Please note this book includes graphic sexual scenes and content so if you are interested in reading Belle’s book, consider this warning. Given the book’s content, mentions of this are included in the Author Spotlight.
Best-selling novelist Jennifer Belle returns with an inverse “Lolita” that explores adolescent desire from a girl’s point of view. Her novel “Swanna in Love” has received praise from authors such as Tom Perrotta (“an addictive read”), Joanna Rakoff (“The most pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence since ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ ”) and Laura Zigman (“beautiful, funny and heartbreakingly true”).
“Publishers Weekly” gave the novel a rave review, noting that its “whip-smart dialogue and a convincing teenage perspective add[s] heft to this comic novel. Belle breaks hearts with the story of Swanna’s first love.” They also ran an interview with Belle about her early success in publishing and her bold move to publish this explicit book.
“Swanna in Love” takes place during the summer of 1982 following fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain who is the only one left at her summer camp. The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late—stoned and radiant—in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover. Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont— to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cozy inside the house with the Russian.
Then Swanna meets Dennis, a handsome, married father of two, at a bowling alley, and she sets out to convince Dennis to help her. But love seldom obeys rules, and even a tough, smart city girl like Swanna might not be able to handle falling in love.
Born and raised in New York City, Jennifer Belle turned to writing several years ago after a successful stint as an off-Broadway actress. Belle dropped out of high school and college. Her first novel, “Going Down,” was named a Best Summer Novel by “Time Out New York” and a Top Ten Book of the Year by the “New York Post,” and has been translated into 11 languages. Her essays have appeared in the “New York Times Magazine,” “Ms.,” “The Independent Magazine,” “Harper’s Bazaar,” “Mudfish” and several anthologies.
For this Author Spotlight, I wanted to ask Belle about her personal connections to her book as well as what the process of publishing explicit content was like.
What inspired you to write an inverse “Lolita” style book set in the 1980s?
I didn’t set out to reframe “Lolita!” I had always wanted to write about something that had really happened to me when I was a kid–a kind of crazy road trip I went on when my mother and her new drunk boyfriend picked me up from theater camp and took me and my brother to an artist colony that didn’t allow kids. I wasn’t sure I could write it.
But then I read a book called “True Grit” by Charles Portis about a fourteen-year-old girl who seeks the help of two bounty hunters to help her find the man who killed her father, and I knew I had to write the book I wanted to write. That book was like a magic potion for me. Then when I finished writing the book, I thought, this is like “Lolita,” but from the girl’s point of view. And as for the 80s–it had to take place then. It had to take place before seat belts and cell phones and anything remotely like #metoo.
What about Swanna’s age and her experience add to the coming-of-age subgenre within your novel? Are there any misconceptions you wish to shed light on when it comes to “Swanna in Love?”
Well that was the tricky part. First of all, would adult readers be interested in the sexual awakening of a fourteen year old girl? And secondly, would I get canceled in this strange moment in publishing? I didn’t want to write a YA book, but I desperately wanted to tell this story. So finally I just did it. And what I’d love readers to take into consideration is that Swanna never feels like a victim. She may feel like one later, looking back on it, long after the book ends, but during her few days with Dennis, she feels powerful, sexy and in love.
What are some things about the 1980s that you wish you could bring back today?
What does it say about me that the first thing that comes to mind is restaurants! I think it should be illegal for a restaurant to close or change its menu in any way. Florent [Manhattan, NY], La Fondue [Saratoga, CA], McBell’s Shakespeare’s [Manhattan, NY], Chez Brigitte [Manhattan, NY], the Kiev [Manhattan, NY], the Indian places on East 6th Street [in Manhattan, NY], Riverrun [Manhattan, NY], Rumplemeyer’s [Manhattan, NY]. I even miss the Uno’s on Sixth Avenue [in Manhattan NY].
I’d like to bring back 8th Street exactly the way it was with the pizza place with the orange double decker booths, the Rocky Horror Picture Show playing at the 8th Street Playhouse, The Postermat and all the shoe stores.
I miss the heart-pounding excitement of meeting a friend without the ability to text and say you’re running late.
So, if I could bring back one thing, it would be Florent. Meeting my friends there at one in the morning for chicken in mustard sauce, wearing my red cocktail dress from Charivari. And someone being late and having no way of letting us know. I’m sorry if other writers are less shallow! But this question made me incredibly happy.
There has been some controversy about the age gap between Swanna and Dennis. What made you decide to stay firm in your decision to have their age gap stay the same?
Actually, that’s not exactly what happened but that’s what I thought would happen. When you write a book, you make a series of choices and there’s no right or wrong ones. You finally just have to make the choices you think are strongest and fully commit to them. What I am always going for is the emotional truth. That’s the most important thing. So I tried making Swanna a few different ages. Some people advised me that making her fourteen was just too crazy, just too young. But I kept coming back to a number of factors. First, she’s a virgin. Or at least she starts off the book that way. And I just didn’t feel it felt true that a girl like her would stay a virgin long past fourteen. Also if she were older, I kept thinking, she would just have gotten out of there. She would have hitchhiked or figured something out. Being fourteen gave her a certain undeniable powerlessness. And I think it raised the stakes. And finally, she has a very nice relationship with her younger brother. She’s very maternal toward him, and if she was older, that would be less unusual.
When I talked to my agent and my publisher about her age, they both felt it worked the way it was and discouraged me from changing it. I like to pretend I’m very sure of myself, but the truth is I really do rely on a great agent and editor to guide me, and I am open to making changes if I can see my way clear to them.
When I was really in the throes of trying to figure out if I was brave enough to make the age gap what it was, I happened to see the movie “Little Darlings”–remember with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neil? They’re fourteen, at summer camp, and they have a contest to see who can lose her virginity first. Going back to what we were talking about before, a movie like that could never have been made today–I was shocked when I saw it again–but I had seen it at the Loews 84th Street Quad with all my friends and we hadn’t thought it was weird at all.
When discussing how your book came to be, you mentioned censorship in publishing. How does this relate to your own book?
I think a lot of editors were scared to publish it, and even to talk to me about it. People don’t even want to go on the record anymore as having an opinion one way or the other. One editor wrote that she loved the book but she didn’t have the vision for how to publish it. You’d think the head editor at a major publishing house would have vision to spare! But everything is changing. If you read novels that were published in the 60s, 70s, 80s, they are worlds different from books published today. Publishing houses have lists of words you can not use. It’s a scary thing for a writer not to be allowed to use words. Taking away words is like taking away oxygen. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The way the book ends is interesting since it’s unclear what happens next. Why did you choose to have this uncertainty happen?
In the past, I have always loved to write an ambiguous but hopeful ending. But the ending of this book is a little different. It’s even more controversial than the characters’ ages. My characters are sort of famous for behaving badly and coming out unscathed. But going back to that old emotional truth thing, I felt that someone had to end up a bit, well, scathed if that’s a word. Or even if it isn’t. Love hurts and someone had to pay a price, even if we didn’t want it to end that way. That was another thing I was open to changing, but nobody asked me to. So this book, I guess, is exactly the way I wanted it, and was very much written on my own terms. And I’m really glad I did it.
Many thanks to Jennifer Belle for facing my questions head-on! Wishing you success as you push boundaries in publishing moving forward.
Thank you to Kathleen Carter from Kathleen Carter Communications for forwarding me this interview opportunity along with a copy of “Swanna in Love.”