Q: Libraries are beloved for their sense of community. Do you remember a time when your library made you feel like a part of something bigger?
A: I feel like I was raised by libraries! When I was a kid, my parents took me our local public library branch, marched me up to the front desk, and asked the librarians to help me pick out books because I was tearing through them too quickly for anyone to keep up with recommendations. After that, I always depended on public librarians and school librarians. One very nice librarian set aside a whole shelf with my name on it, so that even if she wasn’t in when I showed up, I could go find something she recommended for me. I remember her giving me Harriet the Spy. So when I was a kid, I didn’t really understand libraries as the public institutions they really are; I thought of them as these little magical private places just for me. Now, I understand that librarians’ jobs aren’t just to give book recommendations to nerdy little girls but also to do so much more—to fight against censorship, to distribute resources to people who need them. They’re both intimate and civic spaces, of course.
Q: What role did libraries have in your writing process, if any, for Goddess Complex?
A: I often write bookish characters, so libraries are always in and around the worlds of my novels. Libraries feature very prominently in my first novel, Gold Diggers; my narrator, a historian, spends a whole summer doing research in his local public library, where he discovers a historical figure who changes his life. In Goddess Complex, my narrator is an anthropologist, which means she’s spent a lot of time in libraries before moving into the world to do her fieldwork. I am not an anthropologist (nor am I a historian), which means I could not have written these characters without access to libraries. In both cases, I used libraries to give myself a mini education not just in the substance of my characters’ research but also in their methods.
Q: What’s something you hope readers will take away from Goddess Complex?
A: The book is about choice—reproductive choices, life choices, the choices that form our adulthood—and I hope that people read it and feel what I felt while writing it, which is that the more narratives we have for different choices, the freer we are as a society. I’m writing this at a moment when American politicians are increasingly trying to sell us on one single vision of what “female” means, and my book is about how absurd that idea is. The way to notice that absurdity, I think, is to fill our heads with as many kinds of stories as possible, stories that texture our understanding of identity.
Q: Do you have a favorite library memory? Either from doing research for Goddess Complex, or just browsing the shelves?
A: I used to spend most summers and weekday afternoons in libraries doing research for my high school debate team, so asking me to pick just one favorite library memory is almost impossible. I’ll go with an early memory, though: at one point in early middle school or so, I was trying to read books that seemed impressive, which meant I was only pulling books off the shelves that were heavy, with tiny font. One librarian—god bless them, I don’t remember their name—asked me how I was liking whatever it was that I was reading. (I might have been attempting Dickens or something.) I tried to pretend I understood the book, and the librarian gave a big shrug and said they loved when some books were hard, but it was also okay to read a lot of different kinds of books. I think I quit whatever I was reading that day and picked up a young adult science fiction series that I blasted through in a week. I was a kid. I needed a chance to read like a kid before I could try to read like an adult.
