Why did you decide to begin this way?īrit Bennett: Good question… I mean, obviously this is an extremely political topic within our country, within the world.
But when you start a book with an abortion, you’re starting with something that’s ended.” In a way, your novel starts with two endings-a suicide and an abortion. The Rumpus: In an interview with Jia Tolentino for Jezebel, you said, “A pregnancy generates narrative: things are changing, there’s an obvious progression. I had the pleasure of speaking to Brit on the phone-a Friday afternoon in Manhattan, still the morning in Southern California. Since then, Bennett’s work has been a constant in my life and I’m so pleased that through this novel, her work will soon be more of a constant in the lives of others as well.
In late 2014, when I came across her Jezebel essay, I knew she was a writer to look out for. When Nadia Turner is finished with you, you won’t want to leave.Įverything I’ve read of Bennett’s work has felt like she’s known me a little-from her short story “Butterball” to her essays on American Girl dolls, segregated pools, and even Colson Whitehead’s most recent novel. Surrender is necessary, but with someone who can craft stories as skillfully as she can, it isn’t painful. As a reader, it is easy to trust where Bennett is taking you. So much is packed into the pages of this novel, but it never feels overwhelming instead, it is a story told with nuance and care. That could be the end of it, but life is often more complicated than that, and as readers, we are given insight into how this decision affects the lives of the three protagonists in the years after, as well as the lives of the community that surrounds them. When seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner becomes pregnant by Luke, she chooses to have an abortion. It considers decisions and how the ramifications of these individual choices spiral out, engulfing multiple lives. And isn’t that one of the best gifts that literature can offer-to understand and be understood? Bennett does get us, if ‘us’ refers to people who live, and think, and experience deeply in the world.
Was it men? Was it me and him? Was it something else entirely, a category I hadn’t thought to think of? I hadn’t considered that my fascination with Bennett’s work could be summed up in a phrase so succinct. And from that brief passage, I wondered who ‘us’ was. I told him it reminded me of something he had once said to me. It was a passage written from the perspective of Luke Sheppard, the local pastor’s son. I sent someone a photo I had taken of a page from Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers.
0 kommentar(er)
