If you're looking for a novel that is not like any other novel you've ever read, look no further than Sarah Rose Etter's "Ripe."
It’s a surreal novel about a young woman named Cassie who is working at a Silicon Valley start-up. She was hoping it would be her dream job, but it turns out to be a nightmare. Cassie has to deal with long hours and toxic bosses.
She also has to deal with a miniature black hole that she believes has been part of her since birth.
"Ripe" is beautifully written, incredibly immersive and has tremendous energy, flow and pace.
Etter draws on her personal experience working in tech to ensure that she gets all the details right. She talked to Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" about her novel.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Doug Gordon: How similar is your own work experience to Cassie's?
Sarah Rose Etter: I would say her experience is really a composite of things I've seen in tech. Not necessarily for companies where I work, but from stories I've heard. It's kind of taking all the worst things that you've seen and combining it into one company. And so it's really a composite. I think this book, rather than being based on my "reality," is really making sure that it's based on the truth of tech and also just business in general. I mean, honestly, most of these are not new behaviors. They just take a different shape.
We're kind of in this era of conspicuous consumption where, for the first time, people are hiding wealth and status. And so that always fascinates me because it's really the same sort of behaviors, it's just dressed up as a company that's your friend. It's low-key, it's casual, but all of the same things are sort of happening under the surface.
I think that part of my experience and Cassie's do intertwine, where I thought I was making this huge life change and things were going to be improved.
DG: One of the things that makes Cassie different from everyone else is her miniature black hole. What is the origin story of this black hole that is always with her?
SRE: I think the black hole for her represents depression. And I wanted to personify this human emotion that can take on so many shapes and forms. And for the reader, I hope it can mean anything, whether maybe you struggle with anxiety or anger issues or, you know, whatever we're all trying to manage every day as we go to work, as we make money. The black holes were meant to be a stand-in for that. And of course, it was the hardest part to write because we don't fully understand black holes in regular life, let alone turning it into this sort of fictional element.
So I think if you've asked me how many times I had to revise that area, I would say it's a lot. But yeah, I do feel like a little bit of an expert in black holes now. Like if you sent me to a black hole convention, I think I could talk, like in the basement.
DG: Can you give us an example of what kind of knowledge you would share?
SRE: The most fascinating thing to me is the research was so ongoing that I would rewrite the ending of the book a lot because during the time we were sending it to the printer, they were starting to make new discoveries, and that's when they discovered that there were potentially wormholes in the black holes.
And that really changed the whole ending, right? Because it suddenly went from, oh, she's going to be ripped to shreds in this black hole to, hey, there's actually another option. I don't know. I read so much research. It's hard to say.
There was one really nice academic paper that I read about the way we personify black holes. Since we can't understand them, we have to use language like "they spit" or "they consume" or "they ingest." They always have to be doing something that feels human to us because we really can't understand them.
It's one of the only things in science that has that, where we have had to give it a layman's term and try to make it understandable just to a regular person. So that part always fascinates me.
DG: And I understand that the black hole was a symbol of your grief. Can you tell us about that?
SRE: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I really don't know if I would have written this book.
I thought to myself that San Francisco has kind of been done to death. There's been a ton of tech books, you know, so it's not usually my wheelhouse. But when I lived in San Francisco, I used to call my father all the time, and he would talk me through my struggle with the city and with the industry. And he kept asking me to write a book about it.
He passed away shortly before we went into lockdown. And I really found myself just with my grief and very isolated. And I fell into this book as a way to sort of remember him. So the parts about the father in the book are certainly the things about him I wanted to remember.
DG: You've said that you want to leave space for the reader to show up. I love that sentence, that thought. How do you do that?
SRE: I think you have to let the surrealist element do that. If you think about surrealism as an art form, it's almost more important what the viewer sees in the artwork than what the intention of the artist was. And I do want some of that in my book.
People always say, "What was the ending?" And I'm like, I don't care what the ending was for me. I know what it was for me, but I'm far more interested in how the reader sees it ending. And the same is true for the black hole or the knot in 'The Book of X' (Etters' Shirley Jackson Award-winning debut novel). I'm much more interested in how the reader engaged with those elements than what my intention was.
DG: I was intrigued to discover that you don't consider your competition to be other writers or other books. So what do you see as your competition?
SRE: Twitter, Netflix, your phone going off. We're in an attention economy at this point. And so I do think every page of a novel has to be doing something. Sometimes in my head, I think of it as like acrobatics on the page. I need to be doing one really cool trick on every page, or you have every reason to just not read.
You know, it's silly to think of myself in competition with other writers because as we all know, people don't read a lot. And so my competition is the real world and a million devices. And the fact that you have to actually invest hours in order to read a book.
So I do try to play to the reader's attention span so that it feels — I mean, people have jokingly called this a beach read. And I kind of laugh about it because it's a sad book for sure. But I did try to pace it in a way that the reader would be compelled to finish it.
DG: And you definitely did that. So when Netflix comes calling to ask you to turn "Ripe" into a streaming series, that means you'll be competing against yourself. How will you handle that?
SRE: I'm not having those conversations until the strike is over.