Adam Sternbergh, "Happy Anniversary"
It’s December 18. Adam Sternbergh, author of The Blinds, can only get reception if he stands awkwardly on top of this table.
How would you describe your story?
ADAM STERNBERGH: These are the first two chapters for a work-in-progress, which is not something I’d normally share. I’m very—I’d even say obsessively—secretive whenever I’m working on something new, to the point that I won’t even tell my spouse, let alone my agent or editor, about a new work until a relatively good draft is complete. (By relatively good draft I mean: definitely not the first one.)
These chapters, though, are unusually well-suited to stand alone. The whole work is essentially a two-hander about a relationship, and here we meet both people separately, before they reunite to celebrate an anniversary that very well might be their last. The rest of the story has changed and evolved as I’ve wrestled with it, but these opening chapters remain untouched.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
AS: These chapters were written last year in the Before Time. But given that the overall story is about a couple who put themselves in isolation—in this case, in a cabin in the woods for a week—to work out their issues (some known, some to be revealed), it feels to me to be strangely relevant to this pandemic year.
I live in New York, and all of 2020 has been characterized by isolation: not personal, since I’m hunkered down with my wife and daughter, but societal, since we’ve all been cloistered in our households and social bubbles for months. As for process, I’m still hammering away at the larger work in my usual way: a few hours in the early morning, in a converted walk-in closet, before anyone else is awake. But in 2020 my secret writing nook has also become a home office where I spend most of the rest of my day, and our apartment has been forced into full-time service as a home, a school, a shared workspace and an exiles’ island.
What kind of research went into this story?
AS: The story grapples with Adam and Eve, at least thematically, so I did a lot of reading about them—those crazy kids! For the most part, I was interested in the varied and wildly disparate ways that this creation myth has been interpreted over the centuries: these two people, alone in Paradise, under a watchful eye, in love without even a word to describe it, and eventually chastened, chastised and cast out. Conclusion number one: There is a lot less consensus over the details of this story than I was led to believe in Sunday School, including what kind of fruit they ate (maybe dates, which seem more geographically appropriate to the story's origins than apples) and whether the snake was actually a snake. (After all, it likely had legs.) Conclusion number two: This story is bonkers.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
AS: Good question! Especially given that I am not really a short story practitioner, though I have written a few wobbly ones in the past. To me, as a reader, the short story is like a perfectly measured tincture of some highly concentrated, potent intoxicant—just enough to deliver a small and intense but hopefully heady and lingering high.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
AS: Like all authors, I have a website, which, like all authors, is my name: adamsternbergh.com. And, as with all authors, you can carbon-date the release of my last novel by the updates on my website slowly petering out. However, I am also “active” on Twitter—an oxymoronic phrase, since thumbing a screen relentlessly hardly qualifies as activity. But I’m reachable there, at @sternbergh.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
AS: Non-writing answer: My kid. Writing answer: I’m going to fib slightly—I’m sure I’ll recall a better gift five minutes after I send this off—and pervert the question slightly, too, and say a gift that I gave myself. I purchased a book, somewhat impulsively, by the American crime writer Lawrence Block titled Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print at a used bookstore in San Diego in 2010.
Block is a great writer, with lots of great advice, and he has also written so many books (hundreds and hundreds) over his decades-long career in the pulp trenches, both under his own name and multiple pen names, that he’s lost track of how many he’s written. He tells the story of readers approaching him to sign various musty paperbacks at public appearances and, while he’s always happy to sign them, he can’t always guarantee that he actually wrote them. All of which taught me to take my own writing much less preciously, and have more fun. It gave me permission to sit down and write what became my first novel, and that was a great gift. I guess the real gift was from Block to me. I met him years later at an event and, knowing he’d be there, brought his book for him to sign. This one he remembered—and he inscribed it to me, graciously.
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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2020 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians.