Contemporary Authors

• Binary Star ( novel) Two Dollar Radio (Columbus, OH), 2015

1. Binary star : a novel LCCN 2015460251 Type of material Book Personal name Gerard, Sarah, author. Main title Binary star : a novel / by Sarah Gerard. Published/Produced [Columbus, Ohio] : Two Dollar Radio, [2015] ©2015 Description 166 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9781937512255 (pbk.) 1937512258 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2015 161831 CALL NUMBER PS3607.E7285 B56 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2)

• Sunshine State: Essays - 2017 Harper Perennial, New York, NY
• (Chapbook) BFF - 2015 Guillotine, New York, NY
• Things I Told My Mother - 2013 Von Zos, New York, NY

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Gerard

  Sarah Gerard
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Sarah Gerard
  Born Clearwater, Florida
  Occupation Novelist, writer
  Nationality American
  Genre Fiction
  Notable works Binary Star
  [1]Sarah Gerard is an American author and novelist. She recently worked for Bomb Magazine.[2] She is the author of a novel, Binary Star, published in 2015 by Two Dollar Radio. The novel received positive reviews.[3] Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and Joyland. Gerard also writes a monthly column for Penguin Random House online journal Hazlitt.[4]

  Gerard attended the New School, where she received an MFA.[5] She is also the daughter of Florida politician Pat Gerard.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Writing career
  2 Personal life
  3 Bibliography
  4 References
  Writing career[edit]
  Sarah Gerard is the author of one novel, Binary Star ( 2015), as well as two chapbooks, most recently BFF (published in 2015).[6] An essay collection, entitled Sunshine State, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine‘s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other publications, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She also writes a monthly column on artists’ notebooks for Hazlitt.

  Personal life[edit]
  Gerard struggled with anorexia and bulimia while she attended Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. She discusses this in her essay From Hunger in The New York Times.[7] In 2007, she jumped out of a moving train and ended up in the hospital, which is also discussed in the New York Times essay.[8]

  Bibliography[edit]
  Things I Told My Mother (2013)
  Binary Star (2015)
  BFF (2015)
  Sunshine State (2017)

• HarperCollins - https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-124272/sarah-gerard

  Sarah Gerard

  Sarah Gerard
  Photograph by Justin N. Lane
  Biography
  Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and appeared on best book of the year lists for NPR, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, and Flavorwire. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review Daily, Vice, BOMB, and other publications. She teaches writing in New York City.

• Sarah Gerard Home Page - http://sarah-gerard.com/about-2/

  About

  tumblr_ndcydltl6w1qe0lqqo1_1280
  Photo by Levi Walton

  Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, and Ucross. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.

• Brooklyn Rail - http://brooklynrail.org/2017/04/books/Whats-the-Point-of-Love

  QUOTE:
  I wanted to avoid writing about the expected topics when people talk about Florida. Such as Scientology. I was born in Clearwater, but I didn’t want to retread the same ground. I looked for unique aspects of my own personal experiences growing up there. Scientology doesn’t feel personal to me.
  I didn’t want to write any pastoral nature-scapes. There’s something grittier and stranger than that. It’s almost a lie to talk about nature in Florida as if it’s untouched or unaffected by human interference.
  What's the Point of Love?: Sarah Gerard with Christine Sang
  by Christine Sang
  Sarah Gerard
  Sunshine State: Essays
  (Harper Perennial, 2017)

  In Sunshine State, Sarah Gerard nestles her personal stories within historical, social, and corporate movements that have shaped the lives of Florida inhabitants. The essays spiral out to encompass all of humanity, as she spirals in to excavate meaning in sanctuaries often overlooked.

  Sarah Gerard
  In our interview, I often found myself in agreement with her. It’s a testament to the way she uses language to bring you to a resting place, without feeling she’s leading you there.

  Sarah is also the author of Binary Star, and her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Vice, Paris Review Daily, and the New York Times, among other publications.

  Christine Sang (Rail): Sunshine State (Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins) is a compelling mix of journalism and memoir, including over fifty pages of your research in the endnotes and the bibliography. The essays pierce your life in Florida, your parents, and characters from Amway, New Thought, and community kitchens. The essays exist in intersections of corporate and humanitarian movements. As a book nerd, I noticed sections of thoughts were noted with a different font. What elements did you choose to include, and what choices were decided by your editor and book designer?

  Sarah Gerard: It was a very different process than Binary Star (2015), which came out on a small press called Two Dollar Radio, owned by a husband and wife. There were fewer parties making decisions in that case. At HarperCollins, I’m meeting with the whole publicity team, and the marketing team. HarperCollins can also afford to send me out on tour for a week and a half in Florida, and to events around the city. It’s a very different process.

  Rail: Do you have a preference? Large house, small house?

  Gerard: It’s just different. I appreciate the size of the team at HarperCollins because they can do a lot with the number of people that they have. But I also really liked the people I was working with at Two Dollar Radio and the spirit behind what they do. Their DIY attitude is close to my heart.

  Rail: It’s almost as if your publishing experience is like your book itself, as in the personal framed within a larger social conscience.

  Gerard: I think it’s really cool I get to release a book with HarperCollins, given that Rupert Murdoch is the owner of the company, because some of the things I’m saying in the book, are you know, politically…

  Rail: Yes. The Betsy (DeVos) section.

  Gerard: Yeah, the Betsy section…

  Rail: —And the whole book. How did you chose what was included in your book?

  Gerard: I sold Sunshine State on proposal. It was originally to be twelve essays which became eight by the time I turned in the manuscript. The essay about Amway was going to be two different essays. One was going to be about my parents’ time in this organization, and then another essay about residential development and how it has shaped the landscape of the Tampa Bay area. That became, for formal reasons, one essay.

  The “Records” essay also started out as two. One about Jerod, one about Mitch. I couldn’t complete either of them, although I rewrote both of them many times. Eventually, I realized they were actually part of the same story.

  There was going to be a third essay about my mom’s work with victims of domestic violence and separately, an essay about New Thought. Those things were happening at the same time in my mom’s life, and there was a certain commerce of ideas between the two, so I decided to combine those. Then there was another essay we had to cut.

  Rail: What was that?

  Gerard: It was about the Gulf of Mexico. I’d attended an oil spill conference in Tampa. I wanted to learn more about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It’s coming out now in an anthology of writing from Barrow Street Press. The title of the essay is “A Study of Human Responses to Man Made Disasters.”

  Rail: What a title.

  Gerard: I couldn’t finish the revision in time to turn it in with the book manuscript. So we planned to publish it separately, which happens.

  Rail: How did you decide the order of the essays? They have a real shape—like a body, in the way the book’s format also reflects a person; a short entry to begin and end with in page length; and wider sections in-between; as if the book had a head, chest, waist, hips, knees, and feet. The close personal essays are on the top and the bottom, and then you have this body in the middle–a physical new body made of places important to you and have personal lines veining through them.

  Gerard: In writing the book, I didn’t know what order the essays would appear. We decided that it would be best to open the book with an essay that was similar to Binary Star stylistically, in the sense that “BFF” is fragmented and nonlinear. And then roughly move chronologically through time. The very next essay after “BFF” opens with my baptism (“Mother-Father God,”) the beginning of a life. Then at the end of a life is “Rabbit,” which is the essay about death. The last essay is “Before: An Inventory,” which takes you back to the start.

  Rail: “Before: An Inventory” and its flip backwards through memory, reminded me of Joe Brainard’s I Remember. “Rabbit,” in which you’re taken care of, follows after a moment in which you feel you can’t adequately take care of a bird. There’s an arc of waiting and time passing. Time connects the humanity of your father’s quest for perfection, your mother’s quest for connection, and other characters’ points of view, such as G.W. in the “The Mayor of Williams Park.”

  Gerard: Right, he’s talking about people doing drugs, smoking dope, watching porn, and he’s like, those are temporal things. Things of this world.

  Rail: Yes, here it is in the book. “Paul says, for men like me, all things are lawful—but are they beneficial? I don’t get freaked out about people swearing, having dope, watching porn, and whatever, because those are temporal things—things of this world. It’s: how do you act? How do you feel? How do you really feel about people? That’s what you have to fix: how you really feel about people.”

  Gerard: Yes, G.W. is an incredible human, as an example of humanity. I was thinking a lot about faith, and how it carries us though hardship or hinders our ability to advance sometimes. Within that is an interest in eternity and how do we transcend our temporal bodies and how do we transcend death. Like in “Rabbit,” I was asking the question of what’s the point of love if we’re all just going to die. That’s a really blunt way to put it. But it’s true. It’s the truth.

  Throughout the book, I’m looking at religion and this idea that there’s an eternal plane and there’s potential for eternal life, especially in New Thought (NT). They literally believe that you can meditate your way out of death. Pray your way out of your body. I don’t know if this quote actually ended up in the book, but my dad would say for a long time, “I don’t intend to die. I want to become the Body of Light”—which is an NT way of talking about Jesus and their idea that Jesus overcame, he transcended, death. He literally became a body of light.

  Rail: When your father decided he didn’t want to be part of NT anymore, was he hoping for perfection?

  Gerard: Yeah, I think they were. In NT, there really is a belief that you can affirm and deny away all examples of error on the mortal plane. Error being death or sin or sickness.

  Rail: You write about how NT influenced you and your family, and, even our language—as in saying “they made a transition,” not “they died.” It made me aware of the ownership of my use of language. I questioned whether the words I used unconsciously weren’t chosen by me, but integrated into popular use by a spiritual movement.

  Gerard: The NT movement really is fascinating. I didn’t know ’til I started doing this research that it was politically linked to the women’s movement. Cool, right! Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton was peripherally part of that world. Susan B. Anthony too. There’s so much in that movement. It’s mostly petered out now. But NT was a large movement for a long time.

  Rail: It also interwove itself into other organizations.

  Gerard: Yes! Look into the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Swedenborgianism. Many of the origins of NT happened in the Midwest, but a lot of it happened in the U.K. There’s so much that can be written about it. And the way that its shaped—well, it’s a symbiotic relationship—the way that it shaped American ideas of positivity as the cult of positivity, and the confusion of negativity.

  Rail: Your book is dedicated to “Mother-Father.” Was that a reference to your essay, “Mother-Father God” or a spiritual belief you still hold?

  Gerard: The dedication, Mother-Father? I just dedicated it to my parents. A tip of the hat.

  It was definitely echoing that essay. And besides giving a nod to my parents, who figured in largely in this book. I figured it was the least I could do. Dedicate the book to them. They’re so much a part of it. Because I dedicated my first book to my ex-husband. So, my parents were next in line. [Laughter.]

  Rail: Oh, how kind of you.

  Gerard: Well he wasn’t my ex- at the time.

  Rail: That might be even kinder? [Laughter.] You write about your husband in the book. You’re not together now.

  Gerard: No.

  Rail: I’m sorry.

  Gerard: That happens.

  Rail: May I ask if he’s O.K.? You mention his cancer.

  Gerard: He’s fine now. He’s not going to die of cancer. It’s one of the most curable kinds. So he’ll be fine.

  Rail: You use the word “religion,” but the book is so spiritual. How do you see this?

  Gerard: Florida is in the southern states… And Florida is a very religious place. Some came from the characters that I was following, for instance, G.W. He’s a minister and his work is an expression of his system of belief. He’s non-denominational. But he’s a very religious person, in the fact that he’s an ordained minister. I was curious about how his belief would lead him to behave in the world. How his beliefs direct him. My parents too. How they used religion to change their lives or change their mind. How that later fed into their decision to join Amway (“Going Diamond”), which was a very cultish, heavily religious corporation, even as it claims to be voluntarily religiously associated. Participation in Sunday services at the functions that they hold periodically are voluntary but—

  Rail: It’s a social pressure?

  Gerard: They make it available, but they also suggest that you should go. Built into the philosophy of the company is the idea that people get rich because they are blessed by God. Rich DeVos (Amway’s co-founder) says God has given me this money to do as I deem fit.

  Rail: That sense of responsibility to a bestowed obligation echoes throughout the essays. G.W. says, “To me, hell is squandering my abilities.” The characters seem to feel they are destined to fulfill a gift given to them individually.

  Gerard: Even G.W. relates this mid-life changing dream/hallucination that he had while he was undergoing lung surgery, and he says it was as if God had sent him a message. “God told me I’m not done here, yet, I’m not done with you yet.” That led him to a religious life where he had never really been religious before. G.W. had always been interested in religion but he says, “I hate dogma.” In general, I was interested in what it means to believe something is true and the lengths we go to act on our belief, even if our beliefs are obviously wrong to any bystander. Look at Ralph, in “Sunshine State,” for example.

  Rail: You picked the right people to write about, the right characters. They’re fascinating. When you go into a location, how do you pick the one person you’re going to focus on?

  Gerard: I look for the most colorful ones I can find. It’s the one who immediately looks the most interesting.

  Rail: What does “interesting” look like to you?

  Gerard: For instance, Jimbo (“Sunshine State”): he’s a very colorful guy—literally very colorful, Hawaiian shirts. Bright red Converse high-tops. He smiles a lot. He immediately introduces himself. He’s very open. He talks a lot. I had a hunch about him.

  Ralph was obvious because he’s the owner of the [bird] sanctuary. I found out very soon after the beginning of my volunteer gig there [at the sanctuary] that he had been embroiled in scandal for years. So that was a natural.

  Rail: You didn’t know beforehand? Juicy!

  Gerard: I know, right? I didn’t think I was in the need to know, because I wasn’t writing a who-done-it. I thought that I was just going to learn about ornithology. I read their official literature, their newsletters, and of course they wouldn’t talk about scandals there. Once I got there I found out pretty quickly and just followed the trail, because there was still a lot of shady stuff going on.

  With G.W., I’d know him for years already and wanted to write about him. “Records,” was more of a hunch. I started writing about the character of Jerod. I was curious about what happened to him since the last time I saw him in person many years ago. I couldn’t find him anywhere. No paper trail. But I knew he’d been released from prison in Jacksonville around 2014, not long before I started writing that essay. I knew he was still alive somewhere. I’m pretty good at finding people. I’m a pretty good sleuth. It became an obsession of mine. In tracking him down, I came across his very lengthy criminal record. I really wanted to know what happened to him and how he’d got to this point.

  Rail: He seemed so hopeful when we first meet him. You wrote, “He knows what he wants and who he is. He has a bright future.”

  Gerard: Exactly. Eventually, I found him, but even finding him didn’t make enough of a story. I couldn’t figure out what the point was. I trust that my brain is smarter than I am as a writer. My brain is making associations that I might not even be aware of. I knew there had to be a reason I wanted to find out so badly what happened to him. Separately, I was writing about the person named Mitch in the book. I had the same problem with that essay. I couldn’t conclusively call what happened rape. That felt too dramatic to me. It was an unsure feeling and was not enough to conclude the essay. But then I thought, what happens if I made the framework in the book this entire year of my life. Then, because I had this specific time span, it was easier. I could see the patterns in myself during that time.

  That’s how I chose those characters. They rose up from the depths of my past and had impacted me in some way, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time.

  Rail: There’s a similar type of framework within the stories, it seems. With “Rabbit,” you keep returning to the beauty parlor, and each time there, you move into the personal once you have the place defined. You have a year as a framework, and then you go into the personal; you have Florida, the place, as a framework, and then you go into the personal.

  Gerard: Right. That brings up framing in another spot. I discovered in my research on NT that the U-P.C. (Unity-Progressive Council, of which Sarah’s father was a founding member) had been founded on the centennial of the founding of Unity. I realized that my parents were getting involved in NT about 100 years after NT itself was founded. That became a framework. I jumped back and forth between this period of NT history and this period exactly 100 years later in Unity, and Unity Clearwater Church, and my parents’ story. You can see the structure of the essay because of that happy accident.

  Rail: My parents lived in Clearwater. In reading some of your descriptions, I could smell it, I could see it. It was fun to revisit on the page.

  Gerard: Florida is a great part of the world!

  Rail: It is! It’s very unique.

  Gerard: I wanted to avoid writing about the expected topics when people talk about Florida. Such as Scientology. I was born in Clearwater, but I didn’t want to retread the same ground. I looked for unique aspects of my own personal experiences growing up there. Scientology doesn’t feel personal to me.

  Rail: I also don’t see any travelogue moments. The feeling of Florida came through an osmosis of the people and your experiences, rather than something like a travel brochure in a book.

  Gerard: I didn’t want to write any pastoral nature-scapes. There’s something grittier and stranger than that. It’s almost a lie to talk about nature in Florida as if it’s untouched or unaffected by human interference.

  Rail: Your writing style expresses a confident attitude about your past. Even in disclosing tumultuous moments and crises, you’re able to be very clear about what the facts were at that time, how you worked through them, and what the outcome was. What surprised you as you were uncovering memory?

