today's event! launch event (?) for laura van den berg's debut novel, find me. when i first saw the event on the mcnally jackson calendar weeks ago, i immediately thought that laura van den berg and catherine lacey would make this freakishly perfect pairing ... and i was right.
- lacey described find me as "freaky," and berg loved it
- the core of the story was always more the personal dystopia of joy (the narrator) (who's going through life in a haze, trying not to feel). it took a cataclysmic event to strip down her walls.
- lacey: "why is florida so fucked up?" berg: "florida transcends any sort of explanation."
- apparently, in florida (or in berg's part of florida), it's normal for alligators to show up in your backyard. there's a hotline you call when that happens, and the anagram for the hotline is SNAP.
- when she thought of find me as a 2-part story, she couldn't think of it as a short story --> the architecture of the story as being pivotal
- the biggest different between a novel and a short story --> process
- she can work on a short story anywhere, even on the subway or in the bathroom at a party
- couldn't do that for the novel -- she had to go away to summer residences to work on it
- "a novel, it wants your life."
- she doesn't save drafts. she deletes them or edits on them. she likes the clean start.
- (my note/comment: as someone who obsessively archives her drafts, this is SO WEIRD to me. O_O)
- "i'm drawn to books that pull from different worlds and put them in one place."