Q&A with Rachel Hochhauser Author of Lady Tremaine

Why did you want to retell a fairy tale and why Cinderella specifically?

I didn’t set out to do a retelling so much as become fascinated by the idea of this character. The idea came to me during a particularly hard time in my own life, and I was primed to see the

iconic “evil” stepmother as a person—a mother—motivated not by harm, but by care.

How did you research the original fairy tale, did you look into the many variations of the

tale, and did you learn anything you didn’t know before?

There are more than five hundred versions of Cinderella, so I certainly can’t claim to have read

them all—or even most of them. The story spans cultures and centuries, with the earliest

recorded version dating back to ancient Greece. I focused primarily on the Western European iterations that most directly shaped the version of Cinderella embedded in our cultural consciousness.

What surprised me was just how dark and strange many of those versions are. In the Grimm fairy

tale, for instance, the stepsisters cut off parts of their own feet to force them into the slipper,

which promptly fills with blood. The story was never meant to be gentle or sentimental—I felt

there was room to interrogate its moral logic rather than simply reproduce it.

What was the writing process like? Did you start with the original idea of Lady Tremaine’s

story and weave in the details of Cinderella or did you try to work this new narrative into

the existing story?

Everything came from Lady Tremaine’s character. I spent time getting to know her and, after I

had, felt a sense of fidelity. I wasn’t interested in reverse-engineering the fairy tale beat by beat,

though it was certainly fun to think about how to use some of those familiar tropes and then

subvert expectations. In the end, I think I wrote a story that twists and turns inside a familiar

framework, only to bust out of it entirely.

Lady Tremaine is determined to set her daughters up with the most promising future yet

there are so many barriers in their way. What do you think is the family’s largest obstacle?

A system that offers women few viable paths to security while demanding near-perfection. The

family is navigating scarcity, scrutiny, and rigid expectations all at once. Much of the tension

comes from trying to survive within rules that were never designed to serve them.

The wicked stepmother is seen as the villain in Disney’s Cinderella but not in Lady

Tremaine. Who would you say is the villain in your novel?

The easier answer here is to point clearly to one or two characters and claim they are the villain. And while certainly bad things are done and questionable choices are made, the whole point of the book is to muddy the lines between good and bad and instead examine the forces that shape people’s choices. If there is a true antagonist, it’s the social structure that rewards compliance equates worth with marriage and appearance.

Lady Tremaine loves Elin in her own way, desperate to make her stepdaughter engage with

the family. Do you think the “wicked stepmother” is still a common ideology in modern

families?

I haven’t personally observed overt vitriol toward stepmothers, but I do think more broadly, we

remain deeply invested in narrow scripts for womanhood and care. When a woman’s love is

complicated or imperfect, it’s often treated with mistrust. The “wicked stepmother” persists less

as a literal figure than as a cultural shorthand for women who don’t perform care in the

prescribed way.

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