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WORK TITLE: The Distance Home
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1957
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Husband is author George Saunders.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017053014 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017053014 |
| HEADING: | Saunders, Paula, 1957- |
| 000 | 00529nz a2200145n 450 |
| 001 | 10545464 |
| 005 | 20170901111809.0 |
| 008 | 170901n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017053014 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1957-11-13 |2 edtf |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3619.A8249 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Saunders, Paula, |d 1957- |
| 670 | __ |a The distance home, 2018: |b t.p. (Paula Saunders) |
| 670 | __ |a Email from publisher, received August 30, 2017: (The author’s full name is Paula Sanders and her date of birth is 11-13-1957. She is an American citizen) |
PERSONAL
Born November 13, 1957; married George Saunders (an author); children: three daughters.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Syracuse University; postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and novelist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, studied ballet, and danced with th Harkness Ballet in New York as an apprentice. She studied creative writing in college and also studied on a fellowship under noted novelist Toni Morrison. She is married to writer Geourge Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and winner of the Man Booker Prize. Saunders and her husband are practicing Buddhists.
Saunders debut novel, The Distance Home, takes place in 1960s rural America and tells the story of two siblings, one adored by their father while the other is loathed. Saunders told Bookselleronline contributor Heloise Wood that the novel is largely based on her own experiences in the Midwest where she grew up, adding: “I wanted to look at the seeds of what I see as the aggression at the core of American culture. For me, allegiance to the dualistic framework of success and failure, winning and losing, which we acquire early in our family lives, leads us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another.”
Siblings Rene and Leon could not be more different. Rene is smart, athletic, clever, and an over-achiever while Leon is a shy stutterer who, like his sister, is a brilliant dancer. Their parents are split in their affections. Their father, Al, dotes on Rene while their mother, Eve, has a special place in her heart for Leon. However, the father has a developed a deep and unhealthy dislike for Leon based largely on the fact that he is an effeminate dancer, something Al loves about Rene. As a result, the two children grow apart in life. “Saunders brilliantly parses Leon and Renes disparate paths,” note a Publishers Weekly contributor. A Historical Novel Society website contributor remarked: “The two older children are storm-tossed pawns, struggling with self-destructive behavior which crosses over into adulthood.”
Al and Eve were married at a very young age and live in Fort Pierre, South Dakota near Rapid City. They have little money and initially lived in Al’s parents’ basement. Even as time passes, Eve works hard at two job while Leon is often away from home for extended periods in his job as a cattle trader. In addition to Leon and Rene, the couple later have a third child named Jayne. Al cannot come to terms with the fact that his son is not manly but rather a sensitive boy who does not fit into Al’s idea of a real man. Furthermore, Al is disturbed by his sons looks, which are too much like the local indigenous population, which provide a backdrop contrasting the lives of the privileged whites and the poorer native population.
Told through the eyes of Rene, the story reveals that it is this tension at home that leads her to work so hard. However, her achievements cause her peers, and practically everyone else, to resent her. Meanwhile, Al’s harsh treatment of his son leads to Leon withdrawing from those around him. At the same time, Al’s abuse of Leon, including beatings, causes heated arguments between Al and Eve. Leon ends up getting assaulted by someone and then is sent to a Catholic boarding school where the abuse continues. As the years pass by, readers see the very disparate fates of both. Although Rene has managed to avoid the pitfalls of living in such a dysfunctional family, Leon ends up mentally hill and depending on drugs and alcohol to try and control his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others, and her depiction of aging is viscerally affecting,” wrote New York Times online contributor Chloe Benjamin, who went on to note: The novel “becomes a meditation on the violence of American ambition — and a powerful call for self-examination.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called The Distance Home “a grim, haunting parable of split child-rearing in which the dark blots out much of the light.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of The Distance Home.
Publishers Weekly, June 25, 2018, review of The Distance Home, p. 154
ONLINE
Booklist Online, https://www.booklistonline.com/ (June 1, 2018), Carol Gladstein, review of The Distance Home.
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (August 1, 2018), Alden Mudge, “Paula Saunders: A Perfectly Fracture Family,” author interview.
Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/ (January 23/2018), Heloise Wood, “Picador Snaps up Paula Saunders’ Debut Novel.”
Historical Novel Society website, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (September 25, 2018), review of The Distance Home.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 27, 2018), Chloe Benjamin, “If the Bleak South Dakota Plains Don’t Break Them, Their Family Just Might,”
Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.
Saunders, Paula: THE DISTANCE HOME
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Saunders, Paula THE DISTANCE HOME Random House (Adult Fiction) $27.00 8, 7 ISBN: 978-0-525-50874-8
The slow, punitive grind of family dynamics, even when leavened by love, contorts a Midwestern family.
Where does all the hurt and anger go, wonders Rene, the lively, confident middle child, about her sad, victimized brother, Leon. Saunders' debut makes no bones about the answer to that question, illustrating in detail the sedimentary process of psychological damage inflicted on children by their parents, in this case Al and Eve. Married young in Fort Pierre, South Dakota, the couple settles, at first, in Al's parents' basement, Eve working two jobs, Al--a cattle trader--often away on the road. Soon they have two children, Leon and Rene, later a third, Jayne, and money is tight. Set in the 1960s, the novel's world is remote and traditional, at least as represented by Al, whose pitiless response to his son's sensitivities--a stutter; a startling gift for ballet dancing--is knee-jerk harshness. Leon reacts by pulling out his hair and eyelashes and withdrawing from the family group, while Eve's attempts to defend him only result in arguments with her husband. Saunders avoids Leon's perspective, opting for Rene's instead. She too is warped by the constant tensions at home, becoming an overachiever whose will to excel leads to resentment and social rejection. Meanwhile, there's no respite for poor Leon, beaten by his father, assaulted by a stranger, and later sent to an abusive Catholic boarding school. Flashes forward confirm the inexorable outcome: Leon's future will be alcoholism, drugs, mental disease, and PTSD. Rene manages to escape, and Saunders suggests some healing balm in years to come, but not enough to displace the early, indelible harm.
A grim, haunting parable of split child-rearing in which the dark blots out much of the light.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Saunders, Paula: THE DISTANCE HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723394/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=7a9e81f1. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723394
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The Distance Home
Publishers Weekly.
265.26 (June 25, 2018): p154. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Distance Home
Paula Saunders. Random House, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-0-52550-874-8
Saunders debuts with a penetrating and insightful deconstruction of a Midwestern family. The story starts with Eve and Al, high school sweethearts who marry, have children, and find themselves mired in jealousy and misunderstanding. Throughout, Eve's indomitable spirit won't be quashed, no matter the conflicts or the despair that hover over her family. Firstborn Leon, an athlete with a penchant for ballet, is as opposite from his father as can be imagined. Middle child Rene, a fierce, competitive sprite, takes up ballet like her brother and can do no wrong in her father's eyes, much to Eve's consternation, whose heart lies with her first born. As the family moves from Missouri to South Dakota, where Al grows his cattle business and spends more time away from home, the story contrasts Rene, driven to achieve--despite the resentment it causes in everyone who crosses her path--and Leon, a misguided soul bearing his father's wrath. The sweet, easygoing youngest child, Jayne, doesn't get the same attention as the other-characters. Still, Saunders brilliantly parses Leon and Renes disparate paths; they are two wildly talented, sensitive souls--one shattered by life's circumstances, the other learning to soar above them. This debut wonderfully depicts the entire lifespan of a singular family. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Distance Home." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 154. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023360/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=70c38427. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545023360
3 of 3 9/24/18, 11:29 PM
Picador snaps up Paula Saunders' debut novel
Published January 23, 2018 by Heloise Wood
Picador has acquired a "funny and tragic" debut novel about 1960’s rural America by Paula Saunders, the wife of Man Booker Prize-winning George Saunders.
Senior commissioning editor Sophie Jonathan bought UK and commonwealth rights to The Distance Home from Lucy Luck at C+W on behalf of Esther Newberg and Zoe Sandler of the New York-based ICM. It will be published in January 2019 in the UK while Random House in the US will publish it in summer 2018, after being acquired by executive editor Andrea Walker.
The book follows two siblings “growing up in a place of love and turmoil” in rural 1960’s America. Rene is the apple of her father’s eye as an over-achiever, athletic, clever, the best brain in class, and the best dancer in school, according to the book's blurb. Her older brother Leon is doted on by his mother but is shy, a stutterer, whilst being a brilliant dancer. Rene and Leon share a talent, but “it is a gift their father adores in his daughter, and loathes in his son” meaning that “life promises to take them down very different paths”.
With the work, Saunders revealed she wanted to explore the “aggression at the core of American culture”.
A Picador spokesperson said: “The Distance Home is the story of two children growing up side by side - the one given opportunities the other just misses - and the fall-out in their adult lives. Funny and tragic, both intimate and universal, [it] is about how our parents shape the adults we become.”
Jonathan described the debut as “a gorgeous novel, lovingly told - a narrative that sings with kindness and sadness, and a book of wonderful perceptiveness”.
She said: “When Lucy sent the manuscript I simply couldn't put it down. Paula's prose draws you close to her characters and the issues they face, and I have found myself totally captivated by them. As a novel about how our childhood dictates our future, The Distance Home has an important message.”
She added: “This is a read-it-and-pass-it-on book, one that deserves to be discussed, praised and recommended with passion, and I cannot wait to bring Paula’s writing to UK readers.”
Saunders, who grew up in South Dakota, said: “Though it’s based mainly on my experience of growing up in the Midwest, in The Distance Home I wanted to look at the seeds of what I see as the aggression at the core of American culture. For me, allegiance to the dualistic framework of success and failure, winning and losing, which we acquire early in our family lives, leads us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another.”
She added she was “thrilled” Picador will be publishing it for the UK market.
Saunders is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program in New York and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer Chair, Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband, the author George Saunders who won the Man Booker prize for Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) in October 2017. He has written nine other books, including Tenth of December (Bloomsbury) which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short-story collection). The pair have two daughters.
The Distance Home
By Paula Saunders
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Eve grew up in Ft. Pierre, South Dakota during WWII, on a dirt-poor farm that flooded every few years. Her parents are beaten down, but Eve summons grit to move up in the world. She studies and works hard, and the day she turns 18 she marries Al, a charmer who lives in the nicest house in Ft. Pierre. So what if they live in Eve’s in-laws’ basement, while Al spends weeks on the road buying and selling cattle? So what if Al and his mother play rank favorites with Eve’s children? They roundly reject firstborn Leon, but René, born three years later, is her father’s darling. Jayne, their youngest daughter, is all but forgotten.
Eve tries to make up for Leon’s rejection and to curb René’s strong-willed ways, but she is also fighting her own neglectful upbringing and dysfunctional, take no prisoners relationship with Al. The two older children are storm-tossed pawns, struggling with self-destructive behavior which crosses over into adulthood. Even ballet becomes a battleground; both gain strength and confidence, but only René finds approval from both parents. Al scorns his “Twinkle Toes” son.
Paula Saunders taps her Midwestern family history in her wrenching debut novel The Distance Home, and her career in ballet gives realism and passion to the siblings’ dance classes. Ms. Saunders’ story is both easy and difficult to read – I love her fluid prose, but her saddest family scenes ring true. So do René’s hopeful, cynical introspections. Though The Distance Home is a dark story, it is a fair omen for Ms. Saunders’ future literary career.
Interviews
Paula Saunders
A perfectly fractured American family
BookPage interview by Alden Mudge
August 2018
Paula Saunders has been working on some of the material in her wrenching debut novel since she was in graduate school some 30 years ago.
“It was like following little fires around the hills,” Saunders says of her long composition process during a call to her home among the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. “I followed whatever I could find to make it work. Not blindly, but consciously.”
Set in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the 1960s, The Distance Home tells the story of psychological trauma in a seemingly normal, working-class Midwestern family. Al and Eve marry young and live for a while in his parents’ basement before striking out on their own and starting a family. Al, a cattle trader, is away from home for long stretches of time, and when he returns he vents his frustrations, sometimes brutally, on their oldest child, Leon, a sweet, remarkably sensitive boy and a gifted ballet dancer. René, their daughter, is the golden child. She is lively, successful in school and is also a talented dancer. She develops a deepening sense of how unjustly her brother is being treated and the damage being done to him. Jayne, the youngest, is so young that she seems to escape most, but not all, of the trauma. The novel begins quietly, but in the end is profoundly moving.
Like her character René, Saunders grew up in Rapid City and studied ballet. She later danced as an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet in New York. So, is The Distance Home autobiographical?
“That’s such an interesting question,” Saunders says. “For me it is an autobiographical novel. But for a lot of other people involved, maybe it wouldn’t seem so. I think the invention in the novel comes from trying to draw out a relationship that I have an impression of. I have a deep love and concern for each of these characters, and of course they reflect my family circumstances. I had a brother who passed away early from liver failure, and I have a very dear sister who is still here. A big part of the material for me was trying to understand it and see it more clearly. So I created the circumstances that make sense to me, given the character of the people I knew and the eventualities that occurred.”
Asked about her understanding of the tragic figure of Leon, Saunders says, “There are people who can accept the rules of culture, adapt to them and become good at them, even though the rules often have a raw, jagged edge that is hurtful to others and yourself. But there are people who for one reason or another can’t acquire the rules or find them unacceptable. They suffer in a hidden way. Their feelings lead to some kind of alcoholism or drug addiction because they haven’t found an acceptable way in the culture to express themselves. That’s what I think about the tragedy of Leon. There are people who are very tender and very hurt by our culture. Most people can adapt, but some people can’t.”
A singular pleasure of the novel is Saunders’ depiction of the landscape around Rapid City. “That physical landscape is very much a part of me. I have just loved it. As a child you completely soak in all the things that surround you.”
But it is a morally complicated geography as well. Subtly, but quite deliberately, Saunders names some of the worst sites of Native American massacres. And some of her minor characters are obvious in their dislike of Indians.
“There are people who are very tender and very hurt by our culture. Most people can adapt, but some people can’t.”
“Well, the book is a lot about inequality and unfairness,” she explains. “And it’s also about violence. There’s violence that happens in the book all the time. To me, there’s no greater violence in this country than the genocide of the American Indians. It’s a horrific thing that we carry with us, that we never acknowledge or apologize for. We just keep consuming and moving to take for ourselves what isn’t necessarily ours, without any thought of who we’re leaving behind. That’s important to me, and that’s why there’s a parallel drawn between Leon and Native Americans.”
Saunders and her husband, George (who published his own debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, last year), are longtime practitioners of Buddhism. She says this helped her in working with emotionally fraught material.
“Without that practice, without that kind of new way of looking at it, without cultivating that kind of understanding, I don’t think I could have written it.”
Saunders wrote much of the book on a repurposed dining room table from Home Depot in a tiny room in their house outside of Oneonta, New York. To escape the winters of the Northeast, they later bought a house in California. That’s where she finished working on the novel. “I wish I could say I was writing in a little closet,” she says, laughing. “But I have a dream writing space. We’re up in the redwoods. It’s large. It has windows on three sides, one looking over a vast vista. It’s very calm. I can’t describe how much I love this space.”
Saunders thought she had finished the novel, written then in first person, and sent it to her former teacher Toni Morrison to read. “I hate to claim this, because it’s like wearing clothes that are too big, but I sent it to my great mentor. She read it, and she is not, let us say, reticent with her critique. I was a bit taken aback. I had to go and rethink the main character. I realized that if I moved that character into third person, I had the key to the character. So I went back and wrote the whole book again in third person. That took about a year and a half.”
After so much time, the publication of this novel “is really satisfying,” Saunders says. “To have this novel accepted and put forward so that other people can read it and appreciate or understand it in their own way also feels like a big blessing to me.”
This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Author photo © Chloe Aftel.
Medium
The Distance Home
By Paula Saunders
Random House
$27.00
ISBN 9780525508748
Published 08/07/2018
Fiction / Debut Fiction / Family Saga
The Distance Home by Paula SaundersThe Distance Home is a novel of oppositions. Set in a South Dakota landscape at once stark and beautiful, Paula Saunders introduces a family full of meanness and cruelty, but also crushing, miraculous love. These characters, this story, these sentences transcend the typical family drama, as Saunders shows us a world where hate and love are made of the same stuff, and where home and family are the best and worst things that will ever happen to you. In this novel, it is possible to be dragged down by the world, but also to be lifted up by it.
The Distance Home by Paula Saunders ($27.00*, Random House), recommended by Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA.
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The Distance Home.
Saunders, Paula (author).
Aug. 2018. 304p. Random, hardcover, $27 (9780525508748).
REVIEW. First published June 1, 2018 (Booklist).
