Laura van den Berg’s eerie latest novel, State of Paradise (224 pages; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), resembles her other five acclaimed books—most notably an intense short story in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and her first novel, Find Me, which was set during an epidemic that impacts memory—but deeply forges a path into original, glimmering territory. The book asks, What is real? And what if there are many realities and many ways of getting to them? For seamlessly meshing speculative and autobiographical elements, State of Paradise has been called “speculative autofiction.” (Van den Berg’s story collection Isle of Youth, which makes frequent use of noir and detective fiction, was also reissued this year.)

In the novel, an unnamed ghostwriter returns with her husband to Florida, where she grew up and where her father is dying, and stays there to wait out the pandemic. During her teens, she’d suffered from alcoholism and mental health challenges and had been institutionalized for months. Her return to the scene of this haunting experience—a place of sinkholes and extremes—is fraught. She yearns to write her own stories rather than voice the bestselling author’s shallow plots, but the narration of her own life story is nonlinear and absent of memories in places. Meanwhile, the townspeople have been immersed in a virtual reality meditation device called MIND’S EYE; some of them have had such intense experiences, they’ve disappeared. Likewise, the ghostwriter’s sister goes missing in a severe rainstorm, but when she returns she talks about another world. The ghostwriter then starts using MIND’S EYE and moves to the other side of the looking glass.

Van den Berg and I spoke by Zoom during the summer. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ZYZZYVA: For a lot of authors, it was difficult to write during the pandemic. Did you also have that difficulty?

Laura van den Berg: I did have that difficulty. I ended up finishing this novel that will be out in a few years called Ring of Night. I was writing a literary noir that sat in the world of amateur boxing. I’ve always wanted to write a sweaty, sticky, intricately plotted noir novel, and I’ve also always wanted to write about boxing. I finally found the right story that would allow those two interests to intersect. But it’s a much more architecturally fast project; there are multiple perspectives, multiple timelines. It’s a much bigger book than the novels that I’ve written in the past, and that required a level of deep focus that I could not reach during the early days of the pandemic.

What broke me through to the other side was not writing fiction at all. I started to do this diary project, where I would write these daily meditations on some aspect of what it felt like to be in Florida at this moment of time. I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought it was more a way to document this period of time, which seemed to be historic in the sense of the wider world, and also personally historic for me, in the sense that I had not ever intended to come home as an adult.

Z: While reading State of Paradise, I thought about Freud’s concept of unheimlich or the uncanny, which he conceived of as something home-like that has been repressed or recontextualized into a source of dread. With this book, you’re traveling away from what might seem familiar to a lot of other people and toward a Florida uncanny that is closer to what you grew up with. What was your experience of writing that? 

Van den Berg: What was challenging about this book was allowing myself to fully open up on the page. Even after I’d moved away from Florida, when I would come to visit because my family’s here, I would feel like it was a hot stove. I could kind of touch it, and pull my hand away quickly—but I couldn’t stay too long, lest I get burned. The process of writing this book, and also the process of going home, was allowing myself to keep my hand on the stove, allow myself to get burned, allow this armor to get charred and to fall away.

I hate vulnerability. I have deep admiration for people who are very at home being vulnerable in front of groups of people, but I would rather die than cry in public. Absolutely not. I had to let some of that armor that I’ve developed through the years be burned off, and to access the openness and vulnerability that I needed to bring to this project. Also I had to approach going home that way, you know what I mean? I could keep that armor on, and be like, I’m not going to interact with this place. Or I could let that armor fall away and open myself to home and say, Okay, this is where you’re from. And this is where the people you love live. What does coming back here at this moment in your life have to teach you?

Z: Your surrealism allows you to comment on the psychological consequences of our real life conditions or problems. You write from a dream logic that seems to me very natural and organic, but it’s still producing this social commentary, in a way.

Van den Berg: It’s all knotted up together because we live in systems and structures. That could be the system of our neighborhood, or the system of our state, or the system of our country. I’m always interested in where systems interact with each other in a way that produces a friction. Alexander Chee has an essay where he talks about how one thing that fiction does is to illuminate the forces that have shaped a character, perhaps without their awareness even. I’m super-interested in that. The surrealism or the ruptures to reality are a way to take a closer look at what’s already in our world.

Portals are everywhere—which is a unifying theme of the book. I don’t necessarily mean a portal to another reality in the literal MIND’S EYE sense, but I think of technology as a portal, or death as a portal. Birth as a portal. Trauma as a portal. Sleep as a portal. Our body might not pop over into some other multiverse, but our mind goes to other realities in all kinds of ways every day. It’s so common that it’s almost difficult to see. What the surreal and the speculative can do is amplify the stuff that’s so thickened around us that we can’t even see it half the time. It’s like air. We know when we don’t have it, because we’re like, oh, no, I can’t breathe. But otherwise, it’s this thing we’re inhaling and exhaling and aren’t necessarily always being aware of. I’m interested in how we can take the stuff that’s omnipresent in our lives, that is common, and amplify it in such a way that we’re allowed to see it, like a clarifying dream.

Z: One autofictional element in State of Paradise is that during her youth, the narrator spent months in an asylum. How did it feel to revisit that time in your life?

Van den Berg: It was not something I had ever written about explicitly. There’s one story in my last story collection that addresses some of that called “Last Night.” It’s something I had not given a lot of thought to in a long time. Revisiting this definitely felt necessary, partly because the fact of being in Florida stirred so much of this stuff up within me. I saw my younger self everywhere. The anxiety of coming back for long periods of time is that when I left this place I was not a well person. I was able to acquire a greater degree of stability and health in driving away from Florida, but what if there’s something about this place that sends me back into that space of instability? Of course, it’s not the place. It was me. But that’s why I saw Florida as a hot stove.

The most striking thing about revisiting it was how little I remembered—that was what was wild. What I realized is that it wasn’t just my time and treatment; there are memories that are hyper vivid and certain things that I remember with like absolute clarity, like I can see it in my mind’s eye, like it’s playing out on a screen. But then there are these huge holes. The year before and the year after was a near total blackout. I had not realized how compromised my own memory was until I started trying to remember everything that I could.

I made this list of all the details I could remember, and I was like, these aren’t in any kind of sequence; I don’t know that I could put them exactly in a sequence. That was probably the most unsettling part of it, realizing that aspects of this experience are still kind of in a locked room and are still in a space that I can’t access. But it made me understand what brought me to writing and what brought me specifically to storytelling, which is all about putting things in narrative sequence. Certainly it wasn’t a conscious intention, but, on some deep subterranean level, I wanted to restore my sense of time, I wanted to one day be able to put my own experiences in some sort of discernible narrative sequence. How natural than to gravitate toward a medium that’s all about organizing time, right? That’s so much right at the heart of what the fiction writer does.

And then how natural to gravitate toward speculative fiction, which takes a much more expansive view of time and is interested in the types of time that are slippery and weird and can’t really be accounted for by clocks and calendars. In the landscape of the speculative and the fantastic, maybe these holes aren’t just holes. Maybe the landscape can account for them and welcome them in a sense.

Z: Many people are in asylums because they’ve broken from the shared reality of society. In the book, the MIND’S EYE technology provides these breaks to the point of disappearance. Do you think understanding early on that reality could be so shifty affected your writing fiction?

Van den Berg: Yes, and toward fiction that does shift and disturb reality. Julio Cortázar has this quote I really love. He talks about how the fantastic in fiction isn’t a flight of fancy—it’s a commitment to living more deeply in this world. That’s so resonant for me because some of my early experiences as a younger person were that reality was not this fixed, certain, stable thing but something that could shapeshift dramatically, at a moment’s notice. All of a sudden, you were in that other place; it was like going to the Upside Down in the TV show Stranger Things. Your family’s running around looking for you and you’re calling out to them, but you’re in this other dimension where you can’t access them, and they can’t access you. Seeing Stranger Things and feeling like that was so resonant with the experience of having some kind of mental health crisis.

Sometimes, at the same time, when we experience it in our lives, it’s so internal, right? I felt like I was being eaten alive by my own interiority. But when we’re telling stories, sometimes it can be powerful to give that a physical expression, and a body, and a tangibility, so that it’s not just that we’re rendering the interiority, but we can move through a physical experience with the character.

Z: What did that label “speculative autofiction” do for you in writing this book?

Van den Berg: Before anyone else ever read this, I jokingly said I was writing a sci-fi memoir. That was always my understanding of the book. There’s a moment where the narrator recounts a couple of different versions of the story of something that happened to her. And she said, “I’ve been telling different versions of this story for years. I was searching for the one that can match what it felt like to live it.” That’s the thing I’m always after, as a fiction writer.

When I come at something directly through the lens of realism, it’s almost like looking into the sun. But this speculative plot allows me to take a few steps to the side and see the thing with a little more clarity and a little more perspective. That helps me get closer to that aim of finding the version that can match what it felt like to live it. Also, I wanted reality to feel as strange as a kind of traumatized reality can feel, as strange as Florida is. I felt like I needed to disturb the sense of reality in order to accomplish that. A guiding question for me was what kind of story can only be told by bringing the speculative and the auto- together? How does the speculative hold experience, hold memory, hold feeling, hold trauma, in a way that’s like totally unique to that medium?

Z: Did it feel different to write autofiction than the parts that incorporated more genre fiction?

Van den Berg: I think of genre as form. I think of it less as categorization. It’s a container. I grew up reading Nancy Drew and I loved Nancy Drew as a kid, so maybe there is some sort of early imprinting with a mystery structure. But if you think about it, mystery is a very flexible form. It can have many different kinds of manifestations, but it can hold so much. The interesting thing about the different genre forms is that they can give your reader this familiar-seeming shape. It’s a kind of foothold for them, if you’re going to then go into your weird wild stuff.

Z: Your genre-influenced short stories often involve traveling somewhere far away, and likewise “genre” fiction is often a form of escape for readers. In State of Paradise, a number of people are escaping reality into the virtual visions of the MIND’S EYE. What is the role of escape in your work?

Van den Berg: The escapes my characters pursue are often illusionary. It’s an incredibly common thing for people who grow up in difficulty of all kinds—you decide at a certain point that you’re going to leave, whether that means moving to another state or moving across town, if you have the ability to do so. One thing adulthood taught me is that physical escape is yours, but you carry yourself, unfortunately. I’m interested in the way my characters go down a path thinking it will lead them to something more solid, only to have the opposite happen.

There are certain circumstances that make us more susceptible to the uncanny. When you’re away from home, who do you feel you can become, and also in what ways might the reality of the place in which you’ve arrived push back?

Anita Felicelli is the author of the forthcoming short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers and other books. She is the editor of Alta Journal’s California Book Club. From 2021-2024, she served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in the Bay Area.