But it is helpful to write without pressure, without thinking about publishing-I think it might be hard to fully disappear into the writing if you’re worrying about how it will be received.Īs I remember it, Lorrie mostly shared her impressions of my work, rather than direct advice. Writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world. Which makes me want to shake myself, now. I had to let go of some destructive thoughts-my fear that writing about teenage girls wasn’t serious, for one-before I could commit fully. Even when it wasn’t my primary project, I kept coming back to it. When I started this book, I never imagined that it would become my first novel. Rumpus: Do you think it helps to have less pressure on the material as you begin writing something? And did Lorrie Moore give you any advice as you continued writing, regarding plot?īuntin: In my case, it did. She encouraged me to work on Marlena, and after that I picked up a lot of steam-I think I had a finished draft a little less than two years later, though I essentially rewrote it after it sold in summer 2015. She looked at both projects and was like, this one (the titled fragments novel) has zero plot.

I also brought what I had of what would become Marlena.

I brought my “serious” novel, about 150 pages of titled fragments, almost a collection of prose poems, to my first meeting with Lorrie Moore, my advisor and one of my favorite writers. I didn’t start working on Marlena for real until my thesis semester at grad school in 2013. Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year-I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan.īuntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time. Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature , and One Teen Story, among other publications.

Julie buntin