When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different.
Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow.
Eshani Surya: The book is written in first person. Natalie’s voice and observations are a pleasure in this novel, and one of the propelling elements. How did you discover, play with, and refine this voice?
Sarah Anderson: Natalie grew out of the thought experiment of “What personality traits and circumstances would lead a person to choose to accept the job of corporate surrogate?” It was important to me that it be a choice, and not in a life-or-death or survival-level need, but because she genuinely believes it’s a good offer. I built Natalie from there, and her voice developed pretty naturally after that. Humor is important to me—it’s one of my main sources of pleasure when both reading and writing—and I think it’s one of the most effective ways of exploring and questioning the world.
ES: Along with Natalie’s voice, I found the structure of the novel to be engrossing, surprising, and moving. Without spoiling anything, the story has a major twist between Part Two and Part Three, though that twist only enhances the book thematically. And by the end, I noted a sense of return to the opening of the novel, which felt lovely, and again, thematically relevant. How did you approach building a structure for this book?
SA: There were two major craft challenges in the book for me. One was the span of time that it covers—almost ten years—and the other was tracking change in a very passive character. The three parts happened pretty organically in the process of working out the time challenge, and my wonderful editor Jenna Johnson helped me really refine and then name those parts. For Natalie, a person who doesn’t change very much internally and who isn’t really going to unless she is forced to, place and circumstance are important drivers of transformation. There’s a lot of geographical movement, and the three parts help chart that physical trajectory, too, from her life working at the call center to her life in the Company offices to the third, undisclosed location (;)).
Without giving too much away… There is certainly a version of this book that could have existed without the twist ahead of the third act, where Natalie stays with the Company living out her contract until she is no longer useful to them. That wasn’t the version I wanted to write.
That’s a version that to me is less interesting and doesn’t ask some of the larger questions I wanted to explore around sense of purpose, community, and choice.
ES: While the book has a clear plot engine, our narrator spends a lot of time isolated in parts of the book. Many writers would have struggled with scenes that lack interaction, and thus inherent variety of tension. How did you manage to write isolation while keeping the reader connected to the story?
SA: I think it’s always been true that we live most of our lives in our own heads, but it’s only gotten more true as we spend more and more time online. It’s so easy to escape into a perfectly calibrated algorithm and have this sort of extended, private experience with all the content we consume. While social media does connect people in some ways, I also think the “social” part is largely a misnomer; I think it mostly makes it easier for us to retreat into our own interiors. And I think I was trying to capture some of that singular, strange form of isolation on the page. Actually, this question made me think of the weird connections between the experiences of being on the Internet and of being pregnant in that there’s this sense of someone else being there in the room with you or of being watched, but from a remove. That’s the tension that drives those scenes of isolation for me.
There’s also a lot of humor in what we do when we’re alone. I, for one, have ridiculous thoughts when I’m left to my own devices (pun intended). As we increasingly narrativize and share so many aspects of our lives, the idea of being truly alone with no audience becomes even stranger. That’s what kept me interested and connected in those scenes, and hopefully will do the same for readers.
ES: When our narrator does interact with others, she often gravitates toward other women, particularly to-be mothers. I sensed the undercurrent of queerness in the novel. How does Natalie’s relationship with women, motherhood, and queerness inform the novel’s depiction of labor and gender roles?
SA: Complex relationships between women—as friends, frenemies, lovers, sisters, mothers, daughters, or in relationships that are uncategorizable, across the spectrum of queerness—are one of my obsessions, and I will likely spend the rest of my life writing about this. Writing the nuances and ambiguities of the relationships between Natalie and Anika and Natalie and Jackie and how they differ was one of my favorite parts of the project.
I was also interested in exploring our ideas around motherhood in all its messiness. Surrogacy divorces pregnancy and motherhood, and that’s a queering of a sort, and it’s something that people are really uncomfortable with. Why? What does it mean to pay for another person’s body in this way? These are some of the driving questions of the book.
ES: Speaking of labor, the novel is also a satire of the workplace, particularly Big Business. That satire is sometimes compared and contrasted to unconventional, communal living and workspaces later on in the novel. How did you approach crafting this juxtaposition? To you, is there a clear good and evil in the novel?
SA: I’m really interested in portraying the ways in which, from what I’ve observed, power structures and group dynamics replicate in similar ways even across very different contexts—like a corporation and a commune. People are kind of always annoying to each other in the same ways, everywhere you go. Which is weirdly comforting to me?
During the time that I was writing this book, a Tweet went viral that said, “Inconvenience is the price of community,” and I think that’s a good distillation of what I was writing towards here. I wasn’t consciously writing towards either dystopia or utopia, but looking at the finished book now, I think one of the questions I was thinking through was about choice, and its complicated role in both.
For many of us in the United States now, we live in a world with the most possible choices on pretty much everything in our lives. Of course this is dependent on privilege of all kinds, but still, we have more choices than most people in history. And yet… it’s far from a utopia. At a commune and with collective living, there are some ways in which you cede certain choices to the collective, but to gain all the other benefits that come with it. But that comes with its own set of problems as well, of course.
I don’t think of the book in a frame of good and evil. One of my goals was to create a set of circumstances that would defy easy moral categorization. Another was to explore a series of questions, one of which includes, “How do you live an ethical life in today’s world?” I don’t have the answers to many of the questions that I’m asking. If I did, this novel probably wouldn’t exist.
ES: Overall, do you hope that readers leave this novel with a changed ethical or moral framework? Or are you hoping that the book accomplishes something else—or perhaps nothing specific at all?
SA: One of my main goals for this book was that it never be didactic.
Mainly, I hope that it leads people to embrace complexity and nuance, which are often lost in conversations around big topics like bodily autonomy and motherhood.
And I hope that it makes people laugh.
ES: And lastly, the novel’s title, Fallow, gestures at Natalie’s off-season periods, where she isn’t working. Of course, the definition of being fallow shifts through the novel, but I wonder if you could speak to your own fallow periods as a writer. How do you navigate cycles of productivity, and what would you impart to other writers wondering how to manage their own writing seasons?
SA: This is something I’m still very much trying to figure out for myself. There were certain things I had to discover and accept about my own writing process and productivity to finish this book. One is that I will never be an every day writer, and another is that I will never be a morning writer. Accepting these things—these sort of mini fallow realities?—released me to figure out a way of writing that actually worked for me. Although again, it’s an ongoing process.
I do believe that fallow periods are particularly important to writing because it’s the time to be just living, having new experiences, processing things, thinking things, changing as a person, etc. All the things that feed fiction.
Recently, when I was fretting about not having started a new novel project yet, my partner, who happens to be a poet, said that maybe I was one person when I was writing Fallow, and maybe I’ll have to live a little and become a different person before I write another novel, and I found that comforting. That’s not true for everyone, but I think it could be true for me. A novel is a time capsule, and I put everything I had from these past few years into this one, and now I’m back to gathering.
Sarah Anderson is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she won two Hopwood Awards. Her story “Take Me to Kirkland,” originally published in Joyland, is featured in The Best American Short Stories 2025.
Eshani Surya is the author of Ravishing, which received, and was a Chicago Review of Books and Debutiful Best Debut of 2025, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a Mae Fellowship recipient, and a Semi-Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award for Novel In-Progress. Her writing has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Asian Women Writer’s Workshop and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Eshani serves as a board member and instructor at the literary non-profit Blue Stoop in Philadelphia. Find her online @eshanisurya or http://eshani-surya.com.