Brad Barkley is the author of the new young adult novel The Reel Life of Zara Kegg. His other books include Money, Love. He lives in Western Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, and how did you create your character Zara?
A: Part of the book goes back to being a kid in North Carolina, checking out Super 8 films from the library, titles like The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Screaming Skull, and running them through a projector in a darkened basement room.
My family would be upstairs watching regular TV, and I’d be downstairs watching Dracula all alone. There was something about that—the light, the flicker, the sense that what you were seeing was both present yet part of the past—that stuck with me.
Zara grew out of that space, but also out of an interest in what happens when someone has to grow up a little faster than they should. She’s smart, and she’s paying attention, but she doesn’t always know what to do with what she’s seeing.
That lag between noticing something and understanding it felt true to me, especially when it comes to relationships experienced at age 16.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Zara and Zachary?
A: They’re drawn to each other pretty quickly, but not in a simple or entirely stable way. Zara is trying to make sense of things, to get her footing again, while Zachary is harder to read. His stories don’t always add up, and part of what pulls her in is that mystery.
What they share is a kind of recognition in each other. They’re both dealing with more than they’re saying out loud. But they handle it differently, and that creates tension. At times they steady each other, and at other times they make things more complicated. That push and pull is really the relationship.
Q: The novel is set in Carolina Beach, N.C.—how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: Setting does a lot of work for me. I’m less interested in it as backdrop and more in how it shapes what can and can’t happen in a story. Carolina Beach in the winter is very different from the version people usually imagine. It’s quieter, emptied out, exposed.
I was also interested in working against the usual idea of a summer romance at the beach—everything warm, open, and idealized—instead setting the story in a place that feels closed off, a bit chilly, not especially ripe for romance.
But just as important is the theater itself. The Palace is a contained space, slightly out of time, where Zara can step back from her life and watch things play out at a distance. Up in the projection booth, she’s removed from everything, but also in control of what people see.
That combination of distance and control fits where she is emotionally. It gives her a place to hide, but also a way of looking at things she might not otherwise be able to face.
Q: The writer Ann Hood said of the novel, “If John Green wrote a novelization of the film Cinema Paradiso, it might very well be this one.” What do you think of that comparison?
A: It’s a generous comparison, and I’m grateful for it. I can see where it comes from—there’s a love of movies in the book, and the theater itself is a kind of emotional center for everything.
At the same time, I don’t think of the book as nostalgic in a soft-focus way. The movies matter to Zara not because they take her out of her life, but because they give her a way of approaching and confronting life the way we do in dreams or poems. They let her look at things that might be harder to face head-on.
If the comparison points readers in that direction, I’m happy with it.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve just finished revisions on a novel called AmericaLand, which my agent, Jenna Satterthwaite, is currently shopping around. It’s set in a failing theme park that recreates an idealized 1950s small town, populated entirely by lifelike AI “residents.”
Behind the scenes, the people running the park are trying to keep it—and themselves—from coming apart, even as the whole thing starts to feel more artificial than the machines they’ve built.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Only that The Reel Life of Zara Kegg is interested in ordinary life as much as anything dramatic. There are no dystopian stakes, no world-ending scenarios.
The conflicts are smaller, but I think in some ways they’re harder—the kinds of things people actually carry around in their lives. If readers find something recognizable there, something that feels true to their own experience, that’s about all I would hope for.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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