Books
The Animal Room
Coming June 9, 2026 - Grove Atlantic
From the award-winning author of The Wonder Garden comes a set of linked stories spotlighting human-animal relations—and revealing the tensions that threaten to fracture a suburban New England community
Featuring “Dominion,” selected for THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2025
The boundaries between humans and animals blur as tensions simmer in small-town Connecticut. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong? Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from award-winning author Lauren Acampora.
As in Acampora’s debut The Wonder Garden, The Animal Room delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers, and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on human nature. Through its riveting ensemble, The Animal Room paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary American life that is strikingly unique.
“Riveting… Acampora’s generously written characters try to navigate the rich, tenuous tapestry of modern life with a fractured understanding of one another… With her two Old Cranbury collections, Acampora imagines a small town and its memorably conflicted inhabitants as indelibly as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge stories and as intricately woven as Jennifer Egan’s ‘Goon Squad’ cycle.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Acampora reminds her readers that humans are never far removed from their wild roots… Fans of Karen Russell's short fiction and readers who enjoyed the suburban drama of Tom Perrotta's Little Children, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere, or the tight-knit community explored in Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge will savor Acampora's latest. Wielding scalpel-sharp wit and a cool aloofness, Acampora brings her unique perspective on the American suburb to The Animal Room.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Intelligent and shimmering”—Publishers Weekly
“Transcendent. In this dazzling panoply of intersecting lives and stories, Acampora explores our relationship to the animal in all its forms and throws into profound relief our great and tragic humanity. A marvelous feat of imagination and empathy.”—Mona Awad, author of Bunny
"The Animal Room is an epic novel cut into sections and scattered along a trail for readers to gather up. It appears initially to be a collection of stories about the connections between humans and animals. Each story, however, proves to be part of an intricately-realized overstory of remarkable scope and depth. Every life, every being, from the rescue dog to its rescuers, proves to be interrelated in ways only the writer, and the reader, are able to see. It’s a stunning accomplishment."—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
"Piercing and unsettling, the stories in The Animal Room stalk through small-town Connecticut—the wild pressing against fences and windows, the feral lurking beneath the neighborly. With precision and dark wit, Acampora exposes a community where class tensions and primal instincts coil in uneasy proximity: the civilized veneer has always been thin here, and something is scratching at it from both sides. These sentences are tensile and gleaming—Acampora is a major talent."—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
The Hundred Waters
With this gem of a novel, Acampora cements herself as a thrilling voice in fiction.”—Booklist, starred review
Celebrated by the Boston Globe as “a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs,” the seductively weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the lush world that got us all hooked on NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, drawing us into the secret lives of a polished Connecticut haven and jolting us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide
Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she's married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she's grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders’ world forever.
A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the price of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.
Praise for The Hundred Waters
“With this gem of a novel, Acampora cements herself as a thrilling voice in fiction.”—Booklist, starred review
“A thrilling drama”—Vogue (A Best Book of 2022)
”In the tradition of territory-marking novelists John Cheever and John Updike, Lauren Acampora expertly captures deep-pocketed suburban restlessness in The Hundred Waters… Through its delicate narrative circuitry and roving point of view, the novel gradually exposes a community that's in crisis without even knowing it.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review
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“Questions of the pursuit of art, stagnation, youth and aging, and how to exist on a planet that is, increasingly, made up solely of emergencies, are grounded in the richness (no pun intended) of Sylvie and Louisa’s characters. And, as in The Paper Wasp, Acampora’s descriptions of the strangeness of artworks are not to be missed.” —Lit Hub, Best Summer Reads
“With a fluid writing style and a plot that moves along quickly, Acampora’s absorbing new work is an excellent choice for book discussion groups. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal,starred review
“Acampora weaves a tale of artistic ambition, climate activism, and the seductive allure of extravagant wealth. Told in the author's signature lush prose… [T]his is an enchanting pool…” —Kirkus Reviews
“Arresting… Acampora achieves a sharp and tense depiction of an illusory and stultifying haven.” —Publishers Weekly
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You’ve often written about class anxiety in suburbia. In The Hundred Waters, there is also a layer of environmental anxiety. Can you talk about why this backdrop is so useful for examining our climate crisis?
One reason is that it’s home. I grew up in a Connecticut suburb much like Nearwater, and I now live in a New York suburb that’s not hugely different. I’m continually drawn to this setting in my fiction because it’s eminently familiar and also because it’s the sort of place that lulls residents into warm feelings of comfort and control. The lush suburban town of Nearwater in The Hundred Waters is so beautiful and well-maintained that it’s almost unearthly. The quest for tranquility, privacy, and aesthetic perfection is powerfully enabled by serious money. People operate under the impression that ease and beauty can be purchased, that by cultivating a tight sphere of influence one might earn the right to shut out the greater world and its conflicts and conflagrations. There’s an underlying delusion that the climate crisis couldn’t ever reach this place—a place so beautiful, safe, and permanent.
But beneath such delusion lurks a great deal of anxiety. The anticipation of coming catastrophe must be continually quashed. The news headlines are a drumbeat of calamity: forest fires, floods, hurricanes. The truth is that the climate crisis is at the door, whether of a mobile home or a gated stone estate. This can be thought of as an offshoot of class anxiety, in a way. Class can’t protect you, in the end. In the case of the Raders, their high-design home is literally made of glass. Although their immediate surroundings are curated and manicured, the family is largely exposed and vulnerable to the outside. Richard, the husband-architect, in a hubristic temptation of fate, has purposefully designed the house this way. They live in a vitrine, and a vein of apprehension underlies their everyday lives. Their house is fragile, just as their home life is fragile; their peaceful world can very suddenly shatter.
This novel is deeply preoccupied with art and the art world, and you come from an artistic background and family yourself. Have you always wanted to write about art?
For me, art came first. My father was an art dealer and painter from a line of Italian artists, and from him I learned the classical techniques of drawing from life, how to see things are they really are: shapes of dark and light. Drawing and painting gave me a taste of the quasi-religious experience of flow: wordless, thoughtless, instinctive. When I began to write poems and stories, it was a different kind of exaltation—from the power of unfettered imagination, the ability to string words together into any scenario or fable at all. For a long time, I did both art and writing without making myself choose. I spent happy hours in my airy, sunlit college studio, but eventually I banged up against the limits of my classical training. I couldn’t seem to make the leap into original, imaginative production. There was exciting art in my head, but I couldn’t manage to get it out in a satisfying way. The fact that I finally gave up trying might have also had something to do with my dislike of the jobs that came with art: stapling canvases onto wooden stretchers and priming them. I didn’t love lugging out the supplies or dealing with the paint tubes and turpentine. I tried photography, video, and digital art, but again was stymied by materials. The dark-room process drove me nuts, and I felt alienated by the technicalities of video and digital art.
Instead, I wrote. All I needed was pen and paper. In New York, I brought my notebook with me everywhere and wrote in parks and the subway and the MoMA courtyard. I found that being around art lit me up—absorbing the varied styles and media and general wildness. I rediscovered the rush I’d first felt as a child when I realized I could invent anything with words. I could produce any story, any image in a reader’s mind, in the simplest possible way. I realized I could channel my fascination with artists into my writing. Artists are often obsessive, and obsessives are my favorite characters. I could temporarily be an artist myself while writing about them. I could brazenly make artwork on any scale, without the restrictions of space and time or expensive materials—beaming big, ambitious pieces out of my head and directly into readers’ minds without getting out of my chair. In my short stories, I’ve mounted a large-scale photography exhibition and filled a Chelsea gallery with taxidermy art. In The Wonder Garden, I covered a mansion with individually sculpted rubber insects. In The Paper Wasp, I built an indoor stingray tank in a bathroom. In The Hundred Waters, I made public art installations, spray-painted a wall mural, screened video art, and covered an entire building with turf.
The Austrian visual artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser figures prominently in the book and the character Gabriel’s environmentalism. How did his work come to have such a central role in the novel?
My husband introduced me to Hundertwasser on our first date. I’d mentioned that I needed plants in my apartment, and Thomas told me about this Austrian artist who’d written about the importance of greenery in city dwellings, and who called plants “tree tenants.” After the date, he sent me the catalog from KunstHausWien, the museum in Vienna that houses much of Hundertwasser’s work. The artwork was so colorful and manic, with feverish paintings and carnivalesque buildings sprouting trees from their windows and roofs. Beyond his prodigious artistic and architectural output, he also designed utopian city plans, postage stamps, flags, and license plates that reflected his environmental concerns. I was particularly struck by his plans for villages covered with turf, dwellings incorporated into rolling land. He had a casketless natural burial in New Zealand, where his body joined directly with earth in a plot he called the “Garden of the Happy Dead.”
The very first spark for The Hundred Waters came to me during the height of my fascination with Hundertwasser. I wanted to create a modern-day protégé, a young artist attempting to fashion himself in that image, and with a similar preoccupation with nature and the sovereignty of the earth. The name the artist gave himself, Hundertwasser, translates to “hundred waters,” and so he seemed a fitting totem for a young person who thinks of himself as a kind of ark-building Noah figure. Gabriel wants to sound the alarm about coming disaster, specifically the rising sea levels and flooding of climate change—but he also invites (and ultimately creates) disaster as a righteous punishment for humankind, which he considers a selfish, arrogant, gluttonous species.
What other art or movies or books helped you shape The Hundred Waters?
The first notions for the novel originally came to me in a dream. It wasn’t so much as a story as a series of images, a kind of aesthetic tone. I tried to infuse the novel with those original visual elements. From an imagistic angle, artists whose work influenced the book include Bill Viola, Nan Goldin, and Robert Mapplehorpe.
Ancient earthworks were a big inspiration for this book and for Gabriel’s character, in particular Irish burial cairns, the giant white horses carved in chalk in England, and the early Native American effigy mounds that were shaped like animals, such as Serpent Mound in Ohio and Great Bear Mound in Iowa.
As for movies, the setting of American Beauty and the character of Ricky, the philosophical teenaged artist boy, probably shaded the book. The same goes for The Ice Storm, novel and movie both. Other films set in New York City’s art and club scene may have had some influence on my concept of Louisa, like High Art, After Hours, and Downtown 81.
Having grown up in the Catholic church, the stories of the Bible are a strong force in Gabriel’s life and artwork, especially the tales of impending disaster: the great flood, Christ’s last supper, and of course the apocalypse. He models much of his art on the Book of Revelation’s beasts of doom. And for me, Kierkegaard’s writings were a grounding element in the novel, especially his notion of the Knight of Faith: an impossible figure who paradoxically inhabits both the finite and infinite simultaneously—total despair and complete faith at once.
The role of animals is so powerful and nearly surreal in this story. There is also a kind of Tiger King character, Roy Fox, who keeps exotic animals on his private estate. How did this character come to you?
I wrote a short story about Roy Fox before he entered the novel. He’s a retired oil executive who collects exotic animals on the outskirts of a well-heeled suburban town. The original inspiration came from a gorgeous estate near my home that contains a great variety of surprising creatures, and where my young daughter once had a run-in with a wildcat. In subsequent drafts of the novel, it occurred to me that Gabriel could be involved with this estate. To him, the retired oil executive Roy Fox would represent the intractable wickedness of the powerful, those who refuse to halt the global emergency and instead worsen it.
Do you write all of your fiction into the same universe?
I haven’t set out to do this, but it keeps happening. Connections suggest themselves to me, and I can’t resist following them. I find myself “inventing” characters who soon reveal themselves to be characters I already know. The Hundred Waters and The Wonder Garden (my first book of linked stories) weren’t originally conceived as taking place in neighboring towns, but it occurred to me that of course they were. That’s when I began letting characters from The Wonder Garden poke into the novel, taking on cameo roles and insinuating themselves into the book via local lore. Even Auguste Perren, the reclusive film director from The Paper Wasp, has a small part in the book in the form of a still photograph at the art center gala. I think it’s delightful when authors link characters, places, and events throughout their body of work. As I work on and consider new projects, I find myself imagining what roles my pre-existing characters might play in them. I’d love to keep expanding this loosely cohesive world so that more characters and events are mapped and have the freedom to return in ways that surprise a reader, and me.
The Paper Wasp
An electrifying debut novel from the acclaimed author of The Wonder Garden, The Paper Wasp is a riveting knife-edge story of two women’s dark friendship of twisted ambition set against the backdrop of contemporary Hollywood
In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. At night Abby escapes through the films of her favorite director, Auguste Perren, a cult figure known for his creative institute the Rhizome. Inspired by Perren, Abby draws fantastical storyboards based on her often premonitory dreams, a visionary gift she keeps hidden.
When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, she is surprised and warmed that Elise still considers her not only a friend but a brilliant storyteller and true artist. Elise’s unexpected faith in Abby reignites in her a dormant hunger, and when Elise offhandedly tells Abby to look her up if she’s ever in LA, Abby soon arrives on her doorstep. There, Abby discovers that although Elise is flourishing professionally, behind her glossy magazine veneer she is lonely and disillusioned. Ever the supportive friend, Abby becomes enmeshed in Elise’s world, even as she guards her own dark secret and burning desire for greatness. As she edges closer to Elise and to her own artistic ambitions, the dynamic shifts between the two friends—until Abby can see only one way to grasp the future that awaits her.
