Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Marlena
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.juliebuntin.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.booklistreader.com/2017/04/04/books-and-authors/talking-with-julie-buntin-about-her-debut-novel-marlena/ * https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/marlena-the-girls-the-strays-literary-friendship/522786/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Email: juliebuntin@gmail.com
Title: Ms.
LC control no.: n 2016033716
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016033716
HEADING: Buntin, Julie
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053 _0 |a PS3602.U558
100 1_ |a Buntin, Julie
670 __ |a Marlena, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Julie Buntin) publisher’s summary (“debut novel”)
PERSONAL
Married Gabe Habash, 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY, teacher. Writing program director, Catapult.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including One Teen Story, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Cosmopolitan, Slate, The Oprah Magazine, and O.
SIDELIGHTS
Julie Buntin has spent the whole of her professional years immersed in writing and all that it entails. Alongside her teaching position with Marymount Manhattan College, she has also penned several works.
Marlena is her introductory novel, inspired by her experiences as an adolescent and the friends she made and lost at that point in her life. Marlena focuses on a young girl by the name of Cat, whose formerly clean-cut, affluent life has been upended by the separation of her parents. She and her fractured family have relocated to frigid Michigan. There, Cat encounters the alluring Marlena and soon falls head over heels into a close, but hazardous friendship with her. Marlena is clearly and deeply troubled by her own home life, and daredevil activities are how she copes. The story is presented from the point of view of a now-grown Cat, who reveals how the misadventures of the two girls—as well as their bond—come to an unfortunate end. One Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory.” They went on to call the book “devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous.” In an issue of BookPage, Michael Magras wrote: “Marlena is still an unforgettable portrait of teenage confusion and experimentation, a time when one discovers ‘that time doesn’t belong to you. All you have is what you remember.'” A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena’s ‘glow … that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever.'” On the New York Times Online, Deborah Shapiro stated: “This generous, sensitive novel of true feeling is at its most moving when it sweeps you up without too much explication, becoming both a painful exorcism and a devoted memorial to friends and selves who are gone.” SF Gate website contributor Anthony Domestico wrote: “‘Marlena‘ is a novel about youth—a time of splendor and squalor.” He added: “Buntin make us see, hear and feel both.” Kimberly King Parsons, a reviewer on the Book Forum website, remarked: “Buntin does it by stringing gorgeous sentences together, one after another, and by creating characters so nuanced and true-to-life you’d swear you were remembering them yourself.” Washington Post Online contributor Cassandra Morrison said: “That is how Buntin has cemented her first novel: steeped in nostalgia, as a crush-worthy visit to a childhood that is so very unhealthy and so very romantic in many ways.” Liz Moore, a writer on the Boston Globe Online, commented: “Julie Buntin’s debut novel, ‘Marlena,’ is a thrilling and important examination of female adolescent friendship.” On the Pif Magazine website, Alexandra Panic wrote: “Marlena is a story that will feel like your own and open a portal to your past, bringing back a memory of a friendship or a person you let slip away.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, April, 2017, Michael Magras, review of Marlena, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of Marlena.
Marie Claire, April, 2017, Steph Opitz, “What We’re Reading,” review of Marlena, p. 105.
Publishers Weekly, December 8, 2014, Julie Buntin, “PW’S top authors pick their favorite books of 2014,” p. 46; November 14, 2016, review of Marlena, p. 31.
ONLINE
Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (April 13, 2017), Sophie Gilbert, “My Brilliant (Doomed) Friend,” review of Marlena.
Book Forum, http://www.bookforum.com/ (June 13, 2017), Kimberly King Parsons, review of Marlena.
Booklist Reader, http://www.booklistreader.com/ (April 4, 2017), Annie Bostrom, “Talking with Julie Buntin about her Debut Novel, MARLENA,” author interview.
Boston Globe Online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (April 7, 2017), Liz Moore, review of Marlena.
Catapult, https://catapult.co/ (February 23, 2017), Julie Buntin, “On Making Things Up: Some True Stories About Writing My Novel.”
Electric Lit, https://electricliterature.com/ (April 4, 2017), Andrea Arnold, “Those Teenage Years When Everything Is New and Death Is Just Around the Corner,” author interview.
Julie Buntin Website, http://www.juliebuntin.com (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Lit Hub, http://lithub.com/ (May 17, 2017), Bethanne Patrick, “Julie Buntin on the Joys and Tragedies of Teenage Girlhood,” author interview.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (June 30, 2017), Michael Schaub, “Q&A Gabe Habash and Julie Buntin on publishing their first novels,” author interview.
Millions, http://themillions.com/ (June 19, 2017), Claire Cameron, “Two Writers, One Marriage: The Millions Interviews Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash,” author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (April 18, 2017), Deborah Shapiro, review of Marlena.
Pif Magazine, http://www.pifmagazine.com/ (April 18, 2017), Alexandra Panic, review of Marlena.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 12, 2017), Maria Anderson, “Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation With Julie Buntin,” author interview.
SF Gate, http://www.sfgate.com/ (May 17, 2017), Anthony Domestico, review of Marlena.
Vogue, http://www.vogue.com/ (April 3, 2017), Megan O’Grady, review of Marlena.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (April 25, 2017), Cassandra Morrison, review of Marlena.*
Julie Buntin MARLENA PRESS EVENTS BIO CONTACT
Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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SAYING WHAT SHOULDN’T BE SAID: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIE BUNTIN
BY MARIA ANDERSON
June 12th, 2017
Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan.
Buntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time.
***
The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. Where did you begin with the project?
Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year—I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I didn’t start working on Marlena for real until my thesis semester at grad school in 2013. I brought my “serious” novel, about 150 pages of titled fragments, almost a collection of prose poems, to my first meeting with Lorrie Moore, my advisor and one of my favorite writers. I also brought what I had of what would become Marlena. She looked at both projects and was like, this one (the titled fragments novel) has zero plot. She encouraged me to work on Marlena, and after that I picked up a lot of steam—I think I had a finished draft a little less than two years later, though I essentially rewrote it after it sold in summer 2015.
Rumpus: Do you think it helps to have less pressure on the material as you begin writing something? And did Lorrie Moore give you any advice as you continued writing, regarding plot?
Buntin: In my case, it did. When I started this book, I never imagined that it would become my first novel. I thought I was just playing around. But it took on urgency as I wrote. Even when it wasn’t my primary project, I kept coming back to it. I had to let go of some destructive thoughts—my fear that writing about teenage girls wasn’t serious, for one—before I could commit fully. Which makes me want to shake myself, now. Writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world. But it is helpful to write without pressure, without thinking about publishing—I think it might be hard to fully disappear into the writing if you’re worrying about how it will be received.
As I remember it, Lorrie mostly shared her impressions of my work, rather than direct advice. We had a conversation once about looking to the classics—I was reading David Copperfield that semester—and borrowing plots, sort of fitting your stories around a classic foundation. I didn’t exactly do that, but I still think it’s good advice.
Rumpus: How did you go about accessing memories from when you were in high school? I guess I’m wondering if you developed certain patterns or habits that helped you explore this friendship, and also that particular feeling of being in high school and insecure and changing so quickly?
Buntin: I am not sure I developed any habits or patterns to help me tap into those old feelings, but it might have helped that I was twenty-three when I first started sketching Cat and Marlena’s friendship. At that age, I knew absolutely nothing about adulthood or being fixed in your identity—what I did know is that I was deeply homesick for northern Michigan, and I had just enough distance from my high school years to begin to be able to write about that time without being completely clouded by the experience of living it. In some ways, at twenty-three, and even twenty-four, twenty-five, being a teenage girl was the only thing I felt truly qualified to write about. In the novel I am working on now, there’s a bigger cast, some teenagers, some adults—the adults are more interesting this time around. I did sometimes have to remind myself to lean into Cat and Marlena making bad decisions while writing Marlena—I’d start a scene and be like, ugh, don’t do that, why would you do that, but of course, as a teenager, you so often do precisely the worst thing for yourself. I wanted to capture that impulse, to describe it, even though I often wanted to protect my characters from themselves.
Rumpus: Like when they decide to have a party at the beautiful house Cat and her mom clean? We know that won’t end well…
Buntin: Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking about how much more open to experiences I was as a teenager—teenagers mostly say yes, I think, and adults mostly say no.
Rumpus: I’ve read your article in the Atlantic about your friend from high school, who passed away. I’m wondering how close Marlena is to her? And, Cat, the narrator, to you? The details are different, of course—how Marlena and your friend passed away, for one—but I also don’t want to assume this novel is just completely based on your friendship.
Buntin: If you asked me to tell you a true story about myself, and I told you a series of details and events that you later found out were not the real circumstances of my life, you would probably feel betrayed, like I had lied to you. My friend was a real person; her life was infinitely richer and more complicated than anything I could fictionalize. Biographically, she has little in common with Marlena—aside from dying too young. Even the circumstances of Cat and Marlena’s friendship—its duration, their age difference, that they’re neighbors, the particular makeup of their families, their essential dynamic—not only are those things entirely fictional, I feel that overlaying their story onto mine and my friend’s is reductive—both to my friend, who can no longer speak for herself, and to me as a writer. There’s this presumption of autobiography, which sometimes feels a little gendered to me, when women write in the first person—and in this case, because I have written publicly about the loss of a formative friend from adolescence, I’ve noticed it at every turn, from my publisher to close friends from adulthood, who eye the drink in my hand a different way, having read Marlena. There’s something natural about the desire to link reality to fiction, and I respect the question, especially considering the glaring similarities between my story and Cat’s—but I wonder what it is about us as readers that requires a precise accounting of what’s true and what isn’t in the novels we read. In short: the story I wrote isn’t true; the plot is not based in reality. But the feelings certainly have their roots in my own experience, even if the container is different—the desire to escape a place, the weird thrill of self-destruction, the all-consuming nature of friendship as a girl, the fragility of selfhood when you’re a teenager, that stomach-churning combination of humiliation and ego. I was trying to render those emotions as honestly as possible, and this story was the best way I could think of to do it.
Rumpus: What an excellent, honest answer to a fairly annoying question.
Buntin: Definitely not an annoying question! It’s something I always find myself wondering, too. I’m fascinated by why it’s so compelling to trace the link between fiction and an author’s life. Maybe it’s a way of justifying how a novel, a made-up world, can feel so real. A way of explaining the magic, or something.
Rumpus: Why do you think this gendered response to novels by female authors exists? Are there other situations in which you’ve gotten the feeling that the response to your work—or even more broadly, to you as a person—has been affected by your gender?
Buntin: Well, the presumption of autobiography exists for male writers, too—especially with debuts, especially those written in first person. So maybe it’s not that so much that’s gendered as it is the casual dismissal of work by female writers that appears to be, or is interpreted as, autobiographical. Female writers are processing their trauma while male writers are transforming their experience into an articulation of the human condition. A lot of writers are pushing back against these outdated and toxic ideas about art and who gets to make it and how who makes what is received, but these ideas still influence our knee-jerk reactions.
And maybe it’s less intimidating to assume that a writer is drawing from life, instead of drawing from talent or hard work or divine inspiration or whatever else you want to call where books come from. I wonder if it’s a way of undermining your competition. There was this whole freak-out over Elena Ferrante—before her identity was revealed, everyone just assumed that the Neapolitan trilogy has so much emotional power because it is based on lived experiences. It sucks that we had to find out through an egregious violation of her privacy, but I was happy to learn that she came from very different place than the narrator—the reveal underscored the writing’s distance from the writer’s life.
I remember when I was a kid, realizing that in school, in band, wherever, women compete with everyone—whereas men compete with each other. It bothered me a lot when I was working on my MFA. I hated the sense I got, that the men in my classes didn’t consider me a threat. Most of them saw us on different tracks.
I’m getting away from the question a little bit. I would hope people who like my book like it because of how it works as a book, not because they feel they’re getting some intimate look into my life. Like many women, I spend a lot of time, especially at my job, trying to make sure everyone around me is comfortable and happy. But in my writing, I couldn’t care less about comfort. I’m more interested in saying things that shouldn’t be said, in what discomfort—for the characters, for the reader—reveals about who we are. (I’d argue, everything.) It’s an odd experience, publishing this book, partly because it means taking public responsibility for a story that sets out to make the reader feel a wide range of things, many of them “bad.” I am not a man, but I imagine that someone who hasn’t spent their entire life subtly trying to accommodate the people around them might have an easier time publishing a book with dark and difficult subject matter.
Rumpus: The guilt that Cat felt at the role she played in the death of her friend seems to be the driving force behind her need to write about Marlena. You write in the Atlantic piece:
At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go? In my memory, yes, I’m the sidekick, yes, she was the one always egging us to take one more step into the shadows, where we could really get hurt. But wasn’t I holding her hand, encouraging her with my willingness to follow?”
Was there a conclusion you arrived at, by the end of working on this book? Did your feelings of guilt toward what happened to your friend change throughout the process?
Buntin: It’s interesting and challenging to consider how writing this novel influenced my actual emotional experience of losing a friend. One answer is simply: it did not. The characters in Marlena struggle with issues similar to the ones I faced in adolescence and young adulthood, but the differences between their stories and my own makes it impossible to collapse the conclusions reached by either party. Cat’s guilt takes a different shape than my guilt; she is consumed with retracing her steps during that year, both because it is a turning point in her life (the start of her relationship not just with Marlena, but with alcohol), and because she’s trying to discern whether a few choices, handled differently, might have resulted in a better outcome for both women. My guilt about my friend’s loss has more to do with losing touch, and not intervening in a situation that I knew, thanks to social media, had become dangerous.
But that’s not exactly honest, because at the same time that the novel’s events and characters are fictional, I was certainly channeling very real emotions, including a profound frustration and grief about the way substance abuse impacts women and girls. My younger sister is also struggling with drugs and alcohol, and she was in some dark places during the years I was writing Marlena—she was as much on my mind as my friend. There’s also the fact that I was totally immersed in writing about a woman who loses a friend in adolescence and grapples with that loss throughout her adulthood, at the same time that I was grappling with a parallel loss and living in fear for my sister’s life. Writing into and investigating those emotions perhaps, in a way, extended the normal grieving process. I wasn’t able to fully let go until I finished the book. So, I suppose, the process of writing the novel played a part in my reality that was to a certain degree cathartic. I continue to think of that as the most biographically “true” part of the book—that the act of writing, the experience of reading, can transform, or even save, a human being. That is true of my own life, and it is true of Cat’s.
Rumpus: Were there other novels you looked to in writing this one? I was thinking about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Lorrie Moore), Eileen (Otessa Mossfegh), and The Girls (Emma Cline) while reading.
Buntin: Eileen and The Girls came out after I was done with revisions for Marlena, and though I admire both novels, I hadn’t read either until very recently. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, on the other hand, was a definitely an influence—it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and I love how elegiac and compact and emotional it is, almost like a piece of music. A few non-novels in here, but an incomplete list of books that meant a lot to me while I worked on Marlena: Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; Jane Eyre; the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove (especially her adolescence poems); Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (most everything by Edith Wharton); I love Saul Bellow, from his stories to his novels, Herzog being perhaps my favorite, with its off the charts energy and unforgettable voice; Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee; The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard; My Antonia, for its beautiful and clever frame, the way it contextualizes a very precise window of time and gives it greater depth; We the Animals by Justin Torres; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Margaret Atwood, especially The Blind Assassin, which helped me realize something about how every novel is about the process of writing a novel; Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters and Tana French for tension; Zadie Smith for plot and elegance; and then there are the long novels, and though I can’t precisely trace how they influenced this book, but I was certainly reading a lot of them as I worked—Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Man Who Loved Children, The Golden Notebook, The Savage Detectives, and 2666.
Oh, and Claire Messud and Elena Ferrante. I read both writers around the time I was rewriting—I love how emotion simmers right at the surface of their prose, like the skin that separates water from air. You have to kind of dive into it to read the book.
Rumpus: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is one of my favorite books, too.
Buntin: It’s a book people feel strongly about—I’ve met many writers who are convinced it’s not as good as Lorrie’s short stories. (All straight white male writers, for what it’s worth.) And for every one of them, there are readers and writers like you and me, who consider it essential reading, one of those rare books that puts to words something you’ve always felt but could never name—maybe because it does so perfectly capture that precise feeling of looking back on and trying to make sense of a formative adolescent friendship. And for so many women, those friendships are really essential parts of their identities, even long after they’ve ended.
Rumpus: Do you read much nonfiction?
Buntin: I do! I love memoir and essays, narrative nonfiction. In the past couple of years, I’ve loved Dreamland, Eviction, Negroland, The Guardians, The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin… I also love novels that straddle fiction and nonfiction, like Jane Alison’s Nine Island (another Catapult title) and everything Rachel Cusk writes. I am not particularly loyal to any genre, or even divisions like literary, commercial, adult, YA, whatever. I just really like to read.
Rumpus: What helped you work on this book? What was difficult, or what made the writing more difficult? What made it easier?
Buntin: I am a binge writer, which makes my life difficult in general. I am not a daily chipper away-er—my husband is, and it’s something I envy about him, the methodical way, when he’s working on a book, that he can clock two hours a day until the thing is done. It’s very healthy.
I have bad writing habits. My day job is more than a day job, which contributes to the problem—I love my job, and it takes up most of my time and a lot of psychic space. So I write on the weekends, in blocks of time that can sometimes span eight, ten, twelve hours. If I am really cooking on a project—this magically happened with Marlena, during the rewriting phase—I will get up and write in the early morning for a few hours before work, poke at the Google doc on my phone throughout the day, and then put in a few more hours before going to bed, literally bookending my sleep with writing. That’s only been sustainable for me for a couple months at a time, though if I could write like that always I’d be a pretty happy person. When it happens I become kind of a monster, and forget to eat or, if there’s a bag of chips or something beside me, thoughtlessly eat the whole thing. Forget showering, responding to text messages, making and keeping plans—it’s wholly immersive, in an odd way, self-effacing (in that I forget I have a body), but mostly so remarkably selfish and egocentric that I sometimes feel a little ashamed when I come up for air.
It feels increasingly funny to me to talk about writing in terms of it being hard or easy—writing, in my experience, is a self-defined category, this deeply personal mental state, more like a place that I’m constantly trying to fight my way to than an activity. Once I’m there, it’s just writing. Getting there can be very challenging. Sometimes a scene is especially difficult, or you can’t find the music in a sentence or paragraph, and that’s frustrating, but in a sort of addictive way—to a certain degree, those knots throughout the process, the struggle to untangle them, kept me connected to the manuscript, even after a three or four-day writing break.
Rumpus: Could you talk about a knot you untangled that kept you involved in Marlena?
Buntin: As mentioned, I did a pretty dramatic rewrite on this novel, so when I think of the process of writing it, it’s split into two parts, almost as if I wrote two different novels. With the first draft, the question of what was going to happen, the desire to follow the characters to the end of their story was enough to keep me going. But after the book sold, while I was going over my editor’s notes, I became aware of a question that had been in the back of my mind all along. Why now? Why was Cat telling this story now? What was the trigger? It wasn’t enough, just that this story was important to her—it seemed like a major flaw, that I had no good answer to that question. I knew I couldn’t let the book be published without untangling that particular knot—and I also felt that untangling it would help me address some of my editor’s other questions.
In early drafts, Cat’s adult life was almost nonexistent—I’d withheld it, in order to underscore the potency of this adolescent experience, the most vivid and fully alive time of her life. But with the rewrite, I realized that the answer I was looking for had to come from Cat as an adult, from something concrete, in her present, that tripped her back. That thing took two forms—the appearance of Sal, whose story hadn’t felt fully fleshed out in the initial draft, and Cat’s increasingly dangerous relationship to alcohol. That year had been a pivot not just because of Marlena and what happened to her, but because it was when Cat started drinking. That discovery was the key to the book for me. It changed the structure and helped me pare Marlena down to its essentials. It made the book more difficult—certainly darker, uglier. But it felt true, in the novelistic sense.
Rumpus: I loved how we got to know Sal, Marlena’s little brother. His character was one of my favorites. How do you manage, on a day-to-day basis, to maintain friendships, to be a good partner, to keep your living space in order, to get outside and have fun, while still devoting what feels like enough time to writing? Do you put friendships, for instance, on the back burner and become known for always turning down social invitations or backing out of plans?
Buntin: My closest friends would probably say that I do have a reputation for backing out of plans—I’ve always been a little flakey when it comes to social stuff, and though there’s something gross about blaming it on being a writer, I think there’s a relationship between the drive to be alone and the process of writing. I’ve spent a lot of my twenties trying to correct this impulse, in an attempt to be a better and more reliable friend and partner. But I do feel a shred of resistance, in almost every social context, no matter how much fun I’m having—everything that’s not writing is not writing, and that awareness is my resting state. Still, there’s some part of me that feels guilty about putting writing first—over my job, my relationships—as if it’s self-indulgent. Or maybe I’m simply afraid. So much of my writing life is about trying to squash those negative internal voices, the competing pressures of my day-to-day, so that I can get down to doing the one thing that truly makes me feel fully engaged, free. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance.
***
Author photograph © Nina Subin.
Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Big Lucks, and The Atlas Review. She is an editor at Essay Press. More from this author →
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SAYING WHAT SHOULDN’T BE SAID: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIE BUNTIN
BY MARIA ANDERSON
June 12th, 2017
Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan.
Buntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time.
***
The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. Where did you begin with the project?
Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year—I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I didn’t start working on Marlena for real until my thesis semester at grad school in 2013. I brought my “serious” novel, about 150 pages of titled fragments, almost a collection of prose poems, to my first meeting with Lorrie Moore, my advisor and one of my favorite writers. I also brought what I had of what would become Marlena. She looked at both projects and was like, this one (the titled fragments novel) has zero plot. She encouraged me to work on Marlena, and after that I picked up a lot of steam—I think I had a finished draft a little less than two years later, though I essentially rewrote it after it sold in summer 2015.
Rumpus: Do you think it helps to have less pressure on the material as you begin writing something? And did Lorrie Moore give you any advice as you continued writing, regarding plot?
Buntin: In my case, it did. When I started this book, I never imagined that it would become my first novel. I thought I was just playing around. But it took on urgency as I wrote. Even when it wasn’t my primary project, I kept coming back to it. I had to let go of some destructive thoughts—my fear that writing about teenage girls wasn’t serious, for one—before I could commit fully. Which makes me want to shake myself, now. Writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world. But it is helpful to write without pressure, without thinking about publishing—I think it might be hard to fully disappear into the writing if you’re worrying about how it will be received.
As I remember it, Lorrie mostly shared her impressions of my work, rather than direct advice. We had a conversation once about looking to the classics—I was reading David Copperfield that semester—and borrowing plots, sort of fitting your stories around a classic foundation. I didn’t exactly do that, but I still think it’s good advice.
Rumpus: How did you go about accessing memories from when you were in high school? I guess I’m wondering if you developed certain patterns or habits that helped you explore this friendship, and also that particular feeling of being in high school and insecure and changing so quickly?
Buntin: I am not sure I developed any habits or patterns to help me tap into those old feelings, but it might have helped that I was twenty-three when I first started sketching Cat and Marlena’s friendship. At that age, I knew absolutely nothing about adulthood or being fixed in your identity—what I did know is that I was deeply homesick for northern Michigan, and I had just enough distance from my high school years to begin to be able to write about that time without being completely clouded by the experience of living it. In some ways, at twenty-three, and even twenty-four, twenty-five, being a teenage girl was the only thing I felt truly qualified to write about. In the novel I am working on now, there’s a bigger cast, some teenagers, some adults—the adults are more interesting this time around. I did sometimes have to remind myself to lean into Cat and Marlena making bad decisions while writing Marlena—I’d start a scene and be like, ugh, don’t do that, why would you do that, but of course, as a teenager, you so often do precisely the worst thing for yourself. I wanted to capture that impulse, to describe it, even though I often wanted to protect my characters from themselves.
Rumpus: Like when they decide to have a party at the beautiful house Cat and her mom clean? We know that won’t end well…
Buntin: Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking about how much more open to experiences I was as a teenager—teenagers mostly say yes, I think, and adults mostly say no.
Rumpus: I’ve read your article in the Atlantic about your friend from high school, who passed away. I’m wondering how close Marlena is to her? And, Cat, the narrator, to you? The details are different, of course—how Marlena and your friend passed away, for one—but I also don’t want to assume this novel is just completely based on your friendship.
Buntin: If you asked me to tell you a true story about myself, and I told you a series of details and events that you later found out were not the real circumstances of my life, you would probably feel betrayed, like I had lied to you. My friend was a real person; her life was infinitely richer and more complicated than anything I could fictionalize. Biographically, she has little in common with Marlena—aside from dying too young. Even the circumstances of Cat and Marlena’s friendship—its duration, their age difference, that they’re neighbors, the particular makeup of their families, their essential dynamic—not only are those things entirely fictional, I feel that overlaying their story onto mine and my friend’s is reductive—both to my friend, who can no longer speak for herself, and to me as a writer. There’s this presumption of autobiography, which sometimes feels a little gendered to me, when women write in the first person—and in this case, because I have written publicly about the loss of a formative friend from adolescence, I’ve noticed it at every turn, from my publisher to close friends from adulthood, who eye the drink in my hand a different way, having read Marlena. There’s something natural about the desire to link reality to fiction, and I respect the question, especially considering the glaring similarities between my story and Cat’s—but I wonder what it is about us as readers that requires a precise accounting of what’s true and what isn’t in the novels we read. In short: the story I wrote isn’t true; the plot is not based in reality. But the feelings certainly have their roots in my own experience, even if the container is different—the desire to escape a place, the weird thrill of self-destruction, the all-consuming nature of friendship as a girl, the fragility of selfhood when you’re a teenager, that stomach-churning combination of humiliation and ego. I was trying to render those emotions as honestly as possible, and this story was the best way I could think of to do it.
Rumpus: What an excellent, honest answer to a fairly annoying question.
Buntin: Definitely not an annoying question! It’s something I always find myself wondering, too. I’m fascinated by why it’s so compelling to trace the link between fiction and an author’s life. Maybe it’s a way of justifying how a novel, a made-up world, can feel so real. A way of explaining the magic, or something.
Rumpus: Why do you think this gendered response to novels by female authors exists? Are there other situations in which you’ve gotten the feeling that the response to your work—or even more broadly, to you as a person—has been affected by your gender?
Buntin: Well, the presumption of autobiography exists for male writers, too—especially with debuts, especially those written in first person. So maybe it’s not that so much that’s gendered as it is the casual dismissal of work by female writers that appears to be, or is interpreted as, autobiographical. Female writers are processing their trauma while male writers are transforming their experience into an articulation of the human condition. A lot of writers are pushing back against these outdated and toxic ideas about art and who gets to make it and how who makes what is received, but these ideas still influence our knee-jerk reactions.
