An Interview with Lindsay Hunter
Ugly Girls is Lindsay Hunter’s first novel—her first two books, Daddy’s (Featherproof, 2010) and Don’t Kiss Me (FSG, 2013) were kind of short stories that punch you in the mouth and then peace the fuck out. I was interested in seeing if the prowess in her stories held in a longer work. Fortunately, the chapters in Ugly Girls are as brisk as her stories, with most ending in a way that forces the reader into the next and the next.
In the Publisher’s Weekly review the plot of Ugly Girls was described as “depressing,” “relentlessly bleak” and “intolerable,” which seems, to me, to point to exactly why this book is valuable. If much of contemporary literary fiction feels like cocktail banter, Ugly Girls feels a lot more like puking red wine on the host’s white carpet—beautiful and savage in its ugly glory.
This interview was conducted over a series of emails. Hunter and I both took an impolite amount of time to return each other’s emails, which felt both comfortable and fitting.
—Juliet Escoria
THE BELIEVER: Maybe this is for selfish reasons (being someone who writes short fiction who would someday like to write longer work), but I was wondering about the technical aspects of how you wrote this book. Did you have to outline at all? What was the scariest part?
LINDSAY HUNTER: I really struggled, for a long time, trying to figure out how I, would write a novel. It’s a pretty daunting proposition! Would I get bored? Would I be able to maintain the way I like to write in such a long form? Would it be interesting to ANYONE? I decided the only way I could write a novel was to sit down and write the way I knew how, which was to give myself a daily word count goal, and to treat each “chapter” like a flash fiction piece. That’s what I set out to do. I told myself to write 2,000-2,500 words a day, and each chapter would be from the point of view of one of the five main characters. That way, I had a very clear end in sight for each day I wrote. I had a concrete goal. That is very important for me. I don’t work well when I think of the whole thing at once. I need to take it one day at a time.
I think I outlined as I went. So, I started out wanting to write a fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t feel fear. That girl ended up being Perry, but as I wrote Baby Girl, and Myra, and Jim, and even Jamey started seeming like minds I wanted to dip into, and that’s how it went from a first-person narrative to the omniscient kind of thing it is now. I would write my day’s chunk of words, and then, to remind myself, I’d outline on a scratch sheet of paper what I wanted to work on the following day. Or I’d write notes about why I’d planted a seed here, what I wanted it to blossom into later. I’d also write the word count I started the day with, and then I’d draw an arrow and write the word count I wanted to end the day with. It all felt pretty satisfying when I viewed it in achievable tasks like that. Beep boop, I am a robot.
The scariest part is ongoing. Have I done my best work? Will people like it? Why do I care so much about being liked? And all the existential horror that comes after those thoughts.
Super happy that I got to interview Lindsay Hunter. Her book is amazing and was just published on the 4th.
