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• My Absolute Darling ( novel) Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2017

1.  My absolute darling : a novel LCCN 2017013020 Type of material Book Personal name Tallent, Gabriel, author. Main title My absolute darling : a novel / Gabriel Tallent. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Projected pub date 1706 Description pages cm ISBN 9780735211179 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• The Joy Harris Literary Agency Website - http://www.joyharrisliterary.com/gabrieltallent/

  Gabriel Tallent grew up in Mendocino, California, thrashing through the underbrush in search of anything awesome. He attended the Mendocino Community High School and spent a lot of time backpacking, re-reading Greek tragedies, and trying to figure out Moby Dick. Tallent received his BA from Willamette University and wrote his thesis on the discursive construction of pleasure in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which is more interesting than it sounds. He has worked as a crew leader for Northwest Youth Corps, as an extremely bored and distracted checker at Target, as dining room staff at the Alta Lodge, and as a food runner and server at The Copper Onion. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he can be found climbing or futilely trying to identify plants in Little Cottonwood Canyon. His stories have been published in Narrative and in the St Petersburg Review. His debut novel, My Absolute Darling, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/06/gabriel-tallent-my-absolute-darling-interview

  Plato, pulp and guns: meet Gabriel Tallent, the author of 2017's most talked-about novel

  My Absolute Darling is a page-turning thriller that’s been compared to Catch-22 and To Kill a Mockingbird by Stephen King. Its author reveals how a feminist, bushwhacking childhood in California inspired his dark debut

  ‘We need more books about survivors and abuse’ … Gabriel Tallent. Photograph: Robert Gumpert for the Guardian

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  Paul Laity

  @paullaity
  Wednesday 6 September 2017 06.00 BST
  Last modified on Friday 8 September 2017 09.28 BST
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  urtle Alveston, the 14-year-old heroine of My Absolute Darling, one of the most talked-about novels of the year, eats raw eggs for breakfast, cracking them into her open mouth. She sleeps on the floor, skins and roasts rabbits over a fire of dried grass and is an expert shot, spending her evenings meticulously cleaning guns. She even snacks on scorpions. Turtle is “a person of great strength and personal resources and courage,” her creator, 30-year-old Gabriel Tallent tells me. But he adds: she’s “a girl who’s lost.”
  Turtle lives in a ramshackle house on the northern California coast with Martin, her survivalist father; the windows are boarded up, cooking pans are left to be licked clean by raccoons. There are supplies of dried food in the basement – humanity is “slowly, ruinously … shitting in its bathwater”, Martin tells his daughter – and the gravel drive is littered with bullet casings. Turtle’s father is charismatic, macho and handsome, an eloquent self-taught philosopher with a deep feeling for nature: Tallent describes him to me as “visionary”. He is at times a “tender” father and certainly a loving one. He’s also a monster, who verbally, physically and sexually abuses Turtle, and insists on exerting total control over her. “You are mine”, he growls. She adores him and hates him and knows she needs to escape.

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  In the excitement that has built around My Absolute Darling, an unsolicited blurb by Stephen King has played a crucial role. He has called Tallent’s debut novel a “masterpiece” to rival To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch-22. Its publishers have breathlessly proclaimed a “literary and commercial marvel”. The beauty of Tallent’s writing has been praised, but so has the novel’s action-packed thriller plot. The pages turn quickly, and the reader keenly wants Turtle to prevail. When it was published last week, one review concluded: “For once, believe the hype.”
  Tallent’s own absorption with the landscape of Mendocino County, where the novel is set, comes through vividly as Turtle catches eels in rock pools and explores barefoot a wilderness of bishop pines and huckleberry. Equally significant is the author’s evident intent to write a powerful female character. “I wanted her restraint and dignity to burn through the page”, he has said. “I wanted to write her so that the damage we do to women would appear to you, as it appears to me, real and urgent and intolerable.” The two themes, he tells me, were always linked in his mind: we harm “the things most important to us” – as Martin does Turtle, as humanity does the environment – “because we fail to see that they aren’t really ours”.

  Going bushwacking, I'd carry a copy of the Iliad – which I wanted to memorise in order to impress young women

  Tallent grew up near Mendocino, whose reputation as a hippy retreat was established in the late 1960s and 70s. His parents separated when he was five, and he was raised by his mother, the writer Elizabeth Tallent, and her wife, Gloria Rogers. (His father, a carpenter, now lives in Illinois.) Albion Ridge, his home for years, had a “strong back-to-the-land lesbian movement … it was a little before my time, but those ideas were still very much in the air”. The high school he attended was tiny and progressive: every morning the 70 or so students held hands and did a breathing meditation, before discussing the issues of the day.
  “My parents modelled intellectual precociousness,” Tallent says. “Elizabeth is hyper-eloquent” on issues of feminism; “Gloria is a wonderful interlocutor, with a terrific sense of justice; she’s a very honest person”. He was an only child in a house “saturated with literature, ideas, discussions”; the family would read Dickens aloud at night, and their cats were named after feminist icons (“Cixous would wander in and out”). Tallent loved to go “bushwacking along the ridge, and I’d take a copy of the Iliad, which – and this shows you what a strange kid I was – I very much wanted to memorise in order to impress young women.” He laughs: “It never panned out that way.”

  Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill … the activist who lived in a tree. Photograph: Shaun Walker/Associated Press
  His was a free-range childhood: “Any time I had was spent down in the streams, along the banks, looking for salamanders. The woods were this incredible place that yielded excitement and adventure around every turn.” As one of his school projects, he interviewed a local activist who for over 700 days lived in the canopy of Luna, an ancient redwood tree. “I talked about global warming incessantly, and have carried that sense of alarm with me … Being passionate about ideals always opens you up to criticism from more jaded people, so one is slightly embarrassed to believe in justice and kindness and such things, but I did very much and I still do.”
  My Absolute Darling, which took eight years to write, started out as an “ideas-driven book, about ecological disaster … But I turned out not to be … didactic”. At university in Oregon, Tallent began a work of fiction set in the Pacific Northwest with a large cast of characters including dope-growers, anarchists and drop-outs. He researched local plants – knowledge that adds a specificity to the lushness of his nature writing – and guns. After college, when he worked as a waiter in a restaurant, he “spent a huge chunk” of what money he had on guns, and much time shooting them: “I felt I needed to vet every moment in the book critically and not rely on unexamined assumptions.”

  I didn't want to rely on unexamined assumptions … I spent a huge chunk of money on guns

  At a certain point, the painstaking Tallent realised that his best writing centred on the character of Turtle. “We need more books like this,” he says, “about survivors and abuse.” (His novel is bound to draw comparisons with Hanya Yanagihara’s recent A Little Life, which also depicts a childhood of sexual assault and torture.)
  My Absolute Darling – the title comes from one of Martin’s endearments – is, at times, upsetting, explicit and difficult to read. In one scene, her father forces an exhausted Turtle to do pull-ups from a rafter while he holds a knife between her legs. Rape scenes are described graphically. Turtle has internalised her father’s misogyny and cruelty, and on one occasion she injures a 10-year-old girl that Martin brings home. Tallent is sensitive to any suggestion that the novel veers into voyeurism or exploitation. “I felt I was writing across a gap of privilege and I could not be cavalier. Of course I was aware … At college I studied Pamela, perhaps the first English novel, about a young woman who endures a protracted imprisonment, and accusations that the book exploited this young woman’s experience for the audience’s titillation were rampant.”
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  He wanted Turtle to be a real character, not a symbol or poster child. “There is a natural reluctance to showing her doing anything wrong”, Tallent insists, but if you efface any aspect of her experience, it’s “bullshit … I took the risk.”
  Amid the adulation, early criticisms of the book have accused Tallent of doing exactly what he set out not to do – write Turtle as a stereotype, with her ‘coltish’ physique and ‘crooked’ mouth, a teenage girl who’s attractive but believes she’s ugly. She struggles at school but is then instantly brilliant once she puts her mind to it. When she’s anguished, she chews her knuckles. A critic in the New York Times has argued that she is “almost devoid of interiority … What we’re left with is an action hero, a kind of male fantasy figure out of Mad Max: Fury Road”. The high-school boys who Turtle befriends themselves joke that she’s a ninja, “the chainsaw-wielding, shotgun-toting, Zen Buddhist, once-and-future queen of post-apocalyptic America”.
  As an intense teenager, Tallent not only transcribed Plato’s dialogues for fun, but was a pulp fiction addict. He loved adventure stories “about how to be courageous and survive … how to be a good person when the stakes are high and the odds are stacked murderously against you”. This, at one level, is Turtle’s story. I ask if the violent showdown of the novel was influenced by cinema: “I didn’t watch many movies as a kid,” he replies, “I don’t watch many movies now. But I try to be a visual writer, and I wanted to capture the hectic-ness of bad situations.”
  My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent review – a remarkable debut
  A strange and impressive novel that frames big questions about abuse and civilisation against the wilderness of northern California
  Read more

  Tallent is clearly drawn to bad situations: his next book will focus on trauma and friendship among climbers in Utah, where the novelist now lives with his wife. He is a fanatic climber, and gives a terrifying description of an ascent one morning when his footholds were so small he was ‘stepping into air’ and the slowly warming rockface became alive with wasps.
  With its distinctive blend of serious purpose and pulse-quickening action – Plato and pulp – My Absolute Darling is set to guarantee the kind of success that will change Tallent’s life. He isn’t part of a literary scene, and is eager to point to the hundreds of excellent books that aren’t lavished with such attention. How do his climbing friends regard his new celebrity status? “They don’t think I’m hot shit,” he smiles. “They’re thrilled, but what they like is getting drunk with me. It’s not like I’ve risen in their esteem.”
  My Absolute Darling is published by Fourth Estate. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330-333 6846.

• From Publisher -

  Gabriel Tallent was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He received his B.A. from Willamette University in 2010, and after graduation spent two seasons leading youth trail crews in the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest. Tallent lives in Salt Lake City.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/books/gabriel-tallent-my-absolute-darling.html?mcubz=3

  A Debut Novelist’s Descent Into Darkness
  By ALEXANDRA ALTERAUG. 27, 2017
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  The author Gabriel Tallent in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside Salt Lake City last week.
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  Michael Friberg for The New York Times
  It’s clear from the first few sentences of Gabriel Tallent’s “My Absolute Darling” that the novel’s fierce, vulnerable, semi-feral heroine, Turtle Alveston, is in a precarious situation.
  The gravel driveway of her decrepit house is littered with bullet casings. The living room window is boarded up, covered with shot up rifle targets. Dirty skillets are left on the porch for raccoons to lick clean. When she gets home from school, Turtle, who is 14, casually picks up a loaded Sig Sauer pistol lying on the counter among empty cans and levels it at the target. Her father, Martin, smiles without looking up.
  The novel’s ominous opening passages make two things abundantly evident: Turtle is in grave danger, and yet she isn’t the prototypical, passive fictional girl in peril.
  With its unconventional heroine and unflinching portrayal of an abused girl’s fight to save herself, “My Absolute Darling” seems poised to become the breakout debut of the year.
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  A Heroine in the Mold of Huck and Scout AUG. 29, 2017
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  The novel has drawn ecstatic blurbs from writers like Celeste Ng, Phil Klay and Stephen King, who declared the book a “masterpiece” on par with “Catch-22” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
  “It’s one of those books where you start reading and you can’t stop,” said Mr. Klay, whose story collection “Redeployment” won the National Book Award. “You get very attached to Turtle and desperate to see what happens, and it takes you to some very uncomfortable places.”
  Mr. King, who gets so many requests for blurbs that he has a teeming pile of books in his office that he calls “the guilt table,” offered an unsolicited endorsement of “My Absolute Darling” after he tore through an advanced copy of the 400-plus-page novel in three days.
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  Patricia Wall/The New York Times
  “It’s a first novel and he’s got everything working,” Mr. King said. “When I read it the first thing I thought was, I couldn’t do this, and I’ve been doing it for 40 years.”
  Turtle’s story unfolds on the coast of Northern California, in the lush, untamed forests, gulches and tide pools around Mendocino. She lives with her paranoid, survivalist father — a self-taught philosopher and gun nut who teaches her that the world is a treacherous place and humanity is doomed. At 6, she learns how to fire a bolt-action pistol. At 14, she’s become an expert sharpshooter and hunter who can navigate the forests in the dark, identify edible plants, make fire with a bow drill and shoot, skin and roast a rabbit over a fire of dried grass and twigs. She’s at home in the wilderness, but is failing at school and estranged from her peers and teachers. She’s alone except for Martin, a sadistic monster who would sooner kill her than lose control over her.
  In a literary world that can sometimes feel claustrophobically close-knit, Mr. Tallent seems to have arrived fully formed. A 30-year-old rock climber who lives in Salt Lake City, Mr. Tallent was waiting tables when he sold the novel to Riverhead in 2015.
  But during an hourlong interview, it quickly became clear that Mr. Tallent’s splashy debut is far from an overnight success story. It took him about eight years to get the novel into a form he felt was publishable. His mother is the fiction writer Elizabeth Tallent, and he grew up in a literary household, where for nightly entertainment, they read aloud to each other from classic novels by Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle.
  Mr. Tallent began writing the book during his senior year of college at Willamette University in Salem, Ore. At the time, he was profoundly homesick for the wilderness around Mendocino, where he grew up and had what he describes as an idyllic, “free-range” childhood.
  Mr. Tallent was an only child, and his mother and father, a carpenter who now lives in Illinois, separated when he was 5. He was raised by his mother and her wife, an antiques dealer named Gloria Rogers. The two met and fell in love when Mr. Tallent was about 9, when he and his mother wandered into Ms. Rogers’s vintage store in Mendocino.
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  They lived on a 10-acre plot, in a little house that Ms. Rogers built, then moved to a bigger farmhouse north of Fort Bragg. He would spend hours alone outdoors, exploring the creeks and hunting for Pacific giant salamanders, garter snakes and wolf spider lairs. When Mr. Tallent was about 12, he started making up stories about eccentric characters. “He was always scribbling,” Ms. Rogers said.
  He was more comfortable in the woods than in school. He struggled with reading and was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. When he finally started reading fluidly, he began binging on pulp science fiction novels.
  In high school, Mr. Tallent started taking weeklong trips in the wilderness with friends and sometimes alone. He brought philosophy books and plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus with him. In college, he studied 18th-century literature, and began working on a sprawling novel set around Mendocino, which featured Turtle and Martin as part of a much larger cast of characters.
  After graduating, he cycled through odd jobs, before moving to Salt Lake City, where his wife, Harriet Tallent, now works as a nurse in a thoracic intensive care unit. He got a job as a waiter at a ski lodge. On days he wasn’t working, he’d write for 12 to 14 hours.
  Three years later, he had 800 pages of a sprawling novel about the Pacific Northwest and the strange characters who live there — hippies, survivalists, pot growers, anarchists. He realized the seed of a more arresting story was there, scrapped the draft and wrote a much different novel, one that focused on Turtle’s experience and the physical, psychological and sexual abuse she endures, and her fight to overcome it.
  “When I realized that was my subject matter, I was terrified,” he said. He considered abandoning the book. Elizabeth convinced him to keep writing. He started over, and the story got darker. He felt it was critical to write explicitly about the sexual abuse Turtle is subjected to, without letting it define her.
  Writing from the perspective of an abused teenage girl was risky, and some readers and critics may fault Mr. Tallent’s handling of such a sensitive subject, or for attempting it in the first place. Mr. Tallent, who often spoke in abstract, almost academic language about his work, said he approached writing about Turtle’s abuse “with trepidation, and my trepidation had several valences.” But he was compelled to write about it in specific, unsparing language — in part because he feels that violence against young women is too often treated as a plot point in literature, rather than as a way to understand a victim’s experience.
  “It can feel exploitative, and there’s a tendency for hurt young women to be symbols in literature and not characters in themselves,” he said. “I didn’t want Turtle to be a poster child or a stock case, I wanted her to feel like her own person.”
  It took Mr. Tallent five more years and another dozen drafts to finish the book.
  Riverhead quickly acquired the novel in a pre-emptive bid. Mr. Tallent quit his job as a waiter and started writing his second novel about a climber who has a traumatic accident. He’s been stunned by the praise that the novel has received. “I’ve seen these incredible acts of literary citizenship from people who owe me nothing,” he said.
  All the attention feels remote to him from his home in Utah, where he spends much of his free time rock climbing.
  “I live among climbers and health care professionals, so all of our conversations are about health care and climbing,” he said. “Books are this thing I secretly think about when everyone’s talking about what sick lines they’re going to sink tomorrow.”

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/08/my-absolute-darling-gabriel-tallent.html

  Gabriel Tallent Talks Abuse and Identity In His Haunting Debut, My Absolute Darling
  By Bridey Heing  |  August 30, 2017  |  4:13pm
  Author photo by Alex Adams Photography
  Books Features gabriel tallent
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  My Absolute Darling is a near impossible book to categorize. While it centers on a young girl’s isolation as she struggles against an abusive father, it’s also a deep meditation on language, nature and the way we perceive our world. Debut author Gabriel Tallent eschews feel-good plot turns, instead offering an emotionally closed-off heroine who is determined to save herself. Philosophical but without pretense, the novel proves a fascinating examination of personal strength.
  Fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston and her father, Martin, live on a large plot of land on California’s Mendocino Coast. Martin believes the fall of civilization is fast approaching, and he forces Turtle through harsh training in order to prepare for the future. He also abuses her sexually, verbally and physically, with his moods erring towards a desire to punish her. As a result of her mistreatment, Turtle has internalized Martin’s misogyny and vulgar cruelty, which manifests as a warped vision of her identity.
  “I was always deeply engaged in stories, novels, philosophy that talked about how to be a good person and how to live a just life in the face of injustice and tragedy,” Tallent says in a phone interview with Paste.
  With My Absolute Darling, Tallent amplifies the injustice surrounding Turtle. Although Martin’s behavior is abhorrent, his community is complacent in a way that allows him to continue abusing Turtle with little fear of repercussions. After an accident, for example, a friend named Jacob encourages Turtle to go to a doctor by assuring her that no one would report her to Child Protective Services. This sense of not getting too involved in people’s private lives leaves Turtle to rely on her own skills and moral compass, a challenge given her upbringing. But Tallent writes her with a fundamental sense of care and goodness, which enables her to fight back against Martin’s influence.
  Martin looms large in the story, but it’s Turtle’s narrative. We see the world through her eyes, which creates a warped, fish-eye effect. Turtle’s own motivations are striking, but she doesn’t know everything about her father or the world around her. We’re limited in the same ways as Turtle, a conscious choice Tallent made while writing.
  “I grappled with having written a great deal about Martin, but ultimately decided this wasn’t his story,” he says. “I decided he wouldn’t tell her [about his past]. We don’t always know what shapes the most important people in our lives, but I also don’t think it really matters. What matters is what they show up as.”
  This limited access to information cuts both ways; reading the book, it’s important to remember that others don’t have the same full picture of how Turtle’s mind words. “You have access to Turtle’s mind that in a way that makes her more lucid. If she was in your life and you weren’t Jacob, she would be a difficult person. It’s our particular vantage point that makes sense of her.”
  Martin’s influence is most clearly seen in Turtle’s language, which is littered with insults Martin has directed at her. She sees herself as stupid, ugly and her own worst enemy, but she’s aware that Martin’s perception of the world is flawed. “Turtle’s world view is molded by this very charismatic, very domineering personality, and she has trouble seeing the world in a different way,” Tallent says. “You see her parroting him, but at the same time you can see her coaching herself through seeing things he has described through a new light.”
  Turtle sees what Tallent describes as a “sickness” in Martin’s approach to the world, and “when she observes this, she returns to her own world view and assesses herself for the same sickness.” When she first meets Jacob and another boy named Brett, she has already begun to see this. But the boys’ own use of language reveals a new world to Turtle.
  “Turtle has a very literal grasp on language, but Brett and Jacob have a literally fantastical, playful grasp on language and use it in a non-literal means of self-identification,” Tallent says. “It opens up her sense of what’s possible and you can see her engaging with and trying to make sense of the boy’s strategies.”

  While Jacob and Brett are key to helping Turtle reimagine her world, only Turtle can save herself. Tallent points out that it isn’t realistic to expect teenage boys to swoop in and save an abused girl, but this doesn’t mean their influence is insignificant. Rather, it’s a representation of the way people shape others’ lives.
  “We sometimes meet people who…move us so deeply, but who aren’t able to be our rescuers or change our life circumstances,” Tallent says. “Sometimes they provide a little bit of a galvanizing force when we’re working on ourselves. [Jacob] plays the role of a friend and a love interest, but he can’t save her.”
  The novel’s premise makes it easy to assign cliché lessons to it about survival, community or good versus evil. But My Absolute Darling challenges that simplicity by allowing Turtle to define her own reality.
  “What saves Turtle is trying to see the world clearly and, particularly, to see the other people in her life clearly,” Tallent says. “One of the most important lessons…[is] to take other people seriously on their own terms, as people as important as you whose experience may or may not be accessible but are so much more than set pieces in your own life.”

  Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.

• Los Angeles Times - http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-gabriel-tallent-20170825-htmlstory.html

  Gabriel Tallent Q&A coming soon

  Gabriel Tallent, author of 'My Absolute Darling'. (Alex Adams Photography)
  By Michael Schaub

  Gabriel Tallent left California years ago, but California never left him. The author of the debut novel “My Absolute Darling” (Riverhead, $27) was born in New Mexico, then spent his childhood in Mendocino, mostly outdoors, developing wilderness skills that he’d later use working as a trail leader for youth groups in the Pacific Northwest.
  “My Absolute Darling” is a kind of love song to Mendocino, although the subject matter is anything but pastoral. The novel follows 14-year-old Turtle Alveston, who feels more at home in nature than she does at home. She’s a gifted scout and sharpshooter and takes to the countryside around Mendocino partially to avoid her survivalist father, Martin, who abuses her physically, psychologically and sexually. When she meets a kind, funny high school boy, she starts to consider the possibility of escape from her painful home life.
  Tallent spoke to The Times by telephone from Salt Lake City.

  How did the character of Turtle come to you?
  I've been working on this book for so long that Turtle goes back through 15 or 16 generations of herself, with each draft following what has felt true in the last draft. There's a way that a real person feels on the page, so I pursued that and tried to resist any impulse to make it easy or simple or neat and, instead, just pursue where it felt right. [It’s] like if you knock on a piece of wood and it feels solid, like it has some depth to it. [I was] pursuing that in a narrative sense.
  Was it difficult getting into the mindset of a 14-year-old who's been forced to grow up in these really awful ways?
  It definitely required a great deal of attention to Turtle herself, and it required a very careful taking seriously of her mind, because any sort of summary judgment is always easier and more facile and less true. So it took a sustained attention to the character and to her nuances. In that sense, it was sort of working without rules. I had worked with youth around that age, and I don't know that it helped me, but it gave me the sense that youth go in many different directions. So it gave me the freedom to take her as totally herself, as her own character, without trying to write a type, because I felt that youth so often are more than that.

  Redwoods near the border of Mendocino and Humboldt counties. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
  The scenes of Martin's abuse of Turtle are obviously tough to read. Were they difficult to write, emotionally speaking?
  I love writing, and write fanatically, and wrote many of those in long, hard days, trying to get there. I would say writing takes as much of a toll as any other endeavor that matters in your life and leaves you pretty wrecked. But at the same time, just like any other important thing in your life, it feels worth it. That's what gives you the strength to write after a long shift at work, or to write on your only day off, and make the personal sacrifice that is required. Writing is, for me, so time-consuming that it requires a great deal of ruthlessness, and that only feels worth it if you're writing about something that matters. I think important pursuits are oftentimes challenging.
  See Gabriel Tallent at Book Soup on Mon. Sept. 11 at 7:00 p.m. »
  It's always risky for a male author to imagine a female protagonist, and vice versa. Was that something you were conscious of when you were writing the novel?
  Yes. When I quit school and set out to write a book, I spent all of my time writing, and I accumulated this enormous text with a great deal of things going on in it. But Turtle was the best. And when I think about when the novel took shape, it's the moment that I decided to make this book about her, and that was terrifying, to peel away everything else, especially to peel away the material I felt that was closer to home or more comfortable. So I guess what I'm saying is that I arrived at that character through a tremendous labor of writing rather than sitting down and conceiving of a story, and I think because it was sort of step by step, I had realized what it was about, and [was] terrified. Is that what you mean? Are you talking about actually being daunted, or are you talking about the difficulty of projecting yourself into a female character's mind?
  Writing is, for me, so time-consuming that it requires a great deal of ruthlessness.... I think important pursuits are oftentimes challenging.
  — Gabriel Tallent
  Kind of both. [There are] female characters who are typical tomboy [stereotypes], and she doesn't seem like that. She seems like her own person, like she doesn't really care about gender roles one way or another.
  That's interesting that you say that, because a lot of times women say to me that she has so internalized the misogyny and is obsessed with its thoughts and its language. So we're even gendered in the terms that we're two dudes talking about this right now. I am writing across a gap of privilege that ought to be acknowledged. And that's why I like this question, and my answer is that I feel like I have my own vantage point on how women I have known have accommodated and overcome trauma. But the important thing to say is that it's not the only narrative, and then we get into the problem of paucity of representation. Sometimes when there are too few narratives, pressure is put on any particular narrative to do everything, which it can't. So I'm writing from a position of privilege, but this is also my culture, Mendocino is my culture, and these are my places, and I grew up among women and feel like I have insight into that. But it's not the sum total of all insights that can be had.

  Just as an aside, just pushing back a little bit, because we all experience a culture of misogyny, it is sometimes troubling to me the degree to which women survivors are absent from male fiction. And I don't mean that they're absent as spectacles, because they're all over the place, in every form of media, as spectacles, sort of the hood ornaments of TV episodes and novels, and the justification for doing many things that male protagonists go about [doing] in their books. Sometimes survivors are curiously absent from that fiction in a way that they are not absent from our lives, and I think that erasure is very troubling.
  Mendocino almost strikes me as being a character in this novel, not just a setting. What does Mendocino mean to you, as someone who grew up there?
  I feel passionately about place and found my way into Turtle's character through her love of place, because I think wilderness, the places we go as children, we go there to learn things about ourselves and to take those skills back into our lives, and that seems to me so essential. Also, we are losing these places. I wrote this book the first time that I was away from Mendocino in a protracted way, and I think that's because that was the first time when the full meaningfulness of the place became visible to me. In a way, you take it for granted, and then when you lose it, it becomes visible. [This] plays into my concerns about global warming, that this is a disaster that we're not able to conceive because we can't conceive what we're losing, we can't make visible what is about to be lost to our imaginations. So that was my two-fold concern: my love of place and also my tremendous anxiety about environmental destruction.

  An evening view of the coastline in Mendocino County. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
  One of the characters in the book that shares that concern is Martin, who's obviously in most ways a really unsympathetic character.
  Martin is sort of a co-protagonist in the book, who is fighting to be more and greater than his injuries, and he's trying to do it for his daughter. I think that we have all seen people struggle to be more than they were raised to be, and we all have seen people fail. Martin is a person of, at times, tremendous prescience about the world, and he has flashes of clarity. He's raised a pretty cantankerous daughter, and that's not something you do as a totally unredeemed person. That is an accomplishment that, as divided as he is, speaks to something about his character.
  Sometimes survivors are curiously absent from that fiction in a way that they are not absent from our lives, and I think that erasure is very troubling.

  Martin’s a compelling character, he's very charismatic, very intelligent. Was it important to you to have him be more fully realized than just a horrible human being with absolutely no redeeming value?
  Yeah. I mean, I was never interested in him in being a horrible human being. I think that Martin is the sort of person whose help we need if we're going to change society. Sometimes outsiders like Martin see the structural inequalities with tremendous and difficult prescience. He was always meant to be a character who is deeply divided within himself and struggling within himself to be a good person. He's prepared his daughter with a tremendous degree of fortitude and with tremendous and very clear critical skills for thinking about her life. Those are accomplishments; those are the actions of someone who's trying to be better than they are.
  Turtle is very comfortable outdoors. She feels at home in nature; she's a great scout. Were you like that growing up?
  Yeah, I spent a great deal of time outside. I used to roam around a great deal, I did a lot of solo backpacking as a child, and I used to go on lots of adventures with my friends out into the woods, sometimes staying out there for a couple of nights. And I felt passionately about the places I encountered, and the wonder of encountering them. [That] is something that is sometimes neglected in contemporary fiction. It's something that becomes invisible when we lose our ability to look for it. The wilderness is almost an acquired taste, something you have to learn a little bit about. And I really wanted to show the reader that love through Turtle's eyes.

Tallent, Gabriel: MY ABSOLUTE DARLING

(June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Tallent, Gabriel MY ABSOLUTE DARLING Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $27.00 8, 29 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1117-9
A 14-year-old girl struggles to escape her father's emotional and physical abuse in this harrowing debut.Turtle (born Julia) lives with her father, Martin, in the woods near the Mendocino coast. Their home is equipped like a separatist camp, and Martin opines officiously about climate change when he isn't training Turtle in gun skills or, at night, raping her. Unsurprisingly, Turtle is isolated, self-hating, and cruel to her classmates. She also possesses the kind of strength that suggests she could leave Martin if she had help, but her concerned teacher and grandfather are unsure what to do, and once Martin pulls her out of school and her grandfather dies, the point is moot. Can she get out? Tallent delays the answer to that question, of course, but before the climax he's written a fearless adventure tale that's as savvy about internal emotional storms as it is about wrangling with family and nature. Turtle gets a glimpse of a better life through Jacob, a classmate from a well-off family ("she feels brilliantly included within that province of things she wants"), and her efforts to save him in the woods earn his admiration. But when Martin brings another young girl home, Turtle can't leave for fear of history repeating. Tallent often stretches out visceral, violent scenes--Turtle forced to sustain a pull-up as Martin holds a knife beneath her, homebrew surgery, eating scorpions--to a point that is nearly sadistic. But he plainly means to explore how such moments seem to slow time, imprinting his young characters deeply. And he also takes care with Martin's character, showing how the autodidact, hard-edged attitude that makes him so monstrous also gives Turtle the means to plot against him. Ultimately, though, this is Turtle's story, and she is a remarkable teenage hero, heavily damaged but admirably persistent. A powerful, well-turned story about abuse, its consequences, and what it takes to survive it.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tallent, Gabriel: MY ABSOLUTE DARLING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495428015&it=r&asid=d7e3e2c82236ca84e49b7acfeb0f413d. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495428015

My Absolute Darling

Michael Cart
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* My Absolute Darling.
By Gabriel Tallent.
Aug. 2017.432p. Riverhead, $27 (9780735211179).

"My absolute darling," Martin calls his 14-year-old daughter, Turtle. The girl's mother is dead, and the misanthropic and misogynistic father and self-hating daughter live, surrounded by guns, in a run-down house on the Northern California coast near Mendocino. A pariah at school, Turtle has only one friend and confidant, her alcoholic grandfather, until she meets funny, articulate Jacob, who is fascinated by her. Learning of her interest in the boy, Martin beats her savagely with an iron poker, saying "You're mine. Mine." Perhaps further expressing his ownership of his daughter, he routinely rapes her, leaving Turtle with deeply conflicted feelings, both loving and hating him simultaneously. This is Turtle's life until her grandfather's death becomes the catalyst for Martin's disappearance. In his absence, Turtle leads a relatively peaceful existence in Jacob's company until her father returns three months later, bringing with him a 10-year-old girl, and things begin to change dramatically. Turtle is an extraordinary character whose thoughts and actions enliven the pages of Tallents remarkable first novel--remarkable not only for its characterization but also for its minute examination of the natural world that Turtle inhabits. So vivid is the gorgeously realized setting that it becomes itself a major character in a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page.--Michael Cart
YA: Older teens will be caught up in Turtle's unusual world and fascinated by its brilliantly realized setting. MC.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "My Absolute Darling." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA499862700&it=r&asid=ff2461b0c4e18226d2fc9363b5bd4758. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862700

My Absolute Darling

264.26 (June 26, 2017): p149.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
My Absolute Darling
Gabriel Tallent. Riverhead, $27 (432p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1117-9
Room meets Rambo in this emotionally fraught first novel. Fourteen-year old Julia "Turtle" Alveston is growing up in Northern California, near Mendocino, under the overprotective eye of her abusive father, Martin, who, for all intents and purposes treats her like they live in a two-person survivalist camp--he teaches her how to shoot and hunt in the wild, and abuses and sexually molests her. Even though she goes to school, Turtle feels cut off from her fellow middle-school students until the day she meets Jacob, a high school student whose sudden appearance in her life forces her to question for the first time the way she's being raised. Martin adds a new member to the family, which forces Turtle to make a bold move to keep his history of abuse from repeating itself, leading to a suspenseful and bloody climax at a teenage house party. In Turtle, Tallent has crafted a resourceful and resilient character. Unfortunately, Martin is such an obvious psycho creep that readers will wonder why the characters he interacts with--Turtle's teachers, a friend from the old days--don't see through him. Jacob, too, in the dialogue the author puts in his mouth, doesn't sound like a real teenager. In the end, though, Turtle's story is harrowingly visceral. (Aug.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"My Absolute Darling." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 149+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497444209&it=r&asid=14a0922721726372d261361abdf7e1ae. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444209

Book World: 'My Absolute Darling': A brutal novel about a tough teen girl

Lisa Zeidner
(Aug. 28, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Lisa Zeidner
My Absolute Darling
By Gabriel Tallent
Riverhead. 432 pp. $27
---
Fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston lives with her father, Martin, in an isolated, decrepit house in Mendocino, Calif. Her mother drowned long ago, probably a suicide. For breakfast, Martin has a bottle of beer, which he opens with his teeth, and Turtle downs a raw egg right from the shell. At night, they clean their guns together - a survivalist, Martin taught her to shoot when she was 6 - before he rapes her. Sometimes, the sadist invents new entertainments, like forcing Turtle to do chin-ups with the chair kicked out from under her while he holds the lethal point of a hunting knife to her crotch. Not surprisingly, Turtle isn't prospering in middle school.
The horrors recounted in Gabriel Tallent's grim and fascinating first novel, "My Absolute Darling," intensify when a caring teacher suggests therapy. Obviously, Martin, a sociopath who has stockpiled enough supplies to survive an apocalypse, would prefer to avoid a visit from Child Protective Services. And Turtle is determined to compartmentalize the brutality: "There is something in her as hard as the cobbles in the surf and she thinks, there is a part of me that you will never, ever get at."
Her problems intensify when she falls for a high school boy named Jacob. His cushy life, in a lavish house with loving parents, makes her long for escape. Turtle hopes to prove as tough as her father claims her to be on those special occasions when he isn't degrading her with misogynistic insults. ("Absolute darling" is one of his nicknames for her.)
"You can't wear her out," he says. "It is a thing out of myth, almost. You could hamstring her and drive her way out into the bush and leave her there, and you would come back to find she had taken up with wolves and founded a kingdom."
Many recent young adult novels have featured adolescent girls who are self-sufficient and wise beyond their years, coming of age in harsh, unforgiving worlds. Girls save entire civilizations or stave off vampires. ("Twilight," in fact, gets wry product placement in this story.) And young adult novels like to feature thorny social and family issues. Nevertheless, someone should slap an NC-17 label on "My Absolute Darling." As well as being graphic about its sexual violence - and violence in general - the novel is long, dense, ornate in diction and full of sophisticated literary allusions. "Middlemarch" gets a shout-out, as does"Deliverance." Martin reads Kant and Hume; there's a bullied kid named Rilke. The analogues are not recent YA hits but novels like Charles Portis' "True Grit" and Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," both of which also feature teenage protagonists.
Part of what makes Turtle so memorable is her passion for the natural world. She takes refuge in the woods and ocean. Descriptions you might skip in another novel here become a mesmerizing, fairy-tale-like dreamscape, hauntingly beautiful and threatening. After being sexually assaulted, Turtle "closes her eyes and feels her soul to be a stalk of pig mint growing in the dark foundation, slithering toward a keyhole of light between the floorboards, greedy and sun-starved." A churlish reader might complain that this isn't convincing as a teenager's perception, and it's true that Tallent sometimes waxes overweeningly poetic, as here, when he claims to articulate Turtle's post-rape mood: "She wants in some way to quench her loneliness. She wants to lie here and be wrung clean of all personhood."
Still, despite occasional missteps, the complexity of the characterization is impressive, especially in how Turtle tries to reconcile her love for her father with her fury at him. Tallent, who is from Mendocino, also paints a saucy portrait of the convergences there: old hippies, farmers, Silicon Valley billionaires and crazy survivalists all bumping into one another at the local espresso bar. It might be one of the only places in the country where a psycho like Martin could blend in with his neighbors - and even have poker buddies.
For the most part, Tallent manages to keep the melo- out of his drama. I could have done without quite so many animals killed in quite such coldblooded ways - does Turtle really have to snack on live scorpions? - although maybe that is to be expected given the number of guns on the wall (and knives in the drawer). But "My Absolute Darling" is a novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.
For all its bleakness, the story does have some fine lighter touches. Jacob and his best friend, the duo who introduce Turtle to normal, goofy stoner life, serve as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this tragedy. Their friendship as warm and wisecracking nerds allows Tallent to insert a contrasting voice into the tale and hints at a different direction that we might see in future works from this prodigiously talented new writer.
---
Zeidner's most recent novel is "Love Bomb." She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Rutgers University at Camden.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Zeidner, Lisa. "Book World: 'My Absolute Darling': A brutal novel about a tough teen girl." Washington Post, 28 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502040566&it=r&asid=3740598942d293793bb2d1ee737a5caa. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502040566

"Tallent, Gabriel: MY ABSOLUTE DARLING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA495428015&asid=d7e3e2c82236ca84e49b7acfeb0f413d. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017. Cart, Michael. "My Absolute Darling." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA499862700&asid=ff2461b0c4e18226d2fc9363b5bd4758. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017. "My Absolute Darling." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 149+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA497444209&asid=14a0922721726372d261361abdf7e1ae. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017. Zeidner, Lisa. "Book World: 'My Absolute Darling': A brutal novel about a tough teen girl." Washington Post, 28 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA502040566&asid=3740598942d293793bb2d1ee737a5caa. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/24/my-absolute-darling-gabriel-tallent-review
  Word count: 1198

  My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent review – a remarkable debut

  A strange and impressive novel that frames big questions about abuse and civilisation against the wilderness of northern California

  The magnificent, inhospitable landscape is also a character … the Mendocino coast. Photograph: Alamy

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  Lara Feigel
  Thursday 24 August 2017 07.30 BST
  Last modified on Saturday 26 August 2017 00.10 BST
  “Y
  ou need to surrender yourself to death before you ever begin, and accept your life as a state of grace,” Martin Alveston tells his daughter Turtle. It’s heavy advice to give a 14-year-old, but she receives it willingly. First presented with a gun at the age of six, Turtle is now better at shooting than she is at school vocabulary tests. She can light fires and drive a truck. She can even, when commanded by her father, perform a makeshift finger amputation on a terrified visitor.
  My Absolute Darling is the much feted debut by the young American writer Gabriel Tallent. At its heart is the intense, warped love between Turtle and Martin. He’s taught her everything he knows, giving her the skills that they both know will enable her to destroy him. In the meantime, he rules through a mixture of fear and love. She is compliant when night after night he appears in her bedroom to have sex with her, sharing his mixture of pride and shame. “In the waiting she by turns wants and does not want it. His touch brings her skin to life, and she holds it all within the private theatre of her mind, where anything is permitted, their two shadows cast across the sheet and knit together.” This is abuse, and Tallent doesn’t shy away from the fact, but he is also insistent on naming their love as love. This is partly down to the lyricism of his prose. It is additionally because Martin, though a controlling monster who’s trapped Turtle in a frightening folie à deux, has created a world that remains enticing for her, primarily because of their shared closeness to nature.

  This is abuse and Tallent doesn’t shy away from the fact

  Tallent grew up near Mendocino and the magnificent, inhospitable landscape of northern California is itself a character here. Turtle has been initiated into her relationship with the woods and beaches that surround their home by Martin, but that environment now feels more consistently nurturing than her relationship with him. Indeed, she feels guilty when she abandons him to retreat into the wilderness, and it’s here that she meets Jacob, the boy who allows her to glimpse a new, more ordinary world and to admit to herself the unhealthiness of her own.
  From the point that Jacob and his friend Brett appear on the scene, the novel becomes a fast-paced adventure story, which explains why it has a puff from Stephen King, who has called it a masterpiece. This phase of the story is too heavily plotted for my liking, because when you’re anxiously turning the pages wondering what will happen next there’s less time to appreciate the detail along the way, and it’s detail that Tallent is so good at. When he slows down, there’s an excitement in smaller moments: the act of catching an eel can take on all the drama of a chase. Encouraged and instructed by Turtle, Jacob lifts a reluctant fish out of a rock pool “and it squirts out of his fist and he goes down hard on his knees, lunging, lifting it and again losing it” as it disappears beneath a stone.
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  What we are witnessing here is an encounter with nature in which Turtle’s world is pitted against Jacob’s. She has been both seduced and repelled by the consumerism of his luxurious home. “Where are your tools?” she asks, perplexed by people who simply hire a tradesman when something breaks. Now she is teaching him to inhabit her world, and it’s a lesson that almost kills them both, washing them up on a kind of magical island where they rely on her skills to survive. It’s not hard to see why Turtle can’t quite bring herself to forsake her home for Jacob’s. In his saner moments, Martin is a kind of eco-warrior. “The natural world is going to die, and we’re going to let it die, and there’s no way we can save it,” he laments.
  At its most abstract, the battle between Martin and Jacob, conducted through Turtle, is a philosophical one. The “absolute” of the book’s title is literal. “You have always been loved, deeply, absolutely,” Martin tells Turtle. He is an absolutist who lives in a Manichean world in which even target practice is a battle for the soul. The indoctrinated Turtle half shares his view, while secretly aware of its dangers. Pushed to the brink, she wonders, will Martin step back? She cannot be sure.
  Though Martin loves Turtle, it’s a form of possessive love (“you are mine”) that denies her individuality. He has distorted the philosophy he reads to create a world view that denies theory of mind: he insists it’s only by inflicting pain that we believe in the possibility of the consciousness of others.
  Jacob, by contrast, offers a form of love that allows Turtle to exist fully as an independent entity. This is why she feels so released by her first contact with him. All along she has known that “her mind cannot be taken by force, she is a person like [Martin], but she is not him, nor is she just a part of him”. Jacob provides proof of this. It is this growing subjectivity that Martin most fears. “There is a terrible inwardness to you,” he tells her. And the reader is made to understand that it’s only by cultivating this inwardness that she will survive. “I hate him for something, something he does, he goes too far, and I hate him, but I am unsure in my hatred; guilty and self-doubting and hating myself almost too much to hold it against him.”
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  At the end of this strange and remarkable book, civilisation triumphs. When we last see her, physically and spiritually broken, all Turtle can do is plant a garden in the town. This is a world beyond philosophy in which nourishment comes from nameable and tangible things. Her plants repeatedly die, but she tries again. “She just wants to build a garden and water it and have everything grow and everything stay alive and she does not want to feel besieged.”
  • Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury).
  • My Absolute Darling is published by Fourth Estate. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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