Any reader with even a cursory understanding of Greek mythology will recognize her name: Helen of Troy—daughter of Zeus, the most beautiful woman in the world, a “face that launched a thousand [war]ships.” Now take that image and fast forward about, oh, 3200 years, and you get Maria Zoccola’s raised fist of a debut, Helen of Troy, 1993. Through Zoccola’s poetry, Helen is transformed from ancient myth into mid-1990s housewife, from Greek goddess to American mother: dissatisfied, disgruntled, and viscerally relatable. It is a collection as unruly as it is beautiful, named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by Debutiful.
Maria Zoccola is interviewed by E. Ce Miller.
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FWR: This collection has all these layers of time: a character of Mycenaean Greek origin, reoriented in 1993 in the southern United States, speaking to English-language readers in 2025. Can you talk a bit about your process of navigating time as you reimagined Helen’s story? Why 1993, specifically?
MZ: I considered time constantly while writing this book, because every layer of that time machine (1200 BC, AD 1993, AD 2025) had to be intentional. It was a question, for me, of bringing Helen out of a hazy and indistinct past—Bronze Age Greece, more than three thousand years ago—and into a past that still felt crisp around the edges. I knew as I was writing those first few poems that I was entering the world of my childhood (or in fact, slightly before my childhood) in 1990s Tennessee, but I didn’t initially have a target year in mind. I quickly realized, however, that true precision in the detail work of the poems, real-life accuracy with elements like newspaper headlines, cereal choices, even popular fingernail polishes, would be a much more successful tool than the kind of generic nostalgia that’s easy to lean into with a story set in the nineties and eighties and seventies. For accurate research, I needed to lock myself into a specific timeline: when was Helen born? What year did she get married? What year was Hermione born? What year was my end point, when she returns from her affair with Paris and reexamines the life she’s living? I started there, with my end point: 1993, my own birth year, which was a little joke I had with myself while writing. Once I had my timeline rolled out, research became much easier, and the pieces of the book seemed to fall into place.
FWR: The title of the poem “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine” really got to me. You’ve taken a woman so storied and mythical that her name has been remembered for thousands of years and given her a Whirlpool—she’s the most beautiful woman of all time, and it still doesn’t save her from the Whirlpool. Then, in the poem, Helen is sort of going on about the domestic bliss of this new washing machine…
sears & roebuck blazed down
the street double quick to black-bag broke betsy and wizard up a machine
straight from the cave of wonders i mean factory fresh six cycles two speeds
spin like a star trek thingamajig is it good enough for you helen what a thing
to ask as if i don’t crank the dial ten times a day just to watch the foam and
when she really gets up and running doesn’t she just suck out the stains—
(excerpt from the poem “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine”)
I’m interested in what you’re doing here, whether readers are to take her words at face value, or is she messing with us a little bit? The next thing we immediately find out is that she’s been having this affair. So, all is not well in Sparta, as some of Helen’s words in this poem might indicate.
MZ: She’s the most beautiful woman of all time, and it still doesn’t save her—from anything. In the Iliad, what do we see Helen doing, when she’s allowed to have a presence and lines at all? Weaving, endlessly, the way good noble girls are meant to do. Her beauty allows her to escape death in the Trojan War, but nothing else: she is still entirely dependent on the men around her, tied hand and foot by the social conventions that prescribe her daily actions and scope of influence. In 1993, therefore, she is still washing clothes and dishes and cars and children, but she’s doing it, I think, in the same way Helen of 1200 BC is sitting in her Trojan chambers and weaving that tapestry: partially as a way of saying see? I can be good, I can do what’s right, despite everything, despite what’s inside me. (There is more to say about that tapestry, a textile masterwork, a history of the Trojan War Helen is creating in real time, but I’ll leave that for the Classics scholars.)
Helen is desperately unhappy in 1993. There’s a hole within her. She’s casting around for anything that will fill her up, anything that will anchor her down, and performing domesticity is one part of that searching (are there parallels, here, to the rise of the online tradwives in our current decade?). Embarking on an affair is another piece, another experimental avenue she walks down. And, both separately and connectedly, in “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine,” the washing machine in question is of course a metaphor. Helen may be the most famously beautiful woman of all time, but she also has the world’s most famously stained reputation. She’s the ultimate fallen woman. In 1993, after that affair, she’s looking to wash out those stains. She’s produced a lot of dirty laundry, and she wants it clean.
FWR: In “another thing about the affair,” there’s this moment when Helen realizes she can’t discern her own child from all the other children crammed into the school bus, and she says that once she stopped trying to spot her daughter, she “just stop[ped] trying / on everything else.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like this instant when her child suddenly seems very far away from her, like she’s sort of individuated for the first time. I think there’s this moment in many mothers’ lives when the clarity of your child taking on a life of their own forces you to revisit your own life in a way you maybe haven’t in those immediate years after giving birth… So much loss can be realized in that slow return to oneself, right?
MZ: Helen’s relationship with her daughter, Hermione, was one of the fascinations for me in this collection. In mythological accounts, Helen is often given only one child, her daughter (though some writers record her as having sons with Menelaus and/or Paris as well). For a woman in Ancient Greece, a time before modern birth control and in which girls married in their early teens, having only one child is unusual, curious. Hermione herself was held in ancient sources to be very beautiful, though not nearly as beautiful as her mother. And in the myth cycle of the Trojan War, Helen leaves Hermione behind when she is taken (by force or by choice) to Troy; they are separated for ten years. Hermione is rarely mentioned in the Iliad. What, then, is Helen’s relationship to Hermione in mythology? Does she deeply love her daughter, or is Hermione simply something that happened to Helen’s body for the first and last time?
I reckoned with these questions in Helen of Troy, 1993. In my book, as in mythology, Helen has Hermione young, likely before she is really ready to be a parent. She struggles to understand and accept the pregnancy and birth, and ultimately years later calls herself “somewhat of an indifferent mother,” which I think may be accurate. She leaves Hermione behind seemingly without a second thought when she chooses to escape into an affair with Paris, quitting Sparta entirely for many weeks. And yet there are moments in which Helen feels her whole soul and fate to be bound up with Hermione’s, moments in which Helen may even surprise herself in how much she cares about Hermione’s happiness and future. Helen feels trapped in her roles as wife and mother, and yet there are times in which [an] awareness of Hermione as a whole and complete person, someone Helen created and is responsible for, pierces the fog blanketing Helen and wakes her up. I don’t think Helen and Hermione have a tight-knit relationship in 1993, but I do think Helen loves her daughter in her own imperfect way.
FWR: You’re doing something interesting with place here, too. Considering how much American children learn about ancient Greece in school—I mean, I went to this unremarkable public school in the Midwest, and at least a week was spent each school year, from elementary to high school, studying ancient Greece. We’d dress up and get divided into city-states and had to pick Greek names; what I know about ancient Greece as just this very average woman from the American Midwest compared to what I know about, say, the U.S. Constitution borders on absurdity, a little bit… Anyway, that’s a long way of saying: you’ve taken this place that, I think, for some readers, is iconic, mythical, and maybe—especially when you think about philosophy and art and mathematics and democracy—a little aspirational, even, and inserted hurricanes and hydrangeas and ATVs and caster oil and the Piggly Wiggly, this living landscape of rural Tennessee. I’m just wondering if you could talk about what you’re doing with place a little bit?
MZ: I too remember classroom Greek and Roman dress-up from my middle school days—I’m sure I still have my old toga in a box around here somewhere. It’s true that “Western civilization” (heavy emphasis on the quote marks, there) claims the Classical World as the ancestor of our modern culture, to the point that a complex understanding of that vast swath of history is generally lost outside of intensive Classics scholarship. The Parthenon is floored in marble, after all, and it shines in the sun: it’s easy to get an eyeful of philosophy and drama and democracy, and blur out all the rest. Because of course the Classical World was also made up of slave cultures, and was forcefully and systematically patriarchal, and was shockingly brutal in many different ways. And yet people lived there, generations of people, who laughed and cooked and worshipped and fell in love and cleaned their houses when they got dirty.
When outsiders look at the American South, I think it’s easy for them to do the opposite of what we do with Ancient Greece, to see only the rotten and blur out what’s beautiful and holy about this land. We laugh and cook and worship and fall in love here, too. We clean our houses when they get dirty. I could absolutely talk your ear off about this place, about the South: the dark history which is the dark history of our entire country, the revolutionary changemakers in every city and county working tirelessly against a system invested in drowning us all, the indescribable richness of our cultural legacy, the outsiders who relentlessly take from us while discounting us and our worth. That’s not to say that Helen of Troy, 1993 is set in Tennessee as a kind of protest against or reaction to what folks tell me, to my face, about the American South. I set this book here in Tennessee because I live here in Tennessee. I went to Piggly Wiggly after school with my Mimi and hunched in the bleachers reading my book during Friday night football games. Tennessee is my home, and I belong here, the same way this version of Helen belongs here, no matter what her (my) (our) community—still always ready to push out what is different; bless our constant ugliness—may think or prefer.
FWR: Do you remember when you first encountered the story of Helen of Troy and perhaps how she struck you? What about Helen in particular fascinates you, resonates with you, frustrates you, etc…?
MZ: I’ve loved Greek mythology since I was a little girl running in and out of my local branches of Memphis Public Libraries and reading books that were far too adult for me. I encountered the story of the Trojan War as a child, and then again when I read the Iliad for the first time as a young teen. At the time, I found Helen to be a deeply frustrating character. She begins her life as princess and then queen of Sparta, spends the Trojan War in safety and luxury as princess of Troy while a generation of men fight and die in her name, and at the end of the war, she’s brought back across the sea by her former husband and reinstalled as queen of Sparta. Compare this to the fates of the women around her, who at the war’s end are raped and enslaved or slain. To me at the time, Helen’s gentle treatment and good fortune were undeserved. Whether or not it was entirely her choice to run away with Paris, there was a war being fought over her. I felt strongly that she should have, could have done something to stop it.
Helen speaks in only six scenes in the entire Iliad. This is a character who anchors the poem, for whom the war is waged, and yet she is given so very little real estate, so few chances for the reader to understand her character and her mentality. We build our conception of her, therefore, from the opinions of others: other characters in the poem, other writers in history, other people in the modern world. The composite Helen created from this jigsaw of voices is both flat and contradictory: a beautiful, dangerous, two-timing mean girl. I’m embarrassed to remember how easily I myself fell into this trap, this way of thinking.
In the summer of 2021, though, almost out of nowhere, the first kernels of the project that would become this book exploded from my pen. It was like Helen’s voice was flowing through me, poem after poem, and as the project grew from a series to a chapbook to a full-length collection, I immersed myself so deeply in her character that I absolutely fell in love with her. The process of writing this book transformed my relationship with Helen. The more time I spent with her—in mythology, in her specific role in the Iliad, and in the version of her life I was writing in my book—the more I came to understand just how intensely she was trapped and controlled by fate, the gods, the narrative, and the social expectations of her culture. Helen is no villain in the Iliad: she is a woman without choices, reclaiming her agency in the smallest and slyest of ways. I even began to read Helen’s few lines in the Iliad in a completely new way, considering to myself what her tone of voice might be in the delivery, how calculated each word and phrase must be. These days, I dislike the shallow interpretations of Helen we often see in pop culture (the popular girl, the head cheerleader—I’m sure you know what I mean). To me, Helen is incredibly layered and complex, impossible to truly know. She’s the most wonderful mystery, and I hope other writers continue to adapt and explore her character for a long time to come.
FWR: Can you talk a bit about the swans? In the traditional Greek myth, the swan is Helen’s father, correct? He’s impregnated Leda through this act of subterfuge and sexual violence, which leads to the birth of Helen. But in this collection, I’m reading these swans as a chorus of women. Why was it important for you to reinvent the swan?
MZ: I’m glad you asked this question. In mythology, Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan, thus fathering both Helen and her brother Pollux, who were hatched from eggs. In the original mythology, therefore, we might think of the swan as a menacing symbol of erotic danger, the implacable force of the godhead in an elegant yet bestial form. If we look a little later in the cultural interaction with this myth, however—into the Renaissance, for example—we see that “menacing” and “danger” have mostly been dropped in favor of the purely “erotic.” The myth of Leda and the swan was a popular choice for paintings (of course by male artists), in which Leda rarely appears unhappy with the situation, and in which the coupling seems anything but forced. This defanging of Leda’s rape—the transmutation of it into something titillating or beautiful—always struck me as a kind of betrayal of Leda, a woman who likely never existed outside of the myth tradition and yet could so easily be seen as any woman whose assault has been reframed as sexy by the men around her.
In Helen of Troy, 1993, I thought to myself that if the swan had become a kind of locker-room figure within our understanding of the mythology, I would respond by taking the swan away from that particular conversation entirely. I would repurpose and reinvent the swan. The swan would become a symbol for Helen herself, and at times a kind of anima or even guardian spirit for Helen and her town. Swan imagery abounds in this book, even when the swan does not have a speaking role in a poem. It’s also true that in my version of small-town Sparta, Tennessee, the pantheon of gods does not really exist. Zeus does not really exist. The swan is free to be and become. My response to the swan is certainly not the first time a female artist has pushed back against our cultural or historical treatment of this piece of mythology: modern art is full of examples of female painters and sculptors leaning into the violence of the myth or returning Leda’s agency to her; Barbara Walker springs immediately to mind, who in her work has actually turned the swan into skeletal remains.
FWR: Do you have an opinion on whether the original Helen, the possible real woman or the myth, who ran away or was kidnapped?
MZ: I’m not sure I do have an opinion on this. I’d like to hope she ran away with Paris, that a small piece of that decision was in fact her own (this is certainly the version I chose for Helen of Troy, 1993). But what is more interesting to me is that regardless of whether she ran away or was kidnapped, the following ten years of Helen’s life all play out the same way. She is trapped behind the walls of a city in which she is both a reviled foreigner and an object to be coveted, held up as the ultimate reason for the suffering and death of Troy’s inhabitants across a decade of war. She can’t leave, even if she wanted to. She has precious few allies—or even people who are at all kind to her—and remains subject to the whims of the gods at every turn. But Helen is a survivor. She navigates a political minefield year after year, and at the war’s end, she makes an extreme choice to save herself and bring about her preferred outcome to a decade of fighting. Depending on which version of events you believe (that is, whether she was ultimately on the side of the Trojans or Greeks), she either circles the Trojan Horse and mimics the voices of the wives of the men hiding inside, tempting the men to reveal themselves and be slaughtered, or she climbs the tallest tower of Troy to light a beacon to signal the Greeks that it is safe to begin razing the city. When nearly all of Helen’s agency is taken away, what does she do with the little that remains? That’s what fascinates me.
FWR: In one of the final “the spartan women discuss helen of troy” you write: “ah, helen. / when you’re dead we’ll cherish you again.” I think about all the real and mythic women who were so maligned—Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sinead O’Connor, to name very few spanning much of written time—who became revered only once they were out of the way. Do you have any thoughts about this?
MZ: It’s so easy to love a ghost and so difficult to love a real person. We humans are messy, mean, and contradictory. We make a lot of mistakes and don’t like accepting the blame for them. We’re absolutely awful to each other. And when we behave in ways that threaten the powers that be, we are eviscerated for it. But after we’re gone? After we can no longer imperil the status quo, or disappoint those around us, or have a bad day and act in cruel and small and selfish ways? We’re perfect. Our stories and lives and beliefs no longer belong to us: they belong to those around us, who can twist them for any purpose they’d like. We live on as marble statues, stripped of our grime, frozen in only our most palatable aspects. In Sparta, Tennessee, I think that this is what will happen to Helen. Is this better than being remembered only as a cautionary tale? I’m not sure. We’ll have to ask Helen herself.
