The Brooklyn Rail

Paula Bomer was familiar to me as a fellow literary citizen in the early internet lit mag scene of the aughts when I was running Word Riot and its small press extension. She fervently cheerleaded other writers and produced stunning short stories.

The first time I sat with a substantial amount of her work, though, was when I received a submission for her collection Baby & Other Stories. The manuscript arrived at my door upon writer Nick Antosca’s recommendation. Both Antosca and Bomer had book projects floating in purgatory after a small press slated to publish them closed its doors. The collection crafted subversive portraits of the American family that were beautiful and brutal.

With an indie publisher’s flair for the dramatic—there’s never a marketing budget, so carnival-barking hutzpah is key—I emailed Bomer on Christmas Day with the subject, “Merry Christmas! I want to publish Baby.”

The book became one of Word Riot’s most critically and commercially successful, receiving advanced praise from Jonathan Franzen, a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and coverage in O Magazine. Most importantly, it provided an introduction to Soho Press’s Mark Doten, who became a champion for her work and an editor in four subsequent projects. The most recent book Bomer and Doten have worked together on is her novel The Stalker.

Bomer’s work has often taken quiet, interior moments and rendered them explosive. With The Stalker, the subject matter for the dark satire and Bomer’s surgical precision as a writer combine for one of the most disturbing, bold, and hilarious novels in recent memory. We spoke over the phone for this interview.

Jackie Corley (Rail): You’ve been writing for a long time, but Baby & Other Stories was your first book, and it came out in 2010 when you were forty-two. How did it change your perception of your previous work?

Paula Bomer: After you published Baby and it had gotten attention, all of these other works that I had shelved because of endless rejection got a new life. My editor at Soho Press, Mark Doten, who I met through Giancarlo DiTrapano at a KGB reading, said, “You should show me your work.”

I gave Mark Nine Months, which had been rejected over and over because of the unlikeability of a mother character doing terrible things, and he was like, “I love her.” He loved her even though she was obviously not a great person or a moral mother character.

And then the strangest thing really was Inside Madeline. I wrote most of it in my twenties. I had given up on it being published because it was a novella and short stories, and no one wanted those. I had someone once tell me I was a terrible writer, but I just kept on writing.

Rail: A “terrible writer”—I want to emphasize that because this was the book of yours that ended up reviewed favorably in the New York Times.

Bomer: Yes, a published author, nodding his head and saying, “This is really bad writing.”

I guess I’m very loyal to my own craft. At that point, writing had become something that I just did. I just never gave up. It wasn’t all discouraging, though. By the time you published Baby, Open City had published a short story of mine, and Fiction Magazine had published me. Mark Jay Mirsky, editor of Fiction Magazine, was a huge champion of my work, and that meant a lot. I always had some people who did encourage me despite the rejection, and you do need that.

Rail: With The Stalker, you’re inside the head of a perpetrator in a way that you fully embody him. What was that experience like, and how did you arrive at that voice?

Bomer: I was trying to write a book called “Gaslit” for a long time, and I kept giving up. I would look at it and put it down. And then I realized it had to be from the point of view of the perpetrator. This voice came to me, and it was a really beautiful “a-ha” moment.

The voice was obviously key. I write short books and halfway through, I told my son, “I think this is going to be a long novel. I think this is going to be my five hundred page novel.” And then a few weeks later, I was like, “I can’t. I hate this guy. It’s got to end.”

I had a layout for making it go on much longer but decided to nip that in the bud because it does tire you.

For the first time in my life, I really related to actors. I never understood acting because as a writer, you’re alone as opposed to being on a set with other people. But with writing The Stalker, it felt like playing a villain. It was emotionally draining and intense, for sure.

Rail: Your novel is coming out in a national moment where there’s been a kind of lifting up of people who are more predatory.

Bomer: On one hand, it’s just luck for me because I’m not calculating enough to say, “here’s a book for the moment”—not that that’s a bad thing, I just don’t have that special gift. This is the first time one of my books got lucky in that way.

I’m excited that I’ve struck a nerve. Some of my favorite reactions have been hearing from women saying, “I know men like this. I’ve met a guy like this.” Everyone has their story. Everyone has met this guy. They’re everywhere, and that is what I’m trying to say with this book: you’re not crazy. You are being treated badly on a regular basis by regular men.

I wouldn’t say that my narrator is regular, but there’s something automatically awful about him that is typical. It’s not an effort for him to treat women badly. And I feel like there’s this effortless misogyny that we wade through every day.