2016 june 14 at bookcourt: the third kind of book event is where you go in, thumbs too tired for notes, and find yourself absolutely charmed. emma cline (the girls) (on the right) read (very briefly) (she said she read a very, very short passage because those are the book events she likes) then had a lovely conversation with alexandra kleeman (author of the fabulous you took can have a body like mine).
(it must be noted that i feel an automatic kinship with people from california. it's like this weird sense of camaraderie that i feel with a sense of nostalgia, like we share this connection to a past because i have no intention of moving back to california, so i allow myself the freedom to view it fondly.)
- emma cline: california's such a weird place.
- alexandra kleeman: i was born in berkeley then i went back to berkeley and i will never live there again.
- EC: it's such a beautiful landscape, but there's a latent danger in the landscape. like, it's on a fault line, so it's beautiful, but it's also trying to kill you.
- AK: i felt like evie could have existed at any time because the essence of the girl is still the same.
- EC: it's sort of a timeless desire to be known or belong.
- EC: i read a lot of groupie memoirs. which were surprisingly fantastic. you're supposed to read them and be taken by the male singers, but, in the end, i always took away that it was the women who were putting in all this energy in the creating of these myths [of these men]. the men always came across to me as very flat.
- EC: i think friendship is a great realm for fiction. it's murky. we don't have such cultural codes around them like we do for romantic relationships or family relationships.
- AK: in friendship, i feel like there's a pressure to have it maintain exactly the same [way] or it'll fall apart.
- EC: teenage girls are given so little power and agency, so the little they do get -- i'm interested in how they wield it.
- EC: one thing i remember [from reading my teenage journals] -- everything had the pitch of a crime. for adolescents, everything is life or death.
- EC: i think, with an MFA, you have to encounter the fact of having readers.
- AK: i feel like, with debut novels, we discharge the things we've been obsessed with since we were fifteen.