Laura Van Den Berg on Merging Autofiction With Speculative Fiction

Like her most recent novel The Third Hotel, the story of a woman whose reality is askew navigating the seaswept island of Cuba, Laura Van Den Berg’s State of Paradise is a luminous, surreal, fantastical yet clearly realistic adventure. It’s drawn from her own experiences during Covid. “In 2020, my husband and I landed in Florida, where I’m from,” she explains.

We were in Austin for the semester, but then Covid happened and we decided to leave—and central Florida was a day’s drive. I’d started the year intending to work on a different novel, but found myself unable to concentrate. Reality seemed to be shape-shifting before our eyes. Also, I hadn’t lived in Florida since my early twenties, so being home brought a new and unexpected kind of intensity; a lot of memories were getting activated. I felt I needed to keep some kind of record of this period of time, so I began to write daily meditations on landscape, weather, dreams, memory.

I absolutely did not think I was starting a novel—this was just intended to be for myself, a private space to remember and grieve and think aloud—but those daily entries turned out to be the origin of something bigger. The original title was Florida Diary—which speaks to the novel’s start. The shift to State of Paradise reflected how the project evolved into something more expansive than a chronicle of time passing.

Our email conversation spanned the continent.

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Jane Ciabattari: You have said this novel is a combination of autofiction and speculative fiction. How did this hybrid emerge in the writing of the novel? Which came first?

Laura Van Den Berg: Definitely the auto, given the project’s roots in diaristic writing. But at the same time I was thinking so much about portals, those moments where one kind of reality usurps another. I was thinking about this in relationship to the pandemic—one minute we’re going about our business; the next we’re sanitizing our mail, eyeing doorknobs with suspicion—and also in relationship to my own experiences with mental health ruptures. A speculative plot seemed like the best way to not just describe this feeling, but to animate it. A guiding question ended up being: what kind of story could only be told through a merging of the auto and the speculative?

JC: Your narrator and her husband leave upstate New York, where he was teaching, and head to central Florida, to her mother’s house, where she was raised. “How did we end up here, shipwrecked at my mother’s house?”she asks. “At the start of the year we came down to help care for my father, who was dying for some time and is now dead.” Her story begins when they have been in Florida for five and a half months. “Now we stand on the threshold of summer’s sweltering cave,” you write. “During the pandemic I got sick but recovered after a week of rolling around in a wet fever. Ever since, I’ve had the strangest dreams.”

What is it about Florida—a place her husband describes as “a place outside time”—and especially summertime in Florida, that makes it the right environment for this surreal narrative filled with strangeness in the natural world—sinkholes, congregations of cats, massive days-long rainstorms—and in your characters’ perceptions of the world?

LVDB: I amplified the physical qualities of Florida, but not by that much. There are sinkholes. Summer is hurricane season. The weather is volatile, the heat soaking. Reptiles are everywhere. Our neighborhood was filled with a sizable army of feral cats. Florida is a place of extremes. There is often the feeling of being on the edge of something otherworldly.

JC: The pandemic—its isolation, the strange effects of the virus, seem to be changing your characters’ sense of reality and behavior. Was this your experience?

LVDB: It was one of the first times in my life where the entire world was—collectively—wading into unknown territory. No one knew what to expect. No one knew what was going to happen next. Or what exactly this virus was doing to our bodies. Or when the pandemic would end. Was “regular life” gone forever? In State of Paradise, that uncertainty is enhanced by the speculative elements. For example, the mysterious bodily changes the narrator and her sister are experiencing. In my personal orbit, the isolation forced me to sit in spaces of discomfort.

In past visits to Florida, it was usually a holiday—a quick trip, lots of people to see, little time to get too tangled up in anything too complicated. But then, in 2020, I was back and there was no exit in sight. I couldn’t get away from hard conversations with my family, or from past versions of myself—which is true for the narrator also. For me, this ended up being a huge gift; I had to move into and through things I’d been avoiding for a long time. I came out a different person.

JC: Running is the key activity for your narrator. She brings us along on runs into wilderness where we can explore the strangeness of Florida during this time, follow her memories and shifting sense of reality. Is running part of your own process?

LVDB: I do run a lot, but honestly I don’t love running or find it useful for writing. I don’t think about writing when I run. I listen to music or podcasts; I need a distraction to disappear into. I run because I box competitively, and running is a part of the training program. I try my best to do it like I love it even though I sincerely do not.

JC: The narrator’s husband also runs in Florida; he returns with stories. In fact, he runs ten miles a day, which ties into his book project, a historical account of pilgrimages in medieval Europe, when pilgrims walked hundreds of miles on foot: 248 miles from Bologna to the catacombs in Rome; 500 from Mannheim to Our Lady of Walsingham. He “wants to understand what has become of the pilgrimage in our broken modern world.” How did you develop (and interpret) his journey in parallel to the narrator’s?

LVDB: My real life spouse, Paul, is the true runner in our household! He goes out for very long runs and listens to nothing. Amazing. In Florida, he would go for long runs early in the morning and would bring back stories from his runs. Some of those stories ended up in my daily meditations—including the knifing story from the opening section. I think that was actually his first run in Florida. Talk about feeling like you’ve arrived in a different reality. But he and the guy who did the tire knifing ending up getting to know each other over time. Paul became very popular on his route.

JC: Your narrator is a ghost writer for “a very famous thriller author,” a job that evolves in the course of the book into a strange story of its own, and a multi-leveled exploration of authorship and storytelling. Did you plot this thread of your story in advance? Or did it happen organically?

LVDB: This happened organically. I always saw State of Paradise as a book that was very much about storytelling. How do stories form us? Shape how we imagine the future? How do we complete stories that have become fractured? The narrator longs to write “real stories”—her own stories—but doesn’t know how, so she presses on with her work as a ghostwriter. I knew someone who ghosted for a certain famous thriller author, and still remember how this person described the work, the deep strangeness of arranging your words inside someone else’s structure. So that struck me as just the right job for this narrator, though I did not foresee how big a role the famous author—and his mansion in Palm Beach!—would come to play. That was a surprise.

JC: You break the novel into three sections: The Wilderness: May 15-July 1, Everything Is Not as it Seems: July 1-14 and Become Who You Are: July 15-X. How did you settle on these sections of time for your story?

LVDB: I always thought the novel would cover one summer. Originally there were a lot of dates and times embedded in the narrative itself, partly because of the diaristic origins. But ultimately my editor and I decided those could be pulled out. They were scaffolding—helpful in writing the book, but didn’t need to be part of the final form. Still, I wanted to make sure readers had a sense of how much time was elapsing, so I decided to put dates in the section titles.

JC: Memories bring the narrator back to a time nearly two decades ago—“Days that felt like they’d been drenched in tar. Two attempts, one experimental and one sincere. One hospitalization, in Fort Lauderdale.” It’s a period she has “never discussed with another human soul.” As this thread unwinds, you capture the eeriness of returning to traumatic times, the vividness of memory during the pandemic. How did you do that?

LVDB: For The Institute, I drew heavily on my own memories from spending many months in an in-patient treatment center as a teenager. This is a novel, so not every detail is from life, but for the most part I just wrote down what I remembered—and the memories that I do have are very vivid. There’s a lot I don’t remember very well, and I tried to shine a flashlight into those holes and to see what was there. I did a lot of deep meditation. I recorded my dreams. I was finally ready to open those particular portals.

JC: Memories also involve your narrator’s mother, who has taken an interest in utopian texts and who founds a cult during these summer months, and her sister, who works as a claims adjuster. All these family members are living in close proximity for the first time in years, triggering spats and other behaviors. Then the sister disappears. Do you consider this element of your story a key to the mystery at the heart of the book? It seems to move the plot along quickly! Sisters go on the road. Make many discoveries.

LVDB: There’s an intentionally circular quality to the first part of the novel. Certain patterns repeat; the speculative elements are just a hum in the background. I knew that circularity needed to be disrupted at some point—so the characters and the plot could go forward. The sister’s disappearance is a moment where that necessary disruption happens. 

JC: Virtual reality plays a big part in this novel; including triggering the sister’s disappearance (“During the pandemic, my sister became addicted to MIND’S EYE, to putting on her white headset and sliding down into other worlds”). ELECTRA representatives distributed these headsets free during the quarantine, to “help people cope with isolation,” but they pull people out of reality into strange manipulative set-ups. What research was involved in developing this thread?

LVDB: I tried out an Oculus headset, just get a feel of the physicality of a (less futuristic) version of MIND’S EYE. I also became really interested in the use of simulated realities to navigate trauma and other forms of “narrative therapy”—and did quite a bit of research into those fields. And I wanted to write into the way tech opens portals that allow us to access whatever version of reality we’re seeking. There were so many moments when I was sitting around with my family and realized we’re all on our phones—together but also in separate worlds. I do think tech companies have been, in their way, conducting a mass social experiment—so I wanted to amplify that idea with MIND’S EYE and its inventor.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

LVDB: I did end up writing that other book I set aside in 2020! It’s called Ring of Night and set in Florida as well, but a very different book in every other sense. It’s a literary crime novel that takes place in the world of small town amateur boxing.

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State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.