Please join us for a Q&A with Margie Sarsfield, author of Beta Vulgaris.
Please join me in welcoming Margie Sarsfield to our BookBrowse Community Forum online discussion. She was the recipient of the 2019 Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. She earned her MFA from The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, CutBank, the Normal School, Seneca Review, Hippocampus , and elsewhere. She lives in Reno, Nevada.
Margie’s debut novel, Beta Vulgaris, was featured in the February 12 issue of The BookBrowse Review.
Please use this space to ask Margie questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Margie, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
I’m sure this has to be the first question everyone asks you, but where did the idea for Beta Vulgaris come from? I mean, why beets of all things?
Elise, the heroine of the novel, has some pretty significant challenges – money problems, an eating disorder, no support from her mother and minimal support from her boyfriend, and a complete lack of confidence. What can you tell us about how you approached the character and how she evolved as you were writing her?
Our BookBrowse reviewer states that “Perhaps the novel is most accurately described as an anxiety story.” Do you agree with her about that? How would you describe it?
Howdy! I’m really looking forward to talking with everyone, and appreciate the invite!
I am a freelance writer/editor (and unpaid horror enthusiast) ex-New Yorker living in Reno, NV with my husband and three barely-trained senior dogs. I love all things book-y and write poetry and CNF in addition to fiction. I also really like philosophy, veganizing recipes, and emo music. I’m so grateful for everyone who has picked up Beta Vulgaris this year and for opportunities like this!
I actually worked the beet harvest in Minnesota in my early twenties. It was a lot of money (for me at the time, at least) for a short burst of extremely hard work, and I went with two of my good friends. That was over a decade ago now, but it really made an impression on me. It was a pretty memorable experience! The germ of the book really came from remembering how, as the harvest went on, more and more beets would just show up everywhere because they’d bounce off trucks or wind up in our cars, so by the end of the harvest it was like the whole town was covered in beets. It was like a beet apocalypse. That, and remembering how my coworkers would just, like, leave the harvest randomly throughout the few weeks we were there. It was a transient kind of job, so it wasn’t that odd that people would just pack up their RVs and leave when they got tired of it and no one really cared or made a fuss about it. But I thought: what if these people weren’t actually leaving? What if something else was happening?
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I love that, actually. My favorite stories are anxiety spirals. Living with anxiety or depression or general mental unwellness is horrific, and I think it’s validating to watch your internal struggle externalized on the page or screen. Movies like Good Time and Mother!, books like All’s Well and Fever Dream – those are my absolute top tier fiction experiences. I love a story that feels like a nightmare you can’t shake off after waking up, and that’s definitely the vibe I wanted for Beta Vulgaris.
Elise had a kind of interesting journey as a character, I think. It was not my intention when I started writing for it to be such a character study, but the more I wrote the more I remembered what it’s like to be young, insecure, broke, aimless and mentally ill. You can look back with more emotional stability and perspective and say, “oh, I guess I didn’t really need to be doing all that” but when you’re living it, you’re living it. The things Elise experiences are actually kind of mundane, compared to the surreal backdrop of the harvest, but those things are what can make you feel like your life is falling apart even when everything is basically fine.
In my earliest drafts I really let my inner 23-year-old go ham on the page – just let Elise feel bad about herself all the time, really relentless. As you might imagine, that wasn’t very fun for readers! I knew Elise would end up being annoying or unlikeable to at least some people, and thought even my ideal reader would probably want to tell her to shut up sometimes, but I did need to figure out how to make her tolerable. Each draft I probably took out a little more of her doom and gloom and added a little bit of levity and self-awareness until I got to a point that felt both true to her character and experience and also not a slog for the reader.
I thought your ability to channel a young woman at that stage of life was really amazing. I’m in my 60s, and the way you wrote her character brought back all the same angst I felt in my own 20s, all those years ago! (And it wasn’t a good feeling, haha! It was a little too close to home!)
I’m going to use the spoiler tag here because I’d like to talk about Elise’s journey a little more and I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone.
I think it’s interesting that you chose to have Elise join the beets rather than somehow recover and leave the harvest. What went into your decision to take the ending in that direction?
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What was the most fun part about writing the book? What was the least fun part and/or the most stressful?
I have a bias towards ambiguity and unhappy endings, so that definitely played a role in my decision! But I also liked the kind of dark liberation of the ending as it is – Elise does get what she wants, even if it’s not what we want for her. I think there’s something really interesting and powerful in watching a character fulfill their own desires when those desires are at odds with what the reader might want for them.
Getting to be weird was the most fun, for sure. I feel very creatively fulfilled by looking at something normal and thinking, “OK, but what if something wrong happened here?” Getting to work in dream-logic and surrealism, finding ways to be recursive in the way certain things keep showing up–that’s all SUPER fun for me. The most stressful was plotting. I knew the beginning and the end from the jump, but a novel sure has a whole lot of stuff going on in the middle. Pacing was an issue, and finding enough interesting, propulsive elements to sustain the reader’s attention was definitely a challenge. There were a lot more chapters in early drafts that were just there to be weird and eerie but which didn’t ultimately serve the plot.
It takes time & dedication to write a novel. What inspired you to make that effort or what made it possible for you to take time out of your life to complete the book?
What was the process like to get the novel published? With the unusual premise I feel like it must have been a challenge.
I got extremely lucky and had the leisure to write the novel as my thesis project for my MFA. I had a year where my only job was to write this book. I even got a grant from my program to go back to the harvest for a few days for research! I am even more grateful for those circumstances now that I’m on the other side, trying to write and work at the same time–it’s much harder!
I feel I was lucky here, too! My amazing agent actually sought me out after reading my story “Behavioral Sink”, which won the Calvino Prize in 2019. She agreed to represent me after reading the manuscript but it took about two or three years after signing for us to have a version of the book that someone wanted to publish. Lots and lots and LOTS of words wound up in the trash 
We went out on two rounds of submissions, with a heavy revision after the first batch of rejections. Looking back, it was a really anxious time. My agent sent me updates every two weeks and I always dreaded “update day”, haha. So many “great book but not right for us” responses. We finally got interest from a university press–which I was really excited about, because having your first book picked up at all is amazing!–when W.W. Norton swept in at the last minute with an offer. That was quite the plot twist, and I’ve had a great experience with them.
In retrospect, I don’t think the premise was the hard sell, but the delivery. It’s a very insular, slow burn book. I think that’s probably a hard sell for a debut author. Which is why I’m so grateful that there were at least a couple editors out there willing to give it a chance!
Wow, that sounds so stressful! I admire you for sticking with it. Did you have others helping you with edits and/or making suggestions, or was it just you & your agent? And do you let others read your work while it’s in process, or do you generally wait until it’s fairly finished?