Amber Dermont's Reading List

"The author, Danzy Senna is just a brilliant, remarkable woman, who is a hero of mine. This novel is about two sisters, Birdie and Cole, their father is black and their mother is white. Birdie looks like her mother and Cole looks like her father and it creates this really conflicted dynamic within the family. The mother is Boston blue bood, but she’s rejecting all that in favour of becoming a civil rights activist and she is married to a man who is very active politically. The two of them together are very aware of how they look to the outside world and how, even for the 70s, their marriage is radical. When things start to go wrong between the parents, the sisters react by creating this private language that they speak and they have this really profound intimacy. There’s this sense that the government –someone – might be after the parents because of their political activities and as their marriage is falling apart they split up and the father takes Cole, the daughter who looks most like him, and the mother takes Birdie. They go on the lam separately, Cole and her father go to Brazil, Birdie and her mother go to New Hampshire. Birdie’s mother betrays her in this really complicated way by asking her daughter to pass for being white. She actually poses as being Jewish. It’s just such a powerful book about the time period, about what it means to have a complicated identity, and then to have that identity compromised by a parent, a person who is supposed to know best. Then there’s the political drama that fuels the book. But really it’s a beautiful love story between sisters and how they end up saving each other. Yes. Danzy Senna’s mother is a poet called Fanny Howe and her father, Carl Senna, is a writer and editor, and their relationship is sort of similar to the dynamic in the actual novel. But the book is all from her imagination. That’s the great beauty of fiction, you draw on features of your life but then make it something entirely different."

"I love the form of the picaresque novel – a low-born character trying to search out their identity through a variety of different misadventures. Both this book and Funny Boy are playing with the idea of the picaresque, they’re really novels in short-story form. Joon, the runaway in Miles from Nowhere is smart and wise beyond her years. She witnesses the disintegration of her parents’ marriage and this forces her out of her home, into the world, and she discovers beautiful and horrible things about herself. She becomes very good friends with a character called Knowledge who is probably my favourite character in the book. There is a kind of sexual frisson between the two of them and they break out together from this shelter. They do a prison break, but no one chases after them or really cares. They make their way in the world and slowly all the things they promised themselves they would never do, they do. Joon has a slow trajectory toward becoming a prostitute and a drug addict and Knowledge goes from being a drug dealer who doesn’t do drugs to being a drug dealer who does. What ultimately happens with Knowledge is so tragic, but the real beauty and triumph of the book is how Joon eventually rescues herself. This book is a piece of art, it’s not a memoir, but I know the author, Nami Mun, had the experience of being a runaway in New York at a time in her youth. I’m always amazed by the idea of “darkness.” I don’t want to read books that are affirmations of the beauty of the world! In literature, you want to reveal hard truths about the human condition and, the fact is, there are people who struggle every day of their lives. If you’re lucky and privileged enough to read about that, it gives you greater insight. I’ve never been afraid of the dark."

"The teenagers in this book are not just the actual teenagers but also the parents who in some way behave like teenagers – the mother gets stoned walking through the park on the way to pick up her daughter from nursery school. What I love about this book is that it really is one of the great novels about the now, about what it is like to live with all of this technology that mediates so many of our relationships. It’s a book about a very wealthy family in New York City that’s privileged enough to send their children to private schools. They have a son called Jake and a daughter they’ve adopted from China called Coco. Jake goes to a party and meets a girl called Daisy, who is much younger. She comes onto him and eventually winds up sending him a sex video of herself to get him excited and interested. Without even thinking about it, Jake forwards it to a friend. It goes viral, everyone in the school knows about it almost instantly, and it becomes this scandal. There are no heroes in this book, everyone behaves badly. The parents are not as aware of their children’s lives as they should be, the teenagers aren’t really aware of the kind of power that they have on their cell phones. I was lucky enough to be at a writers’ conference this summer called Bread Loaf which takes place in Vermont. Helen Schulman read from this novel and she read this section where Jake has an exchange with Audrey, a girl he has a crush on. She has witnessed all of the scandal going down and she says to him, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a girl? You’re just an idiot boy, you’re all just idiot boys. Some day I’ll be old and ugly and nobody will want to fuck me and I won’t have to deal with you any longer. I’m really looking forward to that.” When I heard the author read that, it just cut through to the heart of what it was like to be a teenage girl: to have to play by all these rules where you really do feel powerless. You’re only valued for your appearance and your sexuality, you’re not really valued at all. There’s certainly an element of that but, wisely, the book doesn’t offer up any easy answers. It doesn’t say ‘This is what should have been done.’ Certainly there should have been more communication and transparency among the family, and more awareness of what goes on at the parties these teenagers go to. But parents also don’t want to know. A good parent wants to give a teenager a certain amount of independence, and let them make their own choices. One of the things my own novel considers is that, as a parent, you always want to protect your child and ultimately you wind up having to protect your child from him or herself. When a child does something bad, that there ought to be some consequence for, does a good parent try to get their child out of trouble and prevent them from being punished? Or does a good parent say ‘These are the consequences of your action, you have to face them.’ I think so often nowadays, with children of tremendous privilege there are no consequences."

"This is written by a friend of mine, Nick Dybek. He writes with unbelievable power and detail about the sea. Our books came out in the same year and we both have a character named Cal. Both our novels are set in 1987, and are about the sea and the power of the sea. Nick’s book is a retrospective narrative, the actual events take place when Cal was about 14, and he has an obsession with Treasure Island . He lives on an island called Loyalty Island, and everyone who lives on it is involved in fishing. Cal dreams of the sea. There’s this relationship between the ocean and the land: when you’re out at sea and you sleep out on the water, with the hypnotic rhythm of the waves, you have these funny dreams that often involve land in these crazy ways. When you can’t tread on the earth you become this other species. But when you come back to the land, you long desperately for the sea. There are so many gorgeous scenes about the ocean in the book. There’s a scene when a character falls into a crab cage, and the cage goes down into the ocean at hurtling speed. It’s so haunting. Cal’s father is a fisherman, he’s out at sea for months. When times are good they’re wonderful, but you’re always at the mercy of the weather and the market. It’s just such a tough life. I love the child noticing the parents’ hardship and wanting to romanticize the world, but being aware that’s a very dangerous thing to do – making a world seem more glamorous and exciting than it actually is. There’s a man called John Gaunt, who owns the fleet of boats, and when he dies, his son Richard plans to sell the whole thing off. So you have this dilemma – everyone on the island is going to potentially lose their livelihood. I do think it’s a brilliantly plotted book. It has many secrets that it doesn’t willingly give up. Plot is very important to me as a writer, I think it’s underrated. My own family is incredibly stable and supportive, my parents have been married for years, and they still love each other. I’ve an older sister and a younger brother, I’m the middle child, observant, often-overlooked – and happy to be overlooked. But the friends that I made often didn’t have that in their lives – I had a lot of friends who had tremendous instability. I think there’s a kind of honesty to it. A family really only stays together if people are willing to compromise, and there’s a certain dishonesty to compromise. So if people are unwilling to compromise it creates all this drama and you actually get to see what it is the parents really want for themselves. Parents give up so much of their lives for their children and when a parent decides not to give something up for a child, it creates this unbelievable opportunity for narrative, for story."