Q&A With Dylan Landis, author of Normal People Don't Live Like This


How much of Normal People Don’t Live Like This is based on you growing up in New York? Are the settings real?

Dylan Landis: The book's drenched in the New York I grew up in, but only the quick snapshots are true-to-life. When I was nine, I walked by a welfare hotel—naturally, it's gone condo—and a man in a wheelchair was stabbing the air with a knife. I gave Leah that memory. She steals from stores I once loved; they're long gone. She's met perverts in Riverside Park; me too. And I set two scenes in girls' bathrooms at New York schools, because they're such good crucibles—claustrophobic, with trouble you can't get away from.
But real life is just the runway you take off from. I used to write about decorating for newspapers and magazines, so I love inventing rooms. It liberates me to invent what happens in them. The Prideau girls' shockingly messy apartment, or Rainey Royal's pink seashell of a room, or the magical grotto that Helen, Leah's mother, creates in a women's welfare hotel—those are pure New York, and pure inventions.

How does your background as a journalist and non-fiction writer affect your writing style and process in writing as a novelist?

DL: I'm always reporting. I scour each scene, as I dream it up, for clues to my characters' emotional states. I take notes on the precise ways in which each character cleans her room or thinks about Walt Whitman or talks about her grandmother or puts on her makeup, because no two people do anything the same way. I also report for facts, because facts make fiction ring true. For Normal People, I carefully researched frog dissections. And I sat on a friend's New York roof at midnight, alone, and took notes on the weird ticking sounds.
I don’t draw on people I’ve met as a journalist since I start with intimate knowledge of a character. A reporter rarely gets to ask her subject: Describe your first sexual experience…What is your most shameful memory? Tell me about a time someone was extremely proud of you…Did you ever cheat on your spouse? Do you ever stifle feelings of tenderness? Do you chew with your mouth open? But you must know such things about your fictional character, or you won't be able to paint a believable, sympathetic, flawed human being.

Why did you call it Normal People Don’t Live Like This? And explain: normal people don’t live like what?

DL: There’s a moment in the book when Helen, mother of Leah (the main teenage character), goes to her daughter’s best friend’s apartment and almost has a heart attack. Helen is a decorator; she worships serenity and beauty. And this apartment looks like it exploded. Every surface overflows with books, papers, unwashed dishes, diet pills, clothes, magazines, the detritus of teenage girls. Helen’s appalled – she thinks, “Why didn’t Leah tell me? She knows normal people don’t live like this.” But of course normal people have terrible messes and secret lives. They have their privations and their unexpected generosities, and that’s part of what the stories explore – how with all our emotional damages we keeping reaching for each other.

Why did you choose to begin Normal People with a character other than Leah, your protagonist?

DL: Originally, the story "Fire" came first. And Leah's perspective is very clear in that story: she's getting mercilessly picked on by a mean girl, and no one's going to save her. "Jazz” is that mean girl's private story, and it's complex and alarming. When I switched them, Leah remained deeply sympathetic, but Rainey became immediately more interesting. Now, by the time you meet Rainey as a bully in "Fire," she's not just another mean girl; she's trying to empower herself in the absence of any parental investment.

Leah’s relationship with Helen is central to the book. How do they influence one another, both within the novel’s world and in your creation of the characters?

DL: Helen's unhappiness probably drives Leah to seek affection and approval from her older, more worldly friends. And when Helen's anxieties spill out, they fuel Leah's own.
But in the later stories, and as I revised, mother and daughter affected each other in new and subtle ways, despite their secretiveness. Helen is a decorator, and Leah, obsessed with biology, absorbs her mother's ideas about beauty and order. It expands her, quietly. Helen remembers a quirky, romantic story Leah told her about Yoko Ono—and it becomes a kind of gift, because she retells it when she falls in love.

Leah seems to be very influenced by her “friends.” Do you think this affects the changes she goes through? How is the concept of friendship explored?

DL: Leah's friendships start with the spark of fascination: she's drawn to girls who, she believes, hold the key to something she urgently needs: sexual knowledge, confidence, the triumph over loneliness. So she's deeply under their sway. Sometimes that feels glorious and other times she feels like she's drowning.

The theme of control is central to many of the characters and their stories. How do you see the different interpretations of control being addressed and finally resolved?

DL: I think control is a reaction to riptides of severe anxiety, so it's a great subject for fiction. When Leah's in terror of losing her father, she exerts the only control she can: the obsessive cleaning and re-cleaning of her room. As for Helen, she’s been so locked up. She’s controlled the only two things she could–her body and her environment. She starves, and she decorates.
Ultimately, both mother and daughter begin to make forward movement by relinquishing control and taking risks.

While most of the novel takes place in New York, the last story takes place in Paris. Why did you move the setting?

DL: Leah went to Paris quite by accident. I went first, to visit a poet-friend, and as a writing exercise I kept Leah's travel journal for two weeks, since I don't keep a journal of my own. I took notes in the catacombs, the sewers, an exhibition of Delacroix that included a portrait of the artist, who was stunning. Leah loved having control of my pen. She adored the catacombs. She fell in love with Delacroix. She drank way, way too much café crème­—we were seriously over-caffeinated. She took notes on every little thing.
Most people think of Paris as pure romance, but Leah showed me a subterranean Paris in which she has to struggle toward romance. Her journal was so rich it contained everything I needed for a final story.

What are you working on now? Any chance that any of the characters in Normal People will make encore appearances?

DL: I've got a novel in the drawer about Leah, called Floorwork, that I can't wait to pick up again. She's twenty-two, working in a rat lab—which suits her love of things that are sterile and shiny and fit in little compartments—and she's got an engaging, quirky relationship with the rats. But she's drawn into one of those dark and magnetic friendships, and then into a side of New York (and of her own personality) that's risky and then dangerous and that finally won't let her go.
And I've got something cooking that's wildly different: a novel set in New York a hundred years ago, based on a historic figure. People hear the name and revile her, but the more research I do, the more I admire and even love her. All I'll say now is that she broke a lot of social laws: she was fiercely spirited, single, sexually active and a mere servant, at a time when all those things were scorned. And she paid dearly for it.
Rainey Royal's not done with me either. I sense that too.