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Erin Beeghly: Welcome to The Virtual Jewel Box podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I’m Erin Beeghly, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and today I’m delighted to welcome Nora Lange to discuss her new book of short stories, Day Care. Nora is also the author of Us Fools, published in 2024, which was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Us Fools was cited as proof that the great American novel still exists in The New York Times, and it was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Critics have been falling all over themselves to praise this new collection, too. Joy Williams calls your prose smart and surprising, invigoratingly icy and delicious. And Maggie Smith says, quote, “Day Care has made me greedy. Now I want to see more of the world, more of our beautiful batshit existence through Nora Lange’s lens.” So, Nora, my first question for you: just welcome, and how does it feel to be basking in all of this praise? And how has the reception been so far?

Nora Lange: It has been called delicious four times, I’ve counted, which I think is really odd, but makes me happy. I tend not to bask very much. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old, Erin, as you know, so my—when I read one of your questions earlier that was like, what’s on your nightstand? I thought Kleenex, cough drops, baby toy. I was like, oh, this is a good point to fictionalize, but to not fictionalize, you know, I haven’t been basking too much. It’s more just kind of the day-to-day: what’s my travel schedule like, how am I getting one place to the next? And right now I am back-to-back places for this book tour. So I’m looking at not a lot of sleep, which gratefully my toddler has trained me for.

Erin Beeghly: Well, I was hoping that we could introduce readers to some of your prose. Would you read [a little of] your story “Hot Spot” for us?

Nora Lange: Absolutely. So “Hot Spot” was excerpted in The New Yorker, part of their flash fiction [100-year anniversary summer issue], in any case.

So I’ll just read a little bit.

“Hot Spot.” The younger sister, one of two siblings, sat at her desk with a view of the park and counted swollen pigeons. She should have been applying for jobs, but the sister no longer had high-speed internet. The brother had stopped paying for it. He had to draw the line somewhere. He had no intention of bailing her out again, and he said as much to her over the phone.

The sister had made a habit of sketching babies and watching pigeons eat trash in a park rather than uploading her resume. However, he would continue to pay her phone bill for months. The steady older brother in Hoboken with resources had paid her rent, and now he scolded her [during] their weekly check-in call.

The sister resisted mentioning that he would bail her out. The brother worshiped the feeling; he would succumb to this need to be needed. She may have been creative, jobless, and living in a dingy, beloved studio in faraway Brooklyn, but she understood him. Theirs was the sort of familiarity that could pass only between siblings, each competing to survive. Quiet.

She hushed the brother. The pigeons had cleverly discovered something underneath a stroller and were making efforts to dislodge it from the wheels. From her perch, it appeared to her to be lasagna. Those long, thick noodles were unmistakable. The brother talked as the pigeons nibbled away, and a new desire rash began forming on the sister’s left knee. The latest, more of an auburn, complimented the earlier pink splotch that now covered her other knee.

“You’re exhausting,” he said to her during their weekly check-in call. He was right. She had observed that wearing people out, stripping them of their energies, which allowed them to think clearly, was how successful people such as the brother managed to pilfer all the resources.

The brother had been the one to suggest that the sister use her phone as a hot spot. He liked knowing something about technology. It made him feel in touch, like back when he went clubbing with the cool kids, hellbent on dying young because that was the point. She thought the point was to be an artist.

Erin Beeghly: Thanks, Nora.

Nora Lange: My pleasure.

Erin Beeghly: So I read this story when it was excerpted last summer, and I don’t know if we can talk about the ending. Is that a spoiler?

Nora Lange: [Not necessarily?]

Erin Beeghly: Not necessarily, yeah. So the ending is very surreal, and this is, I think, one of the really special things about your style, is there’s this surrealism, but the woman has—I don’t know—turns into this pulsing kind of just desire. What would you say? [A hot spot?] Yeah.

Nora Lange: I mean, kind of like a—I mean, black hole sounds so dark. Mm-hmm. When you really look at what a black hole is, it’s not really dark, right? I mean, it’s kind of—it’s magnetic. It’s just the inverse, the way we think of that, right? So yeah, it’s just another magnetism, I would say.

Erin Beeghly: My reaction was this was a very relatable story. I don’t know, maybe it was summer, and it’s also just these characters have something that’s both longing—they’re really full of desire—but also kind of alienation. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s just something about last summer for me, just at home, I’ve just felt it a lot. I was like, I wanna turn into a throbbing, pulsing hot spot. This actually would feel really good right now.

Nora Lange: I think that is something that runs through the collection, is probably female desire. And I think that, for me, the character in this story, “Hot Spot,” is quite literally tapping into that in a different way, and she’s deciding to sort of surrender herself to the sort of [bodily] version. And I think it plays on Kafka, it plays on metaphor. Whether she really does transform into a hot spot, I think that she is almost like Carrie in the movie. She’s just saying, here I am. But yet she’s giving herself to herself. I mean, she’s kind of in this position, this precarious position with her brother, where she’s gonna kind of forever owe him something and, of course, [he’s] there to remind her of their dynamic, you know, that she’s borrowed money and so on and so forth. So I think for her to kind of phantom-disappear like a superhero into her own desire, be enveloped by her desire, is just like her transformation, her Ovid, her metamorphosis, you know?

Erin Beeghly: That’s amazing.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about your prose. So your prose has been described as unpredictable and careening. So there’s this sense of movement, and I was recently watching this comedy special by [Nick Fleming?], who is this very gender-bendy physical humor person, fast-paced and full of surprises. And I read this review of their special, and the reviewer described them as, quote, “marrying a wild improvisational sense of constantly flying off the handle with writerly precision.”

And I read that line and I thought, Day Care. There were so many moments in this book when I was like, whoa, I didn’t think we were going here, and now we’re here, and just, like, it just spinning fast, disorienting, but in this way that is just so full of pleasure. And I was wondering if the experience of writing these stories was like the experience I had of reading them, or, like, how do you kind of do this really special thing?

Nora Lange: Thank you. That’s really very nice. Yeah, I feel like the word that comes to mind is mischief. And I think that in writing, a lot of the pleasure comes from a playfulness. And thinking about your world and the work you do, Erin, with stereotypes and pigeonholing people, I don’t really wanna pigeonhole certain narrative ideas. And so sometimes—I mean, sometimes I do turn things on their head, but sometimes that is like a postproduction or editing-revision thing. But a lot of the time it’s actually just what’s happening organically, and that I am a detective, so seeing what’s happened and I just kind of push it further, refine it.

But yeah, I’d say that being playful and mischievous, both things are important. And it’s helpful to also be reminded with a toddler—they fall, right? They’re not afraid necessarily to fall. They get up. And I think when we get older, as we grow older, we lose some of that flexibility, that spontaneity, to kind of make error. And so in some ways I play with that with myself. My idea or thinking as a writer is to kind of just turn that on its head a little bit. Right.

Erin Beeghly: One thing that I noticed as someone who studies stereotypes and sort of social roles was that sometimes people can be quite afraid, and rightly so, of these big social expectations and labels, but your characters seem to, I don’t know, to inhabit their roles in a way that is kind of maybe not reckless. I think that there actually is a lot of reckless, fabulous, reckless characters, but they’re not super weighed down by all of these expectations, or don’t really—or maybe they are, but they don’t seem [that way]. They’re just sort of doing motherhood in their own way, or doing friendship in their own way, or being a sister. And I don’t know.

Nora Lange: That’s probably like a kind of writerly [omnipresence] technique, because it’s not autobiography. Even though I play with genre, I think that I am like a cloud, right? That’s how I position myself. Even if I’m writing in first person, it’s not me, right? And I think that allows for a lightness to always kind of keep a constellation, or a circulation, kind of moving through a story, even if often there is a more centered character from which the POV is coming from. I mean, I do tend to, when I look back over stuff, realize that I’m leaning more toward—I can often be leaning more towards one character, be more sympathetic towards one over others. But generally speaking, I’m trying to kind of walk a tightrope. But sometimes it’s just really clearly that one’s an asshole and then one is less so.

Erin Beeghly: So I wanna switch gears and ask you about the titular story of this collection, “Day Care.” So do you wanna tell viewers a bit about “Day Care”? This one is more autofiction-ish.

Nora Lange: So, of course I am a fiction writer, and so Nick is the name of my husband, and his name shows up as Nick in this book. And I think, you know, it’d be easy enough for me to call him Rick, but there’s something about the way that it grounds me, the Nick, you know, to keep it as it is. And you’re right, the autofiction elements that are true to form would be: I was in Los Angeles, Nick is my husband, I do have a baby, I was working full-time. My mother never came. There are tons of things that are not [true]. I never did a dating profile. In this story, this mother who’s single-parenting, who basically says, you know, I wasn’t signed up for this. This is not what I had signed up for. Her husband takes a job in Salt Lake City—or, well, I don’t think that’s what it is in the story—but takes a job in Utah.

Erin Beeghly: Orem.

Nora Lange: Yeah. Oh yes, thank you, which is accurate. Yeah. And the mother character just is seeking daytime sex between the hours of her work job and picking up her child at daycare.

And this came about—I can remember going to a PEN event. This is before the PEN backlash. But in any case, I was telling my friend Louise Steinman in Los Angeles about the story, and we were just all just laughing. I mean, the story wasn’t done yet. I just told them the premise, she and my friend Maureen, and we were all just laughing. I was like, oh, it’s so fun to write this wacky—I don’t know how outrageous—but also I profoundly [sympathize]. It’s not like she’s dressing in something interesting, and, you know, she’s just at home, just literally trying to fill a need, to get laid between the hours of this and this, you know?

Erin Beeghly: Yeah. I love one of the details of that story, which is that the mother who is visiting modifies the daughter’s profile so that it’s only people within one mile. And I’m just thinking, having lived in Los Angeles, I don’t know, those details were kind of really delicious. And as soon as you open up the geographical range then, right, it’s like then it happens.

Nora Lange: Yeah, exactly.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah.

Nora Lange: So, yeah. And just trying to—I think so much is—I’m writing this piece on motherhood as an act of time travel. And so that’s been on my mind a lot, and probably was on my mind a lot. And even again, even if these stories are written over the course where there wasn’t a child, right, of, let’s just say, 12 years, I’ve had a mother all that time. So I think that there’s something interesting about—and I still have to think about how the placement of the stories are together. Like, which comes first, what’s second, so on and so forth. I guess my point is that tucked inside a premise that’s often humorous or sassy is this real core of emotionality, of really just one mother who finds herself single, but that’s not the one you tell at a PEN party that gets your Los Angeles friends laughing.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah, and I think the flip side of that story is the partner, right?

Nora Lange: Yes.

Erin Beeghly: Who’s alone in Salt Lake City. And I remember Nick living in this little windowless room just wanting to be [with] his family.

Nora Lange: Yeah, totally.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah.

Nora Lange: Absolutely. And I think the thing about the Nick character in that, in some ways, was based on him. Like, it was in lots of ways, and in other ways it was some other man in my mind. But at the end of it I think [it] speaks so much to their compassionate connection, which I don’t know that if you start the story, you know that it’s gonna end that way. And I think that it really does end that way. And I think even the final story in the collection ends on this other note too, which I think is more like a labyrinth of openings rather than a closing of [doors].

Erin Beeghly: In terms of your own writing, I just remember when my kid was that age just feeling like I’m always on a clock. You drop them off and the clock starts and you’re racing to get as much done as you possibly can, and there are never enough hours. So how is your writing going now? Or are you pressing pause on writing? No. ’Cause you have so much—

Nora Lange: No, no, there’s no pause. But I’d say the two ways that—two things occur to me, right? One is I really work hard to be more forgiving, because I get very stressed about not being able to complete the things I need to complete. But there’s just—I also know there’s no way. So I have to step back and just be like, well, I did the best I could, you know, I really tried this day.

And then the flip side is, I have very supportive in-laws, such that for the holiday season they asked what I wanted, and I said, for extended daycare hours so I could finish this book. And that was nice. They paid for that. What was interesting to me and had me pause and reflect was [that] I would pick Sylvia up sometimes just mostly actually just an hour later. But it was this one hour additional—even though I could do three hours additional—but the one hour, just knowing that I had this other time, meant that I used my time more efficiently, which I still find pretty profound. Just knowing I had additional time meant that maybe I just felt less frantic.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah.

Nora Lange: Do you know what I mean? So maybe I stub my toe less. I actually did put on pants. Whatever it meant, I didn’t have to run back in the house 17 times because I feel frantic about the few hours I have to squeeze it all in.

Erin Beeghly: Exactly. I was never a procrastinator in college, and I always had to give myself a lot of time because my brain under big deadlines just kind of shuts down.

Nora Lange: Yeah.

Erin Beeghly: And yeah, so I relate to that a lot, just having more expansive time in a day, or, my God, in a week.

Nora Lange: Yeah. And it’s interesting you say that because I feel like drawing my attention to a deadline, right, like I can feel like that about an appointment. Like, if I have an appointment any place, I want extra time. And, you know, someone else—Nick, for instance—he could care less, and he’s like, why do you need 40 minutes to get to a place? It’s only like 20 minutes away. But I just like that buffer, right? Like, what if I take a wrong turn? Then I don’t stress. When I’m under that kind of pressure, I really do make errors, you know? It’s very I Love Lucy, but that’s the forgiving version.

Erin Beeghly: So one more story I have to ask you about is “Dog Star,” this science-fiction story. I can’t even describe how it was to read this story. I was hanging on for dear life, and then this relationship—it was so bizarre. The main character doesn’t have eyelids. People’s flesh is decomposing off their bodies. People are blowing up. But I just loved it, and it actually struck me as kind of the science-fiction version of this relationship in Us Fools, or like an iteration of it. And so how is it writing science fiction?

Nora Lange: It’s so funny. Yeah. I would say I don’t think of it that way. Which is—it’s an experiment, right? So, got it. I think of it like anything else. Like, raising a child actually is kind of an experiment. The way our DNA even comes together is, I guess, even down to that level and [on] a molecular level, an experiment.

But I would say that for “Dog Star” specifically, it was—and I was thinking about this earlier today—but it was during COVID, and we were in Oregon at the time helping family, and we were really, you know, there were fires, like you couldn’t go outside in this period. And I was editing the novel Us Fools—it was just my own revisions, it wasn’t for publication or anything—and I was doing this other story, “Dog Star,” simultaneously.

But “Dog Star,” the setting is, it’s a community world in a snow globe, right? The perpetrators, or the powers that be, are those on the outside versus those on the inside. So the people, or figurines as they are in “Dog Star,” were assembled inside this snow globe to please some sort of fantasy of those on the outside. And then, yeah, it became an experiment, like, well, if they tinker, how do those on the outside tinker? Well, they have to drain the snow globes. How big are these snow globes? Well, they’re pretty darn big. So then it becomes a question of practicality. So I could just hyperfictionalize and just say, well, it happened because I said so. But actually there’s a real interest in looking at these things like puzzles. That’s sort of a long rambling answer.

And there are other things that come to mind, but it was during COVID, we were on lockdown, and I wrote “Dog Star” as kind of an alternative to Us Fools.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah. With some symmetries.

Nora Lange: Yeah, yes.

Erin Beeghly: So this makes me think of the Kirkus review of Day Care. So I did some just reading of the reviews. It says, “The world of these stories is a grotesque mirror image of our own, where repressive gender roles are amplified to the point of comedy.”

And I actually had the opposite take.

Nora Lange: I did too. I—

Erin Beeghly: Yeah.

Nora Lange: I’m so curious about this person. Like, I’m like, huh, that’s so fascinating. And also the same reviewer, later when they talk about the story more specifically, they talk about “Heart Beats” and [they] view it in such a way that never would’ve occurred to me. It’s really funny. I’m like, oh, that’s not my idea of intimacy. I mean, it’s totally great that that’s what you think that those women wanted, but that’s really interestingly not at all what they’re after.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah. I think for me that it’s actually coming from inside the characters and their perspectives, that they’re wacky in certain ways. Like in the—what is it? “Letting Snails Go.”

