Are You There God? It’s Me, Natasha Stagg

Tess Pollok interviews Natasha Stagg about her new novel “Grand Rapids.”

By Tess PollokOctober 24, 2025

• Fiction

NATASHA STAGG’S NEW NOVEL Grand Rapids charts the course of a dislocated and frustrating girlhood spent in exile. Teenage Tess, whose mother has recently died, relocates to her aunt’s house in the Michigan suburbs and begins exploring her identity and sexuality with her new best friend, Candy. What follows is a narrative as banal as it is compelling, as Tess fumbles through familiar adolescent experiences that evoke the alienation and aimlessness that many of us feel in our teenage years. With unflinching honesty, Grand Rapids traces the complicated contours of being a teenager, recalling both the painful moments that haunt us and the milestones that make us.

I sat down with Stagg in advance of the book’s publication to discuss the impetus behind writing the novel, the differences between cities and towns, and why she chose a teenage girl as her protagonist.

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TESS POLLOK: Did you borrow a lot of experiences from your own life to write Grand Rapids? What motivated you to write a book about Grand Rapids?

NATASHA STAGG: I started work on the book years ago, and I’ve been coming back to it over time, just for the feeling of having something to work on. Staring at a blank page is just way too intimidating for me. The book hits pretty close to home for me because I did live there as a teenager. But all the events of the novel are truncated because the narrator, Tess, only lives there for a year. I decided not to cram in everything that happened to me while I lived there, otherwise the whole book would just be a barrage of teenage drama. I wanted it to express the experience of teenage-hood but communicate it through an adult lens.

Much of the book explores Tess’s relationship with her best friend Candy. What were you thinking about there with respect to girlhood and friendship?

I wrote a short story a long time ago about two girls who have this really intense friendship that turns sexual, and it gets a little bit tense and competitive between them. One of those indefinable, ambiguous situations. I think everybody’s lived through something like that.

I think most people’s teenage years are depressing. Obviously mine were because, just like with Tess, my mother died when I was a teenager. That’s how the book opens and how it ends as well, with this acknowledgment that this event is the biggest experience this person will ever have in her life. I think things that happen when you’re a teenager tend to feel that way because teenage emotions magnify things. I was also concerned with making the character realistic in the way a teenage girl would react to things.

How does not having a mother impact the way Tess navigates the world?

There’s something wild about her because the pain is so fresh. She’s searching the world for mother figures, and it becomes this source of disappointment for her because, of course, nobody can fill that role immediately and naturally. I think that people who experience loss are always trying to fill up that hole, becoming the person for themselves that they are trying to find. Maybe that’s too sentimental of me to say. By the end of the book, she does end up knowing that she has to be her own mother.

I can see how that loss impacts her loneliness, her intense self-determination. Did writing this book make you miss that time in your life, or miss Grand Rapids?

Yeah, for sure. I haven’t been back in a long time, but I have family living there so I’ve visited before. It is this feeling where you can never go back, but actually you can. I like visiting and seeing places that once intimidated or scared me. When I was younger, I was so anxious and angsty that I would be like, “Look at this ridiculous white picket fence.” When I go back now, I’m like, “Oh, this store just wants to look nice. It wants to look welcoming.” It makes me realize my teenage self was such an asshole for thinking everything there was so oppressive.

I think a lot about the psychological differences between people who live in small towns and people who live in cities. What is the quality of life like in Grand Rapids? How does the character of people there compare to New York City, where you live now?

I’m from Tucson, Arizona, originally, which is about the same size as Grand Rapids. I think towns like that are interesting because they actually have a lot going on. One thing that’s unique about Grand Rapids is that it’s a swing city. That means everyone is either super talkative about their politics because they think they have a responsibility to change people’s minds or get someone to vote, or they’re in this other tradition of not talking about politics at all. I grew up with the latter, because people within my family had differing votes. We would never have been able to spend any time together if we were talking about it, so we never did.

I have family in Grand Rapids; I don't necessarily think of them as rich, but they own property. They definitely grew up with more money than I did, but that’s just the way people live there. Like, everybody gets a house and takes their kids out on the lake as often as possible.

I’ve always thought that life in small towns was more material than life in cities. People are thinking about owning property, opening a business. In big cities, life feels somehow more abstract—smaller towns have more tangible metrics for growth.

