To mark her sixth novel, the surreal 'State of Paradise,' author Laura van den Berg talks about Freud, Florida, and speculative fiction.
A few years ago, a friend and I joked about MFA vs. Florida; the panhandle, we determined, seemed to be inspiring more of a literary renaissance than the New York establishment. So last year, when Florida native., her fiction has mapped surreal worlds where dead husbands mysteriously reappear and women ingest mouthfuls of sand on the beach at night.
VAN DEN BERG: Oh, so much. Oh my gosh. I’d never been on Nextdoor before, partly because I’d mostly lived in cities and I think of it as being more of a suburban thing. But yeah, I read about poltergeists on Nextdoor. I read about witchcraft. I read about all kinds of attempted crimes that were sorted or not sorted, and just this spectacular range of human oddity. Nextdoor turned out to be this amazing treasure trove of material.
Also a lot of memories were activated with my mom and my sister. We were having conversations that were taking us to places that were difficult, but also necessary. My dad died in 2019, and he was a wonderful person and is missed every day, but he also left a fairly complex legacy in his wake, so we were all navigating that as well. There’s that line too in the book where the narrator says, “I had, to my horror, all my former selves for company,” and I felt that so acutely.
VAN DEN BERG: Absolutely. So the earliest origins of the book, when I had mentioned earlier during 2020, I started taking long walks in remote areas, and I was having these intense conversations with family and thinking a lot about my dad. Another piece of that too is my husband, who had never lived in a place like this was just like, “Where am I? What is happening?” He coped in his own way by going for very long runs, and he would ferry back these incredible stories.
VAN DEN BERG: Yes. That’s a great essay by Freud. I would sometimes teach courses on haunted literature, and that’s always a text that I bring in. Certainly the idea of the doppelgänger is part of the uncanny, and that’s an element in this world with the different strands of reality that we have in play. I think that’s my interpretation of what Freud’s talking about, it’s definitely psychological suppression that’s breaking through to the surface.
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