The Absurd Definitely Plays a Role

Katya Apekina interviews Nora Lange on the occasion of her debut novel, “Us Fools.”

By Katya ApekinaDecember 18, 2024

• Fiction

THERE’S A WILDNESS to Nora Lange’s prose, an unpredictable careening. You think you know where things are going until you don’t. You’re laughing, and then you get slapped across the face. You’re crying, and then you get tickled.

In Lange’s new debut novel, Us Fools, two sisters, Joanne and Bernadette Fareown, are stranded in the Midwest during the 1980s farm crisis. Homeschooled and self-taught, the girls consume equal parts Virginia Woolf and daytime television, watching their parents fight and fuck and spiral into debt.

Nora Lange and I have known each other for over a decade. In September, we talked on the back patio of Civil Coffee in Highland Park, Los Angeles; we spoke again later that evening at the launch of Us Fools at Skylight Books. The conversation at the bookstore felt as wild as her writing: she had underpants, “clean German underpants,” she kept repeating, with “Balzac” and “af Klint” printed on the sides, which she was giving away with the books. She’d patented these underpants, and the patent was running out (though, she explained, there were ways to get around this—if someone, for example, were to Venmo her for them). They were the kind of thing Joanne and Bernadette would have made, just as the shirt she was wearing at our interview, a white T-shirt with “DADAIST” printed across the front, was something they would’ve worn.

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KATYA APEKINA: I want to start by talking about the book’s genesis. What made you want to write it—what were the seeds for it?

NORA LANGE: What happened first was I heard these two voices. And they were saying different things—these two sisters. At the time, I was really into sound art. I was already doing a lot of audio stuff. So, it started with them and their dynamic and their relationship. And then I built a world around that.

What made you want to write about the farm crisis of the 1980s?

I wanted a place to put them. I lived in Illinois for college and afterward. My parents are from the Midwest, and I would spend a lot of time going back to see family. I was always drawn to the place. Us Fools was a way for me to explore that place further. I didn’t know too much. People don’t talk about it.

Do you feel like there’s a parallel between whatever is happening now economically and what was happening then?

For sure—yeah. I think that’s why I decided to hold on to it and explore it. Researching the farm crisis highlighted other parallels. It was like a string of Christmas lights: just, wow. Lots of stuff. Russia, food prices …

In the eighties and now?

Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t just this one particular crisis. I would turn off my research and then turn on my radio and make dinner and be like, What the fuck? Because it sounded like the same thing as I [was writing].

What did you want the reader’s experience to be?

I don’t know what readers feel. But for me, what I wanted was the kind of closeness and intimacy—like you’re tucked away with these characters—that I feel when I listen to things. In audio, I feel a closeness. I wanted to emulate that in the writing: a feeling of closeness to something.

You’re wearing a T-shirt that says “DADAIST.”

Yeah. I mean, part of this is in honor of them. The absurd definitely plays a role in this book for me. Art is definitely something that comes up too. They’re using different examples to illustrate larger things. Whether that’s using a particular painting to talk about a particular dynamic or a particular food product to talk about a particular ideal or dream (or the sensation of being hungry). Or television to talk about gender dynamics.

I think I read an interview where you were talking about this book, and you said it was about America—something like devouring and being devoured by it?

Two Dollar Radio sent me to a booksellers conference. It was my first time doing anything like that. It’s like a banquet: there’s a big table, and the tablecloth. Everyone’s sitting there, you stand up … And I was nervous. At the end of it, I said, “This is a book about America.” And I felt like, okay, yeah, that feels big. But also right. And it came out of being sort of exasperated with myself, trying to figure out how to have a nice sound bite to present.

I feel like it’s also about violence. It’s a very violent book.

In the book? Can you tell me what you are thinking of?

Well, there’s the literal violence in the house. There’s the way sex and violence for their parents are intertwined. But I also feel like the way it’s written feels violent. The narrative style.

I certainly wouldn’t have wanted it to feel like an accosting violence in the writing. Not my intention. I think there’s maybe sometimes a starkness to the language. My intention isn’t for people to feel violence in the language, but there is violence that does take place in the book between characters.

I don’t know that it’s in the language. More like in the juxtaposition of images. It’s things that don’t belong with each other butting up against each other.

Got it. Like disruption.

Like being hit on the side of the head.

I see what you’re saying. I had never thought of it as clearly as you just articulated, linking what’s happening in a kind of domestic example of violence disrupting the familial flow, if you will. I was submerged inside of it for a while; there probably is a house of mirrors, and these things probably are talking to each other in ways that are bigger than me.

You named a character—a love interest in a domestically violent relationship—after my daughter, Fais. I was curious about that.

I loved the name … And that was that. Yeah. Sorry. Nothing interesting there, but I should have said something. I just think the name is so beautiful, you know?

As teenagers, Joanne and Bernadette talk a lot about what it means to be “in America.” They’re very aware of their surroundings in a way that’s interesting for people who haven’t left the country. They do travel a lot in terms of what they’re reading—books put them in connection with the broader world. I know you’ve lived abroad. Did that change your understanding of America?

That’s true. I lived in a few different countries. When I first moved, I was 17. I was in high school. I did a weird experimental program in France. Once I lived elsewhere, even when I came back, I never totally felt like the country belonged to me. It was weird—like, I knew I was American; I was born here and stuff. But I also felt, because I lived away for a while, like I’d never reintegrate in the same way. And that was fine.

You’re a permanent expat. What does the American dream mean to you?

My gosh. I guess it feels like a contradiction. And I feel like maybe that goes back to that other question about disruption or violence—there seems to be a contradiction at play, whether it’s the sisters with their contradictory natures or the violence of someone being sorry, and then someone doing something hurtful. I feel like it’s a promise of a bright future, you know? If it were about the present, that wouldn’t totally work. It has to be the future. Maybe in the moment, you’re like, “Gosh, I’m working three jobs, but if I do that right, then I can have a house and work two jobs.” But more and more, that seems really difficult to attain.

What about how it connects to publishing a book? It’s like the dream is coming true.

Interesting. I feel really lucky to have been able to do a thing that’s meaningful. And the dream of being fortunate enough to have someone look at it feels really, really fucking special, you know?

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Nora Lange’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGiant, LIT, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was long-listed for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program, where she was a Kaplan Fellow. An earlier iteration of her novel Us Fools was short-listed for the Novel Prize in 2020, which recognizes and publishes novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She comes from a long line of Midwestern farmers and lives in Los Angeles with her family.