Adelle Waldman on the Lightly Comic

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Adelle Waldman about her new novel, Help Wanted.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Once you were immersed in this world of big box stores, was there something that struck you the most that allowed you to begin to create fiction around it?

Adelle Waldman: I do think there was that bumping up of the comic and the serious to me, that’s, I think what draws me because I am just really not capable of writing lyrical fiction. I admire it. The only register that I can write in seems to be a sort of slightly comic ironic one or like lightly comic, not necessarily full of hijinks. But the fact that the store, the environment, had a setting that was just waiting for sort of comedy and irony for all sorts of reasons. But also, there being something there that felt urgent and worth writing about. I think I’ve felt this sense over the years that I had always intended to write psychological novels that I assumed would be about the psychological problems of middle class people. And I think that’s an absolutely valid subject for fiction. I love Jane Austen, who wrote six or seven beautiful novels – excellent novels – I said beautiful, and I feel like that makes them sound too small and feminine. But excellent novels about courtship. It’s not that I think those things aren’t a valid subject but for whatever reason, at this point in 2017 and 2018, I had a sense then, I don’t think I’m alone in this, but that something was sort of off and frightening about where we were as a country. I just felt like my energy turned elsewhere and became a little more externally focused and political. So, this appealed in that particular mindset and some part of me feels like things have never quite gone entirely back to normal since then.

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Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published in 2013 and was named one of that year’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.