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WORK TITLE: Pretend I’m Dead
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1971?
WEBSITE:
CITY: Hudson
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1971.
EDUCATION:University of California Irvine, M.F.A.; attended the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and short-story writer. Worked as a house cleaner.
AWARDS:Whiting Award in fiction, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Juked and Faultline.
SIDELIGHTS
Jen Beagin is a writer and novelist living in Hudson, New York. She received a 2017 Whiting Award in fiction. Beagin earned an undergraduate degree in studio art at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California Irvine.
In Pretend I’m Dead, Beagin’s debut novel, Beagin tells the story of Mona, a twenty-four-year-old woman who makes her living cleaning houses in Massachusetts. Mona and her choice of vocation surprises many people, as she is white, artistic, and a native English speaker, unlike many who find themselves in the often unpleasant field of cleaning and janitorial work. She also volunteers at a clean-needle exchange for local drug addicts. At the exchange, she meets a man she refers to as Mr. Disgusting, although the nickname is more affectionate than derisive. Mr. Disgusting, unfortunately, is a junkie, several years her senior, in poor health, and impoverished. It also becomes clear later that he is sexually impotent as well.
Despite his flaws, Mona becomes more deeply involved with Mr. Disgusting, and they develop a mutually affectionate and tender, if unusual, relationship. Although both characters are improved by their togetherness, Mr. Disgusting continues to struggle with his addiction. Eventually he ends the relationship, though an apparent suicide note written to her on the back of a sexually explicit photo she finds among the box of returned love letters and personal mementoes he sends her.
Afterward, Mona takes her former lover’s advice and heads west to New Mexico to start her life anew. There, she rents half of an adobe house and sets out to redefine herself. In the process, the couple in the other half of the house, a hippie couple named Nigel and Shiori, offer her help that she doesn’t want. Mona struggles with her own physical and psychological afflictions as she comes to terms with herself, her difficult childhood, and the choices she’s made as an adult. Eventually, she realizes that Mr. Disgusting had given her the motivation to improve herself that she could not provide for herself, and that both she and him are defined by more than just their superficial characteristics and problems. And perhaps more importantly, she discovers that even her most wealthy and seemingly “with it” clients are just as flawed as she is.
“Both Mona and her author are sharp—but empathetic—observers, and this story is filled with characters who are seriously damaged and wholly human,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
In an interview with Melissa Ragsdale on the website Electric Lit, Beagin reported that her first encounter with Mr. Disgusting as a character was nearly twenty years before Pretend I’m Dead, when she was a studio art major at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. This was “when I first wrote about someone named Mr. Disgusting,” she told Ragsdale. At that point in her life, she continued, I ended up dropping out of college a year or so later and pulling a geographic to Santa Cruz, CA, where I cleaned houses and lived with my brother, and I didn’t write fiction again for seventeen years. So, when I revisited Mr. Disgusting as a character, well over a decade later, I was very conscious of watching, and writing toward, my nineteen year old self. My aim was to write something she would have appreciated and admired, or at least wouldn’t be too embarrassed by.”
Throughout the novel, “Mona’s internal struggles are thoughtfully realized, and Beagin’s sharply drawn characters share the universal longing for connection,” commented Booklist reviewer Leah Strauss. A Publishers Weekly writer called the novel a “funny, touching look at loneliness and the search for belonging.” The Kirkus Reviews writer concluded: “This is a terrific debut. Singularly enjoyable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2015, Leah Strauss, review of Pretend I’m Dead, p. 34.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Pretend I’m Dead.
Publishers Weekly, August 24, 2015, review of Pretend I’m Dead, p. 55.
ONLINE
Electric Lit, http://www.electricliterature.com/ (December 17, 2015), Melissa Ragsdale, “Somewhere on the Path Towards Self-Awareness: An Interview with Jen Beagin.”
Paris Review Online, March 22, 2017, “Jen Beagin, Fiction,” biography of Jen Beagin.
Simon & Schuster website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (July 9, 2018), biography of Jen Beagin.
Whiting Foundation website, http://www.whiting.org/ (July 9, 2018), biography of Jen Beagin.
