Once you’re an adult, you can look back on adolescence with bemusement, maybe even fondness. But at the time, it’s uncomfortable, bewildering, operatic, lonely, exciting— all at the same time. Dylan Landis captures the complexity of being a teenager in her novel Rainey Royal. Set in 1970s New York City, fourteen-year-old Rainey lives with her jazz musician father in a house crawling with hismusical disciples. She has to navigate the indignities of high school, untrustworthy friends, and — most disturbingly — the sexual advances of adults.
Landis grew up in New York in the 1960s and 70s, which “felt like a dangerous time,” she tells Kurt Andersen. And like Rainey, Landis attracted the discomfiting attention of older men. “We had no language to express any of this besides the word, ‘gross,'” explains Landis. “There was no such thing as a registry for sexual offenders. The term ‘statutory rape’ was just a joke. We know today where the blame falls. We didn’t then.”
Landis worked as a journalist for decades before trying to write fiction. “I thought if you wanted to write you had to be born with that gift, the way Joni Mitchell was born with her voice,” she says. Then a friend encouraged her to take a workshop with Madeleine L’Engle, the authorofA Wrinkle In Time. “She would give us an assignment: ‘You may write for 30 minutes and no more. You must set a timer and you must stop when it goes off,'” Landis says. “I couldn’t stop. I would stay up until two or three in the morning and write and write and write.”
Landis first wrote about Rainey in her debut collection of stories, Normal People Don’t Live Like This — there, she appears as a bully to a meek, bookish character named Leah. But as Landis imagined the origins of Rainey’s aggression, the stereotypical mean girl gained a life and personality all her own. “She got way too interesting for her own good,” she says, “and she needed a book of her own.”
We want to hear your feedback so we can keep improving our website, theworld.org. Please fill out this quick survey and let us know your thoughts (your answers will be anonymous). Thanks for your time!