Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting's new novel is Tampa.

From her Q & A with Abby Sheaffer at Chicago Literati:

What were some of the challenges you faced when writing Tampa? How did you overcome them?

I knew that if I was going to write a book about this topic, there were a few essential mandates I had for myself—otherwise, it wouldn’t have felt important to me. One is that I wanted the female protagonist to be effectively soulless. We have such a hard time with literature where female protagonists are merely unlikable, let alone unredeemable. I didn’t want her POV to be mediated by anyone else. I wanted to write it in a very graphic, sexualized way that directly confronts readers with the fetishization of cases like this, the celebritizing of the female offenders, our cultural inability to accept the male students as victims. I wanted the novel to be more an indictment of society—the various factors that contribute to the perpetuation and sense of general approval about cases like this; the attitude that states this isn’t ‘truly’ a crime unless the offender is male. The factors that privilege female appearance over any other aspect of female personhood. The factors that allow us to see male sexuality as powerful and dangerous but prevent us from seeing female sexuality that way.

At the same time, I also realized how much each of these mandates would cause the book (and me as an author) to be unpalatable to some, or seem extreme. But the very real line of thinking that casts a scenario of sexual predation as a fantasy or entertainment--I felt the need to wallow in that slimy line of thinking: fully actualize it, hyperbolize it, satirize it. Take it all the way to its grotesque and campy finish.

The problem is that I’m a long-time people pleaser who is still working at being comfortable around conflict and debate. It’s difficult for me to feel like I’m not liked, or feel my work is not liked. It was a really hard decision ultimately, especially because I knew I wanted to have a child (and did have one by the time the book was published). It was unbearably painful for me to think about my future child Google-searching me and seeing all these ruthless comments; I worried s/he would feel ashamed of me or embarrassed. But I also knew...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Alissa Nutting's website.

--Marshal Zeringue