Jen Beagin, Fiction
By Whiting Honorees March 22, 2017
WHITING AWARDS 2017
JEAN BEAGIN. PHOTO BY LAURA DOMBROWSKI.
Jen Beagin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. Her novel, Pretend I’m Dead, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2015. She lives in Hudson, New York.
*
An excerpt from Pretend I’m Dead:
For the next few weeks she mentally projected Mr. Disgusting’s face onto whatever surface she was cleaning, just for the pleasure of scrubbing it off. The procedure worked best on tiled bathroom walls. She lathered the tiles with Ajax, then, covering her mouth with the collar of her T-shirt to guard against bleach throat, she scrubbed out his left eye, obliterated his right with a furious scribbling motion, and then expanded her stroke to remove his mocking eyebrows and long black hair. She scrubbed vigorously, her hands sweating in rubber gloves, her breath moistening her T-shirt. When his face was gone at last, she doused the tiles with water from the tap. Her mind often seemed to clear itself of debris, and in its place, she felt the pleasant but slightly irritating sensation of having a word on the tip of her tongue.
A month later her anger suddenly dissipated and was replaced again by longing. So he’d almost killed her and then told her she looked like a fish — big deal, people made mistakes. She was getting over it. Besides, he’d apologize profusely via voicemail, and on her doorstep he’d left a Japanese dictionary in which he’d circled the words for contrite, shame, repentant, confession, apology, remorse, touch, please, help, and telephone. That certainly counted for something.
She dialed his number but his phone was disconnected. She stopped by the Hawthorne a few times, but he was never in his room. She checked his other haunts — the Owl Diner, the Lowell Public Library, and the Last Safe and Deposit, a bank turned dive bar — all without luck. Since he loved getting mail, she sent him a postcard of a Henry Darger drawing featuring little girls with penises. On the back she wrote, “How’s it goin? You’re prolly just hanging around, being rad. I miss you a super ton, dude. I’m like totally lost without you. I fully want to make out with you again.” He loved it when she wrote in her native tongue.
Two weeks later, on her twenty-fourth birthday, she received a large cardboard box in the mail. No return address, but she recognized Mr. Disgusting’s cramped handwriting and felt a flutter in her chest. At last, he’d come to his senses. And, he remembered her birthday. Not bad for an old man. No doubt he sent her something he’d found in the trash, but whatever — she’d take it.
She brought the box to bed and sat with her back against the brick wall. Inside the box were two smaller boxes, one much larger than the other, but each carefully wrapped in the wrinkled maps of her native state. Nice touch. With a red Sharpie he’d drawn a heart around her birthplace, Santa Monica, and another around her hometown, Torrance. She wondered what had possessed him; he definitely wasn’t the heart-drawing type.
Inside the first box was everything she’d ever given him: love letters; purposely bad cowboy poetry; several drawings of her hands and feet; an eight-inch lock of hair she’d meant to donate to Locks of Love; a deck of hand-illustrated German playing cards; a small lump made of Japanese silk thread; and a locket with a skeleton keyhole, the doors of which opened to reveal a photograph of her very beautiful left eye.
The other box contained photographs of her box, photographs for which she’d reluctantly posed atop his bed at the Hawthorne last summer. He’d never showed them to her, but then she’d never asked to see them, either. She’d examined herself with a hand mirror before, but there was something about the pictures that unsettled and sickened her. It was like looking at graphic photographs of her own internal organs.
Happy birthday to me, she thought. Thanks for negating our entire relationship.
Perhaps she was more sentimental than she was willing to acknowledge. Never in a million years would she send someone a box like this.
Before the package, her plans that evening had been to order pho from the Viet Cafe and watch Liquid Sky on VHS. Instead, she opened a bottle of Cabernet, brought it to bed, and emptied the contents of the first box onto the comforter. She picked up a love letter. Her handwriting looked frumpy and reminded her of uncombed hair. She rummaged through the rest of the contents, and that’s when she found the note written on the back of a beaver shot:
My Little Wallaby,
I’m leaving the planet shortly. I apologize for the tragic ending. I always told you I wouldn’t make it past fifty. Please don’t take my departure personally. You know very well it has nothing to do with you. My pain is ancient and I’m tired of carrying it around. That’s all this is.
