Can you tell us a little about how she arrived on the page? Mona, the main character, walks a knife’s edge between keeping it together and falling into a very dark place psychologically. “Yoko and Yoko,” along with the other sections, started as long short stories that I wrote and workshopped in grad school. But the book endured a lot of radical surgery in the five years before I sent it to Mike. The only structural editing we did was to lop off twenty pages at the end. My editor, Mike Levine, kept the structure of the book pretty much as is, and I’m very grateful to him for that. How did you decide to structure your book into its four sections, “Hole,” “Yoko and Yoko,” “Henry and Zoe” and “Betty”? Disgusting partly because she’s a cleaning lady, and his face is an angry, overworked drawing because that’s the sort of art she makes in her spare time, and because I used to be both of those things-a cleaning lady and a failed visual artist-I gave Mona a lot of the images I’d been carrying around for years. I can write dialogue all day long, but thoughts? No, thanks. I was also searching for ways to reveal her as a character without spending too much time in her head, which has never been my strength as a writer. She’s a cleaning lady, but she’s also a visual artist, so I wanted a lot of the imagery and descriptions to reflect those things. I tried to keep the point of view as close to Mona as possible. “Pretend I’m Dead”’s droll tone and sly humor drew me in immediately, for example, “His hair was a long angry scribble in need of hot oil treatment, his face an overworked drawing with too many wrinkles…” Do these images appear on the page mostly intact or do you hone them as you go?
In general, I would say the fiction writers who’ve influenced me most are Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill, Mona Simpson, Aimee Bender, Jennifer Egan and Joy Williams, whose recent story in The New Yorker I read five times. Andrew Sean Greer, a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine forced us to memorize and recite poetry in our fiction workshop, which was slightly annoying at the time but turned out to be a great and memorable exercise. His voice is still inside me, twenty years later. In my early twenties I was obsessed with Steven Jesse Bernstein, another suicidal but much less famous poet, whose spoken-word album “Prison” I listened to every day for a solid year. Although, to be honest, I was less interested in their poetry and more interested in their diaries and letters.
I don’t write poetry, but I was certainly influenced by it, especially as a teenager. Do you also write poetry? And who are some of the writers who have most influenced your work? There is such creative use of language in your novel that I felt as if I was reading fiction written by a poet. Wherever she goes, she always manages to meet a number of characters as memorable as she herself. The novel’s four sections all focus on Mona, a young woman whose adventures take her to places such as Lowell, Massachusetts and a small New Mexico town near Taos.
#I am pretending that i am dead full
It’s full of brilliant language and many instances of laugh-out-loud, frequently self-mocking humor. Jen Beagin’s novel “Pretend I’m Dead” is an enviably accomplished debut.
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