This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
Etter’s latest novel is a poignantly tragic, absurdist view of the “late-capitalist hellscape” that is grind culture.
Every once in a while, a novel crosses your path that serves as a metaphorical trap door, thrusting you into a chute that then drops you into a rabbit hole of a world inside someone’s head, before abruptly evicting you back into your world upon its conclusion, like Kate McKinnon’s character in those iconic SNL alien-abduction sketches. You find yourself emotionally naked, on top of a building somewhere weird with your pants around your ankles, left to your own devices to process what the hell just happened.
Such was the case when I was done inhaling Sarah Rose Etter’s glorious sucker punch of a second novel, Ripe. It’s six weeks in the mind of protagonist Cassie, an ambitious young writer in a half-assed relationship who is always shadowed by a lurking, ominous black hole. She worked her way out of Philadelphia and away from her dysfunctional family to serve in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups, ironically called Voyager, only to find herself unexpectedly pregnant, the job ridiculously horrid, and the contrast between the area’s absurd tech wealth and the abject poverty surrounding her is tragically overwhelming. It’s a razor-sharp commentary on the relentlessness of tech culture and millennial striver conditioning, so aptly described on the book jacket as a “late-capitalist hellscape.”
The story is told in the first person, and Etter plops us directly into the intricacies of Cassie’s head and heart. “First person has just always been how the voice comes to me for the character, so I liked the immediacy,” says Etter. “With her being in San Francisco, it needed a pace and pulse. In literary fiction, when we use the third person, we’re kind of sometimes doing it not for any other reason than to play some cool tricks. I’ve heard so many times that first person is looked down on, and third person is more literary, but I just never really got it. I started reading mysteries to decompress my brain and discovered it’s only a choice that’s made to force the characters into a situation together.”
Ripe, as it wades through Cassie’s struggles with clinical depression, could feel dauntingly heavy in different hands, but with Etter’s artfully deft and empathetic prose, it’s something of a dark adventure. Etter recognizes depression can be inherently challenging fare for some: “It’s a sad book. The big fear I have to work through every time is having confidence in my work, even if it’s not the pretty thing. Even when we started to accept surrealism and weirdness and bleakness, you still hear about how publishers want optimism, but when I look at the great works of literature, I don’t think any of them are optimistic. I know people don’t want more politeness, but I also think it is really disingenuous. Optimism, for me, is in the little things every day, like when I get to wake up and pet my dog.”
The novel is set in Silicon Valley, and Cassie finds herself financially trapped in a toxic work culture, relentless grinding at a rising tech company where she’s pressured into a series of unethical compromises she detests. Etter, who lived in Silicon Valley for a year, channeled some of her own experiences into Ripe. “I felt like I was on the edge of the Earth,” she says. “I felt like I was watching society collapse in front of me.” As with Cassie, a homeless man slept under her window each night. “I didn’t sleep very well, with so much suffering outside of my window. After I wrote it, I realized it’s not just San Francisco. You could really replace this with any city in America. With housing being what it is now, and how expensive it is to be able to live in any city, the rise of homelessness. I grew up outside of Philly and lived in Philly proper for probably 10 years, and I just don’t remember it being this bad.” Cassie’s pervasive sense of helplessness in the face of human suffering just cranks up her depression. “There’s really a [feeling of] trying to grapple with being an individual up against a lot of systems you don’t like and that you don’t feel like you have any real control over,” Etter explains.
Though Etter is firm about a chasm between herself and Cassie, it seems Ripe, and the evolution of Cassie, has been gestating in Etter’s brain as something of an alternative life of hers for quite a while. “Every character I’ve written has been a woman named Cassie since grad school,” she explains. “She’s sort of this parallel being that just runs alongside. I think sometimes I can give her the ability to express things that I might feel too afraid, or too reserved, to. Certainly, she is a very big exaggeration of difficult parts of me, and of difficult parts of things I’ve seen. It’s not a whole cloth from my life, but certainly there are places where people will find me, and there are other pages where I’m not there at all.”
Cassie’s close relationship with her dad is drawn directly from Etter’s own experience. “The novel really started because when I was in S.F. [San Francisco], I would call my dad a lot, and he would give me a lot of the advice that’s in the book.” A pregnant pause follows before Etter reveals, “He had asked me to write this book, and then he passed away like right before we went into lockdown. It’s so funny because everyone’s like, ‘This book is so sad,’ and I was! I was isolated with all this grief, so I wrote the book for him. I couldn’t avoid the grief. I had to sit in the house with it. I couldn’t go to the bar with my friends, or get on a plane, or do any of the stuff we would normally do. You can feel it in the text. That was probably the worst stretch of my life. I was asking myself, ‘Is this that cruel of a world?’”
There is a romantic interest for Cassie, albeit a complicated one. Etter says the nebulous nature of their relationship was deliberate: “It’s kind of reflective of San Francisco for her too, all of its transience. It promises one thing but is actually something else. I wonder sometimes if what she’s accepting is what she’s capable of too.” The book also deals with the question of abortion in a way that captures how adult women feel when wrestling with the decision.
“All of our stories about it are about an 18-year-old trying to cross state lines and not have their parents find out," Etter explains. "Most often, this is not the case. This is somebody who doesn’t have money, and her mental health is not good, so I did want to show you can make a choice for the greater good, and you can still have a conscience about it. I wanted to show, in a compassionate way, that someone deserves care when they make a really hard choice, and they deserve to be able to make that choice and not be judged. On the right, it’s very easy to portray this as everybody’s just having abortion parties all the time because they don’t like to wear condoms, and that’s not the reality. If you are a straight woman, every time you have sex, you are doing math — even if you were using protection, even if you use a condom. Bodies are unpredictable! For this character, bringing a child into the world would have been tragic. We all try our best to not end up in this situation, and unfortunately, it is impossible to know with 100 percent certainty other than not having sex that nothing’s going to happen.”
With Ripe, Etter set out to forge new ground by playing with structure. Cassie’s nerdy, obsessive preoccupation with black holes and pomegranates anchors the narrative. “My interest is how you write a novel that hasn’t been written before. Part of that, for me, has always been structural — you make it into an object instead of just a book. That’s how the pomegranate came about, and then when the black hole became involved, it took a really long time to get right. I had to research, and I really felt like I became an expert, but it needed to have a tether all the way through. Everything needs to be equally weighted. I was trying to mirror the function of memory when you smell a certain perfume and get a flashback. I wanted to jump around [in time] so you had context without removing you completely.”
Etter’s prose reflects her ability to gaze into and magnify the ugly muck that clogs our hearts and minds, reporting this dark matter (like what’s in a black hole) back to us anecdotally through Cassie’s lens. “The black hole is depression for Cassie, but for me, it was clearly grief. When I talk to my friends who have writer’s block, my first thought is like you’re afraid to look right at it; I mean, the worst things in your head,” Etter says, recognizing the emotional demands of that task aren’t always the easiest to fulfill. “There are certain scenes when I outline and draft, I have to put a big red X on them, and I know when I write this, I’m going to have a really hard day and have to take care of myself. I get really intentional. I need to really be okay with getting close to the pain, getting close to these feelings to figure them out, because that’s the only way I can really understand the world.”
I tell Etter that her structural choice facilitated my ability to inhale the whole book in two days. “For whatever reason, they sort of became like tethers. As a writer, I think my big competition isn’t other books — it’s Twitter, it’s your phone, it’s Netflix dropping a new series of Love Is Blind,” she explains. “I struggle sometimes to keep my head in a book. If my life is going crazy, if my dog needs to go out — you have every reason in the world not to finish a book. The other side of it is, if we talk about the circumstances in which art is created, I’m working full-time, so sometimes I can only write for an hour a day. I started to think about writing it in terms of scenes instead of pages. I do want this feeling that, like, every scene is compressed and circular, and like a little orb.”
