Adina is not an ordinary girl. She may grow up in a Philadelphia suburb, go to school, make friends, graduate, and move to a city with a distinct life path for the young creative, but all her life, believing herself to be an alien, she faxes observations and descriptions of the masters of human life. This is what she believes is her purpose on Earth, and she spends her time writing about reality TV, male egos, the origin of phrases like “Woah Nelly,” and any other trait of human behavior that, when you think about it, warrants further discussion. Finally, she publishes her thoughts in a memoir titled Foreign authorship, gaining fans and detractors alike, skeptical of its alien claim. As she progresses in life, friends and family leave, and when her bosses stop responding, Adena finds herself at a loss for what to do with life. Thoughtful, intelligent, and endlessly warm, Beautyland It is an intelligent, relatable character study for anyone wondering if they are truly alone in the universe.
We sat down with Mary Helen Bertino to chat about taking notes on humanity, New York City, and moving through loneliness.
Congratulations on another great book! How do you feel now that it's a little over?
Thank you! Feel good; The vibes have been very positive. I felt so grateful. I'm always grateful to release a book, it feels like a miracle every time.
The heart of this story is Adina, the warm alien sent to Earth to report on human activity, and fax her findings back to her masters. When did you first come up with the idea for this character?
In 2012, I wrote a short story called “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours,” which was published in my first collection, Safe as homes. It features an unnamed girl who believes she is an alien who faxes notes about humans. After I wrote that story and published it, she wouldn't let me go, and I kept taking notes about people even after that story was published. I wondered if it would be a good novel, so I began very slowly to establish her identity and location. Adina's identity took a few years to fully take effect, but it began many years ago with this short story. .
Very cool – did you always have the ending in mind? How has it changed over the decade you've written it?
I didn't always have the ending in mind, and it's actually different [for me]. I usually hear the ending and write just for the sake of it. But just in case BeautylandI tried to transfer the short story to novel form, and the short story was written in the first person. I had the first-person novel too, but it wasn't working. I tried many different things, but I realized that I would never be able to achieve the depth of character that I was looking for from her point of view. To my horror, I realized that the novel might need to be in the third person. I mentally skimmed through the first couple of pages to see what it would be like, and I realized almost immediately that, yes, this is actually the right decision. So I had to rewrite the novel and reassemble the new perspective all the time, and once I started doing that, I got the ending. The ending is a really important part, and the fact that I got it as soon as I changed the sound felt very important.
Adina's musings are intelligent and highly creative – and they range from the banal to the profoundly complex. Did you have to keep a little page of notes over the years and filter them through what Adena might think?
I did, yes, I kept a folder on my desktop called Notes on Humans. And I was putting things in there, things that exercise instructors would say, why “melt” and “melt” are basically the same thing, I took notes on Vanna White and Wheel of fortune At one point. Any particular details I might notice during the day I put them in this folder. Funny enough, I still notice things and still take notes. I don't know what that means, but maybe there will be a sequel.
I wanted to ask about the title of the novel – “Beautyland” is based on the department store in Adina’s hometown of the same name. It tells Adina about beauty and finances, but it seems to have a minor role in the book – what made you choose it as the title?
Like most good titles, the title becomes very important after you've read the entire book. So what I will say without spoiling the readers' experience with the book is that Beautyland is a location in her neighborhood as well as being a location on the ground. It's a way of defining where she is, and I think it has more significance the more you read and the more you understand her world, the more you read what happens to her.
I really enjoyed Adina's journey in New York – it perfectly follows the raw experience of a creative person trying to find themselves, while working odd jobs, trying to get together with friends, and getting yelled at by fitness trainers. What did you learn from to write this part?
Yes, at one point I was also a newcomer to New York City, and I used Adena's own perspective to explore some of the things that were funny and interesting to me when I was learning New York City, such as language. The fact that there are beaches and caves in New York City…that was a surprise to me. I think New York City is a place that a lot of people have opinions about who have never been here before. It's rare that way, where everyone feels like they know it. When you've lived here a fair amount of time, people seem a lot different from their stereotypes; They worked hard to support their families, and they had a lot of pride. I was trying to photograph the New York I found. The areas of New York that I found were not documented in literature, I was hoping to enjoy expressing them.
Let's talk about Adina's relationships – the relationships that are most important to her aren't romantic, but with her mother and her best friend, Toni. What did you want to explore through these relationships that you follow through to the end?
With her mother, I wanted to write a single mother character that I hadn't really read in fiction; She was flawed and made mistakes but she was serious and hardworking and loved her daughter dearly, investing in herself in small ways throughout Adina's life that benefited greatly. When Adina reaches middle age and is able to see her mother go back to school, get her degree, and rise through the ranks at her company, in a way that surprises her mother as well. I wanted her mother to grow up alongside her. A literal representation of this is that her mother starts a garden of asphalt and rocks at the beginning of the book, which continues to grow throughout the novel. I liked the idea of creating a garden that grows in the background of all the current events Beautyland.
With Toni, it was meant to represent female friendship, chosen family, and how important and important these deep friendships are in our lives and the people we become, and who we become.
With the help of friends, Adina finally publishes some of her ideas Alien Opus: A Memoir in Stories. She has gained a good following, but some protesters have boycotted her readings because they believe she is pretending to be an alien. What did you want to explore through this dynamic, especially as a writer?
Yes, you never know what will capture people's imagination. Yesterday, I was reading an article about the new trend on TikTok, mafia wives costumes. People were saying: “Why?” this Popular now? You can never know. I was thinking about trends like this, when I was thinking about how celebrities are sometimes created out of nothing. I loved the idea that an honest representation of human beings would achieve this kind of wild celebrity. And so, as I was building this idea, I knew there would be naysayers, non-believers, who would take the time to come out and say “I think you're bullshit.” I was also speaking for the cynical reader who would be reading Beautyland And I say: I don't believe this woman at all. She's dysfunctional. I thought it would be interesting to incorporate some opposing viewpoints into the book. Not only was it fun for me to write, but I felt like it would be realistic, if it were actually happening in the world. So I included the naysayers, and they were a lot of fun to write too.
Adina's life is transformed, instantly, into a harrowing grief by death – some of the passages in which she sends a fax to her supervisors, with no response, are truly heartbreaking. The thing is, she was sent out to give an account of the human experience, all of it, which includes death and grief, but understandably, the moment you get a taste of that, it becomes all-encompassing. What was it like to write so closely from this perspective?
There was something I really wanted to explore and say about depression and how it moves and works. I wanted to talk about it directly. I moved Adina through the depression that I felt she would be going through during this part of her timeline. You experience loss and grow old. Both of these things sometimes come with feelings of loneliness and depression, so I wanted to say a few things about it. For example, loneliness is a complex feeling and, ironically, a feeling that cannot exist alone. They usually have other emotions within them – if you extract those emotions and untangle them, you'll find things like anger, hunger, frustration, etc. Then loneliness can often disappear. I wanted to explore cool things like this, that I had read about or experienced, because I thought it would be unique and different, as well as subtle.
However, Adina goes through this depression. This is literally explained in the book where she can no longer run, and stays in bed. As can sometimes happen, it gets better every day. Sadness stirs within her and she does not overcome it, she is only able to incorporate it into her forward momentum. And then, when she's going through the worst of it…what happens to her happens to her, and that's the end of the book. But she was over the depression by the time she got to the end of the book, which I thought would be interesting. Not that she fell in love with the world again, but that she was able to feel the world again.
definitely. It was such an arc that she went through. Finally, what are you working on next? Is Adina still in the back of your mind somewhere?
I think it will always be, for sure, just like all my heroes, because they were always with me, in the beginning. I'll be publishing a collection next year, also through FSG, so I'm about to finish some of those stories. I will start another novel too. Always moving forward, always writing something!
Beautyland available now.
