We chat with author Jandy Nelson about When The World Tips Over, which is an intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.
Hi, Jandy! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! Sure! I write YA novels, screenplays, and poetry and have lived in San Francisco—which I love passionately—for over thirty years. I used to work as a literary agent and didn’t write a word of fiction until I was forty years old. Before that, only poetry. I love visual art and cooking and growing flowers and hiking through redwood trees and dancing in the kitchen with friends at 3AM. Ha—I feel like this is a bio for dating site!
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I was always mad for reading, for stories, and wanted to be a writer since I was little, but I was focused on poetry until fairly recently. Writing fiction profoundly changed my life: I realized it was a way to cram many, many lives in my measly one, which felt/feels like the greatest magic there is.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Madeline but under duress! My mother was obsessed with it and so it was the only book she would read to me! All I wanted was Harold and the Purple Crayon, but it was Madeline every day and night for YEARS!
- The one that made you want to become an author: Hmmm. This is hard. I think all the books I read and love make me want to write and always have. But I’ll mention three pillars: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: To the Lighthouse again. I love it so much and have read it so many times that it’s intricately woven into my perception of the world.
Your latest novel, When the World Tips Over, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Everything I ever wanted to write. (Sorry, six words!)
What can readers expect?
A lot! They can expect a multi-generational saga of a Northern California family. A story of a mother and daughter who live in an RV at the edge of the world. They can also expect a fairy tale, a mystery, a food memoir (aphrodisiacal soufflés!), a scrapbook, a ghost story, a love letter to California and an ode to storytelling itself. The novel is jampacked with family curses, rivalries, road trips, and love stories upon love stories upon love stories—all kinds, familial, platonic, romantic, queer, straight. Like I said, it’s everything I ever wanted to write all in one book! My whole heart is in this one.
Where did the inspiration for When the World Tips Over come from?
Actually, from an old, abandoned house. (pic attached below). For years, I’d travel north from San Francisco through wine-country where I’d pass this big white house tucked away in the redwoods by a creek. It seemed perpetually light-struck and enchanted, and every time I’d drive by, I just had to stop, to tromp around, to peek in the windows, and soon I began imagining a family. The Falls. The front door of the old house would blow open in my mind, and there would be nineteen-year-old human-minefield Wynton Fall, violin in hand. Or I’d catch a glimpse of seventeen-year-old Miles Fall in an upstairs window, harboring secrets. Or I’d spot through the kitchen window twelve-year-old Dizzy Fall—a wild commotion of a girl who sees spirits—pulling a soufflé out of the oven. On and on it would go, as I traipsed around the abandoned property, the cast of characters expanding as time reversed and the Falls from previous generations began revealing themselves to me too.
Then one day, a rainbow-haired girl showed up in my mind and began knocking on the front door of this house, of this brewing story. I knew who she was and that everything was about to change for the Fall family. That’s when I knew I had a novel and began to write. I dropped the big white house into dreamy, half-magical Paradise Springs, a fictional Northern California wine town, where the sun floods out of the sky and The Devil Winds blow your reason away. And almost a decade of writing later here we are!
But the strangest part of this origin story is I drove north recently, and the house is gone! Vanished. I’m so glad I took pictures because I might’ve thought I imagined the whole thing. I guess it has left real world now that it lives on in this fictional one!
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Oh wow. All the characters honestly. This crew completely took over my life for almost a decade! I think they became just as real, if not more real, to me than my own family. Dizzy was probably the most fun to write because she’s brutally honest, filter-less, and has such a rollicking sensibility, but I loved diving into Wynton’s and Miles’s tumultuous inner lives too. And, of course, it was a kick to be able to talk with dogs as Miles. And then there’s Cassidy who I feel in many ways shares my same heart, so, you see? Impossible to choose. It’s like asking me to pick a favorite child. In terms of moments, there are so, so many I enjoyed writing, but some top ones that come to mind offhand are the couple funny, awkward meet-cutes between Miles and Felix, twelve-year-old Cassidy getting lost in the woods, and Miles’s emotional confrontations later in the book with someone I can’t name as it’s a spoiler. Oh! I also got to write a shoot-out and a car chase in this one for the first time in my life which was amazing!
What do you hope readers take away from When the World Tips Over?
I’m hoping readers walk away from the story—or float away actually—with a full heart and a hungry belly, perhaps thinking about what I was while writing it: that safe harbor is found in other people, that joys are sometimes hidden away in sorrows, that splendor is everywhere, and soufflés are the most heavenly food on earth, bar none.
What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned as a writer since your debut?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned about writing fiction is how important it is to be yourself on the page—that your voice is yours alone and so you can’t be afraid to mine your most private passions, histories, idiosyncrasies, mythologies, questions, joys, sorrows, madnesses, loves and hates, etc.
In terms of a more publishing industry-oriented lesson, I’ve learned how important it is to be true to your vision and not give the market and its expectations (or anyone’s expectations) your attention until you’ve finished the work. I also think it’s crucial to take the time you need to make your novel the very best you possibly can. You really only have one shot at it so it might as well be your best shot.
Oh, one more. Like Ray Bradbury said, I think it’s important to go with gusto when writing. He wrote, “. . . if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.” I so agree. I think it’s crucial to explore characters/events/times/places/ideas that fascinate, horrify, confound, impassion, enflame, sadden, delight you, that get your heart beating and your blood flowing, things that see to your gusto.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a new YA novel, my first to take place in San Francisco. It’s about three seismic love stories that coincide with three major San Francisco earthquakes: 1906, 1989, during the AIDS epidemic, and an imagined contemporary one. I’m so excited about it, have been immersed in research, which is one of my favorite parts of the writing process. Also, a section of it takes place in Paris so I hope to spend some time there soon. I also have been thinking a lot about how I want to adapt When the World Tips Over for the screen and I’m excited to embark on that.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
I recently enjoyed Honey by Victor Lodato, Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. I read Nina Lacour’s new novel for adults in manuscript form and it’s fantastic. I cannot wait to get my hands on Gayle Forman’s new Middle Grade novel Not Nothing, Percival Everett’s James, Helena Fox’s new novel The Quiet and the Loud, and Colored Television by Danzy Senna.
