The Brooklyn Rail

Thinking about literary fiction as a genre sometimes makes me sad, not because I dislike literary fiction, but because, on some level, all fiction should be literary. Even under the most charitable assessment, so little of today’s is.

We live in a time in which many of the most celebrated books, prizewinners even, amount to little more than soulless recitations of physical detail. Proudly plotless and willfully story-less, these books read like catalogs of a staid “writerly” version of “reality,” many of them written in the same vaguely upmarket minimalistic prose, one book nearly indistinguishable from the next. These are not the sort of books or writers that are going to survive AI. They are, in fact, the first things AI will consume. Which, if you think about it, is both doubly true and doubly troubling—though it may also point to a little light. Maybe what humans can do better than AI is just that: to be human, individualistic, idiosyncratic to the point of abject weirdness. This, at least, is something to hope for. It’s also something you get in the fiction of Amber Sparks.

There’s a level of eccentricity to Sparks’s work that might in someone else’s hands come off as self-indulgence. What Sparks does though is to exhaustively research her off-beat topics and consider her wacky characters to the point at which every part of a story, every tangent and subtopic, is weighed out and measured, in all its oddity. In the end, pieces that seemed like they couldn’t possibly fit together form a cohesive whole, building a fiction that’s both intriguing and inspiring. Applying the same radical artistic individuality that defines her short work (I reviewed her last collection here), Sparks has written a debut novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here, filled with deft, deadpan wit, unpredictable magicality, and so many stories (stories upon stories upon stories); a book I breezed through and was sorry to see end.

Sparks spoke to me over email in the summer of 2025.

Kurt Baumeister (Rail): Amber, this new book of yours is wild, truly. The things you sling together here: it’s almost like you throw a bunch of words in a hat, pick a few, and go from there. 

“A defunct sanitorium turned apartment building?” OK. “Abused child star perpetually on the run?” Alright. “An artist who supports herself and her daughter by building miniature replicas of famous rooms?” Check. (Note to reader: there are more, many more. Yet, somehow, they all come together beautifully.) 

How on earth do you come up with this stuff? More importantly, how do you make it work?

Amber Sparks: Thank you! Honestly this is what makes me such a chaotic writer. My inspiration is ninety percent whatever is interesting to me in the moment, and it’s mostly random with some themes popping up over and over again. I’m a catholic reader and watcher of tv shows and movies; and I don’t mean in the religious sense but rather in the all-embracing sense. I’m always obsessed with certain time periods and themes. The 1920s and the beginning of modernism shows up over and over again. Artists and painters make frequent appearances. Con artists and doubles are also steady guests. But sometimes it’s just what I’m reading or watching or thinking about. I watched Magnolia for the first time in a long time and was struck again by the sad pathos of William H. Macy’s former child prodigy character and also wondering what happened to that Heaven is for Real kid who got so big like twenty years ago or so. And if it’s in my brain, it goes into the book! That’s why my books are an insane mess in the first draft. They’re not books at all, they’re just bad cabinets of curiosities that I need to carefully cull in the editing process, figuring out what goes where and what wild connections I can make to give the individual elements more meaning. That’s what the original Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities) makers were doing: taking objects they were fascinated by, and building a new kind of language that was deeply personal but hopefully would mean something to others, as well. I think that’s how I see my writing: I’m a collector who makes connections and tries to say something new with the detritus of the past.

Rail: You develop extensive psychological detail in this book. In fact, I’d call the psychology of the two main characters, Alice and her daughter Fern, the driving force within the narrative. So, let me ask the psycho-novelist (as opposed to the psycho novelist!) to put on her analyst’s hat and answer a related question to, “How do you come up with this stuff?” Which is, “Why do you come up with this stuff? What drives you to put this sort of challenge before yourself and, perhaps even more than that, to see it through?”

Sparks: Ask my therapist! No but truly I think every good writer should be constantly thinking about what other people are thinking about. To me it’s less psychology and more detective work, not because I’m solving a crime but because I’m a nosy bitch. I can’t overhear a conversation without starting to wonder about what’s really happening: what’s the subtext, what’s the history between these two people? What’s driving them to have this obviously painful conversation? Why do they stay in this relationship? I think if you don’t have that fundamental curiosity about human psychology and motive, you can’t possibly be a good writer. People aren’t NPCs, and your main characters can’t be either. 

I will just add that when I went to college, I initially wanted to be a criminal psychologist, but I became a theater major instead. So do with that what you will!

Rail: I found the structure of this book intriguing. There’s simultaneously a definite, familiar architecture, one that’s literary, even classical. Yet, at least to my reading, there’s a breathlessness in the telling, a chaotic energy that comes through at line and scene levels. Could you talk about these two competing forces within the text? 

Sparks: I’m so glad that duality comes through because it is, I hope, the style I’ve developed, finally, by my forties. It’s both intentional and also the natural result of growing up on fairy tales and myths and lots of traditional storytelling. One of my favorite writers is Isak Dinesen, aka Karen Blixen, and when I read that she considered herself first and foremost a storyteller, I thought instantly—that’s me. That’s how I see myself, too. 

But of course it’s not entirely true, because I’m a writer who values play, who also grew up on Italo Calvino and John Barth and Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. I love experimentation and fragmentation and new forms. I started out writing flash fiction that was quite experimental, inspired by young writers like Matt Bell and Blake Butler and Amelia Gray, these writers who were just doing weird, great stuff, and I don’t think I could write a book that didn’t have some of those fractured narrative elements, lists and out-of-body experiences and jumps back and forward and asides. And of course, to bring it full circle, a lot of those elements are actually present in fairy tales and in some of the oldest stories and novels we know. So it makes sense to weave them together! It feels quite organic, to me. But as you say, the process is absolutely chaotic and full of frenzy—that’s the energy I like to have when writing, and I always hope it comes through on the page. Why write unless you’re writing like a madwoman on fire? (This is probably not good writing advice.)

Rail: Focusing on the characters some more. There are a lot of them for a fairly brief book, many have alternate identities assigned by Fern that stress their dual roles: One as people that exist in Fern’s “reality,” the other as signifiers within a narrative that’s going on in her head. Are there multiple realities at play in Happy People Don’t Live Here, multiple worlds?

Sparks: I don’t think so much real multiple worlds, but a sort of metaphoric version for both Fern and Alice. Poor Alice has her past taking up so much real estate in her brain that it’s almost as if she’s still living it, parallel to her real life. Her trauma is sort of the opposite of buried; it’s omnipresent, it’s ubiquitous. And Fern has a simpler but no less crucial split happening. She’s right at that age where she has to start seeing the world as it really is, but she’s still processing everything through a fairy tale lens at the beginning of the novel. So she’s kind of living in two worlds, the two worlds we all inhabit briefly when we’re ten: one we know is real, and the one we wish was real. Recently my own daughter, who just turned ten a few months ago, told me that for the first time she was playing with her dolls and suddenly realized she was just playing with dolls, they ceased to be living things. But then the next day she was back to happily playing with them again in this sort of suspended fantasy. I think the sense of self at that age is incredibly precarious, and incredibly enchanted, because we’re all weaving in and out of the imaginary and the real and slowly leaving the things of childhood behind. It’s such a melancholy time, but also such an exciting one, because we’re becoming something else.

Rail: With all the weather metaphors, supernatural components, and physical isolation of the narrative, I couldn’t help thinking of theater, Shakespeare to be more exact, plays like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You trained to be an actress for a while. Would you talk about your time in acting and how that experience comes through in your writing?

Sparks: My daughter got to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream this summer! She was Helena and it was incredible. I hadn’t seen that play in a long time, and honestly a bunch of ten and eleven year olds made it come to life better than the last adult production I saw. Such a magical, and funny play. I was indeed an actress for a while, and I got into directing, too—that’s where I really wanted to go. And I do think it all informs my writing probably constantly. I’m always thinking about things like giving my characters business; I visualize everything as I’m writing it and I block it all out, and nothing bothers me more when I’m reading a novel or a story where the characters are just kind of … floating heads, just existing and talking and not rooted in a place at all. (And not in a Beckett way, but in a “I didn’t feel like thinking about setting way.”) I also learned how to write humor on the stage. Its beats, its back and forth, its surprise. Theater taught me that things are rarely funny just because they’re clever; they’re funny because they’re surprising and we love to be surprised. It’s absolutely delightful and it makes us laugh, like babies before they have object permanence. But that said, it’s very hard and very rewarding to write clever humor, to be witty, and I learned from the stage that you can only write your kind of wit or it will fall terribly flat. For years I tried to write Noël Coward and of course, nobody can write Noël Coward except Noël Coward. Then I tried to write Christopher Durang, and well, same thing. I learned that you can only be funny in the way that you yourself are funny, and also that it’s okay not to be funny, too! But unfortunately I will never not need to be funny, because I’m always whistling in the dark with all my might. 

I love that you mention the weather, because something else I just realized I’ve taken from the theater is the need for a good storm as catharsis. The same thing with a good dinner. There’s nothing like trapping a bunch of people at a dinner table or in a house during a storm and then watching things happen. 

