The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of their books’ releases. This issue features Lara Stapleton.
What is your most recent book?
The Ruin of Everything, a short story collection published by Paloma Press (2021).
What has been the response/what has surprised you most about the response?
The book was very nicely reviewed by a small amount of publications, one of which was The New York Times. Being reviewed by them was just stunning, and the review was both celebratory and somewhat snarky. The reviewer noticed something that I had not really put my finger on, that I write with poetic flashes. I suppose I knew that, but hadn’t identified it as a trademark element of my style, but I really enjoyed that and another review mentioned it also. I’m glad to be seen as having that unique signature. On one review I knew the writer hadn’t read my book but had gleaned some information from other reviews. Ha ha. It didn’t sell very well. I’m okay with that. I don’t let those kinds of things bother me. It took me so long to publish it, life has been challenging in other ways, I can’t be bothered to be hurt by that. I was glad to get it out there, and Aileen Cassinetto, my publisher, of Paloma Press, was such a dream to work with, so supportive and easygoing.
Tell me something not obvious or known about the book.
Something I find kind of fun about the book is that the figure on the cover looks like me, but is not me! I found it on a website of Filipino-American artists, and I love the image, by Dr. Nanette Cacorda Catigbe. The woman is somewhat performative, maarte, she seems to be someone exaggerating her troubles, which matched perfectly to a somewhat self-pitying voice I use sometimes. I think it adds a layer of interpretation, post-modernist, and that she looks like me, and I name a character “Lara Stapleton,” is kind of incredible. I named a character after me to continue testing boundaries of characters, and for fun, really. It surprised me that people say I’m funny sometimes when I think I’m very heavy, but I’m glad they think so.
What are you working on right now?
I haven’t really figured out how to explain this to my satisfaction yet, so for now, I’m going to say the novel I’m writing is about my friend Juan who passed away last year, and I’ll explain it by talking about him. He was the most incredibly loving person; everybody thought he was their best friend. He also had intense intimacy issues. He was an odd boyfriend and a skilled and agile friend. He had a New York accent like he grew up in Washington Heights but he was raised in Liverpool, born in Chile. He was very transparent, in the sense that his first priority in everything was to be loving, he expressed love all day long, but he had some strange secrets that came out after he passed. He was mostly friends with women, strange for a heterosexual man, I admire him for that, and he was extraordinarily kind and supportive, but a cagey and frustrating boyfriend, as I learned through my desire to commune with others who loved him after he passed. The novel is a way to continue carrying him with me. We became friends extremely gradually, and had only been close a few months before he died, but he was one of those people I was made high by knowing. I think perhaps I will say the novel is an argument that our extension of love can heal us much more than we believe, and that much suffering is made by the withholding of it, I think it’s a particular problem with New York’s competitive type-A intelligentsia, he was an antidote to that, but of course, not only in our circles. Also, I want to argue that we don’t have to be perfect to be loving.
*****
Lara Stapleton was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan, her maternal family is from the Philippines. New York City is her homeland. She is the author of two short story collections, The Ruin of Everything (Paloma Press) and The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute Press), an Independent Booksellers' Selection, and a Pen Open Book Committee Selection. She edited The Thirdest World (Factory School) and co-edited Juncture (Soft Skull). Her work has appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The LA Review of Books, Poets and Writers, The Brooklyn Rail, Ms., Glimmer Train, and The Indiana Review.
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