The lives of two families collide in a most intriguing and shocking way in Andrea Uptmor’s darkly delightful debut novel, The New People. Faced with foreclosure and falling victim to the ruse of a real estate scammer, Charlotte and Dirk Deniison lose the place they called home faster than they can gather their belongings. The new owners, Emma and Rachel, settle into the house and what should’ve been a new start to an easy new life, only to discover that things aren’t always what they seem. The New People is a deeply moving novel that explores themes of love, loss, and community, and what it really means to feel at home.
Andrea Uptmor is a writer, editor, and a producer on the Taking Charge website at the University of Minnesota. As a content developer at the Center for Spirituality & Healing at the university, Andrea has been a part of a team that launched many online learning modules for healthcare professionals, students, and the general public on the topics of integrative nursing, wellbeing, resilience, and integrative therapies. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Master’s Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her family. The New People is her debut novel.
Tsahai Makeda: I just finished the book a couple hours ago. I like to read the books close to the interview, so it’s in the front of my head when we’re talking about it. This book is really one of those, grab hold of you, get into your skin type of reads where you’re so interested and invested as a reader, which is what books are supposed to do. You’ve done that fantastically with this novel.
Andrea Uptmor: Oh, Tsahai, that means so much to me. I think there are so many writers who do that so well, that have that propulsive urgency to their stories, and I really have been trying to get to that level. So to hear you say that really means a lot to me, so thank you.
TM: The premise of the novel is intriguing, thought provoking. It does a good job of keeping us rooted in the fiction of it while simultaneously nudging us, pushing us to take stock in a lot of the things about our own lives; our beliefs, our compassions, our money, how we treat ourselves, how we treat each other. For me, it navigated between themes of doubt, loss, and self-loathing, and then community love and sympathy. Tell us about the book. How’d you come to the story or how did it come to you? Was there a particular moment that gave rise to your needing to tell this story?
AU: I think it was probably less, one specific moment, and more a collection of experiences I had that marked me. Several years ago, my wife and I bought our first house in Minneapolis, and it was a foreclosure that had been renovated and everything on the inside was brand new; carpeting, paint, fixtures. The previous owner had been completely painted over, but there was this kid’s Christmas sticker on the inside of the front door and we could not get it off. No amount of Goo Gone would get this thing off and it was there for the entire six years we lived in this house. It was always this real disconnect for me, walking in and out, to what felt like this clean, brand new life for us and to be reminded that for another family, this house represented loss. I wasn’t necessarily thinking, I’ve got to write about this, but those things, they left a mark and I thought about it a lot over the years. We lived in a neighborhood where there were a lot of foreclosures, including our next door neighbor. And then their house was taken over by squatters and we lived next door to these squatters for a year. At a certain point I was like, I want to write a novel about foreclosure. There is so much that it just touches you so deeply, the thought of losing your home. Your home is a place where you are your most vulnerable, you spend time with your loved ones, you sleep and are sick. It’s a place we all want to go to. For those of us who haven’t lost a home, I don’t think we appreciate how painful and difficult and disorienting that can be. And then I heard about frogging, which is this concept of living in somebody else’s house while they’re there and that was fascinating to me. There are so many crazy stories online of people realizing someone’s living in their attic, or living in their basement, or crawl space, and they didn’t know. Those two things came together for me and the novel grew out of that.
TM: It’s fascinating, like you say, and terrifying in a calm sort of way. My attic was converted into our sons’ room and you can’t get to my basement unless you’re inside of the house. But we have an active and functioning barn…but it’s at least seventy yards away from the house. So the thought that somebody could really just go and take up space in there is wild to me.
AU: It’s invasive, yeah.
TM: The novel is terrifying in that way, but also very intriguing. And that lends to the feeling of being wholly scared. This lent to how you developed the characters, but we’ll get into that in a minute. It really does good work exploring home and what that means. When we hear the word foreclosure, we typically think business, capitalism, money, loss. We never really think, there’s a human side, which is actually what the book is about. What did you hope to explore in the novel about what it means to have a sense of home and what actually belongs to you?
