Alison Espach
Featured Book
At the “ancient” age of 26, Alison Espach has written a dazzling debut novel that considers the blurry divide between childhood and adulthood. The protagonist of The Adults, Emily Vidal, is 14 when the novel begins in suburban Connecticut, and in her 20s when it concludes. Through a neighborhood tragedy, an on-and-off affair with her high school English teacher (known throughout her teenagehood as Mr. Basketball), and a front-row seat for the disintegration of her parents’ marriage, Emily becomes a sort of anthropologist in the adult world, if not exactly an adult herself. It’s one of those rare books that manages to be serious and heartbreaking, while remaining relentlessly, mercilessly funny.
eMusic’s Jess Sauer recently spoke with Espach about the slipperiness of adulthood, the challenges of being a female writer, and what she has planned for her next novel.
So, does having a book published make you feel like an adult?
I don’t know if it’s adult, necessarily. A lot of things are difficult about being an unpublished writer, but one of them is that you don’t know whether or not to take it seriously, and nobody in your life really takes it all that seriously. Friends and family have admired my hobby of writing, but whenever it came down to “Well, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” or, “How are you going to make money?” I think actually having a published book eliminates those questions. So it does definitely make me feel more adult, at least in the eyes of my parents and the older people in my life who always worried about me.
One of the themes of the novel is neotony — the continuation of childhood into adulthood — and it seems like a very of-the-moment concern. The New York Times did a whole article about 20-somethings being kind of shiftless. What interested you in this question of what constitutes adulthood?
In terms of myself and some of the people I grew up with, I definitely felt like the age of adulthood kept being pushed back. I would be thinking, “When I’m 18, I’ll really be an adult and have all this freedom,” but then I turned 18 and nothing happened. I went to college and really thought that that was when I would become an adult, and instead I felt more coddled than ever. After college, I lived at home for a couple of months and, you know, became 13 again, despite being 23. So I always had this false sense of when I would actually turn into an adult, like there would be a moment.
I think the book was a lot about that invisible line, and how maybe that line doesn’t even really exist. That’s sort of why I hesitated to answer your first question, because I think there are parts of me that feel ancient — parts of me that feel so tired, like I’ve been alive forever — and then there are parts of me that feel brand new and naïve and immature. It depends on who I’m with, you know? If I’m with my family, I feel like I’m nine years old. If I’m teaching, I feel ancient. So I guess I was always interested in that line, perhaps because I was the youngest in my family, and had been so desperate to grow up. I really, truly believed my life would be better. And it certainly is, in ways, but it also gets harder. That’s what’s tricky.
Is there a different quality to how you’re writing now that you’ve published one book?
You want to do something different from your first book so that you don’t rewrite the same thing over and over again, but you also don’t want to alienate the readers that are already your fans. So, as far as that goes, there is a certain pressure. I had this Eureka moment a month or two ago where I just felt like I was writing what I was supposed to be writing. It was a similar feeling to what I was feeling when I started The Adults. There’s this pressure as a female writer to not write about sex or love or young girls — whatever those concerns were that I had, once I cast them aside was when I really started writing The Adults. It was sort of like a good feeling of “Who cares? I’m going to write what I want.”
Can you tell me a little about what you’re writing now?
Yeah, I’ll tell you what I don’t think will change about it. The narrator is a young girl, about 10, and her older brother dies very suddenly and very strangely, and because of the peculiar nature of his death, the family sort of become celebrities of tragedy. They get invited to all these talk shows and radio shows and the little girl sort of goes on this media adventure, grieving her brother but also enjoying the perks of people caring in such an extreme way. I’m not sure what it’s called yet, but that’s mostly what it will be about.
Do you feel like you can easily inhabit a younger voice or do you need to research yourself at that age to kind of get back into that headspace?
It comes to me very easily, but I did go back to my old town and look at my high school again. Just even driving on some of the same streets, some of the absurd thoughts that I used to have as a younger person came back to me. There definitely is a lot of prodding of the memory that takes place, but it starts very naturally.
Earlier, you mentioned the pressure on female writers to avoid certain topics, and I think especially now on female novelists, what with Jonathan Franzen and V.S. Naipaul denying the possibility of a woman writing a good novel, or saying that even if she does, it’s a “woman’s novel.” Do you feel like this chauvinism is something you’ve had to be conscious of as a female novelist?
What had kept me from writing The Adults for a long time was the fear of it not being a legitimate story. The fact that it really is about a girl and the things that happen to her, there was a fear deep down that it wouldn’t be taken seriously. That fear kept me from writing it for a long time. I had to sort of rewire my brain and be proud of that story, like “This is a real story and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be taken seriously.” Once I really just allowed myself to feel that, that’s when I ended up writing The Adults. So I guess I went into it with skepticism, and I didn’t really expect many male readers. But I have gotten a lot more fan feedback from males than I would have expected. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from men saying “I was never a young girl, but I totally related to this and I loved it.” So I am surprised, actually, by the reaction it’s received from the male literary community, but at the same time, I don’t know.
You know, a professor of mine once said, “Yeah, this is really great chick lit” after he read it, and I was like, “Okay, thanks…” The only reason I think he said that was because it was about a girl. So of course there’s always going to be that reaction, and I think the farther you get outside the literary community, it actually gets worse. Certain members of my family who are not really readers just read the back of the book and say, “Oh, it’s a women’s book. I’ll buy this for my wife.” In the literary community, though, I really have had no conflict in terms of being cast as a female novelist.
Was there anything that catalyzed the moment when you decided it was a legitimate story worth telling?
I went to a very Catholic college, where we read everything in the sort of Western Catholic tradition: Aquinas and Jonathan Swift and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. As a writer, I started thinking, “How am I even relevant?” Once I started reading people like Lorrie Moore, Diane Williams, and Amy Bloom, it was the first time where I felt like I might actually have a place in the literary world, and an audience somewhere. So I think the catalyst would just be reading a lot of modern female fiction writers and also writing a lot of crap about men.
