The Rumpus Interview with Laura van den Berg

An interview with faculty member Laura van den Berg appears online at The Rumpus:

Things I will never forget about Find Me: the website on which you learn whether your loved ones are alive or dead is WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com; a plastic rabbit mask and the defeated, injured eye beneath it; the world’s most sinister cardboard toilet paper roll.

Find Me, Laura van den Berg’s first novel, follows Joy Jones, a cough syrup-addicted Stop & Shop cashier, in the face of a widespread epidemic, known only as “the sickness,” which leads to memory loss and death. A small number of people seem to be somehow immune to the sickness (including our protagonist Joy) and are routed to a hospital in isolated, frozen Kansas to have their genetic makeup studied by scientists who are hoping to find a cure. The first half of the novel takes place entirely inside the hospital. In the second half, Joy embarks on a journey to find her mother, who abandoned her as a baby, and to uncover the events of a year repressed entirely from her memory. Along the way, she recovers her humanity vis-à-vis her relationships with key players from her past and with mysterious strangers in the new, dystopian America.

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