The Paper Wasp is a thrilling, unexpected journey into the psyche and imagination of a woman determined to fulfill her destiny from one of our most unique and incisive writers.
Praise for The Paper Wasp
“Take ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ cross it with ‘Suspiria,’ add a dash of ‘La La Land’ and mix it all at midnight and this arty psychological stalker novel is what might result.” -New York Times Book Review
“Hypnotic and sensual…Acampora’s prose has a seductive, pearlescent allure, even when she’s addressing doomed friendships, friends who can never live up to our expectations, friends who betray.” -TIME Magazine
“A hypnotic tale of codependence that skewers our fascination with gossip and fame.” -Oprah Magazine
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"…a razor-edged tale of female friendship.” -Town & Country
“Acampora’s debut novel is a thrilling tale of a twisted friendship, obsession and ambition…an unsettling, compelling read.” -Tatler
“Acampora’s accomplished prose style and the complexity of the themes she addresses catapults this story into the freshly minted category of literary psycho thriller.” -Daily Mail (UK)
“Acampora’s kaleidoscopic narrative shifts fluidly from Abby’s strange, shimmering images to Elise’s descent into tabloid erasure, artfully tracking the unexpected power shift between them.” -Jane Ciabattari, BBC
“Gripping and nuanced.” -The Irish Times
“This electrifying debut novel is a dark portrayal of female friendship, set against the backdrop of contemporary Hollywood. An arty thriller that takes a piercing look at obsession and the warped side of human psyche.” -Book Riot
“…the strangest, most intriguing literary debut of the year…a highly specific portrait of a particularly virulent strain of Hollyweirdness.” -The Hollywood Reporter
“[Acampora’s] writing is sublime, and she mines complexity and truth from each and every character.”-The Day
“Lauren Acampora’s The Paper Wasp is sublime—and a highly original debut.” -Image Magazine (Ireland)
“Utterly bizarre and completely bewitching, this twisted, delicious tale will grab you from the first page and hurl you over the edge.” -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Acampora's linked short story collection, The Wonder Garden, electrified literary critics, and this deeply disturbing, wildly inventive, and completely unpredictable debut novel is sure to do the same. Abby and Elise will be haunting readers' dreams long after the last page.” - Library Journal (starred review)
“An unsettling and surreal excavation of the boundless depths of the human psyche…a piercing, disquieting novel.” -Publishers Weekly
“Penny-bright, heartfelt, and compulsively readable.”-Library Journal“
“This electrifying story from acclaimed author Lauren Acampora presents a dark and twisted friendship that will leave you on the edge of your seat… This novel excellently displays the mind and imagination of a determined, goal-oriented woman willing to do almost anything in order to achieve her dreams.” -Tallahassee Woman Magazine
“The Paper Wasp is a dark fable on the nature of friendship, fame, and the way dreams can influence our waking life.” -Zyzzyva
“It seems at first a novel of friendship between women—a rich vein for any writer—but in The Paper Wasp, Lauren Acampora upends convention, creating an unsettling (and impossible to put down) story about art and ambition, fame and power.” —Rumaan Alam, author of That Kind of Mother
“A lyrical, provocative, imaginative page turner that makes the world feel new again, The Paper Wasp is both a stunning portrait of a fixated woman and an addictive, modern commentary on an eternal theme of obsession. In her glittering, goosebump-inducing prose, Lauren Acampora gives us a soul trip/head trip/rarefied LA trip replete with surrealism and social commentary.”—Caroline Kepnes, author of You
“The Paper Wasp is a crazy joy ride of a novel; a bold and joyous take on female friendship, outsider ambition and the secret powers of loners. It gives us a heroine who is selfish, weird, and manipulative, and makes us root for her with all our selfish, weird, and manipulative hearts. I loved every second of it.”—Sandra Newman, author of The Heavens
“Acampora is an exquisite stylist who misses no shade or psychological texture and who also plumbs depths of feeling in note-perfect prose that leaves one stunned at the artistry on display. The Paper Wasp is a powerful statement of aesthetic purpose, and an unalloyed triumph.”—Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves
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How did this book come to you? What was the spark?
There were two sparks. One was the “fairy tale” story of the wholesome girl from the Midwest transformed into a glamorous movie star. More than the success story itself, though, I was interested in the people a girl like this would leave behind. What would it feel like to be a childhood friend watching the fairy tale play out from a distance?
The other spark came from my own high school reunions, which are always attended by our own celebrity classmate. It really is uncanny to encounter a face in person that's both familiar and famous at once. There's always an added degree of excitement at our reunions because of this, along with an unspoken, disorienting awareness of fame in our midst. Fame throws people off balance. And how strange it must be for a celebrity, too, to sense this sharpened awareness, this invisible aura around herself—a magnetic field both positive and negative. It must be challenging to re-encounter old friends and acquaintances through that distorting haze of fame.
Can you tell us about the paper wasp and how it behaves in nature? How does this relate to your characters?
For the most part, the paper wasp queen builds a nest by herself and dominates over the subsequent colony until she dies. The queen devotes much of her time to social interaction, whereas the workers (who remain unmated) devote most of their time to foraging and brood care. What's interesting, and what surprised me to learn about paper wasps, is that sometimes when a queen fails to establish a nest of her own she will integrate herself into another queen's colony and become a subordinate worker. Sometimes this joiner (usually a sister of the queen) will achieve dominance over the founding queen and take control of the nest. This is called usurpation, when the tables are turned and the newcomer becomes the queen and the queen is demoted to worker. There's a story right there.
If you've ever seen one, you know that a paper wasp nest is a sophisticated, beautiful construction: a honeycomb-shaped shelter made from hundreds of tiny cells. Amazingly, a single wasp creates this architectural feat entirely from fibrous pulp made from chewed bits of weathered wood. The idea of constructing a habitat out of nothing but one's own saliva strikes me as an apt metaphor for the art-making process.
Throughout the book you interweave film, art, and lots of dream imagery. Did you set out wanting to incorporate these elements or did they come up in your writing process?
Initially no, but as I expanded the original short story into a novel and Abby’s character deepened and came into focus, I understood that Abby was an artist, and that the conflict that animates the story—the conflict at the heart of this friendship—springs fundamentally from this fact. Artists are driven by two things: the desire to create, and the desire to disseminate. I realized I wasn't writing story about friendship so much as an allegory about art.
To me, the creative process is intertwined with dreams. Both art and dreams spring from a mysterious well of the unconscious. Much of my own writing has been sparked by dream images and scenarios.
Many of the best books, films, and art pieces are like dreams in that they affect us on a deeply emotional level beyond language. The act of creating a piece of art—a book, a painting, a film—is itself tantamount to creating a dream for someone else to experience. Film in particular has such an immersive nature; it's truly the creation of another world—visual, audible, temporal. Film also offers a wonderful means of artistic dissemination. That's why, more than any other medium, Abby considers film to the be the ultimate vehicle for her ideas. Her goal is to get her images and stories out of the poster tubes in her closet and onto screens in front of audiences.
As for Abby's character, I'm reminded of Jenny Offill’s wonderful novel, Department of Speculation, in which she coins the term “art monster.” You could argue that Abby is mentally ill, or you could argue that she’s an art monster. She's driven to do what she needs to do to make her art and get it in front of an audience. This kind of creatively-consumed character is my favorite kind of character. I often find myself writing about people like this, who are blinded by their own vision and ambition, and indifferent to or ignorant of the effect their actions have on others.
What books, films, and artists have influenced you as a writer?
The influences wax and wane depending on the type of story or book I'm writing. In terms of The Paper Wasp, the most important figure has to be David Lynch. His dreamlike films and art are sui generis, emerging from the deepest well of consciousness, or unconsciousness, as the case may be. Like all true artists, he seems to be utterly unconcerned with contemporary trends. His work scares the hell out of me and is often hard to take, but it's also shot through with breathtaking beauty and purity and puts the viewer in a kind of altered state.
As for books, I'm passionate about Donna Tartt's novels. The Secret History, in particular, has made a deep impression on me. The novel's atmosphere and imagery are gorgeously palpable, suffused with glittering snow and darkness, and its characters feel mythical. The story has an aura of inevitability, of legend.
As for visual artists, I've been most influenced by my father, Ray Acampora, who taught me to draw and paint when I was young. He explained the concept of chiaro e scuro, saying, "Make your darks dark and your lights light," and showed me how to approach a canvas by "painting all over the place" and not getting stuck in a cozy corner of a composition. These lessons have carried over to my writing. Another prominent artist in my life is my husband, Thomas Doyle, whose work either influences mine or grows out of our shared garden of space and time—it's hard to tell which.
The work of Henry Darger, commonly considered an "outsider artist," has also seeped into my consciousness, especially with respect to this book. The work is fantastical, at turns savage and rhapsodic, and I can't help but associate his obsessive murals with Abby's strange and visionary artwork.
You also examine motherhood in a way that is unexpected and darker than what we usually see. Did you want to subvert the stereotype of women as perfect mothers or twist that in some way?
In this book—and in life—children, especially infants, symbolize pure creative potential. When I was a new mother, I remember feeling reluctant to expose my newborn to the coarse world; I wanted to preserve her pure state of being as long as possible. She seemed to still be part of another realm, swimming in the unconscious so to speak, and it seemed sad that everything she saw and heard and touched from the moment of birth onward would violate that purity and shrink her notion of herself. I think of it as a change from being everything to being one thing. From all to I.
You could argue that Abby is more suited to motherhood than the other women in the book because she understands this. She recognizes and cherishes children as powerful creative conduits and is concerned about protecting them. The book is full of child endangerment, whether it be through the opioid epidemic in the Midwest, alcoholism in Malibu, violence in Central America, or the mistreatment of migrants at the U.S. border.
THE PAPER WASP looks at Hollywood glamour and tabloid fame, but also touches on some very serious, topical issues like the migrant crisis and opioid epidemic. Was it important to you to address these issues?
Yes. The source of Abby’s anxiety and depression is the cruelty of the world. Art is her sole defense against the darkness and death she sees everywhere. She’s more sensitive than most, perhaps, or else she lacks the conventional ability to tune out the constant stream of calamity in order to live day to day. It was important to illustrate the real tragedies happening now in order to underline why her character behaves the way she does.
There's a quote from a Theodore Roethke poem: "What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?" Abby's actions are in fact the only "noble" ways she can cope with the darkness around her.
A question at the heart of the novel is: what are we to do in the face of darkness and disaster?
The Wonder Garden
A man strikes an under-the-table deal with a surgeon to spend a few quiet seconds closer to his wife than he’s ever been; a young soon-to-be mother looks on in paralyzing astonishment as her husband walks away from a fifteen-year career in advertising at the urging of his spirit animal; an elderly artist risks more than he knows when he’s commissioned by his newly arrived neighbors to produce the work of a lifetime.
In her stunning debut The Wonder Garden, Lauren Acampora gathers with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These intricately interwoven stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, the supposedly ordinary lives they lead, and the secrets they try so desperately to hide. Acampora’s characters are neighbors, lovers, friends, who, beneath their dreamy suburban surface, are nothing like they appear. These incisive tales reveal at each turn the unseen battles we play out behind drawn blinds, the creeping truths from which we distract ourselves, and the massive dreams we haul quietly with us and hold close.
Deliciously creepy and masterfully choreographed, The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.
Praise for The Wonder Garden
"I thought of [Edith] Wharton when reading Lauren Acampora's stylish debut..." -Alix Ohlin, New York Times Book Review
"Acampora's ability to lay bare the heartaches of complex individuals within an utterly unique imaginative world is worthy of high praise." - Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
"In 13 sharply drawn linked stories, Acampora reveals the complexities beneath the polish and privilege of a prosperous Connecticut town." - People Magazine
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"...well-drawn characters, interesting plots, cultural zingers and dead-on critiques of consumerism...Acampora delivers a page-turner." - Martha Sheridan, The Dallas Morning News
"A wonderful debut by a striking talent." -Chris Schluep, Amazon.com
"This debut demands to be savored. Editor's recommendation." -Barnes & Noble
"A smashing debut, with range, subtlety and bite. Reading Acampora, we're In Cheever country, with hints of Flannery O'Connor." -Jane Ciabattari, BBC
"The Wonder Garden...carries a razor-sharp edge of dark satire and lands Acampora firmly on my list of writers to watch." - Poornima Apte, Book Browse
"[Acampora's] well-plotted, incisive and beautifully written fiction will encourage all of us to think about how our lives intersect with our neighbors', like it or not." - Nora Piehl, Book Reporter
"Prose...nothing short of masterful." - Christopher Schultz, Lit Reactor
"A magnificent debut." - David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"A smartly written and satisfying collection." - Zack Ravas, ZYZZYVA
"Intelligent, unnerving, and very often strange." -Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
"Spooky and fabulous... A clear-eyed lens into the strange, human wants of upper-class suburbia." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Acampora wields prose with the precision of a scalpel . . . [She] brilliantly captures the heartaches and delusions of American suburbanites.” -Booklist (starred review)
"The stories in Acampora's first collection are so vivid, tightly plotted, and expertly woven that they make you look forward to reading more by this accomplished author." -Library Journal (starred review)
"The world depicted in Lauren Acampora’s stories seems reassuringly familiar, until it becomes unaccountably strange and unsettling. One moment we seem to be in Cheever’s Westchester, the next we plunge through the looking glass into realms that may remind some readers of George Saunders or Robert Coover or the David Lynch of Blue Velvet, though, inevitably, all resemblances prove to be superficial. Acampora is an original and The Wonder Garden is an outstanding debut."
-Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City and How It Ended"A dark and brilliant collection of stories. Lauren Acampora is a terrific writer."
- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland and The Dog"Here in the suburb of Old Cranbury, where the lawns are carefully tended and life is coated with a veneer of normalcy, Lauren Acampora shines a bright light on the mysteries of human emotions. These perceptive, riveting stories give us the opportunity to explore the hidden tumult of a prosperous community and to discover its dramatic secrets."
- Joanna Scott, De Potter’s Grand Tour"Like the famous opening scene in Blue Velvet, Lauren Acampora's The Wonder Garden pulls us under the surface of that most carefully tended American garden, the prosperous suburb, to lay bare its dark underbelly. The Wonder Garden is wondrous, and its stories are addictive. I dreaded coming to the end."
- Susan Choi, My Education"The Wonder Garden is a beautiful book: witty, intelligent, deeply compassionate, and gorgeously crafted. Lauren Acampora is uncannily skilled at chronicling the emotional lives of her characters with the same razor-sharp precision as she does the suburban landscape that surrounds them. I can't stop thinking about these stories."
- Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans"Acampora's linked stories about one Connecticut town vividly explore dark interiors as well as polished facades. The Wonder Garden is an elegant construction and a chronicle of the surprising ways in which suburban lives intersect. Lauren Acampora is a writer of extraordinary dexterity."
- Elliott Holt, You Are One of Them"I loved The Wonder Garden. Acampora's writing moves like a laser through her characters' souls, finding the deepest, darkest truths and delusions. Every story surprises. Every story is devastating. Like Mad Men set in the present day, but better."
- Heidi Pitlor, The Daylight Marriage -
What made you want to write about the dark side of American suburbia?
It's funny—I don't know that I set out to write about the dark side of suburbia, or even suburbia, per se. In fact, the book started out as something very different. And yet the town of Old Cranbury did become critical to these stories, the nucleus shared by all the characters, almost a character itself. Isolation, anxiety and intolerance exist in every human setting, of course—urban, suburban or rural—but the straight answer to why these stories take place in suburbia is that it's what I know best, and what I see every day.
I grew up in a town much like Old Cranbury, and now live in a suburban town in Westchester County, New York. My hometown was, in a sense, a paradise—my mother called it "La La Land"—where financial inequality was nearly invisible, and easily forgotten. The town was such an extreme example of privileged living that it served as a kind of lightning rod for its residents. Some of the people I grew up with were rabidly proud of living there, while others disdained it and couldn't get away fast enough. This kind of town, like all human attempts at paradise, continues to fascinate me—and I am intrigued by how various types of people interact within it.
After a number of years in New York City, I returned to the suburbs with new eyes. I now live in a beautiful town (really the farthest reaches of the suburbs, semi-rural in places), and love every minute of it. I love driving past gorgeously renovated antique homes and horse farms and imagining the lives inside. I love imagining those people, who they are and who they want to be, and wondering whether those identities mesh—whether they are experiencing the happiness that such homes seem to advertise.
What has living in the suburbs revealed to you about the pressure of community expectations and class anxiety?
The suburbs are uniquely defined by tightly circumscribed property lines; private territories closely abut one another, with each house a jewel at the center. There is a dependence on neighbors to maintain a nice community image, to keep up property values. It is unsurprising that this kind of setting gives rise to insecurities and conflicts that may not exist elsewhere. I'm aware of this every time I feel self-conscious about my own untended yard, or proud of a new paint job. What a strong tendency it is, after all, to think of our homes as extensions of ourselves. Like our clothing, we use them to project our identities, and we look for clues in the homes of others that might help us understand—or at least pigeonhole—them. It's such a deep-seated human instinct, to judge others in order to elevate the self, and, in this country at least, it often finds its expression via real estate.
And, indeed, in the affluent suburbs, an almost palpable class anxiety can sometimes be found. All sorts of tension exists between the old guard and the new, separated by just a half-click or so in the socioeconomic hierarchy, in either direction. Not to mention the uneasy snobbery toward arrivistes, the rankling against those who are more demonstrative with their wealth, the affront of seeing extravagant new houses splayed upon tear-down lots where perfectly nice old Colonials used to stand. In writing The Wonder Garden, it was interesting to imagine how this kind of class tension might play out on an individual level.
