Story in the Public Square 3/5/2023

us are prone to great bouts of certainty, seriousness, and risk taking.

Others are more cautious.

And some just wanna have fun, sometimes at all costs.

Today's guest is an author whose recent novel explores the timelessness of coming-of-age stories with a very modern tale of her own.

She's Tara Isabella Burton.

This week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week, we're joined by Tara Isabella Burton, an acclaimed author of fiction and non-fiction.

Her most recent book is "The World Cannot Give," which was published in 2022.

She joins us today from her home.

Tara, thank you so much for being with us.

- And thank you so much for having me.

It's a delight to be here.

- So I said, I mentioned to you before we started recording that I think I liked this book a little bit more than I was supposed to, but we're gonna talk about that in a second.

But I wanna begin with you and your journey as a writer, because you've got, if I'm not mistaken, a doctorate in theology from Oxford University.

What did a nice theologian like you do becoming a novelist?

- I think my doctoral supervisor might have asked me the same thing.

(Jim and G. Wayne laugh) So I always was fascinated in so many kind of different ways and different directions by the idea that kind of this hunger for faith, this hunger for understanding how the world fits together, isn't just an intellectual exercise.

I think the stereotype of theology is that you're figuring out, you know, how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

But for me, and this came out of my academic work, theology is a way of understanding people.

What do we believe about the world?

What do we believe about who made it or didn't make it?

What that means about our relationship to one another, our relationship to ourselves, what we want.

And so for me at least, writing novels, novels about people who were trying to figure out those questions, often in ways that were exciting plot-wise, for me, felt like a natural outgrowth of my theological research.

So when I was done with my doctorate, I had sold my first novel, "Social Creature."

I moved back to New York to work for vox.com as their religion correspondent and kind of tried to explore side by side the hunger for meaning and experience in these two very different ways, fiction and non-fiction, that I hope complimented each other.

- So Tara, I wanna back up even a little bit further and get into your youth and your upbringing.

Did you have a religious upbringing and did that- - I- - Go ahead.

Go ahead.

- Christmas and Easter.

I, like many New Yorkers, grew up in a kind of Jewish-ish, Episcopalian-ish family.

We went to Hanukkah celebrations with cousins but also went to church on Christmas Eve.

But it really wasn't a significant part of my life growing up but it was something that I was fascinated with the same way, you know, some 10-year-old girls get fascinated with horses.

That was me and, you know, saints.

- But you could have gone into so many different fields.

Why theology?

And I think I recall reading, maybe on your website, that when you told your mother that you were going to be studying this, she had a funny reaction, I guess would be the best way to describe it.

Talk about that.

- So with the caveat that I think I've convinced her by now, when I first told her I wanted to study theology, she said, "But, you know, when you meet people and you tell them that, they're gonna be so weirded out.

How are you gonna talk to people at cocktail parties about God?

Like, religion's the one thing you don't talk about."

And I've actually found, to my surprise and sometimes delight, that the opposite is true.

That when you tell people, "I'm a theologian," about to say an ex-theologian but a priest I met once told me there's no such thing as an ex-theologian, (Jim and G. Wayne laugh) that people hear it and they immediately want to talk about their view on religion, their relationship to the divine, or the absence of a divine.

I always imagine it must be like if you say you're a doctor and people immediately start telling you their medical problems.

Everyone I've met, almost, regardless of their religious affiliation or background, has some sense of something they wanna say, some hunger they have, some anger they might have about religion.

And I think that we often say we live in a secular age now, but at least anecdotally, I have not found that to be true.

- It's really central to the human experience, isn't it?

Sort of these questions about how did we get here?

You know, is there a transcendent being?

Are we part of some something bigger?

You get to those questions in "The World Cannot Give."

And I found what was so fascinating about this was that you play these, this sort of this, it's set in a private boarding school and it sort of reminded me of Hogwarts with Instagram, right?

Like there's these very modern elements set in this very traditional setting.

But these young ladies are drawn to sort of these transcendent questions about belonging and they do so in a way that's both youthful and what you would expect of 16 and 17-year-olds, but profound at the same time.

I wonder if you could sort of walk us through a little bit how you came to tell this particular story.

- I really wanted to capture something particular about my own experience at a New England boarding school, albeit not one with a lovely view of the coastline.

And it was that very academically inclined, book-smart teenagers, people who've read too much and thought or think they're thinking too much, but don't have the emotional maturity or the life experience to back that up or to discern what from all of the books they've read and the philosophers whose arguments they've heard should be taken seriously, taken with a grain of salt.

And I think that what I wanted to capture in this book is what I love most about the campus novel, which is that it's this kind of like black box as it were, this sort of experimental arena where ideas really seem to matter.

And for the students at St. Dunstan's, in particular, the members of this chapel choir that make up the main choir, excuse me, the main characters of the book, I wanted to explore what happens when well-meaning, hungry people, and I think all of the characters, even Virginia, are initially well-meaning, what happens when they take ideas too seriously and let it affect them and let it corrode them.

- So I probably should have begun the discussion of the book with this question, but for folks who have not read it yet, what's that 30,000-foot overview without giving too much away?

- It's the relationship between two young women, Laura, a newcomer to the school, and Virginia, the fanatically obsessive, kind of intense, slightly terrifying member of the chapel choir of this local boarding school.

And Laura falls under the spell, not just of music, singing in this somewhat obsolete chapel choir, one of the last of its kind, but the kind of cult that has sprung up around Virginia and the boys of the choir who see themselves as inheritors to this lost tradition, the lost magic of a certain kind of quasi-religious environment, and the legacy of a controversial writer, Sebastian Webster, the school's most famous and infamous alumnus, who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

- So we're not gonna give the ending of the book away, but we can say that the ending is violent.

This is not a happy ending to a coming-of-age story.

Why did you decide to go in that direction?

Could have gone in the other direction, could have taken a middle ground, but you did not, why?

- I was attracted in writing this particular novel to the sort of legacy of a certain kind of story.

I think originally, although the book did change, I conceived of it as a sort of contemporary Bonnie and Clyde, a contemporary "Thelma and Louise," the kind of aesthetic answer to the idea that the world as it is somehow doesn't have enough poetry, enough excitement, enough transcendence, to make it worth living in.

And so the very violent decision that some of the characters make towards the end of the book for me is the kind of natural conclusion to this philosophy that they've memed themselves into, you could say, that only something that sort of feels awful or feels terrible, or Virginia uses the word hideous, can possibly set them above the sort of mediocrity they see as a life without certain kinds of transcendence.

- So I want to get into the reaction to the book.

You got a lot of great reviews from very prominent places.

I went on Goodreads, and that would've been before the book came out or in the early stages of publication, and there there were many complimentary comments there too but there were some that were not complimentary.

Two questions.

Can you explain or get into that in a little more detail, number one, and number two, when you see or read a negative comment, what is your reaction?

And as a writer, I really want to hear this too.

(Jim laughs) 'Cause I've been in this, I've been in this- - I haven't looked at my Goodreads, so I'm afraid you know more than I do about it.

I think that a fair critique of this book, one that I heard from my first novel "Social Creature" as well, is that these characters are unlikable.

I have my reservations about thinking about characters that way, but I think, yeah, it's true.

It's very difficult to like anyone in this book.

Everyone, and not just the people responsible for the worst violence in the book, nobody is really likable.

Everyone is deeply, deeply compromised.

But for me, a question that always haunts me as a writer is how do you love the unlikable?

How do you love characters that you don't like?

And that's the lesson that Laura at the end of the book, as she's grappling with how profoundly compromised everyone she has known has become, how perhaps wicked they have become, she still has to ask herself, you know, what were we looking for?

Was there any good in what we were trying to find?

Was there something real in what we had even as it got destroyed in such an intense way?

And for me, a commitment I have in all of my work is to say no, people are often unlikeable, especially when they're looking for something good or looking for something real.

It's precisely that pursuit of the things that are so important that somehow how can lead us so firmly off the path.

So if people tell me, "I hated your book 'cause everyone was unlikable," I think, all right, fair.

You know, we agree on something.

(Jim laughs) - So when you are creating an unlikable character, and this is a dilemma or an issue that many authors, I would cite Stephen King certainly is a great example, when you are creating them, is there any part of you, and I'm talking you the person, not even necessarily you the writer, is there any part of you that says, "I really ought to cut this person a little more slack"?

And that really is a long way of saying, how closely can you identify with the characters, fictional characters, you create?

- I think I probably identify with everybody a little bit.

I joke that all my characters are self-portraits in one way or the other.

If I hadn't gone into writing or academia, I would've gone into theater.

At the time, there was a time when that was something I was strongly considering.

And I think that process that actors often do of trying to figure out, you know, them in a character is a process I still use where I think the questions of what does this person want and how can I understand what they want, how can I see the what is good and real in the desires that motivate them, it helps me see the humanity in them, even as I think that perhaps more gracious approach frees me up to be a little harsher when it comes to certain details, the little ways that people lie or delude themselves or kind of try to convince others of the person they want to be.

And for me, the kind of trying to see the best of them or relate even emotionally to the best of them kind of frees me up, I hope, to be sharper without being cruel.

- You know, so I understand what you're saying about the characters not being likable, but there is a difference in my mind between being likable and being attractive.

And so let's talk about Virginia.

You describe her as beautiful, headstrong, maybe a little domineering, but also, I thought, fragile and uncertain.

And after I finished the book, I found myself thinking about Virginia, and I get to ask the author, the creator, is that exactly what Virginia would've wanted, that after she had left, I was still thinking about her?

- Absolutely.

I think she wants power, but a very particular kind of power, which is, I always see Virginia as someone who is so desperately afraid to be human, desperately afraid to be ordinary.

Everything about the way that she constructs her identity, from the fact that when she decides she's gonna convert to Christianity, she won't just, you know, talk to the local school chaplain and do it in this normal way.

She is drawn to Catholicism because she thinks it's the most hardcore version of what she wants.

She has a very fraught relationship with sex and sexuality that seems deeply tied up with the idea that she doesn't wanna be, you know, just another teenager having sex.

She wants to be this kind of virgin goddess above it all.

And I think that all of the decisions that she makes, horrific though they are, come from this absolute terror of what if I'm just a human being?

What if I'm just as uncertain, as confused, as scared, as potentially annoying, as any other student in the school?

And that she is so unable to contend with herself as a flawed human being, that she makes herself into this myth and makes decisions knowing that they will transform her almost into a work of art rather than a person.

- And I found myself, too, thinking about her in the context, in comparison with sort of the anti-Virginia, in my reading anyways, which was Bonnie, which is Laura's first roommate.

But they're both very specifically, very particularly, constructing an identity for themselves.

They couldn't be any more different in any other sense, but it all comes back, I thought, to this sense of not just the search for a higher meaning, but for an understanding of who they are and who they present to the world.

Am I overinterpreting that?

- Oh, that's absolutely right.

Bonnie is my favorite character in the book.

So I'm glad we get to talk about her.

(Jim and G. Wayne laugh) So Bonnie is extremely annoying.

She is a would-be Instagram influencer, perhaps in the Caroline Calloway mold, one might say.

She is extremely cringe as the kids say.

Constantly trying to record these chapel choir, these evensongs.

Her love of the music seems to be merely aesthetic rather than elevated in a certain way that the chapel choir understands themselves to be, that Virginia understands her self to be.

But she's also, she's kind, she's well-meaning, she's a decent person and a good friend and- - She's easy to be with.

- These qualities don't come through because people think she's irritating.

- Yeah.

- So- - But she is just the mirror of Virginia in many ways and I very much intended them to be.

- You are also a distinguished writer of non-fiction, including many essays that have been published in "The Wall Street Journal," in "The Washington Post," and "The New York Times," and there's a long list of them.

I wanted to get into a couple of them.

This one really caught my eye.

It was published in "The New York Times" on May 8th of 2020, which was the beginning of COVID, or the worst part of COVID, and that was titled, "Christianity Gets Weird.

Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren.

Maybe you should try a Latin Mass."

Great headline.

Tell us about that essay, what you were saying in that essay.

- Sure, so it was part of wider work that I'm doing now about the sort of contemporary spiritual landscape in America among young people.

And in that article, I was interested in the revival of certain kinds of traditional Christianity as a source of meaning, but also a source for a certain kind of aesthetic identity.

I think "The New York Times" picked a headline for another version of the piece that said, "The future of Christianity is punk."

And my particular interest in that piece, and more broadly, is how we simultaneously search for transcendence, and as you say, construct our own identities, our own personal brands, if we want to get too Twitter about it, and how these impulses intersect and how for this group of young people, a certain kind of, whether it's a traditionalist Catholicism or the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Episcopal church, whether sort of smells and bells and incense did something for people for whom certain kinds of, let's say, Christmas and Easter Christianity or other forms of generic spirituality seemed insufficient or insufficiently challenging or insufficiently intense.

- So another essay was published in "The American Interest" was titled, "What The Culture War Is Really About," and you contend there that it's not race, gender, or free speech, but a debate about human nature.

Can you expound on that and what was in that essay?

- So I think that, I always try to stay out of culture war debates, but something that I do think is really interesting is that when we talk about gender, for example, what often kind of comes to play is this question of, which I think is implicit, it's often not rendered explicit, but there's something very complicated and weird about human beings.

We have a lot of freedom, creative freedom, imagination.

The ways in which we tell stories about ourselves, the ways in which we shape our destiny, seem like they're, at least in part, up to us.

We're also members of communities, communities that give us language, that give us stories, that were shaped by those in a particular ways.

And we're also animals that are wedded to particular physical states, to our own bodies.

They're ways in which we're not free.

And I think these three elements, you know, I mean, what is it but the human condition to work out, what do we choose?

What is sort of thrust upon us by an animal state?

What is thrust upon us by a social state?

How do we in turn affect that social state?

These are questions that I think we've always been working out, we've always been trying in various ways to get a handle on.

And I think that, without being too reductionist about it, a lot of our contemporary debates do touch on the fact that this is still an unsettled question.

I'm actually working on my next book, which is an intellectual history of self-making, it deals more directly with these very same issues.

- Tara, I'm curious, you know, you're such an accomplished writer in so many different formats.

Is there one that just feels like home?

- I'm a novelist at heart.

I love it, but I also really, really hate it.

It's a deeply, deeply emotional process in a way that non-fiction isn't.

That said, I think that my non-fiction and my novels support each other.

Sometimes I'll, you know, write a whole novel and then realize, oh, you know, just as we're talking now, I realize how much of "Self-Made" came out of writing Virginia in "The World Cannot Give."

And sometimes writing a book of non-fiction will get me interested in questions that then get explored in a novel.

So while I do have both a greater love and let's say a greater hate for the novel writing process, I really do see the two as reinforcing one another.

- So you said you're a novelist at heart, and at the risk of a bad pun, God bless you.

I can totally relate to that.

You mentioned your next book and I just wanna give the title of it and it's coming out I guess in June from Public Affairs, "Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians."

Again, a great title.

Give us a little preview.

- Oh, thanks, I'm very excited about it.

Hopefully I'll be seeing galleys very soon.

- Can you tell us a little bit more about what's in it or no?

- Sure, yes.

- Oh, go ahead.

- So it is an intellectual history of the idea of self-creation, looking at the self-made man, the kind of entrepreneur, and the dandy, the person who creates himself or herself as a work of art, as two sides of the same coin.

It tells the story from the Renaissance all the way into the present day and the land of Instagram about this idea that what it means to be a human being is to make yourself, to look inwards and let your desires become a source of your reality.

You might say, you are who you want to be.

And we look at Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde, we look at Gabriele D'Annunzio and Mussolini, we look at Andrew Carnegie and P. T. Barnum, and we look at Kim Kardashian and Caroline Calloway.

So it's- - I can't wait.

I can't wait.

- A bit of a tour through some of the most notorious and exciting self creators in, let's say, modern European American history.

- That's phenomenal.

You know, when you think about the trajectory of both your academic development, but also your development as a writer, does that theology, that grounding in theology, come back into all of your work?

- Absolutely.

As that priest said, there's no such thing as an ex-theologian.

And I think even as a novelist, certainly as a writer of non-fiction, those questions of what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to have a relationship with an idea, an understanding, a question about where the world comes from, I think those questions are essential to kind of who we are as people as they are to understanding the world around us.

And I've been lucky that the fiction and the non-fiction afford me two avenues to exploring that.

- So we're almost out of time, but maybe in about 30 seconds, and we could do a whole show on this, talk a little bit about craft.

When you write, do you outline first?

Just a 15, 20-second overview of your craft, how you do it.

- I do something that makes me insane, which is I rewrite the book from scratch every draft until I don't hate it.

And at a certain point, (Jim and G. Wayne laugh) I know it's getting better when I'm retyping it from a PDF and not just rewriting it.

But that is how I work, and it makes me miserable but it also makes better books because I change so much each time.

- Well, Tara, you're a great writer and we enjoyed having you on the show today.

She's Tara Isabella Burton, and the book is "The World Cannot Give."

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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