Frances Badalamenti: On Autonomy, Drawing Inspiration From Real Life, Writing as an Existential Reckoning, and Her Book ‘Many Seasons’
Frances Badalamenti and I met in 2020, during the most isolated days of the Covid pandemic, in an online class taught by the author Sheila Heti. As part of the class, Fran and I were randomly paired to form our own writing group. We started meeting over Zoom from our retrospective homes, Fran in Portland, Oregon, me in Petaluma, California. It stuck. Four years later, we still meet regularly to share our work and commiserate about writing.
I feel lucky that I was paired with Fran out of the hundreds of possibilities in that class, because not only is she the coolest, but I found I really enjoy her writing. At the time, she’d already published her first novel, I Don’t Blame You, about a woman losing her mother during her own pregnancy, and was about to put out her second, Salad Days, about life in Portland in the 1990s and the complications of twenty-something romance. She was starting her third, Many Seasons (Buckman Publishing, 2024), about a woman balancing child-rearing and the struggles of marriage while trying to find time for creative work.
Fran drew on her own experiences when writing these works of fiction, which may be why Ana, the protagonist of all three novels, feels so real. In Many Seasons, we follow Ana through her daily life, which is filled with chores, caregiving, seeing friends, tending to her child, negotiating with her avoidant spouse, and trying to find the focus and time to write. Underneath these activities is the constant ebb and pull of emotions, as dissatisfaction, insecurity, humor, anxiety, and pleasure fill Ana’s hours, coloring and shaping her experiences. Ana is well aware of her privilege as a white, middle-class woman, yet she often feels caged by the roles this life affords her, especially as wife and mother. She’s conflicted that her work isn’t as culturally valued as her husband’s job, resentful she has to do all the caretaking, and frustrated that her need for freedom and creative fulfillment must constantly be put aside for other reasons. And always, there are the traumas of the past lingering in her memory and urging her on a journey toward healing.
It’s a lot for such a slim book, and yet reading Many Seasons feels intimate and friendly, like getting to ride along on someone’s day, to feel their challenges and struggles, and to nod and say, yes, exactly. Me too. I have also felt like that.
Joy Lanzendorfer: Before we get into the themes of Many Seasons, I’d love to hear about your writing process and if that has changed much since your last books. What is the same and what has changed?
Frances Badalamenti: My first two books taught me how to write a book. I’m a fully self-taught writer outside of some workshopping, so they were my canvas. During the time that I was working on those books, I was basically a householder and parent, which I dissected in Many Seasons. At that time, my job was to learn how to be a writer. I read a shit ton and studied craft. I would get my kid off to school, head to yoga, then sit my ass in a café and write for a few hours, stop at the grocery store, pick up the kid from school, get dinner going and repeat. I got two books and many other short pieces out of that immersion in writing, but it also was the result of a lot of privilege and the struggles that came out of not having a ton of autonomy because I chose artmaking over money-making. As you know, I teased out a lot of those tensions in Many Seasons.
The first book began as a memoir. But then when it came time to publish, I decided to change names, places, things like that, and called it a novel. When I was working on the second book, I really started adapting some new methods, experimenting with form, and learning how to utilize the fictional part of my writerly mind. That process felt very freeing, and I found my true voice and style as a writer. Once I started working on the third book, I was able to fully drop into the work and allowed myself to be more experimental. I learned how to use my personal and often very intimate experiences as the inspiration for material.
JL: I know this book is based on many facts about your life in Portland, but it’s also definitely fiction. Why write about your life through autofiction, instead of, say, a memoir?
FB: I came to writing through a more autofictional lens by accident and mainly because of some literary influences. When I was working on my first book, I was fully immersed in creative nonfiction, writing it, reading it, studying it. And then one day, I was reading a Ben Lerner story in bed and had this major aha moment about how writing could be. It felt like I was reading memoir, but I knew it was fictional and not in any kind of hybrid way. It blew my mind.
That piece became a launching pad for discovering other writers like Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Annie Erneaux, Kate Zambreno, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Garth Greenwell, Lucia Berlin, Yuko Tsushima and so on. Since then, I’ve been deep diving into autofiction. I continue to write through this lens, and I teach it as well. But I’ve recently dropped the term and now call it writing the self, because autofiction has become a loaded term. If we had a few hours of interview time, I would get into that, but all I will say is that I think something about the intimacy of it makes some people uncomfortable, so they call it lazy or lesser than straight fiction.
JL: When we were talking about this before, you made this terrific distinction between how you approach handling facts in memoir vs. autofiction or writing the self. You said with autofiction you write around the self and with memoir, you write through the self. Can you elaborate what you mean by that?
FB: I feel like when we are writing memoir or personal essay, we are going straight to the core of what we remember as truth. You’re not going to get it perfectly, but as a writer of creative nonfiction, you’re in a contract with the reader to write as you remember something.
On the flip side, even though autofictional material makes the reader believe what they are reading is truth, the writer is actually taking something from their personal experience and writing not in but around the truth. The truth is in there for sure, but unlike in proper fiction, you’re not crafting something out of nothing—you’re taking an experience and homing in on the emotional landscape.
JL: I really related to Ana’s conflict around work. She’s a wife doing unpaid labor around the house while her husband, who rarely helps out with their son and chores, is out doing the visible and “important” work of making money. He can check out while Ana keeps everything running around him. Ana is resentful of her obligations and guilty about her unearned privilege, but also frustrated because she really wants to be doing her own work, which is writing. It’s complicated and you lay it out so well. What made you want to write about work?
FB: I desperately needed a space to express my internal struggles around work and money. Before I had a child, I worked in advertising, and I could never quite settle into that career path. When I became a mother and because my spouse was able to financially support our family, I ended the toxic cubical misery. But then I started writing and after some time, I realized not only how hard it was to make money from writing, but how it was even harder to justify the importance of what I was doing. My work was seen as frivolous; in the book I think I call it “my cute little writing projects.”
Because my spouse made the money to support us as a family, he got to make the important decisions. And because of my lack of fiscal contribution, I ended up doing a majority of the householding and caregiving for the kid and the pets.
In the end, my spouse’s work has more fiscal value, so it has more cultural cred. It’s kind of a double-edged sword combined with the golden handcuffs that many people have a hard time understanding because it is so shrouded in privilege. As much as it might seem like I am writing straight from my personal experiences, I’m actually writing towards the universal struggle that many people experience when they enter a very specific relational dynamic.
JL: The book is full of moments that center on appearance, which felt very real to me. Ana and Drew will be low-key arguing in a restaurant, but when the waiter approaches, they both smile and pretend like nothing is wrong. When Ana is in a yoga class, she chants softly because she doesn’t want anyone to hear her. At a tea shop, she’s annoyed with a slow customer in line but pretends it didn’t bother her when the barista apologizes for the wait.
Everyone does things like this, but for Ana, the worry seems tied to how she’s seen by others. She says she “recognizes how people on the outside see her.” Why write about Ana’s focus on appearances in this way?
FB: You’re right, everyone does things like this, even though we might not want to admit it. I wanted to touch on this very nuanced, subtle layer of the human condition. In these areas of the book, Ana was at a point in her life when she was truly wrestling with her ego; there was a lot of tension brewing within her sense of self. She didn’t have a lot of confidence, but she would often present that she did, hence the smiles at the server and the tea shop patron. She knew that something wasn’t right and that’s why the reader gets to see this inner struggle in these scenes. Ana can see these flaws in a way that a lot of people never do.
I see this as waking up: Ana is deep in therapy and on something of a spiritual journey. This is one of the reasons I kept this narrative in third person, because although Ana is not wholly me (she’s just a part of me), I needed to see what I was personally going through from a distance. I hope that doesn’t sound too philosophical or esoteric. It was a true existential reckoning for me, and of course, for Ana.
JL: I’m curious about your family’s reaction to your fictionalizing them. Some people might assume that Drew is the same as your real husband, for example. Is that a concern for you, and what are the responsibilities of a writer when turning real-life details into fiction?
FB: I have an unspoken agreement with my husband that he won’t read my work, which benefits me as a writer, because I write around so much of my personal life, especially in this book. He’s not a reader nor is he a writer. But he’s a wonderful partner and a truly lovely person. He’s also a self-identifying avoidant male who has a lot of unearned privileges and this is what I write a lot about. But he’s not white, and Drew is a white man who’s an amalgam of a few of my partners combined with some of my friends’ partners. Drew is not my husband; I need to make that clear even though it feels like he is. Drew is an archetype of the privileged male graphic designer.
Like I tell my students, folks in my family aren’t my readers. This is not memoir. I think it’s all fair game, but if anyone had a problem with what I write about, I would absolutely be happy to talk about it.
JL: That’s interesting that your husband doesn’t read your work! Drew is also an “avoidant male,” and the book goes on to parse why he acts the way he does. Both Ana and Drew had hardscrabble childhoods and much of this book is their reckoning with the trauma of their upbringings. Or, rather, Ana is reckoning with that trauma by going to therapy and Drew is avoiding it through self-numbing, often with weed, which causes conflict. Why did you want to explore how lingering trauma plays into their relationship?
FB: I’m laughing because it sounds almost masochistic and exhausting to want to explore the push-and-pull of the classic anxious/avoidant couple. But that shit is pervasive as hell. Ana and Drew are the walking definition of the cis heteronormative couple that I’m way too familiar with: the Gen X, coastal elite progressive, upper middle socioeconomic combo platter. Now add in a generous dose of 1980s-era childhood neglect and you get the avoidant privileged man who makes good money and smokes weed to hide from feeling things, and the anxious-as-fuck woman who just wants to be respected and seen for all that she does.
I remember learning about attachment theory. I was blown away that there was legit terminology for these patterns. Nobody is perfect, we all have these personal and systemic flaws and yes, some of us also have earlier life traumas, but we all just want to be seen, especially in our intimate relationships.
Writing the story of Ana and Drew was a way to see the tension that exists between the person who turns toward the traumas and the person who runs away from the traumas. Ana did a great job by learning to accept Drew for who he is and what he’s capable of while recognizing that she has agency, and that if he cannot see her, she can see herself.
JL: Ana struggles with anxiety. Later in the book, she slips “into a state of panic.” This state, which is caused by her anxiety, is so physical—pounding heart, a sense of being disconnected, insomnia, shaking. Even these days, a lot of people don’t understand how physical mental health can be, and that can be in your entire body, not just your head. What were the challenges of writing about anxiety?
FB: If I wrote anything in this book from truly personal experience, it was the anxiety narrative. The facts that surround the anxiety might not be true, but the experience of the anxiety is true. I’d say the biggest challenge in exploring this part of Ana was having to physically relive some of those really hard moments in order to write the scenes.
What I never knew before the anxiety struck me down like a giant tidal wave was that mental illness can be so physically painful, as you noticed in reading Ana’s story. The physicality of this level of anxiety was unreal and it was exacerbated by the inability to get decent sleep. When you don’t sleep well over time, you’re fucked. And what I learned, and what Ana learned, was that this is how we must have felt as a kid, that the fear was buried deep in our nervous systems until something triggered a reaction (a perfect storm). All of this to say that it was hard to face what I believe is the hardest thing that I have ever been through, but it was also so helpful to relive it through Ana because it gave me a very specific perspective.
I could see Ana’s experiences with anxiety, and I could empathize with her on such a deep level, through a lens that I would never have been able to do for myself. It was a radical act of self-love to write that story.
JL: Many Seasons the last of a series—a triptych, I think you called it. The first book deals with Ana’s youth; in the second, she’s a young adult finding love; and the third is about her struggles as a wife and writer. Do you see revisiting Ana’s story sometime in the future, or are you moving onto other projects? What’s next for you?
FB: This series is definitely a triptych of working my way through writing the self. As writers, we often have to get through the story of our earlier lives in order to do our life’s work, and I feel that this is what these three books have been for me. But I also feel like my relationship with Ana has run its course. She was my muse and midwife and now it’s time to move on. I can take over from here.
I’m planning to take a crack at writing a book proposal for a hybrid book of personal narrative, narrative nonfiction, and craft. Some ideas have been percolating, which I plan to sketch out over the winter. It is based in and around this concept of writing the self. I also feel the pull to write about art, to see more art. Not necessarily art criticism, but more so in and around the emotional landscape of art and how it intersects with writing. Many Seasons ends with a scene where Ana and Drew go separate ways in Manhattan, both to separate museums/galleries, which is based on my personal desire to be autonomous and alone with the art. This was a crossroads for Ana: does she want freedom, or does she want stability? I don’t want to be alone, I just want to be alone with the art.
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Frances Badalamenti is the author of the novels I Don’t Blame You, Salad Days and Many Seasons. Her essays, stories and interviews can be found at The New Yorker, The Believer Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She teaches writing workshops and works individually as a mentor for writers.
Learn more at https://francesbadalamenti.com/