Enclosed are all the precious gifts you’ve given me. I only wish I could take them with me. I would have left them here, but I couldn’t stand the thought of these vultures picking through it. And I thought it would be nice for you to have both sides of our correspondence. How often does that happen? This way our biographers will have to do less running around.
Please don’t despair. I am toothless, dickless, and twice your age — be happy to be rid of me. You need someone younger and more optimistic, who can fuck you properly and perhaps get you pregnant someday.
Some unsolicited advice on the way out: get the hell out of here. You have no real ties so it’s stupid for you to stay. The reason you’re so comfortable in other people’s homes, Mona, is because you don’t have one. Keep searching.
Go to the desert. I’ve always wanted to live in New Mexico, and I can easily picture you living in Taos, a small town I passed through when I was your age. Why not move there and start over? Rent an adobe casita. Paint some pictures. Join a healthy cult of some kind. Get a guru. Surround yourself with [illegible]. I really want you to be —
The sentence ended there. She flipped the photograph over, hoping he’d finished the thought, but there was only the graphic image of her vag in all its squishy, purple glory.
She didn’t believe he’d actually killed himself. He was too attached to his problems. She’d always maintained that if everyone were forced to throw their problems in the garbage, each person would show up at the dump the following day and sift through any amount of muck to find them again.
Jen Beagin
Jen Beagin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and is a recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award in fiction. She is the author of Pretend I'm Dead and Vacuum in the Dark. A former cleaning lady, she lives in Hudson, New York.
Dec 17, 2015
Somewhere on the Path Towards Self-Awareness: An Interview with Jen Beagin
by Melissa Ragsdale
“Hole” (excerpted from Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead) is featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading with an introduction from Emily Gould. Pretend I’m Dead is available from TriQuarterly Books.
Melissa Ragsdale: One of the most striking features of Pretend I’m Dead is the stark Mona-ness of Mona: she has this frank, strange, lovable flair to her that is all her own, from her nosy imagination to her habit of calling God “Bob.” Following the recent Claire Vaye Watkins “On Pandering” essay, there has been a lot of buzz lately about audience, voice, and where it comes from. How did you find Mona’s voice? Do you see your own self in her?
Jen Beagin: Oh, definitely. Mona is a version of me, for sure, except I’m much better looking. Just kidding. We’re about equal in the looks department. I do have slightly better taste in men and vacuums, but not much, and I did a lot more drugs, but overall, Mona is lonelier, and also more assertive, than I was at her age. I had a younger brother from whom I was estranged for several years and then reunited, and also a couple of besties, so I doubt I would have moved to New Mexico alone at that stage in my life–I was too attached to other people, and I didn’t have my shit together enough. In fact, I don’t think I had a bank account until I was 25.
In terms of the Watkins essay, I think that, for better or worse, I was pandering to myself at age 19, which was when I first attempted to write fiction, as a studio art major at UMass Lowell. It was also when I first wrote about someone named Mr. Disgusting. This was–yikes–over twenty years ago now. I ended up dropping out of college a year or so later and pulling a geographic to Santa Cruz, CA, where I cleaned houses and lived with my brother, and I didn’t write fiction again for 17 years. So, when I revisited Mr. Disgusting as a character, well over a decade later, I was very conscious of watching, and writing toward, my nineteen year old self. My aim was to write something she would have appreciated and admired, or at least wouldn’t be too embarrassed by. Watkins mentions “the little white man deep inside all of us” and, for me–at age nineteen–the little white men were mostly dirtbags, drunks, and addicts: Burroughs, Bukowski, Carver, a spoken word artist named Steven Jesse Bernstein, and, weirdly, Updike, who probably wasn’t a dirtbag, at least not in the same way, and whose characters I definitely couldn’t relate to, but boy, could he write a sentence.
MR: Addiction, recovery, and cleansing are huge themes of this book. Most of the characters are hanging onto something–whether a drug addiction or an event from their past–and many are engaged in elaborate stop-gaps. (For instance, Betty’s constant attempts to psychically spy on Johnny.) What does recovery mean for you? Do you see any of your characters as fully recovered?