John Cheever, Richard Yates and Tom Perrotta are known for their dark depictions of the American suburbs, have these writers influenced your work?
Yes, of course. Their characters and situations are so absolutely familiar to me—Cheever, in particular—that I'm sure they color my own outlook in ways I don't even recognize. I share their interest in the nature of disappointment, of facing mortality and touching the boundaries of our own limitations. How do we cope with these inevitable truths, especially in an environment like the suburbs, where there is pressure to appear kempt and content, and little in the way of urban distraction and delusion?
Another writer whose work has shaken and shaped mine is Flannery O'Connor, whose insight into the truths of her characters is at once piercing and embracing, and ultimately merciless. I feel as if there is a tiny Flannery O'Connor in my head, taking note of every ungenerous thought that flits by. I am a little bit afraid of her.
Why did you choose to write THE WONDER GARDEN as a linked short story collection? What did writing in this format enable you to do that you might not have been able to achieve otherwise?
Here's where I admit that the book actually began as a novel about Madeleine and David (the characters from "The Umbrella Bird"), tracking David's spiritual quest from Madeleine's bewildered point of view. The book didn't work; Madeleine's passive character wasn't a strong enough scaffold for a novel. Not wanting to discard everything, I thought perhaps I could at least salvage the crux of the story in a shorter form. After I did this, I realized that the root of that story's conflict was really in David's radical deviance from his conventional environment—and that there were several other minor characters in the novel who were secretly just as interesting, and deviant, in their own ways. It occurred to me that I could give them their own stories and see about weaving them together somehow.
Around this time, I happened to pick up three superb examples of interwoven short fiction: Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, and Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann. All of these, I found, achieve a depth equal to or greater than the bulkiest of novels. By interweaving and overlapping characters and playing them off one another, these books create a multi-dimensional picture of the world in an economical way that deeply engages the reader. Inspired by these models, I gave freer rein to my project, inventing additional residents of Old Cranbury (some were characters that had been bouncing around in my head for years) and letting each have their own story.
Once I chose this format, the book came alive. The last story I wrote, "Aether" (about Old Cranbury teenagers at a music festival), I saw almost as a coda—a way to bring the younger generation in, to provide an unsparing reflection of their elders. I finally had to stop myself from writing even more. It was like throwing a party, when you want to invite everyone you know and introduce them to one another.
You collaborated on the cover with your husband, Thomas Doyle, whose artwork is also preoccupied with suburban scenes. What was it like to work together? Does your work influence his and vis-a-versa?
Thomas and I are both interested in houses and their cultural and psychological symbolism. I think we're both drawn to the archetypal suburban image, the classic American home—symmetrical architecture, flowers, picket fence—and we're both compelled to explode the myth of safety and ease that it represents.
Thomas creates miniature dioramas, featuring tidy suburban houses and their tiny occupants, many of whom seem oblivious (or perhaps accustomed) to a disaster that is occurring, or about to occur, around them. There are some pretty clear parallels between his work and mine. But, whereas in my work the disaster may take the form of a cheating spouse or a troubled child, in his it manifests as a missing wall, or a huge sinkhole, or household debris scattered across the lawn as if in the wake of a tornado; almost like a direct metaphor for the kinds of trouble in my stories. And, in both his work and mine, characters often seem to be going about their lives as if all is normal.
Despite the similarity of our subjects, I don't know that we are necessarily influenced by each other's work, beyond critiquing and encouraging. It's more that we operate on parallel complementary tracks. I do think, however, that we have both been powerfully influenced by becoming suburban homeowners. I've noticed that, in these past few years, we've been creating more work set in that milieu.
We both work from home, so collaboration is natural and easy. And because our artistic visions are so similar, it's great fun. Thomas has illustrated other pieces of mine, as well, and he is the first reader of all my work, so knows it intimately. For the cover of The Wonder Garden, we agreed that the house in "Ground Fault" (white, colonial) would best represent the town, and that the figures should look like David and Madeleine arriving for their home inspection. I wanted an image that was expectant and hopeful; the first view of a house that represents beauty, success and safety for these new arrivals. The miniature figures are toy-like and, as in the rest of Thomas' work, give the sense of peering into a small world where the characters are vulnerable and at the mercy of some greater force. Viewers of his work often have the feeling of watching helplessly as these small people confront disaster; I imagine that readers of my stories may feel something like this, too.