  Gerard: For the final essay, I visited a hypnotherapist to exhume dormant memories of the animals. A lot of them I hadn’t thought of for years. I had no reason to think about them. The hypnotherapist tried to explain to me how I would experience these recurrences of memory. It was really intense for a couple of days. I would be driving to an interview and a cluster would come to me, and I’d have to dictate about ten to fifteen animals in a burst, into my phone or into my digital recorder, which I was carrying at all times while I was doing this research. I actually began to think about time differently too. The recurrences were similar to time in a story as opposed to our lived experience of time. The animals in that essay appear in reverse chronological order but they actually came to me in these scattered bits that I had to reorder in an Excel spreadsheet and then figure out how to write as an essay/poem. The time in our brain isn’t linear. It’s built into our neuroscience. There are all these neurons in a spider-webby cluster that don’t actually make sense, except that they’re linked by feelings. They’re linked by associative imagery.

  That was the impulse I was following when I was writing “BFF.” Start with the memory that stands out, even if it seems unimportant. Because I knew that it would lead me to the next piece of the story to be excavated.

  Rail: Knowing what you reveal about yourself in Binary Star must mean you come to the stories in Sunshine State with deep empathic resonances for the people you’re interviewing. How do you live with that? Do you feel you need to help everyone?

  Gerard: It’s hard because you need to keep a journalistic distance, to an extent. I think it’s a matter of realizing your limitations. Your physical, mental and financial limitations. It’s important to remember that even bearing witness to another person’s story is a kind of help. With Ralph or G.W. or Jerod, I couldn’t have pulled them out. I can be a friend to Jerod. I can listen to Ralph’s story and bring my passion to the telling of it. Because I don’t think Ralph is a bad person. Jerod’s done a lot of bad things. He’s actually a wonderful person with a big heart. Same with G.W. There were some things I could do. For instance, I read his novel and gave him feedback on it. When his computer crashed, I gave him one that I had used in the past, and wasn’t using anymore, because it would be helpful for him to finish his novel. But I couldn’t save all of the people that he works with. It was a matter of realizing that what I could bring to that situation was my ability to tell a story that could inspire empathy in others.

  Rail: Is that your intent in your writing?

  Gerard: I think that literature aims to inspire a feeling. To build an emotional relationship around the character. If you’re writing your character well, with the kind of dimensions we can relate to on a human level, you can understand even their reasons for doing… We talk a lot about unlikeable characters but I don’t think it’s important that a character is likeable or unlikeable. You can come to like someone you would never like in real life, in the form of a character, because you’re getting inside the psychology. As long as they’re interesting and keep the reader reading.

  Rail: I thought you fulfilled that beautifully. I never felt there was judgment, but that they were speaking for themselves.

  Gerard: They’re just themselves. Ralph and G.W. are the best examples of this, because in those situations, I was thinking of myself as a journalist. I was looking at them as characters that were carrying the essay, whereas in most of the other essays, I was the character, the protagonist.

  I interviewed both of them extensively, and they tend towards very long quotes. They were chunky quotes, too, because there’s no reason for me to interject, or to offer my own interpretation. I think you can really ruin a story if you insert yourself in a place that doesn’t require you to be there. Who the writer is, or what the writer thinks is not always the most important thing, especially as a journalist. It’s really not my place to pass judgment. In those cases, it’s just to understand.

  Rail: You’re a teacher.

  Gerard: [Laughter.] Yes, I do teach. I teach writing.

  Rail: When you write, do you think about the reader or do you put all your efforts into letting go on the page?

  Gerard: I’m really just trying to tell a good story. I don’t know how to think about the reader, about who the reader is, because there’s no way for me to know that.

  Rail: “The Mayor of Williams Park” is full of facts, but I became very emotional reading it. Fact, fact, fact. The form overwhelmed me. It left me feeling motivated. I would not have guessed that was possible.

  Gerard: I wonder if that’s because G.W. cares so much. He is the protagonist but he makes a very good argument for, simply put, treating people like people.

  Rail: Yes, but as the writer, you’re choosing the specific facts and voice for the story.

  Gerard: It’s a good point. Yes, if I had centered Robert Marbut in that essay, and had explored his philosophy, it would be a very different essay, right? I happened to agree with G.W. on pretty much every point. The factual information I included in that essay was meant to support, or demonstrate G.W.’s philosophy, as opposed to Robert Marbut’s.

  And you’re right, they’re just the facts. It is a fact that forty percent of people experiencing homelessness are children. You know, how can you not care about that. It’s a fact that non-white and LGBT people are disproportionately—and immigrants and women—are disproportionately represented in the homeless population. That women of color have a higher likelihood to experience violence if they’re homeless. In a certain way, that if you do present the bare facts, they tell their own story. It’s wonderful if the reader feels motivated to go out and take action after reading this. But I’m not really thinking about getting people to do something when I write. It’s that the facts themselves have power.

  Rail: In the essay with G.W., I think the point you make from the accumulation of facts is that the only difference between the success of two peoples’ lives is a home.

  Gerard: That’s the only difference, yeah. That’s true, right? The only difference.

  Rail: Your craft as a writer in using facts to show the difference between a homeless person’s problems and a person with a home caused an emotional catharsis in me as a reader.

  Gerard: I’m not sure what to say about that. I think a lot of that is story craft, too. At the end of a piece, you should have a feeling, an emotional peak. So, as a writer you organize the facts. How can I include this fact, if I’m going to make this point here, using these facts to support it, what needs to precede this such that a reader will understand and empathize and have a sense of progression through the story. At every moment checking, reassessing: where am I now, what else do I need to include before so that this moment makes sense?

  I tend to write scattershot. I don’t really have a method or habit. I’m writing a novel right now. It began as a short story and it’s becoming a novel, because I went back to the beginning and I’m expanding it throughout. Inserting scenes here, here, here, here, rearranging whole sections. There’s no linearity as the story emerges from my brain. There’s only a sense of progression on the page. It’s an internal sense of the writer, not really progression; but I’m figuring out what this question means and how to answer it, within myself. But that’s a really messy process. I notice the holes along the way. I have to go back and fill in them in. I’ll notice myself making a statement that I can’t completely substantiate, if someone were to question me, so then I have to go do some more research or find a way to support my idea. The finished product of an essay or a story is a form of documentation of my own ultimate ability to make sense of a very messy question. So that feeling of catharsis that you might have, is my own. It’s the best that I could do to answer the question within myself. It’s really not so much about what the reader might do.

  Rail: You conduct interviews as a part of your research. If you were going to interview yourself, what question would you want to answer?

  Gerard: I don’t know because I don’t know what I don’t know about myself. It’s hard to say.

  Rail: Do you live in Brooklyn now? Do you have any places there you find resonate as Florida to you?

  Gerard: I really like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s nothing like Florida, except that I get to be around strange plants. It’s the place I can find the most exotic ones. But I have a tradition that every year on my birthday, I go to the Botanic Garden and see the roses.

  Rail: You have a dance background.

  Gerard: I took ballet, character, pointe classes from fifth grade to eighth grade.

  Rail: And you’re a singer. How has that influenced your writing?

  Gerard: I think being a singer is a literal analog to having a voice. My favorite aria is Amarilli, Mia Bella by Caccini. And also Lascia Ch’io Pianga, which I talk about in “Records.” My study of music taught me to listen closely. When I’m writing, too, I’m looking for the different sounds words make, and how one word suits another in a sentence and within a paragraph. Or how I can repeat a word and assign its meanings at different points in the story, and observe how its meanings change or transform. It’s like theme and variation in a piece of music.

  Rail: Do you read your work out loud?

  Gerard: Always. You have to. Otherwise it reads like garbage on the page!

  Rail: You have a trained ear to listen with, so it might be a slightly different experience for you than for other writers without that kind of background.

  Gerard: It’s possible. Just on a practical level though, a writer should always read her work aloud. You get so used to seeing the same sentence over and over, you might miss when you repeat a word, or might not catch that you use the word, bluebell three paragraphs in row. Because you’re so used to reading on the page, it becomes invisible. You’re snow-blinded on the page. But if you read aloud, you can’t help but hear that this one word stands out.

  There’s usually a better, simpler way to say something. My dad, being a journalist, and trained in brevity, taught me that if a sentence is longer than a single breath then it’s too long, unless there is a semicolon or comma or something in the middle. Which I learned in music too– what’s a good time to take a breath. The phrase should be just long enough for a breath.

  Rail: Who are you reading right now?

  Gerard: Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry To Disrupt The Peace (McSweeney’s 2017). It came out in mid-March. It’s a book about suicide but it’s just hilarious, and also extremely sad, but in a way that would never make you feel despair. Her voice is like nothing—I don’t know how she does it. It’s so dry, and funny, but incredibly dark. It’s detached but also so present in each moment. I’m mystified by her. Her book is so good.

  I’m also reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I’m interested right now in reading a lot about love. Love, desire, sex. I’m trying to define love. Which sounds so stupid; how could you do that; but—because I recently broke up with my long-term partner—because I’m seeing new people now. I’m also dating women, in a serious way, for the first time. I’m thirty-one. I’m developmentally at my sexual peak. I’m thinking a lot about sex and love from a political standpoint too. I’m also looking very skeptically at our heteronormative values in love and commitment. I’m trying to understand a definition of it, and to see what else there is.

  Rail: You’re trying to put it down in words a thing that has no words to it. It’s not concrete.

  Gerard: I was at HarperCollins signing a bunch of books this morning, and I was talking to my editor about this. She is aware of this new book I’m writing and she’s also in a long-term relationship that’s different from others she’s ever been in. She and I have become very close, because of writing this book, and she knows my ex- well and she knows my story well. I asked her, you know, Erin, what is love? We don’t know and we only have this one word for it, yet it describes so many things. It’s an insufficient word to describe it. It contains and constitutes so much of the human experience, and because we only have this one word in the English language, it superimposes cultural expectations on situations that can’t sustain or meet those expectations. There are a million examples of this: heterosexual love, polyamorous love, sex that is separate from love, that has nothing to do with love—or relationships that in our most romantic moments meet the criteria for true love, but only last six months.

  In Sunshine State I was looking at belief, faith, and religion in the same way. What does it mean to believe that something is true? What does it mean to believe anything at all? Are our beliefs mutable; are they ironclad. These are people who tend to believe the immutable and eternal, but look at my parents’ story. Even their beliefs, as strong as they were, crumbled soon after they left that church. We weren’t indoctrinating ourselves daily so what does it mean to believe at all.

  What I observed about beliefs happened in the action of these stories. Something we can believe, is just to observe what these characters do, like Ralph and hoarding. I don’t have an official diagnosis for Ralph, so I can’t actually say he’s mentally ill, but we observe his behavior, and we see that his beliefs fall very outside the mainstream, based on the way that he behaves. Even if he says he believes one thing, we can see that his beliefs aren’t founded in his reality. What does it mean to believe? How do we stand up against challenges? What is the value of how you believe?—that’s what I’m trying to get at: how you believe.

  Rail: And does a belief have to go on forever?

  Gerard: And what is the expectation? Why is there an expectation? Why are we so afraid of changing? Why are we so afraid of our loved ones changing? Changing their beliefs?

  Rail: Speaking of love, can I ask about Ashley. Are she and “BFF” the same people?

  Gerard: Oh no, they are different people. “BFF”? I didn’t want to name her as a respect of privacy. But Ashley read the book and loved it. She really came out of a difficult situation, and “BFF” has also come out of a difficult situation too.

  Rail: Do you have contact with her?

  Gerard: No. We have lots of mutual friends. So they are both doing well now. Thank god, right?

  Rail: I wasn’t expecting that. It’s almost a happy-ever-after ending, right?

  Gerard: In “Records,” I have that coda at the end, the “after-words,” because I was thinking about time passing and things changing over time. For instance, I got the tattoos that “BFF” and I shared, covered up. Adolescence is a great time to look at if you’re thinking about the maturation of your mind. Then maturation is mapped on to your physical bodies. We carry that effect of our lived life, daily. I got that tattoo covered up by a tattoo, by someone who also affected trauma in my life. I, at the time, was really trying to grapple with the meaning of that, and that friendship. It feels very messy.

  Rail: There’s no reason it has to be figured out.

  Gerard: Patty Yumi Cottrell said something really smart: writing is not therapeutic in any way. [“Writing Is Not Therapeutic in Any Way,”interview by Claire Luchette, Lit Hub, March 21, 2017] My thought is that it’s not as if once you finish writing, you can leave that experience behind, and that you’ve figured that out now. The memory of it is a part of your neuroscience, which itself is not linear. Whereas in writing a story you reach a conclusion, in your mind you don’t have that. You know it’s not the only version of the story that exists in the world. There’s another version of that story that lives on in your brain. There’s a minor sense of peace that comes with telling a story of your trauma, but it’s not like it erases your trauma. I’m using the word trauma because it’s a single word but, there are things not necessarily traumatic, yet I have to continue to grapple with, as a human being in the world. You know how writers write about the same things over and over? It’s because we don’t figure it out. It’s because the things that we write about are emotional touchstones: we navigate there, and then we move away again, but not because we’ve figured them out and we’re perfectly at peace in our lives. It’s why writers are some of the most troubled people on the planet, because even though it’s the way that we process our lived experience, it’s not a form of therapy necessarily. It’s not like I’m at peace with what happened between “BFF” and I, nor will I ever be. Or with Mitch—like, I still don’t ever know.

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/what-makes-florida-so-florida-bc48762bee9c

  Michelle Lyn King
  Michelle Lyn King lives and writes in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in Shabby Doll House, Joyland, Brooklyn Magazine, Catapult, and The Fanzine.
  Apr 11
  What Makes Florida So Florida?
  Sarah Gerard went undercover and got hypnotized to understand what it means to be from the Sunshine State.

  Sunburst (Weston, Florida). By Francisco Anzola, via Flickr.

  I like to joke that Florida is the one ex-boyfriend I’ll never get over. It’s been eight years since I lived in the state, but it still fascinates me. I lived the first 18 years of my life there and I still haven’t come close to figuring out what makes Florida so strange, so alluring. When I learned that Sarah Gerard was publishing an essay collection about Florida, I knew I needed to read it.
  Gerard’s collection captures not what it’s like to visit Florida, but what it’s like to live there, an experience that has very little to do with theme parks or beach resorts. She writes on a myriad of topics — homelessness, residential development, teen drug culture, female friendship — and uses a new form for nearly every essay. In an essay on Amway and consumption, she blends fiction and nonfiction. In another, she uses the epistolary form to write to her childhood best friend. The book’s final essay is composed of vignettes detailing every significant animal encounter Gerard’s ever had. One of the things that makes Florida so unique is that it manages to encompass so many different identities — the sonic nightclub scene of Miami, the mega-church counties of North Florida, the old school preppiness of West Palm Beach — into one place. Like Florida itself, Sunshine State is a collage of voices and styles.
  I met Gerard at her apartment, and thanked her for inviting me into her home with a six-pack of Cigar City, a Tampa brewed beer. We started the interview by sipping tea. We moved on to the Cigar City about halfway through our conversation.
  Sunshine State (Harper Perennial) is a spectacular, deeply complex book. It is about so much more than just the state of Florida.
  Michelle Lyn King: I heard that Sunshine State started as a book called Tracks. Is that right?
  Sarah Gerard: Well, the book hadn’t been written then. That was a proposal that I was sending around. I was thinking about experiences in my life that made an impression. I’m really just describing a memoir right now. [Laughs] That’s just what a memoir is. I wanted to look at my young self as an artist, which I ultimately ended up doing, so that made its way into the new book. But then, also, I had this kind of specific trauma with a freight train, so I was planning on writing about that again. It’s funny the kinds of stories you carry with you throughout your life that you know someday you’re going to write. I’m still just…I don’t know if I’m really ready to get to that yet. Animals figured largely in the book. So, animal tracks were another kind of track.
  [But] people wanted a more specific idea. Editors wanted something they could hang a marketing plan on. And actually it did help me narrow in on more specific ideas, like the bird sanctuary. Things that were specific to that place. Place has always been something I’ve had a hard time understanding. In the past, I’ve been so focused on character. In Binary Star the voice is so isolated. And, like, America is the setting. It’s not as specific as Florida. Florida gave me characters, actual characters from that specific place.

