In Laura van den Berg’s fiction, readers will encounter a disappearance or two, a mistaken identity, characters with various compulsions and disorders, long journeys—to Madagascar, Iceland, Cuba, Italy—addictions and illnesses, a detective—licensed or amateur—deceased loved ones, and foreboding landscapes. In State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), her sixth work of fiction in fifteen years, van den Berg once again conjures a world made strange to her protagonist, but this time, the author has trained her eye on subjects that are personal to her: her home state of Florida and her occupation as a fiction writer.
Written largely during the most intense days of the COVID-19 pandemic, after van den Berg, her husband, Paul, and her dog, Oscar relocated to central Florida to ride out the lockdown closer to her family, State of Paradise is not a novel the author originally set out to write. It began as a series of nonfiction vignettes, a practice she instituted as a way of marking time during those long, formless pandemic days. Soon, her daily written observations and meditations about Florida evolved, and she came to understand that the voice at the heart of these entries was no longer quite hers.
What had begun as a nonfiction project ultimately became van den Berg’s most personal novel to date. It’s also her boldest venture yet into the speculative space as well as her funniest book, filled as it is with the absurdities and complications of our strange and strained era.
In late September, as Hurricane Helene was about to make landfall in Florida, I spoke with van den Berg on Zoom and asked about the novel’s origins, her abiding interest in the metaphysical, and the dangers of utopic thinking. What followed was a wide-ranging conversation about writing, relationships, and the necessity of storytelling.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
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The Rumpus: Across three story collections and two previous novels, you’ve often given your characters unusual jobs. You’ve written Bigfoot impersonators, academics, mini-mart clerks, detectives, and copy-shop employees, but this time around, your unnamed protagonist is a writer. What was it like writing a character who shares a version of your own occupation?
Laura van den Berg: State of Paradise is, at its heart, about why we tell stories, why we need stories, the power of storytelling, learning to tell our own stories, and also the limitations of stories. So I knew that I wanted the narrator to have some sort of relationship to storytelling, but I didn’t want the protagonist to be a novelist.
I’m drawn to speculative fiction because it allows for a spaciousness. There are things in the world and in my own life that I’m very interested in writing about, but coming at them directly feels like staring into the sun to me—it blots out all perspective. So I think the choice to make the protagonist a ghostwriter is just me stepping to the side a little.
The other thing that felt important is that I was imagining an alternate version of myself, you know? What would my life have been like if I never discovered fiction, never discovered storytelling, never learned to tell my own story? I think the central internal conflict for this character is that she longs to tell her own stories, but she doesn’t know how, so she spends her time using her language to tell someone else’s stories. I was interested in that tension.
I have an acquaintance who used to ghostwrite for a “very famous thriller author,” and it just sounded so fucking weird. He never actually met the thriller author. Instead, there were go-betweens who managed the ghostwriters. I took little seeds of that strangeness and amplified them in the novel.
Rumpus: Your protagonist was also a graduate student in English. Because the book is written in the first-person, her academic background allows you to make references and literary allusions that you may not have been able to include had your protagonist not been a reader. I was delighted by references to so many other texts and writers, including McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time, Frank’s Alas, Babylon, Zamyatin’s We, Anne Carson, and Truman Capote. How did you decide what references to make?
van den Berg: They occurred organically. When I’m writing first drafts, I let myself go—the emphasis is on doing rather than thinking. That also means that there’s a lot of reimagining that happens in subsequent drafts. For instance, the Anne Carson lines—which are attributed, of course—came to mind because, in the novel, the husband’s writing a book about pilgrimages. I was interested in creating these layers of story. I was also trying to explore the different ways that writers have imagined dystopias and utopias.
Rumpus: Whether you’re talking about Thomas More’s Utopia or more contemporary iterations of utopia, it seems that any attempt to create a utopic world almost inevitably creates something dysfunctional. In State of Paradise, you invent two distinct worlds, sort of mirror universes. Do you think of these worlds as either failed utopias or dystopias? Is it a bit of both? Or neither?
van den Berg: Speculative fiction is so fascinating to me because it’s less about inventing dangers that don’t yet exist than it is about taking what’s already in our world and examining it closely. For this book, I was thinking a lot about climate catastrophe and technology. I was thinking about how many people seem to have been eaten alive by their devices—and are actively consenting to being eaten alive by their devices. By taking things that exist in our world and amplifying them to such a degree that they become defamiliarized, we’re able to make fresh contact with them.
When it comes to utopias, we can theoretically devise a society with principles and rules that would make life equitable and safe for all involved, but human nature naturally corrupts that project—though I don’t think that means we shouldn’t still try.
Utopias have been imagined for eons, yet I wonder if it feels harder than ever to imagine what one would look like for us right now. Think of the climate crisis: it’s not too late to make meaningful changes at the micro and macro level, but there’s also an understandable anxiety that we’ve missed some sort of critical window. Is it too late for a city like Miami, for example? On some days, it might feel like it for the people who live there.
I should also add—lest this all sound terribly bleak—that this was also a tremendously fun book to write. Maybe humor and desperation naturally go hand in hand?
Rumpus: It is a very fun and funny book. Of course, it’s not lost on me that you wrote the novel during the lockdown era of the pandemic, a time that demanded that we either make our own fun or give in to despair.
van den Berg: Oh, absolutely. And it was very much a surprise book. It was not something I had intended to write.
Rumpus: Then I have to ask: Where did it come from?
van den Berg: Well, to answer that, I have to back up a little bit. At the start of 2020, [my husband] Paul and I were living in Austin. We were both teaching at the Michener Center, and I’d intended to begin a novel called Ring of Night, a literary crime novel set in the world of small-time amateur boxing. It’s a vaster book: it spans decades, has a big cast of characters. I had written maybe fifty pages when the pandemic hit, and we ended up leaving Austin for central Florida. Our rapidly changing reality was so psychologically and emotionally overwhelming that I felt like there was an impenetrable wall between me and that novel. So I decided that I needed to take a break.
It was the first time I’d been home for longer than a holiday or a wedding or a funeral since I was in my early twenties, and I began writing daily meditations on some aspect of Florida.
Florida is beautiful—it’s a vivid, terrifying, hallucinatory, natural world—and I wrote observations about the landscape, weather, memory, my family. I could feel all these doors that had been bolted shut for a long time beginning to open up.
I did that every day with no intention of it turning into something other than what it was—a way of staying anchored, a record of time passing. After six or eight months, I began to notice a subtle but discernible shift. I realized I’d started writing these meditations in a voice that was not entirely my own. It was a voice that was a lot like mine, but it was also not mine at the same time—that ended up being the voice of the ghostwriter.
I did not want State of Paradise to be mired in the quotidian details of lockdown, partly because so much about that time became “normal” to us so quickly. Masking, hand sanitizing, wiping down your groceries and doorknobs. It’s amazing how quickly we can adapt to new realities. I wanted to evoke the essence of those early pandemic days, and the best way to do that was to locate the story in an uneasy post-pandemic space, filled with a kind of strangeness that we’re not already numb to.
Rumpus: In State of Paradise, you introduce readers to an addictive and immersive technology called Mind’s Eye, which is an extremely advanced virtual reality headset that has a kind of transportive capacity. I’m curious to know more about Mind’s Eye and how that element of the novel came about.
van den Berg: I was thinking a lot about the vortex-like quality of our devices. That was the real origin of Mind’s Eye. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were moments when my sister, my mom, Paul, and I would be in the same room, and we could be talking about anything, but we were all on our phones. This is nothing new, but I think the pace of reality had slowed down enough for me to notice it in a way that I hadn’t before. That’s how Mind’s Eye—an immersive, Oculus-like device that puts people in alternate spaces and that might contain portals to other worlds—came about. Also, “portals” became a unifying element in the book, how we move between different realities, which is actually something we do all the time. Art as portal. Death as portal. A mental health crisis as a portal, when the affected person has slid into a terrible “elsewhere,” a reality distinct from those around her. The pandemic was a moment when reality, as we previously understood it, was usurped by something else.
Rumpus: I was very sorry to learn that your father died shortly before the pandemic, and of course, in State of Paradise, your protagonist has also lost her father. Are you consciously working through some of the thinking and emotions surrounding that loss in this novel, or did certain details from your life subconsciously work their way into the book?
van den Berg: My dad died in 2019, so when we moved to Florida in 2020, that grief was still very fresh. My dad lived in Florida for most of his adult life, so in those first weeks and months, I saw him everywhere. And I wrote so many meditations on my dad. Also, because I was talking to my siblings more, I was hearing things about my dad that I didn’t know. One thing about being the person who leaves home is that you get to experience a lot of different realities than what you grew up with. But you also miss a lot.
The other really big thing from lived experience that found its way into the novel was that I spent some months in a psychiatric facility as a teenager. This was a long time ago, but still, in Florida, I saw that younger version of myself everywhere. I thought I’d already killed that person. I’d put a stake in her heart, bolted her in the coffin, buried her underground. But then, once I was home, she was like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, the dirty, bloodied hand coming up through the earth.
My first novel, Find Me, takes place in a hospital in a dystopian version of our world. So this is something I’ve sort written around for a long time, I think. But I felt somehow that the time had come to write about that period in my life directly.
Rumpus: In the second section of Find Me, there’s a disturbing and wonderful moment when Joy, the protagonist, repeatedly gets high and crawls into a tunnel carved into the wall of a dilapidated mansion’s basement. She climbs in there and tries to commune with her mother, who may or may not be alive.
