Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Lucky You
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.erikacarter.net/
CITY: Richmond
STATE: VA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.npr.org/2017/03/21/520448255/lucky-you-is-a-perfect-balance-of-humor-and-tragedy
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017025257
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3603.A77699
Personal name heading:
Carter, Erika, 1986-
Birth date: 1986-04-08
Found in: Lucky you, 2017: CIP t.p. (Erika Carter) publisher's
summary ("debut novel")
e-mail 2017-05-02 fr. Wah-Ming Chang, Counterpoint: (Erika
Carter is not the same person as n 96001724, the quilt
artist; her birth date is 04/08/1986)
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born April 8, 1986; married Rob Carter (an artist).
EDUCATION:University of Arkansas, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Resident, Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Colorado Review, CutBank, Deep South Magazine, Meridian, New Ohio Review, and South Carolina Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Erika Carter’s long-fiction debut is Lucky You, set in the American South during the economic downturn of the early twenty-first century. “Carter’s debut novel explores the crushing blow of the financial crisis on floundering 20-somethings in Fayetteville, Arkansas,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “where a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job.” Lucky You is the story of “three girls–young women, really–living in Arkansas,” explained Nina Renata Aron on the Full Stop website. “They’re ostensibly friends, though ‘frenemies’ often feels more fitting. The year is 2008, and the financial crisis circulates diffusely but unignorably above the action of the novel like an unwelcome weather pattern. It can be felt in the generalized but pervasive hopelessness that is the book’s defining mood, and in the girls’ precarious employment. `What they’re saying on TV is a fact,’ one girl tells another. `It’s really, really hard to find a job.’ We learn early on that the University of Arkansas English degrees they’ve very recently earned are `worthless.'”
The three girls, Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel, each respond to their situations with self-destructive behaviors. Ellie becomes more and more mired in alcoholism while having an affair with a married man. Chloe sinks into hypochondriacal neuroses. Rachel has developed a relationship with a young man named Audrey , who tries to recruit her and her friends for a kind of twenty-first century commune. “Once all together, the foursome flirt, eat fruits and vegetables, smoke pot out of apples, watch ASMR videos, and read aloud from books about with titles like Give It Up: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less,” Aron declared. “They chant things like `We are one mind, one trance.’ Autry, a toxic narcissist, spends his time planning the Project, a creepy cult loosely based on health and environmentalism, and trying to write a memoir about their experience.”
Critics enjoyed Carter’s debut. “Carter has written a wonderful novel, intelligent but unpretentious,” enthused Michael Schaub on NPR. “As an author, she’s both unsparing and compassionate, and among her greatest gifts is an ability to find a savage kind of beauty in the unlikeliest of places. `It was beautiful, she thought, but what do you do with it?’ ponders Ellie at one point, looking out a window at a wintry tableau…. Lucky You is, in the end, challenging, intelligent and, yes, quite beautiful.” “Carter’s compassion for her lost young women is clear,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and the story never falters from the starkly realistic trajectories marked out for the protagonists.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Lucky You.
Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2017, review of Lucky You, p. 171.
ONLINE
Counterpoint Press, http://www.counterpointpress.com/ (November 1, 2017), author profile.
Erika Carter Website, https://www.erikacarter.net (November 1, 2017), author profile.
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (April 6, 2017), Nina Renata Aron, review of Lucky You.
NPR, http://www.npr.org/ (March 21, 2017), Michael Schaub, review of Lucky You.
Erika Carter's short fiction has appeared in the Colorado Review, South Carolina Review, New Ohio Review, CutBank, Deep South Magazine, and Meridian, among other literary journals and magazines. Lucky You (Counterpoint, 2017) is her first novel.
She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas and has earned residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, and other places sometimes, with her husband, the artist Rob Carter. She is at work on her second novel.
ERIKA CARTER’s work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Meridian, CutBank, and the South Carolina Review, among other literary journals and magazines. She is thirty years old and lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, the artist Rob Carter.