JB: I don’t see myself, or any of my characters, as fully recovered, but rather somewhere on the path towards self-awareness. I was badly out of focus for many years, and by that I mean my primary focus was on other people and what they thought of me and/or the terrible things they’d said or done to me. Put another way, my head was always up someone else’s ass. Recovery, for me, starts with becoming aware of my own triggers, motivations, and fucked-up behavior, and I think most of my characters are on a similar path. Betty, though, is perhaps not very far along.
MR: One of the central points of this book is Mona’s move to New Mexico, and Mr. Disgusting ascribes great importance to New Mexico. What draws you to New Mexico as a setting?
I was a cleaning lady in New Mexico just before I went back to college in my mid-thirties. I didn’t live there for very long–I went broke after eight months–and I don’t feel as though I know the place all that well, but when I started writing, I knew I would set something there. Mostly, it was the landscape that spoke to me–it’s really dirty and really clean at the same time, and also both alive and dead, peaceful and unsettling, and I’ve always been drawn to those extremes.
MR: In this excerpt, we see Mona’s intense relationship with Mr. Disgusting play out, and eventually Mona begins seeing him in shifting perspectives between “aging hipster” and “total creature.” How did you go about creating this duality in Mr. Disgusting’s character?
JB: Mr. Disgusting is a composite of a bunch of guys I hung around out with in my twenties, all of whom were simultaneously young and old, beautiful and hideous, funny and dead serious. So the duality of Disgusting wasn’t something I felt I needed to create; it was already there, and very attractive to me.
MR: Mona’s relationship with photography is in flux throughout this book. While she’s under the influence of Mr. Disgusting, she blows off art school, and when she tells clients that she’s a photographer, she describes it as a “lie” to make them more comfortable with a white cleaning woman. Yet, we see that she’s both prolific and gifted at photography. For you, how much is Mona deluding herself? What does it take to label yourself as an artist?
JB: I took hundreds of pictures of myself cleaning houses, one of which was used for the cover of the book, because I was bored out of my mind, but I was also interested in making meaning out of the work I was doing. I cleaned a lot of houses all over the place, in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Taos, but I didn’t have much going on otherwise, and I wanted all the cleaning to count for something, even if it was “just for my records.” The pictures I took were mostly terrible or else vaguely creepy, and not in a good way, but I felt like I was doing something “other than,” which was vital to my sanity at the time. But was I an artist? Is Mona? I have no idea. I’ve always disliked that word. We are both photographers, though, for sure, and obsessive documenters.
MR: We see that Mr. Disgusting has a lot of power over Mona. However, in many aspects of his life, he is not in control–he’s a heroin addict, in failing health, close to impotent, and poor. In your view, where does Mr. Disgusting’s influence over Mona come from?
JB: Attraction is often a mystery to me, but I know that Mona feels invisible in her daily life and she feels seen by Disgusting, at least initially, and that’s very powerful. It doesn’t matter that he’s toothless, dickless, and penniless, because well-adjusted, well-heeled, conventionally handsome men don’t hold much interest for her. Yoko and Yoko would say that she manifested him for a reason, that he was the perfect vehicle for her to start dealing with her past, and blah, blah, but she also feels emotionally met by him on a level she hadn’t found with boys her own age, boys who perhaps hadn’t suffered enough. I remember being very attached to my suffering at that age, and also being drawn to people who had suffered in a similar manner.
***
Jen Beagin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. She lives in Boston. Pretend I’m Dead is her first novel.
Jen Beagin
2017 Winner in Fiction
Jen Beagin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. Her novel, Pretend I’m Dead, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2015. She lives in Hudson, New York.
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Print Marked Items
Beagin, Jen: PRETEND I'M DEAD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Beagin, Jen PRETEND I'M DEAD Scribner (Adult Fiction) $24.00 5, 15 ISBN: 978-1-5011-8393-5
A young woman's offbeat adventures among misfits, weirdos, and other human beings.
