Louise Marburg‘s debut novel, Fancy Meeting You, follows Laura Harrigan, a middle-aged woman whose life is built on a foundation of carefully crafted lies. Depending on the audience, Laura is a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or the mother of Yale-bound twins, but in reality she’s single, childless, underemployed, and spending many of her evenings at a Baltimore dive bar. Over the course of her fiftieth year, Laura navigates awkward family gatherings, questionable romances, and unexpected friendships, forcing her to reckon with who she is beneath the stories she tells. Funny, sharp, and unsentimental, the novel offers a fresh take on midlife reinvention through a heroine who is neither seeking marriage nor motherhood, but her own version of fulfillment.
Marburg is an acclaimed short story writer whose previous collection received reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. At age sixty-five, Fancy Meeting You marks her debut novel.
We asked Marburg to answer our recurring My Reading Life series so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I was neither read to nor given books when I was very young, but I was crazy about art and drawing, I went through a pad of drugstore sketch paper a week, replenishing it on Saturdays with my allowance. I would construct stories with pictures, drawing the characters while making up the plot and speaking it aloud. My Godmother, who was an amateur painter, knew I loved art, and she gave me what I think is the best children’s book ever written, Where the Wild Things Are. I couldn’t get enough of the illustrations! I read the book every day for years until the pages were soft and the illustrations faded. The spine broke and I taped it up, a page tore, and I carefully taped that back together, too. I loved it until I was far too old for it. I still love it, though the actual book is long gone.
What book helped you through puberty?
By the time I hit puberty, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and that included my mother’s cheap paperbacks. When I think back to my teens, I can’t believe the stuff I read! I was particularly taken with the Danielle Steel oeuvre. I found The Autobiography of Malcolm X at a friend’s house and read that with great interest. Now there’s a memorable book! Also I loved Taylor Caldwell’s The Bad Seed, which I think was made into a terrifying movie. There isn’t a single book in particular I can name that helped me through puberty. What saved me was the act of reading whatever was available and as much as I could. Reading has sustained me through many hard times. I’d happily read a cereal box if there wasn’t anything else. I was also a big fan of Mad Magazine.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
When I was sixteen I was as sexually unaware as a department store dummy. I knew literally nothing about my body other than it was fat and I didn’t like it. I wish I’d read Our Bodies, Ourselves, which I did later read. Not only would it have clued me into myself, it would have helped me accept my physicality long before I was able.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I have always believed, and I think rightly so, that in order to become a Damn Good Writer you have to read a huge number of books, specifically books in the genre you want to write. When I was in graduate school for creative writing I was amazed by how little my peers read! In my DGW class I would recommend specific books for individual students to read, books that inform the sort of stories they write. But for a whole class I would add any of Alice Munro’s collections to the syllabus—The Moons of Jupiter is the book that made me want to write—because her stories are deceptively readable while being incredibly complicated, and taking them apart is so much fun. Yes, she was a reprehensible human being, but there’s no denying her contribution to literature. As an example of the most absorbing, maybe the greatest, novel ever written, I would insist my students read Anna Karenina. I didn’t read it until I was in my thirties, and speaking of books I wish I’d read, I was sorry I came to it so late. Finally, I would assign my hilarious novel, Fancy Meeting You, because I think novice writers are far too serious.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Every book I’ve ever read (including those in the Danielle Steel oeuvre) guides me in everything I write; my marvelous personal history of literature is inside me forever and I rely on it every time I sit down at the computer. But Fancy Meeting You is different for me because it’s funny from beginning to end, and truly funny books are few and far between. If anyone asked me (alas, no one ever has) to name the funniest book I’ve ever read I would say Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. It is just a completely silly, laugh out loud achievement that really loosens me up when I read it. That’s important because to be funny you have to be relaxed. Also important in comedy is rhythm and timing and for those qualities I sought out Katherine Heiny’s collection Games and Rituals. The stories are snappy and smart and massively witty. Actually, I’d like to add her to my Damn Good Writing syllabus.
What books are on your nightstand now?
The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter; Famesick by Lena Dunham; Vigil by George Saunders; Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich, among others. I always have a teetering stack. Partly that’s because I review books, and partly because I buy more books than I can read in this lifetime, like most writers do. I have a huge Kindle library as well with many unread books in it. I simply can’t resist buying too many books, but it’s like buying too many sweaters, you always end up wearing a fraction of them even as you imagine needing them all.