AU: I think having a home and having a place where you feel like you belong is something that, hopefully, we take for granted, because it’s something that we have in our lives, and we don’t notice it until it’s gone. I think the physical home that Emma and Rachel move into, that Charlotte and Dirk were displaced from, explores the idea of who gets to feel like they’re home, who gets to have a sense of belonging? It seems like it’s Emma and Rachel. But at the same time, they’re navigating a sense of disconnect or not belonging in their community as the same sex couple in a kind of conservative town. I felt like there were some similarities between these two things that, having a sense of home or having a sense of community, is so vitally important to flourishing as a human being. And most of us, hopefully, have it a little bit on some level. But when it is stripped and taken from you, it’s devastating, and those moments of devastation are kind of what makes fiction really great. That’s what you’re sort of looking for as a writer; create a situation where people are suffering, to see what they do to get out of it, or how they respond to it.
TM: I want to get into the characters of the book without giving away too many spoilers, but we’ll give a warning here, so spoilers ahead. One of my favorite elements of Charlotte and Dirk’s whole experience is Charlotte insisting on wellness hour. The juxtaposition of the direness of the situation that they’re in, and her being like, We have to move. Like we literally need to stretch. We need to get our muscles going. It is hilarious, but relatable. The relatability in it is they’ve just gone through this thing that’s super devastating to their everyday life and Charlotte makes sure that even though they are actively having a traumatic experience, the least they can do is not get sick. Charlotte, Dirk, Emma, Rachel, and Patty also. And the godawful Alex. The characters are all super nuanced, and that’s the pull for me in the book; they feel like real people, and whole individually. What was your process in developing these characters, particularly the four main ones?
AU: That’s a great question. When I first started out, I started with Emma because I have the most insight into the experience of her life. I’ve been an instructor at a university, I’m married to a woman, I’m a bit older than Emma but I’ve lived through her age, I have purchased my first home, and I’ve gone through IVS. So I put a lot of my awareness of these situations into her story. I had this idea in the beginning that I wanted Emma and Charlotte to be these opposites. Emma was this very progressive young person and Charlotte was gonna be the conservative looming in the attic and as I wrote I just thought, This doesn’t feel right, and I ended up relating to Charlotte so much more by the end of the book. I found that every sort of conservative, homophobic bit that I wrote about Charlotte, I ended up creating Patty and put her as the next door neighbor. But by the end of this book. I was like, nobody is this flat. Patty is the brusque, very homophobic person, who’s not trying to hide it at all. But she also cares so much about community, about her neighbors, and that can be true. People are weird like that, that we have these completely conflicting selves in each of us. So whereas I thought, Oh, it’s gonna be very difficult to write this, almost seventy year old woman, and her husband, I think there’s so much of me in Charlotte. She’s the one I’d probably be friends with if she were real people.
TM: I really enjoyed the character dynamics. Initially, I was like, “Eww, Patty and Charlotte.” And then by the end I was like, “Aww, Patty and Charlotte.” Emma does a lot of self-loathing, self-doubt, self-deprecation, and by the end, I was like, “Hell yeah Emma, that’s who you always were.” By the end of the book, Charlotte becomes the mother that she thought she wasn’t and Emma finds the mother that she feels like she never had. They are these things now to each other, which is serendipitous. I also loved how we only got Justin in hindsight and memory and flashback, and we never actually meet him. Let’s pivot a little bit and let’s talk about your writing practice. How do you balance managing your everyday day-to-day life with your writing?
AU: Oh my gosh, this is something I think about all the time. Because I have four kids, all under the age of ten, so there is a lot of energy in my house. And I have a pretty busy, hectic 9 to 5 job.
TM: Do you have animals also?
AU: Yes, we also have two cats, although they’re pretty chill.
TM: So you have 6 kids.
AU: Yeah, we’ve got a busy household, so I have to be so intentional about this. Not writing, is just not an option. I figured this out several years ago that if I get up an hour and a half before my kids are up, I have time to sort of center myself. I get the writing done. I would say 90% of The New People was written at 5:30 in the morning, because that’s the time that I have. And at first, I felt really stressed out. When a novel comes to you, you just want to throw everything aside and you just want to work on it, then you start to get resentful of everything else. And I felt like I don’t have enough time, but an hour is enough, half an hour is enough. It really is. There’s no rush to do anything. And I do also really believe that most people can find thirty minutes in a day. You have to make some kind of sacrifice, but you can find thirty minutes to write. The real trick is what you do with the other twenty-three and a half hours that makes that thirty minutes productive. For me, it’s so important to engage fully with my life, be very present with my kids, take care of my health, drink lots of water, get lots of rest, so that when I sit down at the computer, I am ready to go and I am totally present with the writing. So I think even if you’re only writing for half an hour a day, you’re creating a creative life that’s gonna facilitate that. I really believe in that.
TM: I ditto that, and you put it together so succinctly. My writer friends and I always say, we’re always writing, even when we’re not, because we’re thinking about writing or we’re reading about it, even if we don’t think so.
AU: You’re having human experiences that will later inform what you’re going to write about. I mean, you have to go out there and live your life if you want to write anything.
TM: That’s a good segue to my next question. What does your writing community look like? Where and who do you reach to for support in your literary practice?
AU: Also a very good question. I am a lifelong introvert, so I sometimes struggle with reaching out and connecting with people. I did get my MFA, so I’ve got some MFA friends from years ago who are always willing to read something I send to them. My wife is the first person I go to. She also has an MFA, so she’s my first reader and will be honest with me. I also have a close friend who’s actually a very funny and amazing romance novelist, who is an excellent reader. Her name’s Adrienne Gunn, and we spend a lot of time talking about not just what we’re working on, but the sort of life of being a writer. It really is so important to develop a community and it doesn’t have to be a big writing group, even just one or two people in your life who you trust with pages and who will be honest with you. And maybe even a person who’s also going through the publishing process, you can talk about how scary it is and how hard it is to find an agent and all that kind of stuff.
TM: I love that. What was your publishing journey like?
AU: Well, for this book, it’s been wonderful. I did have a failed novel before this one that I couldn’t get an agent for, and I nearly collapsed under the creative grief of that, though I got a lot of positive feedback. Emma in the novel goes through this, and I actually used real emails that I got from agents in the book. And I thought, I’ll never write again. I can’t do this, and then somehow I just did. I felt like I saw the novel pretty clearly. And then when I was ready to send to agents, I sent out a handful of queries, and I got representation from my agent, Natalie Edwards, pretty quickly. She’s wonderful. Then we did a couple months’ rounds of revision, just tightening the story a bit. She suggested some reframing of the ending, the penultimate chapter wasn’t in the first draft, and she suggested it, and she was so right. Then when we were ready to send out to editors and it sold in under a week. It was really fast. I feel like it’s my karma from all of the devastation that came before that. I know that it is not often this easy and may not be easy like that for me ever again, but I’ve appreciated that this was relatively stress free.
TM: I love that phrasing too; creative grief. Finding a term for that feeling of like, I’m going to send my baby out in the world, and then nothing or devastating nothings.
AU: And that’s where that writing community comes in hand, because other people in your life are not gonna understand. They are going to say, “Well, just write another book,” or, “Ah, you’re still a good person.” They don’t understand. It’s a horrible bottomless feeling to work so hard on something and then have the world say, “No, thanks.”
TM: It’s terribly woeful. Now I’m going to ask just a couple of questions about you while we round this out. First, how long have you been writing and when did you know that this is what you wanted to do?
AU: Like most writers, I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I actually have a memory of writing my first novel at like age ten, in a notebook. It was not very long, but it was about a group of kids who go on a field trip to an island with their teacher and then they get shipwrecked, and they have to survive with another teacher. I was reading a lot of Babysitters Club Super Specials at the time. I just remember thinking it was so cool, that I can make anything happen, like anything I want. It felt so powerful. But then I went to art school and kind of got sidetracked by the visual world for a while. I was in my twenties when I came back to grad school to focus on writing because creating a story always seemed to resurface for me as the thing I wanted to do. Even in my day job, I’m a content producer for a hospital, so I do patient education and that’s a different type of storytelling, but it still sort of scratches the itch, you know, creatively.
TM: It’s nice when your day job kind of still pulls that creative muscle. You’re still flexing that so it feels good. What are you most looking forward to once the novel is out in the world?
AU: Being able to really focus on my next one. I think I’m probably itching to turn to a new project but I’ve just had a lot of things to do for this one. The whole process of going through the copy editing and the proofing and all that, it takes a lot longer than you think it would, then it requires more of you than expected. I feel like once it’s out in the world, it’s not mine anymore, it belongs to the readers and now I can completely turn and focus on something new.
TM: What’s the last book that you read for fun? And the last book that you read for craft?
AU: Okay, it’s been a while but, Charles Baxter’s The Art Of Subtext, I believe, is probably the last one that I read for craft. I have to say though, I pretty much exclusively read fiction and for fun, the last book that I really loved, I read a couple of weeks ago, is called, The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş. It’s both propulsive and plotless, which is my dream in life. Nothing really happens in the story and you get into it knowing that nothing’s really gonna happen. It’s just this kind of tedium of being a certain age and deciding whether you want to buy a house and feeling a little displaced in your community and it’s just the day to day of that. It is so compelling on a sentence level. I just gobbled it up in a day. I loved it. I’ve been trying to recommend it to everybody.
TM: What’s a wisdom you’ve learned from your journey in writing and publishing this book that you can share with emerging writers?
AU: Never lose sight of other things in life. When I was going through my failed novel experience before publishing this book, I just felt so hard on myself. I felt so bad and I think that it’s not the most important thing in life. Like, it’s just not. Writing, and any kind of creative work, can fuel you, be beautiful, and it can be validating to have it out in the world, but it is not the most important thing. The people around you are the most important things. Your sense of inner stillness is the most important thing. It’s really important not to lose sight of that ‘cause it’s so easy to get caught up in the, I’m connecting my sense of self worth with how my creative work is going. And that’s just a bad road to go down.
TM: Thank you. That is good advice. The last question I have for you is, what’s next? So, you did mention what you’re looking forward to is being able to look at your next project. Is there anything that you can share with us about what you’re working on?
AU: Yeah, it’s a story about a young woman whose therapist dies and she attaches herself to the therapist’s family without revealing her identity, and ends up getting dragged along this cross country road trip to settle an inheritance property dispute. It’s got a lot of the same themes as The New People; there’s queerness, a little bit of religious trauma, motherhood, and, of course, property disputes, which apparently I love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrea Uptmor received her MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota, and her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Masters Review, among others. She lives in the Chicago area with her family.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Tsahai Makeda is a Jamaican-American writer who writes about the human experience and its impact on one’s sense of self in the world. When not writing, she is reading or knitting. She earned her BA in English, minor in Philosophy, from The State University of New York at New Paltz and her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches workshops at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and has received support for her work from The Center for Black Fiction and The Kenyon Review. She received The Caribbean Writer’s 2023 Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for her short story, ‘For Generations’. Her work appears in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Women Who Submit, Epiphany, Breadcrumbs, REWRITE London, The Caribbean Writer, & Prairie Schooner. She’s recently finished writing her memoir and is in conversations to get it out into the world. She lives at the foot of the Catskills where she writes and reads, and writes some more.