An appropriately bratty summer

On saying eff it, and just doing the thing

It’s high summer in Massachusetts, and I’ve been writing my tail off. I’ve been working with film producers, churning out revisions for The Bullet Swallower adaptation, while simultaneously learning how the heck a person even writes a screenplay in the first place. It’s like learning to drive while hurtling down the freeway at 65mph. Or learning to swim while thrashing around a shark tank. Or…grilling your first steak while Gordon Ramsey cusses you out in British? It’s stressful is all I’m saying.

That’s not to say the summer’s been all toil and trouble. There was a bit of this:

And a bit of this:

If you ever get the opportunity to lie in a hammock that is suspended above a swimming pool whilst simultaneously enjoying a cold beverage, it is so choice. I highly recommend it.

I also highly recommend Appropriate, the Tony award-winning play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and starring Sarah Paulson. I believe the last play I saw was a community playhouse production of Mid-Summer Night’s Dream when I was in the 8th grade, so my experience with live theater is sadly nonexistent. But this show was remarkable. It’s about a dysfunctional family tasked with cleaning out their' deceased patriarch’s plantation home, and uncovering some very ugly truths in the process. And for a play about horrible secrets, it was hilarious. The audience was howling - with both laughter and horror. I actually shouted, “Oh my God!” at one point, and I do not believe I have ever spoken aloud to any performance ever.

It was incredible to be in the theater watching people react to the story in real time, and to be swept along in the experience myself, along with a roomful of strangers. Reading is a very solitary pastime. So is writing. I never see my readers gasping or giggling or holding on to the edge of their seats while they’re reading one of my books. Even watching a movie in a theater — if you happen to go during a particularly full showtime — isn’t quite the same experience. There’s something very passive about watching a movie, whereas a live performance seems to allow more crowd participation. I can see how, as an actor or playwright, the experience would become addictive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about plays lately. Screenplays and plays have some foundational aspects in common — they’re visual, dialogue-driven, usually consist of three acts. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have recently joined a workshop group made up of primarily playwrights and screenwriters, directors and actors. Their approach to storytelling is so different to mine, and it’s been utterly fascinating to read their work. And to see the delicious risks they take in their stories.

Literary fiction — what I write — has long been mired in a pointless and protracted battle with genre fiction — a category that includes sci-fi, horror, fantasy, romance, thriller. Much ink has been spilled about whether a particular book is literary or genre, which type of book is superior, whether publishers or readers want to see more of one or less of the other. It’s very boring.

But being aware of the debate, and being aware of the sort of lesser-than stigma attached to being labeled a “genre writer,” I have hesitated to let my writing get too weird. (And I realize this is rich coming from the person who wrote an entire short story about a planet where all the inhabitants look like John Slattery.)

Roger Sterling, the original zaddy.

But I do struggle sometimes with finding the courage to be weird and to take risks with my stories. When the books that are critical darlings tend to be sparse, realist, quiet, and (sorry, not sorry) plotless, I question my taste level sometimes if what I want to write are sprawling, messy, florid, time-hopping disasters of form. In the quiet words of Joan Collins: Am I too much?

Enter my new friends, the playwrights. Their work is beautiful, surreal, dirty, littered with oblique pop cultural references, nonsensical, and glorious. It makes me so happy when I read something and I have no bloody idea what could possibly happen next. I wonder if the live performance aspect of theater demands writing with a big personality, if only to be heard all the way at the back of the second balcony. And I wonder if plays, unlike novels, have a “springiness’ to them, since the lines could conceivably be altered night by night, the audience scarcely the wiser.

I discovered Charli XCX’s new album, Brat, the way many of us in our 40s did: We clicked on an article explaining why Kamala Harris’s online promos are lime green. Being a pretty cool bean myself, I listened to the album and really enjoyed it, and have embraced the whole “brat summer” ethos, which seems to mainly consist of doing what you want and not washing your hair. “I went my own way and I made it…That city sewer slut's the vibe.”

I’m in favor of more of us doing what we want more and washing our hair less. Taking risks and being weird and being too much and just. Doing. The. Thing.

May this be the summer we all get weird. Cheers, you blessed freaks.

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New stuff:

I’m super excited to be appearing at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC on August 24th. Here’s a nice writeup about it.

I’ll be at the Saratoga Book Festival October 6th.

And the Texas Book Festival in Austin November 16 and 17th.

I’m teaching Getting Stated in Essay Writing on August 31st (online) and Writing Strong Voice in Fiction on December 7th (also online).

I reviewed Bret Anthony Johnston’s new novel We Burn Daylight

I also reviewed Alex Espinoza’s new novel, The Sons of El Rey

The Bullet Swallower was named one of Esquire’s best books of 2024, one of Crime Read’s best historical novels of the year, and Goodreads featured it in a number of lovely lists including Journey Through the Ages with 48 New Historical Fiction Books, A Reading Roadtrip Across the U.S.A., Recent Reader Favorite Contemporary & Historical Fiction Hits, Hot & New: 81 Very Recent Hit Books, and A Guide to Second Novels that Nail the 'Sophomore Surge'.

xoxo,

Elizabeth