Author’s debut novel is a worldly work
JULIA PHILLIPS DISCUSSES HER DEBUT NOVEL, ‘DISAPPEARING EARTH’
Julia Phillips has always been obsessed with Russia.
For years, the 31yearold New Jersey native studied Russia and was transfixed by its language and culture. She also had a longstanding dream of becoming a novelist.
“I didn’t know at first how I was going to combine those two interests,” says Phillips, who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Then, a solution arrived — in 2011, she went to the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka on a Fulbright fellowship. This year, Phillips published her sweeping debut novel, “Disappearing Earth,” which is set entirely on Kamchatka.
Phillips will speak about her book, which was a National Book Award Finalist, from 7 to 8 p.m. Jan. 16 at the Westport Public Library, 20 Jesup Road. During a recent phone interview, Phillips talked about the book, her inspiration for writing it, and why she told the story in a shifting narrative.
“Disappearing Earth” opens with the disappearance of two young girls on an August afternoon. Each subsequent chapter tells the story of other characters, whose lives in some way dovetail with those of the missing girls.
Phillips says, as a fan of true crime podcasts and such TV shows as “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” she thought the missing girls were a strong way to start the story, and that Kamchatka was an effectively eerie place to set her tale.
“It’s pretty set apart and pretty isolated,” she says. “It’s very beautiful, and it’s not an urban center.”
But Phillips says she never wanted the story to be a straightahead detective novel, focusing solely on the missing girls. Instead, she says, she wanted to use this crime as a way to examine the lives of people on Kamchatka.
“I didn’t want to look only at the disappearance of the girls,” she says. “We have a lot of stories like that. It’s more interesting, I think, to write a story about a society in which a crime like that occurs.”
In the stories of these other characters, there is still plenty of tragedy and horror. A dog goes missing. A woman fears she has cancer. A widow undergoes yet another heartbreaking loss. Friendships are severed. Relationships end. There’s also another family who had a daughter go missing, which raises questions about why her case doesn’t get the attention of the two missing girls.
Philips says it was important for her to surround the major catastrophe at the heart of her novel with a bunch of little, “everyday hurts” experienced by the people who live in a certain community.
“I wanted to build a picture of a society in which people can be hurting in ways that are both big and small,” she says.
Phillips says she’s been pleased at the positive reception “Disappearing Earth” has gotten from both critics and readers. She says she hopes the Westport appearance provokes more interest in the book.
“I have been really, grateful for how many people have engaged with the book and want to talk about it,” she says, adding that people have thoughts and ideas about the book that didn’t even occur to her while writing it. “Reading is such a subjective journey, and so personal,” she says.