Nora Lange: Mm-hmm. Yeah, “Letting Snails Go.”

Erin Beeghly: Yeah. In “Letting Snails Go,” when she returns home for her high-school reunion and picks up some snails from a parking lot and just pops ’em in her mouth and is kind of like—

Nora Lange: Yeah. Well, I—’cause I think even it’s like a way of—it’s sort of, I guess, to me, this is just this one character’s version of how to—I guess you could pop [Prozac]. I don’t know what people take—ketamine, whatever you do, right?—to handle your anxiety. But—

Erin Beeghly: Oh my God, these are snails, Nora.

Nora Lange: I don’t—no, babe.

Erin Beeghly: Sick. They’re gross. I was like, what is Nora thinking? This is disgusting. Oh, and then she pops them out again, puts them on the floor. Oh my God.

Nora Lange: I think it’s just a way—I don’t even know that—I think that she thinks they’re covered in rain, which I guess is gross, but, I mean, it’s pouring rain. There are these snails.

Yeah. That’s so funny. It is gross. I don’t think anyone should do it, but I just also think it’s her way of navigating the anxiety of the situation, which is entering an auditorium with all of these old high-school friends and foes or whatever. And also, it’s her secret, you know? I think there’s something about fiction and writing where you get—see, you get to have secrets, right? And these characters, the reader gets to share it with them, you know? But not everyone in the auditorium knows about the snails in her mouth.

Erin Beeghly: Sure. She is found out, though, and then masturbates—

Nora Lange: Yeah.

Erin Beeghly: She does. You know, which is—

Nora Lange: She does. That’s true.

Erin Beeghly: Which is another one of these moments where it seems like it would be a moment of intimacy, but it’s also a moment of great kind of distance. These sort of delicious tensions running throughout the collection.

Nora Lange: Yeah, it’s—I don’t know—it’s a whirlwind. It’s a lot of different points in my life and different stories, and it’s interesting to feel like each one of them is full in its own way. It’s nice to think about them with you, Erin.

Erin Beeghly: Well, I have one more kind of question. Since the Oscars just happened, if you were to pick one of these stories to be on the big stage, so as it were, which one would it be? I mean, I did think about Day Care. I was like, who would play fake Nora in Day Care?

Nora Lange: Yeah, I like the idea of fake Nora. Yeah. You know, so Us Fools, there is a director attached to it. And, you know, those are some of the things that come up, as like, who do you think would play Bernadette or Joanne Furrow and Bernie or Jo? I mean, do we get to be dreamy?

Erin Beeghly: Yes.

Nora Lange: Okay. If we can be dreamy-pants, I mean, who doesn’t love a little Cate Blanchett? Dakota Johnson.

Erin Beeghly: Hmm.

Nora Lange: That’d be cool.

Erin Beeghly: I love that.

Nora Lange: Like, we live in a world where they don’t have to look alike, right?

Erin Beeghly: No.

Nora Lange: Yeah. Oh gosh.

Erin Beeghly: Josh was like, Jenny Slate would play fake Nora.

Nora Lange: Oh yeah.

Erin Beeghly: A lot of energy.

So you have a Salt Lake City reading coming?

Nora Lange: I do.

Erin Beeghly: At The King’s English.

Nora Lange: It’s April 6th. Yeah. The really kind of sneaky little thing about it is that it’s the day before the book comes out, but they’re gonna have copies, shh.

Erin Beeghly: So everyone come to The King’s English. It’s at around six.

Nora Lange: It’s 6:30. 6:30. We’ll have some snacks and some beverages. I think it’ll be a good time, and that’s my goal. Like, my goal—when Us Fools came out, Sylvia was like, what, just over two? I felt a lot of guilt. You know, my goal with this book is just to have a lot of fun. Like, I just wanna have a good time. Yes. So come have a good time with us. Have a bite. Have a sip of something, and get mischievous.

Erin Beeghly: Yeah. And celebrate.

Nora Lange: Yeah, celebrate.

Erin Beeghly: Thanks, Nora.

Nora Lange: Thank you, Erin.