Poured Over: Melissa Broder on Death Valley

By Jenna Seery / November 11, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Shift in perception is a miracle”

Death Valley by Melissa Broder is part desert survival story, part examination of grief — mixing the absurd with the profoundly human in a feat of imagination. Broder joins us to talk about the realities of anticipatory grief, incorporating fantastical elements into the real world, including humor in her work and more with guest host, Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.             

Featured Books (Episode):
Death Valley by Melissa Broder
The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Leave Society by Tao Lin
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Correction by Thomas Bernhard
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

Full Episode Transcript

Jenna Seery

I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over. And today, I am so excited to be here with Melissa Broder. She is a poet and she is an author. She is an essayist, she’s given us The Pisces and Milk Fed and so much more. And I cannot wait to talk about Death Valley because this one is such a wild ride. A lot of my vibes for 2023 have been I have to laugh, because if I don’t, I’ll cry. And I think that this book fits in so well with that mode of what I’ve been trying to exist in this year. And I think it’s going to really resonate with a lot of people. So Melissa, thank you so much for being with us.

Melissa Broder

Thanks for having me. I’m here in California with my dog Pickle, he’ll probably we haven’t decided yet if we’re going to make this video because I’m in my bathrobe. So if we do make this video, you’ll know that and if you don’t, you can just visualize.

There’s a lot going on. But I think that that really matches with where we’re all at these days of like, things that used to matter just kind of don’t matter anymore. And things that really are important now are so much bigger, because of what we’ve all I think been through in these past few years. And Death Valley certainly has a lot of those sentiments of like, there are big things and we have to address them. And sometimes that means we have to stop addressing the old things.

Right, yeah, it’s really, you know, it’s a funny book about grief. And it’s also a desert survival story. And I think that it’s a book that really where a protagonist who’s not a particularly nature-y girl gets very pared down and has to survive in the desert.

I think that that’s like the bare minimum of setup, there’s so much in this book. But at the same time, it’s hard to sort of get into all of the nuances, just in like an elevator pitch, because it is about grief. And it is about what happens when you leave your best western behind and venture into the desert. And there’s so much that I think people are going through now that we never imagined we would. And so I’d really just want to start with how this book sort of came to you and how you started the journey of writing this one.

In December 2020. While I was recording the audiobook when I was in the studio recording the audio book for Milk Fed, I found out that my father on the East Coast had been in a car accident, and he was in the ICU for six months before he died, which is a very long time to be in the ICU. And we were not able to go see him for the first couple months because it was during COVID. I live in Los Angeles. He was on the East Coast, my sister is in Vegas, I was experiencing anticipatory grief. But I didn’t know what that was at the time, I just thought my usual levels of anxiety and depression were like spawning new anxiety and depression babies. And that was what I was feeling. And so I tried to escape these feelings and was driving back and forth through the desert to see my sister in Vegas quite a lot. And on one of those trips, I was driving through Baker, California, home of the world’s largest thermometer. And the first couple lines of this book came to me, I thought about the idea of a cactus, a giant cactus where you could go inside and encounter your loved ones at various stages of your life. So in essence, you could have more in different time with them came to me. And that was how that was how it began.

And I think many readers and listeners will have just had their interest piqued because who doesn’t want to encounter a giant cactus. But I think the thing that makes this book so special is that you have these really sort of outlandish, absurdist elements. You’ve got a giant cactus, you’ve got talking rocks, you’ve got letters to rabbits, there’s so much in there that is like fun and interesting. But at the core, the voice of your narrator is so relatable and so human and so easy to be like I have felt that exact thing. And it just is so easy to like delve in and I wonder how you create though that voice because it is so clear and crisp in this work?

Well, first of all, you know, I love, I am not a big fantasy genre reader like where the entire world is set in a fantastical world, but I absolutely love when books are grounded in reality and then there’s a departure The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George more recently, Henry Hoke and Open Throat, it’s set in this very contemporary LA but then there’s then there’s this anthropomorphized mountain lion. So that is my favorite kind of book to read is a book that is very grounded in in the reality you know, in the tangible world, but then there’s a departure right? Mrs. Caliban is another book like that. I mean, There’s a ton of them and infinite. And I also the other thing is I really see this as a send up of auto fiction. So it’s right like people, there are a lot of similarities between the protagonist and myself. She, her father is in the ICU, she has a disabled husband, but then her journey takes a turn, and we get this magic cactus and from there it departs.

And I think there’s so many people nowadays who they feel like when they’re trying to connect to a narrator, who and this is unnamed, and it’s sort of a he big capital N narrator, I would say, there’s this idea of likability that is so like prevalent, I think, in fiction, specifically fiction featuring women as famous, like lead characters, that there has to be this easy palatability, to the way that they speak or the choices that they make, and your characters decidedly don’t fit into that category. And it makes it so much more relatable and realistic, I think, for so many of us to read and be like, oh, yeah, I don’t always like agree with these choices, but I can absolutely see why she’s making them.

I mean, it’s funny, because I get, you know, like, asked about the likeable protagonist and my unlikable protagonist, you know, fairly frequently, and I’m always like, but I really liked my protagonist, when I’m writing them, I don’t have the intent to be weird, or to make them unlikable. Or it’s really I’m like, I like these people. You know, I mean, they’re flawed, but it’s like, we all contain multitudes. Right? I remember I had a poetry teacher, because I started as a poet. And I had a poetry teacher who said, you know, a good poem contains a weave, right of darkness and light. And this is true, I think, of the human experience. And I think this is true of individuals, right? We all contain that, that braid or that weave.

And I agree that I think that your characters are likable, and I want, it’s like that feeling of wanting them to succeed or like get through and you’re like, Oh, I’ve kind of been there. Even if you haven’t been in that exact situation, it’s like a, we all have dealt with grief. And we all have dealt with family, and especially some of the things that you throw into this about that weird, where technology meets nature in this whole world of like, your characters on Reddit, and she’s having to use FaceTime. And I think sometimes we stray away from those things, because it really defines, like what time we’re existing in, in the novel, but at the same juncture, like, over the past few years, we’ve all really encountered, what that means to have to navigate an online presence, and an in person presence.

Hopefully, you know, this is a book where it’s a pretty internal book, right? Like, we spend a lot, we spend all of our time with the protagonist, right. And there’s very few auxiliary characters who are directly in the frame. So I needed to find a way to, we don’t want to spend, you know, like 250 pages in this woman’s head. So I needed to find ways to externalize. And one of those ways was through like, you know, a Reddit, like a crew of a Reddit Greek chorus, if you will. There’s also another Greek chorus of talking rocks, there are these rabbits who communicate, there is the cactus who doesn’t really speak, but is a character. And then we have, you know, also on the technological front, we have, we’re sort of getting motivations for her action through, you know, Twitter, envy of other writers, we’re getting her Facetimes with her father and her husband. So I needed to find a way to bring in other characters. And it’s in a way, because, you know, what I went through with my dad was during COVID, I didn’t want to make this a COVID narrative, but I wanted to convey sort of that feeling of disconnect from the people you love and the ways that sort of, okay, it’s not human, always human, on human in the raw, right, like flesh on flesh, so to speak, in terms of our interactions, but like the ways that we are all communicating with each other, now that we don’t all live in the same villages with our families. Right. So that was those were my reasons for bringing in technology. And also because read, it’s extremely funny, I find Reddit a really funny place.

It is very funny. And I think that there are a lot of people who probably aren’t super familiar with it, and then aren’t going to realize like the vastness of really what happens there. And that is such a microcosm of people who are very disparate and truly come from like every walk of life and every, like, niche interest, and they all sort of flocked to this one place, which I feel like kind of has interesting parallels to fiction readers because I think it is like a really similar thing. Fiction readers are so diverse, and they all come from these different things. And yet we all sort of commune around these books and around these like singular says, but I wonder how often those worlds really meet outside?

Outside of Reddit? Yeah, like people who normally wouldn’t meet? Well, what I find it funny about Reddit is, you know, internet comments are such a funny place. And the language of internet comments, right, and the sort of like, jargon, and Reddit is comprised solely of it’s to all comments, that’s what it is, there are these wars that go on, there are these fights that go on there. And it’s like, you know, between people who you have no idea who this other human being is, it’s really avatar fighting with avatar.

So it is the sense of community there is very different, I think, than a lot of other places. But it really is sort of lends to this book, in the sense that, like you said, it could be a very isolating story, it could be a very isolating experience. And in many ways, it is for our protagonist that she’s out in the wilderness, and in many ways, extremely alone, physically. And yet, there’s all these threads that come back and sort of replay and especially, I mean, my favorite character, of course, Jethra herself, who makes her appearance, but you do find ways to sort of like, create this tapestry that is so great, even when there’s not that many characters that you really have to play with.

Totally. Yeah, Jethra is probably I would say, my favorite character from the book to somebody the other day was saying they want to write Jethra fanfic. So maybe Jethra will come to have a life of her own and for those listening, Jethra is, so the Best Western plays a huge role in this book. I myself am a lover of the Best Western, I am not a Best Western ambassador, I’m receiving no money for that yet. Not yet. That would be that would be amazing. But so Jethra is a woman who works at the front desk at the Best Western and comes to be you know, a hero as also the Best Western Grab and Go breakfast comes to be a hero product.

Truly, I think very differently now of like, the entirety of that hotel culture and being like, oh, yeah, I would have to grab that breakfast now because you just never know. You

You don’t know.

if that’s if that’s what anyone walks away from this with it’s just take them off and be ready for breakfast because you never know what’s gonna — always take the muffin. And I feel like there’s so much in this book to have like, because we’re inside this one woman’s head and we can we’re with her at like, sort of varying places of, of sanity and togetherness. There’s this idea of sometimes I’m you’re never sure if something’s really happening in the way that it’s being portrayed to you as, and I love the idea of sort of, like an unreliable narrator or an unstable narrator. But as you’re going through, especially in those like absurdist moments, I’m like, I don’t know if this is really happening, but I’m just gonna hope that it is.

Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, people ask me if my book The Pisces, which is about a woman who falls in love with a merman on Venice Beach, they were always saying, how real is Theo is the name of the merman. And how real is Theo? You know, is he does he really exist? Is he only in Lucy, the protagonist’s, imagination, I was like, how real is anyone that we’re ever romantically obsessed with? You know, we’re really romantically obsessed with our own idea of that person. And so, and I think the same can be said for much of life, right? Like, so much is about our perception.

And especially when you’re dealing with things like grief and trauma and these, like, huge emotions that your character is going through, and that we’re going through with her because I think you do sort of, I was very quickly attached to the situation, because of just sort of the rawness with which she’s describing everything you’re like, I have no choice but to sort of get on board with this, because this is what I’m being presented. And I mean, just the moments of her sitting in her car, and you know, driving around and sitting alone at a Mexican restaurant, and it’s just like, I have been there like I have had those feelings.

Yes. Yeah. You know, in terms of like, what the reader is being presented with, I think I really, you know, with all of the flights into fantasy, so to speak, and all this sort of archetypal imagery that comes up in the book, I really felt that it had to be around anything that that sort of appears or is a departure from what we traditionally may encounter in our lives, you know, on an earthly plane, I felt it had to be earned. So if there was going to be a magical saguaro cactus, right, I remember the night when I found out that saguaros don’t actually grow in the wild in California. There is, it’s contested. It’s contested. There’s some people say there’s a certain area, California but they don’t grow. They’re not growing in the wild in the Mojave, in the high desert, and so I had to build that in and make that a plot point because even though it’s a magic cactus, so it’s like, one would think like, well, who cares where so arrows grow? It’s a magic magic magic act, they don’t grow anywhere. To me, it was important to okay Well, if they don’t go in California that’s got to go in the book, you know, like, that has to be a contested point.

I think those little details that like I’m not from California, I really have spent almost zero time there in my life. So I don’t have like a great, I wasn’t coming in with this, like perfect image of what this world would look like. And I would never have known that had you not put that in as a piece, but at the same time, those little like nods and that like care for what is going into this as a whole. That’s what makes it so easy to just be on board, like you said, it’s because I can trust that voice that wherever it’s going to take me is somewhere where I’ll end up in happy and taken care of, I guess, in that sense. Totally.

I mean, I think like, I had another poetry teacher who said, you know, you can do anything you want in a poem if you teach the reader how to live in it. And I think that so for me, you know, with fantasy, it has to be earned, it has to be earned. And the reader does have to be able to trust that like, there’s a scaffolding there that there’s an intentionality in some ways to build that intentionality, I think are to like, seed, the fantasy in earlier in reality, and then sort of depart.

And I think that trust in the voice. So much of that comes from the care that I know that you take in writing these sentences, I’m not sure if it comes from the poetry background, or from what or if it’s just your own, like special breed of magic, but each sentence feels like so perfectly chosen. And I wonder as you’re writing, are you doing like a lot of revising? Is it all kind of coming out in a first draft and getting shaped? What’s the actual writing process look like?

So, I’m actually a terrible writer, as a drafts woman, there’s like very little concrete, it’s really bad. And actually, my challenge used to be how do I create enough clay that I can then sculpt so I for The Pisces and Milk Fed, I actually dictated those books. And then on to end use, like simple note, and Siri to kind of translate it into visible and then started editing from there with this book, I did it differently. I really perfected each chapter on a line level as I went, rather than kind of generating the clay and then sculpting the whole thing, sculpting the whole thing. And there’s a real risk, I think in going in at a line level. So early on for a chapter in the sense that a lot of things are going to have to move. So a lot will be scrapped, you know, in terms of like the architecture of a book. But for me, I did really write and edit this like poetry. And so each chapter I really like honed to be a diamond and then moved on to the next.

I have, I’ve read The Pisces, I’ve read Milk Fed and I’ve read your poetry. And I really feel like this book is like a new step. As I was reading, I was like, this is different, this feels different. It feels like you, but it feels fresh. And I could tell that you at least for me, it seemed like you really had a lot of fun while you were writing, there’s a lot of great humor, there’s a lot of movement in the prose and in the world. And so as I was going through, I was like, This really feels like something new.

I think we can always tell if a writer is having fun when they’re writing. And it’s like, I mean, writing can’t look, writing a novel is a marathon. It’s an act of endurance. But for me, the fun of it is really like choosing the right language on a line level. You know, like that, to me is fun, and also making myself laugh. And so yeah, and you can always tell, you can always tell the writer, something good time.

And I think humor is so important in this kind of work, where we’re talking about grief, especially like that anticipatory grief that is hard to sort of put into words, it’s hard to sort of pare it down to this is what this should feel like. I think we’re used to grief in certain contexts where it’s kind of safe and corralled. And we can kind of come at it and look at it from a distance, but really being in those moments where we are with our narrator so often, where she doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither do we. But then there’s always that sort of humor, and to sort of ground us back into something that we can keep moving with.

Yes, and Life is funny, and I think we, you know, as a human being, I always have to keep grounding myself back into the humor, as you were saying at the beginning of our conversation, right, like you I have to laugh, because if not, right, and so it’s this sort of returning again and again, to humor, which I think you know, is a shift in perception. And shift in perception is a miracle. So it’s a miracle to be able to see everything as fun and just be able to find the humor and things.

Especially I don’t like like you said, this isn’t really this doesn’t feel like a COVID novel. This doesn’t feel, I think worked for decades and decades and decades. We’re going to be getting COVID novels, which are sort of these big sprawling takes on what we all went through. But yet there was so many minutiae and so many little things that affected us day to day that I don’t even think we realize it’s different now. Even down to like being so comfortable being on zoom and doing all these things and being more comfortable with distance and being better navigating those details in the day to day I think of how we are different now are so much more interesting in a lot of ways than sort of, yes. Another novel about masks or you know, what have you even though I think we’ll be getting those, like I said, for a long time.

Well, I mean, I’m here in my bathrobe, and I would not have been in my bathrobe pre COVID. I don’t I mean, I would have been, but I wouldn’t have been doing the podcast this way. I wouldn’t have come to the studio in my bathrobe. Let’s put it that way.

And if you would have we would have just said like, well, this is where we’re at now two, I think sometimes we just have to roll with it. And if that’s a bathrobe, and that’s a bathrobe, but at Barnes Noble, we don’t care. And you alluded earlier that you had a bit of a Barnes and Noble story for me about your time in high school.

Yes, so Barnes and Noble, I grew up outside of Philadelphia and Barnes and Noble was a refuge for me. So I would go and I would, I would get dropped off at the gas station, which was like a major Hangout, you know, it was like a gas station Mini Mart and I would get like a ton of candy. Or I would go to this place hopes cookies, which had like the best ice cream and get like their chocolate chip ice cream. And then I would go to Barnes and Noble and just go around and get a stack like a juicy, juicy stack of it wasn’t always novels, it was like, you know, a lot of like, there would be like books on spirituality and astrology books and books out of like, self help, and magazines and novels. And I would like get in the corner. And I would just spend like the afternoon there. And it was total respite.

And that’s like, think the dream of like working in books and being a bookseller is to like provide that experience for people and to be like, yes, like, there’s so many things here. Of course, there’s fiction, which we end up talking a lot about, but like you said, there’s so many other things that people can sort of come and expand. And I think like, I can definitely see how some of those like, wellness and personal growth and sort of self-transformation pieces come in into your work. There’s always like allusions to crystals and to sort of those like more esoteric things, which I always enjoy finding in your work.

Totally. And like, you know, it’s always tongue in cheek, right? Like my friend Karah Preiss, she’s belletrist, which is Emma Roberts’ book club, she does, she’s the producer and sort of like, runs the book club as well. And she and I always talk about wanting to be done, like wanting to be done with a feeling want to be done with growing, I just want to be done. Right. Like I just, you know, and I think there is sort of in in self help, there is this idea that, okay, we’re gonna get to this place, I’m going to become a whole person. Here it is right, like, and then it’s the end, you know, in books, a protagonist, and actually the, you know, the protagonist of Death Valley is a writer. And so she talks about this experience of where your characters, they have an arc, and then they disappear on the last page. But the author still goes on living, right. So we’re not done. We’re never done.

