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How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
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How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
Paperback $21.00
Apr 12, 2005 | ISBN 9781400034369

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    Apr 12, 2005 | ISBN 9781400034369

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  • Dec 18, 2007 | ISBN 9780307426291

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Praise

"A major new talent. . . . How to Breathe Underwater is a dark and beautiful book." –The New York Times Book Review

"These stories are without exception clear-eyed, compassionate and deeply moving. . . . Even her most bitter characters have a gift, the sharp wit of envy. This, Orringer’s first book, is breathtakingly good, truly felt and beautifully delivered." –The Guardian

“Orringer’s engaging wit, her eye for social detail, her ear for patterns of speech and thought, and her insights into human nature proclaim her a writer to be reckoned with.” –Los Angeles Times

"Captivating. . . . Orringer limns the ordinary, terrifying time between childhood and maturity so skillfully." –San Francisco Chronicle

"Pure gems, rollicking along with scintillating prose and surety. Just when you think they will stop–and lesser writers would stop–they keep going with inexorable momentum." –Ploughshare

"The harsh landscape in which Orringer’s characters dwell corresponds to the fierce beauty of her writing. Even the grimmest of these stories conveys, along with anguish, a child’s spark of mystery and wonder." –The New York Times

"Beautiful, so wise and vital. . . . It’s impossible not to feel for the pained and alienated young women in Orringer’s stories, and impossible not to be stunned and moved by their quests for redemption. More so than any debut author in recent years, Orringer proves that the kids are all right, even when they’re not." –The Austin Chronicle

"Utterly authentic . . . the passage through childhood and puberty is strewn with dangers and roadblocks. But what [Orringer] does with those hazards in her stories is something altogether magical." –The Seattle Times

"Eloquent. . . . Orringer sifts the inexorable sparks of sexual awakening and unearths moments of brittle surprise and bitter triumph. . . . Haunting." –Miami Herald

"Unclouded by sentimentality . . . Orringer endows her situations and her characters–adults as well as children–with complexity and humor. . . . She writes with penetrating intelligence and remarkable self-possession." –The Boston Globe

"How to Breathe Underwater is unbelievably good: the humiliations and cruelties and passions of childhood, sparkling fresh prose, a writer with a big heart and an acute sense of the small things that loom large in our lives." –Monica Ali, The Guardian

"Absolutely magnificent. . . . In Orringer’s world, we are forced to remember that time in our lives when we had to tolerate mystery and meaningless, because, to the child in each of us, the world is still a murky–and potentially magical place." –Ms. Magazine

“Intelligent, heartfelt stories that tell a whole new set of truths about growing up American. Julie Orringer writes with virtuosity and depth about the fears, cruelties, and humiliations of childhood, but then does that rarest, and more difficult, thing: writes equally beautifully about the moments of victory and transcendence.” –George Saunders

"Fair Warning: Once you start reading Julie Orringer’s debut collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, you may find yourself unable to stop. . . . Orringer’s work has a glorious maturity and burnished grace. . . . Each story delivers the satisfying details and emotional heft of a novel." –Elle

"A fiercely beautiful debut. . . . Orringer delves into the harrowing rip tides of emotion and circumstance that disturb lives yet enhance survival. Her tales are tough, transcendent and so richly imagined you won’t want to get out." –Nerve.com

How to Breathe Underwater is an outstanding collection. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about–youth, friendship, death, grief, etc.–but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So while her themes are as solid and recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before. . . .The moment I finished it I bought myself a first edition, and then another. It’s that sort of book. –Nick Hornby, The Believer

"These stories will remind you of all the lovably flawed girls you ever knew . . . or were." –Glamour

“Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories—wise, compassionate and haunting.” –Dan Chaon

"Wondrous. . . . Not one of her stories leaves you unaffected; often, your heart aches from sustained and painful empathy. And yet you’re left exhilarated, too, by their sheer energetic artistry. . . . [Orringer] seems to remember childhood events as if it were last week. All her stories have unexpected settings and events, yet ring so true you practically feel you’re there somewhere yourself, sitting unobserved in the landscape observing your struggling fellow humans." –San Francisco Magazine

"The world of the nine stories in this astonishing debut collection is one of beauty and longing. . . . [These stories] are astounding in their ability to capture young people in all their simple agonies and joys." –The Anniston Star

“In How to Breathe Underwater, Julie Orringer delves into the complex lives of girls and young women, and with uncommon courage and exceptional clarity she shows us what she finds: passionate, often disturbing feelings of longing and jealousy and grief; an intense struggle to make sense of the unfathomable world of adults, and above all a determination to survive. These are tough, beautiful stories, piercing and true, and they mark the debut of an exceptionally gifted writer.” –Ann Packer

