Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of The Seaplane on Final Approach, her debut novel, published in June 2022 from Doubleday (USA) and Granta Books (UK). Her fiction has been awarded the inaugural Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Originally from Davis, California, Rebecca lives in Berlin. She teaches creative writing, most recently at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and Bard College Berlin.
The Seaplane on Final Approach is sexy, filled with dark humour and adventure, making it a perfect summer read. The book has been listed as one of the most anticipated summer releases by TIME, Lithub and Goodreads to name a few. Enjoy our conversation below!
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Could you tell me a little bit about the process of writing The Seaplane on Final Approach? In a way, the book's story feels like a farewell to a certain period of life, to the naiveties of youth. Did writing it take you back to your own teenage days? What did you feel looking back?
Oh, it’s for sure I was looking back when I was writing this! And I felt a mixture of concern for erratic teenage Rebecca and envious of teenage Rebecca’s deranged, white-hot ego.
But I was also preoccupied with what happens when we revisit our adolescence, especially when we’re looking for answers. How, as adults, we revise and reconceive the stories of our youth to align with what we see as the reality of our present. How, when we whittle down narratives to achieve the clean lines of origin stories, things get troubling. What parts of our past do we embroider? What parts do we dismiss?
And, because this book takes place in a tourist destination in Alaska, the parallels between the practice of revising personal history and larger, more sinister practice of packaging history and place as tourism.
Mira, the narrator, is a young woman who gets sent from sunny California to an isolated island in Alaska by her parents in the hopes that she’ll return “corrected” and with a new sense of purpose. But Mira decides to turn this into a quest to truly understand her obsession – sleaze. What is sleaze to you? How did it become the focal point of your book?
Two big reasons: 1) I knew I wanted to write a young woman who goes doggedly looking for trouble, for the fulfillment of a particular fantasy. Young women protagonists are still so often portrayed as uninterested in the seamier side of life, and passive to boot: people to whom sordid experience happens.
And 2) when I worked in the Alaskan tourism industry, I realized Alaska likes to sell itself in terms of purity—pristine wilderness, crystalline glaciers, the experience of being the only person for miles around.
But there’s this other side to the state. Alaska’s also an escapist paradise full of misfits and runaways and people drawn to anonymity and getting rich quick and dive bars and brawls. There’s a seedy underbelly.
So started imagining a young woman protagonist who was actively attracted—and sought out— this more sordid, sleazy Alaska, and the kind of hot-exacty-because-he’s-busted guy that embodies that.
All three girls working on Lavender Island, Mira, Erin and Polly, fall for fairly questionable characters. What is it about young, inexperienced women desiring sad, mostly old, worn-out men that works so well in a fantasy?
This dynamic is kind of an extension of the two sides of Alaska. Alaska’s purity/sleaze dichotomy becomes quickly gendered…and, because of this, quickly becomes fodder for fantasy.
All three of these young women are operating within fantasies that are so broadly heterosexual they double back into parody—the pairing of sweet femininity and rugged masculinity, innocence and experience, etc.
Mira in particular sexualizes this, getting off to this imagined tradwife future where she bakes pies and her sweetie is off commercial fishing and then he comes home and they have rough sex.
What are the sleaziest sides of Berlin?
This is difficult to answer, because sleaze exists in the eye of the beholder! And certainly people can act sleazy even in the least sleazy-seeming places.
But I also don’t think Berlin is actually all that sleazy. If you’re chasing high octane sleaze, I’d go to Vienna.
What kind of a reader are you? What are you currently reading?
Roving and omnivorous until I land on a particular author or subject—and then I’m straight-up obsessive.
Right now I’m reading Aamina Ahmad’s riveting The Return of Faraz Ali, which, as I found out during July’s heatwave, makes a great midsummer lakeside companion.
Interview by our bookseller Iti Libe
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