A Reader's Interview with Julia Phillips

Hello!

On a semi-regular basis, I talk to authors about my two favorite topics: reading and writing. This week, I’m excited to share my conversation with Julia Phillips, whose novels Disappearing Earth and Bear I took with me on my family’s road trip through New England last summer. (You can read what I wrote about that experience here.)

Reading a book is like being invited into the mind of another person. When a book is really working for me, there is often an extra layer of simpatico—a feeling that if I were to meet the author, we would hit it off immediately. I felt that way while I was reading Julia Phillips’ novels. I imagined that if we were to meet in person, we would have so much to talk about that we would keep interrupting each other with stories and book recommendations. I would say that we were “kindred spirits,” and she would know that I was referring to Anne of Green Gables, and then one of us would say “bosom friends,” and we would both laugh.

I met Julia last November at the Texas Book Festival, and our brief interaction between her panels was exactly as fun and interrupt-y as I hoped it would be. This interview came out of that connection.

I want to ask you about fairy tales, because there is this connection in Bear to the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, Snow-White and Rose Red, about two sisters who invite a bear into their home. In Bear, you turn the fantasy of a wild animal rescuing the sisters from their life of drudgery on its head. I have read that you lugged a complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales around as a kid. How were you introduced to fairy tales? Were you always aware of their false promises and darker elements?

The question of introduction is such a good one—it makes me realize I have no idea where that book, or many others on my childhood shelves, came from. I was lucky enough to grow up as the youngest child in a very bookish household. The collection of Grimms’ tales was available for me to grab, along with the Roald Dahl, the Richard Scarry, and a bunch of multicolored encyclopedias for children. I don’t remember them arriving, I just remember them there.

I certainly was aware of their darkness: they’re so explicitly bloody! Lots of people