Paula Saunders on Navigating the Teen Years

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 Paula Saunders about her new novel, Starting from Here.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Your main character René meets herself in the world in your book and that’s what so much of what your book is about, she’s navigating the world, mostly alone as a teenager and how does she find out who she really is? And she has lots of highs and lots of lows, more lows than highs. She’s seeing this doctor who’s giving her these mysterious shots that cost a lot of money. And she’s just obsessed with her weight, which I think is probably common in the dance world. And you write about her giving up on fitting in or belonging and her loneliness and solitude which felt like a penance.  How important was this element of her character on her journey in the book?

Paula Saunders: Oh, this is really important, really important in her journey, because what she’s going to come to find out, what we all come to find out, is that you have to rely on yourself. There has to be this self-reliance so that you have an internal strength that you can draw on all the time.  That’s really important to her. And I think that it reaches out to all young women who are going through the transition of adolescence. I mean, there’s so much to find out. There’s so much to know about what you’re going to do and what your life is going to be like, and how you’re going to interface with the world, what you’re going to be interested in, what you’re going to follow, who’s going to be in your life. There’s so much to figure out during that time, and I think that we as a culture have a way of denigrating young women….I feel like those are some of the most beautiful years in a young person’s life. I mean, these teenage years, to me, were just magical. There’s so much discovery. But for teenagers in our culture, there is that suffering of feeling separated and alone and having to take on their own teenagerhood, especially girls, as a penance that they’re working through and then finding within themselves, in that solitude, a power that comes from within them, from within themselves. So, that’s kind of the way that I hope the book reaches out to people, is through that kind of connection, even though this girl is going through a very extreme situation, I think all young women go through this kind of dilemma as they’re going through adolescence and growing up.

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Paula Saunders is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany, under Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. Her first book, The Distance Home, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2018 First Novel Prize and named as one of The Best Books of 2018 by REAL SIMPLE. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.  Her new novel is called Starting from Here.