Her first draft of Ripe only took about six months, but she says the editing process was far more time consuming to allow for playing with tense and changing characters. A meticulous outliner and something of a storyboarder, Etter loosely planned Cassie’s plot trajectory before digging into the writing process. “You’re kind of writing for your life, and so that was definitely a motivator,” she says about her determination to knock the book out within a reasonable period of time. “I figure out what the big sections are going to be, I know what the overall arc is going to be, and I make a big piece of poster board for each section in the book. I knock out all the scenes that need to happen, all the characters, all the settings, then I put each scene onto a note card so by the time I’m done outlining, I should have a stack of index cards so every day when I sit down to write, I can just pull a card and write that scene.”
After all, writing a novel, as Etter so aptly says, is something of “an endurance marathon” more than anything else. “It’s not even about how talented you are; it’s about how many times you can stare at the same page, how many hours you can sit in the chair,” says Etter. She laid down the initial groundwork for Ripe as a writing prompt from her current agent after her first critically acclaimed novel, the Shirley Jackson Award-winner The Book of X, came out. “I liked it because it was taking me out of the pressure of the book that was coming out and was making me think about my career and the next thing,” says Etter. “I gave him two short stories and the first 25 pages of this book, and we agreed to work together after that in 2018, 2019.”
Ripe: A Novel
Without a doubt, Etter’s fate to become a writer was likely sealed as a little kid. “I would staple pieces of paper together and write books. They’re all goofy and obviously written by a toddler, but I’ve always been drawn to that. It’s taken a long time to have the confidence [to tackle a novel]. I let myself write short stories for a very long time — I never thought I would write a novel — so it’s kind of fascinating to me, later in my life, to find out that I’d write them because they’re so hard and are such puzzles.”
Her first job as a writer was as an intern at Research/Penn State magazine, writing the Q&A column as an undergrad: “One of the questions was ‘Does my dog really love me?’ and I’d have to go interview an animal scientist and find out about how dog brains work. He said they did not love us, and they got a lot of hate mail about that for a long time.” Eventually, after graduation, she moved to Boston to report on prisons for a website: “They would send me into corrections facilities to interview the inmate. After I left, any time I would interview at jobs, they would be like, ‘If you can do that, you can do this.’”
When asked which writers inspired her growing up, Etter is clear in response. “I remember distinctly the first time a teacher shared Sylvia Plath with me was a big deal. [For Ripe], I definitely built a little stack of books I wanted to be in conversation with, especially The Bell Jar and [Joan Didion’s] Play It as It Lays. I tend to want to write surrealist work and like to try to write outside of time and place, and so they kind of gave me permission to look at the current time instead of constantly trying to hover in this timeless, location-less space. I didn’t want it to be a pandemic novel, but it is pretty new that we can have 24-hour access to headlines, be demolished by them, and still have to keep living our lives. I did want to get that feeling of looming panic, but you can’t really say why; you don’t really know why. You read a headline on Twitter that morning — it seemed pretty bad, and you don’t really know what to do with the feeling.”
Without giving too much away, as intimated earlier in this interview, we are left to our own devices to gain closure with Cassie’s fate. As far as her own fate goes, Etter, who is now based in Los Angeles and still works full-time in tech, feels incredibly fortunate to be able to write books, period. “Ultimately, you do need to sell copies if we want to keep doing this. I feel very lucky that I have found some people that like my work enough that I’m able to have this book come out — that’s huge to me,” she says. “My only goal every time is just to be able to write the next one, which kind of says a lot about the state of the market. All I can do is write the best book that I can at the time.” When asked what advice she’d give to an aspiring novelist, Etter says to take risks with the work: “I do think we’re in a place where it’s almost better to get rejected for being too extreme and eventually find your home than it is to try to dull yourself down and fit in. If you make great work, the people will come.”