If you’re grappling with a thorny issue in your life, there’s a good chance Daniel Lavery has wrestled with it, too. The Brooklyn-based author spent six years writing Slate magazine’s popular Dear Prudence advice column, untangling knotty questions like: Should I leave my alcoholic boyfriend? (probably); Is it okay to call my co-workers “dear”? (nope); and Do I need to befriend my polyamorous wife’s new girlfriend? (only if you really want to).

So it’s not surprising the characters in Lavery’s debut novel, residents of a women’s hotel in 1960s Manhattan, would face a few quandaries of their own. Is Katherine, the first-floor manager, obliged to indulge every demand made by Kitty, the resident sponger? Does aging, unemployed Josephine have the right to steal from others to make rent? Are any of the women obligated to be kind to Ruth, the odd — and off-putting — newcomer to the fictitious Biedermeier Hotel? 

Lavery explores these questions with nuance, wit and whimsical digressions that are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. (When the residents debate who knows the most about writers George Eliot and George Sand,  “I’m the closest,” Lucianne offers, “because I know they’re not the same person.”) He also peppers the novel with fascinating social history. Who knew the New York transit system used to have an annual beauty contest to determine its loveliest riders?

In a recent interview, Lavery described Women’s Hotel as “an emotionally rubber-necking” book. “It’s very nosy,” he says cheerfully. “It’s like I carved away the front of the building and let you peer into everybody’s lives for a little bit, so it did feel very much like an advice column. Like, here’s six problems and we’ll all look at them together and weigh in – and everybody disagrees with everyone else.”

Lavery’s literary agent suggested setting the novel in a women’s hotel after reading a history of the Barbizon, the legendary New York residence that was once home to Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath and Liza Minelli, among others. The idea appealed to Lavery for a few reasons. He’d already written two books (Texts from Jane Eyre, a collection of irreverent imagined text conversations between famous literary characters, and Something That May Shock and Discredit You, a collection of essays that touch on his decision to come out as transgender in his early 30s), but he felt “at sea” when he contemplated writing a novel. Setting the work in a hotel seemed more manageable because it enabled him to tell individual stories that were only loosely connected, and he was fascinated by the “short-lived utopian ideal” that women’s hotels represented. 

For a brief period, he says they served as a sort of “extended sorority” for single women moving to urban centres like New York to work. Hotels like the Barbizon and dozens of others that sprang up during the first half of the 1900s served as a launchpad for women’s independence. But they also placed boundaries around the residents’ new freedoms “with curfews and dorm mothers that kept men out of the lobbies.”

As a writer who relishes exploring human behaviour, Lavery found that tension fascinating. “What are the things [the women] are and aren’t allowed to do? And also, are these people living together because they share values or is it just the best option available to them?”

He’d also been reading a lot of domestic women’s fiction from the early 1900s during the pandemic — his favourites included Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson and Evenfield by Rachel Ferguson (no relation), which he described as a “lightly comic, Proustian reverie” about an Edwardian woman renovating her home “that’s both incredibly shallow and incredibly profound.” “The books were mostly about middle- to upper-class women and the small daily affairs of their lives – the sort of Barbara Pym universe of mundane experience and politeness. That was something I really wanted to try my hand at.”

To capture life in the 1960s accurately, Lavery spent hundreds of hours at the New York Public Library researching details like how much a sandwich cost and what a stenographer’s salary might have been. Some of the novel’s characters are based on real people, including Gia, a beautiful young woman with exquisite taste who moves to New York on a mission to marry her mother’s ex-lover. (Her IRL counterpart was the late American author Joan Brady.)

Their stories don’t all end happily. The residents of the Biedermeier Hotel can be catty, suspicious of each other and occasionally nasty – especially to residents who had no hope of moving out and moving on to a better life. “Because I feel a lot of affection for these characters, I also wanted to make sure that I was not writing something that got too affectionate or too cozy,” Lavery says. “I didn’t want it to feel like ‘isn’t it fun that they’re so quaint and this is the past, and doesn’t that make you feel warm and fuzzy all over?’ I wanted them to experience and express cruelty, and show how much they valued social fluidity in that era. If you didn’t have that, good luck to you.”