Adrienne Brodeur on Using Summer 2016 as a Setting for Little Monsters

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 Adrienne Brodeur about her new novel, Little Monsters.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: The structure of Little Monsters is that you set the story over a summer and it’s separated into months and further separated into points of view. Was structuring it by time and point of view things you knew right away? Did that structure help you in the creative process?

Adrienne Brodeur: I think anything you can hang on to in fiction, because the world is so wide open for you, you can go anywhere and do anything with any character so once you have any sort of grounding it is so helpful. I think one of the first things I knew was that I had a sense of this family, not completely, but a sense of this family. And I knew I wanted to set the story in 2016, before the election, and it is really not a political book, but there was something about the mood of the country at that time that I found riveting.

And then I also sort of love the somewhat subversive idea that the readers would know more than the characters. The characters we’re going to assume some things were about to happen in their future politically, then the readers are going to know that there’s something else going on.

And I’m no sociologist, but 2016, to me felt like some kind of global inflection point, which was going to mark the collapse of the sort of the established social order, and it was kind of a perfect storm, so that some people were able to recognize and reckon with their privilege, while others went into deeper denial. So, the time was kind of a backdrop, and I knew I wanted it to stop before the election. So, I sort of had this idea that we needed to have a chunk of time. I fell in love with this little tight family unit, all of whom had something very significant at stake.

So, you know it’s a process of each time something falls into place, having a better sense of where the book is going, because my last book was memoir, and what’s beautiful about memoir is, you know, who’s telling the story and you essentially know the story, which is not to say there’s not a lot of craft involved and there’s not a lot of decisions and thought involved in the whole enterprise, but with fiction, there’s so much freedom and it truly, it’s cliche, but you’re building the plane while you’re flying it and you have to write quite a ways into it, I think, in order to understand who people are and to go back and figure it out. So, all that is to say, yes, knowing the family structure, which I knew fairly early on, and knowing the timeline was truly helpful because I knew nothing else.

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Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children. Her new novel is Little Monsters.