  Author Sarah Gerard. Photo by Levi Walton
  MK: One thing that immediately stood out to me about the book is that — at least in some of the essays — it’s not always a book that’s so obviously about Florida. Sometimes, sometimes it is, like in the title essay, but other times it seems that it’s the details that are very Floridian. In “BFF,” you use Florida almost as an adjective. You describe the tramp-stamp as —
  SG: So Florida
  MK: So Florida, yeah. What does that phrase mean to you? What makes something so Florida?
  SG: I guess I’m referring to the cliche of trashiness. White trash. White poverty, bad education, drug abuse, trailer park, trailer queen. That’s what that means. But it’s troubling because along with that the word “tramp” is associated with it. We associate trashiness with female sexuality, looseness. Using sex as a means of exchange, which is what my friend in that essay winds up doing in certain ways. Using her sexuality to get by. I think [that’s] very characteristic of some people raised in Florida. It’s an experience in Florida that we’ve all at least seen.
  MK: Oh, definitely. I kept reading that essay — and other ones, especially the one where you’re talking about your senior year — and picturing people from my own school. One piece I really want to talk about is the Amway essay. I want to begin by talking about the form. You blend nonfiction and fiction, which is something you don’t really see a lot. How did you come to that decision?
  SG: I originally wanted to write about residential development in Florida and how it has shaped the landscape. A place where I decided I could do that was in the Bayou Club. I was really interested in how we associate economic success in this country with material possessions, and then how our lives kind of transform around us in this McMansion style. A good way to start digging into that idea of success was looking at my parents and Amway. I wanted to think about how touring those houses might have shaped my idea of success and how that might have guided my life. I wanted to peel away any delusion. I remember it so fondly, but with this cringe.
  I started the essay by reaching out to a real estate agent and telling her I’m a writer and asked if she could give me a tour of one of her houses. I actually got a lot of information that I found really valuable later on, but I could tell she would’ve talked to me differently if she’d thought I was actually in the market to buy this home. So, the next two tours I went on, I brought along a friend and basically told him to act like my husband. We dressed up, which was really awkward actually. I had a hard time deciding what to wear. Looking back, I never would’ve mistaken myself for a millionaire.
  MK: Oh, wow. What did you wear?
  SG: It was a thrift store dress that I wore with a silver belt, and I wore some high heels, and I brought one of my grandmother’s alligator skin bags. I tried to paint my nails, but I’m really bad at painting my nails, so there’s no way this person thought I was a millionaire. Although, one of the relators wound up looking me up. I used my real name because I had to email her, and she looked me up. She was like, “Ooh, you’re a writer.” She kind of convinced herself that I was this —
  MK: That you’re, like, Jonathan Franzen. Or, like, selling your books into major motion pictures.
  SG: Right, exactly. Yeah, so, for the next two tours I kept the recorder hidden in my bag and I’d already made the choice to use it as fiction. I wanted to be able to disappear into the fantasy. Plus, the quality of the recording was bad, so I was able to reshape those and use them as fiction. But the descriptions of the houses are accurate. The dialogue and actual story were not.
  MK: I didn’t really know much about Amway before reading the essay and it took me until you actually said Betsy DeVos’s name to realize its the same DeVos family, to realize she’s the wife of the founder. I kind of freaked out when I realized.
  SG: Oh my God. Isn’t it horrifying?
  MK: It’s insane.
  SG: Yeah. They’re so sinister. But it speaks to the degree to which we can delude ourselves. I actually believe that they believe they are…their records are clean, you know? That’s the terrifying thing. They’re so convinced.
  MK: And if there is one person they help, they believe that’s the person who speaks for everyone.
  SG: Exactly. Yeah. Well. Yes and no. This is when I start to doubt. It’s clear…they have all the numbers, right? It’s clear that the people who are endorsing the company are the highest level achievers in the company and they’ve been with the company forever. It’s very, very rare that someone actually rises to the top. Only so many people can be at the top. It’s organized that way. So, it’s not like they don’t have all the information. They just…it’s almost like they can’t live with themselves or something. Or it’s greed. It must just be greed.
  MK: I feel like maybe it’s greed and they’ve set up traps in their head so that they don’t exactly have to confront that fact.
  SG: Yeah.
  MK: One thing I want to talk about is money and class, specifically as it pertains to Florida. There is a lot of money and wealth in Florida — in places like the Bayou Club — but all of it — or a lot of it — is new money. It doesn’t have the same history and “class” as somewhere like Connecticut or Boston. Pretty much everyone I know who is wealthy in Florida is first generation wealthy, and there’s a gaudiness to the wealthy communities in Florida that I don’t see in a lot of other wealthy communities. Were greed and wealth something you were considering when writing the essay?
  SG: I don’t know if that was the point of the essay, but it was something that led me in there. I think I was actually more interested in my family, how we were able to fall for it at all. Me, I was a child. But I did. Once you learn to think a certain way, you can always return to that way of thinking. I remember exactly the ways that I would talk to myself as a person who was destined to be wealthy. It felt like it was inevitable as long as my parents stayed in Amway because it was something we continuously told ourselves, and everyone around us told us that, too.
  “I remember exactly the ways that I would talk to myself as a person who was destined to be wealthy. It felt like it was inevitable as long as my parents stayed in Amway…”
  MK: Through the process of writing the essay you wound up learning about your family. You learned that your mom had —
  SG: Had never liked it, yeah. And had been made to lie. Well, not lie, but conceal her feelings. She went along with it to support my dad because he believed in it so ardently. Yeah, so, what was I trying to get at about wealth? Looking back on it now, that way of thinking feels so empty to me. Having the values I have today, I can’t believe I could have ignored them. I don’t know if I’m saying that right. That I could have thought wealth was so important, I guess. It was a very selfish way of thinking. There’s a moment in the essay where I hurt my mom’s feelings. That disgusts me. It’s so shameful to think about that now. And that was really telling, actually. To see that these ideas would hurt my mother. It was very eye-opening.
  MK: I want to talk about the research you had to do about your family — especially your mom — for this collection. Especially in “Mother-Father God,” I imagine you almost had to research your mom, in a way. What was the “research” process like with your mom in that essay?
  SG: I did one long interview with her and then I called her a bunch of times after that and then emailed her. She sent me her prayer journal.
  MK: How much did you know before starting the essay?
  SG: Well, I remembered hearing about the Emma Curtis Hopkins College, and I knew the people who were involved in it. And I would go to church regularly. Less so as I got older, but they were people who were members of our community, so they’d come over to the house. They’d have meetings in the house. But I don’t know that I really understood…to me it felt like a big, important thing when I was a kid, and now I realize it was a small but fascinating effort by a really enthusiastic group of people. Very spiritually driven people. It’s interesting to me how the people who were involved in this were also successful in their careers. It’s kind of a hair-brained scheme, but Dell deChant was a professor of Theology at the University of South Florida. My mom had a master’s degree. These were real things, but it’s kind of a magical thinking venture. It’s interesting. It’s odd to me.
  MK: Did you give the essay to your parents after you finished it?
  SG: I sent the essay to both my parents. They both had thoughts about it. The way that I described my mom’s beliefs today is slightly different than she described to be on the phone or what she had described to me in the past. She said, “Oh, actually I don’t want to say that.” It was useful because it gave her a chance to be more specific or more accurate. My dad, too. I think my dad actually had some factual corrections about the timeline of the college, or who did what. It was a really interesting process. They were very open to it.
  MK: How did you decide on these essays for this book? I imagine it must’ve been hard to narrow down.
  SG: Well, the original proposal for Sunshine State had twelve essays. Four of them were compressed into two. And then I cut another two, I think. For instance, Linda Osmundson who appears in “Mother-Father God” was going to be her own essay. The Amway essay was going to be its own essay, separate from an essay on residential development. I’m glad you’re asking me this because now it’s all coming together. I mentioned the recordings I made earlier. Instead of trashing that essay on residential development I thought, well, we toured the Bayou Club anyway. I thought the essays would speak to each other in that way. So, then I got to use those audio recordings for fiction. We have to learn to use our tools in creative ways, or turn mistakes into opportunities. [Laughs]
  MK: I want to talk more about animals. It seems like one of the main through-lines in the book, and, speaking personally, I know animals were so central to my experience of Florida.
  SG: They just seemed to be omni-present as I was growing up in Florida. I think in the book they act as kind of spiritual guides. Or just…
  MK: Well, you talk about what brought you to the title essay originally was —
  SG: Birds.
  MK: Yeah. Having this experience with a bird.

  SG: Yeah. Exactly. They’re calling out to you, in a way. They’re kind of little symbols. I treat them as symbols in my life. I think I’m coming out of an elephant phase and I’m moving into an alligator phase right now. [Laughs] I said this to somebody recently. But for a long time I really identified with the elephant, and it’s nobility. Its docility, despite the fact that it’s so huge. If you look around my apartment you’ll probably see a lot of elephants here and there. They’re kind of hiding. Now I think I’m moving into an alligator phase. I’m really drawn to the alligator on the cover of Sunshine State. I’m feeling kind of fierce and misunderstood in my life, so I think the alligator is a better creature for me. But in all fairness, the alligator is a pretty docile creature, too. Unless you upset it.
  So, I think I wanted to write about animals in Sunshine State because they figure so largely in my memory of growing up in Florida. Especially the alligator. When I was nine we found an alligator in the ditch of our backyard and we had to call animal control. It was a nine-foot long alligator, and my neighbor had actually warned me about it. She showed me a picture of the dog that the alligator had eaten half of. That was etched in my memory. And then a kid in my school had been chased by an alligator in the park nearby because he was throwing marshmallows at it. Just things like that. We were so close to animals growing up there. I truly feel like I have an understanding of the Animal Kingdom. I’ve always felt close to animals in my life and aware of them and aware of their emotional world.
  MK: That’s a good transition to talk about the title essay. So, you had this experience with a bird, which led you to volunteer for six-weeks at The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in Indian Shores, Florida. The bird sanctuary turned out to have a great deal of controversy behind it. (The majority due to its owner, Ralph Heath Jr., who was accused of stealing money out of donation boxes and was illegally housing wild animals in a warehouse.) What did you know about the controversy before you started volunteering?
  SG: Nothing.
  MK: Nothing?
  SG: Nothing until I got there.
  MK: So that moment when she was like “Are you a journalist?” was just the first thing to tip you off?
  SG: Yeah. I was just like, Well, now I am. [Laughs] I should have maybe done more research up front. I didn’t even think to look in the news. I remembered it being just this quiet little out of the way place. I read their website. I even read a couple of their newsletters. But I didn’t go searching.
  MK: You weren’t like, “I wonder if the founder is a hoarder.” I wound up looking those pictures up. They were very upsetting.
  SG: Holy shit. I’m actually glad he wouldn’t let me in. I think I would’ve vomited.
  MK: Deeply, deeply disturbing. So, you set this volunteer session up, and were they just kind of like, Yeah come on down?
  SG: Yeah, they didn’t mention anything. They weren’t like, NO OUTSIDERS. They told me to stop by when I came down. I went down there. They told me to come back the next day and fill out an application because the volunteer coordinator wasn’t there. I came back. I told her I was a writer and then she asked if I was a journalist. From there, I just started interviewing people. The first person I talked to was this guy Chris, the groundskeeper. I followed him around for a day. We cleaned the pelican enclosure, I think. Originally I thought maybe he would be the star of the essay because he actually has an interesting story. He was addicted to Oxycontin and was arrested for trafficking or something and had to do a bunch of community service and lost his job. I was like, okay, well, this is kind of thematically relevant. I write a lot about addiction, and certainly Oxycontin in Florida was an epidemic. So, that was motivating. But then I just started overhearing talk. And in that first conversation with Chris the warehouse came up and I was like, What’s in the warehouse and he was like, You don’t know what’s in the warehouse. [laughs]. I was like, Uh, yeah, I do. But he wouldn’t tell me. I just got nosey. I followed the story.
  MK: There are people in that essay who, if it were a piece of fiction, I’d be like these people are not believable at all, but it’s nonfiction and it’s Florida, so…
  SG: Yeah. [Laughs] Who is your favorite character in the essay?
  MK: Jimbo. For sure.
  SG: Me too.
  MK: He’s incredible. The exchange where he’s like, Sometimes I imagine I’m a macho man, and you’re like, I knew better. He also really believes in Ralph’s character.
  SG: He really does. Even in the end when he was crying on the phone with me he knows that Ralph didn’t intend to do harm. That’s the heartbreaking thing about it.
  MK: It would have been easy for you to write Ralph as a villain, but the essay understands that it’s more complicated than that.
  SG: He’s just such a nice guy. He’s just so sweet. He reminds me of a child. I don’t know. I think it has a lot to do with his relationship with his father. Needing to fulfill his dad’s expectations. It has a lot to do with privilege, too. He never had to experience the hardships that the rest of us do. He never even had to have a job.
  MK: He also seems like he is not…I don’t think he understands humans very well. Perhaps because he understands animals so well.
  SG: Oh, yeah. I actually think Greg and Kelly are the most suspicious ones.
  MK: For sure. They reminded me of the eels in The Little Mermaid.
  SG: Oh, yeah. Wow. Good one. Nice nautical comparison. Yeah, they’re funny. Actually, the conure that I adopted at the end of that essay for four days was inspired by their conure, who was very cute that day.
  MK: I do really believe that Ralph’s goal was to save as many wild animals as possible. If I’d just read newspaper articles, I probably wouldn’t believe that, but the essay made me believe that.
  SG: One hundred percent. He dedicated his life to it. It’s the only thing he’s ever done.
  MK: As I was reading the essay, I was amazed by how many people were willing to talk to you and what they were willing to tell you.
  SG: They wanted to talk to me. Every one of them. Because it’s concerning.
  MK: And everyone in that essay firmly believes they haven’t done anything wrong.
  SG: I know. And yet they’ve all enabled him in some way.
  MK: They don’t think they have anything to hide.
  SG: Fuck. I know. It’s a mind trip. Yeah. Every one of them is complicit somehow. They tried to change or improve things from the inside. Each of them works really hard and cares about animals. Nobody gets paid very much. Most of them are volunteers or they work there part-time or they’re paid for part-time work but really wind up working there full-time hours. Even when they leave the sanctuary, they go on to found other sanctuaries. It’s really what they want to be doing. And, you know, it would be crushing for Ralph if he could in any way be convinced that these animals didn’t really love him in return.
  MK: Or that he had hurt them.
  SG: Or that he had actually hurt them. Hurt the thing he loved the most.
  MK: Yeah. The images are very disturbing.
  SG: Yeah. Can you imagine being the Florida Fish and Wildlife agent who had to search that place multiple times?
  MK: It reminded me of Grey Gardens, in a way. Like, pre-Jackie O clean up.
  SG: Oooh, yeah. Similar concept. He’s such an island, isn’t he? He’s not there anymore. They’ve actually rebranded. His sons bought it and I believe…what is his name? One of the rehabbers. Gary, I think is his name. He’d been volunteering for a long time and is now the general manager. So, that’s the comforting. Ralph is reportedly not involved, but who’s to say?
  MK: I want to talk about the essay “Records,” where you track your senior year of high school. What your research process like for that essay? Were you looking at old journals? Old pictures?
  SG: I began with the character of Jerod. That one began as two different essays, too. I was going to tell the story of Mitch and Jerod as two separate essays. Jerod was looking a lot at the Florida nightlife culture at that time. But I was also interested in his criminal record. I have a lot of friends like that, who’ve been in the penal system over and over again, or they’ve disappeared from my life because they were incarcerated. So, I began with wanting to find him. I didn’t know what happened to him. The last time I saw him was in 2009. I went to look for him and I couldn’t find him on Facebook. There was no trace of him on the internet. But I’m a really good sleuth. That led me to track him down. I knew he’d been arrested a couple of times, but I didn’t know the extent of it. He’d actually been in the jail since 2013 or something. Very recently. I finally found him in Indiana.
  But I kept trying to tell this story and I couldn’t. I was spiraling out into other people who were related to the story. I couldn’t find a through-line. I couldn’t draw a conclusion. I didn’t really know what it mean yet. I was telling all these individual stories and trying to tie them together and separately was trying to tell the story of Mitch, this experience of sexual assault with my boyfriend three days before I left for college. I couldn’t not be the victim in that story and I really didn’t want to be the victim, you know? That was not what I was interested in at all. When I finally began to imagine what it would be like to tell the whole story of that year it was…how do I explain this? I was finding that in telling the story of Mitch I couldn’t not tell the story of Jerod. I had to mention that I had this whole other boyfriend at the time. That’s when I was like, well, why is he appearing in this whole essay of his own? I think in some linked collections you can make connections like that. But it just didn’t click. I couldn’t see what it all meant until combined them, until I decided to talk about the entire year. I had to talk about it all.
  MK: Why did you decide to tell the essay in the present tense?
  SG: I think because, at that time, I didn’t have any retrospect. I wanted to be true to the experience of thinking and feeling all those things for the first time. It creates a sense of possible danger, because I don’t have any foresight.
  MK: I can say that as a reader, the present tense really kept the energy up, and seemed to almost match the energy of that time in your life. So much of that time in your life seems like it was about moving from place to place. Being in cars, going to the movie theater, going to someone’s house, going to a party. Just moving, constantly.
  SG: Yeah. And when you’re in ecstasy, there is only the present moment. Music is like that, too. You only hear this one beat at a time, but they’re all linked together. I wanted…what did you say a second ago? Oh. The energy. Yeah, I had a lot of energy at that time. My sexual impulses were all mixed up with my artistic impulses and the general impulsivity of being a teenager. I was trying to find myself. Trying to cobble together an identity through experimentation and different art forms and different people and modes of expression.
  MK: That comes across in the essay. It’s so tricky at that age. You’re trying on all these different personalities in a way you never are again. I want to talk about the edits you made to “BFF,” the epistolary essay about your relationship with your childhood best friends. They’re minimal, but seem pretty important. What kind of work did you do in changing it from a stand-alone chapbook (with Guillotine) to an essay in a collection?
  SG: Oh, wow. I’d have to look at my editorial notes from my editor. Well, in the chapbook it ends with her wedding, right?
  MK: And you’re looking at her husband.
  SG: Yeah. I think my editor thought it would be more fitting to end on this reflection on us. This bittersweet childhood moment of innocence. It did feel more accurate. In the chapbook I ended up moving chronologically — oddly, because I don’t do that elsewhere. It felt right to go from being 12 to her being married. I think it’s also maybe tacky to end on a picture I’d come across on the internet. It’s not a sentimental thing, you know? It’s sad, but it’s not something that’s special to us or in our relationship. It’s a moment that happened after our separation.
  MK: And then it’s also ultimately more about you. It’s about you deciding what that picture means to her and what it means to you. But it’s not an essay about you. It’s an essay about both of you.
  SG: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, so in that last memory, it’s us together, poolside. [Laughs] Right? Our feet are in the pool. We had these matching bathing suits. Except hers was purple and blue and white and pink and mine was green and pink and blue and all different colors. I think yellow, too.
  MK: Do you know if she read the chapbook?
  SG: I don’t know. I recently learned that she’s welding. She’s in welding school. I’m happy for her. But, no, I don’t know if she’s read the chapbook. She recently liked on Instagram — this is how insidious the internet is, right? This is what I know about her. Things I happen to see on friend’s feeds. But she recently liked a picture of my friend holding my book. So, I know she knows the book exists. I don’t know about the chapbook, though. It’s okay. I still love her. She’s a beautiful person.
  Patricia Engel on Florida, the Courage of Immigrants, and Writing a Novel of the Americas

  Patricia Engel’s new novel, Veins of the Ocean (Grove Press 2016), begins with one of the more arresting sequences I…
  electricliterature.com
  MK: One of the edits you made that I took note of is you talking about are sorry that you couldn’t love her in the right way and then — you don’t say this part in the chapbook — but in the way that she deserves.
  SG: Oh, yeah. Yeah. She does. She’s a beautiful person who has been through a lot. That’s what trauma does. It makes people protect themselves with their behavior.
  MK: In another interview you talked about how, short of doing something out of spite, there isn’t a reason not to write about someone.
  SG: And to protect their privacy.
  MK: Right. Yeah.
  SG: But it was never my intention to publicly embarrass her or have the last word or make her the bad guy. I would never want to do that. I just needed to resolve something in myself. It really hurt the fact that we could never….there had just been too much that came between us. There were too many things we had never said to one another and they had just piled on top of each other over the years. There was no way for us to talk about any of it without really hurting each other.
  MK: You take a great deal of blame in the essay and throughout the whole collection you expose these parts of yourself that are…less than favorable. I’m thinking of that scene in the Amway essay where you tell your mom you get everything you want.
  SG: [Laughs] God. So Embarassing.
  MK: Whenever I read nonfiction where the author hasn’t done anything wrong, I’m immediately like, You’re lying and I do not want to read this anymore. [Laughs] But was it difficult to include those parts of yourself at all? It would’ve been easy to just…not include them.
  SG: But it’s important to include. I think your writing should transform you and I think the only way to do that is by truly confronting yourself, who you are. That was really a part of who I was. I thought I was special because I was spoiled, that that was something I deserved and should be proud of. That’s a disgusting thing to have to admit, but I don’t think that’s who I am today. I mean, I laugh and say it’s embarrassing, but I don’t subscribe to that way of thinking anymore. A piece of writing should also show us how our thinking has changed over time and changes in the writing of the piece. I think that you can’t show how your thinking has transformed if you don’t include every step of it, every aspect of it. If you don’t really show the process. I think in the Amway essay I’m pretty clear about the fact that I don’t think that way anymore. I think I even say that it brings me shame to tell this story. That demonstrates how my thinking has evolved from that point.
  “Your writing should transform you and I think the only way to do that is by truly confronting yourself, who you are.”
  MK: Let’s talk about the last essay in the book. It’s really good and it’s really weird. I’ll admit that in my first reading, I really struggled with it. Let’s say that, up until that last essay, the most “experimental” essay in the collection is the Amway essay. But you’re told the rules of that piece. You’re given an intro that tells you basically, “this blends fiction and nonfiction.” With the last essay, you’re not really given a way to navigate it, at least not such a straightforward map. I really want to hear about your writing process with it. So, you went to see a hypnotist, right?
  SG: Yeah. I wanted her to help me remember all the animals I’d ever met.
  MK: Was the hypnotist in Florida?
  SG: She was in Florida, yeah. She was in Saint Petersburg.
  MK: How did you find her?
  SG: I Googled “Saint Petersburg hypnotist.” [Laughs] I called a couple offices and asked what their rates would be and what their methods were. And then she and I ended up talking for about a half an hour. I was like, Here’s what I want to do. It’s really weird. And she was like, Ooh, well, here’s how memory works. She was like, They’re like clusters. We talked about trauma and how a trauma memory is a like a flash-bang. She was up front in saying she couldn’t help me remember every single animal I ever met ever in my life, which was my initial intent. She was like, You just didn’t record every single one, but the ones that you come away with are the ones that have some emotional significance for you. You actually formed a bond with them. And I was like, well, that’s actually more interesting. I saw her and we went on this hypnotic journey to the bottom of a lake. We actually talked for a long time about my sensory inclinations, whether I’m more visual or auditory or sensory. She needed to find a pathway into my memory. I think we decided I was visual.
  MK: Were you taking notes during the session?
  SG: I couldn’t because I was hypnotized.
  MK: Oh, right. Obviously. So do you remember…do you not remember the actual. Sorry. I’m so fascinated by this.
  SG: I do and I don’t. She told met that I was allowed to fall asleep if I needed to, that I wouldn’t actually be asleep. It got really deep. She told me that I would continue to remember more animals in the coming days. So, for the whole time I was in Florida I was carrying around a digital recorder and as I was driving I would just be dictating into my recorder. I have notes in my phone. I have notes in my notebook. And then I organized them chronologically in a spreadsheet, and I took notes on each one. I needed a visual assignation for each animal in the essay so that it wasn’t just a dog at somebody’s house or a dog doing something. I needed specific and significant details. In the spreadsheet I have columns. There’s a column for the kind of animal, where they were or where I saw them, the year, and then what they were doing. Oh, and who — if they were domesticated animals — who they belonged to. That was another column. Then I had to turn that into…I had decided in advance that I wanted to write it in reverse chronological order, so I had to find a way to show you, the reader, that it was moving in reverse chronological order. I tried to show this with my age, with my birthday. If you saw another birthday come along then you’d know a year had passed. Then my editor finally convinced me that we should have a couple of more markers. I really wanted it to be…I wanted not to have to be so overt. I wanted it to be shown in the text.
  We had to decide where the moments of transition would be. There are a couple of places where you can see that the text changes shape. The shape of the text shows you that you’ve begun a new epic or moved backwards into a new era. The rhythm would also change slightly. It was a fun and interesting and frustrating and challenging piece to write.
  It was actually in the original proposal. When I was talking to Cal Morgan about it, I wanted to — he’s the one who acquired the book — originally I wanted it to be any animal I’d ever met, ever, and I said, “Well, would that include animal videos I’ve watched online?” This is the craziness of research, right? Making a note of every time I watched an animal video on the internet. And I was like, Well, I can mine my internet history. It felt so overwhelming because in the raw data itself there’s no story. You have to find the significance of it through — well, in my case — through the emotional through line of my memory. These are the animals that were significant to me that I’ve met in my life, and significant for some reason.
  MK: I’d like to end by asking what you’re working on now. I know you have your Hazlitt column and I heard you’re returning to fiction.
  SG: Yeah, I’m writing a novel now. I can’t say anything more about that. But I’m always writing something.
  MK: How does it feel to return to fiction?
  SG: So fun. I’m having a great time with it. I’m teaching fiction now. I’ve learned a lot about fiction having to teach it. It’s fun to be writing it again, and it always…I think the frustrating thing about writing in a political climate like this one is that it’s very distracting. Especially with fiction I feel like I need to be kind of isolated, which was not the case when I was writing this book, although I did go away for a month at one point. I was so productive. I wrote like three essays. But writing fiction…I don’t know. I feel so affected by what’s happening. It makes me second guess what I’m writing. That’s a really good thing, but it has stopped me as a writer. Is the thing I’m saying worth saying right now? Is this an important thing to say right now? Usually when I ask myself that question the answer is yes, so thankfully there’s that. But it’s also hard to forget the outside world while writing. It’s so tempting to read the news, which gets me so off-track.
  MK: What are you reading right now that isn’t the news?
  SG: I talked to Lida Yukanavitch recently. I interviewed her, so I just read again The Book of Joan. Oh, I’m also reading Jess Ardnt’s book Large Animals. It’s really good. The stories are really short and the language is so crazy and playful.

• Interview - http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/sarah-gerard-binary-star/#_

  QUOTE:
  Sometimes I fantasize about it, but I don't know what's best. I'm not sure what would actually work. I think I would be a very good member of an organization like that, but I would not be a very good leader of an organization like that, because I feel ethically caught between doing one thing and another. I spend a lot of time considering.
  SARAH GERARD'S SHATTERED GLASS
  By RACHEL HURN

  Published 01/20/15
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  ABOVE: SARAH GERARD. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOSH WOOL

  At the moment, Sarah Gerard's life is rife with celestial metaphor. Her much anticipated debut novel, Binary Star, was released by Two Dollar Radio last week to energetic praise. Even The Millions couldn't help milking the metaphor: "Sarah Gerard's star is rising."

  Binary Star follows two characters, an anorexic young woman obsessed with celebrity magazines, Red Bull, and Hydroxycut, and her alcoholic boyfriend, who, like binary stars, circle each other but can never quite make contact. They hurtle through the world like a star hurtles through the solar system, their energy dangerous and ready to ignite in one luminous burst. Fast-paced, visceral, and distinctly tragic, Binary Star is a must read for anyone curious about what it means to be a body in space.

  RACHEL HURN: There's a lot of violence in your book, whether it's the narrator's violence against her own body, or if it's the ending of the novel, which I won't talk about specifically, but the ending is very violent and radical. I was wondering about your thoughts on the violence that surrounds Binary Star?

  SARAH GERARD: There's a scene where the narrator and her boyfriend watch a documentary about the Earth Liberation Front setting fire to a logging station, and the question comes up about how to define violence and whether property destruction is considered violence. In fact, the same question came up surrounding the Ferguson protests and riots. The question is, why do we in this racial context value property over human life? Or why, when nobody is actually injured, do we condemn this reaction, which is actually just a stand against the systemic violence of capitalism? It's a theme that runs through the book. We have this top-down violence in the way we consume food and images of celebrity bodies and other forms of systemic or top-down violence, and then we have the violence between the narrator and her boyfriend in the form of their sex life. The only way that he can get off is by tying her up, or through this fantasy of domination. It's only later on in the book when they work together to bring her to orgasm that she actually can orgasm—where he's much gentler. Where he doesn't have this fantasy or force.

  HURN: How do you think as a character he got to the place where he could set aside his need for domination?

  GERARD: I think in a relationship those things can happen accidentally. You try communicating with each other in a variety of ways to see what works, and you form new habits. I don't think it actually worked for them in the end.

  HURN: Speaking of violence against property and institutions, you wrote about that before for The New York Times, correct? Remind me what it was called?

  GERARD: It's called "Earthlings, Anarchists, and Other Animals." That was also an Earth Liberation Front action, but they set fire to a housing development. It was, at the time, the most expensive case of domestic sabotage in US history. It was to protest a new development that was encroaching on nearby forests. But nobody was injured.

  HURN: Your book also talks about the history of releasing animals from labs.

  GERARD: Yes, they're similar. The ELF and the ALF—the Animals Liberation Front—are similar. They're insurrectionary groups, but they're decentralized so the cells operated independently. And there was no governing body. The ALF came first, and they targeting laboratories, slaughterhouses, and they would release animals. Or just stop operations somehow.

  HURN: Do you ever think about participating in these protests?

  GERARD: Sometimes I fantasize about it, but I don't know what's best. I'm not sure what would actually work. I think I would be a very good member of an organization like that, but I would not be a very good leader of an organization like that, because I feel ethically caught between doing one thing and another. I spend a lot of time considering.

  HURN: It would be hard to make a decision.

  GERARD: Yeah, I'm not a very action-oriented person, unless it has to do with writing.

  HURN: Do you consider writing to be passive?

  GERARD: I think speaking out has a lot of value.

  HURN: Definitely. I was going to say you basically are a member of those organizations by bringing them to the light, or discussing the issues they're concerned about in your own work.

  GERARD: Yes. Sometimes I fantasize about burning things down though.

  HURN: [laughs] So do I! Actually, breaking things. I think about breaking things a lot.

  GERARD: Just the sound of a window shattering.

  HURN: Oh my god, yes.

  GERARD: It's so satisfying.

  HURN: When I first moved to New York, I had fantasies of taking a big-ass rock in my hand and just throwing it through a huge piece of glass. This was probably for a lot of reasons, but I also think it was the energy of the city that I was not used to. It was overwhelming. Pressure, not enough time to yourself and to think your own thoughts.

  GERARD: I think the sound of a window shattering also represents the beginning of disruption of the status quo. It never ends with the window shattering, it always incites a riot. I think that's part of the fantasy for me.

  HURN: Yeah, it's like we need to stop this cycle that we're on so something drastic has to be done to stop it. Anorexia is a major topic in your novel. When we're talking about breaking glass signifying the start of a different order, a new system coming and breaking what came before it, this idea made me think of your experience. Other than going to rehab or going to therapy, it seems so hard to bring about a new order of health and nonviolence to one's body when they're addicted to this system of anorexia. Was there a moment for you where the glass was shattered?

  GERARD: Yeah, it was my face. It was my face that was shattered in a train accident. But actually, it didn't happen immediately. When the glass shatters, everything isn't automatically different. Everything has to—

  HURN: You have to clean up the glass.

  GERARD: Exactly. And the riot afterward, or the process of cleaning up the glass, for me was the couple of years that I spent healing from that accident. I had to get a tooth replaced, and I had to go through several rounds of oral surgery, and my oral surgeon said if I was throwing up my food he wasn't going to perform the surgery. There was a lot of damage to my upper jaw, and he would have to rebuild the bone and the gum, and he had to do this implant, which was very painful. It took over a year and several rounds of surgery to do that. Recovery is a long, complicated process, and sometimes I'm surprised to find that certain things are still difficult for me. In my everyday life sometimes certain foods seem unappetizing. Or a certain bad experience will make me think, "Maybe this person would react differently to me if I were skinnier." A sick thought. But I think the train accident was the moment when I realized this fantasy is never going to be a reality for me now because this scar is never going to go away. Now the possibility of perfection has been literally taken away from me. Not that it was every achievable, but it made it very visible. And the process of recovery has been learning to be comfortable with imperfection, learning to love imperfection. Or even just doing away with the idea that perfection is even a reality for anyone.

  HURN: I think that's also something we go through coming of age. The crushing realization of getting older and that bad things can happen—I'm not invincible, my body's not invincible. I used to think it would be the worst thing on earth if I couldn't run as much as I wanted to, or be as athletic as I wanted to be. If anything, for me, going through injury has given me a healthier relationship with my body, where I see that I was pushing for perfection. And now I think, actually, no, perfection is impossible for everybody. It's much more freeing.

  GERARD: Well, yeah, and it's also like, perfection for how long? Our bodies are all going to break down and die. I mean, how long do you need to be perfect to be happy? What even gave us the idea that perfection is happiness anyway? One of the things that I realized when I was really thin and really sick is that in order to maintain that thinness, which I was never happy with in the first place, I reached a point where I was consistently miserable. I was sick, I was tired, I was hungry all the time. Nobody liked me anymore. I was in a really unhappy relationship with someone else who was also sick. None of my friends approved of my lifestyle, so I alienated all of my friends. I was just alone and hungry and tired and nervous all of the time. And I was still not thin enough, and even if I had reached my goal weight, whatever it was that day, how long would I stay there and what would I have to do to keep it? So perfection never equals happiness. And even if you were happy at a certain weight for however long, it would be temporary because our bodies aren't made to stay the same all of the time.

  HURN: Then the moment you weren't perfect anymore, then what? Your world just shatters and falls apart? It's an extremely shallow outlook on life.

  GERARD: It's delusional.

  HURN: You're working on another book that's related to all of this, right?

  GERARD: Well, I've been reading a lot about animals because animals also get eating disorders. Interesting, right?

  HURN: Like what?

  GERARD: For instance, if you breed a pig to be very thinner sometimes it just stops eating all together. And then other pigs will sort of pick up on it and stop eating too. Also certain primates stop eating for certain periods of time when they feel shunned by their groups, which is a social reaction. If they're shamed for a behavior that's outside of the standards of their group, their group will ostracize them, and they will stop eating for like six days. But I've also been interviewing people about their struggles with eating of any kind—I include crash dieting and overeating. I thought I was writing a proposal for a book length work, but now I think it's going to be a proposal for an essay collection.

