Tara Goedjen never stays in one place for long. She has worked for a publishing house in Australia, as a tennis coach in Spain, and she wrote No Beauties or Monsters on the island of Guam and in the desert of New Mexico. Now she lives and writes in a rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest. Goedjen is also the author of The Breathless.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Tara Goedjen's website.
The title, No Beauties or Monsters, alludes to the external threats in the novel, which is set in a remote desert town in California where an unusual number of people have gone missing. But the title also hints at the internal struggles that each character is facing: many of them are put into life-and-death situations that reveal whether they’re capable of doing monstrous things or beautiful ones.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?
I grew up reading Stephen King, so I don’t think my teenaged self would be at all surprised by my mystery-thriller with speculative elements. No Beauties or Monsters is definitely a book that I would’ve loved as a teenager, because it’s atmospheric, and eerie, and even otherworldly in places.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
The beginning of No Beauties or Monsters starts off with seventeen-year-old Rylie being forced to move from San Diego to an isolated desert town in California, a place called Twentynine Palms. And Rylie is thinking of all the reasons why she doesn’t want to move; she’s actually been to Twentynine Palms before and she doesn’t have the best memories of the surrounding desert. It’s always seemed strange to her, and threatening. So it’s no surprise that on the drive to her new home, something terrifying happens. This opening scene introduces the hook of the book – but it also introduces who Rylie is and how she behaves intense situations. I wanted to set up her character and set up the intrigue of the plot, as well as set up the overall atmosphere. For that reason, beginnings tend to take a lot of rounds for me, because they’re working on so many levels.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
My main character, seventeen-year-old Rylie, is obsessed with rock climbing, while I’m scared of heights, so in that respect we’re very different. But Rylie also loves national parks like Joshua Tree—one of the main locations in the book—and she is extremely protective of her younger brother, which reminds me of myself. When I was younger, my family moved around a lot, so I was constantly having to evaluate our surroundings and decide who was friend and who was foe. This is similar to Rylie’s experience in No Beauties or Monsters, because when the novel opens, her family is moving to California’s Mojave Desert, a destination that she’s hesitant about. And it turns out that Rylie’s instincts are right, because strange things start to happen once she arrives.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
The TV shows I watched when I was younger, like Unsolved Mysteries and The X-Files, and the shows I’ve loved more recently, like Netflix’s Stranger Things and The OA. In a way, No Beauties or Monsters is a homage to those early influences that I loved so much as a kid.
My Book, The Movie: The Breathless.
The Page 69 Test: The Breathless.
--Marshal Zeringue