Jennifer Saint Talks Hera and Putting the Queen of the Gods Center Stage
Photo: Emily Goldie Photography
Greek mythology retellings are one of the most popular trends in publishing right now. From contemporary reimaginings to female-focused reframings of classics by Homer or Aeschylus, these are stories we truly can’t seem to let go of, even thousands of years later. Jennifer Saint is one of the most prolific authors writing in this space today, and her stridently feminist reimaginings have given multiple sidelined, forgotten, or otherwise overlooked female figures from Greek legend the spotlight history has long denied them.
Her latest novel, however, is a bit of a swerve: Unlike her other books, Hera follows the story of an extremely well-known figure from the Greek pantheon, one that many readers not only likely already know quite a bit about but have formed strong opinions on. But what makes Saint’s book so compelling is that it’s one of the few stories about this particular goddess that actually puts Hera at its center, offering much-needed nuance and emotional depth to a figure who’s traditionally been portrayed as little more than a jealous, petty wife in larger stories about her husband.
We had the chance to chat with Saint herself about Hera, framing the Queen of the Gods’ story in a new way, what’s next for her as an author, and lots more.
Paste Magazine: Your previous books—Ariadne, Elektra, Atalanta—have been about female figures from Greek mythology who are either lesser known or whose stories have been sort of overshadowed by the men in their lives. But Hera is perhaps the most famous female figure in the entire Greek pantheon. What made you want to write a book about her?
Jennifer Saint: I’m always interested in finding the human heart within these ancient stories. For my previous heroines, I’d never felt that we were getting a fully developed portrayal of who they might have been, instead only seeing them as adjuncts to a hero’s story.
While these heroines had been misrepresented by being overlooked, Hera is the opposite— she’s everywhere in Greek mythology!—but she usually appears as a fairly one-dimensional villain, and this presentation didn’t ring true to me either. I wondered what might be behind her fearsome façade if you peel back some of the layers – and the more I started to look, the more intriguing and complex I found her to be.
Paste: Did you find it easier or more challenging to write a story about Hera, a figure that so many authors (both classic and modern) have already had takes on/opinions about?
Saint: The research was a lot more challenging because of the sheer scale of it. In some ways, that felt like a luxury as I had a wealth of myths and artwork and academic research to turn to for inspiration on Hera, as well as the historical record of her worship. I suppose the difficulty came in knowing when to stop researching and start writing!
Although there are a lot of representations of the goddess, there seemed to be a consensus on the kind of character she was—spiteful, angry, vengeful and jealous—and I found that the vision of Hera that was emerging in my mind was something different. I saw her as a powerful, famous woman who was resented and feared and so was always portrayed in terms of familiar misogynistic tropes, and I wanted to free her from those sexist stereotypes that aim to keep successful women down.
Paste: How did you decide which…version of Hera, for lack of a better term, was your north star? She appears in so many myths, plays, and poems by all sorts of writers, how did you figure out what her must-have traits were in your mind?
Saint: Rage is absolutely central to Hera’s character. She is always described in terms of her anger—whether it’s in Homer’s Iliad when she’s so furious at the Trojans, she wants to eat them raw; or in Euripides’ Heracles when her anger at the hero drives her to inflict a cruel and destructive madness upon him that leads to unthinkable tragedy. But Hera’s rage feels more physical than divine—it’s not a godly wrath, but a curiously bodily sensation: one of bile rising in her throat, a poison that she swallows down until it burns her from within. It’s something corrosive, toxic, and as painful to her as it is to her victims.
Hera doesn’t get satisfaction from venting her rage, and that’s because she can never direct it at the rightful target: Zeus. For me, that blistering fury and frustration had to be her defining trait and her driving force in everything she does.
Paste: One of my favorite things about this book is the way it sort of nods to our popular conceptions of Hera—jealous, bitchy, cruel, obsessed with her husband’s affairs, dangerously petty—but gives them the sort of depth that makes them feel tragic instead of shallow. What, in your mind, does this say about how we’ve historically decided to remember her story, and those of women like her?
Saint: We’ve always received Greek myth through men’s narratives. Historically, it was men curating the stories and it was their versions which were allowed to be recorded and passed down. Hera, as sister to Zeus and daughter to the Titan Cronus, has a powerful birthright and a determination to wield that power. And so, it makes sense to me that male narrators have reduced her to an archetypal nagging wife and wicked stepmother, to flatten her power and make her into something much more manageable.
There is a vase painting of Hera fighting a giant, which was a major source of inspiration to me: a scene in which she is wild and ferocious, strong and victorious. While she’s usually known as jealous Hera, she has another epithet: Hera, Mother of Monsters because in one myth she births a fire-breathing, serpent-tailed creature whom she conceives alone in a fit of rage (that’s how angry this woman can get!).
But we get stories of Hera’s pettiness and pique in far greater volumes than we get stories of Hera the warrior or Hera the creator. It reduces her to a miserable sphere of domesticity, where she is pitted against other women and made subordinate to her husband. It shifts the focus from Zeus’ misdemeanors to Hera’s revenge, exonerating Zeus and villainizing her. I always felt that Hera would look very different through a female lens which seeks to understand her motivations and delve into her complexity.
Paste: I adore that you make zero attempts to make Zeus and Hera’s marriage anything other than toxic and awful. Talk to me a little bit about why you wanted to make sure to make this pairing so ugly, and why it was important to you to see Hera survive it.
Saint: Because Hera is the goddess of marriage, her role as a wife feels even more defining. So it makes it worse still that Hera was forced into marrying Zeus, her brother. In marrying Hera, Zeus consolidates his status as ruler of the gods, but Hera’s power is diminished. To then have marriage be her aspect—the domain over which she presides-–is another insult, because Zeus continually undermines the whole institution by being repeatedly unfaithful.
It made little sense to me to interpret Hera’s policing of Zeus’ infidelities as motivated by jealousy, because this was never a love match (for Hera, anyway!) but when you view his extramarital dalliances as yet another weapon Zeus wields in order to mock Hera and everything she stands for, her anger becomes more understandable. Being the wife of Zeus, tied to the ultimate emblem of the patriarchy and never able to escape him, is terrible to Hera. But she’s strategic enough to use her position to bolster her own status, and determined enough that she will always fight him.
I understood Hera to be the ultimate survivor—she might do some pretty terrible things, she might make a lot of mistakes, but she always endures and she never gives in. Hera was a goddess of women, worshipped by wives across ancient Greece. She punishes women, sometimes cruelly and indiscriminately, but I could see ways in which she could also be empowering and inspiring to women too. Bringing out all the different facets to her character was so important to me, and her survival of Zeus is absolutely fundamental to that.
Paste: What do you think is the biggest thing you changed from the original myths about Hera?
Saint: The final part of the novel! I wanted to take Hera beyond the scope of the myths, and to imagine where she would go after the stories about her end. In mythology, Hera and Zeus are locked in an eternal battle that never resolves, but that’s not where I wanted to leave her.
Paste: The ending of this book is particularly bittersweet. Do you think it’s a happy one?
Saint: I do. I cried while I was writing it, but not from sadness. It felt so true to who I had come to believe Hera was. I don’t want to give too much of a spoiler for anyone who has yet to read it, but to me it was where her story was always going to end, and it felt like the right place for her to go which seems to me like a happy ending.
Paste: How do you feel like Hera would respond to some of the other women you’ve written about? I can’t decide how I think she’d see Ariadne. (On some level I think she’d respect Clytemnestra?)
Saint: I absolutely believe that Hera would be behind Clytemnestra, a woman devoted to revenge on her monstrous husband!
Ariadne is another matter—for one thing, she’s married to Dionysus, the divine offspring of one of Zeus’ affairs, which would definitely be a problem for Hera. Likewise, Atalanta is devoted to the goddess Artemis, another illegitimate child of Zeus, and she swears off marriage, which would be insulting to Hera if she noticed. But mainly, Hera would probably consider herself so far above mortals that there aren’t many she’d think worthy of having much of an opinion on either way. Her journey to understanding humans a little better is part of her arc in the novel and it takes a while!
Paste: Can you tell us anything about what you’re currently working on? Or what mythological or legendary woman’s story you’re planning to tackle in your next book?
I put so much work into building the world of the immortals, puzzling out the anatomy of the Olympians along with the geography of their realm and their physical powers and limitations, that I found myself really wanting to spend more time on Mount Olympus. I can’t say much about what’s coming next, but I have another goddess in mind.
Paste: Of course, I have to end with my favorite question always, what are you reading right now?
Saint: I’m currently reading Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, which is a darkly gothic and feminist vampire novel about hunger, desire, and power. It comes out in 2025 and it’s superb!
Hera is available now wherever books are sold.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB