author: Elle Nash
review:
I think what Elle Nash delivers that a lot of authors don’t is a very authentic version of the rural/suburban sort of trashy realism. If you grew up somewhere that is NOT a big city, you know these people, you’ve been friends with some of these people, you went to school with them, you wonder how they’re doing every so often, some of them post pictures of their kids and that’s a little scary, some of them are going through some big problems in public in a way that’s more than a little off-putting…
I think when writers from big cities and who come from that MFA writing background try to do this sort of thing, they never get it right. It always has that feel of like, I don’t know, a sitcom set in New York where the characters are scumbags but live in nice apartments and wear good sweaters. A lot of times if feels like the lowest class person those writers can imagine is basically the most successful person you know.
These are writers who will have a dinner scene at Cheesecake Factory to indicate how pathetic the characters are. “He didn’t even realize that taking his wife to Cheesecake Factory is pathetic!?”
I’m a non-secret Cheesecake Factory stan, by the way. We went there after our cat died, both of us were super sad and just kind of didn’t know what to do. We just ate there because it was open and there were lots of darker, more secluded booths, and that was kind of the vibe we both wanted. But also, Cheesecake Factory is fine, y’all. Nobody is pretending it’s the fanciest restaurant on earth, but if you grew up in a rural place, it may be the fanciest place in town.
Anyway.
I’ve just gotten really tired of that fake-feeling attempt at writing characters from places other than New York or LA, and I’ve gotten tired of stories of people from those places as well, and boy it does end up limiting what you can read in terms of “literary fiction” a little more than you might think.
I’m not into the “the suburbs, now that’s REALLY scary” kind of thing that most people who don’t live in suburbs want to write about.
Good thing Elle Nash is around, eh?