'Fame is so fascinating: there’s so much glamour, there’s artifice, there’s underlying skeeviness. Sometimes there’s just a mundane aspect to it. I can’t resist it,' says author Maggie Shipstead 📝: Annabel Gutterman (annabelgutt)
—she was working on short fiction and dreaming of being published in a literary review. As a student at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the author began writing what would become the first piece in her debut collection. The book, coming May 17, includes 10 stories, all published between 2009 and 2017 in literary journals and sites.
The stories vary in subject, from a love triangle in Montana, to a complicated relationship between a gymnast and a hurdler at the Olympics, to the titular story about a former child actor on an airplane who has recently broken away from a cult.
It’s always helpful when time defamiliarizes you from your own work. The short story taught me how to be a writer—it was the most efficient way to get better. Looking back at them, I can see what I was experimenting with and the little breakthroughs in each one. You feature several characters that are either famous or adjacent to fame. What draws you to that experience?
Celebrity gossip is our substitution for when we lived in smaller communities—we knew more people in common and had gossip we could all take part in. Writing about Hollywood tropes or riffing on existing stories allows you to start with a pre-established familiarity for the reader. Fame is so fascinating: there’s so much glamour, there’s artifice, there’s underlying skeeviness. Sometimes there’s just a mundane aspect to it. I can’t resist it.Less and less, because it’s so fragmented now.
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