Today we’re talking to Nini Berndt, author of One Story Issue #323, “Empress” and the novel There are Reasons for This (Tin House).

Set in Denver, Colorado in the midst of a worsening climate crisis, There Are Reasons for This reckons with the aftermath of loss and how we make sense of what is left behind. Lucy, who has lost her brother Mikey, arrives in Denver searching for answers in Helen, the only other person Mikey has ever loved. Soon, she finds herself drawn towards Helen in ways she never anticipated, and discovers that her search for certainty about her brother’s death requires a willingness to embrace the uncertainties within herself. Nini Berndt’s stunning literary debut explores the nuances of love and asks how we survive its consequences. There Are Reasons for This does not avoid the difficult questions of life, but rather, asks—to paraphrase Berndt’s own words—how are we supposed to live in this world?

—Layhannara Tep

Layhannara Tep: Where were you when you found out There Are Reasons for This was going to be published? How did you celebrate?

Nini Berndt: I got a call from my agent early on a Friday morning. My book hadn’t been out on submission very long, but even so, I was nervous and trying to manage the anxiety of thrusting your book into a stranger’s hands and hoping one of them wants to publish it. My agent told me Masie Cochran at Tin House had just called her to tell her she had a dream about my book after reading it and thought she needed to publish it. I was pacing around my kitchen, sort of in a fugue state. After I hung up with her, I called all of my friends who have watched me work at this for so many years. I hugged my wife, I told my son who was so excited for me. I had another conversation with my agent a little while later and she told me, “Publishing this book means you got the job; it just means you get to be a writer now. This is the first of many books.” That was the best thing. Thinking I finally got to own this way of thinking about myself, that it was just the start of my career.

LT: Both Lucy and Helen in There Are Reasons for This and Marie-Claude in your short story “Empress” grapple with loss and regret (albeit in very different ways). In dealing with the aftermath of loss, these characters turn to a stand-in. What role do stand-ins play in your narrative imagination? How do stand-ins aid in reconciliation? 

NB: Writing is in so many ways the process of creating stand-ins, alternates. Stand-ins for the people we don’t have, alternate versions of ourself, chances at lives we won’t get to live. It is the opportunity to play out the “what if it happened this way? What if I made this choice instead of this other choice?” That’s especially true for Marie-Claude. She sees Eugene as an easy, accessible, available version of the man she used to love, a way to try out the relationship she didn’t get to have, but more than that, he’s a way to try out some version of herself, a self she doesn’t believe can ever really exist, can ever really be loved. For a moment though, she gets to be that person. And maybe if she can allow herself that moment, there’s a way for that self to come more fully to the surface.

In There Are Reasons for This, both Helen and Lucy use each other as a stand-in for Mikey. Lucy wants to understand her brother, and Helen is the closest she’ll ever get to him. And Helen is filling her Mikey-void with whatever she can find. And when she finds Lucy, even though she doesn’t know she’s Mikey’s sister, she’s able to fill more of that void. There’s something in her that gives her what Mikey did. It isn’t a replacement, but for both of them, using the other to access this lost part of themselves, this part that might have died with Mikey, is essential, a way to move forward.

LT: In There Are Reasons for This, the setting is a Denver that is clouded by the looming threat of climate disaster: impending heat waves, oncoming dust storms, and something unnameable that feels imminent and irreversible. The Air Monitor adds a sonic dimension to the setting, as a consistent disembodied voice in each of the point of view characters’ narratives, so that in many ways, even though each chapter switches between point of view characters, the Air Monitor is a constant. In your opinion, what role does the setting play in helping to weave the various point of view characters’ perspectives into one cohesive narrative? What factored into your decision to set this story in a Denver wrought with dire climate conditions? How does it reflect the themes you hope to address in your novel?

 NB: Climate change is in some ways a great unifier. Obviously it’s incredibly divisive in our rhetoric, but there isn’t anyone or anywhere that won’t be affected by the way our planet is changing, its effect on the weather, where and how we live, the simple ways we plan our days. I started writing this book during a summer of particularly bad wildfires in Colorado and all over the West, and so I would go outside and the sun would be red and there would be ash falling from the sky. It was this visual dystopia. I looked at the air quality index every day. I’d never really cared about it before, but all over the west there were days you truly could not go outside the air was so bad. So the Air Monitor seemed like a sort of innocuous Big Brother measure, its role simply to keep people from needlessly succumbing to the elements. But there’s still something a little creepy in that oversight, the way the Air Monitor is ever-present, appearing and disappearing, instructing their days.

Right now, maybe more than ever, there’s a sense of “how am I supposed to live in this world?” But the climate disaster we’re living in asks that question in both a much more terrifying and much more abstract way. Yes, we see the effects of climate change, but we also can’t possibly extrapolate that out too far in the future. It’s too scary, too big. The existential terror of the world both pushes us together, as it does Helen and Lucy and Mrs. McGorvey, and pulls us away, from each other and the world, as it does Mikey. But regardless of how they respond, that watchful presence, the sort of pulsing insertion of unmanageable threat the Air Monitor adds to all these characters’ lives is inescapable. And also, after a time, that threat becomes just a voice in the background. It only holds our attention so long. We become numb to it after a while.

LT: Helen is a professional cuddler and Lucy later takes on the role of a professional granddaughter. What do their roles say about the commodification of the personal and the interplay between intimacy and capitalism?

 NB: I feel probably irrationally afraid of what we’re doing to our humanity right now, particularly with AI. We’re right on the precipice of exchanging corporate profit for the upheaval of millions of human lives through jobs lost to automation. We’re asking machines to do so much human thinking. We use machines to do so much human feeling. Our relationships are through phones, through the internet. Our work relationships take place through a screen or by communicating with bots. We outsource so much of our humanness, exchange so much of our humanness for money and power, that when we need the things that require actual physical presence, we aren’t really sure what to do. So people pay for that, for affection, connection, some semblance of love. We make it into a good, a product that can be bought and sold, because that is the language and structure we understand culturally. The need for other people never goes away, though. And in the face of such constant existential unrest, we need intimacy and connection more than ever, but so many people don’t even know how to access that anymore. All of this keeps me up at night.

LT: There Are Reasons for This explores many different types of love, from familial, to romantic, to platonic. The novel also explores the disastrous impact of misled and unfulfilled love and the lasting scars left behind in the aftermath. In your opinion, what is the novel hoping to reveal about love through each character’s journey? 

NB: Unfulfilled love is such an interesting idea, because there is no conclusion to love, really, so in some ways it’s always unfulfilled. There’s no destination point, it just grows and shifts and changes and absorbs and distorts sometimes. But some of the most painful parts of life are when our love doesn’t match someone else’s. For me, Mikey and Helen loving each other in this mismatched way, wanting so badly for the other one to see that love as the “right way,” is the most heartbreaking part of the story. Because that mismatch of love doesn’t negate the love, but it also doesn’t fulfill the other person.

I think Mrs. McGorvey’s love of her dead husband is an interesting way to think about the idea of “unfulfilled” love also. Because that love is in many ways so complete, remains so complete, but she also can’t directly access it. He’s dead. What can she do? In some ways that’s the most successful love can be, a love that lasts until death, a love that remains immutable because of that death, but there isn’t really any satisfaction in that either. Because all that’s left is this chasm, this gape, and this idea of what could have been. The want to have that person back.

Lucy’s is plagued by this idea that she could have loved Mikey enough to make him better, whole, okay. That feels particularly close to me, that savior complex part of us that thinks we can “fix” someone. We can’t. It doesn’t mean we love them less, but we have to separate ourselves enough that we don’t take on that responsibility. I worry sometimes for Lucy, that she might try to do that for Helen. Try to love her enough to make her okay. Because all you can do is just love, without any attachment to the outcome. Just love and know that unfortunately, it will never be enough. But it’s also the only thing that will get us close.

LT: Lastly, what are you most looking forward to at the One Story Ball? 

 NB: Being there with so many people who mean so much to me. My agent, Rebecca Gradinger, who is in my opinion, the greatest agent in the world. My mentor and friend Amy Hempel, who has done so much to make me into the writer I am now, and whom I admire to the ends of the earth. My best friend is coming, and some good friends in Brooklyn. And I’m so excited to meet the other debutantes in person, many of whom I’ve started some lovely internet friendships with. It’s so fun to be going through this together, having these cohorts of talented, kind debut writers. Oh, and the dress. There are so few occasions for a gown.

Layhannara Tep is the daughter of Cambodian refugees and a writer of fiction. Born and raised in Long Beach, California, Layhannara earned her MFA in fiction at NYU. Her work can be found in Aster(ix) Journal and The Hopkins Review.