How spending a year 4,600 miles from home on an isolated Russian peninsula brought an American writer's debut novel to the final round of the National Book Awards
- Julia Phillips' debut novel "Disappearing Earth" is one of five titles on the shortlist for the 2019 National Book Award in fiction.
- Phillips spent a college semester studying abroad in Moscow before receiving a Fulbright scholarship to spend a year in Kamchatka, the remote peninsula in far-eastern Russia.
- The novel is set in the Kamchatka capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where two young girls go missing on a summer afternoon. It is told, over the course of one year, through 12 female characters' points of view.
- In a recent sit-down conversation, Phillips discussed the art of writing about shock, what drew her to Russia, and how her time abroad shaped her novel.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
When she was a year and a half old, Julia Phillips drowned in the pond in her backyard.
At the time, the Phillips family lived in Montclair, New Jersey. Her dad pulled her out of the pond and yelled to his wife, Julia's mom, to call 911.
Her mom made her way up the hill to their house, stared at her phone, and then, swimming through her shock, realized she couldn't process how to call 911. She called her neighbor, a nurse, instead. The nurse gathered what Julia's mom was saying and screamed at her to call an ambulance.
The scream got through. She called 911. The ambulance arrived. Julia survived.
Tonight, some 30 years later, she is sitting next to me at a bar in Brooklyn. The story is hers, and the wording of it likely rings recognizable to anyone who has read her debut novel, "Disappearing Earth." The novel, which came out this year, is one of the five finalists for the 2019 National Book Award in fiction.
A novel told through intertwining, female-driven narratives
"Disappearing Earth" takes place over the course of one year. It is told through 12 female characters' perspectives, all of whom are connected by a similar thread.
"All of these women," Phillips explained, "lose something or are grappling with some loss in some way."
The biggest loss in this story is the one that opens the novel. In the first chapter, we see two young sisters meet an injured man on the beach, and we fear that they're going to get into his car and disappear. They do.
What unfolds from there feels, at first, like a collection of isolated storylines about unrelated strangers. However, the narrative soon spirals inwards until readers find themselves rethinking the characters they thought they knew.
It is the wording of these women's stories that struck me as so similar to the anecdote from Phillips' childhood. As the characters work their way through longing and grief, there's the recurring sense that what they're really doing is wading through the recognition that their worlds do not look the way they wanted them to. Information comes through in spurts; time feels disconnected.
"To me, shock or rampant anxiety is one of the most interesting things to write about," she explained when I asked about writing in the language of shock. When one of the characters has a panic attack, it manifests as internal and external senses of time moving at different paces: "She's moving slowly and the world is moving fast, and things are happening, and she's in profound shock."
A thriller that drives itself forward through equal parts narrative and character development
Phillips' novel has the plot of a thriller, but it's driven forward by lyrical language that readers may well miss if they rush through it to discover the age-old question of what happens at the end.
Consider Ksyusha, a college student torn between worlds, as she reminisces on her childhood:
"... The horses they rode. The trails followed. The nights Ksyusha spent in the tundra, when she was younger and braver and slept alone, when her world was clear, smelling of smoke and grasses, and thousands of reindeer passed her by."
And later, Oksana, a young woman in the city, who grapples with a recent loss of her own in an entirely different way:
"It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter."
Peppered in between plot twists and turns, though, these musings do not slow the book down.
"The thing I want to write and the thing I always want to read is something that pulls me forward and has momentum," Phillips said of the pacing of her novel. "I think that can be created lots of different ways, sometimes through rapid-fire plot developments, sometimes through rich characterizations."
Several of her characters spring to life with particular clarity. In addition to Ksyusha, there's Revmira, who works at a hospital's triage desk even as she attempts to navigate a series of shattering losses of her own. And, of course, there's Marina, the journalist whose daughters were kidnapped in the first chapter and whose attempts to find answers come together in a swirling sense of anxiety.
But there's also another type of character in this book: Kamchatka itself.
How a semester abroad in Moscow turned into a year in Kamchatka
The peninsula where Phillips set her book has a population of roughly 314,000, making it one of the most sparsely populated regions in Russia. It's a 10-hour flight from Moscow, and there are no roads connecting it to the mainland. In Phillips' words, it's a land of "volcanoes, mountains, taiga, tundra, geysers, hot springs, some permafrost, lots of wildlife."
The first time Phillips stepped foot in Russia was when she studied abroad in Moscow, in college, at age 20. The prospect of returning to Russia after that semester, she explained, provided the perfect opportunity to combine two of her ambitions.
"After four months in Moscow, I knew I wanted to come back. I always knew I wanted to be a novelist. And I thought, 'Okay, if I can write about Russia in English, then I can research by living there and do everything that I want all at once,'" Phillips recalled.
She started looking for a place with "a distinctive regional identity and rich history; some place beautiful; and maybe some place that was not a city, or not in western Russia."
"And when I learned about Kamchatka, I thought: This is it," she said. "This is the place I want to go."
She was awarded a Fulbright student research grant for creative writing to Russia; when she arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky - roughly 4,600 miles from her hometown - in 2011, it was the first time she had set foot in the region. It was, she said, "a dream come true" - but it was also an experience flush with challenges.
"There's a good pair of Russian words, svoi and chuzhoi, meaning 'one's own' and 'other,'" Phillips said. "Svoi covers your family, your home, your country, the things you know, the people you trust. Chuzhoi is everything else. These two words mark the separation of existence into familiar and foreign. On the peninsula, I was so chuzhaya it hurt."
This sense of isolation and of being an outsider plays so strongly into the novel that it feels like not only a setting for it, but also a driving force within it. The battle of insider versus outsider is vividly depicted as women struggle to adapt to new environments, carry on living lives that have lost logic, and sometimes, even, look in on themselves as outsiders in their own bodies.
The book is not without its bursts of joy, though, and Phillips stressed that the time she spent in Kamchatka was a "quiet, productive, very happy period of my life," marked by interactions with people who were patient with her American accent-laced Russian.
These emotions join forces in the novel, where moments of beauty and acceptance come together with pangs of sorrow and loneliness. Fittingly, that theme echoes her own memory of her time there: "I felt overwhelming love and nostalgia for Kamchatka when I wasn't there," she said.
Ultimately, when I asked her whether she could have written this book without her year abroad, Phillips' reply, citing the region's history, isolation, and demographic, was definitive: "It's impossible for me to imagine this particular book taking place anywhere but Kamchatka."
The winners of the National Book Award will be announced on Wednesday, November 20.