa, or the Minotaur – and there are stories that are a little bit lesser known. Hopefully, this book will be a cool opportunity for people to become familiar with another story of ancient mythology that I feel has a very real bearing on the world today.
Q. Out of all of mythology, why choose Medea as a subject?
I initially found Medea’s story so intensely challenging to hold. When she’s brought up in conversation, she’s frequently reduced or simplified into this very violent, savage creature. She’s a witch, or kinslayer or a bad mother, right? And to be sure, certain actions attributed to her are very difficult to grapple with. She’s not the first character in Greek mythology to carry out acts of violence against her children, but she is perhaps the most subsequently despised for her transgressions. I think a lot of that comes from mothers being associated with comfort and familiarity. So it feels very threatening when suddenly they defy those characterizations.
As I wrote, I found that her story actually made a great deal of sense. Hers is one of those stories that has been told for thousands of years by some of the most skilled and eloquent composers, from Apollonius to Euripides. I was definitely inspired by their versions, but I also wanted to explode them a little bit just to give Medea herself the space as a protagonist. I felt like she deserved to have space to be all of the things that women are traditionally vilified for in antiquity – ruthless, complex, vulnerable. Delving into that meant understanding the context from which she emerged, her childhood and her family.
She has a very interesting background: She’s the granddaughter of a Titan and the daughter of a sea nymph. Her aunt is Circe, an enchantress. She’s coming of age in a world where there are monsters running around everywhere, to say nothing of the power dynamics in her own family.
Q. What inspired the magic system of Pharmakon, or planetary herbalism?
In my undergrad years at UC Berkeley, I was really interested in ancient creation, mythologies and dead languages. I took classes in subjects like Egyptian demonology, Scandinavian folklore, Islamic mysticism, and Greek myths. All of these ideas informed my own understanding of ancient mystical practices. I also learned more about contemporary witches to figure out how to adapt ancient magic to the modern world.
When you translate Pharmakon from the ancient Greek, it means both poison and remedy, which is interesting. The double-edged blade of plant magic is that plants can be anything that we want them to be, but it depends on the relationship we foster with them. I was also really enchanted by this idea that everything that springs out of the earth is a clue to the universe and ourselves – that plants can be a signpost of sorts to the divine.
I wanted Pharmakon to honor the rituals of long-ago magical practice while also conveying them in such a way that it felt intuitive and relatable. I don’t think I can say that I created it, but it’s my interpretation of existing systems.
Q. What drew you to the ‘retelling’ genre, and are there any others you might explore?
I love the retelling genre. Something very unique about it is that you almost have a ready-made setting and plot and characters that act like creative suggestions or urgings to draw from. There’s a lot of creativity that can happen between those lines.
My next novel isn’t in this genre, though. It’s kind of a Los Angeles gothic novel steeped in ancient Irish folklore.
Q. Speaking of which, how has Los Angeles influenced your writing?
My next book is kind of a love letter to Los Angeles, in the sense that it takes place around all of these locations that I’ve grown up around and loved. Hollywood Forever Cemetery features pretty heavily, as do the Huntington Botanical Gardens, Point Dume in Malibu and Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills.
We moved to LA when I was six. Before that, I lived in this very small rural town at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas in the Central Valley, which I loved. I spent most of my life in L.A., until I went to college, and then I came back. Initially, when I moved to LA, I didn’t really let myself settle in until high school. When I left for college, I was like, “Oh, wait, I actually really missed this place.”
Q. What would you like readers to take away?
At its core, “Medea” is a novel about what happens when you put people, no matter how brilliant or fierce or kind or resilient they are, into impossible situations. It’s about how trauma doesn’t necessarily make us into these better or stronger people, but rather into evacuated husks of ourselves, isolated from our humanity.
Structures of oppression, like patriarchy and xenophobia, can cause profound damages, and when we restrict the bodily autonomy and rights of marginalized people on a state level, we’re doing more harm to them than we could ever comprehend. I think this is super applicable to a lot of things that are happening in the world today, like the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, or what’s happening with immigration, or the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills that have been introduced in state legislatures.
And at the end of it, even if a reader isn’t that familiar with Medea’s story, I hope they can still submerge themselves in it and maybe find something relatable or intriguing.