First Love Interview: Clare Beams
When I posted about Clare Beams’ first novel The Illness Lesson on Instagram last year, I described it as “Louisa May Alcott meets Edgar Allan Poe,” and that is still the best way I can think of to capture the particular slow-burning creepiness that first singes the edges of this 19th century New England schoolhouse story—before eventually engulfing it entirely. I’m not usually one for anything even horror-adjacent, but Clare has such a deft and incisive way of depicting very real horrors, amplifying them just enough that the supernatural feels not only inevitable but truer than realism, that even a wimp like me can go all in. I am eagerly awaiting her latest, The Garden (out next month!), which she has described a “pregnancy as a haunted house” novel.
I’m thrilled to share a First Love Interview with Clare, who is not only a brilliant writer but also a truly delightful person who I’ve gotten to know over the course of two recent Randolph MFA residencies. Making a new friend in adulthood is a special thing; making a new friend who you can ask, “Want to ditch the party and go eat something?” and they’ll respond with an emphatic yes is precious.
But first! Two exciting announcements:
You can now preorder a signed copy of First Love through one of my favorite NYC bookstores, the Strand!
And my one-day class, Shaping a Narrative Around Questions, is returning to Corporeal Writing in July.
First Love Interview: Clare Beams
conversations with writer friends about writing and friendship
Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson (Doubleday, 2020) a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016), which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her new novel, The Garden (Doubleday), has been named a most anticipated book of 2024 by LitHub, Bookshop.org, and the LA Times. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program.
Tell me about an important friendship from your book, and its significance to the overall story.
The main character in The Garden, Irene Willard, is someone to whom friendship doesn’t come easily. She’s barbed and angry when she arrives at the novel’s country hospital for women who’ve experienced repeated miscarriage—for good reason—and she’s really not looking to bond with the other women. But over the course of the novel and the deepening of the mysteries and terrors around her, Irene comes to need, and then to rely on, and then to truly value and love two of the other women, Margaret and Pearl. On a craft level, I think I created this friendship because The Garden is about mingled interior and exterior terror, and Margaret and Pearl help pull the book and the reader out of Irene’s head just enough. (Which, now that I think about it, is not totally dissimilar to the role friendship has often played in my own life! I’m a person who often needs to be pulled out of my own head.)
Tell me about a book you’ve loaned or given away multiple copies of.
Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, which really offers the reader a chance to be inside a rich, exciting mind for the space of a book. The dense web of references and associations Nunez invokes is a gift in itself: a kind of expansion, this sense that anything you look at can call up all these other things. It’s a novel that makes me pay better attention to my own life and world. And I feel like all of the people I know who’ve read it, many many different kinds of readers, have loved it, which makes it a safer bet as a gift than some of the books I love.
How do writer friends impact your experience of being a writer?
I don’t think I’d fully understood before setting out on this path how crucially important my writer friends would be to me. I mean this practically—my brilliant writer friends are my early readers, and I learn so much from their reactions and thoughts and suggestions, just as I learn so much from being lucky enough to read their work in progress. But I also mean it spiritually. The writerly path is a long one, full of twists and disappointments. Getting to walk that path with people I love, and whose work I love, getting to witness what they’re achieving—it’s beyond the wildest dreams of the lonely little readerly kid who first started trying to write her own stories. My writer friends understand me in a way that’s rare and precious.
Brag about your friends! Tell me about some recent/upcoming work from a writer friend that you’re excited about.
My friends are really killing it this year: the number of friends who are publishing or have published gorgeous and amazing new books in 2024 is well into the double digits. I’ll mention Julia Phillips’ Bear, which is out this summer and is about two sisters on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest and what happens when a grizzly bear comes into their lives. I met Julia teaching in the Randolph MFA program and she’s such a wonderful literary citizen (in addition to being a truly extraordinary writer). I cannot wait to read this novel.
Brag about yourself! What’s something you’re working on/recently finished that you want people to know about?
I feel very proud that I finished The Garden and that it’s being published. Much of the writing of this novel took place during very pandemic-disrupted years of parenting of two small children, and there were times when it seemed like finishing another novel might actually be impossible for me. It feels like an achievement to have finished despite all that, to have said the things I wanted to say, to have given these characters their story.