"This is a wonderful set of stories, full of empathy and wisdom." –San Jose Mercury News

"Wry, poignant. . . . Such clear-eyed precision makes Orringer’s debut as heartbreaking as it is clever." –Entertainment Weekly

Author Q&A

A Conversation with Julie Orringer

Q: Each of the nine stories in your collection focuses on a different young girl—child or adolescent. Reading about them puts one instantly back into one’s own childhood, you capture their voices and concerns so perfectly. Was writing these stories as an adult difficult?
A:
I’m fortunate enough to have a younger brother and a much-younger sister—five and eight years younger, respectively—so I had a kind of extended lifeline to childhood and adolescence even as I left that part of my life behind. I also started writing stories pretty early on, and so I think I always paid attention to the way other kids thought and spoke. Nonetheless, it’s always hard to write about kids. You want to do justice to their intelligence and perceptiveness, but at the same time their confusions and misperceptions are fascinating as well. Being a child means being embroiled in a constant struggle to figure out how the world works and how you fit into it. As we watch that process from the comfortable distance of adulthood, we’re often apt to romanticize or simplify the struggle. In reality, though, it’s often painful and brutal and tragic, and it’s one of the most important tasks we have as human beings.

Q: What drew you to writing about this period in life—the complicated terrain between childhood and adulthood?
A:
There seems to be so much emotional danger in this part of a young person’s life. Oftentimes the most difficult events—death, illness, change, acts of cruelty against us—hit us before we’ve gained the maturity to understand them. In many of the stories, young women face a task that sometimes seems impossible: they must re-create themselves as adults and learn to survive in a world that confronts them with difficult decisions or with awful truths about the fallibility of human beings. They must learn to hold onto the familial, romantic, and companionate love in their lives, even when that love involves significant emotional risk. In the end, I hope the book suggests that our parents, our siblings, and our friends can be sources of strength and understanding, if we’re willing to accept their limitations and flaws. And I hope the book also suggests that we can look back with compassion and understanding upon our younger selves, upon the stupid things we did as young people. Most of the time we were doing the best we could.

Q: Please talk about the circumstances of your childhood.
A:
I lived a kind of nomadic childhood in which reading and writing were always of primary importance. I was born when my parents were third-year medical students at the University of Miami. Despite their long working hours, they spent a lot of time playing with me and reading to me. From the time I was maybe two years old, my father sat down with me and told me stories, which he wrote down on tiny pieces of index card and stapled into miniature books. After a while, he let me tell the stories while he wrote them down. I still have them. They have titles like The Bowling Party and The Funny Blue Car.

When I was four, we moved to Boston while my parents studied at Harvard. We lived in a tiny apartment on a leafy street just a few blocks from my public school. Boston was wonderful—there was sledding, and a library close by, and the Children’s Museum, and we drove to Cape Cod and the White Mountains and Tanglewood. My brother was born. Life was good. Then I turned six and we moved to New Orleans, where the public schools were dismally inadequate and the city was still largely divided along racial lines. At my new private school, I found myself at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I had the wrong clothes, the wrong accent, and even, for a year, had to wear an eye patch to correct my amblyopia—social death for a second-grader. To make matters worse, both my parents actually worked for a living. And I was Jewish. My class contained a few Jewish kids, to be sure, but the school’s main celebrations centered around Christmas, Mardi Gras, and Easter. Our school mascot was the crawfish, an unknown beast within my family’s kosher home.

Due to these circumstances, and probably also due to the fact that I was a year younger than my classmates, I soon became a pariah at that school. My dearth of friends and the many recess hours I spent at the library gave me plenty of time to develop an inner life; I devoured books and loved to write. My favorite novels had young writer-girls as their heroines: Sara Crewe, the story-spinning heroine of A Little Princess; Jo March of Little Women; Laura Ingalls Wilder; and Betsy of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series. In a life more or less devoid of real friendship, these fictional heroes were my closest companions, my big sisters, my role models. From a very early age, I began to envision a life in which what I most wanted to do was write books.

