Sarah Cypher

Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine 2023) and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. She grew up in a Lebanese Christian family near Pittsburgh and lives in Washington, D.C., with her wife.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I love titles that create a syntactical hiccup. For instance, there's Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. The title for The Skin and Its Girl came very late, but I warmed up to it as I thought about all the ways that the various members of my fictional Rummani family struggle with identities determined by the bodies they're in.

I wanted to know, what determines agency: the body or the person? What is the tension between these alternatives? There's Betty with her cobalt-blue skin, Nuha and Saeeda as aging Palestinian women in post-9/11 wartime America, Nuha with her body's queer desires, and Betty's father with his missing hand and scarred arm.

Readers will see the hospital staff reacting to Betty's newly blue skin in the first scene, so there is an early connection to the title. Of course, as the story unfolds, the title takes on new layers, gathering toward a late twist. This novel is an unconventional narrative--stories wrapped in stories--and it deserved a title that hinted at its strangeness.

What's in a name?

So much! My narrator, Betty Rummani, is born into a family with a storied history in the ancient Nabulsi soap-making trade. Rummani means pomegranate in Arabic, and as Betty narrates when reminiscing about difficult love affairs, "We come from an old and thorny shrub...so dense that to wade into it is to be blessed only with scratches and blood." This says a lot about many of my characters' personalities.

Betty's given name is Elspeth, which is a diminutive of "Elizabeth," and connects to the family's blue-skinned ancestor, Alissabat. The Rummanis are Orthodox Christians, so the name has some resonance there. Moreover, though, Betty's mother tends to make things difficult for her traditionalist relatives--here by choosing this difficult-to-pronounce name. She's dubbed Betty by her great-aunt Nuha, the family's storyteller and matriarch, and the name sticks.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Shocked, I tell you. The Skin and Its Girl is so queer! I grew up in a small, conservative, steel-mill town in Western Pennsylvania in the 1980s and '90s. I didn't know anyone who was gay, did not have language for imagining a life in which I'd be as happily married (to a woman) as I am now, and certainly didn't see myself represented in the books that were available to read.

Yet perhaps my teenage self would connect with this novel deeply anyway, as it is so concerned with the experience of being a misfit.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find beginnings much easier, just as it's easy to walk up to a gong and hit it. It's easy to say something that calls attention to itself.

Also, beginnings are wonderfully sensitive to small changes: when I'm writing a novel, I'm aiming at a point very far off on the horizon, so I find myself making frequent, minute adjustments to the opening lines. That trajectory is powerful, holding in itself a whole world, and it's a source of excitement to me.

Joan Didion famously said in a Paris Review interview, "Everything else is going to flow out of that [first] sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. ... The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities." Hence, by the time I get to a novel's ending, I only have a few possibilities, and in the case of The Skin and Its Girl, those options did not feel very malleable.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In almost every writing group I've participated in, my work gets flak for being too ornate--certainly much more formal-sounding than I speak. My family took me to church for a lot of my childhood, and the Orthodox liturgy is quite beautiful; it's chanted, and even in English, it has a very grandiose, formal register. It's impossible to get that golden, transcendent sound out of my bones when I sit down to my writing, which is, in many ways, my only religious practice.

As for the content of what I write, I have an absurdist imagination that came from being a weirdo nerd in anti-intellectual spaces, growing up. It's fun to shoot this irreverence through the formal registers that I mentioned--mixing high and low, subverting what I can.

In my new project, I am exploring nonhuman ecosystems, wild spaces, suicide, and wildlife photography, which sounds like a mishmash, but it comes out of how I spent time during the early part of the pandemic and the sort of thinking I did about humanity in those years. I think the common thread with my past work is that I'm always trying to see how far the novel's form will stretch, even to the limits of human language.

Visit Sarah Cypher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue