When I met Dakota Johnson in February to discuss her new Tea Party Book Club, the actor was grappling with how to talk about her new project without spoiling the surprise. “I don’t want to say too much about the book because I don’t want to give it away,” she laughs. "If you're a mother, if you're a daughter...or if you're just a human being on this planet, this is a wonderful read."
The book, "Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland ," was published by FSG in January and was seen by some as a surprising choice for a celebrity book club, Although this surprise may be the biggest for the author himself. “[Johnson] could have chosen any of the most highly regarded books coming out in January,” Bertino said a few weeks later from his home in Brooklyn. "She could have chosen an organization that was already empowered, like many book clubs do. But she decided to do what she wanted to do."
Perhaps the most interesting element of Johnson's choice is that an actor born into Hollywood's inner circle chose a book that so brilliantly punctures the American class system. Beautiful World tells the story of Adina, a young woman born to a working-class single mother in Northeast Philadelphia. Adina believes she is an alien and faxes observations of humans to her "superiors," mining the silly and profound in an attempt to tell her readers something real.
How you hold your fork and knife is a sign of class. How long are you going to hang around? If you would like to ask the waiter to wait. Who do you find attractive. your hairstyle. Your partner. No matter if your house is cluttered or not. Whether you drink soda. What you remember is a sign of class. Whether you can control your anger. Crime is a marker of class. It doesn’t matter if you go to jail or not and for how long. How do you deal with domestic abuse.
It takes an outsider to present this absurdity so accurately—and perhaps an insider like Johnson to draw attention to it on a massive scale. When Christopher Nolan won the Academy Award for Oppenheimer , Britain's Labor Party seized the moment to point out that 40% of Britons nominated for major cultural awards over the past decade were privately educated, compared with the general population. A proportion of only 6%. The situation in the United States is similar. Bertino, like Adina, grew up in a working-class Italian-American family, and although she is now the author of three novels and a lecturer at Yale University, her perspective is so rare that it feels barely visible on the page. Incredible.
" It's so funny when people ask, why is your character so weird? Because I'm thinking, I'm going to write as honestly as possible," she said. "I use labels like 'augmented realism' or 'magic realism' so others can understand, but I try to write as authentically as possible."
You've just returned from Beautyland's West Coast tour . What is the most common reaction you get from readers?
That's exactly what you asked in your interview with Dakota: What do you think of this alien? [Laughs] I can only say so much so as not to ruin the reading experience for people, so I did a lot of discussion about identity and belief in Adina. Believe your friends when they believe things about themselves that are hard to understand, but that support parts of them that you want to support and love.
Adina responded to the alien label she gave herself, but when she became famous, people wanted to label her other labels, like "autistic" or "asexual." What are your thoughts on labels?
Labels can be helpful or limiting. This sounds very pretentious, but as the author of Adina, I don't actually feel like it's my job to make diagnostic decisions for her. Additionally, since Beautyland takes place throughout her lifetime, some of these things have changed a lot as far as we know. Even using the term "neurotypical" changes our understanding of depression.
I loved those two pages about class—I mean, the whole book is about class—but those pages about the invisible symbols that we learn to read from a young age. Why did you make it a focus?
Because I don't see it on the page very often, from my perspective it still seems like it's something we don't talk about openly. What one of my affiliates wants me to do in my career is make visible certain conversations that are invisible, and conversations about class are still invisible, at least that's how I've experienced it. Do you find that this is true where you are?
This talk is quite loud in the UK. I remember being in grammar school and college and having the distinct feeling that I wasn't in the same class as a lot of people there.
I had the same experience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because over the course of my several years of teaching, I've basically skipped class. I grew up without a lot of resources, just like Adina, no writers, no connections, and just through sheer will I was able to get the resources I needed to get published and have a career. Have you ever heard of the episode of This American Life, "Three Miles"?
No.
I think it is necessary for anyone interested in the class to attend the class. It's essentially about a letter-exchange program between two high schools in the Bronx—one woefully underserved, the other woefully overserved. Girls at these schools wrote letters to each other until one day the underserved came to this privileged school. One of the girls stepped off the bus. She was one of the most promising students and was about to enter college. But when she stepped off the bus and saw this privileged school, she went into full-blown panic. She ran away, they couldn't find her, and then began to slowly fall down the ladder she was on until she disappeared. She just couldn't bear to see what others were lucky enough to experience. I think about it a lot. When you don't have much, you have a feeling that if you put your head down and work hard, something will come of it. But I think it’s a shocking revelation when you discover that not everyone has to have that kind of will, drive, and discipline.
Yes. But there’s a part of me that thinks running is sometimes the right thing to do? Because if you're the girl who gets off, you can go, okay, so I need to dress like these people, I need to imitate the way they talk, I need to be one of them . However, to make great art, I think you have to try and stay in touch with your own perspective.
Yes, this is something I experience every day as a writer. I have to continue to make the decision—less so now, but especially when I was first starting out—to write like myself, even though that may not be what literature is about. Writing in terrain you haven't seen on the page can be a challenge. This is nothing new. We've all heard it. But to my surprise I avoided certain topics. When I ask myself, why don't you write this? Why should you avoid this? Ultimately, because I myself don’t consider them literary. I don't understand how they could be literary. When I realized I was doing this to myself, I realized I had to write them down. All these themes are in Beautyland .
What things have you avoided?
In early drafts, Adina's ethnicity was ambiguous. In the American imagination, Italian Americans are more like the Mafia, but that has not been my experience. I don’t know how to take it back and say that actually being Italian-American can be really nerdy, weird, goofy, artistic, creative, and fun. Writing about Northeast Philadelphia is another story. Essentially, what happened was, I was working with a student who admitted that she was really afraid of showing her work because she didn't think it was what literary fiction was. We were shocked because the stories were so amazing. So I gave this impassioned speech about everything being literary, no matter where you come from, and then I came home and realized I was doing the same thing with the small and so-called "mundane" aspects of life.
But there is fear there. The book is called "Quiet," which is a word I really like, but I admit I heard that word and I thought, oh no, that means all the awards will skip it again, and it won't be Noticed because I'm not this bombastic giant that takes up a lot of space . But that doesn't seem real to me. This is not how I want to show up in the world.
At what point do you worry about being ignored when you talk about awards?
I teach emerging writers, and we all wonder how we can have a book that "works" in publishing presentations. When I posed the question to other editors, writers, and publishers, no one seemed to know what the secret was. It can be anything. Like, okay, is this going to be why I’m discounting this time? Should I do more of this, more of that, or less of this? This is an eternal question.
I think this bothers people in all industries - imagining what success looks like.
Yes, I think it’s not too early to define your success philosophy and write it down. I encourage my students to think of successful ideas that have nothing to do with money or external things. Most of them are thinking, oh, I want a seven-figure book deal. The sad reality is, this won't make you happy. I'm sorry to tell you, but this won't make you happy. It’s like two booksellers from California I met at a book club who raised their hands and said, “I’m here because Beautiful World is my favorite book—and I want to know if you believe Adina is really It’s an alien.” [Laughs. ]
Was there any part of the writing process where you felt like Adina was leading you into something that you knew wasn't going to work?
I usually write very short and then I constantly have to add to it rather than delete it, but one scene from her childhood was probably too close to my own childhood when the Catholic Church wouldn't let me go on my eighth grade class trip, Because they had no record of my mom’s contribution to the church. This is why my family left the church we grew up in. They have an envelope with your name on it and you're supposed to put your donation in the envelope and turn it in and they'll record everyone's donation. We had nothing and my mom was so embarrassed by how little she contributed that she stopped using envelopes. She still donates, but she just doesn't use the envelope. So when I got to eighth grade, they called me into the principal's office and they said, "We have no record of your contributions at church, so you can't go on the class trip to the Port of Baltimore. Instead, you're going to be detained and go home." Tell your mother." So I told her, and that was the only time I remember my mother crying. She said, "Well, first of all, you're not going to be detained, we're going to do something else that day." And she stopped going to church. I put something similar on Beautyland and my very wise editor Jenna Johnson said, "I think we've done enough with Adina. I don't think she should miss her class trip either . ” I agreed with her, so I took it out.
OMG what a horrible experience your mother went through.
I know. But I also think it made her see that the church might not be as generous as it should be in other ways, which was a smart move.
Has your mother read "Beautiful Country " ?
My mom has read this book more than I have read any other book. She read from a draft. She helps me review. Every time a new comment comes in, I think she reads it again. One of the great joys of everything happening at Beautyland is that we get to do this together in a new way. We are huge fans of Dakota Johnson, and never in a million years did I think that Dakota would choose my book as the first choice for her new book club.
Tell me about the Afternoon Tea Book Club experience.
They were really lovely and supportive. It seems like the immersive quality of the Instagram channel is what they're really trying to develop, and it looks like a lot of fun. People get in touch with me and they'll say, "I'm a member of the TeaTime Book Club and I have a few questions."
Do you always answer your readers’ questions?
I will try. If I didn't, it's because I missed it somehow.
How do you feel about Goodreads? I know the author has a lot of mixed feelings about this.
I don't read Goodreads. I don’t read Amazon. I don't read comments.
Is there a reason for this?
Fear. I try to avoid things that don’t help my writing. Whether it’s a glowing review or a can, I know how those two things can stop me from writing or hinder my writing. So I'm very careful with this stuff.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
