In Plum, Andy Anderegg introduces readers to J, an adolescent whose childhood and teenage years are filled with parental addiction and abuse. Told entirely in the second person, Anderegg’s novel is a gorgeous and heartbreaking standout. The ache leaps off the page and will live long in the minds of readers.
Anderegg’s debut comes after she won Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and was named a finalist for The Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press.
I chatted with the writer via Zoom about why she wrote Plum and what comes next.
Debutiful: I’ll start with the first thing people might notice about your book: it’s in the second person. Why?
Andy Anderegg: I’m working on an essay about that right now. When it started happening and the book started coming out in the second person, I was actually afraid. I felt like it can’t be like this. There’s no good way to write a book that anybody’s going to be able to endure. Sure. Lorrie Moore has that amazing short story “How to Become a Writer” is in the second person, I love it. Jamaica Kincaid has the short story “Girl,” which is in the second person, also very short. One of the things that the second person does that I love is the pace is very fast. It’s very intimate. But it’s also very distancing. It reminds me a lot of the voice of my own head and it gives the book an internal voice.
I think that also survivors of trauma use it as a distancing mechanism to recount what has happened to them in a way that it’s not actually them having to say, “This happened to me.”
In Leaving Neverland, one of Michael Jackson’s abuse victims uses the second person a lot. I watched that film as I was writing in the second person, and I connected with his use of the second person. There’s a point when he’s describing something that absolutely didn’t happen to me, like Michael Jackson taking him to the jewelry store and buying him a wedding ring, but I could feel the way that Michael Jackson’s singular gaze and adoration felt.
Debutiful: I’m always curious when writers write so deeply about something traumatic, how they handle it. How did you maintain a healthy mindset while writing Plum?
Anderegg: Honestly, no matter what I’m writing, I feel like a sense of purging euphoria. I almost can never remember what I have written, and when I go back to see it again, I’m surprised to see it there. It also feels like an emotional carving out of anything that’s latent in there. I find it very uplifting, really, really freeing, and really energizing.
Debutiful: Knowing how hard it would be to explore trauma, why J’s story? How and why is that what you wrote about?
Anderegg: Iwas absolutely inspired by my own childhood and my own experiences and my own questions of how much of my past do I have to take with me, and what are the ways that we leaven it behind? Can leave physically? Then do we get to leave fully? What parts of life do we get to have? How much of that is predetermined by things that happen to us that we didn’t really get to say no to?
I had been writing a variant of this for a long time, and some of the questions I had is where and when do kids get to be safe? When do kids get to say, this is messed up? Who is protecting anybody? What systems are we operating within that are broken and that are meant to keep the people in power, in power and doing whatever they want without any oversight? I think those are big questions that I had along the way that led to asking when do we get to write our own story.
Debutiful: How do you feel now? Is there a release?
Anderegg: I feel like there J is. There she is. I see her fully realized. I’ll see a painting or something and there’s a character that reminds me of J. I’ll see a person drive by with a fuzzy steering wheel cover or glittery long nails, you know? I feel like she’s out in the world and is a thing that exists. I have this feeling that I finally got to say what I needed and wanted to say about that trauma.
Debutiful: I’m skirting the line of a question I hate asking about the writer and the character, but how does it feel to have people like me, and maybe even readers, all of a sudden invading your space with questions about your life?
Anderegg: I asked that question before the book even became a book. How much and what am I going to write? How close would I put it to what really happened in my life? If somebody asked me that question, what would I answer?
Sam Lipsyte had an answer that was something like, there’s an autobiography in the feeling, which I kept with me in my pocket. I could always say this could be true and that could be true.
I’m not afraid of the questions of autofiction, but think the answer lies in the ending of the book. I didn’t want to have my biography and the facts of my life overlay onto J in a way that tilted the angle of the book. I wanted J to sort of have that space and have that world of hers.
Debutiful: And now that J’s story is out there, what kind of stories do you want to explore now?
Anderegg: I’m working on another novel now. It takes place in a hospital and I’ve been calling it Hospital List. I was thinking of it as those books I read as a kid where they were cutaways of a building or a submarine and you could see all of the parts all at once.
That’s how I’ve been thinking about it and just all of the things that are happening in a hospital all at once. There’s the feeling of a machine that’s sort of broken and functioning at the same time. Those are some of the questions that I’m thinking about. It’s inspired by my own experience in the hospital and my friends who are nurses, as well as watching our whole world deal with the coronavirus. We saw how are systems are not ready if something is turned up all the way like that.
Debutiful: I can’t wait to see where your writing takes us. Going back to who J is and who Andy is, I’ve started my podcast conversations by asking the writers what their unofficial bio and I think maybe that’s where we’ll end this interview on the site. Who is Andy?
Anderegg: I’m a person who loved books growing up and always thought that books were that magical ticket to anywhere I wanted to be. Outside of writing and reading, I love to be at the beach and be outside, and I love to chop vegetables at night before dinner. I dream of one day being as bold as J and putting on acrylic nails, but I’ve never done it.