11.18.2018  Jardine Libaire’s writing life connects Austin, New York, and Los Angeles

Texas Monthly asked well-regarded Texas authors to select their favorite books for 2017, readers of Lone Star Literary probably recognized writers such as Attica Locke, Amanda Eyre Ward, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Wright, among others. But they might not be as familiar with Jardine Libaire, who was asked by the beloved periodical to weigh in. Libaire’s 2017 novel White Fur (Penguin Random House) is white hot, garnering rave reviews from NPR, Publishers’ Weekly, Kirkus, and more, and has been optioned by Amazon for a new television series for which Libaire will be the writer. We caught up with her via email in Los Angeles, where she is now living, although she says she will never leave Austin.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Where did you grow up, Jardine, and how would you describe those days?

JARDINE LIBAIRE: The south shore of Long Island was my childhood home, and growing up there was great. We lived in a small town on the bay, and my brothers and I roamed pretty freely, playing in the woods, sailing, biking around on adventures. My parents are a happy and generous couple, so we had a house full of family friends, dinner parties, lots of books and gardens, and a ram named Stanley and a pair of peacocks. It was a lovely place to start out.

What brought you to Austin?

In 2007, after living in Brooklyn and Manhattan for ten years and loving New York City so much it hurt, I suddenly woke up one day and had a deep desire to wander and live somewhere completely different, to slow down, and to get more sunshine. These vague desires eventually led me to rent a friend’s house for a month in south Austin, to see what the city was like. Within a couple days of being there, on a street lined with houses lit up by string lights and crowded with cactus plants and roses and jalapeños, after meeting neighbors and getting a sense of the place, I knew I wasn’t leaving. I love Austin so much, and am so lucky to have landed there.

Tell us about your most recent book, the highly acclaimed literary novel White Fur.

White Fur was started at least seven years ago, and I think the seeds of it were planted earlier. I wanted to write a love story that felt real to me, even though it has a pulpy, fairy-tale back bone. The idea of portraying the strange and underexplored side of love and obsession was part of the impetus. And then social class in America was very much on my mind, as another under-explored modern topic. Mid-’80s New York City just seemed like the perfect place to play out both those ideas. And from all that came the characters and the world of their lives.

At what point in your life did you decide to become a writer?

Even before I could properly read and write, I was pretty obsessed with books. My mother always gave me amazing things to read, and I went to a tiny elementary school and had a couple super cool teachers who encouraged us to write a lot, write all the time, with emphasis on imagination and expression, and not as much on rules and order. I sometimes wish I could go back to those classes! The idea of having a career as a writer was never as important as simply learning to write, continuing to write, developing writing projects. A “writing career” has always been something of an oxymoron to me because there is no blueprint, and I still find it best to just focus on loving to write, and dreaming of new projects, and somehow making my rent.

What was your first big break as a writer?

It was when I got a teaching fellowship to the University of Michigan‘s MFA program, as I was looking at that point at either working full-time at something that most likely did not included the writing I wanted to do, or somehow getting funding to keep writing.  Michigan is an extraordinary program, and I got two full and luscious years of just writing and teaching without incurring debt before I then went into working full-time to support writing on the side.

I understand that White Fur has been picked up by Amazon as a TV series. That must be very exciting. Can you tell us more about that?

FilmNation, a company that does a great spectrum of projects, optioned the book, and I developed the series with them and with the director Drake Doremus. It was an extraordinary experience, to take this property and use it as a seed to bank for an unlimited version of the story. It was thrilling to see where [characters] Jamey and Elise could go after the book ends, and it was also exciting to grow all of the characters and storylines around them. It was also incredible to have other people's imaginations and visions become part of the story. That collaborative aspect can be terrible if it’s the wrong crew or bad chemistry, but we were very lucky to have a symbiotic relationship.

There are some threads between White Fur and your first novel, Here, Kitty Kitty. Can you tell us about your first novel, and how it might have informed your second story?

