boom-and-bust industries and towns
prospering on the back of this very
shaky kind of dream. Everyone piled
into land where they weren’t supposed
to be and then thrived there in the tens
of thousands for five to ten years and
t hen ever y t h i ng ju st went da rk , a nd a l l
of those people were displaced by more
conflict or the collapse of the industry
or environmental changes. All of that
still happens and keeps happening.
Another thing that felt familiar and
ended up featuring really heavily in
the book was how newspapers reported
the range wars between big-time cat-
tle barons and independent ranchers.
There were association papers owned
by the barons that told one story and
then regional newspapers that told
another. But the association newspa-
pers could get into national newspa-
pers, so the narrative for decades and
sometimes a hundred years after was,
“We were just good, law-abiding cattle
barons minding our own business, and
then these rustlers came in and took
our cattle.” When historians started
doing research into these smaller,
regional newspapers, they found out
that the barons began accusing the in-
dependent ranchers of rustling as justi-
fication for bringing in mercenaries to
slaughter the ranchers left and right so
they could take that land.
There’s a constant question in this book
of what it means to belong somewhere,
what makes someone a citizen. Was that
something you’ve always thought about,
or were you thinking about it more after
the election?
As an immigrant who came here from a
country that fell apart and who already
had a mixed identity—and in Belgrade
to even claim to be mixed is consid-
ered a political act—I was thinking and
talking a lot within my family about
belonging and what the notion of home
is. When you’re mixed, do you have
to choose a home? Does home choose
you? It was one of the reasons I was
drawn to this project in the first place:
this notion of people at the seams of so-
ciety and identity where none of them
can claim to be one thing even though
they are trying so hard to be. And then
it ended up dovetailing with the na-
tional conversation, with the election,
with what’s going on now. And to see
it brought forward so explicitly and
with such terrifying consequences in
the past two and half years has been
devastating and sobering.Has writing the book changed your re-
lationship to home and the question of
home?
I think asking the question more and
more, and finding new ways to ask
that question, necessarily changes
your relationship to it. I don’t know
that I derived any answers from it.
It’s always going to be something I’m
wondering about and exploring in my
work. I do think one thing it moved
forward for me was the notion that itisn’t a dilemma particular to our time
or this nation; it just is. And I don’t
know if that makes me feel better or
worse. [Laughter.]The landscape of the West comes through
so clearly in this novel. What’s your rela-
tionship to that part of the country?
As someone who moved literally every
three years for the first twenty-five
years of my life, I’ve come to realize
how much specific places have an ef-
fect on your mind, your imagination,
your relationship to self, the person
that you feel you are. You feel these
seismic changes in your own psychol-
ogy when you move. I’m fascinated by
that, and I like to experience it, so I’m
sure that enjoyment bleeds over into a
lot of textural detail of the book.
So much unbelievable literature
has come from trying to describe the
indescribable beauty of the American
West, and I feel so profoundly moved
whenever I’m out there. That’s baked
into the narrative. But I also wanted to
come at it from this other perspective
of Nora, a woman whose husband is
like, “Hey, honey, here’s a great idea:
We’re gonna go out West; we’ll take
some land, and don’t worry about who
had it before, and you can churn this
but ter in 115-deg ree heat.” What does
her relationship to that majestic land
look like? [Laughter.]Yes, Nora’s story really helps to break
apart or at least show how gendered the
romanticism of the American West was.
How did you find her as a character?
I was thinking a lot about my grand-
mother, who I lost in 2015. Toward the
end of what had been a very difficult
life, she had become more open with
me about her rage. I was thinking about
this rage a great deal and how it’s not
permissible. That was in one chamber
of my brain. Then, in one of the diaries I
was reading, a woman wrote about how
the landscape where she was living was
so similar that every day she had to cut
a notch into the house just to feel that
something was different. I was so stag-
gered by that, and I just thought of herSEPT OCT 2019 60