Because I was working on something else, those sixty pages sat dormant for a while, probably longer than a year-I would occasionally chip away at them, or add something, but for the most part I was thinking about something else. I was in an MFA program at the time, and working in earnest on another novel. Julie Buntin: In late 2010 and into spring 2011, I wrote the first sixty pages or so of what would eventually become Marlena, in a very different form. The Rumpus: So, I’d like to start off by saying how much I enjoyed reading Marlena. The narrator, Cat, now an adult, looks back on the premature death of a friend she made when she was fifteen, when the girls were neighbors in rural Michigan.īuntin and I corresponded through email about what it took to create Marlena, her writing habits, and how in social contexts she always feels that “shred of resistance,” even when she’s having a decent time. Marlena, Buntin’s debut novel, is a book about the kinds of friendships we tend to forget about as we grow older: those obsessive, cavernous, headlong connections that are both gentle and cruel, nurturing and painful. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, O, The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature , and One Teen Story, among other publications.
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