#farrar straus giroux
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
Have you had a chronic illness? Indeterminate symptoms that ebb and flow confounding doctors and holistic practitioners alike? Ever prostrate yourself on the floor of an abandoned warehouse to experience Reiki as explained by a recently ordained eight-year old?
No?
Just me?
Junia - or er, Mary, is ill. She lumbers through NY, more a compilation of symptoms than a person, and possibly not even sure she is one anymore. After countless attempts at remedy which leave her sanity and bank account eviscerated, she is referred to a PAKing Practitioner - PAKing being a unique combination of Touch/ Energy/ Zero Balancing/ Reiki / Meditation Treatment which miraculously assuages her discomfort. And, as with most magical alternative cures, it is prohibitively expensive.
In order to scrounge up enough cash to get by, Mary answers a mysterious Craigslist Ad to be a high paid - well, she is not sure what exactly, - but through a series of rigorous interviews, she becomes part of a well-compensated experiment: a “Girlfriend Experiment” for the megalomaniac tortured star of the era, who is convinced that romantic relationships are thwarting his creativity. So, he creates an experiment breaking down the facets of Girlfrienddom and a team of experts casts a woman in each role, my favorite of which is “Mundanity Girlfriend,” whose directives include sharing the space with the star but not exactly acknowledging him: “stare absently out a window in a daze for up to three minutes at a time,” “look in his direction, but not in his eyes…smile, slightly, as if you are thinking about something else.” There is of course “Intimacy Girlfriend,” “Anger Girlfriend,” “Maternal Girlfriend,” and as Mary discovers, “Emotional Girlfriend.”
If the quirky absurdity of the premise doesn’t reel you in, the writing will. Lacey’s prose reads like poetry: utterly human, intimately clandestine and pathetically humorous. The content harkens to Dave Egger’s The Circle and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project, and the insightful narrator calls to mind Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit I was slightly disappointed at the end of the novel. But whether I just didn’t want it to end or I was searching for answers that it wouldn’t give me, I’m not entirely sure. I highlighted dozens of passages in the book and just this moment sent them to a friend to appreciate. The writing is so deep that it seems to resonate at a cellular level. And I wonder if that’s all we all are - an assemblage of random molecules in space, unsure systems negotiating a precarious balance, a collection of cells, congregating in the curvature of a large question mark rather than a definitive period.
*I received a galley via NetGalley for an honest review.
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Tell us about your most recent book and how you came to write/illustrate it.
All-American Muslim Girl is a YA novel born of my own experiences as a white-passing mixed-race Muslim in Georgia. I’m the daughter of a Jordanian-Circassian father and a blond Catholic cheerleader from Florida who converted to Islam when she and my dad got married. Most people have an image in their minds when they hear the words ‘Muslim girl’—and it’s definitely not me. As a result, I was exposed to a lot of harmful stealth Islamophobia over the years, moving unnoticed through predominantly white spaces as guards were down and people dropped casually bigoted comments. Post Trump, that stealth Islamophobia became blatant. I felt compelled to write an Islam-positive story of a young girl who, like me, initially struggles with a lack of connection to her religion but eventually chooses to actively embrace it, exploring how that affects her relationships along the way.
Do you think of yourself as a diverse author/illustrator?
I’ve always had lot of anxiety about my identity, something I address in AAMG (and tried to work through, in my MC of Allie Abraham!) On the one hand, I grew up feeling very much like an outsider, no matter what room I was in. When I was out with my visibly foreign father or my hijabi family members, the reception was noticeably different to what I’d get when out alone with my Barbie-esque mom. People would make fun of my last name (an impossible to pronounce Circassian name rife with consonants). Faces would change when they found out my family’s religion or background. But, on the other hand, my experience as a Muslim has still been very different from those of my Muslim friends and family members—to say nothing of my Brown and Black Muslim sisters. My lighter skin and ability to “pass” as a basic blonde has shielded me from the worst Islamophobia—something I am both grateful for and, honestly, a little ashamed of.
Who is your favorite character of all time in children’s or young adult literature?
It’s a four-way tie between Ramona Quimby, Anne Shirley, Jo March, and Hermione Granger. Feisty young women for the win!
Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you are forced to sell all of the books you own except for one. Which do you keep?
Oh my goodness! Okay, well, since this is purely hypothetical, I’m going to pretend we’re only talking about fiction books. From there…oof. When my husband and I got married, we thinned out our respective book collections, and it was torture. My answer would probably change depending on my mood, but for right now, I’d say my most dog-eared, weather-beaten book: an ancient, well-loved Norton Anthology of Poetry that I’ve had since I was 14. Barring that, my Harry Potter series, which I’m saving to read with my daughter when she’s old enough.
What does diversity mean to you as you think about your own books?
I feel like there’s often this checklist mentality toward diversity in literature, and it comes across as not only inauthentic but completely harmful. To me personally, diversity is about moving past seeing white as a default and not prioritizing the white gaze. It’s about recognizing that our stories are better when they reflect the world as it really is, in all its complexity. When you’re a marginalized teenager, maybe somebody who’s occasionally ill at ease around your peers, books can be your safe haven—a place where you can lose yourself and forget about whatever issues you’re going through, if briefly. Now imagine you read a book and it’s you, your life, your experiences reflected back on the page. How much less alone might you feel? How meaningful is that for a young person—questioning themselves, questioning their place—to realize there are others out there like them? That’s why I think it’s so important to not have publishing continue to churn out the same perspectives, the same heroes and heroines. Those stories have been told. Let’s shine the light elsewhere for a while and see what blooms.
What is your thought process in including or excluding characters of diverse backgrounds?
ForAll-American Muslim Girl, it was important to me to include Muslims from a variety of backgrounds, races, and ethnicities—because that’s the reality of Islam. It’s not just Arab Muslims, which is the default in the media. It’s Indonesian Muslims and Black Muslims and Desi Muslims and Muslim converts. I’m a Circassian Muslim, so though I’m fair like a lot of Muslims from the Caucausus region, my family have been Muslims for generations. I wanted to show not just that diversity of background, but also of thought: the book is full of a variety of young Muslim women who interpret the religion in vastly different ways and enjoy respectfully debating those disparate views. The Ummah is stronger and richer not in spite of our differences but because of them.
Nadine Jolie Courtney is the author of the upcoming YA novel All-American Muslim Girl (November 12, 2019, FSG), as well as the YA novel Romancing the Throne, and two adult books: Confessions of a Beauty Addict, and Beauty Confidential. A graduate of Barnard College, her articles have appeared in Town & Country, Angeleno, OprahMag.com, and Vogue.com. She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her family.
Website:nadinejoliecourtney.com; Instagram: @nadinejoliecourtney; Twitter: @nadinecourtney
