On a remote island in the state of Washington, two sisters in their twenties are barely making a living as their mother is dying from lung disease. This is the premise of Bear (Hogarth Press, 2024), Julia Phillips’s sophomore novel. Sam, the protagonist, is sustained by the hope that after their mother’s death, she and her sister Elena will sell their house and move far away from where they grew up in order to start a new and better life. Yet when Elena strikes up an unlikely friendship with a wild bear, this completely upends their existence.
Phillips’s debut, Disappearing Earth (Vintage, 2020), became a breakout hit and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. It’s a novel in stories, set in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East. In order to write it, Phillips spent a year in Kamchatka on a Fulbright Fellowship, then traveled there again on her own money to collect more material.
Both books share thematic and stylistic similarities, exploring the lives of women facing adversity with richness and nuance. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that Phillips dedicates significant time to research, which allows her to delve deeply into the context of her characters’ lives.
Phillips and I spoke over Zoom about where the idea for Bear came from, why remote places are such a great setting for novels, and how motherhood changed her preoccupations as a fiction writer.
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The Rumpus: Your debut novel, Disappearing Earth, is set in Kamchatka. Was there an expectation from your agent or editor that your second book would also, in some way, be about Russia?
Julia Phillips: If there was such an expectation, it was not communicated to me by my publisher or my agent. They were superbly open to whatever I was coming to the table with. Obviously, it was a collaborative process to land on the story that felt right, told in a way that felt right, but I don’t think there was ever a conversation where someone was like, “Of course it’s going to be about Russia!” That might’ve been because I myself didn’t feel that way. I haven’t been to Russia since 2015, which was when my last research trip for Disappearing Earth happened. As you yourself know very well, the country has continued to change immensely over the past few years, and I don’t see myself as able to write about it. It’s just something I don’t have knowledge or experience of right now.
Rumpus: Do you think there’s a continuity between the two books, Bear and Disappearing Earth?
Phillips: I really do. The central obsession of both books is around womanhood and survival––what it looks like to be a woman today and what it feels like to live under threat. When danger comes close to you, how do you react to it? How do you push back against it or cooperate with it? I think both books are about women and violence––that’s the heart of them because that’s my heart, clearly. There are also some surface similarities. They’re both set in beautiful, isolated places, places that other people want to go to, but where living is a bit more complicated than the vision of it from the outside. Both novels have two sisters who have to grapple with this threat that appears out of nowhere. So there’s a lot of commonality between them, though they are very different books.
Rumpus: What inspired the story for Bear?
Phillips: In a very direct way, it came from fairy tales that I used to read when I was a kid. I was obsessed with Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and there’s one called, “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” My book is meant to be a kind of contemporization of it. This particular fairy tale is about two girls [who are] visited by a bear who turns out to be a prince in disguise. One of them ends up marrying him at the end. As a kid, I would try to write versions of “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but they never landed. So the source material just stuck around in the back of my head. Then, during the pandemic, I had this overwhelming, stuck feeling. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this. It seemed I was not living the life I was meant to live. I was not in a world I had ever known or expected or understood. The mismatch between these two things––how I felt things ought to be and how things were––was overwhelming. Out of that feeling, these characters came, and the old story came back and fit itself around them. The main character in the novel, Sam, is very stuck, and that stuckness overwhelms her. She has these extraordinarily active fantasies about how things will be or how they should be. I was having the same ones. The writing of this story, in a situation so extreme, was a way for me to escape.
Rumpus: The book seems hyper-realistic, but hearing you say it was inspired by a fairy tale makes me wonder: Did you mean it to be realistic or fairy tale–like?
Phillips: I think I meant it both ways. The most exciting parts of the book, to me, are those most realistic. The more closely the story adhered to reality, the more bizarre and thrilling I found the writing. There’s nothing more frightening and vivid than something that’s right in front of you and that you can’t quite believe. That’s the experience I wanted to create. At the same time, the shape of the novel is modeled after a fairy tale. What was always most evocative to me about the Grimm brothers’ stories was how specific, bizarre, and detailed they were in their descriptions of violence. A fairy tale might end with, “And the girl married the prince, and they had a beautiful wedding, and the evil stepmother was put in a barrel studded with nails and filled with broken glass and rolled downhill into a river.” This shocked me! It was so unbelievable, yet because its details were so precise, it had that hyper-realistic feeling. I wanted to channel this in the book.
Rumpus: Why did you set the book on an island off the coast of Washington? Are you familiar with the area?
Phillips: I chose San Juan Island because it was the absolute farthest my imagination could stretch at the moment I wrote this book. It seemed so distant, way on the other side of the country, and yet accessible enough to enjoy fantasizing about. Getting to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the place where my first book was set, required so much money and red tape and time, but with San Juan, I could just book a plane ticket and go! No visa required! How great is that? When I wanted to read about it, I didn’t have to learn a second language. As is befitting a Covid-era book, I did a lot of online vicarious living through other people’s social media posts. It’s such a beautiful, magical, interesting place. I traveled there, to the San Juan Islands and the surrounding area, and spent about a month on Whidbey Island, nearby, revising the manuscript. From start to finish, it was a super joyful research process. It lifted me out of the one-bedroom apartment where I was in lockdown and transported me to another world.
Rumpus: Both of your novels have, at their center, a very intense relationship between two sisters. Is this based on your experience in any way?
Phillips: I am a younger sibling, which was one of the most identity-defining relationships in my life growing up. I felt very strongly that “here’s this other person who provides a model of how to be in the world.” This person will always be there because they’ve always been there. Other generations will pass, but this is your generation, you guys will stick together, you will be each other’s family until the end. But then the older one leaves the nest before you do, and that is destabilizing, identity-shifting. Without a doubt, that’s a dynamic at play in this book. At the same time, the intensity of the sister relationships here, the quality of passionate admiration or awe, comes from friendships I have. I have a lot of very intense friendships in my life, and that bond is held very high. Especially in Bear, the relationship between sisters is modeled after a best friendship, a relationship where you have actively chosen the person in adulthood and formed certain expectations of the role this person will play in your life. You guys have been so close for so long that you take for granted what does or doesn’t need to be communicated. Then something about the relationship surprises you, or wounds you, or comes to a head. You’re like, “Well, what now? We believed all this time we were on the same page, but somehow, we’re not anymore.” That is the relationship in the book.
Rumpus: It seems that Bear is much more about money and class than Disappearing Earth. Why is this?
Phillips: [Bear] is immensely more about money and class. I would say that the core of it is money. My own relationship to money and class has changed a lot since I wrote the first book. Personally, the most powerful recent influence on my preoccupation with money, my desire to center it here, was that I became a parent in the past few years. Becoming a parent, perhaps anywhere, but certainly here [in the United States], is a very radicalizing experience because it brings you into prolonged contact with an extraordinary number of failing systems. You get pregnant, and you’re closely involved with the healthcare system, reproductive health in particular, and our insurance system, all of which are absolute nightmares. Then you have the kid, and there are no social services around leave or support, no public care postpartum for families, for communities. Over and over, you’re encountering a total lack of a safety net. So what kept us safe on the tightrope? Money. Having, or not having, money has made all the difference in the world. Three years into paying for daycare, I’m thinking about money constantly. How could I not be? The conditions under which we’re living, here in the US, have changed over time. The divide between the haves and the have-nots keeps increasing, and we are in an age with an increasingly wide wealth gap. How can we not write about this? If we’re writing about what it’s like to live in this country today, we’re writing about life in and around that widening gap. What a desperate, urgent place that is.
Rumpus: We all know one doesn’t make a lot of money by writing books, so the writer’s life can be financially precarious. How do you picture your own future?
Phillips: When I sold my first book, I connected with a network of writers. That was far beyond what I’d ever experienced before, and that experience taught me how many misapprehensions I’d been laboring under, regarding how an author survives. What an immense variety of ways there are for writers to actually make their living! How much public speaking actually pays, or adjuncting, or screenwriting, or manuscript consulting? I had no idea. I’ve gotten to be in the very lucky, and who-knows-how-long-lasting, situation of making most of my money these past few years from books. When I picture the future, I picture the payments stipulated in my contract. Then, something else? It’s a sheer joy, an absolute gift, to think of those payments, and a looming stress to think of the “something else.” This is the experience, in differing proportions, of every writer I know. We go in and out of writing income, in and out of precarity. And, hoo-boy, do I want to hear about it more!
Rumpus: Do you teach because you like it, or because you need to make money?
Phillips: Definitely, my primary teaching gig—the first writing teaching position I ever had and the only one I have right now—is pivotal to my retirement planning. That said, it’s the best job I’ve ever had. I’m a faculty member at the Randolph College low-residency MFA program. I go in person for twenty days total, and then work with students remotely for the rest of the year. For me, that is an ideal, incredibly nourishing, inspiring, free and flexible role. It builds relationships with fellow faculty and students. I want to do it forever, if they’ll let me. I definitely love that it builds up my 457(b), but I love the work itself. I love this way of being with people I admire. As someone who doesn’t have an MFA and is not embedded in an academic context, I have not found teaching to be more lucrative than, for example, corporate copywriting. Teaching, in my experience, is something you do because you want to be in contact with writing and writers, not because you want to make a lot of money.
Rumpus: You started a networking community of writers you call Lit Mixer. What is this? What was the impetus behind it?
Phillips: A couple of years ago, I started an online series, where once a month, a small group of folks, up to twenty people, meet with a writer and have an hour-long conversation over Zoom. That was born out of the isolation of the pandemic. I was in my early days of parenthood, which was also isolating, and I just wanted to spend time with people. It was extraordinarily meaningful and inspiring and educational. I adored it. Right now, though, we’re on hiatus. My kid is no longer in the phase where he goes down at seven every night, so I’ve got to figure out what time to do it, how to make it sustainable, where exactly I Zoom from, if the kid is still awake. Small things, but for the moment, big obstacles. These are the practical concerns that make up our lives, right?
Rumpus: Is there a third book in the plans?
Phillips: There is, in fact, a third book in the plans. It’s set on Cape Cod, another beautiful, isolated place, where my spouse was born and raised. Actually, my in-laws still live there. I’m so excited to spend more time in this place that I love. Growing up, I always felt very stuck, like I was far away from where I wanted to be, who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be living. I do think I choose these gorgeous island or peninsula settings so I can continue to explore that feeling. It compels me. What is it like to feel stuck in the place where everyone wants to be? What do your days look like when you’re living in paradise?
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Author photograph by Nina Subin
