Shimmering with rage and sparkling with subtle humor, Billie Starr’s Book of Sorries showcases Edgar Award-nominee Deborah E. Kennedy’s singular voice as Jenny, a heroine in the vein of Olive Kitteridge in Crosby, Maine and Miles Roby in Empire Falls, shines a light on the town of Benson, Indiana, where lakes, grudges, and family rifts run deep – but so does a mother’s love.
We chat with Deborah about her new release, Billie Starr’s Book of Sorries, along with sharing an excerpt from the novel!
In Billie Starr’s Book of Sorries, we follow Jenny Newberg, a down-on-her-luck single mother in the town of Benson, Indiana. As an Indiana native, did you draw on your own experiences growing up in the Midwest when writing about this town and its people who can’t seem to stay out of each other’s business?
Jenny’s story is definitely rooted in my experiences coming of age in Indiana in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Even though my hometown of Fort Wayne is more a small city than a small town, it’s surrounded by tiny hamlets like Benson – tight-knit places where everyone knows everyone’s business but not necessarily the deepest desires of their hearts. I sometimes think that small towns are a lot like big families. Your neighbors and relatives might operate under the assumption that they understand what makes you tick but, in truth, they often don’t know they half of it. One reason Jenny is smitten with George, the political candidate she’s hired to seduce, is that he seems to take a genuine interest in who she is. He appears at first blush to want to know the real her. For Jenny, so used to being pigeonholed as nothing more than a pretty face, that interest is intoxicating.
I’ve always been preoccupied with places and people who go under the radar. Mystery flourishes in places no one pays much attention to, among people written off as boring or otherwise not worth the time. While I was writing this novel, the Dar Williams song “Iowa” kept coming to mind. In it, Williams sings, “Way back where I come from, we never mean to bother. We don’t like to make our passions other peoples’ concern. We walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn.” I love that image, of men and women who spend the daylight hours holding their emotions in check, holding everything so tight to the vest that when they’re finally alone, in the dark, they can’t help it – they burn up. It’s those kinds of conflagrations – the quiet, long-repressed kind that take place far away from prying eyes and burn all the more intensely for that – that capture my imagination.
There is a clear divide and tension between social classes in the novel, with characters like Jenny Newberg, her neighbor Marcus, and Billie’s classmate Judd edging on poverty, while other characters such as the Candidate, the other mothers at Billie’s school, and Jenny’s ex-employer turned step-father all being middle- or upper-middle class. Why does social class play such a large role in the novel, and why did you choose to explore that tension?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone make the breezy claim that America is a classless society. What a joke. A punchline, really. Most children growing up in the U.S. are keenly aware from a very young age just where they and their family fit on the American class ladder. And that’s no accident.
It was clear to me as early as elementary school that my family was on the lower end of the middle class. I understood that certain doors would be harder for me to open than they might be for someone whose parents could afford clothes and toys that weren’t on sale. But – and this is a huge but – I could open those doors and it was easier for me to push through them than it was for some of my friends who faced real hardship, due either to genuinely dire financial straits or racial hatred or physical or emotional abuse. My childhood was a happy one. My parents told my brothers and me that we could be whatever we wanted to be, and they meant it. And they worked hard to put us through college and give us good starts.
Not everyone is so lucky. Jenny, for instance. Her father believed in her but he’s gone and all she gets from her mother is criticism. That constant stream of toxic negativity only adds ballast to Jenny’s internal burden, to the demoralizing knowledge that she, like so many people she knows and loves, is most likely doomed to live an unsung life. This fear of hers really comes out during the Bob Butz Family Bonding Dinner when Jenny thinks about why a woman like her might get alarmingly drunk in the middle of the week. What it really comes down to is despair, to the fact that life hadn’t turned out how she thought it would, or maybe it had turned out exactly the way she was brought up to expect, “and that was worse.”
Class hierarchies are just another way of making people feel stuck. Unfree. As a writer of fiction, I’m acutely interested in how a character like Jenny might unstick herself. That is at the heart of this book: how Jenny Newberg, broke, insecure, constantly apologizing single mom, breaks free of class constraints to become her authentic self.
EXCERPT
She woke to snow on the ground, a dripping sink, and her neighbor’s cats at her door, begging for food. The dripping sink and begging cats—Jenny was used to that. Her house was old, her plumbing was shot, and her neighbor, Marcus Rye, often forgot to feed Gertrude and Yo-Yo, and so it had fallen to her to give them two cans of tuna each day—one in the morning and one at night. The snow, though, that was new. The first of the year, it turned her scrubby lawn into something pretty for once, and, standing on the back stoop, cats winding around her ankles, Jenny looked at it—the sparkle, the purity of it—and thought that maybe, just maybe, what she was about to do wasn’t so terrible after all.
She gave the cats their breakfast and poured herself a cup of old coffee. She didn’t bother heating it up. The microwave would wake Billie Starr and Jenny wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She still needed to shower, shave her legs, “get dolled up,” as her mother put it. And she needed time to figure out what she would say when she saw him. The first words. They seemed important. Monumental, even. Life and death.
The man’s picture was in an envelope on the counter next to the toaster. Jenny gave the cats a head pat and went back in, pulled the picture out, studied it. The men in black suits told her to be on the lookout for a weak chin and large, liquid eyes. Also a halting gait. The photograph obviously didn’t show his gait, but the weak chin was there, and his eyes reminded Jenny of a puppy’s. He had a full mouth and shiny skin and thinning brown hair. His brows were bushy and unkempt and his sideburns were out of style, but he wasn’t ugly. More gentle-looking, and his sweet smile gave Jenny pause.
Still, the men in black suits told her that if she didn’t take the job someone else would, and maybe that lady wouldn’t be as cute as Jenny or as kind. It was her choice, the men said. They weren’t there to pressure her. They were simply presenting her with an opportunity, the likes of which rarely came along for girls like her.
Girls like her. Jenny knew what that meant.
She put the photo down, drifted into the living room to the large picture window that looked out on the front yard. The snow gave the sky its light, made the early morning world glow baby blue. Four sets of paw tracks wound around the big locust tree. A rabbit had been by, and a deer. Gertrude and Yo-Yo picked their way across the drive back to Marcus’s, the beige single-wide dark this time of day and missing some siding.
Jenny lived in an old brick schoolhouse at the top of a sharp S curve on a small stretch of road that, a hundred years before, had its own railroad station and post office. That was ancient history, and Acorn Street was part of Benson now. Five miles outside town, bordered by farmland and patches of woods, it was a lonely spot on the map, a nothing sort of place that everyone pretty much forgot was there. Then, the previous August, a drunk twentysomething missed the curve and drove right into Dorothy Renfrow’s house, killing her and her entire collection of African violets. The Fort Wayne news carried the story. A few Indianapolis outlets, too. The twentysomething went to jail for a month. His parents were important somehow. Or anyway rich. The house, a haven for raccoons and blackbirds, had yet to be repaired or torn down. It looked like a punched-in face. And Dorothy, about as a friendly as a thistle, wasn’t missed by anyone.
After the accident, the city installed a blinking yellow sign to alert drivers to the coming curves. It throbbed all day and all night, a sour signal that pulsed through Jenny’s dreams and made the houses on Acorn Street look even worse than they already did. Marcus’s trailer was an eyesore on its own. There was the missing siding, but also several cracked panes, a mountain of soggy mail on the front step, and a charred west wall from the night he’d left the stove on and set fire to a bunch of phone books. And the blinking made it seem like the cops were forever stationed in Dorothy Renfrow’s front yard, radioing for the coroner.
Jenny’s house wasn’t much either but she loved it anyway, cherished its creaky wooden floors and odd nooks and crannies. Even the window above the kitchen sink that let in wind and snow and rain was just more proof of its character, its uniqueness. Most of all, she loved that it was hers. She’d used her tiny inheritance from Pete as a down payment and filled it with Goodwill furniture, cute antiques, candles. How long, though, before the bank took it all away? A collection agent named Kevin called often now, called early, and the flashing sign reminded Jenny that she was three months behind on her mortgage payments. Mortgage mortgage mortgage, its blinking seemed to say. Loser loser loser.
The sign pulsed at the same rate as the mantel clock Jenny’s mother had given her for her last birthday, a hideous rococo thing Jenny hated but couldn’t get rid of because Carla would call her ungrateful if she did. Carla considered rococo “high culture.” Also anything that suggested “Asia at its finest.” Her apartment was cluttered with porcelain figurines of white-wigged men and women at leisure, her walls dotted with prints of geisha girls and sumo wrestlers. Rooms at war with themselves.
The sign and the clock reminded Jenny that time was running out, that, like Pete, like Dorothy Renfrow and her violets, she, Jenny Newberg, would die someday and so would Carla and Billie Starr and Jenny’s best friend, Lyd Butz, and Marcus. Good business for Hiram Hardacre, the town funeral director, but bad news for everyone else. Gertrude and Yo-Yo, they would die, too. And the locust tree. The bunny and the deer, wherever they were. Everything. Everything and everyone would die and then what?
Jenny finished her coffee and padded down the hall to take a shower.
EXCERPTED FROM BILLIE STARR’S BOOK OF SORRIES. COPYRIGHT © 2022 BY DEBORAH E. KENNEDY. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.
