Bea Setton: On Writing Against “Crazy Sad Girl” Rhetoric, Finding Humor and Horror in the Domestic, and Her Debut Novel “Berlin”

Bea Setton’s debut novel Berlin is available on May 16th. An unusual, moody thriller, Berlin is narrated by Daphne, a graduate student in philosophy who is ostensibly in the titular city to study the language, but who is really there to figure out who she is—or what she will become. Daphne is a lonely twentysomething suffering from an unacknowledged eating disorder. She is also profoundly funny. When a shocking and violent event occurs at the flat where she is staying, Daphne sets out on a deranged quest to uncover the source of the danger, leading the reader on a discomfiting journey through a funhouse mirror version of modern-day Germany and millennial life. I sat down with Bea via Zoom to discuss the novel, Plath, and the craft of thrillers. The conversation that follows was condensed and edited for clarity. 

Kate Brody: The ex-pat experience seems tailor-made for fiction. Ex-pats are outsiders, by necessity. They see everything with new eyes. Can you talk a little about your own experience living in different places and how you were able to use that in creating a character like Daphne whose observations are so specific and off-kilter?

Bea Setton: I grew up in a family of outsiders. My mom was born in England, emigrated to France to start a business with my dad. He was born in Paris, but his parents were immigrants who were stateless when they first arrived. I never felt very French growing up in France, and neither did my family. I always had that outsider perspective, and I think that has helped with my writing. Familiarity dulls the eye, while being new—or other—sharpens your perceptions. When you are new in a place, you're going to notice everything. The flavor of milk will be a bit different: the smells will stand out to you, the road signs and place names are strange. Being an outsider demands that you pay attention, and that's really a gift for a writer. I thrive on it. That’s one of the reasons I want to go to Mississippi next, because that is so unknown to me.

KB: You’ve lived in a lot of different places, including Medellín, London, New Haven, and Paris. Why set the book in Berlin, of all those cities?

BS: Berlin has a really particular duality. On the one hand, it’s an incredibly fun place where you can be free to express yourself. You can dress however you want, date whoever you want, party as much as you want. But equally, there's kind of a dark underbelly to the city. There are a lot of substance abuse problems. It's a very economically unequal city, with aggressive gentrification changing many of its historically working-class areas. I was fascinated by the extreme paradox between joy and suffering of Berlin, and I wanted that bivalence to speak through the novel. I wanted it to be both funny and dark. 

Despite the darkness, Berlin is a hopeful place. It's amazing to be in a city that has so many visible sediments of history and a very dark history, and to see how sometimes things can get better. You can be hanging out at a gay bar and you’ll notice the pavement outside is covered by stolpersteine, memorial stones for Jews who were deported by the Nazis. And you think: wow, now we're celebrating queer lives in this space, precisely where there was so much suffering. That contrast is incredible. It feels like such a victory. And I think that's why Berlin really captivated me as a city. I wanted to pay tribute to it in my novel. 

KB: There are times throughout the novel where Daphne goes back and corrects her own record. How did you handle the issue of reliability throughout Berlin? 

BS: I wanted the experience to replicate what it is like to get to know people in real life. A more traditionally reliable narrator will, in an unfiltered manner, convey all their thoughts and give an honest report of the experiences they've had. But when you get to know people outside fiction, you don't get full transparent access. There are certain things they are willing to share with you immediately, others that take time, and still others that they won’t ever explain about themselves. You will just put the pieces together as you perceive how they act. That’s what I wanted Daphne to feel like—a real person, a complex and secretive one. She reveals and confesses to her own flaws, yes, but there’s a kind of cunning quality to what flaws she’s willing to reveal as her over-confidential tone tricks you into thinking that her self-representation is honest. 

But I mean for me, Daphne is not an unreliable narrator. She’s realistic in that she shows how people truly are. She is dishonest with the reader at times, yes, but that’s just because she can’t be entirely honest with herself. Which is the case for all people. We all want to think we are good people. But clearly that can’t be the case. We are all to some degree in denial about our own worst flaws, about how our behavior affects the planet and other people. Daphne is just an exaggerated version of this. 

KB: How did you approach writing Daphne’s mental illness, craft-wise?

BS: I've read a lot of memoirs of addiction, substance abuse, and eating disorders, and they're often told from the point of view of a recovered person who has an objective distance from their illness. They know that they were sick, that they were at rock bottom.  I wanted to write something from the inside of Daphne’s illness. People suffering from addictions and compulsive behaviors are not constantly narrating themselves: I am sick, I am sick, I'm really sick. They are trying to convince everyone around them that they're okay, and they are trying to convince themselves that they're okay. There are sometimes flashes of lucidity, where they're forced to confront how their behavior is affecting their health and the people around them. 

I wanted to write from inside of Daphne’s illness and her warped normality. Daphne feels ‘good’ when she isn’t eating, when she is going for twenty-kilometer runs in the heat. In order to get into the sickness of her mind, I had to reverse what is normal, so that the reader would be trapped in her landscape where not eating is good and exercising to excess much is good. I think it’s relatively easy to get readers thinking like Daphne, because she has an eating disorder. Much of with the behavior around eating disorders is praised societally. Being a runner and restricting what one eats are “positive” things that society is constantly telling people to do. So it was in some ways easier for me to turn the screws chapter by chapter, than say, if it had been another kind of addiction. 

KB: Speaking of Daphne’s compulsive behaviors, running is a big part of the novel. Do you run? If so, what is the relationship between running and your work?

BS: I am a runner, and I've read the famous running memoirs. Murakami: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. For me, though, running is in competition with writing. I don't necessarily think that it's good for my writing. The biggest struggle around being a writer is finding the time. Writers who are beginning, who can’t make their living from writing, we're already fighting to find time. So if you're going to run for an hour, that's an hour of writing that's lost. Whereas a lot of other writers see it as a kind of instrument to their craft. 

KB: Berlin is very formally playful, and it includes humorous footnotes sprinkled throughout. How did how did you decide to incorporate those elements?

BS: My background is in philosophy, like Daphne. A very common thing in philosophy essays is to use footnotes to define precisely how you are using particular words or concepts. Daphne--she really wants to be in control of the narrative in the same way that a philosophy student has to be in control of her terminology. So I thought I would let that academic background bleed into her ordinary life. Daphne is constantly nuancing her language to make sure the reader gets exactly what she wants them to get her story.

KB: In your mind, who are the artists whose work (books, films, etc.) is in conversation with Berlin?

BS: In Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge gives a masterclass in terms of how you control the point of view. She’s really, really good at getting somebody on her side, even if she is behaving badly. It’s brilliant use of the first-person in a TV drama, which is quite rare. 

I read Ottessa Moshfegh about three months before I started writing my novel, and her tone definitely influenced me. She’s very brazen. She helped me get over the hang up of wanting people to like my characters. No more nice girl antics. 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. People are familiar with it as a story of somebody's mental breakdown. What they forget is that it's an absolutely hilarious book. So funny. I think Sylvia Plath was one of the first women who tapped into the dark hilariousness of life. Subsequent generations of writers are indebted to her.

KB: Speaking of Plath, have you ever read Red Comet, Heather Clark’s biography from 2020?

BS: Yeah, I loved it. I’ve read it multiple times. It’s not exactly uplifting, but it is my comfort read. When I’m writing, I can't read fiction, because I'm scared that I'm going to copy it. But I can read biography.

Red Comet is such an important reclamation of Plath’s history and legacy. There’s a quote where Plath says, “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect.” She was an intellectual force and an artist above all else. And Heather Clark really understood that.

It's shocking how much of that “crazy sad girl” rhetoric continues in terms of how women's fiction is discussed. All these trends: unhinged, hot mess, hot girls, all this stuff. I hate to be so serious about it, because I know I know a lot of people love those labels and find them fun. I just find that I'm so offended by them.

KB: Even Moshfegh got a bit lost in that. I had a similar experience with her writing where it felt permission-giving, but then it was quickly rebranded and pathologized.

BS: Imagine having a category for “hot men with depression.” It just does not get done. There’s a lot of people at fault for it, including editors and marketing departments. They’re leaning into that whole so hot and messy thing. How are we talking about this about literature? Literature doesn't always have to be serious, but you can't universally sweep all contemporary women's literature under the hot, messy millennial rug, right? Surely there’s more to it than that? 

KB: How do you think about Daphne in terms of her behavior? If we're not going to talk about her as a hot mess, crazy, or unhinged—how would you talk about what's going on with her?

BS: It’s always just more interesting to be precise characters rather than create umbrella terms for all complex women. She’s suffering but she's also insufferable. She has an incredibly superior attitude towards people. She’s snobby. She basks in her privilege, but she resents it. If men on the street catcall her, she's really annoyed. But if they don't look at her, she's like, why aren't you looking at me? She's really contradictory. And Daphne has this kind of addictive, compulsive behavior. Which makes her very self-centered. On the one hand, she can be blamed for that. On the other hand, it's just actually a kind of symptom of illness where you're not thinking about community, about other people, you're thinking about your version of the next hit. But she’s also self-deprecating, and she laughs at herself. This is a character who is more aware than the reader of everything negative that I've just listed about her. She preempts criticism by being her own worst critic. Which is also a form of manipulation! Daphne’s smart. 

KB: She’s also young. That time in a person’s life (mid-20s) can be a very self-centered. They don't have kids, but they are too old to be in their parents’ care full-time. They’re trying to figure out who they’re going to be.

BS: That is a narcissistic age, but also people that age are encouraged to be like that. If you think about the pseudo-therapeutic language around self-care, for example: you do you, me time, establishing boundaries. It's not that these things are bad, but they are individualistic. Daphne's of the millennial age, and she has been thrown back onto her individuality constantly. That’s the god she worships: her individuality, her sense of self, her self-esteem, her self-respect. She's obsessed with it. But it also this obsession that causes her so much suffering.

KB Speaking of millennial life—the dating apps. Berlin depicts not only dating profiles, but also Daphne’s system for classifying the men she finds on the apps. She comes up with eight categories, the first of which is “Readers of The Little Prince.” How did you go about writing those sections?

BS: I did extensive fieldwork. Serious ethnographic research. I went on the apps, and I swiped. The Readers of the Little Prince category is a real phenomenon, which I still see on the apps to this day. There's nothing wrong with that book. It's just such a weirdly specific thing that someone wants to convey about themselves. It’s kind of existential but it's also so short. So it's the ultimate I'm a clever boy and I've done my homework book. That [the dating apps section] is a part of Berlin I'm really confident about. I laugh every time I read it. Now people always ask me what category they belong to.  

KB: I want to talk about the character of Richard Grausam. He is cast as Daphne’s potential stalker, and he is such a specific type. How did you write Richard? What inspired him?

BS: When I was growing up, I thought that good and evil would be extreme polar opposites. If there was going to be a bad guy, he was going to be like Dracula. Dark cloak, pointed teeth. It would be obvious that he was evil. And what I found interesting—and difficult—as I grew up, is that everything is nuanced. Most people's experience of stalking or harassment is not Dracula showing up to their house with a big crowd that can testify to overt displays of aggression. And that was what was interesting about Grausam. He is threatening, but he also has moments being vulnerable or pathetic. You can feel sorry for him. Bad people are not walking around like: I'm a villain, I'm a villain, I'm a bad person. They’re complex. 

Grausam was inspired by my own experiences with predatory men who were never pure monsters. They were always weak and vulnerable in their own way and they were still scary. So often women are left in these situations wondering: Is it that bad? Should I be scared? Was what happened that bad? Is if this unsafe? People occupy that murky, uncomfortable space between benignly irritating and scary. And that's what I wanted to be stuck in. It's a form of disorientation, because the reader is in the same position of doubt. How scared should Daphne be of this person? 

KB: How did you play with and subvert thriller tropes while writing Berlin?

BS: I didn't set out to write a thriller; I set out to write a character who thinks her life is a thriller. Daphne is part of a generation that has absorbed a lot of true crime. She had read a lot of fiction. She longs for epicness, even if that epicness is darkness. 

The thriller dimension came through the atmosphere and the details. What the character pays attention to can make a benign scene really scary, even if nothing dramatic is happening. I thought a lot about how I was going to use language: what images, what metaphors, etc. This again was inspired by Plath. She wrote a poem, “Cut,” about slicing her thumb while cutting onions, and it reads like a gothic thriller. She was able to kind of tap into the somber cadence of domestic life and everyday things in a way that is a particular strength of women's literature. When men are fighting battles, or wrestling or dueling or whatever it is they do, they don’t need to write gothic horror about wallpaper or create a thriller atmosphere in the kitchen. 

The pretentious answer is that Berlin is an existential thriller--a story about someone grappling with self-knowledge—which sounds not very interesting. But the stakes are very high, the stakes of self-knowledge for Daphne are really high because it involves identifying various threats, external or internal. She needs to figure out what they are in order to save herself. 

KB: What was the easiest part of writing the book and what was the hardest?

BS: Developing Daphne's voice was the first thing that came to me. I immediately knew how she would react to a situation. And even now I feel like I could write in her voice. The plot was harder, because I was creating a lot of suspense from the beginning but I didn’t really know what was going to happen, or what all the scary foreshadowing was about. I needed help from my editor, who gave me that support to make the ending satisfying. Suspense is a promise you're making to the reader and you have to deliver it. 

KB: Are you working on a follow-up?

BS: I am working on a psychological thriller. It’s more of a morality story than Berlin. It’s about how one could get into a position where one does something very bad. And how often those kind of bad actions are not the result of Satanic will, but an accumulation of small weaknesses and petty, selfish moments, which can lead to a terrible thing happening. 

KB: Are you reading anything that you're excited about? 

BS: When I'm writing, I try to go back in time and not read something that's part of the immediate literary discourse. Because I'm moving to Mississippi, I'm reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury. Absalom, Absalom! Not easy reading, but rewarding. 

In terms of contemporary stuff, I read Brandon Taylor’s short story collection, Filthy Animals, recently. I find him really exciting. I also recently finished Your Show by Ashley Hickson-Lovence, about Uriah Rennie, the first black referee in the Premier League. Football (soccer) is an important theme in my next novel, and I found Your Show to be a great model for sports writing. 

Bea Setton was born in Paris to Franco-British parents and has lived in the US, Colombia, Belgium, Germany, and the UK. She holds an MPhil in Philosophy and Theology from Cambridge University, and she is about to start an MFA at the University of Mississippi. On top of the success of her first novel Berlin, Bea’s critical and creative writing has appeared in outlets such as The Irish Times and Female First. Find her at beasetton.com and @beasetton.