Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son. “There Are Reasons For This” (Tin House) is her first novel.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it?
Nini Berndt: The book is about a girl, Lucy, who comes to Denver following her brother’s death, and goes to find the woman he loved, the person she believes knew him best, hoping to better understand both her brother and his death. But when she moves in across the hall from this woman, she becomes infatuated with Helen and doesn’t tell her who she is, Mikey’s sister.
The longer she keeps this information from Helen, and the closer they become, the more potentially ruinous this omission becomes. The book is set against a backdrop of a crumbling Denver, a hostile climate, rampant feel-good drugs, commodified intimacy, and this collective longing and fear. It is a near-future dystopia, but one we could easily wake up in tomorrow.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
I started writing the book during COVID. My wife and I were taking long walks, as so many people were, exploring this place I’ve lived most of my life, but one evening I saw a building behind East High School with a plaque that said “St. Catherine’s Home for Working Girls, est. 1899” and I immediately started filling the building with women, working girls. The book began much more as a collection of linked stories, and then tightened around Lucy and Helen and Mrs. McGorvey in this house, and then became much more about Mikey, his death. It didn’t start there, but that became the heart of the book. Still though, these elements of work, women’s work, the work of domesticity and care, factor really heavily throughout.
SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
Berndt: The excerpt is the beginning. I think it’s challenging to hop into the middle of something and provide enough context and grounding for the reader not to feel unmoored. And if you aren’t excited about the beginning of a book, you aren’t going to keep reading anyway…
SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Berndt: I don’t usually know exactly what a project is before I start, so finding things that help shape the book comes after I’ve been writing for a while, once I better know what the book is. Lydia Millet’s “A Children’s Bible” was really important to me. For me, writing about something like climate change requires not looking directly at it, and she does that so well.
It’s part of the atmosphere and the ethos, but it isn’t political, it doesn’t feel didactic in any way, which is essential to me. I read a lot of Joy Williams, and I think that influenced the prose style. She’s also just my favorite. Reading Joy Williams is what makes me excited to be a writer. She’s so often my North Star.
“There Are Reasons for This”
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SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Berndt: I’ve worked on two other book-length projects before, but this was the first time I feel like I “got” how a novel works, or how a novel can work. Short stories feel really intuitive to me, I understand their shape, how they move, largely because stories rely on the line as their primary unit of measure. But novels require so much more orchestration, there’s so much balance required, you’re threading so much, withholding and unfolding in equal measure. And you’re much more cognizant of the reader.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Berndt: I think it took some time to find the story. I think this is often true for me. I’ll have the voice, a character, but knowing what “happens” takes me a lot of time.
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Berndt: The most important parts of this book for me are the human relationships. The messiness and complication of love in all its forms. The imperfection of love, that it is both the only thing that really matters and also insufficient. That, and that there are always these infusions of hope despite the burning, failing of the world. And our job is to find those glimmers, to love even when that love feels inadequate.
SunLit: Did you intend to write about Denver? What about setting a book in Denver was important to you?
Berndt: We don’t get a ton of Denver literature. I’m so bored of New York books. So I did want to write something set in the city I’m from. The Denver I grew up in in the early 2000s and the Denver I came back to after grad school in 2016 were such different places. 2016 Denver was this glittering, shining place, everyone was young and healthy and happy, there was money, prosperity, everyone was having a good time, people were moving here in droves. I can’t imagine a better place to live during those years.
And then during COVID it changed again. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. Downtown was, like so many cities, this ghost town. It became unrecognizable again. So I was writing from that place, a place of seeing this city shift and shift, fall apart, this bursting bubble. The beautiful parts of living here, the mountains, the robust economy, the liberal politics, the youth and beauty, were now much more elusive, relegated to a certain class. The wealth disparity, like most places, became glaring. That factors into this book substantially.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Berndt: I’m very excited about this next book. It feels like what I’ve needed and wanted to write for a long time. I think so much of writing for me is a way to contend with all of the lives we don’t get to live, all of the people we could be but simply can’t be, because we’re working with an incredibly finite period of time, and we make choices and every choice means giving up something else. I think this next book confronts that really directly. Particularly at the age I am right now.
A few more quick items
Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: I’m bopping between a few things right now, as I usually do. Next to me right now is Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica,” which I have meant to read for about 10 years, and which I’m upset with myself for not reading years ago, because it is extraordinary, the kind of living inside someone’s life and memories with perfect clarity, such closeness, that you forget everything about who you are. The reading list right now is long, a big stack.
First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: “Catcher in the Rye.” Maybe a little passé, but reading that book my sophomore year of high school felt like I suddenly understood literature, what it could do. I think so many writers talk about being voracious readers as kids and honestly, I wasn’t. I loved one book, “The Farthest Away Mountain.”
I checked it out from the school library like once a month. And I think that’s sort of how my reading has always been. I find something I love, like really, really love, and I just keep reading it. I add to that list, but I am not a person who has ever needed to read everything.
Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Two things: “Calmly write a not calm story,” and, “Put everything up front. If you know it, put it in now.” Because that forces you to go to a new place, an unexpected place, a place you don’t know yet, and that’s where the story actually begins taking shape. And that calmness in writing the not-calm allows you to be unruly with intention. It’s some variation of the Flaubert quote, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Finally having my life together, I deeply understand that now. Now everything, all the disorder, can filter to the page.
Favorite fictional literary character: Pearl, in Joy Williams’ “The Changeling.” Or Faith, a recurring character in all Grace Paley’s work, who is some version of Grace herself. Faith is my heroine.
Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): My guilty pleasures are always rereads. Right now especially, I feel like I’m supposed to be reading only recent releases, but sometimes I just want to read Amy Hempel stories for the eleventh time. Because those are my heart books, those are the things that make me remember why I write.
Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print, only.
One book you’ve read multiple times: I reread a lot, for many years most of the reading I did was rereading. Rereading is essential to being a better writer. I’ve read “The Lover” by Marguerite Duras more times than I can count. I love teaching that book, probably in part because I love rereading that book. I just finished Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” a couple weeks ago and I’m about to reread it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I need to understand how it works.
Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: A beverage. Coffee, tea.
Best antidote for writer’s block: Reading. There’s nothing else, I don’t think. I go back to my favorites, the texts that I want to keep with me all the time, the books and stories that give me something new even when I’ve read them five times, that make me feel like there’s a secret between me and this writer, this ability to capture what it feels like to be alive. Because then it becomes, “How do I do that? How do I access what to me is the highest calling of art?”
Most valuable beta reader: I have a friend who is brilliant at structure, so I always go to her, because that is not my natural strength. My agent. I show her things really early because I trust her tremendously. She is so good at helping me find the story. My wife. It’s so good to have a non-writer reader, a reader who can say “I’m bored by this,” or “I don’t understand this,” without really interrogating the craft. I trust my prose, but I need other eyes on the story. The essential question: Do you want to keep reading?