In mid-twentieth-century South Dakota, marrying at 18 signals the end of ambitious and overachieving Eve’s dreams. Her husband, Al, a cattle broker, spends most of his nights on the road. When he’s home, tension and arguments rule the house. When children arrive, they struggle to make a place for themselves in the family. The two eldest, Leon and Rene, find solace in a local dance class, its structure and discipline helping them navigate their rocky family life. Rene is as ambitious as her mother once was. Al basks in her success while berating Leon for his stutter and love of dance. Eve tries to smooth everything over, desperate to hang on to her volatile marriage to a man she loves and despises. Saunders’ debut is an exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another. This beautifully written novel takes readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions, delivering them to a place where painful memories live alongside hopes and dreams. The Distance Home will leave readers eager for more from this extraordinarily talented writer.
— Carol Gladstein
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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
Fiction
If the Bleak South Dakota Plains Don’t Break Them, Their Family Just Might
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By Chloe Benjamin
July 27, 2018
THE DISTANCE HOME
By Paula Saunders
288 pp. Random House. $27.
In “The Distance Home,” Paula Saunders’s debut novel, family alliances ossify early. Al and Eve are the parents of young children when Al’s mother, Emma, begins to favor the middle child, René, over her younger sister, Jayne, and her sensitive older brother, Leon.
“The problem,” Saunders writes, “which had started earlier — maybe even back before time itself — was that, as Emma was every day bringing René into her heart and holding her as the beloved, she was, in the same moment, handily evicting Leon.” Al sides with his mother; Eve aligns herself with Leon and Jayne. And so the fault lines are drawn, the children made actors in a home as harsh and factious as the rural South Dakota landscape in which the novel is set.
The family moves to the Black Hills above Rapid City, where Native and white populations live in uneasy proximity. By the 1960s, the indigenous people who inhabited the Black Hills for thousands of years have been confined, violated and stripped of their culture by the United States government. Just as discrimination and systemic inequality endure — reinforced by upwardly mobile whites like Al and Eve, who are all too happy to buy food cheaply “in the Indian part of town” but warn their children to stay away from Native classmates — so too does history shape the lives of Leon and René.
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This is particularly evident in the case of Leon: natural peacemaker, natural dancer, derided by his father for the latter as well as the “beautiful high cheekbones and broad nose of the Sioux” risen “from somewhere buried deep in the silence of the genetic line.” Al, a second-generation cattle trader, has no framework for unconventional masculinity. Though he is frequently on the road — making Eve, in one of the novel’s rich vernacular details, a “grass widow” — he disdains Leon at home. Leon’s torment is expressed first through a stutter and later through trichotillomania (pulling his hair out), but he remains tenderhearted, quick to defend his sister at school despite her privilege at home.
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Leon and René’s sole parity exists in the realm of dance: Naturally talented, they excel in the region’s only elite ballet academy. Through ballet, as unusual in midcentury South Dakota as Leon himself, Saunders explores the extent to which it is possible to escape one’s circumstances. The siblings’ dance instructor argues that although it rose “from the basest limits of our existence … ballet was nothing less than the one pure expression of humankind’s ability to transcend.” Her optimism mirrors the up-by-your-bootstraps narrative core to a mythic version of America, one that’s accessible to very few.
I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, then, that the novel’s exploration of prejudice and vulnerability remains incomplete. Early on, Leon’s struggle to escape his environment is compared to that of Native Americans: “Leon was in a fight just like the Indians — a fight he hadn’t asked for, didn’t understand, and couldn’t win. … He was going to lose, and it wasn’t going to be fair or just or right.” Saunders movingly explores the difficulty of changing one’s course in the face of accumulated trauma, but the deeper implications of this rather delicate analogy to Native American experience remain unclear. Posing Leon as a subtle proxy for indigenity risks an oversimplified equivalence — unexpected in a novel sensitive to imbalance.
Still, Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others, and her depiction of aging is viscerally affecting. As Leon’s life tunnels toward its inevitable conclusion, “The Distance Home” becomes a meditation on the violence of American ambition — and a powerful call for self-examination. René is pained by her brother’s suffering, “but when it came to sacrificing something for Leon, it always seemed to René like there was an answer she couldn’t remember or that she’d never known in the first place. … And mostly, she was watching out for her own skin.” It’s easy to hold Leon’s family in contempt. More difficult — and, as this compassionate novel implies, more important — is to acknowledge in ourselves the combination of fear and complacency that prevents those of us who know better from acting like it.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2018, on Page 21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Family Fault Lines. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe