The Girls of Her Youth

Jo Ann Beard Essays a Novel

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, April 29, 2011

You know you’re in good hands when a teenage narrator starts her story with, “We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed to be in charge here, so there’s a sense of somebody not doing their job.” The opening lines of Jo Ann Beard’s just-published novel In Zanesville (Little, Brown, 2011) burrow deep into the 14-year-old mind, where being embarrassed is worse than death and every disaster is “somebody’s” fault.

There are writers who thrive on high drama, and writers who make the everyday sing. Beard is defiantly in the latter camp. In the movies, she’d be a genius character actor, her craft evoking the plainspoken truths, buried emotions, and glinting weirdness of real people’s lives.

Her first book, The Boys of My Youth (Little, Brown, 1998), a much-praised collection of personal essays, shares a lot of DNA with In Zanesville . Both books brilliantly conjure a Midwestern coming of age in an era when mothers smoked, fathers drank, and plaid culottes were an envy item. In Zanesville's narrator is a self-described “sidekick,” geeky enough to join marching band and rebellious enough to quit during a parade. Although she’s never named, there’s a bit of a tease: Her first name sounds something like “Joan,” and one of Little Women’s March sisters. Could it be Jo Ann? Is this a memoir in disguise?

“I don’t actually get too involved in that conversation. I have enough trouble just writing it,” Beard says. “For every piece I write, even if I’m writing in a journalistic way about somebody else’s experience, I have to inhabit the character so fully that I feel as if I’m remembering it. Fiction feels exactly the same–the writing process is so intensely about imagining something in order to put it on the page. It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s fiction and what’s in between, which might be a little where my work resides.”

She picks up her teacup and sips. We’re sitting in the kitchen of the Rhinebeck farmhouse Beard shares with novelist Scott Spencer. A cast-iron woodstove squats inside a colonial fireplace scaled for roasting an ox. An old dog named Shep dozes under a window. Outside, it’s still not quite spring—there are patches of late-season snow and a skim of ice over the duck pond, a steady rain falling. Beard pulls her cardigan closer, rearranging a patterned green scarf. She speaks slowly and thoughtfully, and when she falls silent, her eyes have a palpable sadness.