About a week after my seventeenth birthday, I was dropped off at a therapeutic wilderness program in the high-altitude Utah desert—a boot camp for teens who’d gone off the rails. Over the previous year, I’d experienced a great unraveling. Externally almost everything about my life had remained unchanged, but internally it was like someone had hold of a loose thread and kept pulling and pulling until my whole life lost its shape. I held myself together for months, but then something gave—I couldn’t stay in my own life any longer. One morning I walked out of my first period class, got into my car, and drove across five state lines. A state trooper picked me up a few days later at a rest stop in the middle of the night. That’s when my parents decided to send me away.
When I first sat down to write this book, I thought that was the story I wanted to tell—the tale of my unraveling. But my attention kept pulling toward the desert. As lonely and strange as it had been as my life unspooled, it was even more startling to show up in this desolate place and find a bunch of strangers who’d had the same thing happen to them. We were there for so many different reasons—eating disorders, addiction, attachment issues, violence, theft, sneaking out of the house, sex, drinking, failing classes, running away, lying, self-harm; the list went on and on. But at the heart of our stories was some unnamable tension. It was like we had each swallowed a shard of the same broken glass.
The program was meant to deprive us of comfort, of agency, of distraction. Even the landscape itself was scrubby and tough—it gave nothing. The plants were designed to draw blood and the only animals we ever saw were birds. They looped overhead like they didn’t need to hunt, as if they could rely on the desert to do the killing for them.
Alongside the starkness, there was the richness to the place. All of our stories came crashing together. It was not only us; the staff members each had their own reasons for taking a job that put them in the middle of nowhere with a group of adolescent girls.
Writing about this landscape was like lifting up a rock and finding a whole teeming world of life beneath it. In early drafts of this novel I stuck too closely to the truth of my experience. I thought the power was in the reality of what happened. But the further along I got into the project, the more I realized that the heart of the story was not what happened out there in the desert but what could have happened. We had been yanked out of our homes and dropped into this alien landscape with strangers. We had no way to contact the outside world. At night, they took our shoes. We were at the mercy of the weather, the wildlife, the staff, each other. It was like living on a knife edge.
The work I’ve had to do in writing this story is the unwinding of what happened from what could have happened. As I looked back through those early drafts, I searched for the moments that hummed with danger and I pushed further into them. The book morphed—it split from its original form and became something else entirely. Now it’s the story that was lurking at the periphery all along, the story that would have taken such a small push to fall into.
Although the heat of the book lives in what unfolds out in the desert, I wanted to give the reader the sense of the machinery behind the program right from the start. I didn’t realize until I was in the desert myself that there was a whole industry built around teenage dysfunction, a business that leveraged parents’ desperation into cash. Sometimes the staff joked about how much our parents were paying for each minute, for every flavorless freeze-dried meal, for all the nights spent in our army surplus sleeping bags under cheap plastic tarps. We understood that there was privilege in coming to the desert. I’d spent a night in a juvenile detention center and I’d done seventy-two hours in the state mental hospital. This wasn’t that. In those places I was a burden, but now I was a commodity.
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In the first section of the novel published here in Shenandoah, I wanted the reader to understand the way the individual experience fits into the machinery of the industry. I knew I had to be careful to keep one from obscuring the other. Instead of zooming in and out on the scene, trying to provide a wider context for what was happening, I chose the first-person plural POV, which allowed me to stay right up close to the character without sacrificing the sense that she was caught up in a story much bigger than herself. For a while I toyed with the idea of writing the whole book this way, but as the story progressed, I understood that something would be lost if I did this. At some point, the plural had to collapse into the singular.
To publish this first section of the novel means a great deal because I’ve always been obsessed with beginnings. I believe the beginning to any story has to hold everything that the story will go on to be. Rather than writing a full draft of the novel, I wrote draft after draft of the beginning, reworked it so hard I thought the whole project might come apart. But I knew the book wouldn’t work if this first section didn’t have the grip it needed to hold the rest of the story.
As I wrote this first section, I looked ahead to the rest of the story I wanted to tell. Everything that happens in the novel is rooted in these first pages—the dislocation, the way a body changes shape in someone else’s hands, how distance can mimic the split between sleep and wake, the electricity and the powerlessness of being a teenage girl, how existence itself can feel like an emergency. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg question when I try to parse whether the beginning of the book determined the end or vice versa, but only when the beginning found its shape did the rest of the story come into focus.
Not only is the beginning essential for me in terms of setting up the emotional framework of the rest of the story, but it’s also a place to return to. I always think of a good story as being shaped like a broken circle, the beginning and ending not quite touching, but close, occupying the same space in some way. Writing these pages helped me find the ending the book needed; it helped me see how the story would curl back on itself and arrive some place both new and familiar.