TYPORAMA
***********
************
Funny and refreshing, A COMPLETE FICTION is an accomplished mashup of women's commercial fiction, literary fiction, and sitcom-style comedy, with a dash of romance, all while examining the complexities of #metoo.
It is a fun read that makes you think!
“A Complete Fiction checks all of the boxes for an incredible read that sits at the intersection of cancel culture and #metoo. It's packed full of contemporary anxiety, it's hilarious in moments, and it's a page-turner where readers will get a true joy out of being a fly on the wall to the conversations between characters. Maizes surfaces the absurdity of modern life, but in the way your smartest and most empathetic friend would. This novel is a beach read for people who also care about the cultural zeitgeist."–Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else and If the Ice Had Held
“I loved this witty and completely absorbing novel. Maizes has compassion for her characters and their very real mistakes, and she allows them to negotiate the varying degrees of harm they do one another with artful nuance. The underdogs, in Maizes’ inspired telling, transcend themselves.”—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North and The Portable Veblen.
ABOUT A COMPLETE FICTION:
With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a “nibble” on the trendy new social media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication.
The nibble shoots to the top of the site’s Popular Menu Items, and before you can say “unpaid literary labor,” George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy.
P.J.’s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed her sister Mia’s secrets in the book?
Some diners on Crave think so, and now it’s P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.
Told in the humorous vein of Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, A Complete Fiction examines the very serious questions of who has a right to tell a story, and has cancel culture gone too far in our social media–drenched world?
************
A Conversation with
R.L. Maizes,
Author of A COMPLETE FICTION
Q: Why did you write the book?
A: It troubled me that writers were being cancelled, often for little to no reason. Someone would read a two-sentence description of a book and condemn it on social media. They wouldn’t have read the whole book or even a piece of it and they wouldn’t have taken the time to understand what it was about or its nuances. A book that may have taken someone a chuck of their life to write was judged on a blurb the writer didn’t even compose themselves. Writers were being condemned for attempting to capture the truth of other people’s lives, for writing about subjects they’d imagined rather than lived, which is actually the job of a fiction writer, to imagine lives that are not their own.
Also, like most writers, I’ve experienced ups and downs in my professional career, and I empathize with other writers who’ve experienced them. I wanted to shed light on how challenging it can be to persevere as an artist in a society motivated largely by money, a society where respect is often given to those who have money and withheld from those who don’t.
Q: You satirize social media in the book. What is it about social media that you find so objectionable?
A: I’ve seen writers’ lives and careers destroyed on social media. Sometimes it’s because they’ve been cancelled on social media, other times it’s because they spend so much time on social media, they have little time left to write. I had to withdraw from a platform that took up too much of my mental energy. I had my husband block other social media platforms on my laptop. I wanted to put my energy into writing this book. Those apps make us stupider. They take us away from our real lives. People read posts instead of books. They engage with “friends” rather than the actual friends they’re with. The apps are especially insidious when it comes to writers, who are generally people starved for attention. The platforms promise attention but what they provide is at best fleeting. It’s a system that demands writers create content for free, instead of writing a book or an article they might get paid for. I could go on.
Q: What does the title, A COMPLETE FICTION, mean?
A: To start with, the book itself is fiction. It’s a novel. The title is also meant ironically. Because you could say that neither of the protagonist’s books are complete fictions. George has drawn on material from his own life and P.J. has drawn on material from her sister’s life. Hardly any novels are complete fictions. Even if it’s just the real conversation a writer overheard in a coffee shop that they included in the book or the habit their uncle had of licking his mustache that they gave to a character. At the heart of most novels is something very real that bothered the writer, that spurred them to spend years bent over a laptop.
Q: What was the journey to publication like for this book?
A: It was a somewhat torturous journey, and in that sense not unlike P.J.’s and George’s publication journeys. I wrote it during the Covid pandemic. It went through two agents and was rejected by more than two dozen editors. At that point, I took it back from the second agent to read through it again. I immediately thought of a way to improve it. Rather than having Twitter be the social media platform that the characters in the book use, I decided it would be fun to create an entirely new social media platform called Crave. I also strengthened the focus on how social media hurts writers and humans in general. To make those changes took about six months. After that, the first editor who read it offered to publish it. Thank God. That took about two weeks. In the end, I’m so glad all of the earlier editors rejected it, even though each rejection hurt like hell, because it gave me the chance to make the book the best version of itself.
Q: This is a departure from your earlier books. Although there’s an animal in it, it’s not about animals. And there’s no magical realism in it. Why did you choose to write a different kind of book this time?
A: I write about things that bother me, that I’m obsessed about. Writers being unfairly cancelled is one of those things. Also, I don’t want to repeat myself in my work. That’s boring for me as a writer, and if it’s boring for me as a writer, it will be boring for the reader. As a reader myself, I don’t like when other writers write the same book over and over. It always disappoints me. There is a dog in the book if someone really needs one. She has a small subplot.
Now that I’ve spent years creating this book, I find I miss writing magical realism. I hope there’s some in my future.
Q: Do you mean to say in this book that no one should ever be cancelled?
A: Absolutely not. People who are dangerous should not be given a platform to do harm. Criminals who are using a platform to commit crimes? Cancel them. People who are spreading lies or conspiracy theories? Cancel them. But have the evidence from a reliable source before you do. Be responsible before you post or share something. George, the most sympathetic character in the book, is the first to say sometimes people shouldn’t be given a platform. I used to be an attorney. I believe people should have the right to defend themselves when they’re accused of something.
We shouldn’t destroy people’s lives or their professional careers based on rumors or innuendo or without giving them a chance to be heard.
Q: A character’s sister plays an important role in the story. You have three sisters. Is the book based on something that happened between you and one of your sisters?
A: It’s not based on anything that happened between me and my sisters. But having sisters I know how close those relations can be and how complicated. I know how meaningful the shared history and DNA is, and the high standards to which we hold our sisters in our relationships. Because I have sisters, I really enjoyed writing about that relationship, trying to find the balance between what they want from each other and their love for each other. Their demands on each other and the goodwill that accumulated over their childhood. I had fun writing the other family scenes, too, which I used for comic relief in the book, since the book deals with serious themes.
Q: Can you talk about the friendships in the book?
A: The friendship between P.J. and Marissa humanizes P.J. It shows another side of her, one that has nothing to do with her struggles as a writer. P.J. is divorced and in many ways her friends are her family. When P.J.’s novels are rejected, Marissa gets her out on a run or a hike. When Marissa needs someone to accompany her to a medical appointment, she calls P.J. Our biological families are sometimes inept at providing what we need, while our found families seem instinctively to know, whether it’s advice or a Cosmo. I love reading about friendships and found families which play a large role in so many of our lives. That also made me want to write about them. The friendship in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, and the found family in Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, are some of my favorites.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Photo Credit: Steve Olshansk
R.L. Maizes’s debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020.
She also is the author of the short story collection, We Love Anderson Cooper.
Her short stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020.
Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR.
She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and the recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2024–2025 for her novel-in-progress.
Maizes was born in Queens, New York, and lives in Boulder County, Colorado, with her husband, Steve, and her muses: Rosie, a dog who spent her first year homeless in South Dakota and thinks Colorado is downright balmy, and the ghost of Arie the Cat.
For more information, please visit www.rlmaizes.com.
Adding to your TBR?
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping.