Daphne Fama presents Author's Note to
House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama
(Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2025)
House of Monstrous Women would not exist without a good deal of suffering and so much more bravery. It's hard to be a woman who dives into the dark, chasing after a future that's not guaranteed, the chains of obligation coiling around her ankles ready to pull her back when she dares to go too far. It's hard to be a woman already bound, clawing at the locks. Or the woman who has already accepted that life is cruel, and gently pads the shackles for her successor, so that her daughter's life will be a little bit easier.
This is the cycle that the Fama women have endured for generations. I am the first Fama girl to be born in the United States, though the chains still followed after me.
But Carigara, the home of my ancestors, came, too, in the stories my mother told. My childhood was filled with tales of the dark forests that surrounded her village in the Philippines. She whispered bedtime stories to me about the monsters who hid in the trees there. Creatures who sprung up between roots and who’d drag you into the spirit world if you were disrespectful or too beautiful. But the stories that fascinated me most were those about aswang. For some, aswang were monsters. For others, they were cursed people who were tormented with a vicious hunger who spent their lives like wolves cloaked in the fleece of lambs.
The aswang sank their claws into me as a child and became more than monsters as I grew. In high school I saw myself in them as I struggled to blend in with my peers, failing to swim in the synchronized rhythm of normality no matter how I flailed. It was then that my mother added a new chapter to the story. She told me about a friend she’d had who the entire village thought was an aswang. Eventually the rumors and heavy looks became too much and her friend fled, reinventing herself in a new town, under a new name. It comforted me to know that there was always a chance for new beginnings. She even moved close by, an hour away, and she’s still a family friend.
When I entered college, first tackling a degree in politics, my mother shared a new story. A story about death, and hope, and what it means to fight against impossible odds. She told me the story of those who’d sacrificed themselves to fight against a dictatorship. She told me about how, even in her rural village, she could feel the passion and electricity from Manila as the people swarmed the streets in peaceful protests. This inspired me to focus my major on Philippine politics, and I dove deep into political dynasties, which still grip the country today.
The last story my mother told me was after I passed the bar. I never wanted to be a lawyer, but I pursued it to make her happy. I was miserable. I saw my future shackled by forms and baked beneath fluorescent lights. For the first time in my life, my mother apologized, in her own way. She told me the story of the women of our family. How every woman had lived in quiet sorrow, sacrificing themselves for the betterment of the family. An act as hard as it was brave. And then she cried. She wasn’t just crying for me but for herself, and all the women who’d come before us. She’d suffered so much to make my life easier.
Years of stories coalesced. I saw myself in the aswang, in the centuries of suffering of the Fama women. In the girl who ran away and wrote a new story for herself. From all this, House of Monstrous Women was born and the shackles that I’d shared with so many women were broken.
House of Monstrous Women is a story of darkness, and it is a story of hope. It takes many of its cues from real life. The political massacre that annihilated an entire family, the witchcraft and the family practicing it, all have roots in reality.
And in my opinion, the Philippines has the most interesting sorcery in the world.
*****
Daphne Fama was born in the American South and embedded in its tight-knit Filipino community. When she's not writing stories about monsters and the women who love them, she's writing about video games. And when she's not writing, she's spending every minute adoring her partner and pup.
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