Sea, Poison is a book like none I have read before. It is. I was lucky enough to speak with Caren over the phone this February.   

 

Caren Beilin is the recent author of Sea, Poison, among other works. She lives in Cleveland where she is Fiction Editor for Cleveland Review of Books and an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

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I'm curious what your childhood in Germantown was like. Do you think there's a specific character to Germantown—or just to growing up in Philadelphia in general—that still shapes your writing? 

 

That's such a wonderful question. Nobody's ever asked me that, but I’m always pushing it. I'm like, come on, talk to me about Germantown. 

 

Germantown is a very historic neighborhood of Philadelphia. I grew up there until I was 12 years old, and then moved to the suburbs, in a very ‘90s white flight sort of fashion That was very much the trend in Philadelphia. So as a kid who left Germantown, and left the opportunity to be a Philly City kid, I felt kind of cut off.

 

I just treasure my upbringing so much. I think of it as very in me. I feel very raised by the atmosphere of Germantown. 

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Anytime I go back to there, I think about how it’s such a magical place that feels packed with a fairy-like energy, with all the moss and old stones. I remember being small, close to the ground and the snaggletoothed sidewalks with moss coming up between the bricks. 

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Every child is so myopic, and what a beautiful place it was to be myopic in. There’s so much mica in the area, so there’s so much glitter in the rocks. As a child, we would be surrounded by glittering silver, roaming around with what we thought of as silver and gold. 

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These are things that are still in me so I try to imbue that feeling into my novels.

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When you're writing, do you tend to return to those earliest memories, or is your writing more reflective of recent experiences? What is your process?

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A lot of the topics I write about are related to confronting the horror of the world, which one very much does as a child. But, we also have to deal with this as an adult in a whole different way. So I feel like my topics are more borne out of, specifically, an adult female reckoning.  

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I mean, becoming a woman in this world has been the heartbreak of my life. That moment when you realize how you will be treated, it's like a shattering of the child.

My novel Sea Poison certainly deals with that experience.

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But I do think that, in my writing, I hold onto these earlier memories. At different points in my life, I’ve returned to a letter from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He’s talking about love and he says that every couple must have a Christmas of their love. This really touched me, because I’m Jewish but I love Christmas. Christmas is full of mica, all this sparkling wonder that you can’t believe is real. That’s what he’s invoking— there has to be a Christmas of your love because there would be all these challenges later. I think that Germantown, and childhood, are the Christmases of my life. It’s such a funny thing to say because I have so many Jewish themes in my work, but those are my Christmases. And I have to hold onto those things. Because how are you going to get through anything—including writing a novel—without holding onto those things?

 

In Sea Poison, how do you think Cumin holds onto her Christmases? You've said before that friendship is sort of a radical thing to do. But I never got the sense that Cumin has any real relationships with other people.

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Yeah, that's so true. Cumin’s pretty alone or she's trying to have connections, but they're also libidinal, which is hard. She’s maybe giving a bit too much to the libidinal stuff, because she’s just completely obsessed with that. And then there’s the horror of losing a friend. She’s really at a time in her life where things haven’t worked out. 

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But because I’m writing in this autofictional vein, I’m often tracking my life in some way. 

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And I'm definitely in a moment in my own life where friendship has gotten both so complicated and so sweet. When I was an undergrad in college I thought that all of my friends would be my forever. But it doesn’t really work that way. People get so complicated. 

 

What is it about adulthood that you think makes friendship complicated? 

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So many things happen, and we become irresolvable to ourselves. What I think makes things hard is that by the time someone is an adult, they’ve figured out what works for them. They’ve been through different things, maybe they’ve overcome certain things, and they’ve realized what makes them feel safe. They’ve figured something out, in the chaos of everything going on—whether it’s with their family, or with money, or whatever. So people tend to be a lot more controlling with things when they’re older. I mean, when I was in undergrad, everybody was half-living at everybody else’s houses, just floating around and available to be hurt. But then when they’re older, everything’s a lot more pinched. You can hang out with someone, but only if you come to their house at a certain time and leave at a certain time. Everybody’s like this is what I am willing to do. 

 

It almost feels like your writing is working in opposition to all of that. Is your writing a means of deconstructing some of these structures that are,unhelpful for our well being?

 

I really hope it is. I’m teaching a class at Case right now about writing unlikeable fiction. We’re reading works right now about fiction that aggresses against readerly expectation, that is reader-unfriendly. I have a lot of ambition to be reader-unfriendly in a certain way. I mean, I want there to be people who find my work and feel like that’s what it feels like for me too. But I’m an anti-realist. I’m not trying to repair things in my writing, or offer security about how the world is. 

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So that’s why Sea Poison is pretty destabilizing. At first it reads like a traditional novel: there’s a narrator and something’s going to happen to her. But then it gets weirder. But that’s just what this world is like: it’s really destabilizing. I’ll read some comments online from readers who are really disappointed in the book because it didn’t soothe their expectations as a reader. They wanted to follow an arc with Cumin Bailin, where something happens to her and she gets repaired. Or maybe they wanted the book to stay with her as some sort of psychological exploration. But I write autofiction because I’m not interested in doing a psychological exploration of my characters. The narrative that comes from Cumin is just the bubbling up of the horror of medical abuse and rape. The book is about those things that can’t be suppressed, that just filter up into her character and everything that she’s doing. 

 

Whenever I try to write autofiction myself,  I worry that it makes me more self-interested or more vain. I'm curious what you think about those questions and whether you've reflected on them. 

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Oh yeah, I definitely have. There's certainly people who write autofiction and it comes across that way. But I think for me, there’s a difference between autofiction that’s self-deprecating and autofiction that’s not.

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Sometimes autofiction is just a legal category. There are people who want to write a memoir, but they don’t want to deal with the implications of it being a memoir, so they just call it autofiction. But I think it becomes really fun when it’s quite self-deprecating.

It becomes, secretly, a way to divest in characterization. A friend of mine, Simone Cocklove, has a really great literary magazine called Lean Magazine. It’s all about non-protagonist centered fiction, which has inspired me a lot. I think that autofiction can operate as non-protagonist centered fiction because there's whatever-ness to the gesture of being like, it's me. Look at my bio, I don’t know. You can release yourself from the psychologizing of character that’s very Western, very individualizing. I think it’s part of the sickness of our society, probably.

 

Is there fiction you're excited by right now? 

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Patrick Cottrell has a great new book coming out in April. It’s called Afternoon Hours of A Hermit, which is a great title. He's a true devotee of Thomas Bernhard (which I am as well), and he pays sufficient worship to Bernhard in his novel. I actually think that's probably one of the more interesting things about his book. 

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I just finished teaching Woodcutters, which is truly one of the best novels ever written, in my opinion. People get infected by him because he has a very particular style and language. I read a lot of people who are Bernhard diehards.

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My fundamental alienation is glowing lately. I feel a lot of despair around the world. Life just gets weirder and weirder in your own human relations as you get older. So I read Patrick’s book at a bar in Philadelphia with two drinks and some fries and it was heaven on earth to me. It was matching my alienation in a way that made me want to be alive. 

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I'm also currently teaching one of my favorite writers, Dennis Cooper, who’s a really wild ride. I've been deep in the world of his novel Frisk and it’s dazzling me more than ever. Reader beware. 

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What a beautiful description of reading in a bar with fries. That does seem like heaven.