And maybe it’s less intimidating to assume that a writer is drawing from life, instead of drawing from talent or hard work or divine inspiration or whatever else you want to call where books come from. I wonder if it’s a way of undermining your competition. There was this whole freak-out over Elena Ferrante—before her identity was revealed, everyone just assumed that the Neapolitan trilogy has so much emotional power because it is based on lived experiences. It sucks that we had to find out through an egregious violation of her privacy, but I was happy to learn that she came from very different place than the narrator—the reveal underscored the writing’s distance from the writer’s life.
I remember when I was a kid, realizing that in school, in band, wherever, women compete with everyone—whereas men compete with each other. It bothered me a lot when I was working on my MFA. I hated the sense I got, that the men in my classes didn’t consider me a threat. Most of them saw us on different tracks.
I’m getting away from the question a little bit. I would hope people who like my book like it because of how it works as a book, not because they feel they’re getting some intimate look into my life. Like many women, I spend a lot of time, especially at my job, trying to make sure everyone around me is comfortable and happy. But in my writing, I couldn’t care less about comfort. I’m more interested in saying things that shouldn’t be said, in what discomfort—for the characters, for the reader—reveals about who we are. (I’d argue, everything.) It’s an odd experience, publishing this book, partly because it means taking public responsibility for a story that sets out to make the reader feel a wide range of things, many of them “bad.” I am not a man, but I imagine that someone who hasn’t spent their entire life subtly trying to accommodate the people around them might have an easier time publishing a book with dark and difficult subject matter.
Rumpus: The guilt that Cat felt at the role she played in the death of her friend seems to be the driving force behind her need to write about Marlena. You write in the Atlantic piece:
At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go? In my memory, yes, I’m the sidekick, yes, she was the one always egging us to take one more step into the shadows, where we could really get hurt. But wasn’t I holding her hand, encouraging her with my willingness to follow?”
Was there a conclusion you arrived at, by the end of working on this book? Did your feelings of guilt toward what happened to your friend change throughout the process?
Buntin: It’s interesting and challenging to consider how writing this novel influenced my actual emotional experience of losing a friend. One answer is simply: it did not. The characters in Marlena struggle with issues similar to the ones I faced in adolescence and young adulthood, but the differences between their stories and my own makes it impossible to collapse the conclusions reached by either party. Cat’s guilt takes a different shape than my guilt; she is consumed with retracing her steps during that year, both because it is a turning point in her life (the start of her relationship not just with Marlena, but with alcohol), and because she’s trying to discern whether a few choices, handled differently, might have resulted in a better outcome for both women. My guilt about my friend’s loss has more to do with losing touch, and not intervening in a situation that I knew, thanks to social media, had become dangerous.
But that’s not exactly honest, because at the same time that the novel’s events and characters are fictional, I was certainly channeling very real emotions, including a profound frustration and grief about the way substance abuse impacts women and girls. My younger sister is also struggling with drugs and alcohol, and she was in some dark places during the years I was writing Marlena—she was as much on my mind as my friend. There’s also the fact that I was totally immersed in writing about a woman who loses a friend in adolescence and grapples with that loss throughout her adulthood, at the same time that I was grappling with a parallel loss and living in fear for my sister’s life. Writing into and investigating those emotions perhaps, in a way, extended the normal grieving process. I wasn’t able to fully let go until I finished the book. So, I suppose, the process of writing the novel played a part in my reality that was to a certain degree cathartic. I continue to think of that as the most biographically “true” part of the book—that the act of writing, the experience of reading, can transform, or even save, a human being. That is true of my own life, and it is true of Cat’s.
Rumpus: Were there other novels you looked to in writing this one? I was thinking about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Lorrie Moore), Eileen (Otessa Mossfegh), and The Girls (Emma Cline) while reading.
Buntin: Eileen and The Girls came out after I was done with revisions for Marlena, and though I admire both novels, I hadn’t read either until very recently. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, on the other hand, was a definitely an influence—it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and I love how elegiac and compact and emotional it is, almost like a piece of music. A few non-novels in here, but an incomplete list of books that meant a lot to me while I worked on Marlena: Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; Jane Eyre; the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove (especially her adolescence poems); Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (most everything by Edith Wharton); I love Saul Bellow, from his stories to his novels, Herzog being perhaps my favorite, with its off the charts energy and unforgettable voice; Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee; The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard; My Antonia, for its beautiful and clever frame, the way it contextualizes a very precise window of time and gives it greater depth; We the Animals by Justin Torres; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Margaret Atwood, especially The Blind Assassin, which helped me realize something about how every novel is about the process of writing a novel; Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters and Tana French for tension; Zadie Smith for plot and elegance; and then there are the long novels, and though I can’t precisely trace how they influenced this book, but I was certainly reading a lot of them as I worked—Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Man Who Loved Children, The Golden Notebook, The Savage Detectives, and 2666.
Oh, and Claire Messud and Elena Ferrante. I read both writers around the time I was rewriting—I love how emotion simmers right at the surface of their prose, like the skin that separates water from air. You have to kind of dive into it to read the book.
Rumpus: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is one of my favorite books, too.
Buntin: It’s a book people feel strongly about—I’ve met many writers who are convinced it’s not as good as Lorrie’s short stories. (All straight white male writers, for what it’s worth.) And for every one of them, there are readers and writers like you and me, who consider it essential reading, one of those rare books that puts to words something you’ve always felt but could never name—maybe because it does so perfectly capture that precise feeling of looking back on and trying to make sense of a formative adolescent friendship. And for so many women, those friendships are really essential parts of their identities, even long after they’ve ended.
Rumpus: Do you read much nonfiction?
Buntin: I do! I love memoir and essays, narrative nonfiction. In the past couple of years, I’ve loved Dreamland, Eviction, Negroland, The Guardians, The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin… I also love novels that straddle fiction and nonfiction, like Jane Alison’s Nine Island (another Catapult title) and everything Rachel Cusk writes. I am not particularly loyal to any genre, or even divisions like literary, commercial, adult, YA, whatever. I just really like to read.
Rumpus: What helped you work on this book? What was difficult, or what made the writing more difficult? What made it easier?
Buntin: I am a binge writer, which makes my life difficult in general. I am not a daily chipper away-er—my husband is, and it’s something I envy about him, the methodical way, when he’s working on a book, that he can clock two hours a day until the thing is done. It’s very healthy.
I have bad writing habits. My day job is more than a day job, which contributes to the problem—I love my job, and it takes up most of my time and a lot of psychic space. So I write on the weekends, in blocks of time that can sometimes span eight, ten, twelve hours. If I am really cooking on a project—this magically happened with Marlena, during the rewriting phase—I will get up and write in the early morning for a few hours before work, poke at the Google doc on my phone throughout the day, and then put in a few more hours before going to bed, literally bookending my sleep with writing. That’s only been sustainable for me for a couple months at a time, though if I could write like that always I’d be a pretty happy person. When it happens I become kind of a monster, and forget to eat or, if there’s a bag of chips or something beside me, thoughtlessly eat the whole thing. Forget showering, responding to text messages, making and keeping plans—it’s wholly immersive, in an odd way, self-effacing (in that I forget I have a body), but mostly so remarkably selfish and egocentric that I sometimes feel a little ashamed when I come up for air.
It feels increasingly funny to me to talk about writing in terms of it being hard or easy—writing, in my experience, is a self-defined category, this deeply personal mental state, more like a place that I’m constantly trying to fight my way to than an activity. Once I’m there, it’s just writing. Getting there can be very challenging. Sometimes a scene is especially difficult, or you can’t find the music in a sentence or paragraph, and that’s frustrating, but in a sort of addictive way—to a certain degree, those knots throughout the process, the struggle to untangle them, kept me connected to the manuscript, even after a three or four-day writing break.
Rumpus: Could you talk about a knot you untangled that kept you involved in Marlena?
Buntin: As mentioned, I did a pretty dramatic rewrite on this novel, so when I think of the process of writing it, it’s split into two parts, almost as if I wrote two different novels. With the first draft, the question of what was going to happen, the desire to follow the characters to the end of their story was enough to keep me going. But after the book sold, while I was going over my editor’s notes, I became aware of a question that had been in the back of my mind all along. Why now? Why was Cat telling this story now? What was the trigger? It wasn’t enough, just that this story was important to her—it seemed like a major flaw, that I had no good answer to that question. I knew I couldn’t let the book be published without untangling that particular knot—and I also felt that untangling it would help me address some of my editor’s other questions.
In early drafts, Cat’s adult life was almost nonexistent—I’d withheld it, in order to underscore the potency of this adolescent experience, the most vivid and fully alive time of her life. But with the rewrite, I realized that the answer I was looking for had to come from Cat as an adult, from something concrete, in her present, that tripped her back. That thing took two forms—the appearance of Sal, whose story hadn’t felt fully fleshed out in the initial draft, and Cat’s increasingly dangerous relationship to alcohol. That year had been a pivot not just because of Marlena and what happened to her, but because it was when Cat started drinking. That discovery was the key to the book for me. It changed the structure and helped me pare Marlena down to its essentials. It made the book more difficult—certainly darker, uglier. But it felt true, in the novelistic sense.
Rumpus: I loved how we got to know Sal, Marlena’s little brother. His character was one of my favorites. How do you manage, on a day-to-day basis, to maintain friendships, to be a good partner, to keep your living space in order, to get outside and have fun, while still devoting what feels like enough time to writing? Do you put friendships, for instance, on the back burner and become known for always turning down social invitations or backing out of plans?
Buntin: My closest friends would probably say that I do have a reputation for backing out of plans—I’ve always been a little flakey when it comes to social stuff, and though there’s something gross about blaming it on being a writer, I think there’s a relationship between the drive to be alone and the process of writing. I’ve spent a lot of my twenties trying to correct this impulse, in an attempt to be a better and more reliable friend and partner. But I do feel a shred of resistance, in almost every social context, no matter how much fun I’m having—everything that’s not writing is not writing, and that awareness is my resting state. Still, there’s some part of me that feels guilty about putting writing first—over my job, my relationships—as if it’s self-indulgent. Or maybe I’m simply afraid. So much of my writing life is about trying to squash those negative internal voices, the competing pressures of my day-to-day, so that I can get down to doing the one thing that truly makes me feel fully engaged, free. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance.
***
Author photograph © Nina Subin.
Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Big Lucks, and The Atlas Review. She is an editor at Essay Press. More from this author →
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ShareThis Copy and Paste:) Making nostalgia a thing of the past. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE SAYING WHAT SHOULDN’T BE SAID: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIE BUNTIN BY MARIA ANDERSON June 12th, 2017 Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan. Buntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time. *** The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. Where did you begin with the project? Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year—I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I didn’t start working on Marlena for real until my thesis semester at grad school in 2013. I brought my “serious” novel, about 150 pages of titled fragments, almost a collection of prose poems, to my first meeting with Lorrie Moore, my advisor and one of my favorite writers. I also brought what I had of what would become Marlena. She looked at both projects and was like, this one (the titled fragments novel) has zero plot. She encouraged me to work on Marlena, and after that I picked up a lot of steam—I think I had a finished draft a little less than two years later, though I essentially rewrote it after it sold in summer 2015. Rumpus: Do you think it helps to have less pressure on the material as you begin writing something? And did Lorrie Moore give you any advice as you continued writing, regarding plot? Buntin: In my case, it did. When I started this book, I never imagined that it would become my first novel. I thought I was just playing around. But it took on urgency as I wrote. Even when it wasn’t my primary project, I kept coming back to it. I had to let go of some destructive thoughts—my fear that writing about teenage girls wasn’t serious, for one—before I could commit fully. Which makes me want to shake myself, now. Writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world. But it is helpful to write without pressure, without thinking about publishing—I think it might be hard to fully disappear into the writing if you’re worrying about how it will be received. As I remember it, Lorrie mostly shared her impressions of my work, rather than direct advice. We had a conversation once about looking to the classics—I was reading David Copperfield that semester—and borrowing plots, sort of fitting your stories around a classic foundation. I didn’t exactly do that, but I still think it’s good advice. Rumpus: How did you go about accessing memories from when you were in high school? I guess I’m wondering if you developed certain patterns or habits that helped you explore this friendship, and also that particular feeling of being in high school and insecure and changing so quickly? Buntin: I am not sure I developed any habits or patterns to help me tap into those old feelings, but it might have helped that I was twenty-three when I first started sketching Cat and Marlena’s friendship. At that age, I knew absolutely nothing about adulthood or being fixed in your identity—what I did know is that I was deeply homesick for northern Michigan, and I had just enough distance from my high school years to begin to be able to write about that time without being completely clouded by the experience of living it. In some ways, at twenty-three, and even twenty-four, twenty-five, being a teenage girl was the only thing I felt truly qualified to write about. In the novel I am working on now, there’s a bigger cast, some teenagers, some adults—the adults are more interesting this time around. I did sometimes have to remind myself to lean into Cat and Marlena making bad decisions while writing Marlena—I’d start a scene and be like, ugh, don’t do that, why would you do that, but of course, as a teenager, you so often do precisely the worst thing for yourself. I wanted to capture that impulse, to describe it, even though I often wanted to protect my characters from themselves. Rumpus: Like when they decide to have a party at the beautiful house Cat and her mom clean? We know that won’t end well… Buntin: Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking about how much more open to experiences I was as a teenager—teenagers mostly say yes, I think, and adults mostly say no. Rumpus: I’ve read your article in the Atlantic about your friend from high school, who passed away. I’m wondering how close Marlena is to her? And, Cat, the narrator, to you? The details are different, of course—how Marlena and your friend passed away, for one—but I also don’t want to assume this novel is just completely based on your friendship. Buntin: If you asked me to tell you a true story about myself, and I told you a series of details and events that you later found out were not the real circumstances of my life, you would probably feel betrayed, like I had lied to you. My friend was a real person; her life was infinitely richer and more complicated than anything I could fictionalize. Biographically, she has little in common with Marlena—aside from dying too young. Even the circumstances of Cat and Marlena’s friendship—its duration, their age difference, that they’re neighbors, the particular makeup of their families, their essential dynamic—not only are those things entirely fictional, I feel that overlaying their story onto mine and my friend’s is reductive—both to my friend, who can no longer speak for herself, and to me as a writer. There’s this presumption of autobiography, which sometimes feels a little gendered to me, when women write in the first person—and in this case, because I have written publicly about the loss of a formative friend from adolescence, I’ve noticed it at every turn, from my publisher to close friends from adulthood, who eye the drink in my hand a different way, having read Marlena. There’s something natural about the desire to link reality to fiction, and I respect the question, especially considering the glaring similarities between my story and Cat’s—but I wonder what it is about us as readers that requires a precise accounting of what’s true and what isn’t in the novels we read. In short: the story I wrote isn’t true; the plot is not based in reality. But the feelings certainly have their roots in my own experience, even if the container is different—the desire to escape a place, the weird thrill of self-destruction, the all-consuming nature of friendship as a girl, the fragility of selfhood when you’re a teenager, that stomach-churning combination of humiliation and ego. I was trying to render those emotions as honestly as possible, and this story was the best way I could think of to do it. Rumpus: What an excellent, honest answer to a fairly annoying question. Buntin: Definitely not an annoying question! It’s something I always find myself wondering, too. I’m fascinated by why it’s so compelling to trace the link between fiction and an author’s life. Maybe it’s a way of justifying how a novel, a made-up world, can feel so real. A way of explaining the magic, or something. Rumpus: Why do you think this gendered response to novels by female authors exists? Are there other situations in which you’ve gotten the feeling that the response to your work—or even more broadly, to you as a person—has been affected by your gender? Buntin: Well, the presumption of autobiography exists for male writers, too—especially with debuts, especially those written in first person. So maybe it’s not that so much that’s gendered as it is the casual dismissal of work by female writers that appears to be, or is interpreted as, autobiographical. Female writers are processing their trauma while male writers are transforming their experience into an articulation of the human condition. A lot of writers are pushing back against these outdated and toxic ideas about art and who gets to make it and how who makes what is received, but these ideas still influence our knee-jerk reactions. And maybe it’s less intimidating to assume that a writer is drawing from life, instead of drawing from talent or hard work or divine inspiration or whatever else you want to call where books come from. I wonder if it’s a way of undermining your competition. There was this whole freak-out over Elena Ferrante—before her identity was revealed, everyone just assumed that the Neapolitan trilogy has so much emotional power because it is based on lived experiences. It sucks that we had to find out through an egregious violation of her privacy, but I was happy to learn that she came from very different place than the narrator—the reveal underscored the writing’s distance from the writer’s life. I remember when I was a kid, realizing that in school, in band, wherever, women compete with everyone—whereas men compete with each other. It bothered me a lot when I was working on my MFA. I hated the sense I got, that the men in my classes didn’t consider me a threat. Most of them saw us on different tracks. I’m getting away from the question a little bit. I would hope people who like my book like it because of how it works as a book, not because they feel they’re getting some intimate look into my life. Like many women, I spend a lot of time, especially at my job, trying to make sure everyone around me is comfortable and happy. But in my writing, I couldn’t care less about comfort. I’m more interested in saying things that shouldn’t be said, in what discomfort—for the characters, for the reader—reveals about who we are. (I’d argue, everything.) It’s an odd experience, publishing this book, partly because it means taking public responsibility for a story that sets out to make the reader feel a wide range of things, many of them “bad.” I am not a man, but I imagine that someone who hasn’t spent their entire life subtly trying to accommodate the people around them might have an easier time publishing a book with dark and difficult subject matter. Rumpus: The guilt that Cat felt at the role she played in the death of her friend seems to be the driving force behind her need to write about Marlena. You write in the Atlantic piece: At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go? In my memory, yes, I’m the sidekick, yes, she was the one always egging us to take one more step into the shadows, where we could really get hurt. But wasn’t I holding her hand, encouraging her with my willingness to follow?” Was there a conclusion you arrived at, by the end of working on this book? Did your feelings of guilt toward what happened to your friend change throughout the process? Buntin: It’s interesting and challenging to consider how writing this novel influenced my actual emotional experience of losing a friend. One answer is simply: it did not. The characters in Marlena struggle with issues similar to the ones I faced in adolescence and young adulthood, but the differences between their stories and my own makes it impossible to collapse the conclusions reached by either party. Cat’s guilt takes a different shape than my guilt; she is consumed with retracing her steps during that year, both because it is a turning point in her life (the start of her relationship not just with Marlena, but with alcohol), and because she’s trying to discern whether a few choices, handled differently, might have resulted in a better outcome for both women. My guilt about my friend’s loss has more to do with losing touch, and not intervening in a situation that I knew, thanks to social media, had become dangerous. But that’s not exactly honest, because at the same time that the novel’s events and characters are fictional, I was certainly channeling very real emotions, including a profound frustration and grief about the way substance abuse impacts women and girls. My younger sister is also struggling with drugs and alcohol, and she was in some dark places during the years I was writing Marlena—she was as much on my mind as my friend. There’s also the fact that I was totally immersed in writing about a woman who loses a friend in adolescence and grapples with that loss throughout her adulthood, at the same time that I was grappling with a parallel loss and living in fear for my sister’s life. Writing into and investigating those emotions perhaps, in a way, extended the normal grieving process. I wasn’t able to fully let go until I finished the book. So, I suppose, the process of writing the novel played a part in my reality that was to a certain degree cathartic. I continue to think of that as the most biographically “true” part of the book—that the act of writing, the experience of reading, can transform, or even save, a human being. That is true of my own life, and it is true of Cat’s. Rumpus: Were there other novels you looked to in writing this one? I was thinking about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Lorrie Moore), Eileen (Otessa Mossfegh), and The Girls (Emma Cline) while reading. Buntin: Eileen and The Girls came out after I was done with revisions for Marlena, and though I admire both novels, I hadn’t read either until very recently. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, on the other hand, was a definitely an influence—it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and I love how elegiac and compact and emotional it is, almost like a piece of music. A few non-novels in here, but an incomplete list of books that meant a lot to me while I worked on Marlena: Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; Jane Eyre; the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove (especially her adolescence poems); Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (most everything by Edith Wharton); I love Saul Bellow, from his stories to his novels, Herzog being perhaps my favorite, with its off the charts energy and unforgettable voice; Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee; The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard; My Antonia, for its beautiful and clever frame, the way it contextualizes a very precise window of time and gives it greater depth; We the Animals by Justin Torres; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Margaret Atwood, especially The Blind Assassin, which helped me realize something about how every novel is about the process of writing a novel; Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters and Tana French for tension; Zadie Smith for plot and elegance; and then there are the long novels, and though I can’t precisely trace how they influenced this book, but I was certainly reading a lot of them as I worked—Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Man Who Loved Children, The Golden Notebook, The Savage Detectives, and 2666. Oh, and Claire Messud and Elena Ferrante. I read both writers around the time I was rewriting—I love how emotion simmers right at the surface of their prose, like the skin that separates water from air. You have to kind of dive into it to read the book. Rumpus: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is one of my favorite books, too. Buntin: It’s a book people feel strongly about—I’ve met many writers who are convinced it’s not as good as Lorrie’s short stories. (All straight white male writers, for what it’s worth.) And for every one of them, there are readers and writers like you and me, who consider it essential reading, one of those rare books that puts to words something you’ve always felt but could never name—maybe because it does so perfectly capture that precise feeling of looking back on and trying to make sense of a formative adolescent friendship. And for so many women, those friendships are really essential parts of their identities, even long after they’ve ended. Rumpus: Do you read much nonfiction? Buntin: I do! I love memoir and essays, narrative nonfiction. In the past couple of years, I’ve loved Dreamland, Eviction, Negroland, The Guardians, The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin… I also love novels that straddle fiction and nonfiction, like Jane Alison’s Nine Island (another Catapult title) and everything Rachel Cusk writes. I am not particularly loyal to any genre, or even divisions like literary, commercial, adult, YA, whatever. I just really like to read. Rumpus: What helped you work on this book? What was difficult, or what made the writing more difficult? What made it easier? Buntin: I am a binge writer, which makes my life difficult in general. I am not a daily chipper away-er—my husband is, and it’s something I envy about him, the methodical way, when he’s working on a book, that he can clock two hours a day until the thing is done. It’s very healthy. I have bad writing habits. My day job is more than a day job, which contributes to the problem—I love my job, and it takes up most of my time and a lot of psychic space. So I write on the weekends, in blocks of time that can sometimes span eight, ten, twelve hours. If I am really cooking on a project—this magically happened with Marlena, during the rewriting phase—I will get up and write in the early morning for a few hours before work, poke at the Google doc on my phone throughout the day, and then put in a few more hours before going to bed, literally bookending my sleep with writing. That’s only been sustainable for me for a couple months at a time, though if I could write like that always I’d be a pretty happy person. When it happens I become kind of a monster, and forget to eat or, if there’s a bag of chips or something beside me, thoughtlessly eat the whole thing. Forget showering, responding to text messages, making and keeping plans—it’s wholly immersive, in an odd way, self-effacing (in that I forget I have a body), but mostly so remarkably selfish and egocentric that I sometimes feel a little ashamed when I come up for air. It feels increasingly funny to me to talk about writing in terms of it being hard or easy—writing, in my experience, is a self-defined category, this deeply personal mental state, more like a place that I’m constantly trying to fight my way to than an activity. Once I’m there, it’s just writing. Getting there can be very challenging. Sometimes a scene is especially difficult, or you can’t find the music in a sentence or paragraph, and that’s frustrating, but in a sort of addictive way—to a certain degree, those knots throughout the process, the struggle to untangle them, kept me connected to the manuscript, even after a three or four-day writing break. Rumpus: Could you talk about a knot you untangled that kept you involved in Marlena? Buntin: As mentioned, I did a pretty dramatic rewrite on this novel, so when I think of the process of writing it, it’s split into two parts, almost as if I wrote two different novels. With the first draft, the question of what was going to happen, the desire to follow the characters to the end of their story was enough to keep me going. But after the book sold, while I was going over my editor’s notes, I became aware of a question that had been in the back of my mind all along. Why now? Why was Cat telling this story now? What was the trigger? It wasn’t enough, just that this story was important to her—it seemed like a major flaw, that I had no good answer to that question. I knew I couldn’t let the book be published without untangling that particular knot—and I also felt that untangling it would help me address some of my editor’s other questions. In early drafts, Cat’s adult life was almost nonexistent—I’d withheld it, in order to underscore the potency of this adolescent experience, the most vivid and fully alive time of her life. But with the rewrite, I realized that the answer I was looking for had to come from Cat as an adult, from something concrete, in her present, that tripped her back. That thing took two forms—the appearance of Sal, whose story hadn’t felt fully fleshed out in the initial draft, and Cat’s increasingly dangerous relationship to alcohol. That year had been a pivot not just because of Marlena and what happened to her, but because it was when Cat started drinking. That discovery was the key to the book for me. It changed the structure and helped me pare Marlena down to its essentials. It made the book more difficult—certainly darker, uglier. But it felt true, in the novelistic sense. Rumpus: I loved how we got to know Sal, Marlena’s little brother. His character was one of my favorites. How do you manage, on a day-to-day basis, to maintain friendships, to be a good partner, to keep your living space in order, to get outside and have fun, while still devoting what feels like enough time to writing? Do you put friendships, for instance, on the back burner and become known for always turning down social invitations or backing out of plans? Buntin: My closest friends would probably say that I do have a reputation for backing out of plans—I’ve always been a little flakey when it comes to social stuff, and though there’s something gross about blaming it on being a writer, I think there’s a relationship between the drive to be alone and the process of writing. I’ve spent a lot of my twenties trying to correct this impulse, in an attempt to be a better and more reliable friend and partner. But I do feel a shred of resistance, in almost every social context, no matter how much fun I’m having—everything that’s not writing is not writing, and that awareness is my resting state. Still, there’s some part of me that feels guilty about putting writing first—over my job, my relationships—as if it’s self-indulgent. Or maybe I’m simply afraid. So much of my writing life is about trying to squash those negative internal voices, the competing pressures of my day-to-day, so that I can get down to doing the one thing that truly makes me feel fully engaged, free. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance. *** Author photograph © Nina Subin. Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Big Lucks, and The Atlas Review. She is an editor at Essay Press. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin Are We All Our Own Vanishing Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay OTHER COOL STUFF Rumpus Original Fiction: Zhiyu/Jerry Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #98: Nicky Nodjoumi Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dean Rader Next Letter in the Mail: Stassa Edwards Shop Related Products Marlena: A Novel $15.32$26.00 (73) The Girls: A Novel $11.21$17.00 (1655) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. 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Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE SAYING WHAT SHOULDN’T BE SAID: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIE BUNTIN BY MARIA ANDERSON June 12th, 2017 Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan. Buntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time. *** The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. Where did you begin with the project? Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year—I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I didn’t start working on Marlena for real until my thesis semester at grad school in 2013. I brought my “serious” novel, about 150 pages of titled fragments, almost a collection of prose poems, to my first meeting with Lorrie Moore, my advisor and one of my favorite writers. I also brought what I had of what would become Marlena. She looked at both projects and was like, this one (the titled fragments novel) has zero plot. She encouraged me to work on Marlena, and after that I picked up a lot of steam—I think I had a finished draft a little less than two years later, though I essentially rewrote it after it sold in summer 2015. Rumpus: Do you think it helps to have less pressure on the material as you begin writing something? And did Lorrie Moore give you any advice as you continued writing, regarding plot? Buntin: In my case, it did. When I started this book, I never imagined that it would become my first novel. I thought I was just playing around. But it took on urgency as I wrote. Even when it wasn’t my primary project, I kept coming back to it. I had to let go of some destructive thoughts—my fear that writing about teenage girls wasn’t serious, for one—before I could commit fully. Which makes me want to shake myself, now. Writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world. But it is helpful to write without pressure, without thinking about publishing—I think it might be hard to fully disappear into the writing if you’re worrying about how it will be received. As I remember it, Lorrie mostly shared her impressions of my work, rather than direct advice. We had a conversation once about looking to the classics—I was reading David Copperfield that semester—and borrowing plots, sort of fitting your stories around a classic foundation. I didn’t exactly do that, but I still think it’s good advice. Rumpus: How did you go about accessing memories from when you were in high school? I guess I’m wondering if you developed certain patterns or habits that helped you explore this friendship, and also that particular feeling of being in high school and insecure and changing so quickly? Buntin: I am not sure I developed any habits or patterns to help me tap into those old feelings, but it might have helped that I was twenty-three when I first started sketching Cat and Marlena’s friendship. At that age, I knew absolutely nothing about adulthood or being fixed in your identity—what I did know is that I was deeply homesick for northern Michigan, and I had just enough distance from my high school years to begin to be able to write about that time without being completely clouded by the experience of living it. In some ways, at twenty-three, and even twenty-four, twenty-five, being a teenage girl was the only thing I felt truly qualified to write about. In the novel I am working on now, there’s a bigger cast, some teenagers, some adults—the adults are more interesting this time around. I did sometimes have to remind myself to lean into Cat and Marlena making bad decisions while writing Marlena—I’d start a scene and be like, ugh, don’t do that, why would you do that, but of course, as a teenager, you so often do precisely the worst thing for yourself. I wanted to capture that impulse, to describe it, even though I often wanted to protect my characters from themselves. Rumpus: Like when they decide to have a party at the beautiful house Cat and her mom clean? We know that won’t end well… Buntin: Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking about how much more open to experiences I was as a teenager—teenagers mostly say yes, I think, and adults mostly say no. Rumpus: I’ve read your article in the Atlantic about your friend from high school, who passed away. I’m wondering how close Marlena is to her? And, Cat, the narrator, to you? The details are different, of course—how Marlena and your friend passed away, for one—but I also don’t want to assume this novel is just completely based on your friendship. Buntin: If you asked me to tell you a true story about myself, and I told you a series of details and events that you later found out were not the real circumstances of my life, you would probably feel betrayed, like I had lied to you. My friend was a real person; her life was infinitely richer and more complicated than anything I could fictionalize. Biographically, she has little in common with Marlena—aside from dying too young. Even the circumstances of Cat and Marlena’s friendship—its duration, their age difference, that they’re neighbors, the particular makeup of their families, their essential dynamic—not only are those things entirely fictional, I feel that overlaying their story onto mine and my friend’s is reductive—both to my friend, who can no longer speak for herself, and to me as a writer. There’s this presumption of autobiography, which sometimes feels a little gendered to me, when women write in the first person—and in this case, because I have written publicly about the loss of a formative friend from adolescence, I’ve noticed it at every turn, from my publisher to close friends from adulthood, who eye the drink in my hand a different way, having read Marlena. There’s something natural about the desire to link reality to fiction, and I respect the question, especially considering the glaring similarities between my story and Cat’s—but I wonder what it is about us as readers that requires a precise accounting of what’s true and what isn’t in the novels we read. In short: the story I wrote isn’t true; the plot is not based in reality. But the feelings certainly have their roots in my own experience, even if the container is different—the desire to escape a place, the weird thrill of self-destruction, the all-consuming nature of friendship as a girl, the fragility of selfhood when you’re a teenager, that stomach-churning combination of humiliation and ego. I was trying to render those emotions as honestly as possible, and this story was the best way I could think of to do it. Rumpus: What an excellent, honest answer to a fairly annoying question. Buntin: Definitely not an annoying question! It’s something I always find myself wondering, too. I’m fascinated by why it’s so compelling to trace the link between fiction and an author’s life. Maybe it’s a way of justifying how a novel, a made-up world, can feel so real. A way of explaining the magic, or something. Rumpus: Why do you think this gendered response to novels by female authors exists? Are there other situations in which you’ve gotten the feeling that the response to your work—or even more broadly, to you as a person—has been affected by your gender? Buntin: Well, the presumption of autobiography exists for male writers, too—especially with debuts, especially those written in first person. So maybe it’s not that so much that’s gendered as it is the casual dismissal of work by female writers that appears to be, or is interpreted as, autobiographical. Female writers are processing their trauma while male writers are transforming their experience into an articulation of the human condition. A lot of writers are pushing back against these outdated and toxic ideas about art and who gets to make it and how who makes what is received, but these ideas still influence our knee-jerk reactions. And maybe it’s less intimidating to assume that a writer is drawing from life, instead of drawing from talent or hard work or divine inspiration or whatever else you want to call where books come from. I wonder if it’s a way of undermining your competition. There was this whole freak-out over Elena Ferrante—before her identity was revealed, everyone just assumed that the Neapolitan trilogy has so much emotional power because it is based on lived experiences. It sucks that we had to find out through an egregious violation of her privacy, but I was happy to learn that she came from very different place than the narrator—the reveal underscored the writing’s distance from the writer’s life. I remember when I was a kid, realizing that in school, in band, wherever, women compete with everyone—whereas men compete with each other. It bothered me a lot when I was working on my MFA. I hated the sense I got, that the men in my classes didn’t consider me a threat. Most of them saw us on different tracks. I’m getting away from the question a little bit. I would hope people who like my book like it because of how it works as a book, not because they feel they’re getting some intimate look into my life. Like many women, I spend a lot of time, especially at my job, trying to make sure everyone around me is comfortable and happy. But in my writing, I couldn’t care less about comfort. I’m more interested in saying things that shouldn’t be said, in what discomfort—for the characters, for the reader—reveals about who we are. (I’d argue, everything.) It’s an odd experience, publishing this book, partly because it means taking public responsibility for a story that sets out to make the reader feel a wide range of things, many of them “bad.” I am not a man, but I imagine that someone who hasn’t spent their entire life subtly trying to accommodate the people around them might have an easier time publishing a book with dark and difficult subject matter. Rumpus: The guilt that Cat felt at the role she played in the death of her friend seems to be the driving force behind her need to write about Marlena. You write in the Atlantic piece: At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go? In my memory, yes, I’m the sidekick, yes, she was the one always egging us to take one more step into the shadows, where we could really get hurt. But wasn’t I holding her hand, encouraging her with my willingness to follow?” Was there a conclusion you arrived at, by the end of working on this book? Did your feelings of guilt toward what happened to your friend change throughout the process? Buntin: It’s interesting and challenging to consider how writing this novel influenced my actual emotional experience of losing a friend. One answer is simply: it did not. The characters in Marlena struggle with issues similar to the ones I faced in adolescence and young adulthood, but the differences between their stories and my own makes it impossible to collapse the conclusions reached by either party. Cat’s guilt takes a different shape than my guilt; she is consumed with retracing her steps during that year, both because it is a turning point in her life (the start of her relationship not just with Marlena, but with alcohol), and because she’s trying to discern whether a few choices, handled differently, might have resulted in a better outcome for both women. My guilt about my friend’s loss has more to do with losing touch, and not intervening in a situation that I knew, thanks to social media, had become dangerous. But that’s not exactly honest, because at the same time that the novel’s events and characters are fictional, I was certainly channeling very real emotions, including a profound frustration and grief about the way substance abuse impacts women and girls. My younger sister is also struggling with drugs and alcohol, and she was in some dark places during the years I was writing Marlena—she was as much on my mind as my friend. There’s also the fact that I was totally immersed in writing about a woman who loses a friend in adolescence and grapples with that loss throughout her adulthood, at the same time that I was grappling with a parallel loss and living in fear for my sister’s life. Writing into and investigating those emotions perhaps, in a way, extended the normal grieving process. I wasn’t able to fully let go until I finished the book. So, I suppose, the process of writing the novel played a part in my reality that was to a certain degree cathartic. I continue to think of that as the most biographically “true” part of the book—that the act of writing, the experience of reading, can transform, or even save, a human being. That is true of my own life, and it is true of Cat’s. Rumpus: Were there other novels you looked to in writing this one? I was thinking about Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Lorrie Moore), Eileen (Otessa Mossfegh), and The Girls (Emma Cline) while reading. Buntin: Eileen and The Girls came out after I was done with revisions for Marlena, and though I admire both novels, I hadn’t read either until very recently. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, on the other hand, was a definitely an influence—it’s one of my favorite books of all time, and I love how elegiac and compact and emotional it is, almost like a piece of music. A few non-novels in here, but an incomplete list of books that meant a lot to me while I worked on Marlena: Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; Jane Eyre; the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove (especially her adolescence poems); Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (most everything by Edith Wharton); I love Saul Bellow, from his stories to his novels, Herzog being perhaps my favorite, with its off the charts energy and unforgettable voice; Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee; The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard; My Antonia, for its beautiful and clever frame, the way it contextualizes a very precise window of time and gives it greater depth; We the Animals by Justin Torres; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Margaret Atwood, especially The Blind Assassin, which helped me realize something about how every novel is about the process of writing a novel; Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters and Tana French for tension; Zadie Smith for plot and elegance; and then there are the long novels, and though I can’t precisely trace how they influenced this book, but I was certainly reading a lot of them as I worked—Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Man Who Loved Children, The Golden Notebook, The Savage Detectives, and 2666. Oh, and Claire Messud and Elena Ferrante. I read both writers around the time I was rewriting—I love how emotion simmers right at the surface of their prose, like the skin that separates water from air. You have to kind of dive into it to read the book. Rumpus: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is one of my favorite books, too. Buntin: It’s a book people feel strongly about—I’ve met many writers who are convinced it’s not as good as Lorrie’s short stories. (All straight white male writers, for what it’s worth.) And for every one of them, there are readers and writers like you and me, who consider it essential reading, one of those rare books that puts to words something you’ve always felt but could never name—maybe because it does so perfectly capture that precise feeling of looking back on and trying to make sense of a formative adolescent friendship. And for so many women, those friendships are really essential parts of their identities, even long after they’ve ended. Rumpus: Do you read much nonfiction? Buntin: I do! I love memoir and essays, narrative nonfiction. In the past couple of years, I’ve loved Dreamland, Eviction, Negroland, The Guardians, The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin… I also love novels that straddle fiction and nonfiction, like Jane Alison’s Nine Island (another Catapult title) and everything Rachel Cusk writes. I am not particularly loyal to any genre, or even divisions like literary, commercial, adult, YA, whatever. I just really like to read. Rumpus: What helped you work on this book? What was difficult, or what made the writing more difficult? What made it easier? Buntin: I am a binge writer, which makes my life difficult in general. I am not a daily chipper away-er—my husband is, and it’s something I envy about him, the methodical way, when he’s working on a book, that he can clock two hours a day until the thing is done. It’s very healthy. I have bad writing habits. My day job is more than a day job, which contributes to the problem—I love my job, and it takes up most of my time and a lot of psychic space. So I write on the weekends, in blocks of time that can sometimes span eight, ten, twelve hours. If I am really cooking on a project—this magically happened with Marlena, during the rewriting phase—I will get up and write in the early morning for a few hours before work, poke at the Google doc on my phone throughout the day, and then put in a few more hours before going to bed, literally bookending my sleep with writing. That’s only been sustainable for me for a couple months at a time, though if I could write like that always I’d be a pretty happy person. When it happens I become kind of a monster, and forget to eat or, if there’s a bag of chips or something beside me, thoughtlessly eat the whole thing. Forget showering, responding to text messages, making and keeping plans—it’s wholly immersive, in an odd way, self-effacing (in that I forget I have a body), but mostly so remarkably selfish and egocentric that I sometimes feel a little ashamed when I come up for air. It feels increasingly funny to me to talk about writing in terms of it being hard or easy—writing, in my experience, is a self-defined category, this deeply personal mental state, more like a place that I’m constantly trying to fight my way to than an activity. Once I’m there, it’s just writing. Getting there can be very challenging. Sometimes a scene is especially difficult, or you can’t find the music in a sentence or paragraph, and that’s frustrating, but in a sort of addictive way—to a certain degree, those knots throughout the process, the struggle to untangle them, kept me connected to the manuscript, even after a three or four-day writing break. Rumpus: Could you talk about a knot you untangled that kept you involved in Marlena? Buntin: As mentioned, I did a pretty dramatic rewrite on this novel, so when I think of the process of writing it, it’s split into two parts, almost as if I wrote two different novels. With the first draft, the question of what was going to happen, the desire to follow the characters to the end of their story was enough to keep me going. But after the book sold, while I was going over my editor’s notes, I became aware of a question that had been in the back of my mind all along. Why now? Why was Cat telling this story now? What was the trigger? It wasn’t enough, just that this story was important to her—it seemed like a major flaw, that I had no good answer to that question. I knew I couldn’t let the book be published without untangling that particular knot—and I also felt that untangling it would help me address some of my editor’s other questions. In early drafts, Cat’s adult life was almost nonexistent—I’d withheld it, in order to underscore the potency of this adolescent experience, the most vivid and fully alive time of her life. But with the rewrite, I realized that the answer I was looking for had to come from Cat as an adult, from something concrete, in her present, that tripped her back. That thing took two forms—the appearance of Sal, whose story hadn’t felt fully fleshed out in the initial draft, and Cat’s increasingly dangerous relationship to alcohol. That year had been a pivot not just because of Marlena and what happened to her, but because it was when Cat started drinking. That discovery was the key to the book for me. It changed the structure and helped me pare Marlena down to its essentials. It made the book more difficult—certainly darker, uglier. But it felt true, in the novelistic sense. Rumpus: I loved how we got to know Sal, Marlena’s little brother. His character was one of my favorites. How do you manage, on a day-to-day basis, to maintain friendships, to be a good partner, to keep your living space in order, to get outside and have fun, while still devoting what feels like enough time to writing? Do you put friendships, for instance, on the back burner and become known for always turning down social invitations or backing out of plans? Buntin: My closest friends would probably say that I do have a reputation for backing out of plans—I’ve always been a little flakey when it comes to social stuff, and though there’s something gross about blaming it on being a writer, I think there’s a relationship between the drive to be alone and the process of writing. I’ve spent a lot of my twenties trying to correct this impulse, in an attempt to be a better and more reliable friend and partner. But I do feel a shred of resistance, in almost every social context, no matter how much fun I’m having—everything that’s not writing is not writing, and that awareness is my resting state. Still, there’s some part of me that feels guilty about putting writing first—over my job, my relationships—as if it’s self-indulgent. Or maybe I’m simply afraid. So much of my writing life is about trying to squash those negative internal voices, the competing pressures of my day-to-day, so that I can get down to doing the one thing that truly makes me feel fully engaged, free. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance. *** Author photograph © Nina Subin. Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Big Lucks, and The Atlas Review. She is an editor at Essay Press. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Buntin Are We All Our Own Vanishing Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay OTHER COOL STUFF Rumpus Original Fiction: Zhiyu/Jerry Glimpsing the Colors of the World: Nancy Chen Long’s Light Into Bodies The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #98: Nicky Nodjoumi Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Dean Rader Next Letter in the Mail: Stassa Edwards Shop Related Products Marlena: A Novel $15.32$26.00 (73) The Girls: A Novel $11.21$17.00 (1655) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, short fiction, and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. 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By Annie Bostrom April 4, 2017 1 Comments
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Talking with Julie Buntin about her Debut Novel, MARLENA
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, speaks straight to readers from its first line: “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.” What narrator Cat can’t forget is her yearlong best-friendship, at age 15, with Marlena: a girl her opposite in some ways, but with whom she instantly, deeply bonds. Buntin’s emotionally vivid portrayal of their friendship—beautiful, complicated, tragic, and of singular importance for all that will follow it in Cat’s life—is in a class of its own.
Over email, Buntin shared her connection to her novel’s dramatic setting, the challenges of letting her characters make bad choices, and the importance of greedy reading.
Julie Buntin, photo by Nina Subin
Julie Buntin
ANNIE BOSTROM: In the first few pages of the book, readers find out that Marlena drowned almost 20 years ago, and Cat is now living in New York. (And, of course, we know who the book is named for.) At what point did you know that this would be readers’ doorway to the girls’ story?
JULIE BUNTIN: I’ve always been immune to the concept of spoilers—the idea that a story might be ruined by finding out what happens in advance is something that I almost can’t quite understand. Hearing about a plot point or twist is very different than experiencing it in the context of a story, and besides, in the stories I love the most what happens is always secondary to how it does, or how what happens is told. Marlena isn’t a thriller. It’s not a murder mystery. Suspense isn’t its primary concern. For me, it’s a coming of age story about grief and addiction and memory, and so the doorway into the novel was always Marlena’s death. The story moves backward and forward from there, but that’s at the center, and so it seemed the most natural and authentic place to start.
The northern Michigan setting is so important to the book. It’s almost like another character. What’s your connection to it?
The easy answer is that I grew up in northern Michigan. I left for college, like Cat, but I am homesick for Michigan every day. Does that sound like an exaggeration? It’s not. It’s an impossibly beautiful place, with a lot of contradictions—I grew up in a resort town that doubles in size in the summer, a place known for both its skiing and its beaches. As a teenager, I could recognize how special it was but felt desperately that I wanted to escape, that the region was a trap—your standard small town feelings, and ones that Cat and Marlena definitely share. But as an adult, I feel nothing but longing for home, which is really a longing for the past—I think setting the book in that landscape was partially a selfish way for me to return to it, to spend a lot of time there. I also found those contradictions really interesting, in a fictional sense—there’s a tension built into the very fact of the place.
I love what grown-up Cat says, remembering a time when she desperately wanted to talk to Marlena after overhearing a fight between her parents. “When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen the world ended over and over again. To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you’re still responsible for your mistakes.” Or maybe Cat realized this then, at 15. When do you think she did?
One thing that fascinates me about teenagers is how smart they are. I honestly think 15 year old girls are among the canniest, most emotionally perceptive people around—but they don’t always know what their own intelligence means, the full nuance of say, an observation about another person. They’re smart as hell, but they’re not quite wise. So a lot of those moments in the book, where Cat has these insights—I think of them as things she recognized on some level as a teenager, but that now, as an adult, have taken a different depth and texture. It’s like when you’re having an important moment and you think to yourself, I’m going to remember this forever—later, when you remember thinking how you’d remember it, the memory’s colors are more or less intense, depending on how you’ve changed since then. You know more about why that moment mattered, or why you thought it did–you also know how it fits into your life from this new vantage point. So those thoughts exist in both phases of Cat’s life, but with different connotations depending on where she’s standing.
Marlena by Julie BuntinStories are of recurring importance in Cat’s life. Of the one we’re now reading, she says: “Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me.” Is this a feeling you relate to?
Yes, definitely. I have been a greedy, all-consuming reader since I can remember. Everything I write is in conversation with the books I’ve loved, the books I’ve hated, the books that haunt me.
Was it easy to let Marlena and Cat behave dangerously? Did you worry for them?
Sometimes I think this was the hardest part of writing Marlena. They’re difficult girls, but I loved them both, and the deeper I got into the book, the more I wanted to protect them from their own bad choices. But I kept reminding myself what it feels like to be a teenager, how for so many the default, when presented with something new and scary, is to say yes instead of no (no is my normal mode now). The teen years are probably the only age when it’s easier to choose risk, instead of comfort or safety, especially when friends are involved. Part of what I wanted to explore in writing the novel was the reverberations these risks, taken when we’re too young to really understand their full dimensions, can have on an entire life. Not in a cautionary sense, but as a way of articulating something about growing up.
Your husband is a writer, too. Do you share a workspace?
He is, and we do, in the sense that we both write at home—our apartment is a railroad-style Brooklyn floor-through, essentially a large studio divided by french doors. He writes at his desk in the bedroom, and I write in the dining room, sitting in a computer chair I’ve rolled up to the window side of the kitchen table. It looks weird when guests come over, but it’s close to the coffee pot.
Marlena comes out tomorrow. As of right now, what’s the best thing about having written it?
Questions like these. Comments and notes and tweets from readers. Getting to hold the hardcover in my hands, and slide it onto the shelf, like a real book. That it’s a real book! That will never stop being one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.
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Posted in: Books and Authors
Tags: adult fiction, author interviews, featured
About the Author: Annie Bostrom
Annie Bostrom is Associate Editor, Adult Books, at Booklist. She is a cat person, but also really likes dogs. Follow her on Twitter at @Booklist_Annie.
1 Comment on "Talking with Julie Buntin about her Debut Novel, MARLENA"
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marciakmeyer@gmail.com' Marcia Meyer says:
August 6, 2017 at 7:47 am
Marlena by Julie Buntin
I love your writing style in Marlena. A couple favorites: p. 96
“The park was full of people. Three beautiful girls, nineteen or twenty or so, clicked by in heels, their hair bobbed and shiny; I watched them magnetize the particles in the air, so that they drew the attention of everyone they passed. After awhile, I got up to leave, but no one looked at me.”
The ‘ magnetize particles’ is perfect for how the girls attracted looks, and then “no one looked at me”. What a contrast!
Another:
” In Coral Springs, window light simmered through the trees, warm little fires that bobbed in and out of view. The summer people were already there, gin and tonics sweating in their palms as they clinked glasses in their lake-view porches or toasted marshmallows in their backyards. The kids caught fireflies in mason jars and kept them on bedside tables as tiny temporary lamps- Mom and I were the ones who unscrewed the caps and dumped their buzzed-out bodies down the toilets. So many rich people things we’d never done to their levels of catalogue beauty. Our marshmallows shriveled on the stick over the pit where we burned our trash. We caught fireflies with our bare hands for an instant or less before they struggled away; sometimes we clapped them between our palms so we could smear their iridescent guts on our cheeks.”
Another great contrast- Their marshmallows and fireflies vs ours. Their glow was savored and enjoyed while ours lasted only a instant or was smashed by our own hands.
I object to one idea that is mentioned twice in the book. You write about the sunset sky changing to blue black rapidly. Maybe this too is a metaphor, but I find the warm colors of sunset go on and on, sometimes seeming to last forever. But then I’m a retired resorter.
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Q&A Gabe Habash and Julie Buntin on publishing their first novels
Gabe Habash and Julie BuntinGabe Habash and Julie Buntin (Coffee House Press/Nina Subin, Henry Holt)
By Michael Schaub
Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash have a lot in common. They’re both young Midwesterners living in New York. They’re both first-time novelists whose books debuted this year. And they both recently got married — to each other.
The writers share some similarities, but their books couldn’t be more different. Buntin’s “Marlena,” published in April by Henry Holt, is an understated but fiery novel about a teenager named Cat in Michigan who befriends a troubled girl with a drug-dealing boyfriend. Habash’s brash and explosive “Stephen Florida,” released in June by the independent Coffee House Press, follows an obsessed college wrestler desperate to win a national championship.
The authors spoke with The Times via telephone from their home in New York; the conversation has been edited.
Since your books are being released so close to each other, I'm guessing there's got to be some kind of friendly competition going on, right?
Buntin: I don't feel that from Gabe at all. I'm way worse about that. Gabe is very supportive, and 100% has a healthier, less frantically anxious perspective on this whole process. I tend to be more competitive in general. I've tried to keep that in check, and having a partner that's very chill about it is helpful. It can be hard not to play the comparison game, though.
Habash: I don't really feel competitive in general, but with Julie, our books are so different. I'm published by a small press, she's published by a bigger press. We've written very different books, so in a lot of ways, our situations are really different despite the fact that they're both fiction and they're coming out around the same time. We both hit enough of the benchmarks and goals that we wanted through the process. I think that we both are very happy with our own experiences, and for each other's experiences, so I don't think there's that much competitiveness.
Buntin: This is corny sounding, but I think "Stephen Florida" is one of the best books I've ever read. So anything you read that you love, you just want it to do well, other people to feel the same way you do. I love Gabe's book, so even if, say, Scott Rudin buys the film rights, my excitement about the book getting the recognition it deserves mostly rises above any competitive feeling.
Habash: Just to piggyback on that, going back to when we were writing the first drafts and showing each other our work before it's ready to be shown widely, I think for both of us, the other's opinion is very important. I would not be happy if Julie didn't like my book. That would make me miserable. There's a reason why I'm showing her my book before anybody else, because I really want to get her input. So in that sense, both of the books are very important to both of us.
How long have you two been together?
Habash: We've been married since September 2015, and we've been together since 2011, right?
Buntin: Yeah, we met in grad school at NYU, I guess 2011 or thereabouts. We were both fiction students. Gabe was a year ahead of me in the program, but we did have a class together. I think that was my first semester.
Did you write “Marlena” and “Stephen Florida” at the same time?
Buntin: Kind of.
Habash: Your book was in a different form for a while. I started my first draft in July of 2013. Do you know when yours was?
Buntin: It was earlier than that. I had been working on a version of this book that changed a lot. I had been working on it since 2011, basically. But Gabe was working on something else, and then started this. He's faster than me. There were definitely times when he was working on "Stephen Florida" and I was working in the other room, and you can hear the other person typing, and you're like, "Oh, they're actually writing." Nothing makes me feel more insecure.
And you’re just checking Twitter or something.
Buntin: Yeah! When you're sitting in silence and you can hear the thoughts coming from the other room. I definitely had a lot of times like that. I'm way more of a procrastinator.
Did the same thing happen to you, Gabe? Were there times when you could hear Julie typing and you were kind of stuck?
Habash: We sort of work differently. Julie will put off writing, but then she'll write for like 18 hours and I'll periodically put snacks in front of her while she's sitting at her computer because she'll be immobile for an entire day. It's like one step removed from having a bedpan there. But my habit was, I would come home from work and write for an hour or two, and then I just had no more mental energy. I would write on a more frequent basis for shorter periods of time, whereas Julie worked for larger swaths of single sittings.
"Marlena," by Julie Buntin
"Marlena," by Julie Buntin (Henry Holt and Co.)
It sounds like you complement each other pretty well.
Buntin: Gabe would be like, "When will you be done? 7 p.m.?" and I'd be like, "Sure." But that would really mean, like, 11. I would find myself a little bit jealous of the more moderate approach. Every writer is different in how they go about it, but his way seems saner to me somehow.
Did you ever reach out to each other for advice, if you were blocked or you just had a part of the book you weren't sure about?
Habash: In general, we both are each other's first readers. When I was writing the first draft, I wrote the first 50 pages and showed them to Julie, and I was like, "Is this good or bad?" and she was like, "It's good." So I just wrote the entire rest of the draft without showing her anything after that, because it’s important to me when I write, when it's in the first draft, that it's something only I have access to. And then once I finished the first draft, I showed it to Julie, and then from there, it started to get worked on. It's not only the novel, it's anything I write, I show to Julie before anybody else, and I almost don't send anything out unless Julie looks at it at least once or twice.
Buntin: I feel a little bit like that too. I can't imagine what it would be like to be married to someone who doesn't do the same thing as you, though many people are like, "Oh, my God, that sounds terrible," especially now with our books coming out at the same time. I really trust Gabe's take. I feel the same way — I show him stuff before other people, and definitely when the book was getting ready to go out.
Have you ever thought about collaborating on a writing project with each other?
Buntin: No.
Habash: No, no.
Buntin: I don't know why, but not only have I never thought about that, that sounds like — why does that sound so terrible?
Habash: I don't want to collaborate with anybody.
Buntin: I think we both have pretty distinct ideas about what kind of fiction we want to write, and our sensibilities are very different. I think it would be really hard.
Habash: Speaking for my book in particular, Julie edited that very heavily. The book's dedicated to her for a reason, I'll put it that way. That's fairly close to collaboration, I would say.
Buntin: I don't think that's true.
Habash: Thanks. [Laughs]
Buntin: Whatever.
Your books both take place in the Midwest, in Michigan and North Dakota, respectively. Did you both grow up there?
Habash: Yeah, we both did. Julie grew up in Michigan and I grew up in Ohio.
Was there any question when you started these books that you wanted to set them in the Midwest?
Buntin: For me, not really. I feel like in writing “Marlena,” I was channeling some of my own homesickness for the Midwest. I moved away from Michigan at a similar age to Cat, and I just want to go home so bad all the time, even though I've been in New York for over a decade. I don't think I couldn't have written about a place that I am currently living in; I needed distance to be able to imagine it.
Gabe, did you ever live in North Dakota?
Habash: No. I think Julie and I are similar in that regard. I don't like writing anything close to my own daily experience, because I'll just be really bored. I had never been to North Dakota before I wrote the book. I just thought of the most lonely and isolated and removed from my own experience place, the only qualifier being that I knew it was going to be set in America. I thought of the location that was farthest and furthest removed from my own experience and work in Manhattan. So North Dakota, having never been there, was sort of like a blank slate. What's actually in North Dakota? How many people actually live there?
Buntin: Gabe didn't visit North Dakota until really recently, after the book was already in galleys, which I thought was so interesting. I was writing from a place of fictionalized memory, but [his writing] was completely imagined and researched.
Habash: It's a really strange place. Both of our settings are very evocative, and I think for different reasons. Julie has a very strong connection to her upbringing and growing up [in Michigan], and my book has no connection. [Laughs]
Julie, I saw on Twitter that Gabe has a T-shirt with your book cover on it.
View image on Twitter
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Buntin: Oh, my God, that's the most embarrassing thing on Earth. That didn't even come from Gabe. That came from Colin Drohan, who's the program coordinator at Catapult, where I work, who's been working with me for about a year. He got it for me as a thank-you gift for writing his grad school letter of recommendation. And I think he was trolling me a little bit. [Laughs] Then Gabe got wind of it. So now he and Colin just troll me with pictures of that T-shirt.
Habash: We had dinner with some of Julie's friends who live out of town and who Julie hadn't seen for a while. I was wearing that shirt and Julie made me change it right before we left. I was going to wear it out, and she wouldn't let me do it!
"Stephen Florida" by Gabe Habash.
"Stephen Florida" by Gabe Habash. (Coffee House Press)
A “Stephen Florida” book cover T-shirt would actually look pretty cool.
Buntin: I don't know why I haven't done that in retaliation.
Habash: We can print it on a singlet.
Buntin: That's a really good idea.
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JULIE BUNTIN ON THE JOYS AND TRAGEDIES OF TEENAGE GIRLHOOD
THE AUTHOR OF MARLENA IN CONVERSATION WITH BETHANNE PATRICK
May 17, 2017 By Bethanne Patrick
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Two girls converge in a rural wood—and one won’t make it out again. Fifteen-year-old Cat comes to Silver Lake with her mother, who is looking for a fresh start. Cat finds her own fresh start in 17-year-old Marlena, who lives in a nearby barn with her elusive father and much-younger brother. Cat and Marlena quickly become partners in crime.
Like these characters in her startling and compassionate debut novel Marlena, Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. She teaches writing at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. Buntin lives in Brooklyn, and spoke to me by telephone from her home there about drugs, fast girls, beauty as currency, and resilience.
Bethanne Patrick: Before we talk about your characters, let’s talk about meth and the place it holds in America, especially in the America of your novel, where hopelessness seems to multiply faster than anything manufactured.
Julie Buntin: Growing up in Northern Michigan, meth was the drug we were all warned about, the one that lurked on the periphery, the one that would eat you alive. What makes meth really frightening is that it’s something people can make themselves. It’s this terrifying experiment, a substance that’s cheap and relatively easy to conjure from scratch, using materials anyone can access—that’s one of the things that makes it so destructive, especially when you think about teenagers getting a hold of it. Even Marlena, who isn’t afraid of using other drugs, or afraid of hurting herself in general, is afraid of meth. Unlike pills, it’s so explicitly something that will harm you—that felt resonant to me, in writing a story about addiction set in the Midwest.
BP: Of course, hopelessness touches the lives of everyone, not just those who fall prey to meth addiction. It touches Cat and her mother and her brother, too.
JB: Right—I think that has something to do with place, for each of the characters in the book, to varying degrees. The area where the book is set (the upper part of lower Michigan) is really lovely in a lot of ways—a close-knit small town, a solid high school, tons of natural beauty—but at the same time, there’s a lot of economic disparity. Both between the summer people and the locals, and, within the community of year-rounders, between the locals who work in the hospital or the schools, and the ones whose jobs are tied more directly to the tourist and service industry, the seasonal jobs. The fact of existing in one kind of life while spending so much time face to face with the kind of money you can’t really fathom—I think that can breed a certain kind of hopelessness. There’s also the weather, this constant oppressive winter, the euphoric summer that comes and goes in a flash.
BP: The part of Michigan where these girls live is a fallow place. Is leaving, getting away, the only solution?
JB: That area is fallow for them, definitely, but for many others—again, the summer people, many of the locals who could never imagine living anywhere else—it’s a dream place. For Cat’s mom, who decides to move there over anywhere else, it has that small-town allure, even if the reality is different than she imagines (jobs can be hard to come by in small towns). I think for Cat and Marlena, especially as teenagers, it does feel like leaving is the only answer. That’s probably true for teenagers in small towns everywhere, that feeling like you’d do anything to escape, like you’re trapped.
I grew up near Petoskey and I babysat for “summer people” when I was growing up; I both envied and resented them a little bit, those people who came and enjoyed the best parts of the year but didn’t have to endure the worst of winter. And at the same time, the very fact of their presence gave the place this special atmosphere—verified it as a something rare and wonderful, which anyone could see just by looking out the window. So even though I wanted to leave, I had a deep love for home at the same time, I still do. But yeah, for anyone who wants to transcend their circumstances and have access to a culture that’s more diverse, different experiences, leaving, if only for a little while, feels like the best solution.
BP: Speaking of different: How is Cat and Marlena’s teenaged adventuring different from their friends’? How is it similar?
JB: That’s one question I had as I started the book, that was kind of haunting me. When does adolescent risk-taking go too far? What are the repercussions? What effect do they have on the rest of your life? For Marlena, those repercussions are very clear: She doesn’t survive. She is really looking into the eye of self-destruction; she’s reached the point when thrill is replaced by need. Who is culpable? Obviously Cat isn’t, but at the same time, she’s involved. She misses so many warning signs intentionally because she doesn’t really want to face what’s going on with her friend; other things she simply can’t see, because she’s too young, too naïve. So for me, it was never really a story about normal teenage adventuring, girls taking risks and breaking rules, that rite of passage stuff—it was an investigation of a moment that’s so real for so many girls, when that behavior takes a darker turn. It’s about the lies that they tell or don’t tell. American culture, for a long time, has put bad girls on a pedestal, I think—there’s this idea that being a “fast” girl is attractive and alluring, but of course, it’s also dangerous. When girls fall into these roles, what really happens to them?
BP: What spurred you to write this novel?
JB: The honest answer is that while the events in the story did not happen, and the characters are not based on real people, I did have a friend who passed away when we were both in our early twenties from complications related to substance abuse. I do think that the act of writing this book was to a certain degree an attempt to make sense of a loss that still feels incomprehensible to me. My sister is also struggling with addiction that tracks back to when she was a young teenager. I have had my own tricky relationship to drugs and alcohol, and yet, I’ve never truly stepped outside of the normal zone into that darker place. Why and how can that be so? How could all of our stories have been different? I don’t know quite know how to articulate it, but I wondered if there was a dangerous friction to being a girl—young, beautiful, promising, certain of your invincibility—and coming up against the limit of your everyday life in a specific kind of small-town, rural environment. I wanted to really investigate what happens at the toxic intersections between beauty and fearlessness, boredom or lack of opportunity and access to drugs.
BP: Young women’s friendships can be incredibly complicated. Why do you think that is? Why is it so for Cat and Marlena?
JB: I think that when you’re 15-year-old girl still deciding how to tell the story of who you are, best friendship is actually a creative act. It can be very empowering. You can be free with your best friend in a way that you can’t be with anyone else—you test out who you want to be, define yourself in collaboration with her personality, her way of being in the world. It’s your first real romance. There’s something so charged about that intimacy. When’s the last time you had a sleepover with a friend that lasted a week and revolved around no special activity, took only the shape that your boredom decided to give it? I think those early relationships—which so rarely last into adulthood—do determine something essential about who we become.
When I was a teenager, my best friend told me I was aloof, and my whole group took that up for a little while. Even now, 15 years later, I think about that sometimes—I worry that a tossed off comment someone said when was in tenth grade is who I really am. These all-encompassing friendships are also often the first time you have a really meaningful relationship with someone who is not in your family. That’s really powerful. I don’t think you really get that again in your life, when you grow up there’s no time for that kind of epic bonding.
BP: Cat’s post-Marlena life hasn’t worked out the way she might have thought it would when she was getting ready to leave Silver Lake. Do you think that’s more a function of her friendship with Marlena, or of her relationship with her mother?
JB: It has and it hasn’t—in some ways, it’s exactly what she wanted. She’s got a good job, she and her husband are in a solid financial situation, she lives in her dream city—the problem for Cat is that it’s not enough, that the thing she left behind has some vivid kernel in it, something her comfortable life lacks. A lot of that has to do with her drinking, which is both a function of that early friendship—which was her introduction to drinking—and her relationship with her mother, who also has issues with alcohol. Cat started drinking when she was 15 in a big way—it’s chemical, your brain is affected, your body is affected, drinking regularly at that age changes your relationship to alcohol forever. So yes, she’s haunted by this friendship and the way it ended, and struggling with some dissonance just as a person who has experienced upward mobility, who is in a different position than her family members, but I don’t think Cat drinks only because she’s sad about this loss, or can’t move on from Marlena’s death—it’s not the full why. She drinks because over time, starting at 15, she developed a dependency—another reason why that year has so much psychic power for her. And I did want to explore how she and Marlena identify each other as “good” and “bad,” but how those roles morph and change. Is Cat, on her fourth martini, still the good girl? Was she ever?
BP: The two of them hold a kind of magic of possibility for each other. Which is why starting the book with Marlena’s death shocks the reader.
JB: That’s a great and beautiful way of putting it, your future is sitting there and the two of you can kind of decide on the possibilities together. But with time, as choices are made, those possibilities get smaller. Marlena’s death was always the story, so the choices were always moving the story to that point. I wasn’t writing a murder mystery; there was never going to be a twist. It’s a book about grief and about looking back and trying to figure out why you are who you are. I wanted Cat to be in full adulthood, with a question mark about whether or not she’s going to be OK. But in a story narrated in the first person, it would have been manipulative to withhold Marlena’s death—the event around which the story is structured—from the reader. And I personally almost always have an issue with novels that develop suspense via the narrator keeping a secret. Cat is saying, this is about my friend who died, but it’s not the story of why or how as much as it’s the story of Cat trying to figure out what it has meant to her, how this friendship and year steered her life. And then, in looking back, she still has hope, even though she knows what’s coming—I mean, anyone who has been in this kind of a situation always hopes that a person who is really struggling can turn it around, they can get better.
BP: You teach other writers. What can be taught, and what can’t be?
JB: I think about that question a lot. I kind of think when you do what I do you’re almost ethically required to do so; I don’t want to sell fool’s gold or snake oil, or whatever it’s called, like “Anyone can become a published novelist!”—because that’s not how it works, necessarily. I don’t know. A lot can be taught. But I will say, I guess if you’re not reading books, that’s something I can’t teach you. Serious reading has to be part of your experience of the world in a really profound way, it has to be a lifeline, it has to be like breathing, that’s the thing that can’t be taught. If you don’t feel that inclination, if you don’t try to apply stories to the world around you to figure out how to live, then how do are you going to write something?
BP: What is the landscape like these days for fiction writers? You’ve had your debut novel published, and that’s incredible—but is that also just great luck?
JB: I definitely think the novel is so healthy, but then, I live and breathe this stuff! At Catapult we are just a bunch of people looking for stories we love that we haven’t heard before, and when you spend every day thinking of writers and writing that way, truly excited about the possibility of reading something that might thrill you, something new, it’s kind of hard to believe that the novel is dying. There’s so much enthusiasm, there are a lot of people who love to read out there. Loving the work. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot of luck involved in the process of publishing. A lot of right place right time that can’t be replicated. That can be both discouraging, and also exhilarating—because all you can do, all you can control, is what you write, is writing what matters to you most.
BP: What was the hardest thing in writing this book for you?
JB: I know it’s a sad book, a dark book in a lot of ways, but I also think of the moments between the girls as joyful. It was joyful for me to write those scenes, the real aliveness that you feel when you do something dangerous as a teenager, the intoxication of recklessness. But hand in hand with that came the hardest aspect of writing this, because too much recklessness becomes a problem. So when things go from fun to ugly, that was hard, because I had to take the joy away from my characters. That was painful for me, I wanted for them to be ok, to stop, to put the drink down, to go to bed. But they wouldn’t, and so they don’t.
BP: What hasn’t anyone asked you about, yet?
JB: I do think of this book very much as a book about writing a book. Cat writes it down—she is staring her story down in an attempt to be free of it, to preserve it and also move forward. So the book is, in a lot of ways, about the act of telling, what it means to do that, and the power our stories have over us. Telling the truth, even if it’s an incomplete, elusive truth. As a way of saying, “This is who I am, and it’s ok.”
alcoholismBethanne PatrickclassdrugsGirlsinterviewsJulie BuntinMarlenamethMichiganteenage girlsteenagers
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Bethanne Patrick
Bethanne Patrick
Bethanne Patrick is a literary journalist and Literary Hub contributing editor.
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Feb 23, 2017
On Making Things Up: Some True Stories About Writing My Novel
“I want you to believe every single word I say, but don’t be fooled—I’m using lies to convince you.”
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HOW TO | DEBUT
In our recurring series, Debut, writers provide a behind-the-scenes look at being a first-time novelist.
*
What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world? I may not make things up in fiction, or tell the truth in nonfiction, but documentary or invented, it’s always been me at the centre of the will to put descriptions out into the world. I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so. – Jenny Diski, On Gratitude
My mother hates my first novel.
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Four years or so after I started it, around the time it went into copyediting, I emailed her a PDF. I was in the kitchen when she called. It feels like I was in the kitchen every time she called to tell me the page she was up to, what she’d just read, her voice an accusation. I was in the kitchen, crying, looking out the window at the waiter on the roof next door, rolling his cigarette; I was in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to whistle, interrupting to tell her—
I didn’t do anything wrong.
*
In a profile of Lorrie Moore I read in college, she says that her only really good piece of writing advice is Write something you’d never show your mother or father. I could never do that! she says her students say.
Lorrie was my MFA thesis advisor. I brought the start of two novels to our first meeting. I was halfway done with one, a lightly “experimental” and not-so-lightly autobiographical novel written mostly in titled fragments, almost prose poems, that had consumed me for most of graduate school. I had about sixty pages of the other, a story about two teenage girls set in the northern Michigan of my adolescence that people in my MFA workshops kept calling young adult. Lorrie generously read them both and suggested I pursue the story about the girls. The other one, it turned out, had absolutely no plot. After a flicker of despair at the thought of all the time I’d sunk into those fucking titles, I was excited. The girls were interesting. They scared me a little. I’d been cheating on my “real” novel with the girls for a long time.
Never, at any point in the writing, or even in the months after the book sold, did I show what I was working on to my mother. She asked. I changed the subject. I said I was working. I made it seem like there was hardly a novel at all. It didn’t occur to me that I was protecting myself from her reaction, though later she would accuse me of that, and I would think maybe she was right. But at the time, aside from my agent and editor, my teachers, my husband, people who were contractually obligated to help me, I never showed anyone my novel. It was private, and it wasn’t done. Probably, despite what my editor said, it would never really be published. I would show my mother when it was perfect. Maybe that was my rationale. I hope it was.
Lorrie never gave me that particular piece of writing advice. Perhaps it was obvious from what I’d written that I didn’t need it.
*
One thing my mother objects to the most is that my narrator’s mom drinks so much tea. Who else could it be? she says.
An incomplete list of what my mother thinks should be removed, for being either too true or too false, depending on which argument we are having: all the blondes, orgasm as motif, northern Michigan, the proper way to make a bed and clean a toilet owned by a stranger, the mother’s boy-slim hips, community college, money, the mother’s beauty, absences where fathers should be, wine in a box, that her mother is the person Cat loves the hardest.
Speaking of orgasms. There’s a scene early on in the novel, where Cat, the narrator, fifteen, masturbates and fails to climax. I can’t believe you wrote about the first time you masturbated, my mother said. I was in the kitchen, hands in soapy dishwater, listening to her through my headphones. Her voice so close it might as well have been coming from inside my brain. Aren’t you ashamed?
The scene had been difficult to write; I’d written multiple versions before settling on the one that made it into the book. These attempts flicked through my mind as my mother talked, layered on top of one another, like remembering something from your past and simultaneously remembering your sibling’s account of the same event, your neighbor’s. They all felt real, and I was ashamed.
Only later, hours after I hung up the phone, did it strike me—the scene my mother found so revealing had never occurred in my real life. Her assumption that what I’d written in Marlena could only be a transcription of my lived experience implied both that I did not have the skill to invent that scene whole cloth, and that she had some kind of omniscient insight into my most private moments. I was angry, in a dumb, childish way, for days. I still keep returning to this conversation, so intimate and, frankly, mortifying. It taught me about a mother’s relationship to her daughter’s experience, and how much I resent the idea that I couldn’t have made this novel up; it taught me about myself as a writer. Because didn’t I also feel a glimmer of embarrassed pride? Well, I remember thinking, that scene works.
*
But it’s true that I often start with a real memory, or a fragment of one. An image, a feeling, usually something that’s tender when I press on it, something that hurts. Shame. Write something you’d never show your mother and father. I guess this is a choice, though it feels like the opposite of that, like scratching a terrible itch. I write until it doesn’t itch anymore. Once I’ve started, it’s very hard to stop. I hear my mother, describing the ways my book is a violation, and the daughter part of me shatters, sees this as a failure that will change our relationship forever. The other part of me, the part of me that belongs to no one, is registering the burn marks on the stove, the spray of toast crumbs and coffee grounds, is thinking of my mother’s pride, the perfectly clean stoves in all the homes of my childhood, is hearing her and thinking the worst thing I could do is write this down, knowing, even as I think it, that I will, and when I do—here I am!—my voice will override hers again.
At every turn in the writing of my novel, I chose what was, to my mind, right for the book. I put my characters into compromising situations. I made them suffer. I made them worse. Cat, my narrator, inherited some of my qualities—a terrible eagerness to please, a taste for dirty martinis, a ferocious reading habit—only, in her form, those qualities were amplified, twisted. A taste for dirty martinis became a drinking problem on the verge of detonating. Her eagerness to please a passivity that I wouldn’t tolerate in myself. Cat, older in the novel than I am now, wanted to be a writer, but she didn’t know herself well enough to figure out how to tell her story. The novel itself would be, partially, that journey. She was very close to me—in that final way, perhaps most of all—and yet, she was not me.
I chose what was right for the book, or what I thought was right—which is different from choosing to protect yourself and the people you love, or to preserve the authenticity of lived experience. It’s more like, in building a table, deciding where to put a nail: an unemotional, practical choice, a matter of load-bearing, of proper construction. What will hold the most weight.
*
I don’t get it, my mother said. Did you just run out of creativity? Am I that interesting?
*
For example. I started this essay with the sentence: “My mother hates my first novel.” In that moment, my concern was to get your attention. I wanted you to read this essay instead of something else on the internet. I wanted you to stay. Is it strictly true? I have felt it to be so. It struck me as the right blend of intimate and dramatic and revealing; there was conflict in it; I trusted the formulation to grab you more than the perhaps comparatively truer, more mother-safe “My mother’s feelings about my novel are complicated,” or “I feel guilty about how my mother feels about my novel.”
I also knew that near the middle of the essay, I wanted to point out the function of that first sentence. I wanted to break down that choice, a reveal that would serve as the essay’s hinge, tipping it toward the conclusion. It was the idea of that construction that drove me to write the essay in the first place; I hoped it might demonstrate something difficult to articulate about writing as invention, as a manipulation of the stuff of reality into an illusion that’s as convincing, even more convincing, than the real thing.
Can you hear me trying to tell my mother that the hate sentence was the best thing I could come up with to suit my goal of making you listen? That this is how these decisions get made, that none of this gets anywhere near the truth of how I really feel about her?
*
Like my mother, Cat’s mother is witty, almost goofy, and beautiful; they share a few other biographical details. They resemble each other enough that, if you only knew my mother a little, by her appearance, her way of making jokes, you might make an assumption about who she is after reading Marlena. But Cat’s mother drinks too much; during the year the book is set, she’s going through a divorce. She is only in a handful of scenes, her actions viewed through Cat's judgmental, teenage eyes. You can see why my mother is upset. How strange it must be to identify bits and pieces of yourself in a character who is not you, in a story that is not your own, a story, in this case, that is filtered through another character. For me, Cat's mother was so clearly and specifically Cat's mother that to confuse her with a real person was, well, confusing—but my mother saw her mostly as a distorted reflection.
Noo, my editor said, when I told her some of the things my mother wanted me to change. I asked my childhood best friend if she understood why my mother was so hurt. Yeah, they look alike, she said. But your mother never drove you anywhere.
*
Stop writing about me, my mother says. Just stop.
*
Here’s a true story about my mother.
When I was a teenager, my high school sent me to mandatory counseling after a cutting incident. I wasn’t allowed to go back to school until the counselor gave the okay. In the car outside the office, my mother told me not to tell the counselor anything about our family. Don’t talk about us, she said. It’s nobody’s business.
Sometimes I think that my desire to write about things people aren’t supposed to say was born right then and there.
(See, she did drive me places. And what if I told you that my best friend, who remembers my mom as never picking me up, was a year older than I was and had her own car and that I was always bumming rides from her? And what if I told you that when I was fifteen my family lived a solid twenty-five-minute drive from town, in the middle of nowhere, and that in addition to three biological kids younger than I was, my mom had three stepchildren who were around at least part of the time and a husband who wasn’t much help? Wouldn’t you agree that it’s fair to say, she drove me where she could?)
And if my desire to write was born right then and there, it feels important to mention that my mother did nothing but encourage me.
*
I used to think that writers should be free to write about anything, anyone, however they wanted. That was before the novel was finished, before it was anything, back when getting from the beginning to the end was what I wanted more than selling it, more than readers, more than for it to be good. In a craft class I took in grad school, I remember my teacher, David Lipsky, talking about John Updike’s famous thievery, the way his life leaked into everything he wrote. David pointed out one detail—a husband notices that the skin between his aging wife’s breasts is “crepey.” This, David thought, was going too far. I believe the detail was from a story published just before John Updike left his wife of many years for a younger woman. Too cruel. It seemed to me a good, true detail. I’d seen chests like that.
Often, I’ve heard writers and critics say fiction allows for a greater truth. I used to love this idea; it captured the exhilarating feeling I got when reading certain books, of the world coming gloriously into focus. But the idea has started to smell a little off to me lately, with its implication that there’s an emotional truth that is somehow superior to reality, and that writers have unique access to this higher realm. There are true stories, and there are invented stories. There are memoirs, which, though subjective, have an alliance to fact, and there are novels. As a novelist, I don’t deal in truth. I want you to believe every single word I say, but don’t be fooled—I’m using lies to convince you.
*
When I was in my early twenties, a close friend from adolescence died of, according to the high school rumor mill, complications related to substance abuse. I don’t know what happened exactly. We’d long grown apart.
The first time I published something about my friend’s death, I mentioned, to the people who asked what I was writing, that I was working on a novel inspired by what happened. Inspired by. What a stupid thing to say. What I meant was: I felt her loss profoundly, and I was urgently moved to write about girlhood because of it, the dangers lurking there, dangers that had not only stolen my friend’s life, but were threatening my sister too. Dangers I had somehow escaped. My novel is not the story of what happened to my friend, what happened to my sister, but it is a story about girls destroying themselves—why and how, the ways it might be possible to recover, and the ways it is not.
I was unprepared for what happens when a piece of writing goes viral. I got hundreds of friend requests on Facebook, hundreds of emails. I noticed that in the comments, which I read obsessively, someone had linked to my friend’s Facebook page. I made the publication take the link down, but how many people had connected her face with the article? For thousands of readers, what I’d said about my friend and our experiences growing up were all they’d ever know of her. That still seems horribly unfair.
*
It bothers me very much that this story I invented could, in the minds of some readers, even just one or two people, come to stand in for a real person’s real experience. I agree with my mother; it is a violation. I always knew that writers have power, but it took me a long time to realize that in getting published, I am a writer with power too.
By the time my mother read the book, it was essentially too late to make changes. I told her to submit a list, that I would need it soon; she didn’t. Later, she said she thought I knew what to change, and, several fights after that, I had what she hated about the book memorized. It hurts to look at the novel now. It’s become weaponized. I want the things I make to bring light, not pain, into the world. I had thought that a dark and difficult book, one about unrelentingly sad things, one that reflected my experience but was ultimately a product of my imagination, might still have that light, at least for the people who felt seen and heard by the story. I am not sure anymore. And yet, how can I regret writing it? It’s me.
The more I write, fiction or nonfiction, the less concerned I am with the ways people do or don’t associate my characters—almost always women very like me, narrating in the first person—with my actual self. My self is not up for grabs—confusing me with my narrator is a failure of your imagination, not mine. But that’s easy for me to say. I know exactly how much of myself I have not given away. I am the one behind the wheel.
*
Here’s another true story about my mother.
Late summer; I was cooking. My kitchen is small, too narrow for two people, with an awkward wall that blocks the sound from the rest of the apartment. I like to sing when I cook, and sometimes I take my laptop into the kitchen and balance it on top of the refrigerator, the country-girl bluegrass I still listen to turned up loud. On this particular day, someone had posted a picture of my galley online: the first picture of my book in the world. I sang as I cut vegetables, placed the steak onto a layer of hissing oil. Hands washed, waiting for the meat to rest, I pulled my laptop down to the counter and clicked idly on my Facebook page, noticing that someone had tagged me in another post.
On my mother’s page was a picture of the book and a corny photo of me. She announced that my novel would be published in the spring, along with all the accomplishments of my childhood that had led her to believe I would someday do great things. Trios of exclamation points. Put it on your must-read lists, she wrote, and dozens of her friends and family, the people I knew she worried would judge her for the contents of her daughter’s upsetting book, wrote that they would. At the end of her post, all in caps, my mother wrote: SO PROUD.
My mother is so proud of my first novel. It’s not a bad first sentence. I hope, the next time around, I can make it work.
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Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin is the director of writing programs at Catapult. Her debut novel,Marlena, is forthcoming from Henry Holt on April 4th. Preorder here.
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THE MILLIONS INTERVIEW
Two Writers, One Marriage: The Millions Interviews Julie Buntin and Gabe Habash
By CLAIRE CAMERON posted at 12:00 pm on June 19, 2017 1
How do two writers live and write together?
coverThe answer changes through time. In her introduction to The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, Cathy Porter describes how Sofia laboriously copied Leo Tolstoy’s work: “After the baby had been put to bed, she would sit at her desk until the small hours, copying out his day’s writing in her fine hand, telepathically deciphering the scribble.” When reading Sofia’s diaries, kept from age 16 until she died in 1919, it’s hard not to feel her creative frustration. “To each his fate,” she writes. “Mine was to be the auxiliary to my husband.”
Historian Alexis Coe writes that being married helps academics get ahead, but only if they are male. In the Lenny Letter, she expands on her findings from reading the acknowledgements in books, “male historians often call wives research assistants while female historians say husbands were patient/encouraging.” Her article is a fascinating look at a selected history of literary couplings, from the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
Bruce Holsinger, a novelist and academic, also searched acknowledgments and found many examples of male authors thanking their wives for typing manuscripts. People continue to share examples on Twitter using the hashtag #ThanksForTyping. A click shows there are many women of the past century who might find Sophia Tolstoy’s words familiar.
While a word processor changes dynamics, the way a work is attributed often reflects a power relationship between two authors. When a couple are both authors, the relationship is often colored by the politics of their day.
In 2017, many couples are striving for a more equal balance of power in relationships. There are as many ways this can play out as there are couples, but I want to continue the conversation. How does a modern couple balance the domestic with a literary life?
Julie Buntin’s Marlena is one of the most energetic and vibrant debut novels released this spring, which Kirkus calls, “as unforgettable as it is gorgeous.” Her partner, Gabe Habash, just published one of the breakthrough debuts of the summer, Stephen Florida. NPR calls it, “starkly beautiful and moving.”
I was intrigued to learn that Buntin and Habash are partners and live together. While I assume they both do their own typing, I wonder how this particular modern couple make it work. By email, I asked them about reading each other’s work, egos, money, and solitude.
The Millions: Gabe, did you know Julie was a writer when you first met?
Gabe Habash: Yes, we met in grad school. We had a craft class together, and I was immediately struck (and probably a bit intimidated) by how smart and perceptive she is. But we didn’t actually have any workshops together so I didn’t read her writing until after I graduated. By then she was starting what would eventually become Marlena. I’m grateful I get to watch how she shapes her work. It’s amazing.
TM: Julie, you knew Gabe was a writer when you met. Did you consider this a good or bad thing?
Julie Buntin: Soon after we started dating I realized that we weren’t going to have a problem with competitiveness when it came to writing—I’d dated a writer before, and that had been an insidiously toxic problem, but Gabe and I never had that issue. Mostly because of him, I think—Gabe is immune to comparing himself to other people. It’s very strange and I envy it. I am not immune, but am trying to get better.
TM: Is Gabe the first reader of your work?
JB: He is. It’s a bit of a crutch. When I was deep in revisions of Marlena, after he’d already read it a couple times, I would sometimes send altered drafts to my editor without showing Gabe, but for the most part, he sees everything before it goes out. I’ve delayed submitting things to the point of missing deadlines because I want Gabe’s take first.
TM: Is Julie the first reader of your work?
GH: Yes, she’s always been my first reader. I wrote the first 50 pages of the novel and showed them to her to find out if it was bad. I wouldn’t write any more until I knew she liked it because I respect her opinion more than anyone else in the world—if she says it’s bad, it’s bad. Julie is just as good of a reader as a writer, if that’s possible. There are numerous reasons the book is dedicated to her.
TM: Has she or he ever said anything about your writing that you wished she hadn’t?
GH: Nope.
JB: Gabe’s going to be embarrassed that I’m sharing this, but I showed him the first few pages of a new novel a while back. He said: “You can do better.” In general, I appreciate that we’re at a place where we don’t need to dance around anything, but that work was a little raw for a fully honest assessment—still, I’m glad he told me what he really thought.
TM: Do you believe Gabe when he praises your work?
JB: I do. Gabe is a bad liar, and I think my answer to the previous question gets at the directness of how we talk about writing.
TM: Do you ever feel threatened by the success of Julie’s novel?
GH: Honestly, no. Our books are so different and I love Marlena, so it never felt like they were competing against each other. Also, just watching someone work at something so hard, putting years into it and going through really challenging moments with it because it’s a vital part of her life—it’s impossible for me to feel jealousy or to feel threatened when I saw that because I knew how much telling the story meant to Julie.
TM: Marlena was blurbed by Lorrie Moore, is an Indie Next Pick, and was selected by The Rumpus Book Club. For a debut novel, it doesn’t get much better. Did you ever worry that Gabe’s book might not be as well received?
JB: I have never doubted for a second that Stephen Florida would be well received. Even when a number of major publishers passed, I had no anxiety about it eventually finding the right home—Gabe did, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s blind wife faith either—I hadn’t had that same certainty when his previous novel was on submission. After reading Stephen Florida I felt a flicker of jealousy—he wrote a book that alchemizes his talent and experience and deep thinking about literature into a novel that’s exhilarating to read. If anything, I feel a little smug about all the good reviews it’s getting. Like—told you, world!
If anything (please forgive how pretentious this sounds), I worried that his book might be taken more seriously from a critical perspective, because Marlena is about girls and Stephen Florida is about boys. That doesn’t seem to have been the case, at least not so far, but I did wonder if that was going to be an issue. I’m still not sure how I would have handled that.
TM: Writing and books aside, what do you both love to do?
GH: We like to take walks like old people. We watch Game of Thrones and Twin Peaks. Some day, I swear, I will get her to like video games. We both like horror movies, which Julie will point out to you is some study’s number one metric for determining relationship compatibility.
TM: You both work in publishing and are writers. Is it ever too much?
JB: It can be. Sometimes we get home and we’re eating dinner and we go from talking about our books to talking about books that he’s reading or assigning for review to talking about books on submission at Catapult or something I’m editing or a writer I want to get to teach and we have a moment where one or the other of us snaps and is like, no more books. Please, enough. And so we try to introduce spaces into our lives for other stuff. It can be overwhelming. Sometimes it feels like we’re always sort of working. But most of the time it’s nice to never have to translate why doing this work matters so much to me.
TM: What about money?
GH: As writers who also work in publishing, we are obviously very rich.
Julie, I think, needs writing on a daily basis. I go through long periods in which I barely think about it, and then write all at one time. So having no day job I think is more for Julie—she would use the time, whereas if I weren’t in the middle of a project I would just wander around like a vagrant, wondering how to fill the hours.
JB: Oh, this is a hard one. I would be lying if I said I never thought about this. It has occurred to me that in some ways I’ve made my writing life harder because I’m married to another writer, instead of someone with more financially-driven ambitions. Gabe is better at balancing his work life and writing life—he’s more of a daily chipper, less of a binger—and as much as I love my job, I feel like I am giving something up every minute that I am not writing. But maybe I would go crazy if I had that time. Or maybe I’d have finished another book by now! Who knows—like most writers, I’ve always had a job or two or three and squeezed writing in somehow.
All this said, I’ve learned a lot about writing from Gabe, from his edits on my work, from the process of editing his. There a lot of writer couples. Maybe once you become accustomed to the benefits of having an in-house reader and editor, not to mention someone who challenges you to think more deeply about how and why you write, I don’t know, those things become more important than a pension. We’ll see if I feel the same way in 20 years.
TM: What is the best part about living with another writer?
JB: Never having to explain why you don’t want to go out.
TM: What is the worst?
GH: Whatever plans you might have, they can get eliminated at any time if one of us is in the writing fugue. You just have to accept that your plans are canceled in that instance.
TM: Do you understand Gabe’s work better than anyone else?
JB: I don’t know that I understand it better than anyone else, but I do think I understand how it came to be better than anyone else. I look at the first page and I can see ghosts of cut phrases, all the thinking that went into making the book what it is—it’s a privilege.
TM: Do you understand Julie’s work better than anyone else?
GB: I have no idea! You’ll have to ask her. Julie understands my work better than anyone else.
TM: What is your favorite thing that the other has ever written?
GH: The last chapter of Marlena is two and a half pages. I think about it all the time. It’s contains everything that came before but also opens the narrative up; I love how it shows the story is longer than the book itself.
JB: I love that first page. It starts, “My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them…” and ends like this: “I believe in wrestling, and I believe in the United States of America. I am a motherfucking astronaut.”
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ONE RESPONSE TO “TWO WRITERS, ONE MARRIAGE: THE MILLIONS INTERVIEWS JULIE BUNTIN AND GABE HABASH”
Brooks Williams
AT 4:51 PM ON JULY 31, 2017
This was an absolutely lovely exchange… interesting and sweet at the same time.
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Just watching someone work at something so hard, putting years into it and going through really challenging moments with it because it’s a vital part of her life—it’s impossible for me to feel jealousy or to feel threatened.
CLAIRE CAMERON is a staff writer for The Millions. Her novel The Last Neanderthal is published by Little, Brown and Co., was recently featured in The New York Times, and is a national bestseller in Canada. Her writing has appeared in the Lenny Letter, The New York Times, Salon, and The Globe and Mail. Follow her @clairecameron or read more at www.claire-cameron.com.
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Apr 4
Those Teenage Years When Everything Is New and Death Is Just Around the Corner
Julie Buntin on the power of formative female friendships, diverging paths, and writing about small town angst
Author Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, is about loss, addiction, and teenage friendship. After Cat’s parents divorce, she has to leave her fancy private school behind and move with her mom and brother to a small town in rural northern Michigan. Enter Marlena, the beautiful, musically gifted girl-next-door with a creepy dad and an affinity for pills. Cat and Marlena’s relationship grows more intimate and dangerous as Marlena introduces Cat to a series of firsts, until inevitably — as the reader knows from the very first page — Marlena drowns in six inches of icy river water. Decades later, the sudden appearance of Marlena’s brother, Sal, forces Cat to revisit the ghost of her old friend, whose influence and mysterious death continue to plague Cat’s life.
While living in New York City last summer, I took advantage of its vast literary scene by attending as many readings as possible. One night, I stumbled into Bo’s Kitchen & Bar Room for a #YeahYouWrite event, where I met Buntin. I knew who she was. We have friends in common, and I had heard that her debut novel was outstanding. I had also heard that Buntin was incredibly kind and outgoing, so I felt comfortable approaching her to introduce myself, and I’m so glad I did — all the rumors were true.
When I arrived back in LA, a copy of Marlena was on my doorstep. I read it without pause, entranced by Buntin’s glorious prose and this toxic teenage friendship that felt real and relatable enough to be my own memory. When my editor asked me six months later to interview Buntin, I practically leapt out of my seat to phone her at home in Brooklyn to talk to her about girls, drugs, and Marlena.
Andrea Arnold: In my mind, Cat and Marlena’s friendship was so probable and genuine that I couldn’t help wondering if they stemmed from a real life relationship. How did you come to the story?
Julie Buntin: This is always a tricky question to answer. Cat isn’t me, Marlena isn’t based off of someone I know — they’re fictional characters. At the same time, it would be silly not to acknowledge the fact that I have had many formative female friendships just as intense as Cat and Marlena’s relationship, and in that sense I was writing from experience. I did also lose a friend in my early twenties. She was a very different person than Marlena, from a very different background, but she had been on a dangerous path with substances for a long time. Her death changed how I thought about our time together as teenagers, the stuff we got up to. She died when we were in our twenties, long after we had already grown apart. Writing about some of these subjects — intense friendship, substance abuse, teenage recklessness — felt more urgent after losing her.
“The Thing Between Us” by Julie Buntin
A story about craving wildness
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Arnold: The world of the novel encapsulates a series of firsts for Cat — first kiss, first sex, first cigarette. What makes this time in our lives fascinating to read about or why do you like to write about teenagers?
Buntin: Teenagers are very smart people who often make very bad decisions. A fifteen-year old girl, a seventeen-year old girl — they can be so perceptive. They can sniff out an insecurity in a heartbeat, or offer up a very sharp judgement that has some basis in truth, but so often those judgments and observations are lacking in the nuance and empathy that comes with adulthood. They’re smart but they don’t have wisdom, or an awareness of consequence. I find the hubris of thinking you know everything really fascinating. Cat and Marlena think they understand their parents, right, that they can see them for who they really are, that they have this terrific insight. What they observe might have some basis in truth, a certain accuracy, but they’re not really fully able to interpret those observations, to understand the how and why. The space between the observation and the interpretation, the kid and the adult, an experience as it’s lived and an experience from the perspective of adulthood — that’s writerly catnip for me.
Also, those teenage years are such a potent time. In the book, Cat talks about how some people grow up and don’t think about their teenage years at all while others think about them all the time. But we all had those experiences with firsts — it’s fun to write about them (and read about them, I hope) because they’re so charged, so big, so vivid. I also wanted to track the lineage between the teenager who decides to kiss the boy or make a terrible choice or experiment with alcohol and the adult that teenager becomes — how close are those two versions? How far? What do they have to do with each other?
Arnold: I saw Cat as a good girl who is lonely and sad and gets lured into Marlena’s web. Is that true, or other than geography, what intertwines their souls?
Buntin: I don’t think of Cat as a good girl. I think of her as a scared girl. Cat wants to be liked so much. She doesn’t know who she is — it takes the force of Marlena’s personality to get Cat to begin to develop her own sense of self. Compared to Marlena she is more stereotypically well-behaved, but then, I don’t see Marlena as a bad girl either. In some ways, I think Cat’s moral radar is more confused than Marlena’s — Marlena has a problem, and her problem directs the choices that she makes, especially the dangerous and self-destructive ones. But, especially at first, Cat doesn’t have much inner direction; she’s very susceptible to peer pressure, and Marlena is the person who helps Cat begin to be able to define her own boundaries, even as Marlena pushes them.
It’s interesting that teenage friendships are so often based on circumstance. You’re usually friends with the people you grow up with and who live nearby. In terms of what connects them, beyond that, I think that with each other, Cat and Marlena experience that exhilarating sense of looking out at the world from the same vantage point. And Marlena’s music made Cat see her as somebody with a big destiny. When she sees that in Marlena, it’s intoxicating. Marlena, I think, is drawn to the fact that with Cat she can be a blank slate.
Arnold: That idea of childhood friendships being circumstantial made this book so relatable. I’m still close with lots of girls from home. I was just talking about that with one friend from like first grade. We met because of circumstance and still hang now because we both moved to LA. I’m lucky — it could’ve turned out badly!
Buntin: Right! The accumulation of time becomes a kind of glue in friendships. I have friends like that too. That was something Cat and Marlena didn’t have. They aren’t constricted by the other knowing their past. When they meet, they get to decide who they are for each other — what kind of friendship they’ll have, who will play what role — in that way, best friendship is always a collaboration in the act of telling a shared story. I wanted to write about how girls make and mythologize those stories, and I needed Cat and Marlena to be strangers, for there to be an element of the random in their meeting, in order to really explore that.
“Best friendship is always a collaboration in the act of telling a shared story. I wanted to write about how girls make and mythologize those stories…”
Arnold: Socioeconomic distinctions are important in the novel. Cat’s life is comfortable until her parents divorce. Afterwards, Cat’s mom cleans houses, and one night the girls break into her client’s mansion and throw a party. How would these girls have been different people had they lived in that house instead?
Buntin: I think some elements of being a teenager are universal — the intensity of those firsts, the passionate friendships, the insecurity and yearning — but this would be a different story if both girls had more money. Cat was comfortable when her parents were married in the sense that they were getting by, but it was still a paycheck to paycheck existence. That’s why the divorce wreaks such financial havoc. If this were about wealthy people, maybe they would have had more supervision in the form of hired help or a stay-at-home parent, I don’t really know. Certainly, neither girl would be living with the immense anxiety that permeates life when you’re not sure where the money is going to come from, whether it’s going to come at all. There might not be as much chaos and instability in the background. A more concrete sense of opportunity. I think it’s hard as a teenager in a small town, when you don’t have any money and you’re not sure what’s going to come next and no one is telling you to go to college, to think about the future, to say, I’m going to live for this next thing, instead of just in the moment, because as a teenager everything in your body is screaming now now now. If you’re the kid in the mansion, maybe you have more faith in later. Cat and Marlena think about the future in a fantasy way, but I don’t know if Marlena especially believes in her gut that she actually has a shot at a better life, which corresponds to the kinds of choices she makes in the novel.
Arnold: The reason I ask maybe is because I also grew up in the Midwest but on the opposite side of the tracks as Marlena, yet I felt like I knew that girl, like she went to my high school. I wasn’t friends with her, but she was there. The main question I had while reading your novel was: how could this girl or any struggling with fucked up families surrounded by hardcore drugs and abusive men and circumstances out of her control survive it?
Buntin: It’s hard to think in those terms, but, yeah, I think so — I hope so. I think in a hypothetical or in a different story there is. One thing Cat’s struggling with, trying to discover in the process of telling this story, is if she can track the moment where things toggled from bad to really bad — which step was the one that went too far? What if a couple of things that didn’t even seem that consequential at the time had gone down differently? What if she told someone something? Asked for help? Stood up to Marlena? There are a ton of ways to try and intervene in real life, with real people — but that’s not what this book is about. Especially because Cat’s revisiting this year in memory, the consciousness of the novel is ever aware of the fact that Marlena won’t survive it. It’s the train barreling down the tracks and knowing that you can’t stop it from the very first page. That’s Cat’s story.
“What if a couple of things that didn’t even seem that consequential at the time had gone down differently? What if she told someone something? Asked for help?”
More personally, I’ve seen people struggling with addiction and watched it turn around. I’m also familiar with the point where you know that it might not. You hope and hope that it will but, I don’t know, I think that’s one of the difficult things about writing about addiction — how do you capture that horrible dawning feeling when you recognize, shit, this person is in way over their head? Or juggle the dual awareness, as a writer, of knowing just how much trouble a character is in, but writing a narrator who misses all the cues and is suddenly blindsided by the extent of an addiction, because she was naïve or self-absorbed or because the addict has become such a good liar? That happens so often in real life, that you both see and do not see what is going on — I know it from my own experiences with an addict in my family.
Arnold: Why was it important to show Cat as an adult living in New York looking back on her life? Why fluctuate from present to past and not just tell the story about the girls as teenagers?
Buntin: My answer to this goes back to when you asked why it’s fun to write about teenage girls. The fact that they are so sharp and perceptive but don’t have much wisdom is exactly why I wouldn’t want to write a novel about teenage girls from the perspective of a teenage girl. I wanted to be able to move between the past and present, to hold up each moment and let it refract off all the years that had passed, Cat’s sense of herself as an adult versus who she thought she’d be, etc. I needed that narrative distance in order to explore how memory changes the stories that we tell, how frustrating and impossible and beautiful it is to try and find the truth in our own pasts. Cat had to be telling this from the perspective of adulthood in order to do that — I needed that emotional range. Plus, aside from Sal’s reappearance in Cat’s life, the reason Cat is telling the story of that year is because she’s on a precipice with her drinking. To write the book I wanted to write about addiction, I had to go back to the problem that had been shadowing Cat since she was fifteen — her reliance on alcohol, which started the same year she met Marlena. It’s a life-defining year for that reason, too.
Arnold: So Cat is meant to be an unreliable narrator.
Buntin: Definitely. Cat, in telling this story, is trying to get to the truth of her own experience, but whether or not she can rely on her own impulses as a story teller, as a witness, to be objectively true — that’s something she’s wrestling with. A first person narrator is always unreliable, but I really wanted Cat to lean into that and say, I told you this, but I didn’t tell you this, to make the reader question what Cat’s motivations are in sharing certain things, what she might be hiding from herself, what she might not be ready to admit. For me, Marlena is about female friendship, definitely, and coming-of-age, but it’s just as much about memory — how we build our identities out of these stories from our pasts — and the act of telling. What changes during that process, what we can discover or reveal? What does it mean to take ownership over your own story?
Arnold: I saw the girls’ brothers, Jimmy and Sal, as the only male figures here that weren’t terrible people. This question is meant to be a little cheeky. Were you concerned about or did you think about what it would mean to portray most of the male characters in a book about female friendship as unlikable?
Buntin: [Laughs] No, I did not, but I love that question. I did not want to vilify men, I did not set out to do that, but I was interested in how you portray an absence of a male figure. You have to draw an outline so the reader is aware that that character is haunting the events that are happening in the book without him ever appearing on the page. Cat’s dad gets his scene with Cat, but I wanted to make the fact of his having left something that was always in her psyche, even when she wasn’t directly talking/thinking about it. That was a fun challenge. And I think of Jimmy and Liam as good guys essentially. They’re just not the story’s heart. The central relationships are between Cat and Marlena and Cat and her mom. Those other relationships had to be in a faded zone outside of the frame in order to amplify the female relationships. I am sure men can handle it.
Arnold: To me, Jimmy was the most tragic character because he had a chance to get out and didn’t take it.
Buntin: I think of him as somebody who has a lot of potential and just chokes, at least during the year the book is set. He decided he was going to take some time off and then just never got back on the right track after that. For some people, taking a gap year is a great idea, but for others it is a terrible sinkhole. He lost his inertia. He wound up in this new town and didn’t know what he was doing, but I love his character — he’s a sweet, intense guy, but he’s always a little bit of a mystery to Cat. He grows up to be just fine though — better than Cat in some ways.
Arnold: When exactly does this story take place? Would things have turned out differently for Marlena had she grown up today?
Buntin: Marlena and Cat are in high school circa 2006, during the rise of the opioid epidemic and at the moment when social media was still sort of a novelty, before it fully swallowed every teenager whole. Also just before the housing bubble bursts. All these things impact the story, their specific circumstances, but I didn’t put in any dates in the book — as a reader, I tend to find such markers distracting, and I wanted to create an impressionistic sense of time, for it to feel a little like everyone’s high school experience. The only deliberate timestamps in the book are references to technology that came out in 2005, 2006. Because it was also important to me that Cat be an adult as she’s looking back, that means the narrative present takes place a few years from now.
Maybe it would have turned out differently for Marlena if she had been in high school today — there’s certainly more of an awareness of the danger of pharmaceutical drugs. And I don’t think small towns are as isolated now — the Internet provides constant access, constant connection. Teenagers today know that there is a bigger world out there.
Arnold: You earned your MFA from NYU. Did you start the novel while you were there? What was it like workshopping it?
Buntin: I did start it while I was there, sort of, in the sense that I first wrote something with these two girls in it. I was in a novella writing class and I wrote like sixty pages, and not one of those sixty pages are in the book you read. But those pages were about Cat, Marlena, Ryder and Greg. I honestly don’t remember what it was like workshopping it. I think there was some debate over whether it was YA. I sat on those pages for a while, poking at them here and there, but I was working on another novel very seriously at the same time. The other novel was experimental and written in fragments and super autobiographical. It was not very good, and I hated writing it. Writing Marlena felt entirely different — it was immersive and compelling. I wanted to find out what happened to the girls. It was a relief to realize that the story that you want to write is probably the one you should be writing. After I committed to Marlena, it went quickly. I finished a full draft about a year after grad school, though I did a full-blown rewrite after it sold. I feel like I wrote two books — the book that I sold, and the book that is coming out.
Arnold: In addition to being a writer, you also work for Catapult.
Buntin: Yes, I direct the creative writing program — we host a robust series of workshops and master classes in our NYC offices, and also online. I’ve also edited a few books.
Arnold: How is the editing process different for you than for other editors since you are in the unique position of also being a novelist?
Buntin: I think editing has taught me to kick my own ass! [Laughs] And in a way that I really didn’t know how to do before. If you’re editing someone else’s work, and you are coming at it from a place of love, of wanting the book to be the best possible version of itself, the writer to reach their highest potential in every single sentence, and you don’t apply that same intensity to your own editing process, then you’re a hypocrite.
Arnold: What are you writing next?
Buntin: Right now, I’m trying to keep my head above water between all the book stuff and the regular pressures of my day job. It’s a little early to talk about the novel that I’m working on now, but I can say that it is set at a boarding school, with a bigger cast of characters, both teenagers and adults. The adult perspectives are more central to the narrative than the teen perspectives. It’s also not in first person, which feels really liberating after writing in Cat’s voice for years and years.
