A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Author Lauren Friedlander

“I started thinking about immoral women, women who are not merely complicit counterparts to A Bad Man but active participants in cruelty.”

On August 21, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, the second edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman. Submissions for the 2019 awards are open now. “Bellevonia Beautee” is narrated by one of the “Beautees,” a mysterious singing and dancing group who all seem to be hiding from something or someone.

*

Lauren Friedlander is a graphic designer and writer from Kansas living in New York City. Find her on social media @la_friedlander.

Every morning Andrew fetches her breakfast. This is just a recent thing. I’ve seen him reading in a book that it is vital to treat your woman kind. Something special at least every day, a little surprise to keep everyone on his or her toes. So for Deb especially, he treks down the mountain in the early hours, when dawn is on the brim, all violet, and he hits up the diner that is like a half mile east, maybe less, called Cassidy’s. Cassidy doesn’t work there anymore— she’s passed—but new customers always ask. I haven’t been let down to Cassidy’s in a bit. I remember they had nice red booths with glitter in the vinyl or something that made them sparkle.

I stay put in our tent with Deb. I stay put and Andrew goes “hunting.” I am fully aware that this is the way it’s been done between man and woman for eons now, and my mom used to say there’s no need to fix what hasn’t broke.

Deb prefers eggs, scrambled, and toast cut into triangles with butter pats and grape jelly on top. It takes Andrew a full hour at least to get all the way down the mountain and all the way east to Cassidy’s, so by the time he is back, the food’s gone cold. The first day of this new routine, Deb sticks her knuckle in the egg pile and gets pissy about it, flat out refuses it, so I vulture her leftovers, since I’m hungry but also dying for a non-jerky-like texture to work my jaws.

*

Catapult: Where did you find the idea for this story?

Lauren Friedlander: I hadn’t written fiction in years when the idea for this story started steeping in my head. I was working in publishing, preferring to champion the work of debut authors whom I loved—and of whom I was a little bit jealous—instead of my own. When I got laid off at the beginning of 2017, my best effort at sticking it to The Man was to order as many free books as I could in the two weeks of lead time I was granted. (Hot tip: Revenge is low-key one of the best modes of reading.) I chugged through mostly pulpy true crime stuff, books about Munchausen-by-proxy, Amanda Knox, Jodi Arias, the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. Something stuck with me about Wanda Barzee, the partner of the man who held Elizabeth captive. I started thinking about immoral women, women who are not merely complicit counterparts to A Bad Man but active participants in cruelty.

At the same time I was also (non-vengefully) reading Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, my favorite book of 2017, which details the traumatic aftermath of a mother slaughtering her daughter with an axe, never explicitly describing the incident itself but instead ruminating on the emotional ramifications that still ripple decades later.

Devouring these woman-centric works of true crime and literary fiction, I wanted to explore the tension that surfaces when the presumption of “the feminine”—a “Neutral Good” synonymous with vulnerability and softness, inherently trusted by way of maternal potential—has to reckon with violence, monstrosity, filth. “Bellevonia Beautee” was a first step into that exploration.

The narrator of “Bellevonia Beautees” doesn’t cater to the reader and leaves so much unsaid. We know, for example, that she used to be pregnant but isn’t anymore, but we don’t know what happened to the baby, just like we don’t know exactly who or what the Beautees are hiding from. What were your strategies for getting inside the narrator’s head? How did you decide what to withhold and what to reveal?

I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator who gives you the sense you’re not getting the whole story, or the honest one. But in these cases it can be tricky to bridge the gap between writer and reader, especially when the character being written is deeply emotionally stunted. That’s the kind of woman I wanted to portray here. Her wants come off as very superficial at first, and her petty and jealous behavior towards Deb, a nine-year-old, is extremely juvenile, if not utterly delusional. She clings to frivolous, minor accomplishments from her past as totems of her self-identity, which every day is slipping faster through her fingers.

I wanted to convey that her emotional stuntedness is due in no small part to Andrew, who has brainwashed her into leaving the material world behind, in order to further isolate her from her life before him. The way she nonchalantly refers to her pregnancy in a quick tangent is all Andrew: One day she had a baby, the next day she didn’t, and it doesn’t do any good to get too attached to things. She’s repeating his brainwashing back to the reader, though the light of her humanity shines here and there through tiny cracks in the facade, mostly in her memories of her mother.

How long did it take you to write this story?

I let the subject matter quietly take up more and more space in my brain for a while before the actual story tumbled out of me over the course of about two weeks. When The Rumpus accepted it, my editor, Sarah Lyn Rogers, played an integral role in shaping it into what it is now. Sarah guided me in making the narrator less of a victim of circumstance and more of an active participant—the key was to sharpen the sword of Damocles hanging over Andrew’s head, and the narrator’s final actions became the whetstone. I couldn’t have asked for a more thoughtful, thorough, and insightful editor for my first published fiction.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

I am so grateful to receive this prize. I’m also grateful that such a prize exists, as I’ve long believed that emerging or debut writers are the ones to look to for the next generation of great literature. Plus, the external validation is no small thing. Especially for a newish writer who can sometimes feel like her work is just a shitty gift to the void, this kind of recognition can quiet that constant playback of self-hatred. Of course, soon enough, the playback loops a new rude mantra, something like, This has all been a fluuuke . . . beginner’s luuuck . . . !, and creates the itch to prove that this is no fluke. God, I hope it’s not.

What are you working on now?

I’ve had my most productive year of writing yet, thanks to the fuel of the prize and also to my steadfast writing group—formed after Tony Tulathimutte’s CRIT workshop, vital for any aspiring writer in or near NYC—who are the shrewdest readers and most inspiring writers I’ve had the privilege to meet.

The stories I’m writing now seem stitched together by the common theme of “bad” women, bred both literally and figuratively in captivity. Men, if they must pop by, are allowed to do so only as underwritten pawns.

You’re from Kansas, and the characters in “Bellevonia Beautee” are wandering through a wilderness scattered with small towns. Is there a connection here? Do your Kansas roots inform your work?

A lot of what I’ve been working on uses my hometown as the setting, if not explicitly, then atmospherically, as is the case with Bellevonia Beautee. Andrew has intentionally submerged himself and the Beautees in an incomprehensibly vast landscape to anonymize them, leaving the narrator to grapple for a moor in a moorless place. I am a little obsessed with those stretches of the Midwest where you feel your tether to the world’s been cut: swathes of land so endless it infuriates the eye, nothing to puncture the horizon until you feel you might fall off the edge of it. (Hi, Kansas Visitors Bureau? My rates are very reasonable.)

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

Long-standing faves include Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading (especially the Commuter series, which features flash), The Rumpus, Longreads for non-fiction, and Full Stop for debut novels and new works of translation not as widely covered by mainstream outlets.