In her debut novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, Christine Murphy takes us on a tumultuous ride through California wildfires and campus rape culture. It’s a brilliant, gutsy, and irreverently funny journey, both for the reader and for the main character: Sarah, a Ph.D. student, who is focused on Buddhism and vengeance. Notes on Surviving the Fire is ultimately a story about a woman’s journey back to herself.

When Sarah’s best friend, Nathan, turns up dead, she must confront her own dark past, as well as his. Notes on Surviving the Fire provides many unexpected twists and surprising laughs, but at the end of the book, just like in life, there are no easy answers. I adored every chapter and couldn’t wait to sit down with the author to discuss it.

Notes on Surviving the Fire releases today, 2/25/25. Christine Murphy will be in conversation with Michelle Hoover for her launch of Notes on Surviving the Fire tonight, 2/25 at 7pm ET at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (in-person event with virtual livestream).

Here’s our spoiler-free conversation:

Timothy Deer: You were recently on the 7am Novelist podcast with your writer friend Hilary Lahan. Did you name the character ‘Hilary’ in your novel after her?

Christine Murphy: My editors asked me to change a bunch of my secondary and tertiary character names, because I don’t care about names. I’m like, “Bob! Frank! Bill!” The editors went through and said, “All of these names are terrible, you need to make them better.” And now there’s a Hilary. I was like, “who do I know with a good name?” Is there a Timothy?

There’s not, sadly. It’s funny you say that, though, because you have so many interesting names and types of names in the book, and I was wondering how you chose them.

When I say I don’t like names, I mean actual birth names, but like nomenclature – that interests me. I really enjoyed referring to the rapist as ‘Rapist’, or referring to the landlady as ‘Empress’. Referring to characters through like ‘blue hair’, ‘shaved head in the back’, ‘baseball cap’; it serves as a name, and it gives a description, so when the reader visualizes the scene, instead of ‘Bob in a baseball cap’, which is clunky and lengthy and takes up too much text, it’s just Baseball Cap. If a character only shows up once, what’s the purpose of giving them a name? Plus, it fits with the narrative voice. I think that’s how Sarah would talk. She would absolutely be somebody who doesn’t bother memorizing her students’ names.

You had a skillful way of navigating large scenes and finding creative ways to not get bogged down in the sheer number of characters.

I don’t care about names, or physical descriptions, or where everyone’s sitting in a classroom. If you’re going to go into that level of detail, there needs to be a reason. It’s like Chekov’s gun. If you make sure that the reader knows that this character is seated by the door, there needs to be a reason. At the end, if they’re like, “he had to have killed him because the bullet came from there and you were seated by the door,” fine. But if you’re not, if that’s not the point, then you’re just wasting time on room decor. To me, it’s the equivalent of having a lengthy description of the painting on the wall. Why are we doing it? It’s not that you can’t, but why? That’s not serving the story I was telling.

It’s funny that you don’t care what people look like, because you’re very interested in how people move.  

I think it’s a great way of showing elements of the character, but also who’s observing the character, what they pay attention to. I dislike complicated verbs, but I feel bodies, I feel movement, I feel things bodies do. Physicality can be very intriguing when there’s attraction, but it can also be repellent, like in the case of the forced proximity of rape. I wanted Sarah to exist in this hyper aware limbo of both.

How much did the book change between the different phases: Novel Incubator, querying, going out on submission, and now being published?

From my perspective, the bones are all the same. The ending is identical. The opening was the hardest. Openings are tricky. With earlier drafts, your opening kind of sucks because it has to suck. You’re trying to get everybody in a room. Who are these characters? For a lot of drafts, the opening is basically the scaffolding of the whole story. Once you’ve written the bulk of the story, then you can go back and say, “Okay, now that I actually know what I’m doing, and I know who everybody is, now I can actually write the opening.” The voice was refined over time, but by the time I was querying, the voice was pretty much nailed down. The wordcount definitely tightened up. It was at 105k for a long time. When I queried, it was around 100k words. We had two developmental edits with editors and my agent, and we kept it at like 98k. Then the last round of developmental edits, I had a come to Jesus moment with myself, I was like, “By the way, this is Christine, and she needs to put her editor brain on and disengage emotionally. What would make this go, go, go?” I cut 14,000 words, and we went straight to the copy edits after that, because I really had trimmed all the fat. I was shocked there was still fat to trim.

It’s an interesting coincidence that your book is coming out when the LA wildfires have been such a problem lately. Do you think that’s interesting timing, or is LA always burning so it’s just math?

I was in California off and on for eight years, and I was living in smoke constantly. It was foreign to me, but Californians were extremely chill about it. I have lived and worked independently in over a hundred countries, so I’m very accustomed to being an outsider, but California will never not be the weirdest place I’ve lived. One time I was looking at this lovely pair of earrings in a store window, and on a whim, I went into the store to ask the price. They were $400,000. I had to write a book about California. I had to make sense of this crazy place.

You did a great job of keeping the theme of rape and violence present in very subtle ways. How much of that was a product of revision, or was it in the groundwater of the book all along? Because the book is extremely funny, too, so you’re balancing a lot.

It’s the product of revision, but in the opposite way. I had to tone it way down. The voice, first person, present tense, came to me pretty early on, and I knew that was the tool I wanted to use to tell it, that forced intimacy. I wanted the reader to feel the forest fires. Air pollution is the great social equalizer. You can buy bottled water, you can buy higher land, you cannot buy clean air. So in much the same way that I chose forest fires, not just because it makes sense in the California scenario, but also because they are inescapable, and I think unfortunately, like sexual violence, the way we handle it in this country and in so many others, it is inescapable. With so many things, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening is a source of oppression, because until you name it, you don’t acknowledge it as real. The things we can’t label weigh on us.

I know the title changed after the book sold. How did you land on the new title? I don’t think you ever say the title in the book.

No, and it took forever. It took a year. I love the title now; it’s like how the student center gives out all these little educational pamphlets, like an absurd campus email: “The world is burning! Here’s what you can do about it.”

Notes on surviving the…novel. What advice would you offer to other writers?

I think creativity is like the language instinct; we’re born with it. It’s part of the human makeup. We’re all creative beings, but some of us are artists through and through. I was deeply conflicted about that with myself. I come from a farming background. I was raised by pathologically practical people, but I have learned that that doesn’t work for me. Give yourself permission to radically rework your entire life. It might not mean you quit your job or move to a cabin in the woods, but it might mean you completely shift what everything means to you to make more space for writing. I’ve realized that some things I used to do were such a waste of my time and energy, but that transition required a lot of soul searching.

Writing is similar to most really bold things, whether you’re running a marathon or completing a PhD or writing a novel. It requires an enormous amount of energy and sacrifice, but even if you do all of the things that are required of you, it still doesn’t guarantee shit. So you have to do it knowing that there’s no promise of a payoff. You have to get to the place where you’re willing to commit and sacrifice and do all those things for something that honestly may never see the light of day. Most novels are never finished, let alone published, so the question is: how do you do what do you need to do? Where do you need to go? What do you need to understand about yourself? What do you need to get out of your book and your writing experience? To be willing to do all of that, because at no point will anything be guaranteed. It just won’t.

Christine Murphy (a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program) has lived, worked, and traveled in more than a hundred countries, including living for eleven months in a tent across the African continent and a year as a resident in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas. A trained Buddhologist, Murphy has a Ph.D. in religious studies. Notes on Surviving the Fire is her first novel. You can find her on Instagram.