"American Mermaid" is a Meta Dive into the Funny, Fishy World of Adaptation

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Haley Hill: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Haley Hill, and today I'm so excited to speak with author Julia Langbein about her fishy, funny, fantastically feminist fiction debut, American Mermaid. Welcome, Julia. Thanks so much for being here today.

Julia Langbein: Thanks for having me.

HH: Well, it's a pleasure to have you. So, this story hilariously captures the experience of an emerging writer who moves to Hollywood to adapt her first novel, also titled American Mermaid, into a big budget film. In many ways, it feels like a pretty meta work of fiction. What made you decide to write your debut novel about a debut novel? And did you initially approach this story with the intention of doing so?

JL: No. Why did I write a debut novel about a debut novel? That's a great question. It's funny, there are two main characters in this book. There's a mermaid, who is the main character of a novel, and then there's a writer who wrote the novel. But they sort of share the book. They get equal billing. And the one that came to me first, that I understood first as a fully-fledged character, was the mermaid herself. Then it struck me as important to think about, as hilarious to think about, how somebody would navigate the world of publishing and of Hollywood with trying to keep this character intact.

The reason that I ended up writing the novel the way I did was because I came from a comedy background, where there're improv games in which you jump from scene A to scene B and then return from scene A to scene B and scene A to scene B. And so it was this improv comedy structure that really, for me, got the book going as one in which you jumped between a character in a book and the writer of the book.

HH: That's a really fascinating answer, because an alternative way that I had originally written out that question was, “Which came first, the story about the mermaid, the story about the debut novelist, or a story about Hollywood?” And so it's really fascinating to me, especially it being inspired by your standup background, the fact that actually the character that came first is almost the least comedically tied to the rest of the book. What really struck my attention about this is, debut novels are sort of known as being very lyrical. And then I love the way that this is very fresh and contemporary in the other halves of it, but both halves offer this very distinct feminist lens in their respective styles of prose. So I was curious also, how did navigating the tonal and comedic shifts at the heart of this novel affect your writing process?

JL: Well, so, it's interesting. The very, very first manifestation of this book in my life was many years ago, in, like, 2012, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. And I had serious stuff to do. I had papers to write. I totally wasted a day during exams—or, I don't know, I probably had something to do that felt important at the time—because I was completely overcome with this idea of this story. And I spent the whole day just writing this mermaid character. And it was so unlike me, because this character wasn't funny. There was nothing funny about it. It was actually kind of historical. It was about this mermaid who finds a painting. It was something that never made it into the book. This character just really appeared to me, and I had to sit down and I had to write it. And I felt so guilty I'd wasted a whole day of graduate school.