HELLO TO ALL THE BEINGS IN THE UNIVERSE
It’s such an honor to be here. Thank you to Books are Magic for hosting me and Tracy. I’m so excited to share this story with you, it’s taken me a while to get the words right and I want to begin by thanking those who literally made the book, Claudia Ballard, Jenna Johnson, Lauren Roberts, Lianna Culp, Thomas Colligan, and the whole team at FSG.
Beautyland is the lifespan of a woman growing up in Philadelphia who believes she is on the earth to take notes on human beings and send them to her superiors on another planet via fax machine. I’d like to tell you a little about the woman at its helm, about me, and the process of writing Beautyland. I had a lot of stops and starts and a lot of panicked vacuuming while I figured out how to do that. Then, I remembered that in a lot of books, the entire novel is contained in the very first paragraph.
So, here is the first paragraph of Beautyland.
SLIDE 2 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph)
In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother. Adina (in utero), listening to the advancing yeses of her mother’s heart and her mother in the labor room, vitals plunging. Binary stars. Adina, swaying in zero gravity. Térèse, fastened to the operating table. The monitor above the bed reports on their connected hearts: beating heart, heart, beating heart, beating. Térèse’s blood pressure plummets as Adina advances through the birth canal; she has almost reached Earth. At this moment, Voyager 1 spacecraft launches in Florida, containing a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extraterrestrials.
So, here we’re introduced to a little girl named Adina who has just been born at the same time Voyager One is launched into the universe. It seems like it’s just her and her mom. But let’s look at this more deeply. In the beginning, let’s stop right there. I should probably explain what happened in the beginning of time. So, very quickly.
SLIDE 3 (Image of earth with text)
SLIDE 4 (Image of author as a little girl, a pad of paper on her lap, holding a pencil)
Here I am, working on the first draft of Beautyland. I was raised in Northeast Philadelphia. Growing up, I loved to read and write. But I didn’t know any writers or how to go about being one and we couldn’t afford any schools for writing so super long story short I decided to move to where writers live, New York City and found a writers group called The Blackout Writers Group who helped me learn how to write fiction. I also learned how disparate wealth is and this figures prominently into Adina’s notes regarding class and status. I sent my short stories out like it was a part-time job until I had enough published for a collection and went to Brooklyn College where I learned more about how to write a novel from genius teachers like Michael Cunningham and Susan Choi and Josh Henkin.
SLIDE 5 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph)
Back to the first paragraph
In the beginning, there is Adina and her Earth mother. That line was originally just “mother” but then I went to a craft talk by the fiction writer Claire Luchette who talked about “the misfit detail” and how sometimes one object that is slightly askew in a line can tell you a lot, so I added the word “Earth” so the reader goes, Wait, what now? This is the first indication that maybe things are not what they seem. Thank you, Claire.
Adina is raised by a single mother named Térèse who goes through a lot of changes throughout the novel. I wanted to write the kind of single mother I rarely see in fiction—one who is flawed but hardworking and who changes in surprising ways. I should probably tell you a little about my Earth mother.
SLIDE 6 (Image of woman dragging a wagon with three dogs in it)
Here she is dragging her dog and mine down the street in a wagon. For most of my life, she thought her name was Helene Térèse but one day she found her birth certificate and on it was the name Helene Theresa.
SLIDE 7 (Same image of woman with name corrected)
Oh, she thought, I guess that’s my name. There are a few stories in my family about someone believing something for their whole lives only to find a document or will or person from their past that reveals the truth. I feel like this is a common experience in an immigrant family. A lot gets lost from there to here, over the big wide ocean. Like Adina’s Mom, my mother had a near death experience when I was born and she also used to drag a lot of antiques out of the trash to refurbish.
Let’s get back to the text
SLIDE 8 (Image of first paragraph)
She has almost reached Earth.
So here is where I should tell you about Adina’s namesakes.
SLIDE 9 (Black and white photo of light-haired girl, laughing)
Adina Talve-Goodman was a dear friend to me and many people on our planet. She was a writer and artist of being alive. We lost her in 2018 at the age of 31. I wanted to honor her by giving my protagonist her name.
What feels like a million years ago, I stood in her kitchen while she made a pie. Adina celebrated every Pi Day by inviting friends over to help her bake then eat a pie. In her kitchen was a framed print of an apple pie and over it was a quote that read, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” From Carl Sagan. I stared at it for quite a while. What does that mean, I wondered?
SLIDE 10 (Black and white photo is joined by another black and white photo of older, distinguished man)
In the book, Adina’s last name is Giorno after the poet Jon Giorno. Though I never got the chance to meet him, he was kind of a queer Italian grandfather figure to me. In Beautyland, after Adina reaches Earth she misses her family intensely. But she’ll find chosen family with childhood friends, workout instructors, little dogs, pianists with synesthesia, Carl Sagan, Yoko Ono. Sometimes the best person to notice a place is a newcomer. She’ll write transmissions about things as varied as popcorn and death. When she moves to New York in her twenties, she sends transmissions about the city as she learns it like a language:
SLIDE 11 (text)
Living in New York, she writes, is like sitting at a nine-million-person blackjack table. We work together against the dealer. If you call on 11 (request a fresh bagel to be toasted), the table scowls at you. You can trust the group. If a group of New Yorkers are walking against the light, you can cross. If a group of New Yorkers avoid a subway car, it is covered in feces. If a group of New Yorkers leave their cars parked on ASP day, alternate side of the street and parking meter rules have been suspended. Like it or not, you’re part of the team. Uptown or down? Express or local? Yell Hold the train, and at least three New Yorkers will wrench their hands between the closing doors. Life in New York is a series of no-look passes.
SLIDE 12 (back to image of first paragraph)
Let’s get back to the text because it’s about to get super galactic. At this moment, Voyager One spacecraft launches…
SLIDE 13 (Image of Golden Record on black background with quote from Carl Sagan)
Voyager One is launched the very second Adina is born and becomes a kind of sibling to her in the novel. Adina’s major milestones are attached to milestones in NASA and America’s understanding of Extraterrestrials. Voyager One is famous for containing the golden record, created by the astronomer Carl Sagan and his team. Carl Sagan becomes a father figure to Adina because she believes he is looking for her. I did a lot of research on him and Voyager.
SLIDE 14 (Golden Record image is joined by an image of people drinking and eating and two audio links)
Here are a few of the images and greetings that are on the Golden Record. One of my favorites is this one from China… This is a message to all children in the universe from Nick Sagan, Carl’s son, when he was 6, and I’m going to play it for you now. PLAY JAWN. Here you see a photo of someone licking an ice cream cone, a man eating a chicken leg, and another man drinking from a pitcher. You can imagine an extraterrestrial seeing something like that and thinking, oh yeah, I totally want to connect to that civilization. Here is a recorded sound of footsteps, heartbeats and laughter. It might be important to note that drugs were a lot stronger back then.
Let’s return to the first paragraph, for the final time.
SLIDE 15 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph)
Finally, we come to others, extraterrestrials.
SLIDE 16 (Images of assorted alien articles and photos from television)
Aliens are really having a moment right now. Scientists have found questionmarks in space, we’ve discovered the first interstellar object, our government has just released all sorts of hidden info. Even as I wrote these lines, I was listening to an NPR Science Friday segment on whether there is intelligent life in the universe. If aliens were to come to Earth and hide among us, one of the hosts just said, where would be the best place to hide?
But I and Beautyland wonder what scientists mean by, “intelligent.” Adina believes that on her planet they’ve evolved past the body and its senses. But here on earth, we haven’t even evolved past war or genocide. We haven’t even evolved past alternate side of the street parking? When they say intelligent, wouldn’t it mean Life intelligent enough not to destroy its own habitat?
SLIDE 17 (Image of Cher and Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck, dressed up and watching an opera)
We’ve been talking a lot about stars, but I also want to mention something closer to our solar system. The moon. That is, I want to say something about home.
One of the last times I hung out with my friend Adina we went to the Brooklyn Historical Society to see our favorite movie, Moonstruck. Moonstruck is about family. Beautyland is about how, even if we feel far away from our people, we can still find family, but it might not look how you think it will. Beautyland became a beautiful braiding of my sweet friend, of differentness, of family in surprising places, and not only inventing but embracing the universe.
I worked with a student at The New School Allison Hess who is writing beautiful female centric stories about Appalachia. And she admitted to us during workshop that she had been scared to write about her hometown because she didn’t think it was literary. And I gave some kind of impassioned speech about how every hometown is important and went home and realized I was doing the same thing about NE Philadelphia, a place of Auto Worlds and boulevards and concrete. How could I ever connect Auto World to the stars? I thought.
SLIDE 18 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph)
So, this paragraph seems like it’s about only Adina and her mother, but there are a lot of unseen people here, too.
SLIDE 19 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph, with these names with arrows pointing to the text)
Like my friend, my mom, Voyager One, Claire Luchette, Carl Sagan, that Prize is Right contestant. But also…
SLIDE 20 (Image of Beautyland’s first paragraph, with these names with arrows pointing to the text)
Everyone who helped me make the book, like Claudia Ballard and Ted and Tracy and Jenna Johnson and FSG and everyone who helps them and everyone who helps them. This paragraph actually has all of the people of Earth in it. So when we think about the eternal question that launches space ships and books alike:
SLIDE 21 (Image of question mark in space preceded by the question, Are we alone?)
ARE WE ALONE? The answer is…
Yes.
We are, sometimes. Sometimes in life, we feel and are alone. It would be cruel to have you listen to me this whole time and then lie. I know there are those who suffer and feel alone. And if they feel alone, they are alone. Carl Sagan said, sometimes we are On Our Own. It hurts and it’s lonely and it’s hard.
SLIDE 22 (Image of question mark in space changes to include the words, AND YET)
And yet.
There’s this giant feeling of wellbeing that occurs when you feel like you may have found an other, someone who understands you.
SLIDE 23 (Image of question mark in space changes to read: DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? joined by image of Beautyland’s book cover with arrows that read, you, me, and art.)
Writing has always been the way I’ve called out into the universe and said: DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT I MEAN? And it’s been a gift to have readers reflect back to me, YES, WE ALSO FEEL THIS WAY. Or, NO, WHAT ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Or, MY BOOK ARRIVED DAMAGED–ONE STAR!
In this way, we can meet on the page, in perpetuity, forever and ever.
SLIDE 24 (Now against space, it reads: END OF TRANSMISSION, and underneath, smaller, TAKE IT SLEAZY ((The Good Place reference)).
END OF TRANSMISSION
Thank you, Books are Magic for having me. I’d like to invite my dear friend Tracy O’Neill up to the stage.
Tracy is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients and a forthcoming memoir, Woman of Interest. She has been named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Currently, she teaches at Vassar College.
Full transcript of interview will be provided after event. Thank you so much for joining us!