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Print Marked Items
Buntin, Julie: MARLENA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Buntin, Julie MARLENA Henry Holt (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 18 ISBN: 978-1-62779-764-1
Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntin's tale of the friendship between two girls in the
woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new.Fifteen-year-old Cat catches her
first glimpse of Marlena as they're unloading the U-Haul; Cat's parents have just gotten divorced, the most obvious
consequence of which is that her mother has moved the remainder of the family from the suburbs of Detroit to Silver
Lake, a rural town in Northern Michigan, 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store stocking vegetables. It is a meeting
both unremarkable and life-changing. "The details of her in my memory are so big and clear they almost can't quite be
true," Cat says, looking back. "Her arms were slicked with snowmelt and pimpled from the cold; her hair gave off a
burnt-wood smell when she shook it out of her face, the way she often did before she spoke." Over the course of the
coming weeks, they become friends, and then best friends, their lives wholly and intensely intertwined. Magnetic and
kind and very, very troubled, Marlena introduces the once-studious Cat to a new world of drinking and pills and sex
and also friendship, the depth of which neither girl has experienced before. And still, there are parts of Marlena's life
Cat cannot reach and doesn't understand: Cat knows someday she'll be leaving Silver Lake; Marlena knows she won't.
She's right. With time, Marlena slips further away, swallowed up by drugs and desperation, and by the end of the year
she is dead, having drowned alone in a shallow, freezing river in the unforgiving woods. It could so easily be cliched or
sentimental. It is neither. Jumping between their teenage friendship in Michigan and Cat's adult life in New York City,
Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory. Devastating; as unforgettable as
it is gorgeous.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Buntin, Julie: MARLENA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480922011&it=r&asid=700a85cef14045e30b0e9343952f78c5.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
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Marlena
Michael Magras
BookPage.
(Apr. 2017): p21.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
MARLENA
By Julie Buntin Holt
$26, 288 pages
ISBN 9781627797641
Audio, eBook available
From its brilliant opening sentence, "Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are," Julie Buntin's debut
novel creates a hauntingly original atmosphere for a familiar story. In Marlena, a woman in her 30s recalls events from
two decades earlier, when a brief friendship had a profound impact on her life.
When Cat was 15, she and her "full-blown poor" family, which included her divorced mother and older brother, moved
from their home in a Detroit suburb to a "grubby half-acre" in the woods of Silver Lake, Michigan. As she helps unload
the U-Haul, Cat meets Marlena Joyner, two years her senior, who lives nearby in "a renovated barn coated in layers of
lilac paint that were sticky to the touch."
Cat and Marlena become best friends. Their friendship lasts only a year, until Marlena "suffocated in less than six
inches of ice-splintered river." But it's a life-changing year for Cat, one in which Marlena introduces her to a world
very different from her accustomed environment. She encourages Cat, an excellent student in her previous school, to
cut classes, drink heavily and take recreational drugs. And Marlena's father is hardly a stabilizing influence; he cooks
meth in a railcar behind their house.
Today, Cat has a prominent job in New York, but the effects of her Silver Lake years remain. She still struggles with
alcoholism, and when Marlena's younger brother, Sal, who was 8 when his sister died, calls Cat to say that he's in town,
events from a past she never quite forgot come rushing back.
Despite an error in chronology--YouTube, which figures into the narrative, wasn't around 20 years ago--Marlena is still
an unforgettable portrait of teenage confusion and experimentation, a time when one discovers "that time doesn't
belong to you. All you have is what you remember."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Magras, Michael. "Marlena." BookPage, Apr. 2017, p. 21+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490551629&it=r&asid=2c1c19645464543e14d04cc04cdc6cb8.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490551629
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Marlena
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Marlena
Julie Buntin. Holt, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-62779-764-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc. In a keenly observed
study of teenage character, narrator Catherine, 15, is miserable in the ramshackle house her newly divorced mother has
bought in the dismal town of Silver Lake in northern Michigan. When she meets Marlena, her glamorous 17-year-old
next-door neighbor, Cat is smitten with the euphoria of having a best friend. Buntin is particularly sensitive to the
misery of adolescent angst, and Cat's growing happiness in Marlena's friendship runs like an electric wire through the
narrative. Marlena is dangerous, however: she runs with a bad crowd, and her father cooks meth. From the beginning,
we know that Marlena is irresistible, reckless, and brave; she's a mother substitute for her forlorn younger brother--
musically talented, beautiful, and doomed to die young. It's only later that Cat understands that Marlena is the needy
one in their relationship. Her bravado hides desperation; she fears she'll never get out of Silver Lake, that she has no
future, and that "there were kids like us all over rural America." Almost 20 years later, living in New York with her
husband and working at a good job, Cat is still damaged by losing Marlena. Crippled by "the pain at the utter core of
me," she takes refuge in alcohol and memories. The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for
Marlena's "glow ... that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever." Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.
Entertainment. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Marlena." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 31+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473458968&it=r&asid=d06a75e482b39a8838ce14121c7c465e.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473458968
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What were reading
Steph Opitz
Marie Claire.
24.4 (Apr. 2017): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
Full Text:
1. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US by Stephanie Powell Watts (Ecco)
A newly wealthy man moves back to his failing hometown after 15 mysterious years away and starts building a big,
beautiful house to woo the woman he loves--even though, you know, she's married. Sound familiar? Inspired by The
Great Gatsby, Watts loosely (masterfully, too) retells the American saga from the present-day perspective of a oncethriving
African-American community, breathing fresh life into a classic in a way that feels more essential, more
moving than the original.
2. THE DROWNING KING by Emily Holleman (Little, Brown and Company)
You don't need to have read Holleman's 2015 debut, Cleopatra's Shadows, to enjoy this sequel about the Egyptian royal
family, but you should. (E! only wishes it could film this infamous, primed-for-reality-TV family.) In the equally fastmoving,
heart-poundingly good follow-up, Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe is torn between supporting Cleopatra or their
young brother for heir to the throne. Cue the lies, betrayal, and manipulation!
3. THE ARRANGEMENT by Sarah Dunn (Little, Brown and Company)
Dunn's latest, about an attempted open marriage, is damn funny, which isn't exactly a spoiler--see: her hit show,
American Housewife. Lucy and Owen try to break the monotony by taking a break from monogamy. But even with all
the rules laid out, their six-month plan is comically fallible.
4. MARLENA by Julie Buntin (Henry Holt & Co.)
When 15-year-old Cat moves to a poor, rural community, she never expects she'll form the most impactful,
intoxicating, haunting relationship of her life: Marlena. A year later, Cat's wild-child BFF is dead. Decades afterward,
Cat is still trying to put the pieces together in this gorgeous, knowing debut that will make you reflect on the people
who continue to shape our lives long after we leave them behind.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Opitz, Steph. "What were reading." Marie Claire, Apr. 2017, p. 105. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490768684&it=r&asid=a734034af502549735fcfb34e2a9e812.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490768684
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PW'S top authors pick their favorite books of
2014
Julie Buntin
Publishers Weekly.
261.51 (Dec. 8, 2014): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
For the second year running, we've asked the authors of PW's Top 10 Books of 2014 (announced in our November 3
issue) to each share a favorite title published this year. Their picks are as diverse as you'd expect from a group that
includes two genre-bending nonfiction writers, an Italian recluse, an Iraqi exile, and a Jamaican novelist who has
written an epic of his native island. This year, our authors fell hard for memoirs, essay collections, Graywolf Press, and
international gems that are not yet available in English. Being creative types, they didn't follow all our rules, but we're
pleased at their responses.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
EULA BISS
Biss's On Immunity uses history, research, mythology, and her own experience as the mother of a young son to delve
into a complex issue: immunization. Biss's pick, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, similarly takes inspiration from many
sources as it tackles another weighted topic: race.
BISS'S PICK: Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)
"I've read Rankine's new book, Citizen, twice and will read it again soon. The book defies summary, and there is little I
can say about it that it doesn't say for itself much better. It's about, among other things, 'the anger built up through
experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of
skin color.' Citizen does not allow us to dismiss this anger and does not allow us to read rage as insanity. 'You begin to
think, maybe erroneously,' Rankine writes, 'that this ... anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies
and disappoints.' When I read Citizen for the first time, I had the distinct sense that this was a book I had been waiting
for someone to write. (Shortly after, I saw Claudia Rankine read at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and I tried to tell
her this, but in a Freudian slip I told her that Citizen was a book I had been waiting to write. Writing this book as
Rankine has written it would be impossible for me, but the fixations and questions of the book are all concerns .that I
would call my own. I too, after all, am a citizen.) Reading Citizen for the second time, I reconsidered my own rage. I
remembered a moment in which I had raged over a small injustice suffered by my son. Even as I raged, I had to step
outside myself long enough to ask if there was any way I would survive the rage of raising a child who was not
routinely treated the way white children can expect to be treated. Would I have any choice? If rage is not the most
reasonable response to injustice, Citizen asks, then what is?"
JOSEPH O'NEILL
The Dog is Joseph O'Neill's story of an American man alienated by his native country who ends up in Dubai, where he
must make decisions that challenge his identity. O'Neill's choice is a story collection by the MacArthur-winning Donald
Antrim that, like The Dog, parses what it means to be lost in modern society.
O'NEILL'S PICK: The Emerald Light in the Air, by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"These Antrim stories--brilliant, antic, emotional--are tremendously funny and moving. I read them with that dreadful
exhilaration that only the best writers can elicit."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
LAWRENCE WRIGHT
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Wright is not only on 2014's top-10 list--he wrote Going Clear, one of our top 10 books of 2013. This year, we fell hard
for Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, a painstaking and riveting account of the
1978 Camp David Accords. Though it might seem impossible that Wright still has time to read after publishing two
new books in two years, he does. His favorite of the year is All the Truth Is Out, a thoughtful piece of reportage by
Matt Bai, which chronicles Gary Hart's failed presidential campaign.
WRIGHT'S PICK:
All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, by Matt Bai (Knopf)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"THE DECLINE OF FAIRNESS, IMPARTIALITY, AND RESPECT FOR PRIVACY IN THE AMERICAN PRESS
HAS MANY CAUSES, BUT THEY ALL SEEMED TO COLLIDE IN THE SINKING OF GARY HART'S
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN 1987. IN HIS BRACING BOOK All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went
Tabloid, Bai persuasively argues that the rumors surrounding Senator Hart's marital infidelities, ignited by the 24-hour
news cycle and the diversification of media platforms, permanently transformed the ethos of the political media. Within
a few days, the press brought down the leading figure for the Democratic nomination. After that, the hunger for such
trophies turned private lives into public commodities whenever they wandered onto the political stage, and
entertainment value trumped the ethical considerations that had once allowed reporters and public figures to deal with
each other as something other than predator
HECTOR TOBAR
In 2010, 33 miners spent 69 days trapped in a Chilean copper mine while the world held its breath. Pulitzer-winning
journalist Tobar dives deep into their story of survival in Deep Down Dark. His top read of 2014 is a memoir that
hinges not on a newsworthy event but on one writer's love of a city, surfing, and Moby-Dick.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
TOBAR'S PICK: The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir, by Justin Hocking (Graywolf)
"Hocking's memoir is a love poem to two quintessential creations of American culture--surfing and Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick. As the book opens, Hocking, an avid skateboarder, arrives in New York City from Colorado to reboot his
writing career. He ends up in Brooklyn, just as the hipster boom is gaining steam, and takes up with assorted
skateboarding soulmates. Hocking is an enormously talented wordsmith, and this account of a cash-poor but culturally
rich New York life is funny, self-effacing, and unfailingly erudite. He is a writer's writer, a master of drop-dead
gorgeous similes and metaphors. Like his hero Melville, Hocking finds himself drawn to the sea. He falls in with a
community of misfit surfers at Rockaway Beach. (Surfing in New York City? Who knew?) The ghost of the long-dead
Manhattanite Melville is ever present during Hocking's repeated encounters with the city's unexpected natural and
human wonders. Life eventually turned harsh for Melville in Manhattan, Hocking tells us, as he tracks the great writer's
sad biography while recounting his own literary failures. The Great Floodgates is as original a New York writer's
memoir as you're likely to read. Rarely has modern-day New York been captured so viscerally and sensually."
ELENA FERRANTE
The third of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, continues the epic story of two
friends in Naples whose lives intersect and diverge throughout the years. Ferrante's top pick is Jhumpa Lahiri's The
Lowland, about two brothers and the woman they share, with a setting that moves from India to the U.S.
FERRANTE'S PICK: The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
"WHEN I'M WRITING, I READ VERY LITTLE. THE ONLY BOOK THAT I READ THIS YEAR IN ENGLISH IS
The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri conveys the collision of two worlds to excellent effect. But what makes the
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book memorable is Gauri [the female protagonist]. In Italy the novel was titled La moglie (The Wife). It's one of those
extremely rare cases where the publisher's nonliterary rationale indicates to the reader a great literary accomplishment."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
EMMANUEL CARRERE
Carrere doesn't recede into the background in his biographical portrait Limonov. Instead, the author interacts with the
story, interrogating his own relationship to Limonov as closely as he studies the facts of the Russian dissident's life.
This year, he recommends a French bestseller by Maylis de Kerangal, To Repair the Living (FSG has acquired U.S.
rights). The novel follows a heart as it moves, literally, from one body to another.
CARRERE'S PICK: To Repair the Living, by Maylis de Kerangal
"To Repair the Living is a splendid title and a splendid book. The title comes from Chekov; the book tells of the heart.
The heart in question belongs to a young man who dies in a car accident after a surfing session on the French coast of
Brittany. First comes the announcement to the mother, then the mother breaking the news to the father, and then finally
the doctor, at the hospital where the corpse of the young man lies, asks the parents if they will agree to donate their
son's organs--particularly his heart. The parents are in shock, of course. They need time to think. But there is no time. A
heart transplant must be performed in the 24 hours following death, or not at all. This novel is about what happens
during these 24 hours. Between the moment when a 20-year-old dies and the moment his heart finds a home in the
body of a 50-yearold woman. Maylis de Kerangal describes with frantic energy and wonderful tenderness all the
people, all the individual stories, all the griefs and hopes that are involved in this process. She writes about performing
both mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart surgery. Before this fifth novel, she was considered one of the most
promising French novelists. Reparer les vivants is more than a promise; in France it was an immediate bestseller, and
has remained so from the beginning to the end of 2014 and reconciled the most demanding literary critics with the
largest audience. It will be published next year in the U.S.--don't miss it."
HASSAN BLASIM
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Iraqi exile Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition tackles the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective. He has been compared to
Gogol and Borges, and Blasim's stories, like theirs, are both comic and horrifying, filled with haunting images. Blasim
chose Frankenstein in Baghdad by Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in
2014, a dynamic novel (soon to be translated into English) that takes as its subject the violence in Iraq in the aftermath
of the American occupation.
BLASIM'S PICK: Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi
"Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad courageously confronts the bizarre events set in motion by the violence after the
American occupation of Iraq. In an enjoyable and intelligent style, Saadawi tells the story of Hadi, a peddler in a poor
part of Baghdad who collects and repairs body parts from people who have been ripped apart in explosions. A spirit
breathes life into the assembled parts to produce a creature that Hadi calls the Whatsitsname, while the authorities call
it Criminal X. The creature exacts revenge on all those who helped kill the people to whom the body parts belonged.
It's a painful and powerful story that goes beyond the limits of reality, in an attempt to reach the essence of the cruelty
of wars that disfigure the human spirit and society, as fire disfigures skin. In vain, Saadawi's novel seeks justice in the
labyrinthine chaos of violence in Iraq. His lively style is reminiscent of horror movies and detective stories, with
touches of black comedy. The novel will soon be translated into English, and I hope that will be a step toward
recognition of the new Iraqi literature that has emerged from under the rubble of constant wars, which I like to call the
literature of nightmarish realism."
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MARLON JAMES
James's A Brief History of Seven Killings is a sweeping epic that chronicles three decades of violence and unrest in
Jamaica, centered on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. Like Eula Biss, James picked Claudia
Rankine's Citizen as his top book of the year.
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JAMES'S PICK: Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf) "COURAGEOUS. PAINFUL.
NECESSARY. WORDS THAT WE USE TO DESCRIBE CAPITAL-I important books. It's also the kind of language
that guarantees that people will not read them. But Citizen is too big a work for such reductive paraphrasing. In fact, it
anticipates this language in the stunning second section, which pivots between Serena Williams's 'stubbornness and
grudge,' and Arthur Ashe's dignity and courage, to expose the polite racism behind what is deemed acceptable black
behavior. The question isn't asked so much as unmasked: is America still so in love with the concept of the good black
because it makes for great art and sports, or because it provides a racial template safe to categorize and eventually
ignore? What about the inverse, America's equal fear and fascination for the angry black woman and the black male sex
machine gone berserk? And yet, even at its most boldly confrontational, Citizen grabbed me with its huge heart and
disarming openness. Rankine is far more interested in revelation than confession. It's the pre-Ferguson book that feels
post-, not just because of how it confronts race and identity but because it already feels like an ageless and peerless
work of art. Several times I found myself walking into a conversation already happening, in which Rankine simply
scooted over, never breaking thought, but making space for me to listen, and to eventually speak."
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LESLIE JAMISON
Jamison's The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays that explore pain, femininity, art, love affairs, and yes,
empathy, in language that's daring and compassionate. For her, this year's standout is another essay collection: Charles
D'Ambrosio's Loitering.
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JAMISON'S PICK: Loitering: New and Collected Essays, by Charles D'Ambrosio (Tin House)
"Loitering is a book I will keep returning to for years. I love its fidelity to the complexities of life. I'm excited by the
surge and charge of its thought. You get to watch a mind moving through the world with insight and sensitivity and
something like the opposite of perceptual laziness. A doctor once told me I had an extra electrical node in my heart--
sending out extra signals saying, 'Beat, beat'--and this collection is like another runaway node, making my heart beat
faster with its synthesis of ferocious nuance and unapologetic feeling. Its essays are about a rundown utopia and a
Christian haunted house, a Russian orphanage and a woman on trial, a brother's suicide and another brother's survival.
They make the boundaries between the personal and the exploratory--the journalistic or the critical--feel not just
permeable but somehow beside the point: why polarize these modes of encounter and awareness? Another Charles
(Baudelaire) once protested the segregation of thought and feeling in writing, insisting that 'passion ... raises reason to
new heights,' and there is an emotive force to D'Ambrosio's intelligence that never fails to take my breath away. These
essays are smart without being overserious: they resist easy answers and treat rigorous thinking as an ethical imperative
rather than a chance to showcase intelligence. They are generous to the world. I'm so glad they are in it."
Julie Buntin is a freelance writer and the programs director at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Buntin, Julie
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Buntin, Julie. "PW'S top authors pick their favorite books of 2014." Publishers Weekly, 8 Dec. 2014, p. 46+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA400785330&it=r&asid=a5e580b4dee5b1e1e98befec2117ba7c.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A400785330
---
Julie Buntin MARLENA PRESS EVENTS BIO CONTACT
Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
POWERED BY SQUARESPACE
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Spotlight on first novels
Booklist.
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Bear and the Nightingale. By Katherine Arden. Jan. 2017.336p. Del Rey, $27 (97811018859321.
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Gracefully threaded with Russian fairy tales and a tactile sense of place, Arden's debut tells the story of Vasya,
daughter of a supposed witch, in the northern reaches of medieval Russia. As a child, Vasya's conversations with wood
sprites and household spirits were an odd, but tolerable feature, but when her father marries deeply pious, troubled
Anna, Vasya learns to keep her otherworldly friends a secret. They don't stay secret for long, however: a fanatical priest
quickly catches on, and he becomes obsessed with Vasya's salvation, while Anna roils with anger over her
stepdaughters brazen disregard for propriety. Most treacherous of all, two supernatural beings, Morozko and Medved,
see powerful opportunities in Vasya's gifts. And while Vasya tries to ward off Medved's nefarious grasp on her village,
political rumblings from Moscow threaten their status quo, and the villagers become wary of Vasya's inexplicable
talents and boldness. In a lush narrative with the cadence of a fairy tale, Arden weaves an immersive, earthy story of
folk magic, faith, and hubris, peopled with vivid, dynamic characters, particularly clever, brave Vasya, who outsmarts
men and demons alike to save her family. This beautifully written, auspicious first novel is utterly bewitching.--Sarah
Hunter
YA: With a teen heroine and fairy-tale atmosphere, this could have easily been published as YA. Teen fans of literary
fairy tales will be enchanted. SH.
Bone & Bread. By Saleema Nawaz. Nov. 2016.456p. Anansi, paper, $16.95 (9781770890091).
With an elegance and fluidity of prose rare in first novels, Canadian writer Nawaz presents a masterful examination of
the ties that bind people together and the quiet endurance required for sustaining those bonds through the countless
travails of life and death. Beena remains bereaved, but she is attempting to preserve the burgeoning relationships that
have allowed her to cope with the death of her sister, Sadhana. In the wake of this tragedy, Beena reflects on their
childhood together after the death of their parents, remembering the tumultuous nature of their sisterhood and the many
struggles that led to their final fight. Mingled grief and guilt lead Beena to return to her sister's Montreal apartment to
investigate what exactly went on during Sadhana's last days and uncover the truth behind her death. Poignant,
engrossing, and tender, Nawaz's work explores the lifelong attempt to protect those we love and how we learn to rally
for those dear to us.--Caitlin Brown
The Butcher's Hook. By Janet Ellis. Jan. 2017. 368p. Pegasus, $24.95 (9781681773117).
In this macabre love story, Anne Jaccob is a young woman from a wealthy family in Georgian London. Though she
lives a comfortable life, she receives no love from her cold father, and her mother has been wasting away for years. Not
only that, but Anne has been promised to an oily, self-absorbed man. Longing for love and an escape from her home,
Anne is instantly smitten by the butcher's boy, Fub, when he makes a delivery to the home. She embarks on a
whirlwind love affair, which she must keep secret, and there are no lengths that she won't go to in order to protect it,
including cold-blooded murder. Still, readers won't suspect the story's dark turn, which flips the usual tropes on their
heads and makes for a pleasantly surprising read. Ellis' debut is at times awkwardly paced, and characters are generally
unlikable and melodramatic. Fans of the setting, with plenty of sex and violence thrown in, will enjoy the novelty of
this book that reads like a Tim Burton film.--Emily Brock
The Dispossessed. By Szilard Borbely. Nov. 2016. 304p. illus. HarperPerennial, paper, $15.99 (9780062364081).
Well-known poet Borbely uses his lyrical talent to illuminate the suffering and deep-seated poverty in a tiny Hungarian
village in the 1960s, a time when politics and communism in the region changed difficult lives to impossible. The
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unnamed child narrator, whose drunken father is of Jewish descent and whose family is officially Greek Catholic
(another unpopular religion in a Calvinist village), describes his life as a fearful outcast who, with his sister, does most
of the chores and spends inordinate amounts of time keeping his mother from jumping into the well. The narrator
doesn't shy away from the peasants' coarse humor, sexual aberrations, and cruelty to animals, nor the filth and
excrement that surround them and serve as metaphors for their lives. While the short declarative sentences may seem
somewhat repetitious, every page is laden with significance, and though some readers may not enjoy the education
Borbely gives them, most will find much to ponder in this moving literary novel that compares favorably to both Elie
Wiesel's Night (1960) and Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life (2013) for their disturbingly clear descriptions and
autobiographical nature. Borbely died in 2014. --Jen Baker
Fever Dream. By Samanta Schweblin. Tr. by Megan McDowell. Jan. 2017. 192p. Riverhead, $25 (9780399184598).
Schweblin's first novel tells a frenetic, unnerving tale. A young mother, Amanda, is afflicted by a sudden illness and
accepts that death is imminent. As she waits in her hospital bed, she hears the hovering voice of a young boy, David,
who guides her as she recounts the events leading to her current dire situation. After arriving at a rural vacation home
with her daughter, Nina, Amanda strikes up a friendship with their alluring neighbor, Carla, a local who is revealed to
be David's mother. Carla shares with Amanda an unusual story about her son and her efforts to save him after he was
poisoned. Amanda, at first dubious, becomes increasingly troubled by both mother and son and makes plans to cut their
vacation short and return home. But things go awry when Amanda decides to bid Carla farewell. Schweblin's sparse
narrative, both familiar and mysterious, quickly grows in intensity as the hazy whispers of self-doubt and death itself
descend. A thought-provoking story that provides ample opportunity for readers to grapple with its unanswered
questions. --Leah Strauss
First Light. By Bill Rancic. Nov. 2016. 320p. Putnam, $26 (9781101982273).
Entrepreneur and reality-TV star Rancic, author of the best-selling You're Hired: How to Succeed in Business and Life
(2004), presents a captivating and harrowing debut novel. After doing damage control for a recent oil spill, the Petrol
team members are more than ready to leave the darkness of Barrow, Alaska. Kerry Egan and Daniel Albrecht are
especially excited to return to Chicago to plan their wedding and celebrate the holidays. But during their flight home,
something goes terribly wrong. Stranded in the Yukon Territory after their plane crashes during a storm, Kerry, Daniel,
and other survivors must endure the unforgiving conditions of the Canadian wilderness. Kerry and Phil Velez, another
Petrol employee, are gravely injured during the crash. As the only one with survival experience, Daniel is forced to
make difficult decisions to save the woman he loves and ensure that everyone has a chance of being rescued. First
Light is, at its core, a story of love and family, told within an engrossing page-turner about endurance and hope.--
Patricia Smith
The Futures. By Anna Pitoniak. Jan. 2017.320p. Little, Brown/Lee Boudreaux, $26 (9780316354172); e-book, $12.99
(9780316354189).
Recent college grads Julia and Evan, who alternate chapters narrating Pitoniak's debut, have just traded New Haven for
New York. Without any distinct post-college plans, Julia thinks moving in with Evan is as good as anything else. Evan,
on the other hand, has landed a coveted spot at a highly respected hedge fund, one of the few, he'll soon learn, that's
safe in the about-to-happen 2008 market crash. Quickly, Evan is working around the clock, attracting the attention of a
boss whose elusive praise is wildly sought-after by his competitive colleagues. Julia, working "only" normal hours, is
lonely and disappointed, if not surprised, by how quickly playing house has become anything but fun. When Evan gets
involved in a deal that he suspects, then knows, isn't above-board, and Julia seeks fun and comfort elsewhere, Pitoniak
keeps the pace moving at a steady clip. Through Julia, preppy, privileged, depressive, and Evan, a Canadian country
boy running from his roots, Pitoniak's well plotted, character-driven, interior-focused novel captures the knowable
angst of the unknowable possibilities of modern young adulthood.--Annie Bostrom
YA/M: Julia and Evan an barely older than the teenagers who might like a peek at the abruptly adult lives they lead
after college. AB.