She is the author of:
Lucky You: A Novel
Lucky You
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p171.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Lucky You
Erika Carter. Counterpoint, $26 (375p)
ISBN 978-1-61902-899-9
Carter's ambitious debut novel delves into the ennui that comes with being young and unsure. Three 20-something women-Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel, friends living in the same Arkansas town where they went to college--circle in and out of each other's lives as they each grasp for identity and purpose. Ellie seeks romantic validation from a distant musician and her married boss while slipping slowly into drink. Chloe suffers from a variety of mysterious health problems she is not eager to cure or even to understand. Rachel lives with her sanctimonious boyfriend, whose wealthy parents pay for a house in the Ozarks where they all contribute to "The Project," an off-the-grid lifestyle based on vaguely new-age ideas of health and spirituality. For all their devotion to their assorted identities, be it girlfriend, mistress, or participant in "The Project," the women struggle to find a direction that sticks. This fruitless search is relatable to anyone who has ever been young and confused, and Carter's no-nonsense prose is darkly witty, lacking the self-indulgence or mean-spiritedness often seen in stories about modern youth. While the characters are each charming and believable, there is little narrative tension outside of their destructive spirals. Still, Carter's compassion for her lost young women is clear, and the story never falters from the starkly realistic trajectories marked out for the protagonists. The result is a clever and honest look at the consequences of youthful malaise. (Mar.)
Caption: Erika Carter's ambitious debut novel, Lucky You, delves into the ennui that comes with being young and unsure (reviewed on p. 171).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lucky You." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 171+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195142&it=r&asid=41964bc0d80180faf8b63d0d80d94553. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195142
Carter, Erika: LUCKY YOU
(Jan. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Carter, Erika LUCKY YOU Counterpoint (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-61902-899-9
Three college friends experiment with an off-the-grid commune in rural Arkansas but struggle to find stability in the Project--or in one another.Carter's debut novel explores the crushing blow of the financial crisis on floundering 20-somethings in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where a college degree doesn't guarantee a good job or a happy future. Ellie is a struggling alcoholic having an affair with her married, older boss, while Chloe falls head over heels for a fair-weather lover. Both women spend their nights slinging drinks atViceroy and wondering if there's more. When their mutual friend Rachel invites them to move into a dilapidated country house she shares with her gurulike boyfriend, Autry, Chloe and Ellie try to find "peace and health in the chaos of a cruel, disconnected world." Over the course of a disastrous, slow-motion year, the young women attempt to trade alcohol and dead-end relationships for trance meditation and survivalist philosophy. Like most would-be revolutionaries, Autry winds up to be all talk and no action, and all three women worsen. Ellie retreats further into her destructive behavior; Chloe's mental health demons put her in danger; and Rachel grows more and more restless. Throughout the novel, Carter's language is surprising, even tactile. A cold-weather embrace feels like "the beginning of winter in his coat," while going through the motions of a bad relationship feels like being turned into "a stuffed animal." But the plot, which alternates among points of view, loses both the thread of Chloe's voice and the urgency of her breakdown. After a year at the Project, Rachel and Ellie struggle with the idea of normal lives, and Carter seems to suggest this is a symptom, rather than an effect, of the failed Project. A melancholy, elliptical tale of friendship and alienation in the South.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carter, Erika: LUCKY YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357450&it=r&asid=76829f7d2e1b7267992fd902cb7547c1. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357450
'Lucky You' Is A Perfect Balance Of Humor And Tragedy
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March 21, 20177:00 AM ET
Michael Schaub
Lucky You
Lucky You
by Erika Carter
Hardcover, 271 pages
purchase
It sounds unbelievable to a lot of us, but for some people, their early 20s are the age when things start to come together. They graduate college, find a fulfilling job, marry their sweetheart and start a family.
For the rest of us, though, it's a markedly different story. We think of that time in our life as the age where we wandered around life aimlessly, maybe finding a temp job, dating a succession of inadvisable people and hanging out in bars. We viewed our more successful peers with envy and possibly a little bit of suspicion, and avoided them unless they were buying us drinks.
The three young women at the center of Erika Carter's debut novel Lucky You belong to the latter group — they're unsure of what, if anything, they want to do with their life, and they kill time drinking and entering into quasi-relationships with men they're not exactly sure they like. It's a charming, understated novel that perfectly captures the feeling of being young, depressed and adrift.
Ellie, Chloe and Rachel are friends, kind of — maybe more like semi-friendly acquaintances. They all met working at Viceroy, an uninspiring bar and restaurant in the college town of Fayetteville, Ark. The novel opens with Ellie walking home in a winter storm after her shift serving drinks — she drunkenly invites a group of strangers to her apartment, waking up the next morning with no memories of what happened, but with used condoms and a broken shot glass as unhelpful reminders.
She knows she needs to lay off the alcohol ("She had another idea: she would quit drinking forever tomorrow, which meant she should drink everything she could tonight") but it distracts her from thinking about Jim, her emotionally distant boyfriend, who's gifted at playing country music but not a ton else. ("He thought Things Fall Apart was a breakup book. Like, a self-help, how-to-get-over-your-breakup book," one character marvels. She spends her nights drinking, writing haiku, pining for Jim or for anyone and drinking some more.
[Carter is] both unsparing and compassionate, and among her greatest gifts is an ability to find a savage kind of beauty in the unlikeliest of places.
Ellie sees a chance to change her life when Rachel invites her and their mentally ill friend Chloe to spend time with her and her boyfriend Autry at their off-the-grid house in the country. "You can leave all your unhealth behind," Rachel pleads. "You can escape from yourself here — I mean it. Seriously." Ellie's skeptical, but grows to like the de facto detox. "I mean, to be totally honest, I can't believe how drunk I used to be," she says. "And hungover. Constantly one or the other. An awful cycle of escape, despair, escape, despair. Add a little self-hatred and utter panic into the mix."
Unfortunately — to quote the book that Jim was hilariously unfamiliar with — things fall apart. Ellie takes trips to Bentonville to drink in bars and rendezvous with her married lover, to the dismay of Autry, a dopey hippie Svengali with a penchant for meaningless and deeply stupid aphorisms. ("There's this thing I like to say, that I came up with. Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.")
Lucky You is a marvel of a book, partly because Carter does a perfect job balancing humor and tragedy. The funny moments bring to mind the fiction of Mary Robison and Ann Beattie; the darker ones are reminiscent of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Her humor is dry, and never at the expense of her characters. (OK, it's sometimes at the expense of Jim and Autry, but they deserve it.)
She is deft at describing how it feels to be young and at loose ends, living in a college town and entertaining half-hearted thoughts about someday moving out. And in Ellie, she's created a perfectly drawn character — impulsive, numb, using her own mysteriousness as self-protection: "It was easier this way, not to give anything away, not to reveal yourself to anyone." Some people instinctively run away when they've been figured out — Ellie is one of them, even if she might not realize it.
Carter has written a wonderful novel, intelligent but unpretentious. As an author, she's both unsparing and compassionate, and among her greatest gifts is an ability to find a savage kind of beauty in the unlikeliest of places. "It was beautiful, she thought, but what do you do with it?" ponders Ellie at one point, looking out a window at a wintry tableau. "It seemed as though it wasn't enough just to look at beauty — you had to do something about it. It was as though you had to destroy it to be satisfied." It's sometimes difficult to watch Ellie do her best to destroy herself, but Lucky You is, in the end, challenging, intelligent and, yes, quite beautiful.
Lucky You – Erika Carter
by Nina Renata Aron
Lucky You cover[Counterpoint Press; 2017]
Girls are a conundrum. An excess. They simply mean too much. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate and all that. Girls are accretions of desire, of expectation. They are material beings, a metaphor for modernity, a market demographic, a discrete cultural category, an idea. And also, they’re something else entirely: something ineffable, slippery, hard to understand, harder to look away from. Girls, girls, girls goes the flashing neon sign, the hair metal song, the whole world, if you’re paying attention.
Once we become women, many of us harbor nostalgia for our girlhoods, even as we recall running from them as if from a car fire. That’s because coming into sexual power as a girl is a potent contradiction, both a powerful gift and a weighty burden. For many, the looming question of surviving into some future fixity is quite a literal one. Some girls go wild. Some go fucking crazy. And some don’t make it at all.
Lucky You, Erika Carter’s debut novel, is about three girls — young women, really — living in Arkansas. They’re ostensibly friends, though ‘frenemies’ often feels more fitting. The year is 2008, and the financial crisis circulates diffusely but unignorably above the action of the novel like an unwelcome weather pattern. It can be felt in the generalized but pervasive hopelessness that is the book’s defining mood, and in the girls’ precarious employment. “What they’re saying on TV is a fact,” one girl tells another. “It’s really, really hard to find a job.” We learn early on that the University of Arkansas English degrees they’ve very recently earned are “worthless.”
The novel’s protagonists — Ellie, Chloe, and Rachel — orbit Viceroy, a Fayetteville dive that serves stiff drinks and thrice-reheated lobster bisque of unknown provenance. (After all, “this was Arkansas,” Ellie thinks.) As the novel opens, Ellie and Chloe are working at Viceroy as waitresses. Rachel has since moved with her boyfriend Autry to the nearby Ozarks to pursue health and a life off the grid, and she regularly tries to persuade Ellie and Chloe to join them.
The pacing of the novel is slow, syrupy as grenadine, though punctuated during working hours by the incessant bickering of Bruce and Lorraine, the couple who own the bar. Their characters serve little purpose, except to supply a steady stream of marital acrimony for our rudderless millennial heroines to puzzle over. (Also, Bruce’s fixation on Ellie is how the reader knows she’s the hot one.)
Ellie mostly pines for her boyfriend Jim, a touring musician whose parting words, “Don’t be sad,” are the perfect tagline for not-really-trying boyfriends the world over. She blots out her feelings by drinking heavily at work and at home — Fireball, Rumpelmintz, Jameson, vodka — and has frustrating, depressing, occasionally dangerous encounters with boys she finds insufferable.
Chloe, a vegan with tricotillomania, leads a lonely life in the apartment of a disappeared girl whose mail she opens. (“Why not? They were connected, she and this gone person.”) She lives beside a frat house, which lends her alienation a bit more credibility, and resents Ellie for being prettier, while also wanting to kiss her.
When Ellie tires of Viceroy and is ready to shape-shift, she moves from Fayetteville to Bentonville and takes a square office job at Wal-Mart corporate, where she embarks on a get-on-your-knees, Secretary-style tryst with her boss, who’s old enough (and married enough) to make her feel she’s naughtily transgressing. Still, as with much else, the relationship registers to her as “an enormous joke. Soon she would quit doing ridiculous stuff like this. When her real life started, she would quit humiliating herself with ridiculous behavior.”
Soon, Ellie and Chloe decide they’d be better off living with Rachel and Autry after all, and they move to the compound. There, they find Rachel happily composting, baking homemade bread, wearing Crystal deodorant, tending to a blooming garden, and nonspecifically detoxing to purge herself of “unhealth.” In the couple’s bedroom, “seedlings grew in black pots everywhere, so the room smelled like Earth.” Rachel finds satisfaction in being “just like one of those old fashioned married couples you hear about” and enjoys domestic labor: “Housework felt so feminine and throwback — so sexually retro. It was fun playing house […] Rachel realized that [Autry’s] grandmother had probably not felt so edgy and sexual doing housework, but the times they were a-changing.”
Once all together, the foursome flirt, eat fruits and vegetables, smoke pot out of apples, watch ASMR videos, and read aloud from books about with titles like Give It Up: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less. They chant things like “We are one mind, one trance.” Autry, a toxic narcissist, spends his time planning the Project, a creepy cult loosely based on health and environmentalism, and trying to write a memoir about their experience. “It’s a way of life,” he tells the girls, ”if we can get others onto it, too—I mean, we could legit like, save the planet, I’m just saying.”
The group’s ethos is vague, to say the least, revolving around the nebulous promise of preternatural “wellness” that will feel familiar to most contemporary, beet-juice-drinking readers. It’s part 1960s back-to-the-land purism and part freedom fetish, but filtered through 21st century neoliberal ideas about self-reliance and the looming apocalypse that is climate change. And it is everywhere contrasted with its opposite, “unhealth,” a concept that includes alcohol, Lean Cuisine, and also grown-up pressures like “money. Clothes. A job. A car. An apartment. Keys. Taxes. Facebook. Credit Cards. Alarms and notifications.” Their “lifestyle” takes on an even more sinister cast, as Autry and Rachel begin to pressure the other girls to pursue well-being through asceticism, and Autry fails to take Chloe’s health problems seriously.
Over time, at Autry’s jealous, paranoid direction, the foursome grows increasingly cut off from the wider world. The water turns rust colored, the plants die, the granola grows stale. The girls, ever more prisoner-like, begin to fantasize about Coke and nail polish. Things begin to fall apart.
Lucky You is dominated by a kind of rock-kicking apathy and joylessness. Rachel, Ellie, and Chloe spend their waking hours in a sluggish state of distraction, but as women in their early twenties, they’re still always reverberating — often against their better judgment, sometimes seemingly against their own will — with a shimmering, restless energy. With sex. And it’s a particular sexual power they wield. Though Carter doesn’t offer much description of the girls’ appearances, the reader gets the sense that their appeal is similar to that of the Virgin Suicides sisters in their faded, frosting-colored dresses: stringy-haired, skinny, scabby, faintly androgynous, faintly infirm, white as the driven snow. The girls drift about listlessly in short shorts, an irritating but steadily compelling reminder that laziness is a privilege, and that prettiness, especially in wheat-colored form, still captivates us, perhaps above all else.
Carter succeeds in creating a lush but airless environment in which the anxieties of “adulting” — finding direction, meaning, maintaining a home — are amplified to crippling effect. As Rachel thinks, “they talked […] about changing their lives, the Real World. But the more they talked, the more they tried to pin the details, the more overwhelming and impossible it all seemed. What would they do?” The girls know they should care about things like the environment and politics but they just can’t summon the energy. They even lie to each other about voting for Obama (who they at least agree is “hot”) when they haven’t bothered to vote at all.
With her laconic prose, Carter enacts a sort of millennial laziness that sometimes feel deliberate and expertly controlled, and other times feels accidental or, worse, like actual laziness. In much the way a teenager answers questions in as few words as possible, the spare, withholding language of the novel can make for maddening reading. When Chloe first lays eyes on Ellie’s boyfriend Jim, for example, all the reader gets by way of description is that that’s “pretty much what she figured he’d look like.” Later, reflecting on Autry, Ellie “tried to remember what she herself had ever found cool about him. She couldn’t think of anything. All that surfaced was that Rachel had once found him cool, and so he had been cool, because Rachel was cool.” In its deference to youthful boredom and lethargy, the book often reads more like some YA fiction, or an actual, tormented-but-unintelligent young person’s journal.
This might be why life inside Lucky You feels the way life often can: perfectly pointless. The discovery that the book’s title comes not from a slot machine or fortune teller, but from the message stitched into the fly of Lucky Brand jeans does little to help: “Every time [Chloe] pulled the zipper and worked the button she wondered—was this supposed to be ironic, or sexy?” Who cares, I found myself thinking.
Still, the paradoxes of femininity in painful blossom are portrayed believably here, and they make for absorbing reading. The many girl-flavored miseries of the book are tempered with pleasure, from the perverse comfort of depression (“she could hide in it and no one could find her”) to the blunt satisfaction of a brutal affair (“the pain was as intense as pleasure”), to the sense of easy superiority that turns on a dime and becomes self-loathing (“she cringed at her stupidity”). And Carter’s gift is in drawing these contradictions wryly, wisely, and seemingly without effort.
Despite its simplicity and near affectlessness, Carter’s characters, particularly Ellie, linger in the reader’s mind. But Lucky You also registers as a bit of a trick. The novel hogties you in this rambling, rural no-place, suspends you in stoner time, and makes you wait, as though something will be revealed, some larger meaning eventually delivered. But the reward never comes. By the end of the novel, you realize that may be the entire point. It’s a bit like the sedate emptiness that sets in after leaving a strip club. You step back out into the world, a bit discombobulated, melancholy, not quite sure where the time went. Nothing has changed, nothing meant anything — you were just transported temporarily, by the glisten of skin, the promise, the spectacle of girls.
Autry’s Project ultimately fails, of course. And the girls go on to try to reinvent themselves, resuming various forms of “unhealth” in the process. (By the novel’s end, Rachel is watching TV and eating Taco Bell tacos in Dorito shells with a new, tennis-playing beau.) But they end up no better off. Two are back waiting tables at Viceroy. All are disoriented, alienated, their existence defined mostly by their boyfriends.
The note that closes Carter’s novel is the same one that has been ringing out for more than 200 pages: becoming an adult is sad. You thought you would’ve done something, become someone by now, but alas. Here you are. “This was life,” thinks Ellie in the book’s final pages. “This was a thing people did. This was how people lived.” It’s a sentiment she’s been repeating, a mantra meant to lull herself into acquiescence.
Maybe that’s what we all have to do in order to make peace with meaninglessness, Carter suggests. Maybe that’s just how it is. And that’s if you’re one of the lucky ones.