Something else that I’ve taken with me from theater into writing is not to be too precious about people. Some of my favorite playwrights, like Durang and Tony Kushner, write about the most incredibly serious subjects. But they also understand that objectively we’re all ridiculous objects, wrapped in our pieties and pathos. We are deadly and funny and disgusting, and it’s what makes us dangerous, too. Humans are so embarrassing and stupid, and when we take ourselves too seriously, that’s when we do terrible things, become dictators, commit atrocities. But I digress.

Rail: You use a floating third person narrator here, and transition freely, though sparingly, between POV characters. What did you gain from this strategy? What did you lose? Speaking to young writers who want to emulate this technique, are there specific pitfalls you were particularly conscious of? 

Sparks: I owe my editor, Gina, a lot here. (And everywhere, she’s absolutely wonderful.) If it were up to me, I’d swoop around like a ghost, jumping from body to body and being enormously confusing. The book started out much more like that, and Gina helped me pull it way back, so that it still retained that fluidity of motion, and kept both characters central, but also was clear and didn’t leave readers feeling jolted or confused. The reader will, as in all things, come along with you if you let them, but you do have to let them. If you zip around like Tinker Bell, it does feel a little like you’re laughing at them, and more importantly, that you never land anywhere long enough for the reader to get inside the character’s head. 

Rail: How do you settle on the perspective you choose for something as big as a novel? How much of it is thought versus feeling?

Sparks: I thought it was going to be very difficult, because I often struggle with the POV a lot even in flash fiction. It’s one of the elements I have to unlock before I can get anywhere with the writing at all. (Now that I consider it, this may be why I’m so taken with stories where the protagonist must find an actual key, and unlock a door to break open the tale.) But it was very easy here to find the POV, because I really wanted to tell both Fern and Alice’s stories fully, while never quite invading their privacy. So the close third person felt like the obvious choice from the beginning.

Rail: There are two important children in this book. One of them is Fern, a ten-year old girl sleuth. The other is the past form of her mother Alice, a little girl who like Fern was fascinated with magic and faeries but forced by her mother to coopt this love, to turn it into a series of children’s books that made a lot of money and had her on talk shows. Still more notably, Alice was forced to insist the world in her books was real. Like all parents, Alice is replaying her childhood with her own daughter. She expends a great deal of care and energy trying to spare Fern the things she went through. Is Alice succeeding in this? Is she a good mother? Are terms like “successful” and “good” in parenting even useful? 

Sparks: I thought about this a lot as I was writing the book, because it’s really the central theme for me. My own mother died shortly before I started writing it, and I have my own daughter who is now the same age as Fern. So the idea of not repeating the mistakes of your own mother was a very strong theme throughout the book, though of course you simply make your own mistakes instead, always. I used to think “oh, successful parenting, that’s easy, it’s when you raise a child who’s happy.” But of course it’s not that simple. Happiness is not guaranteed, and often as a parent you have no power over the things that can grant your child happiness or not, including themselves. I sort of think now that there are no successful parents, but there are bad parents, and I don’t think Alice is a bad parent. She makes a lot of mistakes, but she’s done all the important things right. But man, she does need to get herself to therapy after all this shit. Fern too.

Rail: Broadly speaking, social media has been very important to writers over the last decade. People benefit from it to different extents based on their facility and engagement with various forms: Facebook, X, TikTok. How important is social media to establishing yourself as a writer? Is there advice you’d give to writers trying to build audience engagement on social media? Are there pitfalls, sites and strategies even, you’d advise people to stay away from?

Sparks: Three years ago I would have said it was crucial; and I would have hated saying it. It was certainly very important in my own career. Though I do tell newer writers all the time that if you don’t like social media, then don’t be on there. If you’re only there to promote yourself, that will show and it won’t help you at all. Be on social media because you like that site, and pick one or two sites that you enjoy, and support other writers. Talk about other people’s books. Make friends with other writers. Talk about your hobbies and the other things you enjoy, not just writing. And then when it’s time to promote your book, hopefully you already have a following ready to buy it and read it and be excited about it, because they like YOU. 

But that’s all stuff I would have said three years ago. Social media is in such turmoil now, I just don’t even know. Half the sites are owned by the world’s richest and most terrible people, so who wants to spend time there or create content for them? BookTok is either a miracle or a joke depending on who you are, and I don’t think it’s either but I think there’s no magic formula for book sales anymore. Maybe there never was. And the world is on fire in a million ways. So I think I’d still tell writers the same thing I’d tell them three, four, twenty years ago: write the best book you can possibly write. If you do that, you stand the best possible chance of being read, loved, shared, and successful. If you don’t write a great book, you have no chance at all. In the end, it all comes down to the same thing: just write the fucking book.