The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Author follows acclaim of debut with memoir
Stephanie Danler follows up best-selling ‘Sweetbitter’ with a memoir centered on love and dysfunction
Author Stephanie Danler follows up best-selling ‘Sweetbitter’ with a memoir of love and dysfunction.
Stephanie Danler could have written anything she wanted after the critical and commercial success that greeted her debut novel in 2016. ¶ “Sweetbitter,” a coming-of-age story about a young waitress at a fancy Manhattan restaurant gobbling up life — and love and other drugs — didn’t just end up a best-seller or on that year’s best-of lists. The Starz network made it into a series, employing Danler as a writer for its two-season run. ¶ So now comes her second book, “Stray,” a memoir about coming to terms with the flawed or absent love of both her parents and the married man with whom she’d had a passionate, tortured affair.
It’s a story that’s beautifully written and movingly told, but also one that had to be difficult to write, given the raw emotions and bare honesty of her prose.
“I really hope it’s the hardest thing I ever write,” Danler says by phone from her home in Silver Lake, California. “I’m pretty sure I will never write another memoir — famous last words.
“(In 2016), I was still resisting calling it a memoir, because I felt like the expectations of the genre were too much for me. I didn’t have a big car crash or I didn’t have a massive turning point that I feel like so often marks the end of these books.
“And eventually, through reading and talking to other writers, I saw that you really can do whatever you want with memoir,” she says. “It is recollected experience. The form can be elliptical, it doesn’t have to be linear, and you can end it at a point of confusion or a moment of completion.
“So I wrote this book because I felt like I had to,” Danler says. “I don’t think that anyone would write about things that cause them pain if they felt like they had another choice.
This was the writing that felt most urgent to me, and I tend to respect that in myself.”
‘Stray’ thoughts
“Stray” — the title reflects her sense of feeling alone in the world — unfolds in three sections. First, it describes a volatile childhood in Seal Beach with a mother who drank and had a temper. It continues the story with her father, who she writes took off when she was young, only to resurface unpredictably between periods of relapse into drug addictions.
The final section is titled “Monster,” the name she uses to obscure the identity of her married former lover but also to describe the way in which his passion sought to consume her entirely.
Its origins reach back to 2015, shortly before “Sweetbitter” arrived, and an ar ticle she pitched to Vogue about her relationship with her father, and his with drugs, not really thinking the magazine would want it. But it did, and around that same time in 2015, she also moved across country, trading Brooklyn for a cottage in Laurel Canyon
Returning to the landscapes of her youth, she found herself flooded with memories of her parents, and especially her last few years of high school after her mother sent her to Colorado to live with her father.
He is no longer in her life. She reconnected with her mother after moving west in 2015, though there’s no truly happy ending there. “Writing about my mother, while visiting her weekly or monthly down in Long Beach, was pretty unbearable,” Danler says, explaining as the book does that her mother suffered a devastating brain aneurysm in 2005 that left her physically and mentally disabled.
“The massive tragedy, the random nature of that event coupled with the fact that she and I had really struggled even before that, it’s overwhelming to me,” she says. “It’s overwhelming because her aneurysm in a way keeps us from ever meeting each other again as adults, or repairing what happened during my adolescence in particular.”
Writing about the Monster was nearly as difficult, Danler says, given that at the time that “Stray” was written, she had moved into “a really beautiful time of having a new family and having a partner that was so supportive and loving.” (She is married, with a 17-month-old son and another child due at the end of July.)
“I had to remember how I suffered, how deeply in love I was,” she says. “It wasn’t just anything. It wasn’t just lust. It wasn’t just damage. I had to be respectful of that relationship as well.”
Sharing and shame
It’s scary to write your truth about living people in your life, Danler says, but her ability to block out the world while writing made it easier to think only of the honesty of the words that filled her pages.
“I did think about them, but more in the interest
of the book,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about an audience. I wasn’t thinking about my shame, which I think is equally important, because I would have had to take out half the book if I stopped after every section and said, ‘Is this embarrassing?’ “
As for her husband, Matt, handing pages to him wasn’t without a touch of anxiety.
“He’s not used to being written about, but he understands who he’s married to,” Danler says. “I can’t pretend that I wasn’t nervous to show him the passages that related to the Monster. Even though we had talked about that relationship, I think to relive it with me was probably a very different experience. “What I think about more is his parents reading it,” she says and laughs. “My in-laws, my son’s grandparents. And the people in his life reading it who just know me as his wife and don’t necessarily know anything about me.
“That’s where I get a little — like, I’m blushing as we’re talking,” Danler says, and laughs again.
Love and landscape
Broadly speaking, “Stray” is a memoir, but dig a little deeper and different currents flow beneath its surface. There’s certainly a large element about addiction and the trauma it brings, Danler says.
“I do think it is about the effects of addiction and how the inheritance of addiction is not always a oneto-one proposition, which would be I am an alcoholic and a crystal meth addict because my parents were,” she says. “My addiction to hurting myself or making poor choices comes from the same place.”
And place is important, too, in a story that includes chapters set in California areas Seal Beach and the South Bay, Laurel Canyon and Santa Monica, the Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert.
“I think we take our childhood landscapes for granted,” Danler says. “Coming back here as an adult and falling in love with someone who had such a unique lens on California caused me to notice the details of this place. How we live in this kind of pleasureseeking mode, at the same time undermined by how volatile the landscape is.”
But it’s perhaps the unexpected geography of the heart that makes “Stray” as rich and rewarding as it ultimately is.
“I said recently to someone that it was a love story, which surprised the person I was talking to,” Danler says. “But I think as I was writing I was very focused on, ‘This is what happened with my mother, this is what happened with my father, this is what happened with the Monster,’ and then was shocked by how deeply I care for these people.
“Especially my parents, although I do have a lot of compassion for the Monster,” she says. “That first scene that my mother appears in, picking me up from day care and how beautiful she was when she came in through the door. I was shocked to remember that.
“For so long, it’s just been this sort of calcified story about these people who weren’t able to parent me. And remembering how enamored I was of them and how grand they seemed to me was humbling, very humbling, so I do think it’s a love story at the end of the day.”
“I had to remember how I suffered, how deeply in love I was. … It wasn’t just anything. It wasn’t just lust. It wasn’t just damage. I had to be respectful of that relationship as well.”
— Stephanie Danler, on writing her new memoir, “Stray,” about an affair she’d had with a married man