Hindsight. By Mindy Tarquini. Nov. 2016. 320p. SparkPress, paper, $16.95 (9781943006014); e-book, $9.95
(9781943006021).
Eugenia knows where she has been all too well; she is not sure where she is going to end up. Thirty-three years old and
living with her mother in South Philly, Eugenia has the unique ability to remember all of her past lives, but she is only
interested in what her as-yet-unknown future holds. She thinks her current life is too easy, and she is craving more,
when she meets Friedrich, a man who shares her strange talent, as his concentration-camp tattoo from a past life
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proves. The two form an unlikely friendship that always dances around more, and suddenly Eugenia's life is exciting.
Instead of wishing for something better in her next life, she is engaged in the present, able to tackle things she never
thought possible and in sight of the life she has always wanted, this time around. Tarquini charms her audience with
heady wit and laugh-out-loud humor, especially where Eugenia's hilarious Italian American family is concerned. This
is a fast-reading, enjoyable journey through past and present that many readers will enjoy.--Carissa Chesanek
* History of Wolves. By Emily Fridlund. Jan. 2017. 288p. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (97808021258731.
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Fraught with foreboding, Fridlund's first novel is the story of 14-year-old Linda, who lives with her erstwhile cultmember
parents in a cabin in the northern Minnesota woods. When new neighbors, the Gardners, move into their
summer cottage across the lake, Linda becomes babysitter for their five-year-old son and an increasingly large presence
in their lives--and they in hers. In the meantime, her new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, has been found to possess child
pornography and is fired, but not before he has an alleged affair with one of Linda's classmates, the beautiful Lily with
whom Linda is fascinated. The novel moves backward and forward in time to good effect, showing us the enigmatic
adult Linda will become. The isolated setting reinforces a theme of loneliness that pervades the book and lends it an
often bleak, even desolate, air that reinforces the uncertain, nagging knowledge that something is wrong with the
Gardners. The writing is beautiful throughout ("the sun broke over the treetops, turning every surface into a flat knife of
light"; a man is stubborn "like a stain") and is a triumph of tone and attitude. Lovers of character-driven literary fiction
will embrace this one.--Michael Cart
YA/M: Older teens who enjoy literary fiction will he engaged and intrigued by this novel's richly realized themes of
loneliness and the urgent desire to belong. MC.
* I Liked My Life. By Abby Fabiaschi. Jan. 2017.272p. St. Martin's, $25.99 (9781250084873).
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Maddy's husband, Brady, and their teenage daughter, Eve, have been struggling after Maddy's suicide. Wanting to help
her shattered family move on without her, Maddy hovers from the beyond, seeking the right woman to take her place.
She finds the perfect person to help Brady and Eve move past their loss in Rory, an elementary teacher, and she plants
thoughts in their heads to bring Rory and her family together. But Rory has experienced her own loss and may be just
as much in need of learning to live again as Brady and Eve are. Fabiaschi excels at depicting the confusion Eve and
Brady experience as they desperately try to reconcile their Maddy with the one who committed suicide. Excerpts from
Maddy's journal and multiple narrators add to the complexity of Maddy's character as well as the layers of strained
relationship history between Brady and Eve. Readers will be enveloped by the emotional impact of Fabiaschi's writing.
Warm and hopeful, this marvelous debut stands next to novels from Catherine McKenzie and Carolyn Parkhurst in
taking the reader on the emotional rides that define marriage and family.--Tracy Babiasz
* Lincoln in the Bardo. By George Saunders. Jan. 2017.368p. Random, $28 (9780812995343).
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Even though Saunders (Tenth of December, 2013), the much-heralded author of distinctively inventive short stories,
anchors his first novel to a historical moment--the death of President Abraham Lincoln's young son, Willie, in February
1862--this is most emphatically not a conventional work of historical fiction. The surreal action takes place in a
cemetery, and most of the expressive, hectic characters are dead, caught in the bardo, the mysterious transitional state
following death and preceding rebirth, heaven, or hell. Their vivid narration resembles a play, or a prose variation on
Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), as they tell their stories, which range from the gleefully ribald to
the tragic in tales embodying the dire conflicts underlying the then-raging Civil War. On pages laddered with brilliantly
"curated" quotes from books and historical documents (most actual, some concocted), Saunders cannily sets the stage
for Lincoln's true-life, late-night visits to the crypt, where he cradles his son's body--scenes of epic sorrow turned
grotesque by the morphing spirits' frantic reactions. Saunders creates a provocative dissonance between his
exceptionally compassionate insights into the human condition and Lincoln's personal and presidential crises and this
macabre carnival of the dead, a wild and wily improvisation on the bardo that mirrors, by turns, the ambience of
Hieronymus Bosch and Tim Burton. A boldly imagined, exquisitely sensitive, sharply funny, and utterly unnerving
historical and metaphysical drama.--Donna Seaman
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HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz is loud and will continue to be so when literary star Saunders goes on a
national author tour supported by an all-platform media blitz.
* Marlena. By Julie Buntin. Apr. 2017. 288p. Holt, $26 (9781627797641).
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In Buntin's vivid debut, Cath, now a New York City public librarian in her thirties, tells the story of the friendship that
changed her forever. Fifteen and stinging from her parents' recent divorce, Cath has already decided that she'll be
different in freezing, rugged Silver Lake, Michigan, from the nerdy, do-gooder "Cathy" she was back in Pontiac. On
cue, wild, beautiful, unpredictable Marlena, her new neighbor, appears as Cath, her mother, and brother pull up to the
tiny home that's apparently theirs. Cath is suddenly and completely drawn to Marlena: ethereal though chemically
fueled, brilliant but reckless, so comforting when she's not angry or, worse, too honest. An early revelation that
Marlena will soon die increases the suspense. Cath, an aggressively truant smoker in her new identity, knows that
Marlenas dad is up to no good in his rail car deep in the woods, that he's cooking a better version of the meth Marlena's
boyfriend makes and sells, and Marlena's constant pill-popping isn't nothing, but this friendship and the life that comes
with it are closer to belonging than Cath has ever felt. Though Cath tells her story in flashbacks, Buntin's prose is
emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferranteesque.--Annie
Bostrom
YA/M: This novel is full of first times and difficult things, and the teens who are ready for them will recognize Cath
and Marlena. AB.
Our Little Secret. By Jenna Ellis. Oct. 2016.416p. IPG/Pan Macmillan, paper, $14.95 (9781447266785).
Scanning classified ads while whiling away the minutes at her dead-end job, wrangling kids at the Manchester FunPlex
Dome, Sophie Henshaw is intrigued by a listing for an "articulate, well-mannered English girl" to work for a family in
upstate New York. At 22, her life isn't terrible, and she and her longtime boyfriend have an amazing sex life--but not
much else. She's ready to shake things up. Quickly, after interviewing for the job on video, she's flown business class to
New York, and everything only gets more luxurious from there. Edward and Marnie Parker's seemingly endless,
hyperprivate house is teched-up and glitzed-out, and, of course, they're both interesting--and superhot. But where are
those kids Sophie thought she was going to nanny? And is it just her, or is there a lot of sexual tension in here?
Figuring out that something's up with the Parkers, and that Sophie's hire wasn't exactly what it seemed, isn't rocket
science, but plot twists take a limo-length backseat to erotica here. And first-time novelist Ellis cleverly leaves the
ending open for a sequel.--Annie Bostrom
* The Patriots. By Sana Krasikov. Jan. 2017. 560p. Spiegel & Grau, $28 (9780385524414).
Krasikov's short story collection, One More Year (2008), garnered a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award and
the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Now her fluency in the complex interactions between Russia and America
shapes her first novel, an involving, suspenseful, and astute cross-cultural saga. Idealistic and impetuous Brooklynite
Florence Fein lands a job with the Soviet Trade Mission. She falls for a worldly Russian engineer, precipitating her
reckless 1934 voyage to the Soviet Union, where her naivete and brashness both endanger and empower her as she
navigates many-pronged tyranny, anti-Semitism, and vicious corruption. With scintillating language and transporting
narrative command, Krasikov interlayers Florence's harrowing adventures with those of her son, Julian--who endured
Soviet orphanages while she suffered in a Siberian labor camp and is currently embroiled in the race to drill for Arctic
oil--and his floundering son, Lenny. As each generation struggles to find a home and an identity in both Russia and the
U.S., Krasikov dramatizes hidden, shameful facets of history in which expat American Jews were betrayed by both
countries. In a galvanizing tale of flawed and courageous protagonists, erotic and political passion, and harrowing
struggles for survival, Krasikov masterfully and devastatingly exposes the "whole dark clockwork" of totalitarianism
and asks what it means to be a hero, a patriot, a human being.--Donna Seaman
Pull Me Under. By Kelly Luce. Nov. 2016.272p. Farrar, $26 (9780374238582).
Luce follows her hit story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2013), with a debut novel
about secret lives and selfhood. The daughter of a respected Japanese classical-music composer and an American
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woman who committed suicide, Rio Silvestri, a nurse, now lives in Boulder with her loving husband, teenage daughter,
and a passion for long-distance running. When she receives a package containing artifacts and the news that her father
has died, Rio faces the dark past she has spent her life running from: as a teenager living in Japan, she murdered a
school bully and was sent to an institution for disturbed youth. Having hidden her shameful history from her family,
Rio now travels alone to her father's funeral in Japan to face all that she left behind. Striking an unlikely friendship
with her high-school English teacher, Rio explores ancient temples and forgotten memories on a journey to discover
courage and renewed affection for those she loves. Understated yet emotionally gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate
portrayal of one woman's search for identity.--Jonathan Fullmer
* The Standard Grand. By Jay Baron Nicorvo. Apr. 2017.368p. St. Martin's, $26.99 (9781250108944); e-book, $12.99
(9781250108951).
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Milt Wright, a widowed Vietnam vet, operates the Standard Grand, a once-thriving, luxurious Catskills resort, now a
run-down sanctuary for homeless veterans suffering from PTSD. Dying from cancer, Milt is trying to keep the Grand
afloat by maxing out his credit and finding a worthy successor. Enter Bellum Smith, gone AWOL just before her third
deployment to Iraq and running from her abusive, ne'er-do-well husband. Milt takes her in, the only female at the
Grand, and believes she may be the answer to his problems. Evangelina Canek represents a multinational corporation
with designs on the land and hopes to save her job by cheaply acquiring the property and turning a quick profit, since
the Grand is sitting on a massive shale formation. With sentences that flow like water down a mountain, Nicorvo's
muscular and energetic prose will stun readers with its poignancy, while providing a punch to the solar plexus. Whipsmart
dialogue and keen emotional insight bring a ragtag, damaged, but lovable cast of characters to life. Ultimately, it
is Nicorvo's depiction of the deep psychological scars soldiers bring home that will keep this exceptional first novel in
the hearts and minds of readers. Alongside Billy Lynn's Long, Halftime Walk (2012) and Yellow Birds (2012), The
Standard Grand is an important and deeply human contribution to the national conversation.--Bill Kelly
* The Strays. By Emily Bitto. Jan. 2017.256p. Twelve, $26 (9781455537723).
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A note from an old friend sparks Lily's memory, and suddenly it's the 1930s again in Melbourne. Lily is nine, first
meeting Eva, who will become her best friend. Eva's well-known artist father, Evan, is always busy painting, Lily
learns, while Eva's beautiful mother, Helena, is always busy ... being glamorous. Lily, fast becoming a witness to all
this, is fascinated by the family's bohemian existence, their house always filled with other artists, some of whom
actually live there in a kind of chaotic, de facto artist colony calling itself the Melbourne Modern Art Group. With the
adults either occupied or careless, Eva and her two sisters are left on their own--strays, their mother calls them,
including Lily in their number, to Lily's delight. But what seems like a halcyon time changes suddenly when something
nearly unimaginable happens, and Lily is left alone and friendless. Soon thereafter the novel flashes forward some 30
years as past and present come together in a melancholy denouement. Winner of Australia's Stella Prize, Bitto's novel is
a haunting evocation of life-changing friendship. Stylishly written (an elegant woman is "pale and long and light, like a
taper"), The Strays is a marvel of setting and characterization, re-creating a time of artistic revolution and personal
revelation. Memorable and moving, this is a novel not to be missed.--Michael Cart
The Waiting Room. By Leah Kaminsky. Nov. 2016.304p. HarperPerennial, paper, $15.99 (9780062490476).
Australian physician and writer Kaminisky's first novel centers on Dina, who finds her everyday life as a doctor in
Haifa, Israel, intertwined with both her family's past and collective Jewish history. Raised in Australia by Holocaustsurvivor
parents, she reaches Israel as an adult and experiences an immediate sense of belonging. However, even as she
meets and marries Eitan, has a child, and settles down, she feels an inner tug-of-war as she longs to return to
Melbourne, away from the relentless sense of impending disaster. Kaminsky uses the events of one day as this busy
mother and doctor runs from home to school to office and deals with errands to dramatize what it means to live under
constant threat. But she also reminds us that life is the same everywhere, even in places of high-wire stress, as we face
such realities as a strained marriage and the struggle to make time to be with one's child. Kaminsky brings Dina into
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sharp focus, while her ghostly mother serves as a strong secondary character, in order to vividly personalize stark news
reports.--Shoba Viswanathan
* A Word for Love. By Emily Robbins. Jan. 2017. 304p. Riverhead, $27 (9781594633584).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Bea has seen firsthand that real life can mirror fiction. An American student of Arabic in an unnamed Middle Eastern
country that is on the verge of revolution, Bea is on a mission to get her hands on the world-famous "astonishing text,"
a legendary story of star-crossed lovers Qais and Leila and the good Samaritan who kept their ill-fated adventures alive.
In her host family's small home, however, Bea is witness to two life-changing events that unfold along parallel tracks:
an enduring, illicit romance between Nisrine, the Indonesian housemaid, and Adel, a young policeman stationed next
door; and the host family's patriarch's increasing involvement in political dissent, actions that might carry serious
consequences. The themes here seem ripe for melodrama, but Robbins' promising debut steers clear of cloying
sentimentality even if at times the similarities between Bea and the good Samaritan of lore feel forced. Still, Bea is a
winning choice as a narrator, lending the story vulnerability and authenticity, especially because she is such an
empathetic, and often helpless, spectator. With an impressive economy of words, Robbins, formerly a Fulbright Fellow
in Syria, tells a story that proves that themes of love, loss, and freedom truly can transcend borders and time.--
Poornima Apte
YA/M: Intelligent and kind Bea might intrigue YAs, who will be curious to learn more about her path as a young studyabroad
student. PA.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Spotlight on first novels." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 28+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771279&it=r&asid=7db3930eadd5c8069af840369ddaacba.
Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771279
Please follow link for review - unable to copy due to cap on NYT articles.
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My Brilliant (Doomed) Friend
Julie Buntin’s Marlena is the latest in a string of novels to frame a coming-of-age narrative around an intoxicating teenage girl.
Two friends wade in the Frio Canyon River near San Antonio, Texas, in 1970Marc St. Gil / Environmental Protection Agency
SOPHIE GILBERT APR 13, 2017 CULTURE
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Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, opens with the narrator, a 15-year-old girl named Cat, hurtling toward Lake Michigan in a car that’s going far too fast. The driver is Marlena, two years older, strikingly beautiful with a “sly, feline face, all cheekbones and blink.” Although she stops the car before it reaches the edge, the metaphor in the scene seals Marlena’s fate. She drowns, Cat reveals after only a few pages, in “less than six inches of ice-splintered river, in the woods on the outskirts of downtown Kewaunee, a place she had no reason to be at twilight in November.” The rest of the book becomes an attempt by an older Cat to exorcize Marlena’s imprint on her own life—to consider the intoxicating thrill of Marlena’s wildness, and whether Cat could have done more to alter her trajectory.
In this, Marlena joins a glut of recent novels that pair a retrospective female narrator with an extravagantly charismatic but troubled friend. Emma Cline’s novel The Girls loosely reimagines the Manson family murders from the perspective of a 14-year-old named Evie in 1969, who becomes besotted with an older teenager named Suzanne. Emily Bitto’s The Strays is recounted by Lily, a young Australian girl drawn into the 1930s bohemian family of her classmate, Eva. Like Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, these novels consider the fierce complexity of female friendship, and the particular agony of innocence that yearns to be shed. They examine the allure of danger from a space of safety: It’s inevitable which girl will careen toward catastrophe, and which girl will watch, wistfully, from the sidelines. As James Wood wrote of My Brilliant Friend’s Elena and Lila in The New Yorker, “One girl is facing beyond the book; the other is caught within its pages.”
But Marlena, unlike the others, seems to be aware of the complicity of these kinds of stories in perpetuating the mystique of girls who go wrong. Cat considers women like Edie Sedgwick, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Sylvia Plath. “And wasn’t that the ultimate feminine achievement,” she thinks, “to be too gorgeous, too fucked up, too talented and sad and vulnerable to survive?” Seeking out avatars of Marlena as an adult, she finds her in movies and books, in “Ruth and Sylvie in a rowboat, Dorothea at the breakfast table, Anna K. of course, right before she jumps.” This longstanding romanticization of troubled women prompts a question: Are we as readers, vicariously breaking bad alongside Marlena and Suzanne and Eva, also partly colluding in these seductive anthems to doomed female youth?
* * *
If Marlena carries within it a more potent sense of regret, it’s because it’s inspired by a real friendship and a real loss. In 2014, Buntin published an essay in The Atlantic titled “She’s Still Dying on Facebook,” in which she remembered her teenage friend Lea, who died of liver failure at age 22 after lapsing into addiction, but whose presence still materializes on social media.
Lea was the kind of person you join Facebook to stalk. At 16, I was in love with her in a not-entirely platonic way, which every woman who has been the sidekick in a teenage girl-duo will completely understand. And, like a true sidekick, I didn’t question our bad choices—I followed Lea whole hog, in the spirit of best-friendship, of adventure. But part of me anticipated the person who writes this now, by which I mean that even as we chased a night of cocaine with Xanax and Lifetime movies, I already knew that this was the stuff of my wayward youth, and that I’d outgrow it. We promised to be friends forever, but then I went away to college in New York City and she moved to Costa Rica with her boyfriend of the moment. After that, I watched her downward spiral from afar—or more precisely, from close-up, only separated by a computer screen.
Marlena, then, is the story of Lea, fictionalized. Cat first encounters Marlena while moving into a modular home on a “grubby half acre of land in Silver Lake,” Michigan, with her newly divorced mother and her older brother, Jimmy. Like The Girls’s Evie, Cat is dealing with teenage angst: Her father has traded in his wife for a younger woman, and Cat’s subsequent existence is defined by boredom and disappointment in Silver Lake, which is “just a gas station, a trout fishery, a church, and a sex shop.” Marlena appears out of nowhere while Cat and Jimmy are unpacking the U-Haul; she lives less than twenty paces away in a dilapidated barn with her little brother and their father, who, it’s eventually revealed, cooks methamphetamine in the woods.
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Cat falls hard and fast for Marlena, whose life predominantly features drugs and neglect. Marlena eschews meth, having seen what it’s done to her father and his friends, but her boyfriend cooks it in a run-down motel, while Marlena, Cat realizes, is propped up by a smorgasbord of prescription pills, primarily Oxycontin. For Cat, meanwhile, being exposed to Marlena and her rebellious lifestyle becomes its own kind of drug. “When I did something that made me nervous,” Cat recalls, “I was rewarded with a shock of adrenaline that obliterated my self-consciousness and fixed me to the moment.” Later, she catches herself smiling broadly at the “giddy pleasure” of going off the rails.
But almost more exhilarating is Marlena herself, and the acute rush of their relationship. “In no more than a matter of weeks, she was my best friend,” Cat explains. “I was the first person, she told me, whose brain moved as quickly as hers, who got the weird things she said, her jokes, her vile, made-up swears, and could sharpen them with my own.” The chemical reaction of the two girls together seems to initiate a whole that’s greater than its elements. So it is for The Girls’s Evie, after being welcomed onto the ranch where Suzanne and other teenagers live with Russell, their enigmatic and manipulative leader. Though most of the girls are enthralled with him, Evie finds a different target for her obsession. “Since I’d met Suzanne,” Evie thinks, “my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase.”
Suzanne, like Marlena, is a rare and vivid flower tinged with rot. At first glance, the ranch appears to Evie like a trippy pastoral idyll, “an orphanage for raunchy children,” with its llamas and DayGlo symbols and glamorously disheveled drop-outs. But Cline emphasizes its defining quality of decay: dirty feet, strange smells, Russell’s filthy bedspread. In The Strays, too, young Lily is enthralled by the family of Evan and Helena Trentham, two avant-garde artists and their extended circle, but she’s aware even as a child of an underlying sense of menace. Looking at a book of works by Hieronymus Bosch, she recalls how it “gave me the same rotten feeling in my stomach as Evan’s paintings.” Evan and Helena’s three daughters are neglected and regularly exposed to the more decadent recreational activities of the adults.
But Lily is inexorably drawn to Eva, the middle child, and their “shared sense of imagination” sparks a friendship that, for Lily, becomes a fixation. “Chaste and yet fiercely physical, Eva and I were draped constantly about each other’s bodies,” Lily remembers. For Evie in The Girls, Suzanne shapes her sense of self: “No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition.” In adulthood, Marlena’s Cat describes her thought process when she meets women who might become her friend, and her awareness of the other girls who have altered them. “I begin to see the outline of the best friend,” she explains, “the girl she shaped herself around, according to. For so many women, the process of becoming requires two. It’s not hard to make out the marks the other person left.”
* * *
All three books explore the teenage ferocity of female friendship—the intense rush of identifying a kindred soul, followed by an all-consuming passion that’s tainted, as fanaticism often is, with jealousy and suspicion. “I could not damp the hot envy that tinged my love for Eva with a desire to see her fail in some small way,” Lily recalls. “To want what she had.” Marlena, accusatory, tells Cat that she’s “like a jinx, like you want me to fuck up.” For these girls, the lesser power of a friend who defines them is that their dark shadows help the narrators, simply by functioning, shine brighter in contrast.
But when does friendship cross the line into exploitation? “I knew this hero-worship phase of yours was only temporary,” Marlena tells Cat, late in their friendship. Adult Cat is still cognizant that she might bear some of the blame for Marlena’s death, and she drinks to excess herself, with Buntin vividly capturing the slow, blurry creep of intoxication. Cat is aware, too, that her description of Marlena glamorizes both Marlena and her descent, which in reality was sordid. She corrects herself, thinking, “Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and if you pissed her off she’d throw it back at your face … Sometimes I feel like she is my invention.”
The value of novels like Marlena and The Girls and The Strays is how insightfully they capture the complex intensity of girlhood that can’t see yet how exquisitely vulnerable it is. All three protagonists are seduced by danger, and the thrill of a girl who is confidently bad, and whose badness represents a new kind of awakening and freedom. But all three, too, know deep down that they’re safe from the worst excesses that threaten their friends. They’re tourists in rebellion. But they maintain something like survivor’s guilt for escaping unscathed. These are, essentially, bildungsromans where one young woman comes of age, but at a profound cost to another.
“There are times when I try to guess what part I might have played,” Evie thinks in adulthood, after Suzanne’s participation in a heinous crime has been revealed—an event that Evie is almost involved in, until Suzanne throws her out of the car. “What amount would belong to me. It’s easiest to think I wouldn’t have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along … Maybe I would have done something too. Maybe it would have been easy.” The privilege of being the narrator of this kind of story, though, is that she never comes close enough to disaster to find out.
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‘Marlena,’ by Julie Buntin
By Anthony Domestico Published 3:32 pm, Wednesday, May 17, 2017
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Julie Buntin’s excellent first novel, “Marlena,” emerges from two very different novelistic traditions. On the one hand, Buntin’s careful attention to place (wild, beautiful, meth-riven northern Michigan) and class (the working vs. the non-working poor) marks her as a realist in the David Means or Stuart Dybek mode.
As the novel opens, Cat, Buntin’s 15-year-old narrator, has relocated with her newly divorced mother and her brother Jimmy from “the thumb of Michigan” to “the state’s ring finger.” Jimmy has put off a college scholarship to work at a plastics factory, and Cat recognizes her family’s economic precarity: “We lived in fear of emergencies — an errant tree limb, one of Mom’s seasonal clients skipping their ski trip north, a rattle in the car’s engine, a toothache or slipped disc.”
We’ve heard a lot recently about how writers need to pay more attention to Trump Country. Though “Marlena” isn’t explicitly political, Buntin, herself raised in northern Michigan, is a sensitive observer of such territory, where jobs are hard to come by but drugs and alcohol aren’t, where food stamps both help and humiliate. For Cat’s family, much is at stake, psychologically and practically, in living in a “ranch-style modular” instead of a trailer; in being hard-up instead of “full-blown poor.”
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Balanced against this class-attentive realism, though, is something very different: a wild, gorgeous evocation of the wildness gorgeousness of youth. At the center of the novel looms the dangerously charismatic and dangerously out-of-control Marlena, Cat’s new neighbor. Marlena’s world is shadowed by meth — her father is an addict and her boyfriend cooks — and she spends her time caring for her younger brother, skipping school and scoring Oxy. While Cat’s family flirts with crossing the line into “full-blown” poverty, Marlena’s has already made the crossing. It’s unclear if the journey can be reversed.
Yet Marlena appears to Cat, and thus to the reader, not as an object of pity but as a source of wonder. Marlena projects an “air of intensity cut with indifference”; she is smart, sexy, adventurous and self-destructive. Under Marlena’s tutelage, Cat soon begins drinking and skipping classes, their days together “so big and electric that they swallowed the future and the past.” Life with Marlena is a millennial present, radiating possibility and peril.
Charmed and terrified by her new best friend, Cat finds herself almost “manic with longing” — for a different life, for a different body, for cigarettes and sex. This longing makes itself felt in the novel’s many lyrical passages, an intense shimmering that recalls Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides” (also set in Michigan) and Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” (alluded to by Cat). If Marlena has one foot in the world of Midwestern realism, then it has another in the world of visionary fiction.
Cat’s relationship with Marlena is so intense in part because it was so short. Within the novel’s first 10 pages, we learn that Marlena, wandering through the woods for unknown reasons, “suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river” about a year after meeting Cat. This trauma serves as a dividing point in Cat’s life, and the novel is structurally divided into two parts as well. Half takes place in the present. Cat has grown up and moved to New York, where she has a successful job, a serious drinking problem, and constant memories of her year with Marlena. The other half is set in that Michigan time and landscape when life had the glory and freshness — and terrors — of a dream.
This structure allows Buntin to examine the current New York City social scene, and she’s just as good at capturing New York’s “dim places with complicated wine lists and small plates for sharing” as she is at capturing Marlena’s Michigan nights of Franzia and mac and cheese. It also is a way for Buntin to generate narrative suspense. In the New York section, Marlena’s now mature younger brother gets in touch with Cat, and we begin to believe that the truth behind Marlena’s death will be revealed. It isn’t, really. Ultimately I wished for more time in Marlena-dominated Michigan, less in Marlena-haunted New York. Where Marlena isn’t, there’s acute social observation; where Marlena is, there’s danger, there’s poetry, there’s lyricism.
Occasionally, Buntin’s writing can be lyrical in a bad sense, with sentences sounding good but collapsing upon closer inspection. Take this description of a summer day: “It was the sucked-dry, ragged end of August, the air soupy and buzzing with insects even at ten in the morning.” Can a day be both sucked-dry and soupy? More generally, though, this lyricism is precise and revelatory, capable of great beauty (“What a luxury, the endless velvet of teenaged sleep”) and, when called for, great ugliness.
“Marlena” is a novel about youth—a time of splendor and squalor. Buntin make us see, hear and feel both.
Anthony Domestico is the books columnist for Commonweal. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.
Marlena
By Julie Buntin
(Henry Holt; 272 pages; $26)
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JUN 13 2017
Marlena by Julie Buntin
Kimberly King Parsons
web exclusive
“Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Buntin’s riveting, assured debut novel Marlena. For Cat, a librarian and avid reader, storytelling is crucial, and she struggles to recount a tragedy from “a period of [her] life so brief, it was over almost as soon as it started.” Within the first few pages of the novel we learn that Cat’s best friend Marlena died, “suffocat[ing] in less than six inches of ice-splintered river,” when the girls were teenagers. Cat has never believed that what happened was “pure accident,” and a strange phone call from Marlena’s younger brother Sal sends Cat spiraling back to the months leading up to Marlena’s death. The premise sounds like a classic mystery, and though Marlena is propulsive and gripping, it is anti-climactic by design. Less interested in the circumstances of Marlena’s death, Cat wants to convey the impact that this fundamental friendship had on her life, realizing all the while that she’ll never be able to fully render Marlena, “in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness.” The heart of their intense, fleeting connection is multifarious: “It’s between me and her,” Cat says, “what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. Divide it further—between what I mean and what I say.” This is not a novel of answered questions or clear-cut resolutions—like Cat, Buntin focuses on the way memory obscures and warps, and how the act of storytelling itself may be the closest thing we have to the truth.
In the wake of her parents’ divorce, Cat, her mother, and her older brother move from suburban Detroit to Silver Lake, a Northern Michigan town sharply divided between fancy lakefront properties and cheap prefab homes. Cat struggles with the adjustment: she has been pulled out of her private high school and away from her friends, and she’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that without her father, her family is “full-blown poor.” She’s feeling isolated and shiftless in her new surroundings when she encounters Marlena, the beautiful, troubled seventeen-year-old next door. “Though it was an unremarkable meeting,” Cat recalls, “the start of a familiar story, in the coming months we’d go over and over the details until they took on a mythical radiance.” Their friendship is instant and all-consuming, reckless and, at times, destructive. Cat, formerly an excellent student, begins skipping school with Marlena and her tough friends, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, feeling happy and “thoughtlessly alive” for the first time in her life. Despite their immaturity and messy choices, both girls are deeply endearing; Buntin excels at capturing the longing and intensity of being a teenager, that “great loneliness, profound isolation [and] cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood.”
Though they live in houses only a few paces apart, Marlena and Cat have very different families. All of these dangerous changes are new and temporary for Cat—she’s slumming it with Marlena, riding along on drug deals, cutting class—but at the end of the day she returns to her clean house and her well-meaning family, knowing that she’ll eventually move on to better things. Marlena is left to her own devices in her ramshackle house; she’s reluctantly assumed the role of caretaker to her little brother Sal, cooking him macaroni with ketchup and occasionally spiking his milk with Dramamine to get him to sleep. Her dad has a bad temper and cooks meth in an old railcar out in the woods; meanwhile, Marlena has a burgeoning drug problem of her own. She keeps pills inside of a silver, house-shaped pin she wears every day, believing that “the best place to hide something [is] in plain sight.”
In order to protect her friendship with Marlena, Cat learns how to lie, and it turns out she’s quite good at it. “Lies don’t necessarily need to be elegant,” she discovers, “though they do require a magician’s sleight of hand, the ability to draw attention to your fingers when it should be kept on your sleeve, where the cards are disappearing.” The same could be said about devising a narrative, and Buntin’s magic comes through Cat’s conscious storytelling. Marlena is divided into past and present, alternating between Cat’s adult life in New York City and her adolescence in Michigan, but the sections bleed into one another, with Cat frequently interrupting to doubt herself or double back, to admit her omissions or to further explore the distorting power of her memory. “Sometimes I feel like she is my invention,” Cat says of Marlena, “Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get.” But the more Cat questions her version of the truth, the more trustworthy—the more real—she seems. Because of its confessional, self-referential tone, Marlena is engrossing in the way the very best literary memoirs are.It’s magical to see someone making sense out of the chaos of their history through carefully chosen words, to see a person so compelled by these events they can’t help but craft their experience into a story. But it’s a trick: like Marlena’s pin full of pills, Buntin’s masterful technique is hidden in plain sight; Cat’s voice is so precise and convincing it’s easy to forget that she too is an invention.
Though Sal’s phone call is the impetus for Cat’s recollection, it doesn’t give anything away to say that when the two of them finally get together to talk about Marlena, their meeting, in the present, doesn’t compare to Cat’s memories.There is no new information about the circumstances of Marlena’s death, no new insight about who she was. This is hardly a disappointment; as Cat has said all along, her “version of the story is all we fucking get.” So how does a writer lay bare the construction of a novel, remove the impact of the so-called climax, offer little-to-no resolution, and still manage to make a powerful and satisfying whole? Buntin does it by stringing gorgeous sentences together, one after another, and by creating characters so nuanced and true-to-life you’d swear you were remembering them yourself. “Tell me a story about us,” Marlena tells Cat. “And make it good…Make us strong.” Cat succeeds marvelously, which is to say that Buntin does.
Kimberly King Parsons is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon.
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CULTURE
Girls on the Verge
Megan O'Grady's picture
APRIL 3, 2017 8:30 AM
by MEGAN O'GRADY
A new crop of fiction brings female friendships to the forefront.
Photographed by Kay Bell, Vogue, March 1954
Last summer, I received an email from Anya, a friend I hadn’t seen in 20 years. Its contents were startling—her older sister’s death following a heart transplant—but even more than the sad news, it was the fact of the message itself that hit me with unexpected force.
Anya was my best friend in high school. I don’t remember if we met in AP English, the class we both excelled in, or AP math, the class she did. In the photo I have of us then—this was the early ’90s—we look comically alike, from the hue of our jeans to the cut of our sideswept, long-layered hair and our identical earrings, sunglasses, and cross-body handbags, which contained lip gloss and graphing calculators. Never mind that she is a petite first-generation Indian-American while I am tall and Irish. We were Sine and Cosine, me and not-me, products of a materialistic Midwestern suburb so anodyne it felt like nothing meant anything and possibly never would.
Not pictured is what we really had in common, which was our disaffection. Too odd-cornered and interior to be good joiners of extracurriculars, we instead had after-school jobs in an upscale strip mall, measuring our boredom in art-house movies, in sales of holiday-themed sweaters and “ethnic” knickknacks. Already, we were looking over the shoulder of life to our futures: hers in medicine, me in something less concrete, something wordier and dreamier, in real cities, in lives that mattered somehow, in which beauty had purchase. Anya was the only person I knew who aspired to something more than a career in management consulting and a comfortable house in the suburbs.
Her self-possession and certainty of purpose was what I loved most about her. We had been socialized to smile and agree and apologize, to believe that we weren’t feeling what we felt, and she did none of those things. Anya had opinions, and it unnerved people. She drove stick shift; she ordered dessert to arrive before her salad. And, of course, she did for me what best friends do: foster the inner world of my thoughts and desires, in a culture that saw us mostly from the outside, as problematic teen bodies in need of Accutane, highlights, or maybe the track team, bodies in waiting for a professional future.
There was no dramatic parting of ways: We simply left home and moved on—she to medical school, me to graduate school and stints overseas. Other friendships took over and neither of us looked back, until we did.
The raw narrative power of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, published in the U.S. in 2012, seemed to awaken a new generation of writers to the dramatic potential of a long friendship. In its wake have come an extraordinary outpouring of novels on the subject, including Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Brit Bennett’s The Mothers, Emma Cline’s The Girls, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, and Claire Messud’s upcoming The Burning Girl, among others. Here was love and betrayal, competition and support—not the rosy, wind-beneath-my-wings kind, but the kind that saves your ass, drives you to your abortion, takes care of your children, inspires your novel, and bears witness to the hard-won formation of the person you are. Reading them, you thought afresh about friendships that had, perhaps, come to occupy a surprising centrality or longevity that our siblings or spouses did not. Or you looked on Facebook to find out what had happened to certain childhood friends, bound up, as they are, so intimately with our sense of origin and identity, class and culture. Much of the suspense of these novels grew from what is revealed when two people from a similar but often crucially distinct set of circumstances exercise what choices they have amid the grand crapshoot of fate. In this, they remind me of Michael Apted’s 7 Up, the documentary series that revisits the same set of children every seven years as they grow into adulthood. We read (or watch) and think: What is character? What is luck? To what extent do any of us really author our own lives?
Through the periscope of retrospection, a childhood friendship can’t help but appear deeply symbolic. And so when Anya reached out, it was irresistible. I couldn’t stop looking from the person she was then to the person she had become, the touch of gray in her black hair, visible when she FaceTimed me, the sea view behind her, as if she might explain something about my own flight path. I began to read her emails as I would plot points in a gripping novel. Who had she become? And why did it matter to me so much?
Similar questions are at the heart of Julie Buntin’s standout debut novel, Marlena (Henry Holt and Co.), which cannily interweaves two different time frames to capture an electric friendship and its legacy. Following the divorce of her parents, Cat is uprooted from her East Coast prep school and dropped into a desolate Lake Michigan town, where elegant vacation homes line the waterfront, but much of the population live in trailers. She finds a buoy in the girl next door, a reckless beauty with perfect pitch, a backyard meth lab, and “that glow to her that lives in lost things.” Needy and loyal, flattering and fun, Marlena makes it all somehow bearable, the unreliable parents, the menacing attention of boys and men, the kind of unremitting boredom that makes a box of Franzia and another of macaroni and cheese an event. Like Ferrante and Smith, Buntin is attuned to the way in which adolescent friends embolden and betray. And, as in its predecessors, Marlena is narrated by the friend who escapes.
In 2014, Buntin wrote an essay for The Atlantic about her friend Lea, who had died of complications related to substance abuse four years before: “At 16, I was in love with her in a not-entirely platonic way, which every woman who has been the sidekick in a teenage girl-duo will completely understand. And, like a true sidekick, I didn’t question our bad choices—I followed Lea whole hog, in the spirit of best-friendship, of adventure. But part of me anticipated the person who writes this now, by which I mean that even as we chased a night of cocaine with Xanax and Lifetime movies, I already knew that this was the stuff of my wayward youth, and that I’d outgrow it.”
The ultimate betrayal, of course, is to leave it all behind: the rough neighborhood in Naples, the North West London housing complex, the forsaken corners of America. (Both Swing Time and the Neapolitan novels include a redemptive reconnection.) Like Lenù and Smith’s narrator, Cat is a keen observer of all the markers of upward mobility: in this case, a New York life complete with a literary job and a kind, stable husband who makes dinner. The novel’s most impressive passages concern the watermark that remains, visible in the light of too many after-work martinis, and in attempts at adult friendships:
“When I hope to become friends with a woman, we usually meet, early on, at bars. Dim places with complicated wine lists and small plates for sharing. We order elegant, expensive things, adjusting our choices to each other. The pretty circle of tuna, the way the raw gems tumble onto the plate when you tap the shape with your knife. . . . After a little while, an hour, less if it isn’t going to work, I begin to notice the way she interrupts and charges forward with her story or asks me question after question. How she requests a second drink—when I do, which is usually before hers is done, or when she’s ready, or not at all. How she eats, carefully moving a portion to her own plate, napkin unfurled on her lap, or if she’s comfortable right away, using her fingers. If she picks. The quality of her listening. Her tone when she mentions her partner, the last person she fucked. Whether she cares what I think. Any and all tics, hand talkers, fidgeters, lip biters, eye contact avoiders, the woman I instantly adored who got too close when she was trying to make a point, who would put a hand emphatically on whatever part of me she could reach and try to touch me into understanding. I notice, and I begin to see the outline of the best friend, the girl she shaped herself around, according to. For so many women, the process of becoming requires two. It’s not hard to make out the marks the other one left.”
One friend is erased, another makes her visible: These stories illuminate not only all the ways in which women disappear—from school or from the stage, from the radar of what is deemed to be an acceptable life, from the arc of their own ambitions—but also the uneasy constellation of reasons they do, which often summon a natural solipsism. “Her story is like a hologram. Tilt it, let the light hit it from a different angle, and the dead girl we’re talking about is me,” Buntin wrote in The Atlantic. “We’d both gotten cited by police at 14 for drinking beer on the beach. At the height of our friendship I matched her drink for drink, inhale for inhale. If I’d had a little less luck, or she’d had a little more—how would this story go?”
Anya didn’t disappear—she’s resplendently alive and well in Victoria—but her story, too, has an element of loss: the end of a dreamed-of career, and with it that clarion sense of purpose. She had devoted nearly half of her life to becoming a highly specialized surgeon, only to abandon clinical practice not long after she was board certified. She was still sorting through the reasons she’d left—her experiences with the health care system as a family member; the toll of sexism; a bureaucratic structure emphasizing profit over patient well-being; the dissonance, as she put it, “both cognitive and spiritual, between the ethics of care versus the execution of care.” It added up to a crisis of faith. She had no idea what to do with the rest of her life, and I understood that this, the end of certainty, was another thing to be mourned, and she understood that I understood.
As we traded notes and advice—I helped her with her sister’s eulogy; she tirelessly answered my questions about child nutrition and development—we cast further and further back in time, recognizing ourselves in each other’s themes and stories, from the births of our small daughters and late marriages to non-Americans to tensions with our families, the accusations that had dogged both of us in our 20s and 30s that we had set our expectations too high. In divergence, many points of convergence. We had something else in common, too: a sense that the professional lives instilled in us as the kind worth having weren’t, after all, the only ones to have. The self-possession of youth had been replaced by the ambivalence of adulthood, and maybe a measure of self-awareness, too. Our messages grew longer and faster, forays into our half-remembered pasts and revised futures. Perhaps, she thought, she should write a book.
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Books
Julie Buntin’s ‘Marlena’ is a gritty coming-of-age story about a troubled friendship
By Cassandra Morrison April 25
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, “Marlena,” is a gritty coming-of-age story about a troubled friendship between Cat and her new neighbor, Marlena. The story comes to us in two alternating time frames — when Cat was a teenager and years later as a fledgling adult, when she reflects on her experience without really understanding the implications.
(Henry Holt )
“At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again,” Buntin writes. “To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you’re still responsible for your mistakes. It’s a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I’d just feel numb.”
As the story begins, Cat is a teenager uprooted from her suburban private school life to Michigan, where she and her mother are surrounded by trailers and drug dealers in a dirty-snow town. Her mother starts drinking, and her brother goes to work at a factory instead of going to college. When Cat meets Marlena, she’s instantly drawn to the beautiful, worldly girl. Marlena’s mother left when she was younger, and her dad makes meth in a trailer near the barn she lives in. For Cat, it’s a fascinating world.
At the end of Part 1, Buntin writes, “I told you the good things. It was the first best day of a life I thought I wanted, and for just a moment, even in the act of looking back — well, to keep it like that I needed to leave parts out.”
Author Julie Buntin. (Nina Subin)
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Within a year after Cat met her, Marlena is found dead in the woods. That mysterious tragedy casts a shadow over the rest of Cat’s life, which grows darker as the novel continues to switch back and forth between past and present, with the perspective becoming less and less objective.
Buntin’s story will remind you of your childhood, your first time sneaking out, the first time you realized drugs were around, the first time you noticed someone looking at you lustfully. But the novel is also a love letter to understanding motherhood and your own mother. It’s infused with a longing to get back the time you wasted being embarrassed by your parents. And that is how Buntin has cemented her first novel: steeped in nostalgia, as a crush-worthy visit to a childhood that is so very unhealthy and so very romantic in many ways.
Buntin shows us how childhood informs our ideals when we grow up. At the end of “Marlena,” there isn’t a real sense of resolution, no answer to how things could be different. There is simply a record of choices made. Different choices, different lives. And that, after all, is what adolescence forces us to do: make decisions before we know what we’re doing.
Cassandra Morrison is a writer in Chicago.
MARLENA
By Julie Buntin
Henry Holt. 288 pp. $26
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BOOK REVIEW
Harrowing tale of teen addict and the naïve younger girl who worships her
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By Liz Moore GLOBE CORRESPONDENT APRIL 07, 2017
Julie Buntin’s debut novel, “Marlena,’’ is a thrilling and important examination of female adolescent friendship. This is a subject that has been treated recently in books like Emma Cline’s “The Girls’’ and Robin Wasserman’s “Girls on Fire,’’ both of which include the same archetypal characters: the troubled older teenager, the naïve younger girl who worships her.
But while these books seem also to be “about” the time period in which they’re set — “The Girls’’ takes place in the Manson-era 1960s, “Girls on Fire’’ in the Cobain-era 1990s — “Marlena’’ feels timeless, its vivid characters suspended in the difficult moment of awakening just before adulthood. It is a gem of a book, brief and urgent, nearly perfect in its execution.
Our narrator is intelligent, insecure, 15-year-old Cat, who is foundering following her transformation from scholarship student at a boarding school to largely truant public school student after her parents’ divorce. Cat’s mother has made the impulsive decision to move her kids from “the thumb of Michigan” to Silver Lake, a remote, vacation town at “the top of the state’s ring finger.” The family struggles financially: Cat’s mother barely scrapes by cleaning houses, and her brother gets a job in a factory.
Upon her arrival in Silver Lake, Cat meets her neighbor, the beautiful, fascinating Marlena, whose abusive single father cooks meth in a railcar in the woods. Cat is enthralled by her. Throughout the book, Cat describes Marlena’s looks lovingly, prompting the reader to recall the exacting eye that teenagers have for beauty: “Marlena lifted her hair off her neck and twisted it into a damp rope . . . She was alarmingly pretty — sly, feline face, all cheekbone and blink — and if I am honest, that was the first reason I wanted to become friends.” Promptly, the girls do.
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The poor decisions made by Cat’s parents seem to have given her the idea that the things she thought mattered — school, grades, getting into college — actually don’t. With Marlena as her guide, Cat engages in riskier and riskier behavior.
Buntin’s prose is elaborately descriptive, sometimes invoking physical sensations in the reader. Cat’s anxiety and resignation as she ventures farther and farther from comfort is particularly well rendered. One day, Marlena speeds a car toward Lake Michigan and Cat, sitting in the passenger seat, thinks: “She’s not going to stop, and for a second I feel something foreign, a rage that’s equal parts hunger and fear. Do it, I think, do it, and my stomach’s in my throat but I’m so tired of being the one to say no, be careful, stop.”
While Cat experiments with danger, Marlena is mastering it. The book is primarily set at the turn of the millennium when meth was the rural narcotic of choice, but opioids were already beginning their insidious takeover. It is to the latter that Marlena becomes painfully addicted. In its descriptions of Marlena’s use, the novel is a haunting snapshot of the origins of a plague: “[Marlena] didn’t share Oxys with me or anyone. Pills were okay because they originated with a doctor, and they weren’t meth, which would kill you.”
We know from the start that Marlena will die. Buntin tells us this on the fourth page of her novel. This early revelation is a daring authorial move that, in lesser hands, would knock the tension out of the narrative. But when Marlena finally meets her end, it feels neither inevitable or muted: Instead, the loss of this young, bright life strikes readers as both surprising and tragic. Despite everything we know in advance, we still harbored the sense that her death could have been avoided.
So does the adult Cat, whose present-day story is told in short chapters that intermittently lift us out of the Upper Peninsula and into New York City. Still mourning the loss of Marlena, she now battles functional alcoholism, which seems like a punishment for surviving.
It might seem improbable that such a brief friendship would have such a profound effect, but Buntin does a deft job of convincing us. Cat’s guilt emerges from her eventual realization that — despite the hardships Cat faced as a child, despite Marlena’s looks and confidence — it was Marlena, all along, who never got a fair chance.
For, as Buntin heartbreakingly illustrates in the elegiac “Marlena,’’ there is a firm line that exists between children who are loved and cared for — even by a parent who makes mistakes — and children who are not.
MARLENA
By Julie Buntin
Henry Holt, 274 pp., $26
Liz Moore is the author of three novels, including 2016’s “The Unseen World.’’
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book MARLENA By Julie Buntin
reviewed by Alexandra Panic
Published in Issue No. 239 ~ April, 2017
“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are” is the that opens Marlena, the astonishing first novel by New York-based writer Julie Buntin. In the form of a confessional narrative, Buntin writes about the kind of friendship that shapes us, about loss and being lost after loss; about finding a way back to a meaningful life.
When Catherine, now in her mid-thirties and living in New York City, receives a call from “a ghost,” a younger brother of her late high school friend Marlena Joyner, she falls into a labyrinth of her most painful memories. “And it all came back, of course, the edges sharper, clearer, than the city around me,” Buntin writes and takes us to Michigan and the day when Cat met Marlena.
From this point on, the novel diverges into two threads. The main thread is a coming-of-age story of Cat, a fifteen-year-old and innocent girl who, after her parents had divorced, moved with her mom and brother to Silver Lake, a god-forsaken town on Lake Michigan. The split of the family left Cat hurt and full of questions she feared to articulate; and as teenagers naturally do, she channeled her anger toward her mother who was trying to rebuild her identity. Fragile and lost Cat, who desired to “fit seamlessly in Silver Lake,” met a seventeen-year-old Marlena who dazzled her with beauty and defiance and pulled her into a series of first experiences. Some almost innocent as a kiss on the lips or a first cigarette, and some dangerous as skipping school, trying drugs, braking into rich people’s houses, and saying yes to unprotected sex.
Within a year, Marlena was dead, “suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river,” but her life and image continued to haunt Cat to adulthood. The memory maze that Catherine had been roaming through for almost two decades narrowed and was threatening to drown her. It was the time for Cat to find her way out and move on with her life. But to move on, Cat had to let go of the guilt that was hiding inside the maze, forcing her to ask the same questions over again. Could she have done more to protect her friend? Might have been something there that she overlooked?
What was on the covers of Buntin’s novel seemed like an interesting but familiar idea—a recount of female friendship, where one obsessively liked the other and blindly followed her friend’s path. “Before that year I was a soft, formless girl, waiting for someone to come along and tell me who to be,” confessed Cat referring to her life-changing friendship with Marlena.
However, Julie Buntin found a hole in Michigan’s ice and pulled an array of important themes from the depth of that lake. Cat and Marlena became Buntin’s voices of resistance against the lack of hope and possibilities in a small American town struck by poverty and self-doubt. A town where the everlasting snow covered its trailer parks and all that occurred inside them; a town where a single mother cleaned rich people’s villas and bought groceries with food stamps; a town where teenagers took an Oxy a day instead of vitamins and believed that the system would never allow them to escape.
Had there ever been an exit from such world? Marlena, a sensible child from a broken family of a gone mother and an abusive meth-making father, saw death as her only relief. “There would be beauty to drowning in the lake, to living your whole life in this place, to never knowing the uglier world outside.” Silver Lake, as Buntin wrote, was Marlena’s greatest enemy.
Julie Buntin’s provocatively honest and first person narrative carries the urgency of Elena Ferrante. The friendship of Cat and Marlena is as intense as the one of Elena and Lila.
And it didn’t matter to me whether an actual event inspired this story, Buntin made it truer than reality. Reading the novel, I felt like I had met the protagonists, like I heard their voices echo inside my room.
When I was fifteen, my mother taught me that every intense friendship was, in fact, a kind of a love affair, presenting the similar range of emotions: There was always an enchantment at the beginning, followed by obsession, commitment, then jealousy and competition. A betrayal of thrust would ambush from a dark corner, which could lead to either forgiveness or abandonment. Where were the limits of friendship? I asked. In Marlena, Buntin raised the same question.
The superbly crafted sentences with a prose rich with imagery and feelings, and yet so effortless, paint a clear picture of a setting that by no means is intriguing. The author who grew up in Michigan has a perfect sense of the place. In her interpretation, Silver Lake did not just become a character but a powerful villain that oppressed its residents, obliterating their hopes for a better tomorrow, creeping under their skins and living with them even after they had escaped. “I looked out of the window at the landscape that would always have a claim on me, that would call me back for years after I left.”
But there was a strong theme that, maybe by mere chance, pushed through the haze of the setting and the gloom of Marlena’s inevitable death, and the question that in some instants of the novel even dominated. How much the presence or absence of a mother defines who we are?
A strong subplot to Cat and Marlena’s story was a story of Cat’s mother and her quest of reinvention after escaping the loveless and suppressive marriage. Silver Lake for her wasn’t punishment but freedom. And no matter how hard it was to make their ends meet, she was happy. But it took Cat a whole year of trying to be more like Marlena to finally understand that the difference between them was huge and unbridgeable. Cat had “a mom who refused to stop loving her, who was her twin in laughter. A mom who would never, ever, leave.” And in the heart of this revelation was Buntin’s statement about the importance of family and parental love, the blessing which Marlena had never had.
Although the story of Marlena makes the central part of the novel, it is the present-day thread where we can see the completion of the narrative arc. It wasn’t only what had happened to Marlena that shaped Cat, but the town as well. “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Buntin wrote. This sentence echoed throughout the novel until, in the end, I heard it resound differently, “Tell me where you came from, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Marlena is a story that will feel like your own and open a portal to your past, bringing back a memory of a friendship or a person you let slip away. And when you’re done reading this riveting debut, first you will crave for more Buntin, then you will want to grab your notebook or your computer and write a story of a relationship or a place that shaped you. I know because I’ve already started.
Marlena: A Novel
By Julie Buntin
Henry Holt and Co. (April 4, 2017), 288 pp.
account_box More About Alexandra Panic
Alexandra Panic lives with her family in Seattle, Washington, where she writes and teaches creative writing. She is originally from Belgrade, Serbia, although her soul is Italian. She holds a BA degree in Italian Language and Literature, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She had three collections of poetry published in the Serbian language, and she wrote her first novel in English. Her words have appeared in The Pitkin, The Writer in the World, and Pif Magazine.
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