Mark your calendars for July 16, 2019. Sarah Rose Etter, one of the most unique literary voices to debut a book this year, will be releasing The Book of X. Trust me when I say this is one you don’t want to miss.
Published by the dynamic indie press Two Dollar Radio, Etter’s novel takes the reader on one hell of a carefully crafted and beautifully painful journey. The premise: Cassie is born with her stomach literally twisted into a knot. She struggles to come to terms with this deformity, both as a child growing up on her family’s meat farm (yep, you read that correctly) and throughout her adult life. Add in a few additional surreal elements (swimming in a river of thighs, anyone?), a distinctive structure, as well as commentary on themes central to the female experience and you get one of the most memorable reads of the year.
Etter sat down with The Nerd Daily to peel back the layers on this emotionally transfixing work, discuss surrealist writing, and confess a few secrets from her past.
The Book of X is an incredibly unique novel. It covers a lot of ground and is difficult to summarize succinctly, but as the author you are up to the challenge! How would you describe your book in five words or less?
Oh man! That’s such a hard question, but I’ll try!
Grotesque, glistening, tumor-like, woven.
In an interview with your publisher, Two Dollar Radio, you said the idea of the book “really started with the first sentence. I thought of that first sentence one day, and it just pestered me for months: I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her.” Could you talk a little about how you developed the novel from here? Did you work forward from the beginning of the story in a linear fashion? Did parts and pieces of the story come to you at random?
Writing the experience of Cassie, a woman born in the shape of a knot, and trace her life from birth to death, required a lot of planning and plotting.
It’s funny because The Book of X is often called an innovative and unique novel, but beneath the surrealism, it is built on some very traditional structures – rising action, climax, falling action. That was necessary to ensure the novel didn’t go off the rails entirely.
I haven’t talked about this too much, but the structure of the book really came from my work at a software engineering company. I was dealing with front-end and back-end computer systems, and learning how to make the front end of a website or an app “speak” to the back-end systems. I became sort of obsessed with the idea of having a novel that did something similar – a traditional narrative that was spliced with daydreams and visions, the idea of the conscious and the subconscious existing in the same space. So I made an Excel spreadsheet of the parts of the book and how they might speak to each other – just like the spreadsheets I used to manage software projects. Nerdy, but true.
Beyond that, I knew at the outset that I wanted a three part structure. I mapped out each section, then I took all of that planning with me to a writing residency in Iceland, and then I just wrote and wrote and wrote for a month.
When I came home, I had a draft that included the general narrative and the visions. But after editing the book for a few years, I started to weave in the facts to give the narrative some breathing room.
From the unconventional structure to the tight prose and emotional content, The Book of X feels very personal. Was this book influenced by any life experiences that you would be willing to share?
Certainly moments of this book are directly inspired by being a woman in the world right now. I think the experiences recounted here will be familiar to many women, and they feel very global to me – being judged based on the body, being spoken to based on the body, being managed by your boss based on the body.
As far as personal experiences, I did have a spinal surgery that is certainly the inspiration for Cassie’s experience having her knot surgically removed. I would argue that’s the most directly personal experience – going to numerous doctors, not being given a solution, filling out the forms, circling the number on a pain scale, finally getting surgery and relief. I didn’t plan for that to carry over so readily, but here we are.
Despite the exaggerated, absurd elements in this novel, the situations faced by Cassie are so relatable to women. Why was it important for you to maintain this balance between surrealism or the grotesque and real life?
While the book begins with a surreal, grotesque premise, it was necessary to imagine Cassie operating in real life in order to make this a sympathetic book – she still needed to have a job, buy clothes, pay bills, go to the bar.
There are quite a few definitions of the grotesque in art and literature, but my favorite understanding of the grotesque is that it is required to inspire empathy in the reader or viewer – without that, the art simply becomes horror. That distinction is incredibly important. It’s the difference between making a blood-soaked slasher film and making The Lobster, which also contains violence but to an empathetic, heart-breaking end.
In order to create empathy, the reader had to have some touchstones for her life that resonated. They had to find themselves in her, even if only briefly.
Reading The Book of X was a strongly emotional experience for me, as I assume it will be for many readers. What sort of “place,” or headspace, did you hope to create for the reader to settle into for the duration of Cassie’s story?
I just wanted to create a book that had never been written before. I wanted to create space for a brand new view of life and the world. I wanted the reader to pick the book up and feel warped by a new perception of the world.
What have been some of your most visceral reading experiences? How have these books/authors influenced your writing?
Ah! That list is so long – Joy Williams’ The Changeling is a book I am entirely obsessed with. Anything by Amelia Gray, Brian Evenson, Carmen Maria Machado. I remember the first time I read a Brian Evenson story and just feeling incredibly seen. Blake Butler as well – another writer who showed me a book could truly be anything.
I’m constantly floored by works in translation – Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream – what an immersive, frantic, succinct book. Why The Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi – incredible, sad, beautiful, crisp. The Book of Words by Jenny Erpenbeck – that book did change my life, from the very first sentence.
The bio on your website shows that you were the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in 2017. There you presented on “surrealist writing as a mode of feminism.” Could you share some of the key ideas from this presentation? Did the writing of The Book of X influence the presentation, or was it the opposite?
Surrealism is one of those wonderful, frustrating terms – it started out as such a macho movement, one that really relegated women to the role of minor players. Female surrealists were often married to surrealist artists or else were seen as the femme enfant, or woman-child — these femme enfants were really there to inspire the men, to be young and beautiful and represented a revival of the male talent.
Now, though, I’d argue we’re making strides in reclaiming the word surrealism, and the space. In France, I focused on the work of Leonora Carrington, Amelia Gray, and Aase Berg. Of course, not all of these women own the labels of surrealist or feminist, but what I was interested in exploring was the necessity of surrealism to forward the female experience in society.
In a way, surrealism can operate as a trojan horse for feminist themes: If we displace the reader, and if we remove the rules of the world, we create a space where disbelief is suspended – and then we might have the chance to show the reader the flaws in the ways the world is operating.
By creating new worlds and new experiences that are outside the norm, we might have a chance to look at our own world with new eyes.
If we look at contemporary surrealist works, we’ll see they are often dealing with gender, race, and capitalism. Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah are beautiful, compelling examples of this. I’d argue that we’re seeing a revival of this type of art, writing, and music in the midst of our political and social time. I believe we’ll be seeing a bigger wave of art that leverages surrealism and explores trauma in new ways.
What is the most valuable lesson about writing that you took away from the MFA program you attended? What is the most valuable lesson you have learned since, just by practicing the craft?
I sort of stuck out like a sore thumb during my MFA. And it wasn’t because of the program – it was simply because I was writing these strange, surreal stories and it definitely made workshops a little more intense.
But I was lucky to have one professor who really understood what I was trying to do, and he started to funnel weird books to me – Donald Barthelme, that kind of thing. I felt incredibly seen reading that work – it made me realize I could continue to do what I loved with language, that I wasn’t alone, that there was a lineage for me.
Are you currently working on any new projects that you could share with our readers?
I’m at work on another novel and a short story collection. It feels good to dig into new work.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: I think it was actually the newspaper. My dad used to read The New York Times to me while I was still in diapers.
- 3 books you would take on a desert island: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The New and Reissued Brian Evenson (I know that is cheating), Why The Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi
- Movie that you know by heart: The Favourite
- Song that makes you want to get up and dance: Anything by Lizzo
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: Vik, the black sand beach in Iceland
- Introvert or extrovert: Both
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Coffee
- First job: Fry Girl at McDonald’s – I got in trouble for giving away Big Macs to my friends.
- Person you admire most and why: Louise Bourgeois – she was tough as hell, and she made work until the day she died.
About the Author
Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party (Caketrain Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cut, Electric Literature, VICE, Guernica, Philadelphia Weekly, and more. She is the recipient of writing residencies at the Disquiet International Program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Creative Program in Iceland. She earned her MFA from Rosemont College. She lives in San Francisco.
