The cover of Rufi Thorpe’s first novel, The Girls From Corona Del Mar, depicts two girls, probably 11 or 12 years old, in swimsuits, sitting like perfect copies of one another. I immediately wanted to read it. Inside, there’s the story of two childhood best friends: Mia, in her mind the bad one, and the narrator of the story; and Lorrie Ann, the beautiful one with what looks from the outside like the perfect family, the perfect life. As we follow the girls, and the city of Corona Del Mar itself, throughout the years past that pivotal point of first friendships and high-school loyalties, the girls’ roles are almost reversed: Mia becomes the settled one with a child, husband and family; Lorrie Ann the runaway, adrift in parties and drugs, a chaser of the latest craze.
Author Rufi Thorpe
I had the chance to talk to Rufi Thorpe about her first novel, and about the importance of those relationships you create at age 12—how they can last throughout adulthood, motherhood, and more.
Kati Heng: The heart of your latest novel, The Girls of Corona Del Mar is the story of the friendship between two childhood friends, Lorrie Ann and Mia, and how their relationship changes due to years apart, motherhood, marriages, etc. Are there friends from your own adolescence/teen years you are still friends with today? If so (or maybe even if not), did the relationships you have with them inspire or influence the friendship between Lorrie Ann and Mia?
Rufi Thorpe: Yes and no. I think I chose to write about female friendship in part because of my own best friend who has played a very central role in my life. We met when we were fifteen and our lives have been intertwined almost since that day. Friendships between women can be passionate and important and not quite like anything else. As much as the Best Friend Novel is a cliché, I still feel like there is a lot of territory there to be explored.
But I have never had a rift with my best friend as serious as the one that grows between Mia and Lorrie Ann, and my friend and I did not identify as the “good one” and the “bad one,” the way they did, although I did originally think of my friend as “the cool one” while I was “the nerdy one,” which is hilarious because in retrospect we were both the nerdy one. She just had a prettier singing voice and wavy hair. Oh, but that singing voice! Oh, but that wavy hair! I don’t think there is a more beautiful woman on the planet than my best friend.
KH: Do you identify more with one of the women in the story? What pieces of each woman do you identify with?
Rufi Thorpe’s first novel, The Girls from Corona Del Mar
RT: Book clubs always ask me so hopefully: which one is you, Mia or Lorrie Ann? I find this totally charming, but it isn’t the way I write at all. I start from a pretty abstract place, with the idea of a situation or a plot or sometimes even just a theme, and then I find the characters by imagining myself as the person in that situation, and so in that sense I relate deeply to both Mia and Lorrie Ann. I put a lot of myself into them just to try to make them seem like real people.
Specifically, I relate a lot to Mia’s mistrust of people, her conviction that eventually everyone will fail her, and I relate to her fear of her own morality or lack thereof. I spent much of my young adulthood terrified that I was bad and obsessed with being good. But I also relate to Lorrie Ann’s rigidity, her inner austerity, the way she goes about trying to make life decisions in the abstract instead of worrying about what would make her happy. There is something in Lorrie Ann that drives her mysteriously off course, and I think I relate to that as well.
KH: As a non-married girl with no children, I’m curious how female friendships change after kids. Just from the few friends of mine with children, I know the Friends and Sex and the City idea of ‘friendship goes on with a baby stroller in the corner’ is completely unrealistic. Can you speak a little about how longtime female friendship can change after children?
RT: Well, my son is only two and a half, so I am at the beginning of this journey myself, but I can already say three things:
1. Babies and toddlers are not conducive to adult conversation. You get interrupted a lot. It’s hard to even just exchange basic how-are-yous sometimes. So keeping up old friendships takes work, but starting new friendships and wading through the mire of getting-to-know-you questions is excruciating. Your world shrinks. It becomes more about just you and baby and partner. As your children age, I think your world expands again and things find their right balance.
But 2. You love your friends’ kids. Getting to watch your friends have children, seeing their beautiful and/or weird-looking babies, watching those personality traits get handed down or not handed down, it’s thrilling. It’s the wildest thing I’ve ever gotten to witness. It makes you love your friends more. It turns friendships into something more akin to family.
Also, and importantly, 3. You need your friends when you are first having babies. You need to complain about how much your boobs hurt and you need to hear about their vaginal discharge and you need tips about the best way to suck snot out of a baby’s nose and you need to know honestly, for real, no bullshitting, how often she and her husband have sex. You need a sisterhood, because without it being a mommy is fucking lonely.
KH: Place is always one of my favorite characters in writing. I loved the way, like the girls, Corona Del Mar itself seemed to age and change and grow. I’m just curious about your thoughts on all this, and I realize this is a terribly worded question… Can places change as fast as people? Can they change as much as people?
RT: Sometimes I think places change more than people, especially when populations change rapidly. Whole cities can be left without memory. Corona del Mar was where I grew up, and my mother still lives there, so I have a strong sense of what it is like now. I could probably list every storefront on that stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. But memory is funny, and when this book came out, I wondered: will people remember it the way I do? I met a whole bunch of readers at events in Southern California who said they were from Corona del Mar and I asked them, but they confessed they didn’t know: they had only moved there five years ago or so. So who knows, perhaps the Corona del Mar of my childhood was completely different! Perhaps I have written of a town that existed only in my own mind.
KH: Do you have any more novels/projects in the works we can look forward to?
RT: Yes, Knopf recently bought my second novel, though we are still struggling to find the perfect title. I don’t have an exact pub date yet, but I am guessing it will come out sometime in summer 2016. It is about a father and a daughter who take a strange Eastern European vacation together. Actually, it’s another novel very much concerned with ideas of place!
KH: What’s on your bookshelves? What are your bookshelves like? Do you alphabetize? How do you sort books? What have you had on your shelf since you were 14? What are you constantly drawing from?
RT: Right now our bookshelves are kind of everywhere: we have an old beer garden bench set up as a desk in the living room with the benches stacked up on top of it as shelves, but we needed much more space than that obviously, so we have bookshelves running along the walls under the windows as well, and then we still needed more room, so we started stacking them on top of the kitchen cabinets.
My husband’s books are mixed in with mine, and nothing is alphabetized, so next to Barbara Kingsolver there will be a Fourier Transformations book or something bafflingly titled Computability and Unsolveability. He is a scientist. Together we are like one perfectly well-rounded person. I feel that his books help lend my books a bit of credibility.
Sadly, I have moved so often that my own books have been ruthlessly culled and what remains are mostly the cheap, falling apart, second-hand paperback copies of every book I really and truly ever loved. James Baldwin, Joan Didion, John Irving, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Conrad, Nabokov. I also read a lot of poetry, and so much of reading poetry is re-reading poetry. It’s never a mistake to keep a volume of poetry as long as there is one good poem in it. You’ll go back and turn to it again and again, whereas even a highly entertaining novel might only be worth reading once.
I also, sigh, read books on Kindle and listen to them on Audible. I love listening to books while doing dishes, walking the dog, folding laundry, etc., and that is probably the number one way I read new releases. After I listen to a book, if I really love it I will usually buy a paper copy so that I can give it to a friend. There are some books where half the pleasure of reading is in imagining pressing the book into some friend’s hands and saying: this one. Read this one.
Kati Heng is a Chicago-based writer and glitter obsessive. You can find her on Twitter here or check out her anti-street harassment tumblr here.
