Working with What You’ve Got: An Interview with Lydia Kiesling
Readers of The Millions know Lydia Kiesling as its current editor, corralling an eclectic group of writers and readers into a daily book blog circulated to thousands of book lovers. Lydia’s first novel, The Golden State, arrives today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s MCD imprint. An unusually accomplished debut, the book has all the elements this interviewer reads for: flow, language, ideas, surprises, humor, and a great big heart.
The Golden State’s protagonist is a young mother named Daphne, separated from her Turkish husband through an immigration screw-up, struggling to support her family in San Francisco. Overwhelmed with her situation, Daphne takes baby Honey and retreats to the family’s ancestral mobile home in rural California, the site of an enthusiastic separatist movement gunning for the new State of Jefferson. As Daphne revisits memories from her family of origin, she faces a thousand small and large obstacles in raising Honey. She follows a trail of longing through the fallout from America’s Kafkaesque immigration system so that she can create a family that coheres. I was lucky enough to catch up with Lydia via email over the summer.
Martha Anne Toll (MAT): How did you first come to writing?
: I was always a reader. I had a corresponding, mostly submerged, urge to write, but I wasn’t sure how to start or what to write about. When I was 25, I decided to set up a Wordpress blog to write…something. Books seemed, who founded as his personal blog and grew it into what it is today, read the posts (via emeritus staffer ), and kindly invited me to make the site a home for my writing. For a long time I only wrote about books, but I was constitutionally unable to avoid bringing in personal elements—writing about my particular experience of reading—which didn’t always translate to the classic book review (there are many strong opinions about this!). I quickly started doing more writing in the category of personal essay, but I didn’t presume to give fiction a try until about six or seven years in.
