Q&A with Sarah Langan

 

 

 

Sarah Langan is the author of the new novel A Better World. Her other books include the novel Good Neighbors. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

Q: What inspired you to write A Better World, and how did you create your character Linda?

 

A: Hitchcock was obsessed with the notion of a false accusation bringing his characters down. It imprinted on him, because as a kid, his dad talked a cop friend into “scaring him straight.” I’m pretty fascinated by that idea of accidentally doing something horrible and being found out—of being blamed for things I don’t understand.

 

As kids, we all think there’s someone in charge. Someone who won’t let bad things happen. There are “powers that be” and these powers are logical and intelligent. But as we grow older, we realize that’s not the case. It’s all pretty precarious, this civilization we inhabit.

 

So, my main character Linda enters an orderly society called Plymouth Valley that seems to have its act together. But she meets a woman named Gal who’s a total mess, who does everything wrong and acts out and is horribly self-absorbed and frightened and bleeding emotion, and this woman does something very bad to her children. The entire town turns against her.

 

I had in mind this main character, Linda, who knows something’s not right —knows that Gal must have had reasons for her actions, and these reasons implicate Plymouth Valley’s entire social order.

 

Linda’s got a compulsive personality. She can’t let things sit. She hates secrets. She has to know the truth, and so she starts asking unwelcome questions. That’s when the town turns against her, too, and she begins to understand that this orderly world she inhabits comes with a price.

 

The story’s a genre mash-up—slow burn social horror, dystopian, and Hitchcockian.

 

Linda is probably the character most like me that I’ve ever written. And maybe a little like my mom, too, whom I miss a lot.

 

Q: The writer Gillian Flynn said of the novel, “Langan has created a United States of the future that feels darkly recognizable—a depository of our current fears about environment, government, health. Her bright, shiny, twisted little town of tomorrow, Plymouth Valley, is a dark, thrilling indictment on the choices we make today.” What do you think of that description, and how did you create the world in which the story takes place?

 

A: I’m glad Gillian liked it! Very generous of her to read it at an early stage. She’s a truly wonderful and supportive person.

 

I put a lot of work into making my world – both outside and within Plymouth Valley – believable but also accessible. I love dystopian literature and I have a master’s degree in environmental health science, so that part came pretty naturally.

 

I love Ishiguro’s description of a falling apart world in Klara and the Sun – it’s a slow burn, we’re plunging into this without realizing it—kind of dystopia, and those feel most realistic. We’ve lived through dystopias throughout history, we just didn’t call them that. National/financial collapse gives rise to them. Viewed through a modern lens, we’d probably consider more early societies dystopias than not.

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I didn’t know the specifics, but I did know that would happen—that turning point at the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival. I didn’t know the outcome for my specific characters. I had to write that to discover it.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: A Better World is named after the corporation BetterWorld, which owns Plymouth Valley. This corporation is also a key plot point in an earlier novel that I wrote, called Audrey’s Door.

 

In the narrative of my novel, my main character is looking for a better world in which to raise her family. But do you force yourself into an elite community in order the achieve that, or do you try to make the world better through action? It’s the big question of the novel – safety or freedom; drawing wagons or smashing walls.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I just finished a novella called Pam Kowolski Is a Monster, about a woman who’s failed in her journalism career and personal life. She sees her high school frenemy on television late one night—a wild success—and decides to revive her career in order to take Pam Kowolski down. It’s mordantly funny, about human connection and the horror of modern life.

 

I’m now working on Parent Trap, about a woman who learns she’s pregnant, but feels she can’t be a mother unless she understands her own messed-up childhood. So she and her siblings return home one last time, to stage an intervention with their mom. Only, mom’s problems aren’t at all what they thought.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: That’s it! Thanks for reading!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb