Sarah Gerard: Author of "True Love" Discusses Navigating Through Love and Relationships In a Patriarchal, Capitalist Society
Desire, self-destruction, identity, loneliness gossip, and, yes, love are all at the forefront of Sarah Gerard’s new novel, True Love. This funny and dark story centers around Nina, a struggling writer and college drop-out who despite her impulsive and poor choices just wants to find love, personhood, and value among the many men she seeks some kind of relationship with. Her yearning for connection sheds light on the struggle we find in our current society of detachment as Gerard critiques our current climate with raw honestly and sharp prose.
Sarah spoke with us about navigating through love and relationships in a white-supremacist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, capitalist society, privilege and art, and creating the character of Nina in her latest novel, True Love.
Nina is a complex character for many reasons but mainly because she seems to have trouble exercising judgment for her own actions. This line intrigued me—“I watch myself doing things and I don’t know why. I don’t even recognize myself. I don’t know who this is inside my body.” This disconnect with the body, this feeling of being in a trance, reminded me of a sort of coping mechanism. A way to disassociate. I think that is very familiar to a lot of young people in our society. I know I have personally felt this way throughout my own life. Can you talk more about creating Nina and this trance-like state she finds herself in?
Early in the novel, Nina’s hypnotherapist says, “A trance shapes what we see and how we respond.” In other words, a trance is a lot like the closed world of a story. A character in a story has consistency when readers can make predictions about what they’re going to do—we feel as if we know them because we’re able to learn through observation that their behavior has a pattern. A core pattern of Nina’s is her tendency to act on impulse and lie, to avoid uncomfortable truths, such as: That she is hurting people, or someone doesn’t love her back, or someone has manipulated or deceived her, or someone is angry with her, and so on. What she really wants is to be loved, and she maintains the love delusion through certain of her choices; there is also an extent to which the trance maintains her behavior. Were Nina to change her behavior, the trance would be broken—and then, there would be no more novel.
Love is a complicated part of this novel as Nina feels an almost pathological need to be in a relationship even if she resents this about herself, or is annoyed at the type of men she keeps choosing. What made you want to explore this sort of compulsive relationship tendency that a lot of us find ourselves in? Why do you think some of us feel the need to always be coupled, even if those relationships are dysfunctional or toxic?
A question I wanted to explore in True Love is where we learn how to love, and how that might inform the way we act in relation to one another. One reading of the novel is that Nina’s parents’ divorce, and their life choices and parenting styles afterward, inform a lot of how she acts as an adult. The divorce left a gaping hole of need in Nina—we all have one, though they look different from person to person.
Another reading of the novel is that Nina’s enculturation in a white-supremacist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, capitalist society informs her behavior—she believes on some level that, if she isn’t married to a certain kind of man who can grant her personhood, and isn’t achieving in her chosen field at the level her culture deems “successful,” she isn’t self-actualized. She hasn’t yet learned to give that love to herself rather than seek it externally.
Yet another dimension of the novel concerns the type of men Nina couples with: each of them deploys a range of behaviors from “negging” and gaslighting, to sexual assault, and other kinds of physical coercion, intimidation, and violence. Women are taught to be caretakers, and Nina wants to be a compassionate, forgiving, supportive partner, as most of us do. She genuinely cares. Her caring nature makes her an easy target and source of mothering for some people who would want to take advantage.
Nina is very much a part of the gig economy, working long hours, and earning low wages. I liked how you address this, that you weren’t afraid to get real about money and work. I find it refreshing when writers are willing to take on the issues of our capitalist society, especially in this time of freelance and gig work, which many writers and artists are finding is the only way to stay afloat. Can you speak a little more about this? Why was it important for you to bring this into your story? Do you find that we as a society don’t like to talk about money?
I benefit from capitalism as a white, middle class, cisgender woman with heterosexual parents who are married, own their home, and paid for both of my college degrees. I’ve attempted to make my own way as an adult, working full time and in the gig economy, and due to the exploitative nature of capitalism which devalues art and labor, I have at times struggled to an extent that I, myself, considered soul-dimming.
It wasn’t a fraction of the struggle my Black and South Asian next-door neighbors in Brooklyn experienced, having lived it their whole lives, whereas I was spared a childhood of poverty and discrimination—was spared the scars that leaves. I was given a head start, and I had a windfall. I could move back home if I really needed to, or ask my parents to float me a hundred dollars for bills and groceries.
Nina works in the gig economy, but she is a white, college educated, cisgender, heterosexual woman, whom we glean also happens to be somewhat attractive, given her cadre of romantic partners. This story as it’s told is only possible because she meets these criteria. When she applies for certain jobs or gigs, her name alone is not a deterrent to someone calling her back. When she has a medical emergency, her father pays the bill.
Had Nina been Black, trans- or bigender, a foster child, an immigrant, disabled, or fallen under any other category of disenfranchised person in America, the focus of her attention, to state the obvious, would have been markedly different. She works in the gig economy because she has the option. She’s been taught that she’s entitled to pursue her art.
How long did it take you to write True Love?
About three years.
What does your writing process look like? Do you keep a specific routine when writing a novel?
This book went through many drafts; I was editing it right up until it went to print. But really, my process depends on what I’m writing. Every story has a way that it wants to get told. If there’s an aspect that holds true across genres, it’s that I make a big mess, then clean it up.
You teach a lot of craft seminars and writing workshops. What are some of your favorite craft subjects to teach? How do you think teaching has made you a better writer?
Reading with my students makes me a better writer; also, engaging with their practices. Seeing how they work and sharing ideas among us. I love teaching writing regardless of the subject on a given day, because my students are always wonderful—I’ve gotten to know each one of them in a personal way, and I stay in touch with them years after they leave my classroom. We construct and deconstruct stories together. There’s no better thing. I’m so lucky.
What have you been reading or listening to during this time of self-isolation? Any recommendations?
I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, but that’s changed recently. Now I’m on to Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction book Barracoon, about the last survivor of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Next up is some philosophy, for a book I’m writing, starting with Simone Weil and George Bachelard. I’ve also been watching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the documentary about Michelle McNamara’s book of the same title, documenting her search for the Golden State Killer. Listening to: Waxahatchee.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel Binary Star, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, and the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help it if We’re From Florida, and One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.
