An Interview with Laura van den Berg

Fiction faculty member Laura van den Berg was recently interviewed for LitHub. Read an excerpt below:

Karolina Waclawiak: In reading your stories, I get a sense that a lot of your characters are women who feel like they’re ghosts in their own lives. They haven’t quite found their way into their own lives, they haven’t taken traditional paths. It feels in conversation with my character Evelyn’s own journey to navigate alternative life paths and being unsuccessful. I’m curious why you find these kinds of characters interesting to write about? These sort of never-do-wells.

Laura van den Berg: A straight-forward answer would be to say I’m drawn to sources of tension. For a lot of these characters, the story is finding them at moments where they have misperceived something pretty significant about their own reality.

I think we all have moments where something we’ve perceived is revealed as false. And that can be a very destabilizing experience. I was interested in looking at that with these women—in some cases, the misapprehension is destabilizing in a way that is not destructive. In other ways, the misapprehension is more serious or more destructive. What happens when a foundational perspective is upended or disrupted?

KW: It feels like it’s almost an investigation into the ways that we cope. And the lies we construct for ourselves. And not necessarily lies, again, I feel like there are negative connotations to that, but looking at our coping mechanisms and what works for us until it doesn’t is a really interesting way to look at how people move through the world.

Evelyn’s reaching this critical age where she’s constructed ways of coping and moving through her life that felt like, “OK, I can do this. This is functional.” But so much of the way we function is dysfunctional at a certain point. Having an about-face in your life to find healthier coping mechanisms is really difficult. A lot of people don’t do it. This book is about Evelyn facing herself and facing her coping mechanisms and saying, “How do I want to move forward in the next phase of my life, if the ways I’ve moved through the world are really unsustainable in the long-term?”

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/on-writing-a-character-who-confronts-middle-age-and-the-necessity-of-change/