I know. So recently, I’ve been like, what no one tells you about living is that, like, you just have to keep doing it. Like, you have to keep processing things forever. Like, that’s just the job. And it’s like, the exciting piece, but also the very daunting piece.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And sometimes it’s moment to moment.

The pendulum swing back and forth between like, doom and joy in Death Valley and in life are so like, that you’ve keyed in so well to that in this book of like, one page being like, the elation of, you know, something really exciting to truly like the worst things that could happen, like wandering off into the desert. But I think it really keys well into where we’re all at this point, I keep saying yes, in these uncertain times has been something that we’ve been saying for years, but it just seems to get more and more true every day.

Yeah, I mean, I’m glad that I’m glad you said that the pendulum swing between doom and joy. And I’m also glad that, you know, you can relate because it makes me feel less alone.

I think truly, I mean, so many people that I’ve talked to this talked about this book with are like, I saw it myself, and like I’ve been in those shoes, even though the experiences might be slightly different. It’s still like, Oh, I’ve been there. And it’s so it is comforting to know that someone else has gone through it. Totally. And I always wonder, like you said, with authors who are like, they have to finish the book and move on. Like, do you miss these characters in this world when you’re done writing it? Or because this was a little more auto fictiony was it like, and I’m ready to close that right now.

You know, I think I was really sad when I when I finished the book and sent it to my agent because I because it was, you know, in a lot of ways, like I started it two months before my father died. And so in a way, it was like in writing the book. We still had this like forward motion together my father and I, you know, and then once it was done, I, like no longer have that. And that was like, that was a loss. For me. That was hard.

It’s definitely one of those books where I got to the end and I was like, I just hope everyone’s okay, like, whatever that means, like I just you I just imagined that in whatever multiverse where that book is still ongoing that everyone just ends up. Okay. Yes. So since we talked a little bit about your Barnes & Noble time and your big stacks of books, I’d love to know some of your, like, literary influences for this novel, or some things you’ve been reading recently that you really love.

So, for this novel, I think that the voice of the book, I wouldn’t have started it that wouldn’t have come up with the first lines. Um, if I hadn’t read right before it. The book Leave Society by Tao Lin. While I was reading it, I think a book that really impacted me was Clarice Lispector is The Passion According to G. H. Also, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, was another book that really because that’s like, I mean, I think I read that book like four times. While I was writing the book, I just I adore that book. And also, I would say, even another influence was probably Correction, Thomas Bernhard, he was a, you know, what was a I love Thomas Bernard. He’s one of my favorite writers. That book had an influence in just whenever I read Thomas Bernhard, he gets it. He infects my language. You know, like, it’s very hard to read Thomas Bernhard, without like somehow starting to I mean, I could never approach writing like Thomas Bernhard, because he’s amazing. But starting to get influenced by Thomas Bernhard,

Do you find it hard, I mean, obviously, you’re just talking about these books that influenced the voice. But do you find it hard to like, read other fiction while you’re writing? Or are you the kind of person where as you’re writing, you want all the sort of interaction with fiction?

I do not find it hard. I find it necessary and delicious.

I love that. It’s such an interesting reaction from some people who are like, No, when I’m working, like I have to just, like listen to music with no words and get down to it. But I think there’s always something that comes in with that play in between influences. And I can definitely see some of those that come through, even like the Lispector and sort of that like dissociation from existence. And yet, you’re still talking about these like, really intense, like feelings and that personal connection. I think it all comes together.

Thank you so much.

And I have to know I mean; you do every genre. Basically, every medium, you are a poet, you write essays, you write novels. Do you have like something in the works? Are you going to stick with novels? Is there always something new that you’re like, itching to get your hands on?

So about a year ago, I started doing this journal project in the vein of like May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude. And about a month ago, I stopped doing it. I was going to do it for a full year, but I stopped. And I don’t think, well, I don’t know. It may end up becoming a thing. But I think that elements of that are going to I’m going to use elements of that for a novel. But I’m not sure I’m not quite sure yet.

Well, I personally will be on board for anything that you write because you especially after this, I can’t imagine a world where I’m not like standing in the front of the line for the next Melissa Broder. But thank you so much for joining us today. I can’t wait for readers to get their hands on Death Valley because it is truly something special. So Melissa Broder, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Jenna. I really appreciate it.