A Reader's Interview with Julia Phillips
Fairy tales, Russian lit, and the joys of reading out loud to children with the author of Disappearing Earth and Bear.
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 being chopped up or beheaded or made into soup. Their violence was on every page. I think, too, that I understood that they were false; they were so simplistic and brief, and the comfort in reading them came from their obvious difference from the complicated real world. But I don’t know if I understood what they were promising. The ideas of good and evil, deserving and undeserving, that I absorbed over the years. I’m still trying to tease those out.
When I saw you speak at the Texas Book Festival last month, you talked about Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear, in which, according to this Wikipedia entry, a “lonely archivist” travels to Northern Ontario and “enters into a sexual relationship with a bear.” You said you were surprised that the publisher let you get away with it. (I am too! That paperback cover – oof.) Do you think of Engel’s Bear as a mentor or sister text to your Bear? What was your backup title?
SUCH A GOOD BOOK! Yes, perhaps Engel’s Bear is a mentor title, or, like, a kooky aunt; I very much wanted my book to grapple with some of the same ideas hers did, about womanhood and wildness and the desire for a different life, but in a very different way. And can you believe I had no backup title for the book prepared? I pitched the publisher my Bear, they allowed it, and I never looked back.
What other books or writers do you draw inspiration from? Are there stories about human/animal relationships that you come back to?
I’ve taken a lot of inspiration the past couple years from reading writers whose novels came out around when mine did: Crystal Hana Kim, Gabriella Burnham, Temim Fruchter, Lisa Ko, Rachel Khong, Clare Beams, Marie Helene Bertino, Essie Chambers, Rachel Lyon, R.O. Kwon, Rufi Thorpe, Gina Chung, Vanessa Chan…It has been so exciting to plunge into their fictional worlds and so profoundly motivating to aspire toward their company. All these writers are doing what I hope to do: grapple with the world today, make art out of what we’re living. And reading them makes me more excited than ever to keep trying.
There are a few books that were real touchstones for me during the writing of Bear. Some of them are about human/animal relationships, while others are about human/creature. Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Pisces by Melissa Broder and Chouette by Claire Oshetsky all helped me connect to the joy of that bond.
The previous question about human/animal relationships reminded me of books I read to my children when they were little. For me, early motherhood was a time of rediscovering my love of stories through my children. Has motherhood changed your relationship to reading?
Oh, yes. YES. It’s also changed my relationship to reading aloud. My kids are four and two now, so I’m reading a lot of picture books, a lot of early childhood stuff, a lot of thirty-two-page or hundred-word stories. And often I’m reading the same ones over and over. (Remember that phase? “Again!”) It feels like a meditative exercise a lot of the time. It feels less about the individual stories and more about the rhythm of reading, the steadiness of it, the beautiful lulling that comes from hearing those words you’ve already heard a thousand times before.
That said, my older kid is slowly moving toward longer books, which has been revelatory. We read The Moomins and the Great Flood the other day, which I’d never read before, and which I loved so much I could’ve exploded.
You and I both studied Russian, and you set your first novel in Kamchatka. Did your studies include Russian literature, and do you have any favorite Russian writers? (Do you look back at those studies any differently after the Russian invasion of Ukraine?)
My main study in college was of the Russian language, so Russian literature was a part of those courses, but not their center. Most of my reading of Russian writers has been in translation. I love Tolstoy. I love Chekhov and Akhmatova. I think a lot of the poems we had to memorize in class—Pushkin, Mayakovsky. I love the way that language sounds.
My relationship to Russia in general has changed a lot over the years. But how I think of those studies hasn’t necessarily…I went to Russia for the first time as a student only a couple weeks after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Russia’s military aggression and propagandizing were blatant then, and before, and after—in fact, those qualities were some of what drew me to study Russian in the first place. I was so interested in that country’s similarities to the United States, where I’m from. A great part of my own study was always trying to understand that: how a nation behaves when it thinks of itself as ruling a sphere of influence, how many eggs it is willing to break to make its omelets.
I still love the Russian language and am still interested in both its behavior as a state and its relationship with the US. But I can’t go there now. And I can’t picture, really, going there again. Not in this reality.
There is a crime (the disappearance of two young girls) at the center of Disappearing Earth, and I’ve read that you volunteered at a crime victims’ center in Moscow. Do you read crime fiction or mystery? Given your volunteer experience, I’m guessing that you would be very selective in this genre. (To be completely transparent, I’m using this question as an excuse to ask if you’ve read Scottish crime novelist Denise Mina, who has a law degree and writes about women and children in the legal system of Glasgow as only someone who has spent serious time studying these issues could. I think she’s brilliant.)
Yes, absolutely, I love crime fiction and mystery! “Literary thriller” is my favorite genre. Tana French is the writer I’m most in love with right now. And no, I have not read Denise Mina, but I just took out a heap of her books from the library thanks to your recommendation. So excited to dive in!
What are you reading now? Any reading goals for 2025?
I’ve been on a major Agatha Christie kick, which is always highly recommendable. And I’ve been thinking tons about Stag Dance by Torrey Peters, which I read last year, but continue to talk about pretty much daily, because it is just so, so good. My goal for 2025 is just to keep reading, I think. It always ebbs and flows for me, so the more it can flow, the more delighted I’ll be. Oh! And I want to read more Moomin books out loud, if my kid’ll let me!
Other interesting things
Julia’s two novels fall into that rare and special category of literary prose that is also commercially successful. Just this month, Bear became a finalist for the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Congratulations, Julia!
Speaking of authors I would like to be friends with, I am 100% down to “discuss waxing v shaving v laser hair removal v au naturel” with Curtis Sittenfeld, whose new short story collection, Show Don’t Tell, sounds great.
Here are the five best parenthesis in literature, and if you guessed that a certain Russian émigré is on the list, you are correct.
I feel like my friend Julia would appreciate this headline.
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So enjoyed this interview...I always come away with more lists of books to read...when will I get to them all! (And thanks for buying Andy!)