I’m curious to know more about your abiding interest in tunnels, portals, ghosts, and the unseen world. Why do you return to these ideas and images with such regularity?
van den Berg: Well, I think it’s related to the earlier question of time and the idea of multiple realities and back to that younger version of myself that reemerged in Florida. After I got home, I didn’t return to high school. I did a GED and then went to community college and then matriculated into a liberal arts college. I felt very out of step with my peers because they had gone through all the normal shit, like high school graduation. Occasionally, I’d bump into people and they’d ask, “What happened to you?”
Their reality felt totally inaccessible to me, and I didn’t know how to describe my reality to them either. Sometimes, I would make up something that was outlandish. Or I would just say nothing. I could see the self I could have been and the moment when the path split. I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to narratives that explore the unseen, the metaphysical, the way reality kind of torques and splits and converges in unexpected ways.
There’s a moment in State of Paradise when the protagonist talks about how she’s been telling different versions of the same story, searching for the version that could match what it felt like to live it. And that’s the whole game for me as a fiction writer.In order to write some of these feelings in State of Paradise, I needed reality to literallysplit into two distinct tracks.
Rumpus: You mentioned earlier that State of Paradise grew out of your meditations, your Florida diary, and at first, I sort of laughed because I thought that, as a fiction writer, maybe you couldn’t help yourself and just had to break from reality.
But at least part of what you’re saying is that the feeling of a moment may weigh just as much as the literal truth of a moment.
van den Berg: Absolutely. I’m going for the felt truth. And sometimes, when I’m trying to capture or find language for that felt truth, and I come at it super directly, as I mentioned earlier, it’s like staring into the sun. Stepping to the side gives you the perspective that you need to find the language that can get at that felt truth.
Rumpus: While I didn’t read the book as political commentary, it certainly exists in a particular political context. Can you talk about the political climate you depict in the book and about your feelings about where we’re at right now?
van den Berg: Florida has always been an interesting state politically, and it’s always had a libertarian streak, but Ron DeSantis has taken the state in an entirely different direction. The policies he’s promoted are hostile to art and education—teachers are leaving the state in droves—and pose a threat to the safety of people who live here, especially queer and trans Floridians. The book banning is not specific to Florida, but combined with legislation like “Don’t Say Gay,” well it becomes clear that this isn’t just about taking books off shelves but about silencing communities.
And then there is this cycle of cruelty: DeSantis’s policies underscore the Flori-Duh stereotype, and some people start fantasizing about Florida breaking away from the rest of the country and drifting away. But that perspective also erases the humanity of the many people who live in Florida and who are working hard to make the state a safer, more equitable place. In fact, some incredibly powerful social justice movements have emerged from Florida.
When I was on book tour in the state, I was moved to meet booksellers who are deeply engaged in making literature accessible to all. They understand bookstores as social justice spaces, not just businesses, and they also talked about how difficult it can be to get publishers to send writers to Florida. I wish more people knew that Florida is filled with thoughtful, enthusiastic readers. I think DeSantis would actually lovefor Florida to be a place artists and writers don’t want to visit, a place where culture does not thrive, a place where rigorous education is not happening.
I live in the Hudson Valley now, and I hate it when people say something like, “Oh! You must be so relieved to have escaped!”For one thing, I’m from Florida, and most of my family is there—so to treat Florida as hopeless is, I feel, to treat the people who are from Florida or who live there as hopeless too.
Florida is its own thing, and Florida is also a mirror. We’re kidding ourselves if we think that Florida’s problems aren’t also national.
Rumpus: That’s one of the dangers of stereotypes, right? That they flatten places and people?
van den Berg: Exactly. And I think this flattening poses two dangers. First, it degrades the humanity of the people who live in certain states or regions. It also allows those who are doing the flattening to feel like they are separate and safe from the concerns of the place that is being caricatured.
Rumpus: I feel obligated to note that there are also an unusually high number of exceptional contemporary writers who, like you, are either from Florida or live there now. It’s unusual right? I’m thinking of writers like Lauren Groff, Jennine Capó Crucet, Karen Russell, Dantiel W. Moniz, Kristen Arnett—
van den Berg: Actually, hold on for just a second! I’m going to quote Jennine, if I may. I interviewed her and some other writers when I was working on an essay about going on book tour in Florida. I wanted to know what they thought makes Florida literature special, and here’s what Jennine had to say: “Florida writing takes risks because we don’t even register them as risks. To us, it’s just what life looks like, and the results are often sublime.”
Right now, in New York, it’s raining, but it’s this kind of like drizzly, misting rain. It hardly ever rains like that in Florida. It pours. If you go outside, you’ll either be drenched, or the sun’s out, and it’s scorching. When it’s beautiful, it is so beautiful, almost otherworldly, and when it’s scary, it’s because there’s, like, a dinosaur in your yard, you know?
Florida is a place of this incredible heightened intensity, and I do think that there is something about living in that intensity that changes your eye on the world. Maybe what looks like intensity to others doesn’t so much to us, so our inclination is to push the worlds of our books further.
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Author photograph by Lucy Bohnsack
