Lust, ambitions and appetites
In the first line of Stephanie Danler’s bestselling debut novel, “Sweetbitter,” her narrator, Tess, begins, “You will develop a palate,” sounding a motif from the book’s initial moment. Another early line reveals as much about the heart of this novel as it does the writer who has penned it: “Eating becomes a discipline, language obsessed.”
Set in New York city in 2006, “Sweetbitter” is a coming-of-age story of one young woman’s initiation into the restaurant world (Danler worked at restaurants in her 20s, including the famed Union Square Café) as well as her first true forays into lust, betrayal and adulthood. This is a book about appetites.
I spoke to Danler, who has moved to Los Angeles, over the phone. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
“Sweetbitter,” which came out in May, has entailed an extensive press tour and continues to be talked about. What is that like?
People tell you that this will never happen. I know I wrote a good book, and I knew it would find its readers, but to have it have a widespread audience, it’s not something you can plan for or expect. I think what’s most surprising to me about it is that [at events] someone always makes a comment to me, “There’s so many women in the audience. Look how many girls are there.” All of these 22-year-old girls, millennials, are desperate for someone to talk to. And that’s what these people are picking up on, this fanaticism has made “Sweetbitter” a success. I see it as a larger problem: Who can they talk to about sex or becoming themselves? There’s something else going on that’s much larger than me and my book.
For much of the book, the main character Tess goes unnamed. Can you talk about this device?
If you take that away from someone — their name — the reader is expecting that you’re going to give it back, that it’s going to be a triumphant moment, and I didn’t want to do that because she’s just not there yet. I kept thinking, “She’s not ready.” Her journey is self-knowledge, but nobody in the course of a year goes from not knowing who they are entirely to “I reclaimed ownership of my name and I set off into the sunset!” That’s a fairy tale. [The reality] is minute, micro-movements forward.
I agree, and yet we often talk about a character’s “change” as being central to the arc of a book. As a novelist, how did you balance wanting to tell an honest story with wanting to write a satisfying conclusion?
In an early draft I was told by many people that the ending of my book was unlikable, that it makes [Tess] an unlikable character. So I came up with another ending and I sold it with that other ending. While I was editing, I was at an artists’ residency in the Catskills, and I was alone and it was 1 o’clock in the morning and I just thought, “Oh God! It has to be the [original] ending!” It was an imperative that Tess touch the bottom of whatever drain she was circling.
Why are we obsessed with fictional characters’ likability?
People come up to me — men and women — who tell me that the prose is really great, but the main character is so unlikable. She’s not unlikable — she’s sincere.
That reminds me of a passage in “Sweetbitter” in which Tess defends Britney Spears. Is Tess really defending herself ?
I don’t think she equates herself with Britney, but she has enough morality to know when something has gone wrong. There’s a new book by Sady Doyle called “Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock and Fear … and Why.” It looks at our female pop culture icons and the way that we cannibalize them, and that is something that has never sat well with me. I was attached to Britney Spears. What Britney experienced is something I know more about now than when I was writing the book, which is people’s expectations of you to be one thing, and the art of branding yourself as a likable woman in a commercial world.
You’ve publicly championed poetry. “Sweetbitter” is a book that isn’t afraid of a certain linguistic opulence. What poetry inspired you while writing?
I obsessively read Anne Carson. Sappho was the first person to call love bittersweet, and then Anne Carson was the first person, many millennia later, to say “No, the order of the words is Sweetbitter and that’s also the order in which we experience love.” When I read that I was like, “Done.” My food metaphor, my love metaphor.
Poetry’s relationship to the book is also about presence. There’s usually an object that’s your entryway into the moment. Look at Frank Ohara’s untitled poem about avocado salad in the morning or Seamus Heany’s poem about oysters. I’ll use my senses to enter a scene, to expose a moment as fully as possible and not explain it away. I can have Tess and Jake in a walk-in having oysters and that’s it. The scene ends when she takes an oyster. I don’t have to say why that’s important.
The sexual resonance of that moment reminded me of “Tess of the D’Urber villes,” when she takes a ripe strawberry between her lips. It’s veiled, but we all know what’s really going on.
She was named after that character for a reason: a girl from the country that comes into society and is seduced and betrayed. It is the oldest story in the book. The ripe strawberry, Eve with the apple.… Food is one of our first entryways into sensation. It’s the satisfaction of a desire — maybe the first one.
“Sweetbitter” is set in New York; how does place inform the book?
When we talk about the American Dream, there are very few places left in America where you can actually achieve it, and I would say that right now New York is not — negative, not — one of them. However, what you have to do to reinvent yourself in a Gatsby sense is to break away from the continuous identity of wherever you were from. This is from the book, so forgive me, but it’s that unbridled ambition that can be absorbed by the city. People tap out of places all the time, and if they have that drive they have to go to New York to test themselves.