Completely. For myself, I love New York more than anything. I’ve always felt comfortable here. Instinctively, I’ve never wanted to own stuff. If I could get all my stuff and all my clothes on a rental plan, I’d be perfectly happy with that. But I also understand the instinct to own land and have more control over your surroundings. I just don’t think it’s the mindset that comes to me naturally.

I love that you specifically mention Alexander Calder’s sculpture La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids in the description of the novel on the book’s back cover. What made you think to use it as a point of reference?

I’ve always had a complicated relationship to that statue. Almost every city I’ve ever lived in has had some big public art installation that everyone has an opinion about. In Tucson, we had David Black’s Sonora—a big red sculpture of abstractly twisted steel—and public consensus was that it was extremely ugly. So when I moved to Grand Rapids and saw the Calder, I thought it would be the same way and that everyone would hate it. But it turns out it’s absolutely beloved in the city; it’s almost like the city flag. It’s on the sides of cop cars and etched on sewer lids. It’s the symbol of the city. I started thinking of it as very cosmopolitan, this Calder statue in the middle of Grand Rapids. When I was younger, I thought he must not be a big deal to have a sculpture in Grand Rapids, but he’s actually a huge deal, which is how I’ve come to feel about the city, as well.

What does the book have to say about adolescence?

I’ve always loved adolescence narratives. As an adult, you sort of come to terms with realizing that not everything is geared towards you anymore. You don’t have any way of connecting to these narratives other than this nostalgic fetishization. That’s partially the crux of the book. There’s always going to be space in my life for me to enjoy movies or books about teenagers. It’s an exciting time, but it’s also sad because it’s such an early part of life. Maybe that’s where some of the melancholy in the book comes from. It’s this person looking back on her teenage years and saying, “That couldn’t have been the best time in my life. I hope something better happens eventually.”

It’s funny that people make such a big deal out of their teenage years. They’re exciting but they’re also terrible.

Youth is wasted on the young. You’re just learning as you go, maybe with a sense that you’re not handling it as well as you could if you had all the experience that you will eventually gain.

What period of life has been your favorite so far?

Probably my twenties. I wish I could say “now” because I’m in my late thirties, but if I’m being honest, I’m a little bored. My twenties were way more carefree. I’m thinking about right after college and into grad school. I remember going on tour with a band that I liked—that was really exciting. It was like that all the time, just every day was a new thing.

How do you see Tess as a character? What traits do you ascribe to her?

She feels pretty out of place in Grand Rapids because she got dropped into this area that is so outside her comfort zone. She doesn’t feel like she’s in the same bracket financially because her mother didn’t have as much money as her mother’s sister, with whom she’s now living. Her aunt has kids of her own and a completely different way of life. Tess just feels like an extra in this family where she knows that she’s different, so she goes out and tries to fit in with the other misfits of the town. I think of that as being a hard journey for her because she’s a misfit among misfits, even the punks and the goths get to go home to their parents. That’s something I experienced myself when I was her age: getting very enamored with various underground social scenes and subcultures. I’m still curious about subcultures and how they offer you a different type of anonymity or comfort in homogeneous behavior. That’s not really an option for kids now.

Why do you feel like that isn’t an option for kids now?

Life isn’t structured in the same way anymore. It’s not like you just walk into a Denny’s now and see all the goth kids hanging out there and you put on black lipstick and you’re goth after that. Or you start listening to an emo song and the words that are being said are all so expressive of your own feelings. I feel like social media and the internet have changed that. People would find it too reductive now to identify with just a specific type of music or clique. But I like thinking back on when you could get away with that.

What does the book have to say about sexuality and sexual experiences?

The sex is really awkward because they’re teenagers. I wasn’t trying to make any particular statement about it, but I do think experimenting is part of a person finding their way. For young women, I think sex can be very access-granting. I always knew if I was going to get invited to things on the basis of whether or not I was sexually available. That’s a power that teenage girls find out about themselves very quickly.

What was your biggest takeaway from writing this book?

I wrote it because I was curious about revisiting the novel form. It takes a little longer to digest, but it’s also a bit slower and more deliberate—I think it’s more interesting that way.

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Natasha Stagg is the author of Surveys (2016), Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (2019), Artless: Stories 2019–2023 (2023), and Grand Rapids (2025).