Tara Isabella Burton

When I met Tara Isabella Burton in 2014 at Brazenhead Books, she struck me as the embodiment of a bright young thing. Like a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel, only one whose firecracker intellect rendered her impervious to Waugh’s coruscating vision. She was living a trans-Atlantic lifestyle, crossing between Oxford and her native New York in pursuit of a PhD in religion. In contrast to my plainspoken Midwestern background and habit of wearing some of the same shirts I have had in my dresser since high school (the dresser, at least, has changed), she was somebody who if not always literally in costume tended to give the feeling of a wild, borderline manic experiment in collaborative imagination. She won my undying respect by posting up all night at a Chelsea diner and writing about it for a national magazine. Along with Scott Cheshire, Rachel Rosenfelt, Brandon Harris, Brian Gresko, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Michael Dobson, Simona Blat, Hugo Perez, Rick Snyder, and the late David Burr Gerrard, hers was among those faces I could reasonably expect to see on any given trip to Brazenhead. Our conversations pinballed into the night, occasionally going so long as to give out on squint-inducing morning light over 2nd Avenue. Those days are gone now, but Tara and I have remained in touch over the years, through the publication of her debut novel, Social Creature, and all that has followed, including her latest, Here in Avalon. For our interview, she agreed to meet at Bemelmans, close to where she and her husband currently reside on the Upper East Side. At my prompting, Tara began to speak of her latest globe-hopping adventures.

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Tara Isabella Burton: I went to Prague. I lectured on Self-Made. They put us up in a castle. Macron was there, in the castle, at the same time. So, we kept dodging his security people. It was really fun, very beautiful.

J.T. Price: Did you actually encounter Macron?

We were close to him. We did not speak with him. As we were unpacking our bags, we heard “La Marseillaise.”

Were you having Casablanca flashbacks?

I had a little extra time before class, so I took the waters at Marienbad.

So Thomas Mann of you.

It was only two hours away. Is that the tea menu? I did a piece in the Wall Street Journal once. It was just about pricing out the cheapest way to experience the fanciest places. And a pot of tea is the way to go.

I’m all-in. If it has caffeine especially.

It’s 14 for a French-press coffee. Which is a pot of coffee. Which is great. And the tea—it doesn’t say here. I think it’s 13 for a pot of tea.

So, taking the waters. Is this something your grandmother would have done?

One’s grandmother. Not, like, my grandmother. My grandmother was from New York and—

Would not take the waters?

I don’t think she would have not taken the waters on principle. But taking the waters is an abstract European fashion. It’s various spring waters that are meant to have special contents, special healing properties because of their mineral content or salt content. And you’re meant to simultaneously—at least in Marienbad—take a little stone cup, and you go around to the springs and you drink the water and it heals you. 

I think we’re just going to do the coffee and tea, the high tea. I’ll have the Guatemalan press.

The same.

I do really love these, the cup and saucer. I keep wanting things that remind me of the Carlyle in my home. But they’re all (a) very expensive, (b) hard to find, (c) the things that the Carlyle does sell are not the same that they actually have. This is really beautiful. It looks the same as—

The wallpaper.

They must have these custom-made?

You’ve never, perhaps, walked out with one in your purse?

No. No, never. I’ve accidentally walked out with . . . the spear they put the cherries on? In the cocktail. Little cherry sword.

And that’s not a disposable thing?

It’s metal. It was not on purpose. I think I was gesturing with it. And now—

Now it’s your cherry sword.

Now it’s mine. So I do occasionally serve myself little cherries with it at home. But it was a complete accident. 

Tell me about your relationship to Bemelmans. You said you were here as a child . . .

Not all of the time or anything. I grew up around here. I don’t think I went as a child so much as I passed it, and kind of liked the idea. And when I was living in Yorkville nearby, it was this slightly Old World, ridiculous, fancy place.

You take your coffee with sugar and milk. Which I’m noting like a good reporter.

I’m just now realizing, I know you, and the idea that the recorder is on is filling me with two competing impulses. One of which is to be extremely guarded and say nothing interesting. And the other is the slightly chaotic thing of “Now I will just talk into the recorder!”

Well, I’m encouraging the latter. 

[laughter] Have you ever had this where you know you’re being eavesdropped on, and you’re having a conversation that’s very animated, it may be very personal, but as soon as you know someone’s eavesdropping you compulsively up the ante?

Sure, sure.

Partly to see how they’ll react. But partly because you can’t not.

The performative thing.

It’s not even joyful performance, it’s like, “Well, I know what you’re thinking . . .”

“I have an audience!” So…

Might as well fake it.

I have just joined the New York Society Library two blocks away, which is going to become my entire personality. And because it is near here, there is now this lure, “If I get a really good day of writing done, then I can reward myself.”

By going to the library, or going here?

By going here after the library. Have you ever been to the New York Society Library? It’s amazing.

Tell me about it.

So it’s a subscription library. Historic. I want to say nineteenth century, in a large townhouse on 79th and Madison. A mix of slightly tweedy younger writers and retirees. And it’s very much an incredible, incredible collection. The nonfiction book I’m reading right now is on the history of magic and modernity. The selection of academic treatments of western esotericism and Rosicrucianism during the Enlightenment. Also, there’s free tea and cookies, every day, between 3:00 and 3:30.

Not too bad. All your acolytes are going to end up sitting beside you there.

My favorite things in New York are deceptively inexpensive fancy things. Not that the New York Society Library is deceptively inexpensive. It’s just very, very beautiful for what it is. I can go to a place that looks like the Oxford College library and surround myself with wood-paneling. It is wonderful and accessible. I feel like I accidentally found a door to a hidden garden. 

My opening questions here are kind of related. Is there anything new that is not also old, if one digs deeply enough?

Intellectually speaking, yes. If I’m going to talk to you with my nonfiction theologian hat on, I would probably say something like, the very obsession with the idea of originality, or the idea of novelty, is relatively new. Such that if there is something quintessentially modern it’s the idea that we are the authors of our own minds, the authors of our own reality. And what we create, including innovation for innovation’s sake, is exciting precisely because it springs out of us and does not conform to something that is already there. The idea of novelty is a novelty.

Per your recent nonfiction book Self-Made, this idea of newness is something like three hundred years old. Because people reading you say that here might think, “Oh, yeah, right, well, I can go on TikTok now and post—”

Oh, yes. By new, I mean post-Renaissance! I do think the internet has both put this into overdrive and also changed it in ways that would be premature to opine on too fully. Which is to say, I think what is going on the internet, with the weirdness there, is different both in kind and in degree from the trajectory of the autonomous self. But we don’t quite have the intellectual distance to work out what’s going on. Yet.

In the sense of where it’s leading?

In the sense that the way that texts proliferate online, like, Reddit stories that become urban legends—this is not a new argument at all—they feel more like pre-printed word storytelling. There is more in common with oral storytelling than with “This is the text, and the text is authoritative.” There’s a body of scholars, thinkers on the internet who argue, “This is a returning to something else.” You know. The primacy of the printed word was a blip, and now we’re getting back to something more diffuse. It is perhaps more explicitly spiritually loaded. Characterized by the language of energy. The language of manifesting. All of this feels like we’re going into an enchanted fairyland called the Internet, at least in the way that many of us talk about our experiences. Online on the astral plane of internet life—Catherine Dee writes about this really well. I don’t think that we have—collectively, as a culture, in the United States, in 2024—a shared sense that there are transcendent ideals to which we must conform. Where goodness is something out there, and the way we judge ourselves is how we conform to this thing which is outside ourselves. And so, I think when we’re talking about aesthetics or politics or literary fashion, we can say truly that very little is actually new. But I think insofar as we are constantly wrestling with the question of “Ought things be new?” it’s almost, to me, more interesting than whether things are new.

To go away from the more abstract to perhaps the more literal—although you can take this in an abstract direction if you want—what is your favorite old thing in New York City?

Ooh. I’m a member of an arts club called the Lambs Club—not to be confused with the restaurant of the same name—which I’m really, really passionate about as an institution. It was founded in 1874, based on the Lambs Club in London founded by Charles and Mary Lamb. It is an arts club that had its heyday for actors in the ’30s and ’40s. Lerner met Loewe at the Lambs. And they lost all of their money in, I want to say, the ’70s or so. Lost their old venue, as the industry changed. And values changed. They were able to keep running in part because I believe the rights to Brigadoon [a Lerner and Loewe musical] were left in their will? They—we—rent a series of rooms at the 3 West Club. Which is hilariously also the Women’s National Republican Club. And the bar on the second floor is shared between the two. 

Do the two groups get along?

I think there is very theatrical opposition. Mostly they don’t interact. There aren’t that many Women National Republicans I ever see at the bar. The club is mostly, has historically mostly been, acht-ors of a certain age: cabaret world, Broadway world.

What’s the décor like?

You haven’t been! It’s red walls filled with oil paintings of famous men and naked ladies. Because it was a men’s club for most of its history. But throughout the ’30s and ’40s there would be these regular parties and showcases called gambols and frolics, and for each of them, there would be an oil painting. And inevitably in the ’30s and ’40s, it would be a beautiful naked woman surrounded by lambs. And many of them are still there. Many are Ziegfeld Follies-esque. Show-girly, tasteful nudity, a little bit kitschy in that respect. Somewhere, and I don’t know where it’s gone, it may have gone to storage, there used to be a collage of passwords to speakeasies throughout the city. Cards with the passwords to get in. But I think that during the last renovation it went somewhere mysterious.

What is your favorite new thing in New York?

Bike lanes. Bike lanes, yeah! I get very excited about this. One of the things that interested me most about the pandemic, one of the rare bright spots in a not very bright couple of years, was the way in which a lot of New York transformed its urban architecture to accommodate outdoor activities. I get excited about the idea that cities are communities. And the best way possible to have a city feel like a community is to have as many people as possible engage their physical surroundings. So I’m very proud of bike lanes. However, this is the part where I get very cranky, that Mayor Adams came to office with a very, very robust plan for bike lanes, a certain number of miles every year. And they have fallen pathetically, astoundingly short. This is my ultimate goal of becoming a cranky old lady. I’m cranky about bike lanes!

You’ll have to start an activist organization, you know. This harkens back to what draws you to Bemelmans—but has that which most enchants you changed over time? From childhood to adulthood? From your twenties to your thirties? 

I think that what enchants has become more expansive rather than changing. I was one of those Oscar Wilde theater kids who loves beauty and dreamed of living in 19th century Paris and I had my LiveJournal LARP set in 19th century Paris where I met my little online friends and we pretended to be courtesans for the Moulin Rouge. It was . . . unoriginal. I did an impressive amount of research for a thirteen-year-old. But not an impressive amount of research by any adult standard. I think for a long time when I was much, much younger, my sense of the beautiful was so incredibly aesthetic and so bound up with this romantic notion of having a poetic life or having a bohemian life, like Anaïs Nin, or these figures I’d read about, and I don’t think I was interested—this is like a lot of teenagers—in the moral dimension of that. Or how beauty or the realm of the aesthetic or the realm of the exciting linked up to any other set of transcendental values. Ironically, I was studying theology in school at the time, but clearly wasn’t learning anything.

You’re speaking about your time at university?

College into grad school. I was at Oxford from basically age eighteen until twenty-six studying theology. And I think at a certain point, I became more interested in beauty as doing something. My thirteen-year-old self would be appalled; I don’t believe in art for art’s sake. Or if I do, I believe that art is for art’s sake, yes, in the way you play a game to play a game. You don’t play a game to achieve something. I think there is a way in which the idea of art for its own sake it’s about not being didactic or trying to effect a particular political or social outcome. That art is just in the realm that it’s in. But the idea that that is automatically translated to, “Well, things should just be beautiful and there is no moral question here,” that . . . that I no longer believe.

When did that change for you? Was there some sort of moment in your life . . . where you fell off a horse?

Ha, yes and no. It did go hand-in-hand with the religious—I don’t know if saying “converted to Christianity” is the right way of putting it. I was a Jewishy, Episcopalian-y everything and nothing growing up. I would have called myself Christian, but only went to church on Christmas and Easter. While studying theology, at some point, I started going to church every week. And thinking, “Oh, yeah, I actually believe this.”

This was in your mid-twenties?

After I came back to New York, after I had been working at Vox for a little while. So, 2018, 2019.

So there was no flash in your mind.

There was no flash. There was a year and a half of knowing I was hungry for something and not knowing what it was. Kind of going to church a little bit out of curiosity because I’d met someone on Twitter. I loved the choral music at St. Thomas.

The first time you went was as the guest of a friend?

The guest of a friend, but I wasn’t interested in finding a church. I didn’t at the time think of it as “I’m Going Back to Church.” I didn’t necessarily think of myself as not Christian before either. That whole part of my life I took for granted. And once I stopped taking it for granted, I started thinking to myself, “Well, if I actually do believe in good and evil . . . and I do believe that I am not the authority on my own life in a certain way . . .”

That’s a scary thing for an author to confront.

Yeah! It is. I hope it’s made me a better writer. I don’t know. I think it’s made me—made me love novels more rather than less. But it’s also made me wary of certain kinds of . . . I think the best thing is to direct our attention to the strangeness of the world. To kind of be an invitation, not to be lost in this hypothetical, theoretical space. Nor to come away being like, “Well, I’ve learned X, Y, and Z thing about being a better person in this book.” But just to have a sense of wonder, like, “People are really weird, huh?” And to have that realization joyfully? Even when you’re reading Dostoevsky’s Demons for the second time. It’s tragic, bleak, awful, but . . .

Said to have foretold the Russian Revolution.

It’s really funny too. I think it’s precisely in realizing how much—in seeing the way that the pettiest things and the most lofty things both matter to people so much. And we can’t really disentangle them from one another, and we’re always getting it wrong. I think I’ve said this before, or written this, but all novels for me are about the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves. Or the stories we tell about ourselves.

Sort of a turn you’re making on the Joan Didion line. Although she’s sort of making that same point, right?

But every story we tell ourselves is wrong. And there’s something asymptotic about a novel. It’s always—there’s a reason Don Quixote is the paradigmatic novel. Everyone has a story about who they are, everyone has a story about them being right. Some of these stories are even more plausible than others. But at the end of the day, they’re all incomplete if not astoundingly wrong. And I think when I read a good novel it is always about self-deception, self-perception, and people trying to work, like, “What is the genre I’m living in?” Am I the hero of my story?

Personally, as the author, you know, don’t you?

I mean the characters. I think many novels, at least the novels I’m most drawn to, are about people asking themselves what kind of novel they live in. And there’s two versions of that, and one is, “Who am I? Am I the hero of the story or the villain of the story?” And the other is, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy?”

I think that being a Christian probably did make me think about novels in that way. Only because I became more interested in the incompleteness of what a novel can do than the fantasy that there is some novel so great that it will capture all of it. It doesn’t, it can’t. That’s the point.

How does the history of the novel mirror or run against or augment the history of individuation, the development of the individual?

I think they go hand-in-hand. And I’m not a confident enough historian to tell you what affected what. But I think broadly speaking the tendency to think of ourselves in relation to story—the tendency to think of ourselves as characters in a novel with a slightly more formal self-consciousness about it—is probably more recent. I’m curious to see the extent to which the Influencer, or the Online Personality, will become a different version of that, will affect how we think about ourselves. Think of Main Character Syndrome, where—I don’t know if someone with Main Character Syndrome these days thinks of herself as the heroine in a Jane Austen, say, or a Gothic novel, or if they think of themselves as in a television show, or—

A zombie story. “Look at all these trolls coming after me on the internet.”

Right. I think that’s the part where I wonder how much is distinct about the novel in terms of storytelling. As opposed to television. Or oral storytelling. And I don’t have a solid answer on that precisely because I think I’m still working out my own mind. The novel I’m working on right now—when I say “working on” it’s not under contract, and it’s going to take me a lot of time to write. I’m having a lot of fun with it. And it’s currently very bad, but I’m at peace with that. It’s about self-justification and storytelling as self-justification. And I think that one of the great things that a good novel does is attempt to justify the personal life or the ideology of the author.

It risks being didactic if it does.

Absolutely. And this is a tension that I worry about as a Christian novelist.

Where if you accidentally write something that’s amoral . . .

Well, what if I accidentally write something that’s amoral. And . . . what if I write something that’s bad because I’m trying to make it too Christian? These are two poles of tension that I wrestle with.

Is there a minister you can speak to about that? “Bless me father, I’m afraid my novel might not be good.”

I think if I am to hold to the philosophy that I do, that is in service to some kind of truth that is transcendent, in the service of something that is real and not just self-referential. . . . But I also think, both as a Christian and someone who reads books, that didactic novels are absolute failures. The closest thing I can think of to a didactic Christian novel that is pretty good, but only pretty good, at apologetics, is C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy. Which, you know, is written for adults as opposed to the Narnia series. 

May I ask you to speak about the first novel manuscript that you ever completed?

Ah, oh God, I was like eleven years old. Do you want to talk about adult manuscripts?

No, the very first.

I was eleven. I was extremely precocious.

Who was your editor?

Actually, you probably can still find it. I’ve tried to scrub the internet of it, but I’m not actually ashamed. I will not give you the name of it, but my grandmother did put it on iUniverse, like, “You finished a novel! Congratulations, honey.” And I was really excited. I was a kid and she meant really, really well. Like, “We’re going to have it so people can buy it!” And the internet wasn’t then what it is now. And I don’t think she was familiar enough with the industry even as it was then to think through the consequences of posting the novel that way.

That it would be there forever.

Yeah. But it did mean when I started writing professionally in my twenties, I had to go and figure out how to scrub this very adorable, precocious novel I’d written when I was eleven. You could have got it on Amazon. It was Print-on-Demand. 

So you were a published author when you were eleven years old, Tara.

Technically, yes. But there was no editorial insight, and it wasn’t good.

Well, tell me, what was the general arc of the story, if you can bear to speak of it.

It was about a priest. It was an allegorical, theological novel about a priest in Italy.

So the priest was the protagonist.

He was. And it was set on the island in Italy where my mother still lives called Ischia. Where I grew up going every summer. When my mom retired, she bought the house next to the bed and breakfast where we’d been going for thirty years. Or more, because she’d been going since before I was born. My mom was an expat in Italy for most of her life. My dad’s Italian. They met in Rome, they didn’t stay together. Mostly because of my mom. There was a lot of back-and-forth. Her heart has always been in Italy. And when she retired, she returned.

So, that was the first novel.

So, religious concerns from the jump. And your grandmother, was she religious?

Not at all. Vaguely secular Jewish. I think the family story about this is I watched the Joan of Arc mini-series with LeeLee Sobieski, got really into Joan of Arc, and that was my gateway drug.

So, that was your Paul falling from the horse moment.

I was a horse girl for God. And I was baptized when I was nine, demanded that my mom take me to church. And I studied theology. I essentially had my intense religious kid phase, and then it softened into an intellectual interest in theology. But I was not religious in my personal life from the time I was a teenager to my twenties. Then I started going back to church. And I look back now and think, “There you go. I was a horse girl for God.” I had a little altar full of saints. But, you know, you’re a kid. I was really into church one day, but then I got into Wicca, like every single thirteen-year-old ever.

Are you thinking you might have a Wicca relapse at some point?

Absolutely not, no. I think I boxed myself into a corner because I pretty inconveniently do actually believe it all. Which is something I’ve been thinking about. For various reasons, I have had my faith challenged recently.

But Wicca isn’t going to be your refuge.

No. I don’t think I could. I mean, I’m not ruling out that my view of the world will change as I mature. I hope that it does. I hope I don’t think exactly the same things that I do now ten years from now, twenty-five years from now. But at the same time I cannot imagine a version of losing my faith that is not incredibly devastating, a world-destroying loss.

Isn’t that what it’s said to be by all the philosophers and great novelists?

Yeah, I think it would be extremely hubristic of me to say, “This will never happen.”

Famous last words. I’m going to move towards your recently published novel. Your Here in Avalon—about two sisters, one more adventurous and chaotic, Cecilia (“She makes you feel like you’re living inside a story”) and the other more rational and security-oriented, Rose (“once informed by a college boyfriend, not unkindly, that she reacts to spreadsheets the way ordinary girls react to sex”). When Cecilia disappears, first abandoning her estranged husband Paul and then her sister, Rose is slowly consumed by the quest to find her sister, with foul play quickly ruled out. Both Rose and Paul understand the disappearance to have been Cecilia’s choice.

To what extent are self-sought disappearances part of your own regimen? Does one have to go up in a puff of smoke every once in while, get some distance from the nightly urban merry-go-round here, in order to stay sane?

That’s a great question. I think there was a time in my life when—because I was younger and in grad school in the UK while my family was here (including my grandmother whom I spent a lot of time with during the last years of her life)—I felt like I was living an incredibly divided life. Oxford was this small c conservative place, studying theology in this very serious world. And then I was in my twenties in New York and—I’d been a big nerd in college, barely any friends—and suddenly, New York existed, and I got involved in the vintage subculture and would dress up and go to 1920s parties. And it was all the more exciting to me because it was in opposition to this very, very different life I had as a grad student. But with time, like many people, I felt fortunate to have a life that is a little more integrated, which is to say, the life I have in New York is more fun and full of poetry and perhaps a little frivolity as opposed to the bleakest days of grad school. But it’s also much more full of community and rootedness and stability than being a hard-partying person in my twenties. And because of that, it’s really the first time that I’ve been able to write consistently in New York the way I would write only when I was away. I could only write when I was in England. Or Italy. I do think it is so easy to get distracted in New York, even now, even without specters of certain kinds of frivolity. Just because . . . I’m an intense extrovert. I love being around people. I want to always be surrounded by as many people as possible. And you can’t write like that.

Amanuensis. Just have somebody follow you around.

And record what I say? I’ve been living with a certain strictness. I think I know myself well enough now to know a routine that will allow me to work in New York. I do a lot of drafts for each of my novels and they’re very rough until they get good. And so it’s often easier for me to write a little bit every day and know that this draft is going to be shit but let’s get it done. And at some point when I really go all-in on the novel, when I’m ready to make it good, I get a flip phone, I’m inaccessible, and I just have no internet or phone for a month. And I don’t leave the world of the book. For each book there were three or four drafts beforehand that weren’t quite working, and then that final one was. I thought, “Now I’m in control of the material.”

Maybe it’s because I come from a theater background, but I think about early drafts of novels as like rehearsals. You do the read-through and you get through the play and you try the scene one way and then you try it another way and you think about what your character had for breakfast that morning. And there is something for me about writing really messy first drafts where every scene that could possibly exist exists. And then you figure out what you actually need for the novel. So you have the show-bible of backstory.

What about this novel’s kinship with Social Creature?

All three books are the same cinematic universe.

These characters could cross paths.

It’s true of The World Cannot Give as well. There’s in-book references to it.

When I read about the drowned girl in Here in Avalon I thought, “Is that the same character from Social Creature?“

Nope. But there’s a reference to it, where someone says, “Wasn’t that the girl—? It turns out it was her roommate who did it.” And there’s Athena Maidenhead the burlesque dancer in Here in Avalon who also appears in Social Creature. But they’re both novels about New York. Social Creature, I think, is incredibly, incredibly cynical. Maybe more than I intended. I was interested in Avalon to simultaneously answer how do you write about all the things that are painfully wrong about the world without becoming consumed by a sense that you, the author, are better than everyone you’re writing about? And I think there’s a Dorothy Parker sardonic gaze you can have towards the world and then there’s the Old Testament prophet gaze you can have towards the world, where you’re like, “Ah, I lament the injustice of this! Shaking my fist. How long, my Lord, will we let this go on?” Both of those are worthwhile. But I think—Jane Austen does this really well, and George Eliot, too—where there are these flawed people constantly getting in their own way and we are incisive about all the dumb shit they’re doing but there isn’t the notion that the author is superior to them. And that was something that I wanted to be in Avalon precisely because I was coming back to writing about New York. A little bit older. A little bit—I hope—more mature.

How does that manifest in the new one, do you think?

In the most important scene for me in Avalon, the anchor of the book, we meet Rose’s friend Lydia and she seems to be this comic character on the side, this slightly deranged basic bitch type, and we kind of think of her as comic relief, we don’t take her too seriously. And Rose, in her head, doesn’t take Lydia too seriously either. Then Rose vanishes, starts her new life in the [cabaret troupe] Avalon, and she reencounters Lydia and realizes that from Lydia’s perspective the story she is telling is that her best friend is missing. And she’s distraught and destroyed and wants her best friend there for these milestones. Even if Rose thinks what she wants is appalling, and that her boyfriend-cum-fiancé is terrible, from Lydia’s perspective this is her real world, this is the story. And she demands to be treated with a certain amount of dignity and respect that we the reader until that point haven’t accorded her. And the reason it was important for that scene to exist the way it did for me was precisely because I wanted to write about not just New York, but post-pandemic New York. And yes, my frustrations with it, but also a sense that we are talking about human beings who are all doing their best to figure out, “How are we supposed to live? What is the genre of our lives? What is the story we’re in?” And all of the characters, from the ones who are really into apps to the ones who are living in immersive theater, are all doing the same thing. They all have the same project. They’re trying to work out how to live imperfectly and they’re looking for narratives or stories or scaffolding that will allow them to understand themselves and what they’re supposed to be doing.

I think sometimes I worry, being a Christian novelist, am I too nice now? Do I need to go and write something extremely dark and bitter?

Evelyn Waugh-style.

But the novels I love to read are not the ones where the novel is giggling behind its hand about some idiots who exist. It’s the one where the absolute idiots are human beings who are worth our time, worth our attention. If an author doesn’t think people are worthy of our attention, then why should a reader?

Cecilia’s disappearance, as you’ve alluded to, turns out to involve a magical-seeming boat-bound cabaret that materializes mysteriously from the night after first luring individuals in with a literary-minded scavenger hunt. Will you say something about the challenge of making this immersive, kinetic, aural enchantment come to life on the page?

It was so hard. Draft after draft didn’t work. It was actually a really fun revelation when I thought, “I’m a writer, I can make it up.” Earlier on, earlier drafts, I was thinking like a theater producer, “Where are the strings? Where are the tricks? What is the budget for the fake grass?”

Right, how do I do this with words?

And so rather than focusing on the effect of this world, the experience of the characters in it, I was trying to direct it as a production. And it was only when I gave myself permission, like, “You know, you can just make stuff up, Tara,” that I was able to focus on what the people in a scene were experiencing. In a fairytale you can just say, “And the music was the most beautiful music in the world.” OK. Done. Everything’s fine. They’ll believe you.

Here in Avalon returns, more than once, to a few real-life sites around New York City. Bars, mostly. How did you select these destinations? As a New York City native, with a native’s knowledge of what has come and what has gone, what does it take for a destination to win you over?

Win me over meaning I like it, or I put it in my book?

[laughs] Either, I suppose. I feel like the places you put in the book you like . . .

Most of them. I either love them or I hate them. If I hate them, I usually make up a name for it.

Oh, interesting, you anonymize it. Because Mona’s I noticed you put in the book.

Mona’s, Mimi’s, Sunny’s. I don’t know if this is going to make much sense. I like places that are themselves. There’s a certain kind of New York place—and I’ve noticed it more and more post-pandemic (and I could just be getting old)—which is designed to convey an experience in a way that feels Instagram-y, both figuratively and literally. I’m thinking of one of my least favorite places in New York. I had a drink there with a friend once. And every single wall felt designed as a backdrop for photos.

I’m going to read to you again, so bear with me. This is Rose’s rational-minded argument to herself from fairly early in the novel.

You were with the people you chose. You didn’t waste time missing people who had only ever disappointed you. Or else, if you missed them, you missed them the way you missed believing in Santa Claus on Christmas Morning, with a healthily distant sense that what you actually missed was being young enough to believe the impossible.

This is a novel in some deep way about romance, but also the longing for romance in our perhaps somewhat arid, ultra-tech riddled society. You set this contrast between a gently satirical portrait of Rose and her husband-to-be Caleb, a tech bro who converts one of his bedroom walls into a whiteboard, and Cecilia’s tempestuous bounding. “And if I ran away,” Rose asks Caleb, “would you go to the ends of the earth chasing me?”

I know you’re something of an expert on the search for spiritual meaning in the modern, often-perceived-as-meaningless world. Is it tech that does this to us, our experience of the day-to-day? I know we can’t all be Wendell Berry.

Why, I want to think about urban Wendell Berry. Seriously. I’m not going to say that I think smart phones are demonic, because I couldn’t defend that. And I also would feel like I was doing a bit of a bit if I said that.

Putting it in religious terms, too.

But . . . smart phones have been bad for my soul, personally. Let’s put it that way. They’ve made it harder for me to pay attention, they’ve taken me out of the present, they’ve enabled my worst anxieties, whether it’s name-searching myself on Twitter or seeing how many people liked my posts. The idea that I am visible to others . . .

The common foibles of anyone who gets into their phone.

Yeah. I haven’t, like, gone on the Dark Web to sell drugs or anything.

Not yet.

I do feel like I am a worse person when I am online in that very creepy way. And I’m a better writer too when I’m on my flip-phone. That doesn’t mean I think technology qua technology is bad. But I do think that the technology of constant self-overhearing and self-presentation and distraction are all technologies that take us away from the present. And I do believe with Simone Weil that attention is a form of love. And it’s painful to me to be forced to pay attention for an extended period of time. Like, a two-and-a-half-hour church service. It’s hard. It’s a challenge. And I want it to be two-and-a-half hours. I want that for my writing. But I’m always reminded that the only time where I have two-and-half hours where I’m not on my phone and staring at something is probably in church.

Then did your embrace of Christianity coincide with your turn away from social media?

It was around the same time. I think there were other factors too: the pandemic. Being very aware of living in a place where everything could be seen. Being a little more public as a writer and realizing that the social media I might have posted for my friends in my twenties was being seen by strangers. And getting married. A lot of things were happening at once.

But I do think I became more conscious of a love of the world and people that is fostered and flourishes when I’m actually present in the world. And I can’t pay attention to the world when I’m thinking about myself. . . . Smart phones are really good for getting you to think about yourself all the time, or distracting you and getting you to think about nothing. You’re constantly looking at content, but you’re not really outside yourself. And I think the smart phone–ification of the world does deny us the opportunity to force ourselves into openness with other people. Actual openness.

Presence with others.

Yeah. And that’s something I struggled pretty intensely with. I think that I idealize a certain kind of discipline, maybe a quasi-religious discipline. And being able to engage with the world and thinking of engaging with the world as a kind of subversive act. Like, to be in the world, present, whether it’s with a person or a text or church, we’re all gonna die. We don’t have infinite faculties of attention. We only get—what is it—our one wild and precious life. And every time we give our attention to something, that’s a sacrifice of our time. And when I think like that, I’m appalled at myself for spending so much time on Reddit. Or appalled at myself for spending so much time running away from the things that ostensibly matter to me. But I think because I struggle so intensely, I’m drawn both to writing stories about people who struggle with wanting some kind of meaning and who are not even sure whether that comes from discipline or what have you.

The lighting goes dark. Night at Bemelmans has begun.

I’m also drawn to characters who are more certain of themselves than I am. I loved writing a character like Virginia in The World Cannot Give. Paul, actually, in Here in Avalon. Characters who are still human and flawed and broken in other ways. But who have an almost single-minded love of what they love. 

We walk north from Bemelmans, Upper East Side pedestrian traffic, construction work, and varicolored cars stream around us.

Now, this is not quoting you, but somebody else. “The greatest evil of the contemporary age is homogeneity.” That’s a quotation from the great nineteenth-century Nietzschean philosopher—oh, excuse me, that’s a March 23 tweet by Dean Kissick. So, clearly this concern is a concern that has stayed with us. How does someone stand apart, Tara?

I don’t think they should. If you pay enough attention, everyone is already distinct. And seeking to be distinct doesn’t do anything interesting for anybody. I just think we shouldn’t worry about that. I think wanting to mindlessly or blindly conform for the sake of social ease is probably not a good idea. But trying to become original is also likely to be stilted and artificial and forced and a waste of time. Spend that time trying to become good at your hobby.

One should become original authentically. And without trying.

I don’t think you become original. Everyone is original. People are sufficiently interesting when given a room to themselves, if we ask the right questions. Finding someone original and interesting is something that happens when you love someone. Not because someone is superior in some way. I’m sure there are people with hobbies or wardrobes or what have you who are good as conversation starters with their unconventional life stories. But I don’t think that—

Big honk-honk-honk from the avenue.

That’s an easy shorthand for originality, a measure of someone’s actual originality. 

J.T. Price’s fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, the Heavy Feather Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Excerpt Magazine, and elsewhere; nonfiction, interviews, and reviews with the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, The Scofield, and The Millions. He is the editor-in-chief of the Brazenhead Review. More at www.jt-price.com or on IG @afflatusjones.