Interview with Sarah Relyea, Author of Playground Zero

PLAYGROUND ZERO, Sarah Relyea’s debut novel,  is a coming-of-age story set in Berkeley in the late 1960s.

“Like a trip through the Looking Glass, Sarah Relyea’s engrossing debut novel takes you by the hand back to the sixties, where social rules were being challenged and political upheaval was the norm. Relyea tells the absorbing story of twelve-year-old Alice and her family through a series of narrators as they each experience the kaleidoscope streets of Berkeley. But she saves her most lyrical and beautiful language for the disintegration Alice sees and the heartbreak she experiences.”

          – Patricia Hurtado, Brooklyn writer and journalist with Bloomberg News

We’re delighted to feature this interview with Sarah on WWWB, as part of her Virtual Book Tour!

Your first book was nonfiction. What motivated you to write a novel?

In my first book I was writing as a scholar, and my primary obligations were to the authors I wrote about: Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. They had ground-breaking ideas about what it’s like to belong to one of society’s outsider groups. Beauvoir’s ideas about women’s experience, for example, rang true for me in some ways, but writing about her work was not the best means for exploring my personal past or my thoughts about coming of age.

I can’t reduce experience and memory to ideas, and I don’t want to.
Playground Zero is about Berkeley in the 1960s—the schools, the counterculture, the People’s Park riot. The main characters are kids. Berkeley was ground zero for the 1960s counterculture, for people playing at revolution. There was a phrase that became popular: “They can’t stop us because we’re stealing everyone’s children.” For a time, I was one of those kids, and the story had to come out.

Is there something unique about coming of age in America that you want your story to convey?

Coming of age in America has long been a time of experiment. I came of age in 1960s Berkeley. We were very young, barely adolescent, and our rites of passage reflected the upheaval around us. I was not even a rebel, but there it was––riots, drugs, and outdoor rock concerts.

I had no idea how outrageous many people found these things. Then I met kids from other places, and they were shocked by my casual assumptions, my counterculture references. For me, that was jolting and scary. I had broken all the rules without even knowing. But through that experience, I began looking at the world from many angles.

My parents had big plans for me, but they also gave me a long rope to hang myself.
Coming of age has never been easy. Improvising is normal—in fact, our culture rewards it. Freedom doesn’t come from avoiding danger; it comes from managing danger as you move forward. And often there’s danger in other people’s judgments about you.

If you wrote a 6 word memoir, what would the words be?

I loved, lost, strayed, ruminated, wrote.

Has the pandemic brought out anything unexpected in your writing?

Yes, I’ve been writing about being stuck in lockdown Brooklyn during the pandemic. I’m posting most of it on my website. Even though I’ve been a New Yorker for years, my sense of home has always been rooted in California. But the pandemic has opened up a new form and setting—and new ideas. It feels like the early stages of a novel—I can’t tease apart the abstract ideas from the sensory overload. Apparently, this is how I work.

What is your best writing advice?

Keep it real.

What’s next for Sarah Relyea?

Our current moment is very interesting. No one knows where it’s going. For a novelist, that’s gold. Think of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—hypothetical history—only set in the present. I’m eager to dive in.

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Sarah Relyea is the author of Playground Zero, a coming-of-age story set in Berkeley in the late 1960s. Sarah left the Berkeley counterculture at age thirteen and processed its effects as a teenager in suburban Los Angeles. She would soon swap California’s psychedelic scene to study English literature at Harvard.

Sarah has long addressed questions of identity in her writing, including in her book of literary criticism, Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin.

With her PhD in English and American literature from The Graduate Center, CUNY, Sarah has taught American literature and writing at universities in New York and Taiwan. She remains bicoastal, living in Brooklyn and spending time on the Left Coast.

Find out more about her on her Website  https://sarahrelyea.com/

Follow her on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/sarahrelyeaauthor

About PLAYGROUND ZERO

1968. It’s a season of siren songs and loosened bonds—as well as war, campaign slogans, and assassination. When the Rayson family leaves the East Coast for the gathering anarchy of Berkeley, twelve-year-old Alice embraces the moment in a hippie paradise that’s fast becoming a cultural ground zero.

As her family and school fade away in a tear gas fog, the 1960s counterculture brings ambiguous freedom. Guided only by a child’s-eye view in a tumultuous era, Alice could become another casualty—or she could come through to her new family, her developing life. But first, she must find her way in a world where the street signs hang backward and there’s a bootleg candy called Orange Sunshine.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing