She has been compared to writers such as Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, James Baldwin and Jennifer Egan - but even without such impressive praise, Sarah Taylor's The second novel "Lauras " is not one you want to miss. Published by Hogarth , The Loras is an epic road trip novel starring an androgynous teen named Alex and Alex's travel-hungry mother, aka: Mom. Taking readers through a series of temporary apartments, Southern truck stops, Appalachian mom-and-pop shops, a Florida surf town, and finally to California, Taylor's novel is deeply rooted in the place—and the place is alive. Small town America.
The story of Laura's family begins with a quarrel between Alex's parents. This type of fighting between teenagers has been seen countless times before, but this particular argument becomes different when Alex's mother suddenly leaves the house in the middle of the night, taking Alex with him in only his pajamas. This event turned into a years-long road trip across the United States; a period that encompassed much of Alex's formative and adult years.
The Laura by Sara Taylor , $16.23, Amazon
Just ahead of the release of The Loras this month, Bustle caught up with Taylor, the Bailey Award-nominated author for her 2015 debut novel The Shore , in an interview.
“It’s so daunting to be compared to writers I respect and love,” Taylor said of the recent praise Lauras has received. "I tend to either convince myself they're referring to a different Sarah Taylor or hide under the bed."
Taylor's personal reading list while filming "The Loras" included Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, Maureen Duffy's "Beloved" and Marilyn Robinson's "Housekeeping." “It’s hard for me not to be affected in some way by the books I read, and responding to them in my own work makes me feel like writing is both a privilege and a responsibility,” Taylor said. "A lot of the reaction is partly subconscious. Occasionally, and always unexpectedly, books inspire people to think 'What if things went in a completely different direction?' " way, but more often than not they are helpful because they show how others have dealt with the technical issues that bothered me."
Although Taylor's "The Loras" begins as a short story about a kind-hearted family member who kidnaps a child, it soon becomes apparent that these characters are the stuff of fiction. "In the first few pages, the narrator's voice already sounded older than I expected, and Ma's background made me curious," Taylor said. "When they got to Florida, I realized this story was going to be a novel."
Both of Taylor's novels, "The Loras" and "The Shore," are filled with fierce and dynamic women. Alex, who tells "The Loras," is surrounded by women who have absolute control over their own destiny - women who defy conservative families and religious fundamentalists to defend their turf and never turn down an adventure. Alex's kidnapping and journey across the country is narrated by "Laura" - the rebellious women that Ma loved and lost throughout his life.
"As a teenager, I read a lot of coming-of-age novels, and regardless of their subject matter, there were seemingly inevitable scenes in which the teenage characters came to terms with their physical development, sexual orientation, or both "For me as a reader, it was a departure from the new territory that these novels explore," Taylor said when I asked her about the inspiration behind writing a genderless teen. If Alex had a binary, "Law Lars" would be a different kind of novel about gender identity.
"Alex developed from the beginning into a genderless character, much like Chloe in On the Coast developed into a female character. When I was asked to consider assigning a gender to Alex, I realized that Asia Alex's genderlessness allowed me to focus on the dynamics of the parent-child relationship without having to deal with the baggage that comes with mother-son or mother-daughter pairings, and Alex wasn't stuck growing up."
Alex describes the pressure to choose a gender identity as a "war" - one that will inevitably force people to choose between identifying with their mum and being the father who was left at home. Alex opined: "In my mind, that's the question they asked: Do you want to grow up to be like your mom or your dad, Alex. I still wonder why I can't be both So, why is this an either/or situation?”
“Language and classification are both tools that we create,” explains Taylor. "It seems easy to forget that they reflect reality, rather than dictate reality, and that they can change and evolve. Overall, I hope readers enjoy the book, but if they want something deeper from it, I hope this will be a moment to reflect on why the binary exists, what cultural narratives it exists to serve, and what assumptions it supports.”
“Conversely,” says Taylor, “not all readers will fit into this binary, and I hope that for those who don’t , The Loras will be a book in which a narrator writes in a certain way. books that reflect their experiences in the same way that many books reflect their experiences as readers whose gender does fit within the binary.”
Alex spent the core of his adolescence on the road, and Mom wondered if and when they would come home and wondered what kind of pursuit they were really pursuing. When Alex discovers the road map that Ma has been using (and mysteriously keeping secret) to guide their journey, Alex discovers that they must not only travel across America, but also through Ma's past: paying off debts and breaking free. Closure, making up for past regrets, and finally finding Laura, her mother's favorite. Therefore, their journey is not linear - crossing states and towns and then crossing again, from south to north, then back south again, west to east to west, and so on.
“I literally left the country of my birth at the first opportunity I could,” Taylor said. "If you give me a mythical mission, I will accept it."
"As far as I know, exploration is one of the oldest narrative genres, and if you take Chaucer as an example, it was very popular at a time when most viewers were expected to die within a few miles of their birthplace," Taylor said . "Although we are now more mobile as a species, there is still a degree of escapism in the pursuits, and metaphorically they map easily onto other life experiences - the search for enlightenment, personal fulfillment, or just aging - These are too big to handle as they are. Road trip stories, I’m told, are a subset of the uniquely American story of discovery. Nothing expresses the anxiety of growing up like being in a car driven by someone else, with an unknown destination. Inevitable momentum."
In addition to the tradition of exploration so vividly depicted in Laura's Family , there is also an explicit acknowledgment in the novel of the tradition of oral storytelling: stories are told within other stories, stories are passed down from mother to mother in an almost sacred way. Alex sometimes. I asked Taylor, who grew up in her own family traditions, if she had a lot of storytelling experience, and the connection between ancient oral traditions and novel writing.
"My parents told me a lot of stories when I was a kid, but as I got older I realized that because the stories they told me were crafted to be enjoyable, I was missing out on a lot , the material between the stories is also important and provides a different picture of reality," Taylor said. "I think there's a huge difference between oral storytelling and fiction writing: the former tends to be streamlined to fit neatly into a tight space, whereas the latter has room to connect what might be individual anecdotes in fiction. The wonder often lies in the interplay between these parts, and how these little fragments gain meaning from their proximity to each other.”
Much of Loras is about daring to get lost in the wilderness, finding peace in the unknown, and letting the answers be revealed in their own time. In the first town Alex's mother decided to build, Alex spent his days wandering alone across the Appalachian Mountains, thinking, "I'm free of the fear of getting lost because I'm lost." I asked Taylor if she saw the power of getting lost, or even staying lost?
"If you plan a trip from start to finish and follow the route on the map, you're not going to discover anything other than what you wanted to discover when you made the plan," Taylor said. "So, I think There's value in getting lost, or abandoning plans and seeing reality as it is. This is more or less where we're left with Alex at the end of the novel: accepting that being "lost" is a viable state of being. Willing to see where this disorientation leads.
The Laura by Sara Taylor , $16.23, Amazon
