I have been awaiting Joanna Pearson’s first novel since reading her Drue Heinz Literature Prize–winning story collection Now You Know It All. Like the complex lives of the characters in those stories, her new novel Bright and Tender Dark is populated with flawed people searching for meaning. Joy, the protagonist, has endured a divorce, her ex-husband’s quick remarriage and anticipation of a new baby, and the seemingly inevitable distancing that occurs between her and her two teenaged sons. Twenty years removed from her college days, she discovers an unread letter from her murdered roommate, Karlie, which casts doubt on the conviction of a local man for that crime.
Pearson and I spent time together on Zoom and discussed everything from her novel’s origins in multiple genres to the role of setting in the novel.
Bright and Tender Dark blends literary and crime thriller genres, with a heavy dose of the campus novel tradition. Did you set out with this in mind? And how difficult was it to juggle the expectations of all those forms?
Hmm, what a great question. I don’t think I set out with a lot of intentionality about meeting genre expectations. I really embarked on the story with a question: who might be impacted by the death of a single person. Instead of a traditional murder mystery, I wanted to do a psychological autopsy of a community. I love literary fiction. But I think plot is important. As I saw what I was doing, I thought, well, it’s going to be very unsatisfying if we don’t get an answer to the mystery of who killed Karlie. I wanted to provide that satisfaction, yes. But what I really wanted to explore was that deeper mystery of how we’re all interconnected in these unexpected ways, and how a death can create this hole, or void, into which people start telling their own stories, and it becomes this interesting echo chamber. So it was definitely an oblique approach to the genre tradition.
Readers encounter many perspectives on Karlie in this book. Though we primarily see her through the lens of her former roommate, Joy, other characters — including youth ministry leaders, one of her professors and his wife, and the young man convicted of her murder — offer their views of her as well. All of this transforms her from a larger-than-life victim of a terrible crime into someone more human and relatable. How well did you “know” Karlie when you set out? Did access to any of these other characters help you understand her better?
You’ve actually put your finger on how I came to know her. The kernel of this novel was essentially a short story version of the first full chapter, “Grand Mal.” It really started with Joy, a woman in middle age, remembering and almost being jealous of Karlie — which is a strange kind of jealousy, to be jealous of a person who’s no longer living because a terrible tragedy befell her. But in a way, Karlie’s sacrosanct now that she’s become this kind of myth, and it’s a status Joy can never compete with. It’s like a deification. Karlie’s ascended to this kind of sainthood. And that was exactly it. I thought, I don’t know Karlie at all. But the hook for me as a writer was, how could I then pull in all these varied perspectives, even of people who knew Karlie only glancingly? How would these perspectives eventually add up? Discovering the actual, human Karlie. And then I did want to put her into the novel as a real flawed adolescent person, too.
Not that this book is exactly like this, but I like the tradition of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, where you have a novel that’s haunted by a central absence. In a way, the stories that get told about that “person” really don’t have much to do with the person at all. It’s only in peeling back layers and getting more information and seeing everyone’s relationship to that central absence that you discover more about the actual human being. So yeah, I had to discover her just like the reader does.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is such a vibrant setting for this book. Did you use any specific techniques to render it so clearly, even over the course of several decades?
Oh, well, it helps that I am back in Chapel Hill. This town has a palimpsest quality for me because I went to undergrad here and then moved back. To make my life easier, I made the characters born in my birth year, and I put them in school during the years that I was an undergraduate. So writing was almost a way of replicating my experience then. I first lived here in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and then moved away for a long time. Living here again helps, but I did have to look things up.
I remember the copy editor making a comment when she was copyediting, saying ‘I cannot confirm that there were basketball courts at Hinton James, which is on South Campus. I cannot confirm that they were there in the 90s.’ And I thought, I’m just certain they were there. I know they were there. I found myself asking other people who’d gone to Chapel Hill and looking it up, but it was handy to live here.
And of course, it’s also a little bit of a blend, as you probably saw, both of real Chapel Hill and imagined Chapel Hill, and real North Carolina and imagined North Carolina. I wanted to give shout-outs to some real places, but then I also felt like real Chapel Hill establishments probably didn’t want a murder set there. I hope it has a true flavor. But I think people who know that area will say, ‘Oh, well that particular restaurant doesn’t exist’ or ‘that particular town in North Carolina doesn’t exist.’