Mona cleans houses for a living. This surprises people, as Mona is white, and English is her first language.
The world seems to expect more from her than she expects from herself, which might be why Mona falls for
a junkie. The man she thinks of as "Mr. Disgusting" is, at first, nothing more than fodder for fantasy--her
profession affords a lot of time for elaborate daydreaming--but, eventually, the two start a real relationship.
Just as there is more to Mona than her clients expect from a cleaning woman, Mr. Disgusting is not solely
defined by his addiction. Both Mona and her author are sharp--but empathetic--observers, and this story is
filled with characters who are seriously damaged and wholly human. The novel is shaped by the people
Mona meets. There's Mr. Disgusting, who cannot escape himself but gives Mona the push she needs to
grow into herself. Nigel and Shiori are a weirdly serene couple whose offers of help Mona ignores, but they
help her anyway. Henry is a client with a secret. And Betty is a psychic who may not be a total fake. And
then there's Mona herself, plagued by ailments emotional and physical and trying to finally understand the
truth of her chaotic childhood. Mona is cleareyed and funny, not a reliable person exactly but a trustworthy
observer. What gives this novel its heart is Beagin's capacity for seeing: As Mona cleans peoples' homes,
we learn that the wealthy, well-dressed, superior individuals who pay her to scrub their toilets are just as
messed up as the addicts and prostitutes and gamblers she encounters outside of work. This is not a new
theme, of course, but Beagin makes it fresh with her sly, funny, compassionate voice. This is a terrific
debut.
Singularly enjoyable.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Beagin, Jen: PRETEND I'M DEAD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650867/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eb95b9f4.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650867
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Pretend I'm Dead
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
112.4 (Oct. 15, 2015): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Pretend I'm Dead. By Jen Beagin. I Oct. 2015. 208p. TriQuarterly, paper, $17.95 (9780810132078).
Twenty-four-year-old Mona, the compelling protagonist in Beagin's smart and funny debut, makes a living
as a cleaning lady in Massachusetts, while volunteering at a clean-needle exchange. After she becomes
intrigued by a man she affectionately refers to as "Mr. Disgusting," she embarks on an unconventional, yet
tender relationship. Mr. Disgusting, however, struggles with sobriety and eventually ends things with Mona,
urging her to move to New Mexico to start over. Mona takes his advice and heads to the desert, renting half
of an adobe house, the other half of which is inhabited by a hippie couple who make a misguided attempt to
take her under their wing. As Mona charts a new path, she finds herself confronting her past, particularly
the fragmented relationship with her wayward father. At the same time, her burgeoning housekeeping
business introduces others into her life, notably a single father who may be hiding a disturbing secret and an
eccentric psychic who convinces Mona to spy on her ex-husband. Mona's internal struggles are thoughtfully
realized, and Beagin's sharply drawn characters share the universal longing for connection. --Leah Strauss
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "Pretend I'm Dead." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2015, p. 34. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A433202213/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5417b478.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A433202213
6/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1529864401333 3/3
Pretend I'm Dead
Publishers Weekly.
262.34 (Aug. 24, 2015): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Pretend I'm Dead
Jen Beagin. Northwestern Univ./Triquarterly, $17.95 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-81013207-8
If Beagin's debut novel feels voyeuristic, it's due to its incisive realism and the protagonist's fascination with
the people around her. Mona spends her 20s cleaning other people's houses and observing her clients
intently. After a heartbreak involving an addict Mona calls Mr. Disgusting, she leaves Lowell, Mass., for
Taos, N.M. The book comes alive in this new location, where Mona encounters New Age neighbors, a
family that may be hiding something, and a cleavage-bearing, leopard print-wearing psychic. As Mona
gains insight into the lives of those around her, she comes closer to confronting her own traumas. Her quick
wit (she tells people that oven cleaner is her poison of choice) and the surprising turns in the narrative
(Mona's clients are always more complex than they initially seem) keep this journey of self-discovery from
veering into cliche. The result is a funny, touching look at loneliness and the search for belonging. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pretend I'm Dead." Publishers Weekly, 24 Aug. 2015, p. 55. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A427301476/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a0352c64.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A427301476