  BINARY STAR IS OUT NOW VIA TWO DOLLAR RADIO.

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/interview-sarah-gerard-author-of-binary-star-52ed86d3075c

  QUOTE:
  The prose reflects the characters’ behavior. Sparse and lean, Gerard’s writing hurtles forward with a momentum that seems bent on burning up, much like the stars her protagonist studies. It’s a novel that takes risks, both in style and subject matter. Women are told that writing about eating disorders is cliché, or that if they write about their bodies or their own narcissism they won’t be taken seriously. Sarah Gerard refuses to let those experiences be devalued and instead puts them at the center of a serious literary work.
  Kristen Felicetti
  Feb 10, 2015
  INTERVIEW: Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star

  Sarah Gerard’s new novel Binary Star is an intense story about a young astronomy student struggling with anorexia and her relationship with a long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. Together, the destructive couple takes a road trip around the United States and experiments with veganarchism. As she starves and purges, he consumes. The prose reflects the characters’ behavior. Sparse and lean, Gerard’s writing hurtles forward with a momentum that seems bent on burning up, much like the stars her protagonist studies. It’s a novel that takes risks, both in style and subject matter. Women are told that writing about eating disorders is cliché, or that if they write about their bodies or their own narcissism they won’t be taken seriously. Sarah Gerard refuses to let those experiences be devalued and instead puts them at the center of a serious literary work.
  Gerard previously published a chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, as well as numerous essays and short stories, but Binary Star is her first novel. I spoke with her at Housing Works Bookstore Café.
  Kristen Felicetti: Binary Star started as a memoir, and then you decided to make it a novel. Why a novel?
  Sarah Gerard: If I had written it as a memoir, I would have had to be very careful. Because both of the characters are very sick people, I would have had to be very careful about how I treated them and who might feel exposed by this story. I didn’t want to have to worry about that. I wanted instead to put the story entirely inside the protagonist’s point of view and allow her to say whatever she wanted about the things she was struggling with. In that regard, it’s completely fictional, because everything is being filtered through the very skewed point of view of this protagonist. And it’s clear that sometimes the way she perceives things is not totally factual, or is not objectively accurate.
  I think people have done really creative things with memoir — Lidia Yuknavitch is a very poetic memoirist, Maggie Nelson has done a lot with the essay form and memoir, and of course, Kate Zambreno. But I am a fiction writer and I wanted to give myself complete liberty.
  KF: In Things I Told My Mother, you said that your best writing begins from a place that frightens you. I think that’s probably a pretty common place for many writers and artists. From the start, what frightened you about writing Binary Star?
  SG: There have been lots of books about women with eating disorders and I wanted to challenge myself to write about it in a new way. I wanted it to not just be a sappy story about a girl who thinks she’s ugly, because it’s so much more than that. I kind of wanted to explode that form and speak to my own history with this, and give myself credit for having suffered in a way that is genuine and vital. I also wanted to remove blame from the victim — that being the protagonist, or being myself — and sort of exteriorize it and look at what might have contributed to the sickness in the first place, what sort of cultural triggers there might have been, and to see how those play out in her immediate surroundings.
  KF: The style of the book is really distinctive and different from the style of your other writing. Was it immediately a conscious choice to write it that way or was that just how the story demanded to be written?
  SG: I just kept hearing the opening lines repeating in my head, and they had a certain velocity that I thought was really exciting and attractive. I’m not even sure what it means to be traditional anymore, because everybody writes in their own voice and in a style that is appropriate for that piece of writing. This was the character’s voice and I wanted to give her a voice that was her own. I think I was sort of tired of trying to write in a way that would be widely acceptable. Like ‘this is how you’re supposed to write’. And ‘where would you shelve this in a bookstore?’ — that was not even a concern I wanted to acknowledge. I knew that the feeling when I began to write Binary Star was one that could carry me through an entire book. That’s what mattered to me.
  KF: Did you think about the voice a lot? Did you read aloud to yourself? Did you move around while you wrote it?
  SG: I always read aloud to myself, especially when I’m editing. When I was writing the book, I found myself physically exhausted by the end of day. It’s a physically tense book; I would find that my body was actually tense while I was writing. I didn’t get up and move around very much, but I think you can feel it. I think you can feel the urge to move when you’re reading it. That’s what I wanted: the feeling of pacing.
  KF: There’s an ambiguity about who is saying what in the book. But did you have, with each line, an idea of who is speaking or who is being addressed?
  SG: Sometimes, but sometimes not. In the prologue, there’s one point where he or she says, “You don’t even know me.” And the very next line is, “You don’t even know me.” It sounds like an argument, but I’m not really sure who says it first. And it doesn’t really matter. I think in a lot of ways they’re the same person, but they’re also opposites of each other. They could also both be her — the protagonist.
  KF: You had a successful Kickstarter campaign to support your book tour. It’s nice how the tour will echo the book itself. Part of Binary Star involves a couple driving around the country, and your tour will be you and your husband traveling around the country. Is there something about traveling/moving that inspires you or intrigues you? Is there something that interests you about making similar movements as your book?
  SG: I’ve done this drive before. Maybe not exactly, like I haven’t stopped in each of the places we’re stopping; for example, I’ve never been to Missoula, Montana before. The road trip in the book is roughly one that I took with a boyfriend in college, so I’ve been to a lot of these places and I’m pretty excited to see them again. It’s been many years since I was in Portland and I really love Portland. I haven’t driven down the California coast in a long time, so I’m excited to do that. I’d like to stop in Big Sur. I haven’t been to Ojai since I was 15. In that way, it’s pretty exciting to see how places have changed, or how my memory serves me, because memory is so imperfect.
  But of course travel is really important to all writers. It’s pretty boring just to stay in New York all the time. I was actually telling my father today that I’m excited not to see concrete everywhere I look anymore. After awhile New York looks the same, everywhere you go looks the same, and that’s not very inspiring. I’ll also be journaling and blogging the whole time. My husband’s a filmmaker, so he’ll be shooting video. Gathering a lot of raw material is pretty important, even if we’re not sure what we’ll do with it yet. We’ll do something. We always do.
  KF: You’ve been conducting on-camera interviews with people who have struggled with food and will be doing more interviews around the country when you tour. Can you talk more about this project? What is the goal of these interviews?
  SG: I’m writing an essay about the process of conducting the interviews and about the interviews, themselves. I’m also doing a lot of research about eating disorders in the animal kingdom and trying to find the similarities. Again, to remove individual blame from people struggling with eating disorders. There’s a lot of ridicule in our culture of people with eating disorders. Not just eating disorders, but mental health in general, I think, is probably the last frontier of empathy in our culture. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a health care worker, but I am somebody who has been through this before and I’m also a writer. I think with that I can probably do something useful.
  I think it will be impossible to do the interviews in every city, but I would like to talk to at least a few people while we’re traveling.
  KF: In the acknowledgements, your book ends with the note, “And to all who have struggled and continue to struggle with food: keep fighting. There is a world for you.” And in your Kickstarter video, you talk about wanting to help others who’ve struggled with anorexia. Binary Star is a novel with literary ambitions, but I feel that’s not the only goal. It seems you also want to connect to other people who’ve had the same struggles, or show them that that experience is not one to be devalued. Do you feel that artists have any kind of social responsibility? Is that something that’s important to you? Or do you consciously try to address that in your work?
  SG: I think people always expect artists to have a larger understanding of the issues they write about. People have looked to writers and artists forever and asked them to be cultural commentators or political commentators, which can be very scary because I can only speak to my own perspective, and I’m figuring this out along with everybody else. I’m not even sure I’m the best person to talk about it, whatever it is, but I’m someone who can and does. I think if nothing else, being outspoken about something like eating disorders can be significant all by itself. I don’t have a solution necessarily, but I do think that having a conversation about it is probably the first step. Sharing an experience is probably the first step. And I like to think I’ve learned something since I began to recover from my anorexia about what it takes to be healthy again.
  My eating disorder is no longer the most important thing in my life. I’ve come to a place where I care about being alive for at least one more day and also being a positive force in the world. An eating disorder, or any kind of addiction, is an incredibly selfish disease and one that affects a whole community of people. It’s never something that someone suffers with alone. My addiction affected my parents. It cost them thousands and thousands of dollars to put me through rehab and to fly to Buffalo to save me after I injured myself horribly jumping from a moving freight train. It affected my boyfriend at the time, who was struggling with his own addiction. It hurt all of the friends I alienated. The people I knew in rehab and the people I knew afterward, it affected them, too. Countless, countless people. The students who were in my class when I was student teaching, who I’m sure knew that I was going through something awful. My mentor at the high school where I was teaching, who found me in the supply closet crying into a tissue, who had invested so many hours in my training and was relying on me daily. I then had to abandon my post to go recover in a different state. I dropped out of school. I was just not responsible for anyone or anything. I realize that now. Not that I regret anything, because I’ve learned so much from that experience, but I sincerely wish I hadn’t hurt so many people with my disease. I think only in that way is it an individual responsibility. It’s not my fault that I was anorexic, but it was my responsibility to do something about it.
  KF: Along those lines, in another interview you talked about how you want this tour to partially be a conversation about problems in our culture. What are some subjects you hope to talk about when you meet with readers? I know it’s a vast topic, but what are some of the ideas you’ve been forming about how we talk about women’s bodies, about food, about Americans’ values, and Americans’ approach to food?
  SG: I think the way that we talk about food is pretty unhealthy. I don’t even know where to begin. Just walk around a grocery store and see how things are marketed. Start there. We have all kinds of hidden ingredients in our food. Things that are addictive and that these companies know full well are poisonous. Companies just lie and lie about what they’re selling to people and what it should mean to them emotionally, and how it should be integrated into our lives. I can’t believe that Lunchables even exist, with the way that they’re designed, down to their ingredients and the shapes of the meat slices, and the arrangement of the different elements. They’re marketed to families, particularly low-income families, and made of complete crap — white flour, salt and sugar, that’s it. And they’re marketed to people who systemically don’t have the time or money to make healthier choices for their children, and who, in that way, are fully taken advantage of. This is how processed food perpetuates socioeconomic and racial inequality in our country. And that’s just the beginning, because as children grow up, they learn to associate these foods with happy memories — in the lunchroom with their friends, for example — on top of which, these foods are designed to produce chemically pleasurable feelings, when there is really nothing nutritious about them. In fact, they’re terribly unhealthy, and have been linked to rising rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
  KF: What about women’s bodies? Women, or maybe just everyone, are affected by certain things, like dieting or image, and sometimes that’s a conflict, especially if you perceive yourself as a smart woman or a feminist. Have you struggled with that thought process?
  SG: Like, “How should I look today?” What do you mean?
  KF: Like: I don’t like that this kind of stuff even concerns me, or that I spend time thinking about it. I want to be an artist. I want to be an intellectual.
  SG: No, I hate it, I hate it. I don’t think about that stuff very much anymore, on purpose.
  KF: Of course. Or even if it’s not about you, for somebody else, to make it more removed.
  SG: I find that the way I look at other women is sometimes insidiously judgmental, but I think I’ve practiced excommunicating those ideas. Because what is beauty, anyway? I’ve decided not to treat myself that way. To speak for myself, I don’t have a mirror in my house. I don’t have a scale in my house. I don’t shave my legs very often. I don’t shave my armpits, it’s been years since I’ve shaved my armpits. I don’t wear make-up. I know that’s a pretty privileged position, because I’m white and petite, and have some degree of what could be considered attractiveness, so I can get away with that and not think of it very much. But I consider it, in my own life, considering my own history, a rather rebellious lifestyle. This is not to say that women who choose to shave their armpits, or who care about fashion — I actually think fashion is very interesting — or who enjoy wearing makeup shouldn’t do that. It has everything to do with what makes women feel confident as individuals, but by their own personal standards. That is, without male intervention. With that said, I do think we need to totally revolutionize the way we talk about women’s bodies. There are certain magazines that I propose we boycott for exactly that reason and plenty of T.V. shows that I wish weren’t on the air because they really do violence. We can do violence with our ideas, and with our words, and with our images, and we do, every day. I would like to encourage women everywhere to shut their eyes to those things and think about what they would like to do with their lives. And what kind of force they’d like to be in the world. Because we have the power to do that, if we can focus our thinking, collectively.
  KF: You seem like a pretty well-read person from other interviews, and you used to be a bookseller at McNally Jackson. What books were an inspirational point for Binary Star?
  SG: Well, the epigraph to Binary Star is Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. I think when people think of the Situationists, they always go to Guy Debord, but they should really be going to Raoul Vaneigem, because his work is a call to action, and especially a call to art making, and included in that is love making. I prefer him. I think a lot of his ideas found their way into Binary Star, intentionally or not.
  I brought Wim Wenders’s book Once along with me, but there’s another book of photographs by Tarkovsky, called Instant Light, that I came across around the same time as Once. Those were pretty inspirational, too. I like to think of the road trip in Binary Star in a sort of photographic way, like snapshots that they took on the road. Tarkovsky’s Polaroids are very intimate, some are intimate portraits of his family. There’s a sort of blurriness and a dual tonality, of greens and purples.
  Clarice Lispector is always an inspiration to me. I was reading The Hour of the Star when I wrote Binary Star, but actually my favorite book of hers is The Passion According to G.H. That has been much more influential to my writing than The Hour of the Star.
  KF: Do you have set reading habits? Or a way that you approach reading? And a second part to the question — what are you reading now and what do you plan to bring on tour?
  SG: Oh! I haven’t decided what I’m bringing on tour yet. I just finished Luke B. Goebel’s book Fourteen Stories, None Of Them Are Yours. And just now, I picked up a copy of Ethan Frome that I found sitting on the table. I included it on a list of my ten favorite novels under 150 pages recently, but it’s been a few years since I’ve read it. So I’m reading it again. Next, it’s Men Explain Things to Me. I’m making it a point to read essay collections by women this year.
  My reading habits are pretty rigid. I read for about an hour and a half in the morning, or maybe two hours, before I go to work. I get up around 7 and then I read. Of course I read every time I’m on the train, or waiting somewhere. I don’t have a very long commute anymore, but I used to read for an hour on the train when I was going to work at McNally Jackson.
  The things I’m reading usually depend on what I’m studying at the time, for whatever thing it is that I’m writing. So I read a lot of books about animals this past year. Before I leave for the tour, I’d like to give myself a little more freedom to read literary fiction, because I was reading non-fiction for a long time and I need to just relax. I always have a stack of things to get around to: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is next in my stack. I just bought Danielle Dutton’s novel S P R A W L. I encouraged my dad to buy Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper earlier today. I reviewed it for the LA Review of Books along with Elisabeth Sheffield’s book Helen Keller Really Lived, because they’re very similar in the way that they talk about women’s bodies and motherhood narratives and marriage. They’re both pretty radical novels. I read a lot of women writers, not intentionally, but it’s a point of pride, I think. I’ll read four women in a row, and then realize that I’ve read four in a row, and think, Gosh, should I read a man next? And, Nah, it’s okay.

QUOTE:
Through writing that is arresting and powerful, Gerard limns the worlds she knew as a child and as an adult.
The Stories of Nonfiction
Neal Wyatt
Library Journal. 142.10 (June 1, 2017): p134.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Essays, commentary, and recollections make for delightful reading, allowing bibliophiles to spend rime in the company of curious and eclectic minds. These six books look at novelists who love to eat, an animal's place in a world of humans, writers who seek to share their truth, and more.

[...]

SUNSHINE STATE (Harper Perennial. Apr. 2017. ISBN 9780062434876. pap. $15.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062434883) by Sarah Gerard is a deep dive into the landscape of Florida's Gulf Coast. Some works, such as the opening, are an intensely intimate undressing of a friendship frayed to bits. Others veer toward reportage, such as the title essay about a bird sanctuary, the long, difficult history of its owner, and Gerard's own experiences there. Through writing that is arresting and powerful, in vignettes that shine a dim light on topics ranging from religion to death to social policies, and via clearly' delineated character portraits, Gerard limns the worlds she knew as a child and as an adult.

By Neal Wyatt

Neal Wyatt compiles LJ's online feature Wyatt's World and is the author of The Readers' Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007). She is a collection development and readers' advisory librarian from Virginia. Those interested in contributing to The Reader's Shelf should contact her directly at Readers_Shelf@comcast.net

QUOTE:
brings a sharp eye to recollections of
growing up on Florida's Gulf Coast.
An intimate journey reveals a Florida few
visitors would ever discover.
Gerard, Sarah: SUNSHINE STATE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gerard, Sarah SUNSHINE STATE Perennial/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $15.99 4, 11 ISBN: 978-0-06-243487-6
Decidedly odd characters emerge in eight autobiographical essays.Combining journalism and memoir, Gerard (Binary
Star, 2015, etc.), a novelist, essayist, and columnist for the online journal Hazlitt, brings a sharp eye to recollections of
growing up on Florida's Gulf Coast. Notable for sharply drawn portraits, her essays depict a host of unusual, eccentric
men and women. In "Mother-Father God," the author introduces the earnest spiritual leader of the Unity-Clearwater
congregation, a New Thought church, where, for more than a decade, her parents were devoted members. Church
activities were omnipresent in her life, leading her to wonder, as an adult, why her parents joined, why they left, and
how that early connection to the church shaped her. Gerard juxtaposes her parents' biographies with a history of the
New Thought movement, particularly Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, that arose in late-19th-century America.
Like those early followers, the author's parents found in Unity-Clearwater "positive, reaffirming messages," especially
the message that "people are not punished for their sins but punished by their sins." Gerard admits that she has been
drawn to the church's teaching that individuals create potential in the world by first believing in it. Maybe this ongoing
belief in potential attracted her parents to become distributors for Amway, a sketchy marketing corporation accused of
being a pyramid scheme. Their involvement, no less enthusiastic than in the church, is the subject of the partly
fictionalized essay "Going Diamond," featuring a portrait of Amway's co-founder Richard DeVos, whose son is the
husband of the current nominee for Secretary of Education. Another essay details, somewhat repetitively, the author's
high school years, marked by drugs, alcohol, sex, and, surprisingly, classical singing lessons. The title essay, although it
also would have benefited from further editing, vividly portrays the bizarre director of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary,
where Gerard visited as a child and returned as a volunteer to conduct research. "The Mayor of Williams Park" offers an
engaging profile of an unlikely activist working to ameliorate homelessness. An intimate journey reveals a Florida few
visitors would ever discover.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Gerard, Sarah: SUNSHINE STATE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921698&it=r&asid=e44b17a369d5dcbe572c3d9419168142.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921698
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QUOTE:
Gerard's collection leaves an indelible impression. Fans of literary nonfiction and dark reverie will welcome
it.
Sunshine State: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Sunshine State: Essays
Sarah Gerard. Harper Perennial, $15.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-243487-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Brave, keenly observational, and humanitarian, Gerard's (Binary Star) collection of essays illuminates the stark realities
of Florida's Gulf Coast. With a mixture of investigative journalism and firsthand experience, she brings to life
outspoken zealots, hopeless romantics, and escapist youth. She describes the hunger of Christian Scientists for earthly
and spiritual wellness, Amway members for self-determined success, adolescents for reckless euphoria, testosteroneflooded
males for dominance, and the underprivileged for nothing more than adequate housing and shelter. Gerard is a
virtuoso of language, which in her hands is precise, unlabored, and quietly wrought with emotion. As evinced by the
extensive bibliography and endnotes, she is also a very diligent journalist. To some, her thorough analyses of flawed
legislation, business, religion, and literary journalism may feel longwinded at times, but readers interested in those
topics will be fascinated. The chapters that will reach any reader are her deeply sad yet valiant personal essays on youth
and death. Gerard's collection leaves an indelible impression. Fans of literary nonfiction and dark reverie will welcome
it. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Sunshine State: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149939&it=r&asid=114c9c1f6260436615971d41abde411d.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473149939
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QUOTE:
Binary Star shines even as it charts the breaking apart of worlds and the spiral-in of events,
Binary Star
California Bookwatch.
(Apr. 2015):
COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Binary Star
Sarah Gerard
Two Dollar Radio
141 East Town Street, Suite 200, Columbus, OH 43215
9781937512255, $16.00, www.twodollarradio.com
Hard drinking, anorexic habits, changing lives, a long-distance relationship, and love that burns out quickly: all these
are facets of Binary Star, a poetic and evocative read that tells of death, rebirth, and change.
Its metaphors are exact and visual, its sense of setting and character is compelling, and yet there's fluidity about its
countenance that creates a blend between observation and impression something that may stymie readers who expect
their stories to be handed to them on one-dimensional plates.
The narrative is charged with scientific allusions and imagery: "I sleep a deep, hyperbolic sleep all the way to Raleigh. I
awake with my face in the sun. It is wet with sweat. I'm nauseous. My mouth tastes like acid." Heavily subjective and
descriptive, this approach may not be for everyone; but it should be noted there are plenty of novels on the market that
are singular. Binary Star shines even as it charts the breaking apart of worlds and the spiral-in of events, and is a special
recommendation for the surreal poet-turned-reader who will find its scientific links to psychological states of mind to be
inviting.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Binary Star." California Bookwatch, Apr. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA410904537&it=r&asid=d3ca437f8d95bd15ce1444aa3bde8a2a.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A410904537
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QUOTE:
Gerard has produced a powerful, poetic, and widely rentable novel that eludes easy classification.
Space oddity
Publishers Weekly.
261.51 (Dec. 8, 2014): p1.
COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Binary Star
Sarah Gerard. Two Dollar Radio (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-937512-25-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A teacher in training struggles with anorexia and a troubled relationship in this fast-moving debut novel in verse by
Gerard (author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother). The unnamed narrator, who weighs 98 pounds at the story's
outset, thinks about her hunger, fear, guilt, and personal disgust while reflecting on her tumultuous long-distance
relationship with her alcoholic lover, John. She recalls the previous winter when she and John drove along the perimeter
of the continental United States. The narrative follows the couple's journey northwest from John's apartment in
Chicago, south down the Pacific coast, east across the South, and north alongside the Atlantic. As their respective
compulsions grow increasingly out of control, their relationship begins to resemble a dying star. Gerard's spare and
methodical prose mirrors the narrator's obsessiveness. Many passages read like concise notes taken at an astronomy
lecture, and the narrator speeds through the events and dialogue of her road trip with John, listing details rather than
describing them. The pages catalogue consumption: what characters eat and drink, what they read, what pills they take
and how often. The cold distance of the protagonist's tone also complements the form of the book and its allusions to
outer space. Gerard has produced a powerful, poetic, and widely rentable novel that eludes easy classification. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Space oddity." Publishers Weekly, 8 Dec. 2014, p. 1. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA393350203&it=r&asid=5ea964097d54b08f489d55e37114837b.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A393350203
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QUOTE:
may be the finest fictional treatment of anorexia
nervosa currently in print. Certainly, it is stunningly original.
It's a difficult read, and one that resists easy narratives of catharsis and cure, but there's beauty there, too.
Sarah Gerard: Binary Star
Anneke Schwob
The Carolina Quarterly.
64.3 (Spring 2015): p132.
COPYRIGHT 2015 The Carolina Quarterly
http://www.unc.edu/depts/cqonline/backissues.html
Full Text:
Sarah Gerard: Binary Star
Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, February 2015. 172pp.
Binary Star, the debut novel by New School MFA Sarah Gerard, may be the finest fictional treatment of anorexia
nervosa currently in print. Certainly, it is stunningly original. Attempting to craft a literary genealogy of eating
disorders brings you up, inevitably, against two genres, recurring ad infinitum: the memoir, and the YA novel. While
there are superlative offerings in both categories--Marya Hornbacher's Wasted and Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls
spring immediately to mind-the general trend is towards a muted, self-help aesthetic. Their protagonists have Issueswith-a-capital-I
and they are unflinching when describing anorexia's many horrors. Progress may be slow and stilting
but their teenage protagonists, generally, move towards recovery. (Their friends and enablers, on the other hand, may
not be so lucky; their fate is just as often to become the sacrificial object lesson). The issue book resists in particular
idiopathy and incoherence: its waifish protagonists are destroying themselves, but they have their reasons.
The nameless voice at the center of Binary Star is clearly, defiantly damaged. Her reasons, however, elude us: she has a
loving-if-distant relationship with her mother; she is passionate about her astronomy studies. And yet she starves. The
relationship at the novel's center is between the narrator and her alcoholic, long-distance boyfriend, John. Throughout
the book's narrative core-divided into sections beautifully titled "The First Dredge-Up," "The Second Dredge-Up" etcwe
follow the pair on an ill conceived cross-country road trip. They fight, fuck, and fail to keep their promises to each
other: his, not to drink; hers, to eat something. They reinforce each other's damage, but are not at base its cause. Their
collective failure to care for themselves is fed by intellectual activist rage, directed outwards: against factory farms,
conspicuous consumption, capitalism. John and the narrator fling themselves against these millennial bogeymen and
make battering rams of their own bodies. In his review of Binary Star, Justin Taylor said of the pair that they "rightly
revolt against the insane standards of a sick society." They make their bodies the site of protest: the personal is political.
Gerard's world is postmodern and disenchanted. Pharmaceutical on-brands abound. The duo's road trip is scattered with
the material detritus of the gas station convenience store. The narrator, an astronomer-in-training, looks to the stars not
out of wonder but because she finds the metaphors of their material existence comforting. Gerard's is a secular world.
Yet, reading Binary Star, I am reminded of nothing so much as early female Christian mystics who mortified their flesh
in divine rituals of starvation and transcendence. Hair shirts and crowns of thorns have been replaced by precisely
divided celery sticks and Hydroxycut, but still the narrator seems to push through the ritual of starvation as a kind of
searching. Even in her precise physical accounting of the heavens, there is a search for transcendence. In the book's
early stages, it resists narrative in favor of a series of beautiful, iterating prose poems. One, alone on the page, simply
reads: "Mass is the numerical measure of inertia and a fundamental measure of the matter in an object." Gerard's
narrator is trying to reduce her mass, to leave herself, as she says on the next page, with "no part of my body touching
any other part." She is trying to reduce her physical matter, but at the same time to take the measure of just how much
she might matter in the world. Or, perhaps, of what it means to matter altogether.
Gerard's prose circles back on itself as her protagonist struggles to make meaning from matter. The same beats reiterate
and proliferate across the text. The text feels incantatory, ritualistic, finding meaning in the minute deformations of its
repetition. In two stunning pages, Gerard runs through the patterns of self-help mantras: "Think about ...," "Tell yourself
...," "I want ..." Within the echo chamber of disease, however, these mantras collapse under an ugly weight: "Make a list
of every way in which you're imperfect, I say. Tell yourself that each item is correct. Make a list of fears. Tell yourself
they're present." The repetition takes on a satirical edge and inches towards hysteria as it remains trapped in reflexive,
endlessly proliferating self-hatred. Binary Star is uninterested in moving beyond the crystalline boundaries of its
narrator's mind. It makes for a claustrophobic experience, bringing the reader into uncomfortable sympathy with its
(dis)order. It's a difficult read, and one that resists easy narratives of catharsis and cure, but there's beauty there, too.
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Schwob, Anneke
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Schwob, Anneke. "Sarah Gerard: Binary Star." The Carolina Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2015, p. 132+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA414264040&it=r&asid=c4d24de5a0b72463585ccea1ee9df49d.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A414264040

Wyatt, Neal. "The Stories of Nonfiction." Library Journal, 1 June 2017, p. 134. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494891747&it=r&asid=d9d435f6516d72078315bcafe96eff81. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Gerard, Sarah: SUNSHINE STATE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921698&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Sunshine State: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149939&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Binary Star." California Bookwatch, Apr. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA410904537&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Space oddity." Publishers Weekly, 8 Dec. 2014, p. 1. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA393350203&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. Schwob, Anneke. "Sarah Gerard: Binary Star." The Carolina Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2015, p. 132+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA414264040&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2017/04/13/522778179/all-roads-lead-back-to-florida-in-sunshine-state
  Word count: 765

  QUOTE:
  Gerard crafts a nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic. Sunshine State is not a glowing encomium of Florida, nor is it a snarky takedown. Instead, it's a drifting, psychogeographical exploration of a place she once called home — and that, in return, has come to live inside her.
  All Roads Lead Back To Florida In 'Sunshine State'

  April 13, 20177:00 AM ET
  JASON HELLER
  Sunshine State
  Sunshine State
  Essays
  by Sarah Gerard

  Paperback, 359 pages purchase

  In Sarah Gerard's debut, the 2015 novel Binary Star, her unnamed protagonist undergoes a metamorphosis of metaphorical proportions. A road trip with her boyfriend takes them to the darkest regions of inner space, and Gerard's body and psyche undergo startling transitions. In the book, she also tackles topics close to heart and experiences, including eating disorders, which she's struggled with in her own life. In Sunshine State, her penetrating and deeply felt debut collection of essays, Gerard once again draws on the experiences and environment of her own life — specifically, her formative years in Florida.

  I was a kid in Florida in the '70s and '80s, not far from the Tampa-St. Petersburg area where Gerard grew up. "Mother-Father God" — the piece in Sunshine State that comes closest to straightforward autobiography — uncannily evokes that time and place, right down to the Jimmy Buffett T-shirts, banks of palms and "lakes teeming with alligators." It's the story of how her parents met, told simply and without excess sentimentality. But that plainspoken tale is woven into a journalistic examination of New Thought, a spiritual movement dating to the 1800s in which Gerard's parents became swept up during the '80s. Gerard strikes just the right balance between objective distance and glimpsed emotion. She also establishes the dynamic she uses to great effect throughout the book: unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history.

  'Binary Star' Is A Hard, Harrowing Look Into Inner Space
  BOOK REVIEWS
  'Binary Star' Is A Hard, Harrowing Look Into Inner Space
  In "Going Diamond," her parents' stint as Amway salespeople — which itself becomes as cultish as their time in the New Thought movement — spins off into an account of the famous home-and-beauty company's business model and motivational philosophy through the years, as well as its insidious colonization of the upward aspirations of working people. Again, Gerard's careful layering of first-person memories and big-picture reporting lends substance to what might otherwise be lightweight recollections of childhood. Not that her autobiographical material doesn't stand on its own; "Records" is a coming-of-age tale set to a backdrop of '90s indie rock and hardcore, only its immersive, music-punctuated narrative dissolves into a coldly harrowing testimony about date rape. Gerard juggles nostalgia, criticism, romance and violence with pitch-perfect pathos.

  Gerard strikes just the right balance between objective distance and glimpsed emotion.
  "Are you a journalist?" the coordinator of a seabird sanctuary in Pinellas County asks Gerard in Sunshine State's eponymous essay. "I'm more of a memoirist," Gerard answers. She's at the sanctuary for a six-week stint of gathering research for her piece on Florida's preservation efforts. Through profiles and firsthand anecdotes, her story leads her to Ulysses S. Grant, beer magnates and the internecine politics and corruption of the animal sanctuary world (no, really). Along the way, she deftly mixes the elemental enormity of thunderstorms in the Gulf of Mexico with the delicate ecological balance — always on the verge of cataclysmic disruption — that marks the interplay of natural and man-made forces in Florida. "I felt I was on the trail of something ancient," Gerard observes. Her writing, lucid yet atmospheric, takes on a timeless ebb and flow.

  Sunshine State doesn't confine itself to its titular locale. It also ventures into other places, both real and virtual, from Cleveland to Reddit. But all those roads lead back to Florida, which Gerard imbues with the eerie gravitational pull of both hometowns and black holes. In an age where the crazy-from-the-heat, ripped-from-the-headlines "Florida Man" has become a popular meme, and where the state as a whole has become in increasingly contentious political hotbed, Gerard crafts a nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic. Sunshine State is not a glowing encomium of Florida, nor is it a snarky takedown. Instead, it's a drifting, psychogeographical exploration of a place she once called home — and that, in return, has come to live inside her.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

• Tampa Bay Times
  http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/review-gerards-sunshine-state-a-complex-portrait-of-self-and-state/2320973
  Word count: 1266

  QUOTE:
  Florida is often played for laughs in literature, but Gerard knows it too well to do anything that simple. The shadows bring depth to Sunshine State.
  Review: Gerard's 'Sunshine State' a complex portrait of self and state

  Colette BancroftColette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
  Thursday, April 20, 2017 8:00am
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  Sarah Gerard, author of "Sunshine State."A permanently injured American oystercatcher is pictured at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in 2016.A nonresident pelican hangs out at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, which was founded in 1971 and recently reopened as the Seaside Seabird Sanctuary.
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  Sarah Gerard, author of "Sunshine State."A permanently injured American oystercatcher is pictured at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in 2016.A nonresident pelican hangs out at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, which was founded in 1971 and recently reopened as the Seaside Seabird Sanctuary.
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  Florida has long been a place people run away to, a place to reinvent yourself and leave the past behind, as attested by its long and notorious history as adopted home to every variety of con artist imaginable.

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  Sarah Gerard was born and raised here. Sunshine State, her new collection of essays, is animated by the awareness of a native who knows Florida, for better and for worse, and wants to get at the truths inside the cons.

  Gerard grew up in Pinellas County. Her mother, Pat Gerard, served as Largo's mayor and is now a Pinellas County commissioner. Her father, Eric Gerard, was a newspaper reporter at the Evening Independent and later ran an advertising agency.

  Gerard, who's in her early 30s, published a well-reviewed novel, Binary Star, in 2015. In Sunshine State, she writes nonfiction, about her youth and family and also about what seem like typical Florida subjects — pyramid schemes, public figures who go off the rails, subdivisions full of McMansions — but she never writes about them in typical ways.

  Sunshine State is a sort of memoir, its essays ranging widely in style and degree of intimacy. Some are clearly personal, like the first essay, "BFF," a simmering prose poem about one of those brink-of-adolescence friendships that can be among the most intense relationships of one's life. Addressed in second person to "you," it chronicles all the ways the friendship goes bad but concludes with a crystal of memory: "This is the before time: before the real hurt came. We exist in the perfect sweetness of girlhood with our feet in a pool, with matching bathing suits, with egrets stalking through the grass behind us and lizards wending their subtle ways across leaves. We are diving in the water. We're clean."

  "Records," another personal essay, is darker, set when Gerard was a student in the arts magnet program at Gibbs High School. It captures the woozy, surreal life of a kid who spends days practicing fiercely for a demanding singing recital and nights doing ecstasy at raves under the Sunshine Skyway and having complicated relationships with inadvisable boyfriends — discipline and abandon in a fascinating dance.

  Some of the book's longer essays span Gerard's personal life and larger subjects on which she reports journalistically, like "Mother-Father-God." It recounts her mother's abusive first marriage, her escape from it and her marriage to Gerard's father. That union hits a rocky patch that leads the family to intense involvement in Unity-Clearwater, a church for a faith historically related to Christian Science that emphasizes spiritual healing and prosperity. For a while, that faith is all-consuming — until it's not.

  The same is true of another enthusiasm the family embraces: Amway (less religion, more prosperity gospel). In "Going Diamond," Gerard traces the history of Amway, "a multilevel marketing corporation. Some call it a pyramid scheme. In 2015, its parent company, Alticor, claimed transglobal sales of $9.5 billion."

  Amway was founded by Rich DeVos, father-in-law of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Gerard notes the family's longtime political involvements. Rich DeVos has a Florida home, of course, in Windsor, "where you go when you bypass Palm Beach. ... There's no such thing as class in Windsor — everyone is as rich as everybody else. In Windsor, Rich DeVos can catch some rays in peace. No one bothers him about 'ethical this' and 'fraudulent that.' "

  Gerard and her parents are swept up in the company's promises of success, always measured in extravagant material terms — although, she notes, many Amway sellers make in the neighborhood of $200 a month from it. Gerard weaves into the essay a series of visits she makes, posing as a potential buyer, to new houses in Pinellas County subdivisions. The houses are ridiculously large and stuffed with useless amenities, yet just as seductive as those Amway promises. "I think of my family's time in Amway as achievement tourism," she writes. "We left reality for a moment and believed the impossible was possible." How Florida is that?

  Even more Florida is the title essay. It's the strange saga of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in Indian Shores and its founder, Ralph Heath, from their days of golden promise to their mutual collapse into chaos.

  Gerard works at the sanctuary as a volunteer to research the story, remembering it from childhood as an idyllic spot. "I thought I would write an essay about birds," she tells us. "I felt I was on the trail of something ancient. I felt I was hunting something powerful and primal."

  The sanctuary, founded in 1971, certainly had its glory days, helping, for example, to bring brown pelicans back from the brink of extinction. At its height, it had 100,000 visitors a year. Heath, a son of privilege himself who made a glamorous marriage to a scion of the Busch brewing fortune, had more than 15 minutes of fame.

  But by the time Gerard comes on the scene, the sanctuary's finances are collapsing. Heath is divorced, estranged from his sons and most of his friends, getting into trouble for things like trying to sell the same Corvette to two different buyers on eBay.

  He's spending most of his time in a warehouse where he keeps some 700 birds — "The scene had a post-apocalyptic wash" — as employees struggle to keep the sanctuary afloat. (It recently reopened under the control of Heath's family as the Seaside Seabird Sanctuary.)

  Still, Heath tells Gerard that he can't let an animal die if there's any way to keep it alive. She relates that to an employee.

  " 'I watched him cry for seventy-two hours straight over Snowball dying,' Jimbo said. 'That was a pigeon. And he didn't shed a tear for his mother. ... He really is committed to birds.' "

  How Heath goes from seabird savior to a bird-stuffed warehouse that gets 54 violation notices from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is a haunting story — again, one of believing the impossible is possible — that Gerard tells with insight and skill.

  Florida is often played for laughs in literature, but Gerard knows it too well to do anything that simple. The shadows bring depth to Sunshine State.

  Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-state-of-post-truth/
  Word count: 1603

  The State of Post-Truth
  By Anya Ventura

  29 0 2

  MAY 4, 2017

  WHAT IS FLORIDA? As one of the original 11 states in the Confederacy, the North feels distinctly Southern but the South swings more to the tropical. Transplants, escapees from other parts, are everywhere, as are the strip malls in all their bland ubiquity. Florida’s closest companion is California, at least Walt Disney thought so, with its oranges and Spanish Missions and gentle coastline, but Florida has fewer natural resources around which to organize much industry. Even the ground, comprised of flaky limestone, is always threatening to sink in on itself. Where California has Hollywood glamour and New Age mysticism, Florida has kitsch. While people go to Hollywood to become movie stars, they go to Tampa to misbehave on reality TV. Florida, according to historian Gary Mormino, has usurped California as the “capital of weirdness.”
  Sarah Gerard’s memoir-in-essays Sunshine State is the newest book to dissect the corrupted paradise that is Florida. Gerard is from Tampa Bay — where this critic also grew up — and her book perfectly captures the idiosyncrasies of the Gulf Coast. The collection’s titular essay scrutinizes the saga of a seabird sanctuary driven into the ground by an eccentric Howard Hughes type. “I remember it being a place of encounters — with strange species, with wild instincts,” she recalls of the sanctuary, but she might as well be writing about the state itself. Sunshine State features the obligatory cast of Florida characters — millionaires, addicts, grandparents, true believers, sexual predators, and exotic wildlife — but the carnival is softened by Gerard’s nostalgic gaze.
  The collection is part reportage, part millennial love letter to lost youth, a native daughter’s attempt to sharpen her understanding of self against the whetstone of history and society. In these essays, the writer excavates photographs, old documents, diaries, and correspondences, to take inventory of the past that formed her. John Rothschild once wrote that “Florida is spiritually unclaimed. On this higher level, it does not seem to exist.” In it, he found “no hero of history around which the population can rally,” which he attributed to “the inevitable result of the invention of a past by the public relations departments.” The paradox of the Florida memoir is the paradox of memory itself in a state that’s always paving over whatever past hasn’t been wiped away by the last hurricane, but over and over we find Gerard combing through the remains. “This is the before time,” she writes in “BFF,” the electric first essay in the collection, before listing the series of lies the two best friends once told each other — one who would stay in Florida and become a stripper, the other a writer in New York.
  What slowly emerges throughout the course of Gerard’s searching is a clear-eyed dismantling of the American dream: the idea that we are the individual architects of our fates, each with the power to will for ourselves the lives we want, the abundance we desire — wealth we trust will lead to true happiness. In “Going Diamond,” Gerard describes her parents’ brief seduction by the Amway (short for The “American Way”) pyramid scheme, and its promises of luxury through just a little hard work. “Dreambuilding is Amway’s profit engine,” she claims. A product of white suburbia (only child, dance lessons, many trips to the mall), Gerard writes: “A house with four bedrooms came to seem normal; I wanted five. I wanted a library. I wanted a hot tub. I wanted a spiral staircase with a wrought iron banister, and a playroom, and a whirlpool bathtub, and a room just for practicing ballet, and a fitness center, and a poolside bar.”
  Gerard has a keen ear for absurdist logic, the contortions of language (the phrase “alternative fact” comes to mind) through which the dreamer rebuffs reality. Sunshine State is full of such dreamers: Christian Scientists who would wish away cancerous tumors, realtors showing homes with all the festive vacuity their profession requires. They are tragic-comic characters who embody the state’s combination of beauty, sadness, hope, and greed. In “Going Diamond,” Gerard recounts a conversation with a real estate agent extolling the gated community’s “natural bayou features.”
  “Tom Fazio is the golf course designer,” says Dale. “He was pretty green and environmentally friendly, kind of before it was all really cool, and that’s what he does, is he builds the course around the natural landscape without changing it.”
  “Doesn’t the golf course itself change it?” I say.
  “Does the course change the landscape?” says Dale.
  “Yeah, doesn’t the golf course itself change the landscape?” I say.
  “It does, but I think he tries not to change the natural landscape, but to design the course around it,” says Dale. “Like, all these holes going right next to the Bayou Crossing Waterway. It’s … it’s … it’s part of it.”
  We drive on.
  In other essays, we see the various ways the dream evaporates, the illusions thinned. “The Mayor of Williams Park” is a piece about Florida’s treatment of its homeless, those outside the middle-class fantasy. In “Mother-Father-God,” Gerard probes her parents’ belief in New Thought, an offshoot of Christian Science, and what its emphasis on wrong thinking means for the victims of domestic violence her mother, herself a survivor, made a career of helping. “Sunshine State,” investigates the corruption, the layers of competing truths, in the despoiled seabird sanctuary. Founded by Ralph Heath, the one-time husband of the Anheuser-Busch heiress — a man deranged by wealth — the sanctuary is an example of how unchecked desires can turn rancid. When Gerard asks Ralph about the charges of embezzlement, he can only repeat, “We were never able to verify that account.”
  Within the past decade, the genre of nonfiction has become a theater to stage the culture’s own anxieties around verification. For her part, Gerard is careful to cite her sources. A memoirist with a reporter’s methods, she is assiduous in her attempts to hound out the truth, however slippery, from its hideouts. The essay “Sunshine State” begins with the following disclaimer: “Characters in the following story are presenting their own versions of events and do not necessarily reflect the truth, which we may never know.” She takes pains to pad the personal with the authority of fact, as if to inoculate against any charges of self-indulgence. But at times the research is not fully digested, characters are introduced and lost in the muddle, and the urgency of the story — its true pathos — is buried in bureaucratic detail.
  Those looking for a larger conclusion about Florida, and what it all means, will be disappointed, but the essays in the collection do gesture toward some bleak realities. Didion’s jittery deployment of ’60s California — symbol of a national breakdown — has yet to be done for Florida in the Age of Trump. Because Florida, as some have suggested, is a microcosm of larger ruptures. Florida is the state of Elián González, Terri Schiavo, and Trayvon Martin. Florida was the first state to adopt stand-your-ground laws, as well as the birthplace of the National Enquirer. Florida was the site of the 2000 election scandal and the Pulse nightclub massacre. It leads the country in identity theft and tax fraud, has one plastic surgeon for every 39 residents, and no state income tax. While the rest of the country would rather dismiss deregulated Florida as a laughable aberration, all signs point to it as the ultimate manifestation of what is in store. It is a dystopia best visualized by Gerard’s description of the Windsor country club — its wetlands drained, residents monied and fortressed, streets purged of danger, real or perceived — where the rich play as the rest of the planet floods:
  There’s no such thing as class in Windsor — everyone is as rich as everybody else. In Windsor, Rich DeVos can catch some rays in peace. No one bothers him about “ethical this” and “fraudulent that.” He plays golf all day. He never has to mow the lawn or wait at a traffic light.
  In Windsor, Rich is surrounded by civilized people. There are no termites. The pool is always eighty degrees. The beach is walking distance. There are no sharks in the water, even at night. Birds never shit on his car in Windsor. There are no loud tourists in Windsor. There’s no media. There’s plenty of shade. There are no alligators.
  The people are all Rich’s friends in Windsor. People always agree with him here. In Windsor, there is only small talk. Everyone donates to the charities of Rich’s choosing. He gets a hole in one every day.
  In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary elected “post-truth” the word of the year, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” We have what could be called the first Florida presidency: an ongoing theater of the absurd in which the true seat of government is not Washington but Mar-a-Lago, held by not an evil man, necessarily, so much as the self-tanned brand of volatile narcissist — a Florida Man, to be sure — that history has proved most dangerous to people everywhere. If it was once golden California that embodied all the best and worst of the country’s dreams, perhaps now Florida — oneiric, savage, tabloidish Florida — is the spiritual center of the United States.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2015/01/15/376093692/binary-star-is-a-hard-harrowing-look-into-inner-space
  Word count: 762

  QUOTE:
  Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body.
  'Binary Star' Is A Hard, Harrowing Look Into Inner Space

  January 15, 20157:03 AM ET
  JASON HELLER
  Binary Star
  Binary Star
  by Sarah Gerard

  Paperback, 166 pages purchase

  In 2012 Sarah Gerard wrote a powerful essay for The New York Times about her experiences with bulimia, anorexia, and addiction. It's a harrowing read, but only half as much so as her debut novel, Binary Star. In it, Gerard's unnamed, semi-autobiographical protagonist takes a road trip with her boyfriend John. He's an alcoholic whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic; she's succumbing to an eating disorder that's wasting her away.

  The trip is first an escape, then an odyssey, then an extended metaphor for a tragic metamorphosis. As Gerard's character struggles to shed pound after pound, she ponders scientific facts about various cosmic phenomenon — to the point where the weightlessness of space symbolizes something far more poignantly earthbound.

  Binary Star is not a light read. It's told in swift, brutal strokes, all wound into dizzying loops of prose. The namelessness of the book's character is magnified each time she chants the names of the celebrities she wishes she looked like, from Lady Gaga to Paris Hilton. In her obsession with diet pills and thigh gaps, an underlying crisis emerges: Young and drifting, she's searching for identity.

  She counts down her weight like NASA counts down a rocket launch, and her rapturous tangents into astrophysics — descriptions of dying stars, anecdotes about cosmonauts — add an unnerving dimension. Well under 200 pages, the book itself is slim. It seems like one more manifestation of Gerard's deep-soul probe, a tendency to see herself in every aspect of existence around her.

  The book deals openly with narcissism, and its protagonist doesn't shy away from such harsh self-interpretation. With her "bulimia teeth" — ruined by gastric acid and malnutrition — she takes an almost perverse pride in her physical deterioration. As her relationship with John turns from rocky to surreal to sexually dysfunctional, her narrative voice becomes detached, even dislocated.

  She's an observer of her own walking, breathing decay, which only makes her sporadic forays into the cold beauty of science feel more desperately chilling by contrast. A visit to a strip club in New Orleans brings her body-image issues into aching focus; her internal monologue is rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal. Every time she tightens her belt, her sense of reality shrinks along with her waist.

  Gerard walks a tightrope, and she rarely missteps. When she does, she errs on the side of trying too hard to make everything connect. Later in the book, her character becomes a vegan, and she and her boyfriend embark on a quixotic quest to become activists. The story strains itself trying to link a vegan's refusal to eat animal products with an anorexic's refusal to eat enough of anything; it's a worthy concept, but here it's done too casually, almost comically, to make an impact.

  Binary Star also takes commercialism to task, particularly of the big-agriculture-and-pharmaceutical variety. The problem is, Gerard is just as apt to rely on hackneyed, page-filling litanies of brand names as she is to poetically explore what those things might signify. Similarly, the book's examination of mass media and body image stalls about halfway through, leaving one of the most promising elements of Gerard's character twisting in the wind.

  "The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its fate," Gerard writes early in Binary Star. The obviousness of this double entendre, and others, doesn't detract from the book's overall elegance and force. It's an activist novel, and while it doesn't always succeed on that level, Gerard is able to strike a careful balance between the real-world issue of eating disorders and sheer, emotional punch.

  There are many threads at play in Binary Star, threads that don't mesh as resonantly as they could but still accentuate the messy rawness that elevates it far beyond a sad story told sadly. Hope even makes an appearance, or at least the last stage before hope becomes possible. Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club and author of the novel Taft 2012.

• BWR
  http://bwr.ua.edu/review-binary-star-by-sarah-gerard/
  Word count: 979

  Review: BINARY STAR by Sarah Gerard
  Jan 20, 2016 | Archive, Reviews

  Binary Star
  Sarah Gerard
  2015
  Two Dollar Radio
  182 pages
  Review by REEM ABU-BAKER
  Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star plunges readers into the mind of its unnamed narrator as she struggles with anorexia and bulimia, road-trips around the States with her alcoholic long-distance boyfriend John, and studies and teaches astronomy at Adelphi University. The narrator’s thoughts are punctuated by brief sections referencing the star systems that she studies. The lyrical narration shifts feverishly between time and space, between thought and dialogue, internal and external—the setting is a field in North Dakota, a strip club in New Orleans, a classroom in New York, the diet page of a celebrity gossip rag, the looping thoughts of the narrator’s disease.
  Fictional portrayals of unwell young adults often run the risk of romanticizing addiction and self-hatred. There is a point at the beginning of Binary Star—with lines like “[They would] reimagine themselves as cosmic beings, bound by nothing. … They called it psychosis” working to flatten the cosmic and the bodily—when I worried that a lyric novel about both anorexia and star systems would inevitably fall into this trap and be a beautiful book about a beautiful wounded girl. Instead, Gerard presents these romanticizations, but rejects them by forcing the reader, almost cruelly, to understand the unnamed female narrator’s eating disorder, her quest for perfection, her obsession with the size and shape of the self. I see myself in the counted celery sticks, the endless coffees and Red Bulls. Gerard highlights the ordinariness of these routines and worries, but the narrator’s sickness never relents. Gerard subjects the reader to it, the endless repetition of refusal, weigh-ins, purges, lies. Caffeine and energy drinks and beers on empty stomachs. To read Binary Star is to feel the tedium and the fatigue, to want the narrator to sleep, to laugh, to get better. She doesn’t. The cycles repeat.
  The core of Binary Star is its prose. The narrator is driven by obsession, and she renders her thoughts in short sentences stitched into almost-as-short paragraphs, so the type on the page almost appears lineated. A glance says that this world is stuttering and broken.
  The novel’s disjointed structure relies in part on the poetic pressure Gerard places on language. Words slip between their multiple meanings. The celestial body becomes the narrator’s body. Matter into matter, mass into mass. The stars in the sky and the stars in the tabloids. Which kind of revolution are we talking about now? At times, the prose even slips into chant, which helps illuminate the uncomfortably performative aspects of unhealthy behavior while also lending a rhythm and speed for the reader:
  Tomorrow, I will lead a test on starlight.
  1. Stars are born in clouds of gas and
  a. Things
  b. Arms
  c. Tummy
  d. Ass
  Stars are born of gravitational collapse.
  Stay away from the vodka, John.
  One more.
  Two less.
  A hundred.
  More.
  A dense, hot core.
  Binary Star is also a road novel. Gerard is refreshingly honest about the long road trip the narrator and John take—mostly it’s just the ugly outskirts of cities, and long expanses of nothing scattered with gas stations, chain restaurants, and motels. Mostly it’s kind of rote and boring, the U.S. another nauseating backdrop for the narrator and John to enact their codependency against. Perhaps this sounds like a criticism, but it isn’t. The narrative never really dwells on the place of the road, and the way the characters experience it provides a necessary relatability to a book that so frequently dwells in a sense of disassociation.
  Although they both struggle with their own self-destructive, addictive behavior, John and the narrator occupy their environments in nearly opposite ways. Alcoholic, volatile John takes up space, takes up arms against whatever is outside of him. He fights his surroundings. The narrator tries to disappear, tries to get her body to eat itself. She wants the world to hurt her.
  And yet, despite the bodily nature of the narrator’s illness, her narration is decidedly disembodied. The first person voice weighs herself on the hour, examines her profile in the mirror, fantasizes about what she could look like. What she wants most of all is not a smaller body or a different body, but no body at all. At times, the narration seems to come from the stars, something gaseous, suspended.
  Early in Binary Star, John joins the narrator in her veganism (which she claims is for health reasons) after he reads a book about factory farming. John’s movement into alcoholism corresponds to the growing militancy of his beliefs. He identifies as a liberator of animals, and he promotes their cause by verbally attacking the humans around him. The narrator’s movement toward animal rights activism seems, at first, an act of passivity, something she adopts because she is pulled around by John. It’s in the last pages of the book when the narrator says, “I read books on animal liberation. I feel they’re about me.”
  And in this line, this moment of honesty, lies the success of Gerard’s novel. There is not much kindness in this story, whether between characters, within the narrator, or towards the reader. And yet, in all the pulsing sickness and the opposing desires to fight and to vanish altogether, the book illuminates some of the worst parts of ourselves. The edges, the bones, the desire to hurt and be hurt. There is a sense, too, of other possibilities—how somewhere on the other side lies passion and love, for living creatures and dead stars.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-sarah-gerard-20150111-story.html
  Word count: 626

  QUOTE:
  Gerard captures the beauty and scientific irony of damaged relationships and ephemeral heavenly lights. Just as with the stars, it is collapse that offers the most illumination.
  Review Sarah Gerard's debut, 'Binary Star,' radiates beauty
  Author Sarah Gerard
  Josh Wool / Two Dollar Radio
  Heather Scott Partington
  Sarah Gerard's debut novella, 'Binary Star,' fuses astronomy and dysfunction to shine light on doomed beauty
  Stars are most beautiful in their death throes, hurling light and color into space. Sarah Gerard considers this doomed beauty from every angle in her haunting debut novella, "Binary Star."

  "I am a white dwarf," her protagonist says. Not only is she dying — physically and emotionally — but she is caught in a dysfunctional orbit with her boyfriend, John, that keeps her alive.

  Gerard's story centers on an anorexic, damaged woman; she fills herself with only diet pills and caffeine. "I eat nothing but time," she tells us. Like a dying star, there is no energy created within her. She uses chemicals to keep her body moving.

  "Binary Star" is imparted through the terse, arresting observations of its main character. Gerard synthesizes astrophysical jargon with a sense of longing:

  "Most things are things I shouldn't eat.

  I pretend to like Tabasco because it burns.

  I need to burn.

  I am very scientific, or at least methodical.

  Everything must be quantified."

  Her meditations on her own form are framed by a tabloid magazine fixation and her study of astronomy. She is a body, bound by gravity and subject only to the pull of other bodies:

  "A white dwarf no longer uses fusion.

  It is held together by degeneracy pressure.

  Extreme pressure.

  This is the only thing supporting it against collapse.

  This is also the only thing that keeps it from exploding."

  Gerard tells a story that encircles the two damaged lovers by looping repeatedly into their obsessive interactions. Yet these lovers are a binary system; they need each other. "Desire requires two bodies," she says. "This and that."

  The lovers are bound by obligation and pattern rather than emotional connection. "Binary Star" takes us through many events in their relationship: a road trip, the back and forth of their long-distance struggles, spikes of anger and lulls of neglect. Her highs are too high and his lows are painfully low. Gerard artfully blurs each event into the next, echoing the protagonist's anxiety-ridden confusion as she circles her boyfriend and tries to hold herself together.

  This is a story of collapse, and in each of the three phases of the novel, Gerard's dying star glows with pain. Each night, she says, "I find the center of my hunger in the center of the floor, in the center of the room. The walls breathe the space between them and I am the space, condensed and expanded and condensed. I pulse. I've burned myself to cinders." Her awareness that she is a tragic body only adds to her alluring complication.

  "Binary Star" eschews notions of linear storytelling in favor of the cyclical. Time is irrelevant, past and present are fused. The novella's strength is in its precise rendering of decaying bodies — both heavenly and corporeal — while maintaining a sense of ever-present longing. Gerard captures the beauty and scientific irony of damaged relationships and ephemeral heavenly lights. Just as with the stars, it is collapse that offers the most illumination.

  Partington is a writer in Elk Grove, Calif.

  Binary Star

  Sarah Gerard
  Two Dollar Radio, 166 pp., $16

• Huffington Post
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-alexander-hess/post_12017_b_10163766.html
  Word count: 1460

  THE BLOG 05/31/2016 08:55 am ET | Updated Jun 01, 2017
  The Explosion of Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star
  By Scott Alexander Hess
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  When I tell people I write literary fiction, I am most often met with a long, blank stare. At times, this is followed by “how nice,” or occasionally “literary....like?”

  I usually launch into my love letter to William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, or tell them about more recent lit favorites like the masterful The Sport of Kings (by C.E. Morgan) or the literary (and erotically charged like my novel Skyscraper) What Belongs to You (by Garth Greenwell).

  I believe in fiction, deeply, despite the hard right turn toward reality housewife shows and tweets, so I was particularly thrilled when I stumbled across the edgy and lush novel Binary Star by (fellow New School alum) Sarah Gerard. Not only is the book a revelation, it’s a success! A downright phenomenon.

  I caught up with Sarah to talk about the explosive success of her novel that has made quite a splash on the literary scene, despite (and surely because of) its risk taking, its uncanny beauty and its being a tad bit out there.
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  Scott Alexander Hess: Part of the brilliance of Binary Star is its use of structure and poetic language in slowly revealing a complicated and rich character. Large portions of the novel are written like a long prose poem. Was this intentional when you started the book? Did it begin this way, or did the form evolve as you wrote it? Tell us about your process and how it shifted along the way.

  Sarah Gerard: When I began writing Binary Star, I thought the whole novel would read like the prologue. I later realized that I’d have to intersperse the fragmented, poetic passages with more formal scenes in order to move the plot along—as opposed to suggesting the plot more poetically. But I was never interested in writing a novel in paragraphs because I felt that would contradict the narrator’s frantic interiority. I wanted the novel to feel anxious and confused, to mirror her experience.

  SAH: You were able to express some painful experiences in a very compelling way. What can you tell us about writing in a way that is equally intense and engaging? Did you ever fear you were going too far or that you might alienate the reader or was that part of the intention? Did you have to wrestle with any editors who wanted to soften any edges?

  SG: I’d like to say that when I’m writing I’m thinking about myself and not thinking about readers—that it’s only in the editing stages that I begin to think about the reader—but once or twice while I was writing Binary Star, I wondered whether it could be triggering for people recovering from anorexia and bulimia. Ultimately, I had to push those ideas aside and write the story I needed to write for myself. I’ve seen one or two trigger warnings for the book on the internet, and I’m grateful for the people who thought to add those warnings. Writing the book was triggering for me at times, but I resisted those urges because I needed to be courageous and tell my story. I’m grateful for the people at Two Dollar Radio being courageous in that way, too.

  SAH: When my first novel Diary of a Sex Addict came out, a lot of people presumed it was non fiction. Have you run into this? Along those lines, did you draw on your own experience for Binary Star? If so, was it cathartic? Painful?

  SG: When I was twenty-two, I took a medical leave from college to check into eating disorder rehab. I drew heavily from my own experience with anorexia and bulimia to write this book but many things were fictionalized: the character of John, many of the settings and events, the character as an astronomy student. Writing the book was painful at times, of course, but I can’t say that was a bad thing. It was cathartic in the sense that I needed to tell the story to move onto other stories I needed to tell—to get it out of the way, and make way for others.

  SAH: I was speaking to people in my writing group about Binary Star and one woman referred to it as a phenomenon. It indeed got incredible praise and coverage. For writers inspired by your success, tell us about how that success happened. Were you a big part of PR? Was working with a smaller press an advantage?

  SG: I’m so thankful for people who reviewed the book positively! Two Dollar Radio is a small team, so we shared some of the PR. I reached out to places, and they reached out to others. I think the book tour Kickstarter may have also drawn attention to the book, which was useful in getting people out to the readings.

  SAH: Your success is especially inspiring in that your book being experimental in form did not hamper it’s catching fire! Do you think the market for transgressive, and/or edgy literary work can grow and thrive in the age of tweets?

  SG: I think there are always readers looking for bold literature and writers who are willing to write it. I don’t know that it has anything to do with Twitter, as I don’t think the human experience and Twitter are closely related—I think Twitter is an ornament like a spire on a place of worship is an ornament. But the spire doesn’t make the place of worship.

  SAH: You worked with a smaller press Two Dollar Radio, and then Harper Perennial with Sunshine State. Are there big differences in the process and/or how the work is handled? Advantages or disadvantages of both?

  SG: I’m writing very different books for each press, so the process has been different, of course. The essay collection is a book I sold on proposal, so I’ve been turning in the essays continuously. The novel was something I completed before submitting it to agents and small presses. I loved working with Two Dollar Radio and have loved working with Harper Perennial, as well. I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed one more than the other. In both cases, I have felt very encouraged and supported.

  SAH: I enjoyed the trailer for Binary Star by David Formentin. A few years ago I did a story about the validity of book trailers as a viable method of promo. Do you think the trailer contributed to your book busting wide open and gaining such success?

  SG: I think David is brilliant and did amazing work with both trailers—he really saw the work. And yes, I think it was instrumental in getting the book out to larger audiences, especially because Flavorwire was keen enough to feature the trailers both times—and Colin Winnette’s novel, as well. It’s so difficult to translate a book to the screen, but David is a genius. So yes, I think it was a critical contribution.

  SAH: So who would you cast in the film version of Binary Star (or is there already one happening!) and who would direct it? Would you want to do a cameo?

  SG: Chloe Grace Moretz stars, but she has to dye her hair. Bette Midler, Cher, and Yoko Ono make cameos. And Stephen Hawking. And Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  SAH: Are you planning to write another novel soon? Do you feel more of an affinity to fiction or non fiction?

  SG: I’m writing another novel. I don’t prefer either fiction or nonfiction—they’re both made of words.

  SAH: We are both New School MFA alum. What’s your take on writer’s debating on to do an MFA or not, in pursuing a fiction or poetry writing career?

  SG: I don’t think about writing as a career—it’s just what I do. I could not do anything else. I’d sooner die. So, I think people should do whatever they want with the determination to survive. If that means getting an MFA, so be it. I’m happy to write your recommendation.

  Follow Scott Alexander Hess on Twitter: www.twitter.com/scottalexhess

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  Sarah Gerard’s ‘Binary Star’: A Novel About Anorexia and Outer Space That Transcends Its Own Metaphors
  Books | By Judy Berman | January 23, 2015
  I nearly put down Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star after only a few pages. “We know each other’s sickness”; “I empty myself”; the prose is full of clichés, sentences seemingly ripped from the pop psychology of eating disorders and codependent relationships. The debut novel follows such a relationship, from the point of view of an anorexic young woman: the tale of two pathologically self-destructive lovers, our unnamed narrator and her alcoholic boyfriend John. They go on an extended road-trip, attempting to heal each other and save their delicate romance. It all sounds like a book you’ve read a million times before, or a movie you’ve already seen. But the further you read, the clearer it becomes that Gerard knows this even better than you do, and that she isn’t thoughtlessly recycling worn-out language. Her repetition and deployment of clichés couldn’t be more purposeful.

  It all comes together in the high-concept cliché of Gerard’s central metaphor: the titular binary star, which she describes in the italicized overture to the book as “a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass” and “are gravitationally bound.” In art, invoking astronomy or physics has become a reliable means of lending weight to interpersonal relationships — last year, Jenny Offill used Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record project as a window into infidelity in her novel Dept. of Speculation, while the often-separated vampire couple in Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive treasured Einstein’s theory of “spooky action at a distance.” For the narrator, the binary star symbolizes the intertwined doom of codependency, and the twinned thrills of self-purification and self-destruction.

  But Gerard is far subtler than her characters — even if her protagonist’s story bears a great deal of resemblance to her own — and she hides quite a bit more significance than that in her cosmic metaphor, which also gains depth and even an element of surprise as the book progresses. Premised on the juxtaposition of something very small (a deteriorating romance between two utterly isolated human beings) and something unfathomably large (a dying star system), Binary Star sacrifices life-size storytelling to cliché in order to make meaning on both micro and macro levels. The novel’s storylines are primarily vehicles for tiny bursts of clarity and connections so far-reaching that they’re impossible to untangle into discrete realizations.

  binary-star-coverOn the micro level, there are efficiently articulated and highly specific moments that resonate on almost every page. At one point during the road-trip, the narrator laments,

  We find nothing authentic in the tour books, so we abandon them. They don’t tell us where the real cities are. We look online and find the same information. We don’t know what we’re doing.
  Through a character we’ve seen before, on a quest we’ve also seen before, Gerard conveys a universal (to a certain kind of traveler, at least) yet rarely documented experience. At the level of thoughts and images and sentences — the latter of which are uniformly short and simple, in abbreviated paragraphs that make each page read like something between a poem and a list — she simultaneously captures the freezing isolation of her narrator’s life and throws into relief what is universal about her story.

  Binary Star performs even greater feats on a macro scale. It’s remarkable, the connections familiar characters and plots allow Gerard to create, as she brings elements of the outside world into the laboratory of the narrator and her boyfriend’s icily insulated existence. The commonness of their story makes it the perfect stage for big ideas; Binary Star says as much about the desolate American landscape that surrounds these characters as it does about their own sickness.

  Our protagonist is both teaching and learning about astronomy; this not only situates Binary Star‘s central metaphor, but also places her in an odd space between responsible adulthood and childlike dependence that mimics her relationship to John and to her distant mother. Though she’s attracted to politically radical ideas, the tabloid headlines and brand names (of energy drinks and diet pills, mostly) that she repeats to herself like incantations betray how deeply she is captivated by media, advertising, and celebrity culture. More importantly, they — along with her late-night Internet binges — explain why we’ve read so many of this character’s thoughts about anorexia before: because she has, too.

  Veganism enters the book as one of many excuses not to eat, but in John’s hands it explodes into a delusional, pseudo-anarchist animal liberation plot. Their increasingly violent sexual encounters draw out the alternately vehement and ashamed masochism of eating disorders, and the way alcoholism can transform a person into an ambivalent — or just plain inadvertent — sadist. The narrator begins to feel, physically, the pain of the animals John schemes impotently to save. It becomes impossible to tell whether the couple are distorting and abusing everything that crosses their path, or if external forces and ideological coping mechanisms are what’s been killing them all along. The answer seems to be a bit of both.

  It’s the convergence of all these personal and political and sexual and professional crises, not the story’s intentionally foggy ending, that is the book’s true climax. Gerard’s style is cold, precise, intellectual, scientific — yet there is an urgency to its bleakness that makes us care about the archetypes she’s invoked. And when I say “makes us care,” I don’t just mean that the book convinces us; it forces us to feel the weight of all they represent, viscerally. Because for all of its layered meaning, Binary Star is still very much a novel. Its final binary is that it works on an emotional level as well as a philosophical one. Its triumph, and its uniqueness, is in bringing us to tears over a great mess of intertwined ideas.

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