Reflections of a BookEnds Selection Committee Reader

Tips on applying to BookEnds

2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier reflects on serving the other side of the BookEnds process.

I once attended a writing conference where an agent held up a manila envelope stuffed with a thick manuscript. “This is how much time you’ll have to get an agent’s attention,” he told the crowd, and lifted the first page a few inches, just enough to read the opening paragraph. He paused, then released the page, which slid back down into the envelope. He flung the whole thing aside with a flourish.

A BookEnds applicant does not get the manila envelope treatment. I know, because I spent much of the winter reading manuscripts from the first page to the last. Each manuscript is read by several people, including alums, all of whom are experienced readers. There isn’t a checklist or list of attributes we’re supposed to flag; reading is a subjective experience. My approach was to note the strengths and weaknesses in each manuscript, consider potential fixes for the problems I saw, and determine whether those issues could be resolved via BookEnds’ revision process. 

As a writer, it was enormously instructive to read lots of “almost there” manuscripts because it underscored some key elements that make stories work, even when they’re not yet ready for publication. I also found myself surprised (and comforted) at some­ of the things that landed a story in my YES pile, even when the manuscript had significant problems. 

So, as both a reader and writer, here are my takeaways. 

Character Matters

The characters populating the manuscripts I read were as varied as thumbprints. The ones that grabbed me were conflicted, inside and out. It didn’t matter that their arc wasn’t fully fleshed out, as long as they had personality and were flawed.

Another key element in strong drafts was a protagonist with agency. Passive protagonists who were like passengers in a car, watching their worlds go by, came off as underdeveloped. Characters who grabbed the wheel— even when they drove off in the wrong direction—crackled.

Characters with agency—who acted—shaped the story. In contrast, when the writer was the puppet master, marching hollow characters through a carefully constructed plot, things fell flat. I’m all too familiar with this problem in my own writing, which occurs when I don’t know my characters well enough yet and/ or I’m clinging to plot elements I’ve painstakingly constructed. A manuscript with a passive protagonist was a sign that a writer still had work to do.

Novel Writing 101 tells us that a protagonist must want something, and there must be obstacles—external and internal—standing in their way. But if a protagonist’s goal was still fuzzy, that wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. Sometimes, there was a tiny seed in a character’s backstory that had yet to blossom into a full-fledged inner conflict, but I could see the potential was there. I know from experience that figuring out a character’s desire can come quite late in the process.

Plot vs. Sensibility

We’ve all heard about bestselling novels that are “propulsive,” where every event causes another, like cascading dominos.

Reading the application manuscripts, I assumed that causality between events would be essential. Instead, I found that what mattered more than tight plotting was the writer’s sensibility and aesthetics, and whether I felt held by the worldview the author was creating.  

At the start of my BookEnds year, I presented the events of my story to the cohort. “And then X happened, and then Y, and meanwhile Z was happening over here….” I understood immediately that the story was not propulsive. Even though the events were connected in my mind, they hadn’t yet been developed to be causal. 

A propulsive narrative can’t be established until a writer homes in on character motivation, which requires time. My BookEnds year offered me the space to work on this critical element in my book, while helping me cultivate the flexibility to restructure my narrative in order to make it more propulsive.

Generosity

There is a subjective You-Know-It-When-You-Feel-It quality to a manuscript, something  BookEnds director Susan Merrell called out as “generous.” A generous story is one that feels written for the reader. 

Heavy-handed manuscripts that were trying to make a point didn’t come across as generous. Neither did those that seemed preoccupied with showing off the writer’s cleverness. Those drafts are for the writer. Sometimes, writers need to work through a few rounds before they can just tell a good story.

Manuscripts that obfuscated and withheld necessary information in an attempt to create “mystery” usually left me feeling frustrated. Similarly tiring was a parade of information that showcased a writer’s research, when it didn’t connect directly to the story. I have a note over my desk with WOO THE READER in all caps, to remind me that a good book entices readers, giving them enough—but just enough—to keep them turning pages.

When I was reading manuscripts with that generous quality, the story’s problems didn’t trip me up so much. Plot holes didn’t bother me, nor did wonky timelines. It wasn’t a deal-breaker when a book hadn’t quite found its structure. Even an unanswered central question like What is this story really about? didn’t disqualify a manuscript. In my own as-yet-unpublished novel, I have struggled with those big picture questions, and it was reassuring to remember that answering those questions is simply part of the novel-writing process.

There’s far more to this experience as a BookEnds reader; importantly, there were terrific manuscripts that strayed outside my subjective guidelines. Being open to what was in front of me, willing to go for the ride the writer was taking me on, was the most delicious part of the process. As long as the story had energy, if there was a beating heart in there, that was enough to carry me through. All other issues seemed workable. After all, writing is revision. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Juxtaprose, on the San Francisco NPR station, as well as in fifteen anthologies. She co-directed the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which aired on PBS.  She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and was a ‘22-23 BookEnds Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California, and is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism. More about Suzanne on her website: https://suzannelafetra.com.

 

 

 

When Things Fall Apart: The Pod as Foundation

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2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier reflects on working with her BookEnds pod.

Writing a novel is such a long, strange process. The non-writers in my life tilt their baffled heads in pity: why go through all that? At least at BookEnds, we don’t have to do it alone.

During my first BookEnds residency, we were sharing our outlines, and it was suddenly painfully obvious that my manuscript had major issues. I came away from my outline presentation and discussion with a task list that seemed insurmountable. The novel lacked focus. It needed a single protagonist, and it had to be told from the point of view of the deeply dysfunctional business-owning family at the center of the story. The novel I had submitted had twelve different point-of-view characters, including a prison warden, a nun, a nine-year-old boy, and a drug kingpin, in addition to the entrepreneurial Fisher family. Furthermore, I had constructed a complicated Rubik’s Cube-like plot that locked the story into place, and it seemed to me that to disassemble any one section meant the whole thing would crumble. 

I felt crushed. The story over which I’d labored for so long, the story I believed was nearly finished, had to be taken down to the studs. “I’m open to making changes,” I said to my pod, Rose Afriyie and Katie Kalahan, “as long as I can do so without completely blowing up the plot. Ideas welcomed.” They commiserated and made encouraging cooing sounds. I knew I was in good hands because they didn’t laugh in my face. Instead, they suggested I reach out to the program co-director, Susie Merrell, who reassured me. “Stop worrying and start writing,” she said, and explained that the people who were most successful in the program were those who didn’t cling to previous versions of their work. She gave me an assignment: Write 20 pages, by Thursday, every week. Messy, vomitous, rambling pages and I shouldn’t worry one bit about the plot or where things started or ended. “Just write,” she said. 

So, I wrote twenty pages that week. And vomitous they were. I did the same thing the next week, and the next, writing as fast as I could from the Fisher family’s point of view, exploring without conscious thought to the sequence or propulsivity or humor or conflict or stakes. Characters mostly ruminated and remembered and wandered. I wrote of Steven’s recollection of his mother peeling an orange, Amanda’s memory of playing Mousetrap as a kid. 

I was reluctant to share the pages at first, because I worried all those memories and ruminations were just wheel-spinning. But my pod said that these set pieces, memories, and deeper dives into the psyches of my characters added context and tension. Rose told me that she fell in love with Adam the moment he shoved a carving knife into the Christmas goose’s back. Katie told me that it crackled when the grandmother was in the room. They loved the new omniscient perspective that made the story feel epic. They reminded me that readers cared about what happened that terrible Halloween fifteen years ago; they wanted to know how in the world a mother’s relationship with her son became so fraught.  

For eight weeks I generated 1000 words a day and the story of the Fisher family began to emerge. I made a list of things my characters could do instead of ruminating and remembering: sneak around, threaten one another, plant a kiss on a stranger, have a drink after ten years of sobriety. I went back through the vignettes and added action, and some of those snippets became actual scenes. But was it a book? I worried I wasn’t moving the story forward. 

My pod showed me that I was, in fact, putting stakes in the ground. The scenes began to line up in surprising ways. Suddenly, they had so many questions: Will Corinna die? Will Amanda’s lie be exposed? How far will Adam go to get what he believes is his? 

Katie assured me that writing “forward” might look like writing backwards sometimes, or downwards or inwards. Rose reminded me that there was no shortcut; writing a novel takes time. We brainstormed plot ideas for all of our books, and talked about trusting ourselves, diving into the depths, and nurturing our spirits while doing the emotionally charged work of novel-writing. They cheered me on. 

Within a few months, I had completed a new draft. Now the novel told the story of the Fishers and their family business. Many characters and elements from the earlier draft remained, but now there was a clear plot line, narrative thrust, and an emotional heartbeat. 

Without the support of writers to read, cheer, coach and commiserate, I might have given up when I realized I had to smash my manuscript to smithereens. But my pod helped me understand that when things fall apart, that’s just part of the revision process. It’s a sign of progress. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Juxtaprose, on the San Francisco NPR station, as well as in fifteen anthologies. She co-directed the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which aired on PBS.  She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and was a ‘22-23 BookEnds Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California, and is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism. More about Suzanne on her website: https://suzannelafetra.com.

Pod Rewards: Writer Geeks, Unite!

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2023 Fellow Craig Holt reflects on working with his BookEnds pod. 

I have always been impressed with the way the writing community supports its own. Whether it’s online or in flesh and blood, we recommend each other’s books to friends, review one another’s books, celebrate each other’s successes, and listen to each other lament the inevitable slowdowns and five-car collisions on the long and winding road to a finished draft. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent critiquing each other’s work. 

I’ve had the good fortune to participate in some excellent writers’ groups and I have exchanged plenty of pages with wonderful peers in my MFA program. I even have a coven of reliable beta readers in my life. I’m grateful to all of them. But as a novelist I always wished I could exchange entire books with other authors and take a deep dive into each other’s revisions over the course of months. I always assumed that such a dedicated gaggle of authors would be difficult to come by and impossible to sustain. How would you structure it? Who has the time? Where do you find peers generous enough to devote that much time to other people’s projects? 

The answer, for me, was BookEnds. 

BookEnds was – and continues to be – an exceptional learning experience anchored by an unprecedented level of mutual support between writers.

First of all, there is the question of scale. Instead of going over ten or twenty pages of one person’s work every few weeks or once a month, my amazing podmates Miranda Shulman, Fae Engstrom and I started by reading each other’s entire manuscripts. We spent our first three meetings talking through our initial impressions and learning what the author was trying to achieve with the book. Thereafter, we gathered every week on Zoom, often for three hours or more per session, to go over one podling’s book. 

We started by addressing big picture issues and then worked our collective way over the course of six months down to line edits. We weren’t obligated to meet every week, but all three of us had been encouraged to essentially run our novels through a woodchipper and reshape the splintery, resinous hash into a new draft. Having read each other’s manuscripts in their entirety, we were eager to see each other’s stories reborn. 

But there was more to it than just the quantity of feedback. There was also the quality. I was struck by the depth of insight Miranda and Fae brought to my work. They are experienced authors and careful readers, and they came to every session with a wealth of ideas, many of which surprised me. Their feedback came from a place of real understanding of my characters, and an enthusiasm for helping me create the story I had intended to write. They were relentlessly honest and unflaggingly encouraging. Miranda and Fae put as much into my story as they did their own, and it was a pleasure to do the same for them. 

Before the program began, I worried that spending so much time on other people’s books would wear me out. Instead, working on Miranda and Fae’s stories energized me. In thinking critically about their work I gained insight into my own story, and their remarkable progress inspired me to slog onward. 

Even after we began work with our mentors (for more on that happy topic, take a look at Daisy Alpert Florin’s excellent post on working with program director Susan Scarf Merrell, among many other posts on working with mentors) our group continued to meet regularly. We continued to go over pages, but we also touched base to talk through slowdowns in our plots or float ideas for alternate narrative routes. Sometimes we got together to listen as one or the other of us lamented being blindsided by self-doubt or just shook our tiny fists at the literary sky. We guided each other to our BookEnds destination, and beyond. 

Since completing the program last June, we’ve continued to meet. We’ve gone through another round of edits on each other’s books, and we share notes on the good and humbling process of querying. We remain invested in each other and in our fellow BookEnders. And as part of the active and encouraging BookEnds Alumni group, our support network continues to grow. There is sustenance there. Fuel for the long journey. So, yes, BookEnds helped me improve my book. Just as importantly, it expanded and strengthened my writing family.

People talk a lot about how solitary the writing life can be, but BookEnds showed me that being a part of the writing community is about more than craft. Investing in other writers and their work can make the process a little bit less painful and a lot more rewarding. 

Craig Holt’s work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He graduated from the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program and, more recently, from the BookEnds, where he worked with program co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Creating Compelling Characters with Eve Gleichman

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2023 Fellow Katie Kalahan discusses their work with BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman, whose forthcoming novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, co-authored with Laura Blackett) is available for pre-order now. 

Sometimes what’s obvious to outsiders is invisible to us. In my BookEnds novel The Flicker, narrator Ida becomes romantically and professionally entangled with Lolo, who might or might not actually care about Ida. Early readers, including my BookEnds podmates, wondered why Ida puts up with and even likes Lolo. 

The question of “why Lolo?” was raised once more when I was paired with mentor Eve Gleichman, co-author of The Very Nice Box (Harper Perennial). Early on, Eve identified one of the core challenges of my novel: how to build tension in a romantic relationship that savvy readers will realize is never going to work. Eve asked me more than once why my narrator liked the love interest, saying, “Is it just because she’s hot?”

Readers tend to like Ida, and since Lolo doesn’t treat Ida particularly well, readers tend to not like Lolo. So how could I make Lolo compelling to my sweet readers who want to step into the novel and save Ida? According to Eve, “being hot” isn’t enough. Eve wanted to be compelled by Lolo the same way that Ida is. They wanted to get it, to understand why Ida keeps returning to Lolo. They wanted to fall in love with Lolo, as a reader, and then have their heart broken. 

Picture me, grumpy in the general direction of this feedback. When I get grumpy about feedback, often it’s because I haven’t done a good enough job (yet!) of teaching my readers how to read my book, leading them in the directions I want to lead them, and being a trusted guide through the world of my novel. 

Eve counseled me to look at novels that create compelling, complicated characters well, including We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart, and The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, pointing out that in both of these novels, the power imbalance which is in the love interest’s favor at the outset shifts to the narrator by the end. When the power balance shifts, the narrator can see the situation more clearly, and, now holding power, is no longer entranced. 

Likewise, in Eve’s novel The Very Nice Box, co-written with Laura Blackett, the narrator also gets sucked in by someone who turns out to be both less and more than what they originally presented. How, Eve asked me, might I do this in my novel? They asked me the following questions over our sessions, which I copied down close to verbatim:

  • What is it about Lolo that is so captivating to Ida?
  • Why does Ida continue to pursue Lolo?
  • What is Ida getting from Lolo?
  • Why wouldn’t Ida leave? 
  • What does Ida like about being in this situation with Lolo?
  • Why doesn’t Ida demand more from Lolo?

Eve also guided me to commit to telling the story from start to finish, reorganizing the book from the fragmented narrative I had been trying to use into a chronological one. Though seemingly unrelated to making Lolo more compelling (but not less hot), shifting to a chronological structure was key in deepening Lolo’s character. The new structure forced me to slow down, which forced me to spend more time with Lolo. As I moved through revision in this new structure, I considered how the characters moved between scenes and how each interaction led to the next. I had to trust that I could hold the reader’s attention. 

I realized that I had been jumping around in the narrative because I was worried that my readers would get bored if I went step by step. Eve assured me that my readers would not get bored, and that I could linger in scenes and linger in specificity. By telling the story chronologically, I was able to explore more fully the weirdness and awkwardness and fits and starts of their romance. I made Lolo weirder, their interactions more awkward. I lingered in the moments of friction between Lolo and Ida. This way, readers discover Lolo as the narrator discovers Lolo.

As writers, we teach readers how to read our novels. The question “why Lolo?” that I had been receiving from readers like Eve was not the question that I wanted my readers to ask. So, in revising my novel under Eve’s mentorship, I explored my own questions about the narrative, in hopes that readers would join me in asking the same questions. When Ida finds herself unaccountably drawn to Lolo, what is it about their dynamic that feels familiar? What feels exciting? How do people behave when they feel as though they don’t have choices? What do we do when we get exactly what we think we want?

Perhaps Lolo is fascinating in the same way that grifters or cult leaders are fascinating. From the outside it’s easy to say that we wouldn’t fall for it, but from the inside it looks like the only obvious choice. To bring readers to the inside with Ida, I’ve found that making the novel chronologically structured allows me to reveal information more intentionally. Although readers will naturally have more distance and perspective than the narrator, by keeping what the reader knows and what the narrator knows more closely aligned, the reader’s experience of Lolo will more closely track to Ida’s experience of Lolo. 

As I continue my revision process now, the question I am facing is: how far am I willing to go? In order to make Lolo break hearts, first I have to make her someone readers might fall in love with. It’s funny, I have to do to readers what Lolo is doing to Ida, drawing her in before she can realize who Lolo truly is. 

My yearlong BookEnds fellowship and mentorship with Eve Gleichman built my confidence, helping me understand that I am sculpting an experience for my readers, and that storytelling includes more than a splash of manipulation. I’m writing a book about two characters who are, in their own ways, manipulative. As I work to illustrate that in the world of my novel, I am coming to terms with the understanding that I may need to use some of their tools in order to tell their story. 

Katie Kalahan (she/they) has a 2021 MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a 2013 BFA in Printmaking/Drawing and English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. Katie was a 2022-2023 BookEnds fellow at Stony Brook University. Their work is published in Crosscut, Witness, and Split Lip, among others.

Fall News Round-Up

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Please join us to learn more about the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at our annual Open House on Monday, October 16, 2023, 4-5 pm EST. Register here!

Following the publication of several novels last year, 2023 has seen the publication of two BookEnds novels: Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt) was a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion and an Alma Award nominee. Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane) has been received to high critical praise, most recently from Library Journal in an audio book review: “An unnerving psychological suspense about compulsion and corruption.” 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2, 2024) 
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, July 2024)
  • Giano Cromley’s American Mythology (Doubleday, Summer 2025)

This coming spring, we will announce BookEnds BookClub events for Nora’s and Joselyn’s books, along with an event for BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman’s new co-authored novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, May 2024). In the meantime, you can always watch our first book club events here, featuring mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden (longlisted for the Booker Prize), in conversation with his BookEnds mentee Caitlin Mullen; Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year, in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell; and Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line, in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother. 

BookEnders are busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; the alumni meetings and Alumni Visiting Writers events, this fall featuring Lucy Ives, Melissa Chadburn, and Laura Warrell; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. 

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out our co-founding Director Meg Wolitzer as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Line Editing with Christina Baker Kline

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2023 Fellow Stefani Nellen talks about working with one of our longtime BookEnds mentors. 

My novel THE DREAM THIEF is about a Dutch scientist who falsifies data and is consumed by his fraud. When I came into BookEnds, the manuscript started too early—about five chapters too early, as program director Susie Merrell helpfully pointed out. I ended up rewriting the entire book, Lauren Groff-style. My guess is that, while this approach hurt my hands and wrists, it saved me a lot of time in the long run.  

When I began working with my mentor Christina Baker Kline in the second half of the BookEnds year, she noted things were becoming shaky in the later chapters. This is what will happen when you write a book in a hurry: fatigue takes its toll. Our first conversations focused on how to stick the landing and come up with the effortless mix of pain and exhilaration that allows a reader to make peace with the ending, no matter how open or pat, happy or sad. 

But the ending became an afterthought once Christina sent me an email about my style. The email was kind, clearly prompted by her fondness of my book and her ambition to make it better, but it was also an honest email: I tended to overwrite, some analogies were hard to follow, and metaphors meandered. In places, it was all too much, and nothing stood out anymore. “Do we need to see the fluffy yellow rag?” We would work on this, she said, making it sound like no big deal, which, to a pro writer, it presumably isn’t. 

To illustrate her comments on my writing, she’d line-edited the first chapter of my book. I read the email late at night in bed, and promptly suffered a case of panic. I’m incompetent, how awful, and to think people have looked at this with their eyes…

Rationality returned the next morning, when I processed Christina’s edits with the goal of understanding what she had done, and saw how much her small changes improved the text overall. 

At this point, I should point out that yes, I’m in the habit of revising my work. Extensively. From nixing timelines to eliminating identical paragraph beginnings, I’ve done it all. But I’d never thought of line-editing as a discrete stage in the editing process. Instead, I treated it like a necessary but boring task, to be finished as quickly as possible. 

Having worked as an editor, Christina told me she routinely edits her own work closely—and that the editors publishing her work appreciate her clean submissions. The word clean still stands out to me from this conversation. 

Imagining many happy editors in my future, I line-edited my book. Christina responded to the edits I sent her with praise, encouragement and meta-edits of her own; I picked through our layers of edits and inserted those that passed final muster into my manuscript. One by one. No shortcuts. I never trust reject/accept changes, but especially not this time. I wanted to get a feel for things, the changes under my fingertips.

My hands and wrists hurt again. It was brutal. It was a lot. And yet, when I was done, I saw my work and my task as a writer in a new way. I can’t edit my work the way an outside editor can, but I can make it clean(-er). 

We even had a little time left to work on the ending. 

Removing clunk, junk, and the evil word that wasn’t what I’d expected going into the mentorship term, but it was what I needed. I learned a new skill, gained insight and wisdom on the writing life from a seasoned novelist, and greatly improved my manuscript. 

Looking back, I’m thinking that my initial response to Christina’s editing email was related to the emphasis on brilliance and individuality of expression that is guiding both our appreciation of and our mentorship in the arts right now. And yes, both must be nurtured and respected. But the term with Christina reminded me of Teju Cole, who said: “Originality is important, but competence and expertise are more important. You can’t be an avantgarde violinist without being a violinist.” Line editing gives me the control to say exactly what I want, precisely what I mean. 

Stefani Nellen is a German psychologist who lives in the Netherlands and writes in English. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Glimmer Train, The Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She was awarded the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Fiction Prize, and had a story in the Masters Review Anthology, Vol IX (selected by Rick Bass). 

Summer News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels

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We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2024)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, Summer 2024)
  • Giano Cromley’s American Mythologies (Vintage/Anchor, Summer 2025)

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions and #1000wordsofsummer, the alumni meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog.

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!

The Thrill of the Unreliable: On Vanessa Cuti’s THE TIP LINE

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, May 24, featuring program alum Vanessa Cuti and her debut novel The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) in conversation with her cohort member Alison Fairbrother (author of The Catch, Random House, 2022), alum Nora Decter looks at Vanessa’s masterful narration. 

All first-person narrators are unreliable, I tell my students every semester, as the writing teachers of yore once told me. It’s a literary foregone conclusion: no one who tells their own story can be trusted. 

Still, it’s a quality I don’t think we laud enough in fiction, this unreliability, perhaps because it’s so universally human a trait we don’t recognize the skill involved in getting it on the page. 

Vanessa Cuti’s debut novel The Tip Line offers readers a daring example of the flexibility of first-person, calling to mind psychological thrillers heavy on the literary gravitas like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Death in Her Hands, whose first-person narrators are richly weird, the stories they tell all the more riveting for that weirdness. Maybe it was The Tip Line’s seaside setting, but I was also reminded of Ann Quin’s Berg, the so-called “working class Virginia Woolf”—something about the particular dark pitch Quin and Cuti give their subject matter. 

All of this to say that with The Tip Line, Cuti has given us the elements of a crime thriller (murdered sex workers, shady cops), added a marriage plot, and then filtered it through a consciousness that genuinely confounds expectations. At thirty years old, our first-person narrator Virginia Carey is unmarried and unemployed, a little behind on her life plan, as her mother would say. When she accepts a job at the local police headquarters, it seems she’s found a solution to both problems. But it’s not the conventional admin job Virginia expected—instead she’s answering a tip line, fielding calls mostly from people accusing their neighbors of being drug lords. Nor is it really a conventional place to find a husband, at least not the way Virginia goes about it. But the setting suits her nature: composed on the surface, with something secret brewing underneath. “Honestly,” she says, early in the book, “I only wanted to stop looking. I could not understand why it was so hard. And so, here we are. The police department.”

In another early passage Cuti gives us a key to understanding Virginia’s motives. Over several pages, Virginia explains her relationship history, how she ended up unmarried at thirty, concluding, “I was always trying to find that little place of darkness in a man. So that when we were quiet, lying in bed, just before or just after, our little darknesses matched up.” 

Virginia’s internal monologue is delivered in a frank, terse tone and we are brought deep into her daydreams, as she fantasizes first about Charlie, a detective, and then later Declan Brady, the chief of police. These fantasies fool us until we adjust to the frequency with which Virginia slips into them. “Not yet. Keep going,” she tells herself after spinning out a scene in her head between her and Charlie. “There were dozens of these,” she says, “These were just a few.”

Virginia is reliable in her unreliability, which is embodied by the increasingly questionable decisions she makes as the plot of the novel progresses. This is especially apparent in her dealings with Verona, the tip line caller who leads police to the bodies of the murdered women on the beach. Verona almost seems a shadow version of Virginia at the other end of the phone. They have in common their relative youth, beauty and the power found in that. But it’s Verona, a sex worker, who is honest, and Virginia who can’t really be trusted. In a remarkably written sequence of scenes, Virginia’s attention shifts from Charlie, the detective she is on the cusp of courting, to Brady, the police chief. Soon Virginia begins to suspect the killer Verona is describing sounds a lot like Brady, and she is drawn even closer to him. Readers remember the earlier passage about wanting a man whose dark spots matched her own. “Those spots—ticking constantly like quartz within us—would be carefully contained, encapsulated, by all the rest of the virtue surrounding them. We were normal people, good people, and we would keep each other’s dark spots from growing, from taking over. This is what relationships were for. What marriages were for.”

Neither the narrative nor Virginia are reliably what they seem. Yes, there are murdered sex workers, but the mystery of who kills them, like the real life Gilgo beach serial murders that inspired the plot, remains unsolved by the book’s end. Yes, Virginia wants a husband, but not for the conventional reasons her friends and family want her to find one. 

But for writers, The Tip Line offers a master class in unreliable narration. The way Cuti writes Virginia is, in the end, even more thrilling than the love affair or the dead girls on the beach. 

Nora Decter is a writer and teacher from Winnipeg, Canada. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook University and she was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her BookEnds novel What’s Not Mine is forthcoming from ECW Press in April 2024.

Girls with Feelings: On Daisy Alpert Florin’s MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR 

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, April 5, featuring program alum Daisy Alpert Florin and her debut novel MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (Holt, 2023) in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell, alum Rachel León considers the validation of reviews and the power of opening lines.

For many writers, to have our work raved about in The New York Times is a landmark feat, a universally-recognized indication of success. The BookEnds community was thrilled to see alum Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel My Last Innocent Year receive such laudatory coverage from reviewer Elisabeth Egan, who writes “My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.” 

My Last Innocent Year centers the protagonist, Isabel Rosen, during her final semester at a prestigious East Coast college as she falls into a relationship with her professor. Set in the late 90s against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, it’s atmospheric and beautiful, a smart and masterfully written novel that examines consent, the cost of our mistakes, and how we reckon with our past.

Egan points out how richly layered My Last Innocent Year is—the multiple threads that are woven throughout the story. And while, yes, the story itself is meticulously plotted, one of the things not noted is the attention to detail on the line level, attention we see from the novel’s very first line: 

“It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.”

This sentence does so much work. It establishes Isabel as the kind of conscientious narrator who wants to get this story right, yet admits the fallibility of her account. This is not a narrator who will manipulate the reader. She won’t lie or stretch the truth. But Isabel is relying on her memory to share her account, and memory is inherently flawed. 

The first line also sets up the opening scene, in which the facts of the events can be debated by readers. It’s clearly a nonconsensual sexual encounter; does that mean it’s rape? Zev could be described as a friend; can one be assaulted by a friend? The temporal distance from which Isabel narrates this story forces the reader to consider the limitations of how our culture talked about sexual assault and consent twenty-five years ago, and continues to debate it today. We live in a culture that still blames women victims of sexual assault for “asking for it” if they are wearing clothes that are tight or revealing, if they drink heavily around men, or if they go to a man’s bedroom, as Isabel does. So this one sentence situates the novel’s themes, from the very first line. 

From there the novel builds to a crescendo. My Last Innocent Year has gotten a lot of buzz for being a literary page-turner that prompts important cultural conversations. Its themes and smart craft choices make it a perfect book club novel, and The BookEnds Book Club event on April 5th one not to miss. 

But what ultimately makes My Last Innocent Year such an incredible success isn’t as easily measured. As Daisy told me in a mini-interview on my Substack, she wrote the book she wanted to read. She didn’t rush, she took the time she needed to write this remarkable novel. And in the end, that’s the greatest success we should all hope to achieve.  

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, BOMB Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. 

Spring News Round-Up: New Novels, Acclaim, and the BookEnds BookClub!

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The past months have seen the publication of several BookEnds novels to great acclaim: Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House), which was Selected as an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times and a Best New Book of the Week at People Magazine; Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville), winner of the Blue Moon Novel Award, a 2022 Great Group Read Selection by the Women’s National Book Association, and a 2022 Best Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses [clmp]; Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press); and most recently, Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023), a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion in February 2023. 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, April 18, 2023)
  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2024)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, Summer 2024)

We are also thrilled to announce the launch of the BookEnds BookClub!

  • Check out our inaugural event featuring Paul Harding and Caitlin Mullen, in conversation about Paul’s This Other Eden (Norton, 2023).
  • Daisy Alpert Florin will be in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell on April 5 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Daisy’s and Susie’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page. 
  • Vanessa Cuti will be in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother on May 24 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Vanessa’s and Alison’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page.

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions, the alumni meetings and author events, and giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!