Here, Kitty Kitty also takes place in New York, but at the very end of the ’90s, as that’s when I was writing it. And it focuses largely on Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I was living at the time. That’s a story of a woman who wants to be a painter, and can’t seem to figure out how to grow up and live life at the same time. She’s a hot mess. One similarity between the books is New York playing a character in the story, as the city is so active and animated. And both books show a spectrum of underworlds and tiny subcultures and rabbit holes, and all the characters that inhabit them.

What is your creative process like?

Probably the first part of feeling creative for me is being inspired, by the world, and also by reading great books, reading poetry, looking at art, watching films. And then when I’m actually constructing a particular project, I do use outlines, as I like to depend on some kind of structure and I like the tension of trying to meet plot points, but then I do a lot of free writing and experimenting with words and language and ideas in between. And the outline always changes dramatically as I move further into it, but at least there’s some thing to build on and rely on. Morning is the best time to work for me, but I have learned I can write anytime and anywhere if I take certain steps to quiet my mind and get focused and lean into it.

You’re currently working on a new project. Can you tell us about it?

There are a few things in the works right now that I am so excited about. I actually just collaborated on a nonfiction book with another Texas writer, which will be coming out in 2020, and we'll be getting the details out there soon. I also continue to work on projects with the amazing collective of artists and imaginations that convene around the parties and art installations at Justine’s in East Austin, and we actually just started a website cataloging all past events and future ones too at www.fleursdumalsyndicat.com. And then next week we wrap on a film I co-wrote with Drake Doremus, starring Shailene Woodley, Jamie Dornan, and Sebastian Stan. That project has been magical to watch unfold, and it’s the most collaborative thing I’ve ever been a part of, in the best way.

What's in the to-be-read pile on your nightstand?

A thousand incredible books!!  Too many books, of course, which is just enough. Since I’m in Los Angeles, I have City of Quartz by Mike Davis lined up. I picked up The Sellout by Paul Beatty too the other day, as it’s another incredible LA-centric book. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing, whose books I adore. And Martin Wilson’s We Now Return to Regular Life. I periodically visit BookPeople’s poetry section too and grab whatever they are suggesting that month, and am always excited by reading new poems.

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Praise for Jardine Libaire's WHITE FUR

“A fairy tale of love and class and money and death and New York City in the 1980s, as seen through eyes so new and so young that everything seems like magic all the time….What holds it together is ferocity — Libaire’s elegant, incongruous, glitz-and-trash command of the language of youth and young love, and the uncompromising fire of her main characters as they drift and dash from page to page.” —NPR

“Each page crackles with the intensity, fury, lust, and pure insane pleasure of first love. Jardine Libaire has written a chronicle of one couple's wild romance: its highs and lows, its delights and contractions, its beauty and its messiness. A delight to read.” —Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

“Brilliantly written and deeply felt, this is a love story by turns comic and tragic, but always moving. Whether her characters are on the social register or the welfare roll, Libaire is a keen observer of human nature.”
—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

“Two barely-20-somethings from opposite sides of the tracks fall in frantic love amid the lush grit of New York City in the 1980s…The real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire’s New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A love story of equal parts grit and glamour, I loved White Fur for its honest portrait of the extremes of American society, and the love that can bloom anywhere, always, despite the odds. Jardine Libaire is an extraordinary talent.” —Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of The Language of Flowers

"Writing with all the senses, Libaire demonstrates an ability to evoke vivid moods and places, drawing a stark and realistic depiction of ’80s Manhattan. She also succeeds at giving equal weight and attention to both her protagonists, elegantly toggling between their perspectives. The most lively, memorable, and convincing character in the novel is the setting itself.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[The] setting is viscerally exposed and uniquely gritty, and Libaire’s meaty, brazen, Ferrari-fast sentences prop it up well.” —Booklist

“White Fur is glorious: dark, dirty, and sexy, lit up with yearning and raw, young love. Libaire's sentences left me breathless. This is a Roman candle of a novel. I absolutely loved it.” —Amanda Eyre Ward, author of The Nearness of You and What Was Lost

“This sexy American fairytale about a star-crossed couple solidifies Jardine Libaire’s status as poet laureate of late nights and young love.” —Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead

“A sexy, literary love story.... White Fur would merely be an excellent exploration of the power dynamic between two lovers if the prose wasn’t so evocative and the sex scenes so torrid.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture

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