Dryland, the first novel from Sara Jaffe, former guitarist for Erase Errata, has, much like it’s creator, way more than one thing going on. Starting quietly, simply, as the tale of sophomore Julie being convinced by one of the popular girls to go out for the swim team, Dryland moves on to explore ideas of persistence, of family ties, of sexuality, same-sex experiments and mentorships between opposite sexes, friendships, high-school crushes and so much more. Joining the team already in the shadow of her older brother, a one-time Olympic level swimmer who has moved to Germany, keeping a sure distance from his family, Julie struggles to find a place on the team separate from the expectations placed upon her. Labeled, as Jaffe herself finds funny, as a “sports genre fiction” story, Dryland is instead the story of dedication and finding out for oneself who and what truly matters.
Author Sara Jaffe
Kati Heng: Most people know you as a musician first thanks to Erase Errata, but how long have you been a writer?
Sara Jaffe: I’ve been writing pretty much my whole life. I was one of those kids who was 7 years old and wanted to be a writer. I always played music as well, but it was almost surprising when music became my main thing for a number of years. I think I always sort of knew that writing was what I would ultimately pursue.
KH: So in the future, do you see writing as the main thing for you?
SJ: I don’t know. I think I’m going to continue, definitely, to write, and I would love to play music again, too. Not only is writing something I care about a lot and feel passionate about, but it has, more than music, a sort of career-life to it. I think I’ll always identify as a writer before I identify as a musician, but I’ll still identify as both, if that makes sense.
KH: So with Dryland being your first novel, what was the message that you really wanted to create for the world – the story of adolescence, discovering sexuality, the sportsy side to it – what was the part of the story that you wanted to be told?
SJ: I don’t really think in terms of “what story wants to be told”; I don’t think about plot first necessarily. I started coming up with the idea of this character first and I was interested in her. I was interested in the idea of writing a story about someone who was doing something that they were bad at and continuing to do it. Then, I sort of became interested in some of the different relationships. It’s more like these emotions and relationships that were first compelling to me.
KH: What was sophomore year in high school like for you compared to Julie’s story?
SJ: This story is definitely not autobiographical. Obviously, I can identify aspects of myself in Julie, but I can identify aspects of myself in all the characters. Sophomore year of high school I had this…I don’t know if this was your experience, but you know how up until high school, it was just like the popular kids and the not popular kids, and then in high school, there are suddenly all these different groups that you could be a part of. That really happened for me at the end of my freshman year of high school. I discovered the weird arty kids and started falling in with them. It was the first time that I really felt a sense of belonging. It didn’t last particularly long, but that year was really important for me in that way.
KH: What’s your relationship with swimming?
SJ: I’ve always loved swimming and I’ve always been mediocre at best. That was one of the initial questions that drove me into writing the book, like why do I keep doing this thing without really caring if I get any better at it? Julie’s relationship with swimming ends up being very different and a lot more complex than that. I did swim on my high school team for one year and I was so bad. I was really really bad. I think that you needed like 100 points to get a varsity letter – I had like .75 points. But it wasn’t a devastating experience because I wasn’t an athlete in the way some people need to be an athlete. It was something I did because I like how it feels to my body to swim.
KH: Kind of on the same note, when I was growing up there were so many books and series about sports for boys that always seemed to be written by men and starring boys, like Bobby joins baseball and Tom goes out for high-school football, and I remember the boys always reading those, but there were never the same kind of cult authors for girls that loved sports and wanted to read something like that, but from a girl’s perspective. Was that something you personally ever looked for? Was it something you ever found? Or, I guess, was it something you ever even cared about/intended to create with Dryland?
SJ: I don’t care about sports (laughs). I don’t hate sports, but I don’t love them. I read a book about sports when I was writing this book called In Praise of Athletic Beauty, but I’m not invested in sports at any level.
KH: And swimming is such a non-sport sport, if that makes any sense at all. It’s so personal.
SJ: I think of it as really meditative. I get a lot of good ideas as I’m swimming. I’m interested, in terms of the book, in the idea of team dynamics and competition, but I really don’t have a stake in sports in general. It’s funny though, because this book is advertised on Amazon as “sports genre fiction,” which is hilarious to me.
KH: Already in this book, set in the early 90s, there’s this feeling that sexuality is getting more fluid among the high schoolers, at least in secret, if not openly. Was that your high school experience?
SJ: Not at all. When I was in high school, I started to preface coming out to myself when I was 16 or so, but nobody was out in my high school. People did not talk at all about anyone being gay. Maybe there were a couple weird dudes who were supposedly bi, but it was not part of the conversation at all. I think that shifted soon after I left. I graduated high school in 1995 and I think the Gay-Straight Alliance was formed the next year, but that was not my experience.
KH: How do you keep your books at home? How do you organize them?
SJ: Last year I had a full-time teaching job for the first time, so I had an office for the first time and I was living in a pretty small apartment, so I had all my books at my office. Now I have them at home again, organized loosely by genre. All the fiction is on these lovely simple tine bookshelves that we bought for really cheap when we lived in Massachusetts, and there’s this other shelf I have that was in my house growing up that, as I moved, I always carted with me. It’s a little bit of an albatross, but it’s a really nice place to put nice books.
KH: What books have you had since you were 15?
SJ: I have some books that I’ve had since I was 15, but I don’t necessarily return to them. For instance, I had a really terrible experience with The Fountainhead in high school, which I think is pretty common for a lot of people. It really really messed me up and made me think that anyone who was ever being kind to anyone was just doing it for their own selfish reasons, so therefore you should never be kind to anyone and all this stuff. So I still have my copy of that book because I want to not feel weird about it some day.
