Sam Cohen: On the Commoditization of Femininity, the Blurriness of Identify and Her New Short Story Collection, "Sarahland"
Named a most anticipated book of 2021 from Electric Literature, Cosmo, Paperback Paris, Oprah Magazine, and many more, Sarahland is Sam Cohen’s debut. This bold and wildly creative short story collection explores queer identity, relationships, and sexuality through multiple lenses, where each story contains a protagonist named Sarah. With pop culture, fairy tales, and even biblical references throughout Cohen's masterful and alive prose create a thought-provoking and exciting series of stories that crackle and pop off the page.
I spoke with Sam via email where she discussed where the idea for this collection came about, identity, the commoditization of femininity, beauty as what is alive, and her new short story collection, Sarahland.
I’d love to know what sparked the idea of creating a story collection with each protagonist named Sarah. Did it begin as one story or did you have the whole project in mind when beginning?
My friend Nikki Darling assigned me a piece in a collaborative project, The Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse. She told me that my horsegirl’s name was Sarah, and was 12 years old. This prompt became “All the Teenaged Sarahs.” Simultaneously, I was working on “Exorcism, or Eating My Twin,” where the characters are named Tegan and Sara(h). I really loved how the two stories spoke to one another—in terms of complicated identity formation under patriarchy, disidentification with/communication via pop culture, the voice of the young girl—and I felt sure that they were two pieces of something larger—a book! At first I thought it was a problem that both narrators were named Sarah, and couldn’t really be changed in either story. Then, I thought, what if I just took the name Sarah as a kind of generative constraint and followed wherever it might lead? This resonated with an idea I’d had previously, to write a story collection where all the protagonists shared a name. I wanted to speak to the blurriness of identity, the strangeness of cohering into a single self.
A lot of the women throughout this collection are aimless but seeking to transform themselves in some way or reinvent their lives. Why was this a topic you were interested in exploring through fiction?
I don’t look at them as aimless, but I do think that they’re often trying to move out–particularly the first character–of the milieu that they’re stuck in, they just don’t see how. I think that Naked Furniture Sarah makes a lot of decisions for herself but is also seeking something that she finds though another character: another world or set of possibilities. Exorcism Sarah is really determined, she has some real goals, even if they are misguided. I would say that some of the characters struggle with decision making. Lidia Yukanivich really brilliantly said to me in an event we had last week that she thought all the characters were running toward or away from something, and I think that’s true. I think that’s because it’s difficult to know who and how to be in this world. And that might be a millennial problem too, not knowing what constitutes a good life, an ethical life, what success looks like. Our boomer parents may have just sought to marry and find good paying jobs without any ethical quandary, but a lot of us struggle with not wanting to contribute to what Naked Furniture Sarah calls “The Grand Shit Pile,” which makes things a lot more complicated for us.
“Naked Furniture” was one of my favorite stories in this collection. I loved this tale of an English major turned sex worker. I’m interested to know the origin of that story.
I think one of the origins is that there are a lot of sex workers in literature and I think that’s always something that’s fascinated me–the character of the sex worker. And so like for the Sarah in this story, I once connected sex work to literature in a way that I’ve come to see as a bit romanticized.
English majors are often very idealistic people who are committed to rethinking narrative, questioning social constructs, and kind of reinventing how the world works while living a little bit in a fantasy. Leaving the space of academia can be a little difficult for people like that when they’re forced to find where they fit in the world. I have always been really interested in sex work as this sort of intersection of pleasure and sexuality. I also think in a way it’s a profession with a lot of ethical purity and that’s something that Naked Furniture Sarah says in that story: she doesn’t want to have to make anything or promote anything or reinstill harmful or false narratives.
So that might be why it made sense to me to connect the English major to sex work, but I’m more interested in the way that femininity is always commoditized. And this is a character who has decided that if femininity is going to be commoditized, it’s going to be commoditized on her own terms.
I was reading Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory while writing that story and there’s a lot of feminist thought that likens marriage to a kind of one-on-one sex work and claims that heterosexuality is transactional, or has been historically transactional, so I was interested in character that might push the limits of what that transactionality could look like.
In a recent review for Sarahland, the author of the review describes these stories as exploring “urgent mysteries, including why feminine and/or feminist utopias are always half-beautiful, half-grotesque.” I was taken with this in your work as well and would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
I think there’s always grotesqueness in beauty. Beauty is alive and moving and squelchy and viscous and fluidy. Beauty is not static nor is it plastic. Beauty is what’s alive and what’s alive always contains the abject.
What does a typical writing day look like for you? Do you keep a specific routine?
I try to record my dreams, whatever I can capture of them as soon as I wake up. Then I’ll make coffee and transition to writing as quickly as possible. I find writing terrifying and once the demands and interactions of the day take hold, it can feel impossible to approach the page. I try to bring the self that is as close as possible to the dreaming-self, and as far as possible from the self concerned with social reception, to my writing. I usually have a set amount of time that I write for, but this varies depending on where I am in a project. If I’m deep in a project, I’ll often go back later in the day and edit and tweak things, but I don’t demand this of myself.
Do you have a favorite Sarah? Or one story that you feel the closest to?
Several people have reached out to me specifically to say that Exorcism Sarah is their favorite Sarah and that always makes me happy because she’s the most abject, difficult, needy Sarah and the Sarah who’s trying to enact her will on others the most, and so it means a lot to me to see her embraced. But I’m not good at favorites in general and especially not with the Sarahs. They all represent aspects of myself and I feel close to all of them.
How long did it take you to write this collection?
I started the first couple stories in 2014, not knowing they were a book, and began seriously writing the book in late 2016. I finished the first draft in 2018, at which point I queried agents. I edited with my agent and then with my editor and handed in the final manuscript in 2020.
What are some other short story collections that you have read lately that you can recommend?
The Office of Historical Collections by Danielle Evans, Boy Oh Boy by Zachary Doss, Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. But my favorite story collections of all time are Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior and all of Kelly Link’s books.
Sam Cohen is the author of Sarahland, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette in 2021. Her fiction can be found in Fence, Diagram, as a chapbook on Birds of Lace, and others. She is the founding editor of the online journal YES FEMMES, the fiction editor of the chapbook publisher Gold Line Press, and the producer of Lambda LitFest. She is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.
