Local author Susan Rukeyser will be celebrating the release of her new novel The Worst Kind of Girl this Friday at Hi-Desert Times Magazines on Friday (7/12) in Twentynine Palms. Presented by Red Light Lit, Rukeyser will read from her new novel, which takes place here in the Morongo Basin, followed by live music by Mary Simich and vegetarian appetizers by Epicurean Fling.
When the uncertainty of the pandemic rendered many of us speechless, there was a moment when author Susan Rukeyser felt she too may had run out of words.
“It was the middle of COVID, and I was completely frozen with this sort of existential dread where I almost felt like ‘I will never write again. I have no words.’ And then suddenly this novel started coming out of me and of course it became like an escape to go into this fictional world somewhat idealized.”
What eventually followed four years later was her new novel The Worst Kind of Girl, an eccentric novel with an ensemble of high desert characters centered around Paula Winger, a 50-year-old widow from Connecticut who is the new proprietor of a rundown Joshua Tree motel. Aligned with the novel’s fluid prose, Paula begins to question her sexuality when she encounters Sky, a local baker. But before you assume this is some quirky queer soap opera, the novel is unnerved by a noir undercurrent with dead bodies turning up in the desert, and we learn Paula’s own husband has long disappeared and presumed dead on the east coast. Yet Paula seems unphased, more concerned with the changes going on in her own living, breathing self, which is what constructs the heart of the novel; certain shifts Rukeyser experienced firsthand when she moved here.
“I wanted to have fun with it. Because as soon as I decided I was going to have Paula come out 50 like I did, I was like, ‘Well then obviously people are gonna think it’s me, so I’ll play with that. I’ll make her tall, I’ll give her gray hair, I’ll make her from Connecticut and I’ll sort of turn all of those elements up a little bit.’ But it is very clear in my mind I kind of gave her my questions about all of that, but she is not the same person as I am—she’s a little less aware of what’s going on than I was. I’m at a point where I do know that is the very first question people ask about novels or any other kind of writings—they always assume it’s about you and I don’t care, that’s fine.”
Despite its very lived-in elements, Rukeyser insists it’s fiction and not to be confused with her own story. She doesn’t run a hotel, for example. But when asked what inspired Paula’s Hi-Dez motel, a mash-up of local spots including the old Travel Lodge sign that adorns the front cover, Rukeyser said: “A motel seems like a good place to catch people when they are coming and going, which is a big theme in this book: disappearing and arriving.”
Other local spots featured in the novel include Joshua Tree National Park, the Joshua Tree dry lakebed, sprinkled with other fictitious recreational centers like the Rainbow Roll, a queer roller disco Rukeyser sees as her attempt at a specific wish fulfillment.
Rukeyser’s manuscript for The Worst Kind of Girl had a fortuitous path. In 2022 it was shortlisted at the Sante Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, a finalist for the Big Moose Prize at Black Lawrence Press, and longlisted with Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, before landing with Pennsylvania’s Braddock Avenue Books, who finally released it in June.
Rukeyser will be signing copies of her book at tomorrow’s (7/12) book launch event at Hi-Desert Times, located inside of Corner 62 in Twentynine Palms, 73552 Twentynine Palms Highway.
The event runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
