Illustration of the fairytale “Snow White and Rose Red” by Paul Hey via Wikimedia Commons. Based loosely on a Grimms’ fairytale, Bear is both enchanting and suspenseful. Sam, a concessions worker on a ferry, is terrified when a bear shows up at her family’s front door. Elena, instead, grows enchanted by the bear, seeking him out in the woods and bringing him food from her job at the local country club. As Sam panics over Elena’s behavior, and both sisters worry about their mother’s failing health, the novel hurtles toward a devastating conclusion. The idea for Bear , the second novel from Julia Phillips, was born during Covid lockdown. Stuck in her New York apartment, Phillips tried to imagine “like the farthest-flung, most fantastical, most beautiful place I could imagine actually getting to” when travel became possible, and settled on the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington State. Her feelings of isolation became a novel about the financial impact of Covid on the working class, what we owe to our families, and finding liberation in the natural world. On our Zoom call, Phillips, a National Book Award nominee for her debut Disappearing Earth , is thoughtful and introspective, speaking slowly and deliberately until she explodes into a burst of enthusiasm or laughter. Her book, she tells me cheerfully, is “like Jaws , but the part where they’re just in the water. And you’re like, Oh, God. At least, that’s the hope.” Morgan Leigh Davies: In Disappearing Earth , many of the characters are isolated, but the structure of the book creates a community out of them. This book is all in the head of one person [Sam], and it’s a character who is really resistant to being in any kind of community or relationship with anyone but her family. How do you approach the shift between the two books? Julia Phillips: To me, the message of Disappearing Earth was the idea that connection can save us: that when we come together, we can save each other. I think this book’s argument is that disconnection destroys us. We’re […]
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Aisha Abdel Gawad (inset) was named the inaugural Cornerstone Writer in Residence by the Wilton Library in August 2024.. Credit:
Close to the beginning of Katherine Packert Burke’s novel Still Life , its protagonist, Edith McAllister, a twenty-nine-year-old trans writer,
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