Lucky for me, when I was in eighth grade my family moved to Ann Arbor and I went back to public school. There, one seemed to care how much money your parents made or whether you were Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Christian. Black and white kids went to school together, lived on the same block, played on the same teams, acted in the same plays. It was a shock to realize that news of my social-pariah status had not reached Ann Arbor. Soon my group of friends included real live human beings, not just characters in books. Ann Arbor was a quiet safe place to grow up. Our idea of a risky afternoon was skipping Orchestra to eat ice cream downtown. My friend Sarah and I thought ourselves very cosmopolitan when we went to the University of Michigan art museum and then drank Italian coffee at a café. Things did get a little crazier as I got older and my friends and I began to spend time in and around Detroit, but that’s a different story…

Q: You explore the impact of loss of parents in a couple of the stories. Please talk about why this theme interests you.
A:
My mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer when I was ten years old. So my childhood was infused with the awareness that I might lose my mother, that health was an unreliable thing, that death was real and immediate. My mother did everything she could to fight her cancer—chemotherapy, radiation, a strict Macrobiotic diet—and she lived with the disease for ten years. In the stories, I found myself returning many times to the idea of loss, of instability, of outsiderhood, that comes with having a terminally-ill parent. In “Pilgrims,” the young protagonist is only beginning to accept the realness of her mother’s illness and possible death; there’s been an irrevocable change in her life, and the stability of the time before her mother’s diagnosis will never return. In “What We Save,” a teenage girl faces the fact of her mother’s imminent death, and tries to understand her mother’s need to see a former boyfriend one final time; these difficult circumstances are superimposed upon the background of Disney World, where the family is taking a vacation. My family did in fact travel to Disney World when my mother was very ill—though not as far along in her illness as the mother in that story—and it seemed to me that the brightness and optimism of the theme park threw our family’s situation into sharp, painful relief. I never forgot that feeling and always wanted to write about it.

Q: The cruelty of children towards one another, the power of peer pressure, the careless way in which young boys take advantage of girls sexually, remind us that childhood is not always an innocent state.
A:
Indeed not. We all know, having been kids at some point, how awful children can be to one another. We’ve all been tormented on the bus or teased for our stupid haircuts or beaten up in a parking lot. Kids can be astoundingly original and subtle in the torments they devise for one another. They can also be quick to appropriate adult behavior long before they’re ready to accept its consequences. In one of the stories, “Stars of Motown Shining Bright,” a girl has decided she’s going to run off to California, where she plans to live with her older boyfriend and pose for explicit magazines. She’s operating on an idealized, hypersexualized view of herself that has a lot more to do with what she thinks the boyfriend wants than what she wants herself. In fact, she comes from a rather protected suburban milieu, where she’s incapable of envisioning the hard, plain adult realities toward which she’s launching herself. A friend who’s seen some of those realities eventually reins her in. But I didn’t always think this story would turn out well for anyone involved. Oftentimes, in real life, there’s no friend stepping in to turn things around.

Q: In that same story (after a bizarre evening involving sex and a loaded gun), 16-year-old Melissa says, “I feel sorry for our parents, they have no idea what goes on.” And in CARE, six year old Olivia is entrusted by her mother into the hands of an irresponsible, drug-addled aunt. Are parents in the dark about much of what goes on in childhood?
A:
I don’t think parents are at all in the dark about what goes on in childhood and adolescence. I think they often know a great deal more about what goes on than kids realize. But maybe there are things parents would rather not acknowledge, truths they’d prefer not to face. It’s got to be incredibly frightening to see your child venturing off into the world to make her own discoveries and mistakes.

Q: What in your own life made you want to become a writer?
A:
A million things, I suppose. All that early reading and writing. A love of narrative. I was always intensely curious about what went on between human beings and how experiences change us. Through my own early reading I entered new worlds and found a kind of compassion and understanding that was rare in my life at the time. Much later, at Cornell, I had some wonderful professors who began to talk to me about how it might be possible to construct a life around writing. I’d never considered such a thing, since both my parents were doctors. Did people actually write for a living? During my junior year, Denis Johnson came to give a reading from Jesus’ Son; he talked about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his early writing experiences, and I read his book and loved it. Soon after, I started reading all the contemporary fiction I could get my hands on—Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Mona Simpson, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro—I became a junkie, and never looked back. I was a stubborn young person. Despite my professors’ advice to spend some time out in the world, I went to Iowa directly after college. Then came some years of misery, when I was living and working in San Francisco, not yet a writer and not really even an adult. Stanford and the Stegner Program saved me, and my professors and fellow students helped me to mature as a writer.

Q: Why do you write short stories?
A:
I like working in both short and long forms, but I feel like the short story is a particularly good medium for learning to write fiction. As a new writer, I think it’s important to feel as if you can take wild risks and make mistakes without incurring devastating losses of time. The short form is perfect for that. I probably wrote thirty short stories during the years in which I wrote the nine that eventually made it into the collection. It was a relief to be able to strike certain stories up to experience and then put them away forever. I’ve also always loved reading short stories. I love the ones that are austere and efficient and compact, like Carver or Tobias Wolff or Yukio Mishima or Flannery O’Connor, and I also love the longer stories that move around in a larger space, like the work of Alice Munro or Katherine Anne Porter or George Saunders. I love the novel too, and am working on one now.

Q: Your husband Ryan Harty is also a writer of short stories, which a collection coming out this fall. Do you consider this to be an odd coincidence?
A:
In many ways it’s an incredible coincidence, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem strange at all. We never planned or expected to have first books coming out at the same time, though I suppose we always knew it was a possibility; we met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1996 and have been together ever since. Later we were both at Stanford. Our writing lives have followed amazingly similar tracks. In addition to being an incredibly talented writer, Ryan has always been a fantastic reader for me—honest and demanding and sensitive. Writing fiction is a lonely and scary endeavor, and it’s an unspeakable relief to be able to share the good and bad times with my best friend. I’m so excited to see his wise, beautiful collection, Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, coming out into the world.

Q: Is there a literary community in San Francisco? Is it important for you to associate with a literary community (ie at Iowa for example)?
A:
San Francisco has a fantastic literary community, of course—one with a rich and varied history. These past few years in particular, an incredible amount of energy has gathered around the Bay Area literary scene. The Stegner Program at Stanford has produced writers like Tom Barbash, ZZ Packer, Michael Byers, and Adam Johnson; McSweeney’s, the Believer, and 826 Valencia are here, with the literary and humanitarian energies of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida behind them. Zoetrope moved to San Francisco, and editor Tamara Straus has consistently offered panels and readings and other literary events to the Bay Area community. Independent bookstores thrive here. The San Francisco Chronicle has expanded its book section and hired reporters exclusively to cover the literary community. People take writing classes through the Stanford Continuing Studies Program, the Berkeley Extension, and the California College for Arts and Crafts. Private workshop groups abound. Litquake, a citywide celebration of writing that features readings by scores of Bay Area authors, has nearly tripled in size in its second year. In short, it’s an explosion. I’ve lived here for seven years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Perhaps it has something to do with the Internet bust; this town used to be nearly unlivable for emerging artists, but in the Bay Area’s new quieter economic climate, the arts have flowered.

Q: You teach creative writing at Stanford. What is your best advice to young writers— about writing, and about what it takes to get published?
A:
One of the first things I’d tell beginning writers (I don’t want to restrict any of these suggestions to “young writers,” since many of the best emerging writers I’ve worked with have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties) is not to concern themselves primarily with getting published. Instead, they should focus upon the writing itself and how to make it better. They should read as much as possible, immerse themselves in the company of other writers, go to readings, take classes. They should set up a writing schedule and then stick to it. They should seek out good books on craft, like Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. And they should read literary magazines that publish work by emerging writers.

I encourage my students to take chances in their work, and not be afraid to throw stories away. But new writers should also teach themselves to be assiduous revisers. Oftentimes you might not discover what a story is really trying to do until the third or seventh or tenth draft. It’s important to realize that the study of fiction and the development of one’s writing is a long, long process and cannot be rushed.

If you feel it’s impossible to wait any longer before sending your work out to journals and magazines, start by doing some research. Go to bookstores and libraries and read literary journals and see what kind of work they’re publishing. Look at Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize Anthology to see where prize winning stories come from. Send to publications that might be sympathetic to your own writing. Then be prepared to be very patient. Most importantly, keep writing.

Q: What are you working on right now?
A:
A novel about a young Hungarian Jewish architecture student living in Paris just before the second world war. The novel is based in part upon the experiences of my maternal grandfather, who lived in Paris from 1937-39 and studied at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture before returning to Hungary and being conscripted into forced labor. During my childhood and adolescence, my family’s pre-war life and wartime ordeals were rarely discussed. I didn’t even know my grandfather had lived in Paris until I was an adult. As I began planning a trip to France, my grandfather began telling me about his experiences there as a young man, and over the course of many subsequent conversations a novel began to take shape in my mind. In the process of researching the novel I’ve traveled to my mother’s birthplace in Budapest, my grandfather’s childhood home in the Eastern plains of Hungary, and my grandfather’s old haunts in Paris. A surprising number of places are still just as my grandfather remembered them from long ago. The apartment building where he lived in Budapest still has the same bright-green door. His neighborhood boulangerie in Paris still offers the same chaussons pommes. And the École Spéciale is still full of students from all over the world.

Author Essay

"Oftentimes you might not discover what a story is really trying to do until the third or seventh or tenth draft," Julie Orringer has said. "It’s important to realize that the study of fiction and the development of one’s writing is a long, long process and cannot be rushed."

To prove that Julie practices what she preaches, we dug into her desk drawers, and discovered that relentless revision is the secret to her literary success. Take a virtual tour of the notebooks we found, all of which included drafts of stories that are included in her first collection, How to Breathe Underwater.

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