Midway through the novel, Maggie, Joy’s ex-husband’s new wife, cautions that, “paranoia is simply another form of self-obsession.” Paranoia, often justified in this case, and multiple forms of obsession play big roles in the plot. How did you balance the need for a logical plot progression with the less rational qualities of characters in certain moments?
I think part of why that felt relevant to me is that it’s partly a story about story. It’s a narrative about narratives. I’m curious about how we tell stories. How do we understand ourselves? How do we understand other people and whether those narratives emerge out of faith, religious tradition, Reddit threads, urban legend, or stories about someone who’s now gone? I think that that was a central interest to me. I really wanted it to be a story about storytelling. And paranoia is also so interesting to me. In psychiatry, there is this idea called the ‘aberrant salience theory,’ which is basically where the dopamine signaling gets messed up. Dopamine helps you register salience, so instead of being able to filter details out, you’re registering too much salience. So there are too many details that start to matter in the world. And your mind starts assigning significance to all of them. And the idea is that’s how paranoia emerges. And I think that that’s why it feels relevant in this story as a mystery. People are trying to piece together what’s going on. They’re trying to figure out what pieces of information have actual salience. And out of that, they’re going to get some stuff wrong, and they’re going to potentially feel frightened when they don’t need to, and they’re going to sort of blame the wrong person, and maybe be on edge when they don’t need to be or maybe when they do need to be. I think this whole novel has something to do with trying to assess data, assess relevance, to piece things together when the world’s a confusing, murky place.
In her message board lurking and Instagram posting, Joy mirrors our society’s obsession with true crime. Meanwhile, a camera crew explores Kaylee’s murder for a YouTube series as well. What should readers make of the complicated role true crime plays in the book?
What a good question! My concise answer is that I think everyone should go read my friend Rachel Monroe’s book Savage Appetites, which is a wonderful nonfiction book that does this delicate dance of both being about true crime but also about the draw of true crime. I don’t know that I’ve necessarily done it, but what I hoped to achieve is a similarly nuanced take. And yet, I am implicated in this. I feel that flicker of interest when I hear a spooky or salacious story. I want to know what happened. But I think there’s also something a little squeamish and icky about that. And so my hope is that readers appreciate that there’s both this understandable interest and appeal of true crime because it’s something that scares us and we’re drawn to. We want to know, we want to understand, but then it’s also this strange part of the entertainment industrial complex, which feels very odd and potentially problematic.
Finally, you published one poetry and two story collections before Bright and Tender Dark. Do you feel that this experience prepared you for novel writing? Or was this an entirely new kind of challenge?
It was an entirely new kind of challenge. But I will say that writing stories was what emboldened me. For a long time, even when I was writing poetry, I really loved reading fiction. Truthfully, I was reading more fiction than poetry. But I think I never felt allowed to write it because I had an MFA in poetry. And then it was also what I had time for while I was doing other education along the way. But at a certain point I said, ‘I’m just going to write short stories.’ I think I did learn something out of doing that.
I hate to be so subject to external affirmation, but I did feel affirmed when my second collection [was selected by] Edward P. Jones, who I love. It was sort of like, well, ‘Edward P. Jones thinks you’re doing an okay job. Like maybe, maybe you could try.’ And I had noticed that there were novels that I loved in which I could feel a sort of short story DNA. I could feel it in their architecture. And I thought, I don’t have to write a novel all at once. It feels overwhelming because it’s big. But what if I just started writing short chunks? I know how to write a 7500 word chunk of something. So what if I started writing bits and pieced them together? In that sense, it really did build out of the stories — although I hope that if nothing else, poetry gave me a sense of shape and structure and the way shapes echo one another.
Bright and Tender Dark is an excellent, propulsive book, the kind that should attract a wide audience to Pearson’s superb writing.
FICTION
Bright and Tender Dark
By Joanna Pearson
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published June 4, 2024
Southern Review of Books 