A girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. This is how Marie-Helene Bertino explains the focus of her new novel, Beautyland, which came out last week with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Like all of Bertino’s writing, Beautyland teeters on the knife’s edge of fantasy. The book follows an alien’s quest to gather information about the human race. It is also a bildungsroman of a lonely girl looking for her place on Earth.
But Beautyland is more than it appears. In its pages, Bertino performs a sleight of hand. I opened the book anticipating an alien story, but I closed it with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Only an outsider, it seems, can elucidate to us the beautiful weirdness that is humanity.
In our conversation, Bertino and I spoke about this, as well as how speculative fiction can reveal the sublime in the mundane and how humor factors into her process.
Shelby Heitner: Beautyland is an expansion of your short story Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours, which you published in your 2012 story collection Safe As Houses. Can you talk to me about your process for turning a short story into a novel?
Marie-Helene Bertino: After I wrote that story—where an unnamed alien girl faxes notes on human beings to her superiors—I discovered that the alien girl at its helm would not let me go. This is most likely because the fascination I have with so-called typical human customs did not abate. So, I began to keep a folder on my desktop called “Notes on Human Beings.” In it, I collected things like, People demand to try on each other’s glasses then seem oddly upset if they find the glasses are too strong or too weak. Or, People love fried eggs on everything. Or, why do the words “thaw” and “dethaw” mean the same thing? After a while as the folder grew, I wondered if I could turn the story into a novel. But I’d have to give the unnamed alien a name, location, family, history, etc. That’s when the real fun began. By fun, I mean hard work that took years.
Shelby Heitner: In a 2013 interview with The Paris Review, you said you prefer to describe your genre as Enhanced Realism. What does that term mean to you?
Marie-Helene Bertino: I’m happy with any term that allows the term-giver to understand work that contains speculative elements. I do like terms that weigh the real equally with the unreal. Rebecca Makkai called Beautyland “hyperreal,” and I agree with that. Perhaps some realities can gather into sharper focus when placed in opposition/relation to the supernatural if you can get the levels right. It reminds me of the photography work of Gregory Crewdson, which I used to study.
Shelby Heitner: Your last two novels were both told over a very compressed timeframe — 2 A.M. in the Cat’s Pajamas took place over the course of one day and Parakeet over about one week. Beautyland is the complete opposite— an expansive novel tracking your alien protagonist Adina from Earth Birth to Earth Death. How did you decide to tell Adina’s story in this way? Was it challenging to write on such a different scale? Did you have to change your writing process?
Marie-Helene Bertino: So far, each story I’ve written has been not only a creative but a diagnostic exercise, enabling me to gather new tools to write the next project. Beautyland is an entire lifespan and this structure allowed me to have callbacks over a longer stretch of time, portray how lifelong relationships bend and change, how a human woman’s body and mind changes as she ages—how resentment can increase while other naiveties recede (or vice versa), and how, sometimes, people can grow and invest in themselves over time, as Adina’s mother does. I was delighted to discover there are five developmental stages of a star, and I borrowed them as section headings to tell the story of Adina’s life.
Shelby Heitner: Beautyland has been described by some reviewers as a semi-autobiographical novel. Like you, Adina and her friend Antoinette-Maria (aka Toni) are Italian-American writers who grew up in Philadelphia. How did the lens of speculative fiction enhance or complicate your ability to write about a character who shares similar life experiences to you?
Marie-Helene Bertino: Beautyland is deliberately a simple concept—a girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. It seems sometimes that skewing one element of the world allows one to comment more directly on it. It’s like when you bring a friend home to your parent’s house and your parents are more honest with that friend than they’ve ever been with you. Sometimes that slight variance—the friend who represents you but is also not you—can create opportunities for vivid candor.
Shelby Heitner: In Beautyland, Adina, as an alien, sees the world in a very similar way to how many conceptualize a writer’s perspective. Adina occupies her life, but is also positioned above it, since she analyzes human behavior in missives that she sends to her superiors. There’s a similar sense of distance granted to writers; people seem to always say any hardship is “good material” for a story. What ways does having an alien perspective speak to how you view yourself as a writer? Do you feel as though you need to exist both within and without your daily experience in order to make art?
Marie-Helene Bertino: Adina’s particular positioning as “extra” to the terrain is necessary for her to be able to see and notate on her subjects. This echoes the distance writers, reporters, journalists, artists usually must have to notice and process. Personally, attempting to integrate the noticing instead of having it be separate has allowed me to live a writer’s life in which I can also be good to my people.
Shelby Heitner: I find it funny that in the many (glowing) reviews of your new book, reviewers seem to be split on whether Adina is actually an alien. This almost directly parallels what happens in the novel itself: when Adina publishes a memoir that effectively outs her as an alien, she ignites an internet firestorm of people questioning whether or not she’s actually extraterrestrial. In your mind, is Adina an alien? Does it matter?
Marie-Helene Bertino: Beautyland’s ultimate meaning will change from reader to reader, depending on what the reader believes about Adina. It is either a speculative piece about an extraterrestrial or a piece about a troubled girl suffering from delusion. It can be read in two different ways, maybe more. If as they are reading the reader begins to suspect that I am directly asking for their participation to decide the shape of the narrative, as if I have engineered these words to turn and look at them, they are correct. My job was to order the words and scenes so that they created a space for this kind of participation, and to let go of any desire to control the outcome.
Shelby Heitner: You deal with a lot of serious themes in Beautyland – grief, loneliness, and otherness – though your novel is far from depressing. You beautifully balance moments of narrative darkness with Adina’s sense of humor and wonder. How do you approach humor in your work?
Marie-Helene Bertino: Humor has been an act of survival. Like Adina, my childhood was marked by violence and not fitting in. By using humor about those who were responsible for those violences—by making light of some pretty bleak things—I was not only able to mentally survive but exercise a bit of control over some pretty uncontrollable circumstances. I think there’s a reason that rigid dictators can’t stand being made fun of—they know they’re being bested in ways they’re not human or smart enough to understand. There’s a Catholic saying I used to hear when I went to Church as a kid: “Singing is praying twice.” For me, humor is living twice.
Shelby Heitner: In the last third of your novel, Adina’s otherness takes on a new dimension when she experiences extreme grief for the first time. I couldn’t help but notice that in your acknowledgements you mention an Adina who was meaningful in your life. Did you find it challenging to write about your loss? I, too, have been struggling a lot lately about how to write about an episode of grief in my life. Do you have any advice for writers who are working through similar themes?
Marie-Helene Bertino: This is an important question, thank you. Sometimes, the answer is to wait until a certain interior structure has grown back that can help you write without collapsing. Sometimes the answer is to write through it—even if it’s “nonsense,” write that, write everything. In fiction, one tip is to write around the grief—to write the effects of the grief, the byproducts instead of the grief, straight on. I ask my students to write how emotions land on the body. As a hasty and inelegant example, instead of writing, I am inconsolable, writing, My arms are leaden with sorrow; I can no longer carry my child.
Shelby Heitner: Last question! Since you’re a former editor of the Brooklyn Review, I have to ask: did your time at Brooklyn College impact who you are as a writer?
Marie-Helene Bertino: I waited a long time before applying to MFA programs because I didn’t think I could afford it or that it would make me a better writer. Finding Brooklyn College was a life miracle—the first time I was in a room with other writers. I felt like I was set on fire (in a good way). A dream come true. I studied with epic teachers like Michael Cunningham, Susan Choi, Lou Asekoff, and Josh Henkin in a program whose tuition I could afford while working. I’m married to a Brooklyn College grad, the poet Ted Dodson. For many years I had a writer’s group of BC grads like Tom Grattan, Anne Ray, Helen Phillips, Elliott Holt, Amelia Kahaney, Elizabeth Harris, Dave Ellis. Robert Jones Jr. was in the class ahead of us. It felt like a wildly exciting place that balanced my two favorite things—creative brattiness and art geniuses who were lowkey. I’ve now taught at MFA programs all over and feel most at home in atmospheres where the emphasis is on the work and respectful camaraderie, like we enjoyed during our time at BC.