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

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

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.

"I think a lot of times the reason that people write, certainly the reason that I wrote, was because I'm interested in the future."

And then years later, in 2016, I was living in London, I was working at Oxford, and I'd gone back to—again, sneakily, guiltily was taking away from all the serious things I had to do—and I'd gone back to doing comedy and I was sneaking around doing improv in bars. I came back to that character and it wasn't a hilarious character, but the question in my mind was, “How do I make this funny? I know that's where my voice lies. I know I'm a funny writer. So, what's funny about this?” And that's exactly the answer, making this serious character this foil for hilarious conversations. You leave this heartfelt world of this aching mermaid desperately trying to find her origins and know herself to these jerks in LA who are like, "So does she have a vagina? Or, like, not really?" [laughs]. And to me, what works about the book is moving between the two worlds that always keeps you interested in the other one.

HH: When you were sitting down to write those brooding scenes and then you switch back to that world where it's sort of poking fun at this very highbrow literary space, do you feel like you were ever poking fun at yourself or laughing at yourself while you were writing those meta moments of the brooding novelist and the brooding novel?

JL: Yeah, I think it's funny. Why did Penelope, the writer character, write this book about a mermaid? I'm not sure she even knows, right? We don't know about some deep wound in her past or anything. If anything, what she's doing is writing her way into a new future. I think oftentimes with writers, we think so much about their backgrounds and their histories, and it's this biographical impulse that we all have, because that's the information that's lying out there about people. But I think a lot of times the reason that people write, certainly the reason that I wrote, was because I'm interested in the future, right? In 2016, not only was I doing improv again, but I also did something else, which was get pregnant. That's a way of existing in a really future-oriented way. All of a sudden, I'm going to throw this life out into the world that's going to do all kinds of things that I'm not in control of.

I think I was interested in thinking about writing for this Penelope character and for myself as a way of changing the future and not just reflecting on the past. And so, yeah, she's not brooding, but she's taking a risk. She's living in a speculative way. She's doing something that's a bit scary by writing this story. And, indeed, she unleashes a force upon the world.

HH: Just thinking about the way that you're emphasizing your focus on the future while writing this is sort of interesting to then conceptualize against how much you did write to the past and the cultural history of mermaids and then make that contemporary and draw these parallels. There's this push and pull between common narratives and the narrative that I think Penelope's creating. So, I'd love to talk about the way your novel dissects the mythology of mermaids. But before I do that, I'm also curious, what do you like about mermaids and if you have a favorite mermaid trope?

JL: I was so obsessed when I was eight years old and I went to see The Little Mermaid. That was a Disney movie that just sunk into the very deepest parts of me and reverberated way too much for way too long. I didn't go back and study mermaids for this. I didn't even go back and read the original Hans Christian Andersen, which I'm sure is super messed up and involves everyone getting stabbed and horrible things happening to everyone. But the myth that I think we all know is the idea of the Mermaid giving up her voice. And this is a book about keeping your voice, about knowing your voice, about protecting each other's voices, about listening to each other.

So, I think that very fundamental fact that The Little Mermaid is about a bargain—of all of the princess stories or Disney stories or fairy tales out there, it's the most nakedly transactional. She goes to this witch and she makes a deal. It's a trade. "I'll give you this if you give me that." And so I think that for a story that's about financial precarity—Penelope, the writer is lured out to Hollywood, even though she loves teaching in Connecticut. She loves being a public school teacher, but she's lured to leave that job because she doesn't have enough money to feel safe. So, I think in a lot of ways, The Little Mermaid story has a modernity to it because it's about what you'll give away to have success, to participate in an economic reality, to have financial stability, to have family. It's funny, this book has actually, ultimately, very little to do with mermaid mythology or The Little Mermaid or mermaids as a complex cultural subject. But it has a lot to do with the kinds of transactions that we make in this precarious modern world.

HH: It's funny, I actually pulled a quote that I think speaks exactly to what you were saying, and I'm so glad that you mentioned that sort of parallel between Penelope's bargain. I'd love to read the quote: "Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid and all her descendants are always trying to leave a place where they're powerful, mobile, and knowledgeable, bargaining away their voices in return for a place where they're ignorant and adorable."

And it really did stand out to me in that quote that Penelope does sort of stumble into a similar situation in Hollywood. She makes this deal with these misogynistic, shallow Hollywood screenwriters. And while there's no denying that her story is brilliant, it's also unfortunately pretty true that sex sells at the box office. And while I'm personally totally on board for a feminist takeover of mermaid mythology, I also really fell in love with your novel for the way it is able to draw those parallels between her contemporary conundrum and the historical role that sailors have played in shaping these stories. You mentioned that conversation about “does a mermaid have a vagina?” And I love that scene where the Hollywood screenwriters are like, "How can we weave that into the costume design?" And it's like, "Let's just not think about it that much," you know? [Laughs]

JL: Something that I think you're picking up on is the fact that there's actually a wild discrepancy between a kind of superficial image of the mermaid, which is quite sexy, kind of a beautiful shape, alluring, right? They lure sailors. And, actually, it's very strange when you think about it. You kind of defamiliarize this thing for a moment culturally, you realize that it's half woman and half fish. I think I said somewhere in the novel, "Tuna from the waist down" or something. Like, that's an insane thing for us collectively to find sexy, right? I don't know about you, I'm not super attracted to sea bass. It is a very weird hybrid.

And also what mermaids do culturally in our collective imagination is they murder, right? They lure sailors to their death for absolutely no reason. There's, as we discussed earlier, this very off-putting kind of warning story for young women about the perils of coming of age. Mermaids are a very strange combination of superficially alluring and profoundly disturbing. And you asked what were my cultural touchstones for mermaids, and I think now about how much I loved The Little Mermaid and I think a lot of it had to do with actually just how sexy and beautiful she was. Something you don't even talk about, but just how crazily hourglass she was and her boobs hanging out in these giant clam shells. Mermaids have a very disturbing line to walk between extraordinary beauty and things that are a little bit more disturbing and off-putting.

HH: Totally. I mean, I don't really find sea bass attractive, but I will say that I did have a childhood crush on Flounder from The Little Mermaid. As attractive as she was right next to him, I was all for Flounder [laughs].

JL: That’s hilarious.

HH: My next question was, to speak to that, Penelope's trying to create this very feminist framework for reimagining mermaid stories, but I am curious—and I think that push and pull between her Hollywood screenwriters might raise this question a bit itself—but do you think that the male gaze will always influence mermaid mythology, if even only in its folly?

JL: Yeah. Tough one. The male gaze. I mean, okay, something that I play with in American Mermaid is this idea of being a creature. Being a being without any kind of sexuality or any kind of sexual desire. There's an aspect of this book in which Penelope, the author, really tries to repress her sexuality, tries to kind of live without desire because she just finds that it compromises her. I think at one point she talks, for example, about how as a teacher she can't help but wanting to impress or liking the kind of inappropriate affections of an older history teacher, right? It's really hard to be a woman in the world and not travel along these vectors of desire and desirability.

"The Little Mermaid story has a modernity to it because it's about what you'll give away to have success, to participate in an economic reality, to have financial stability, to have family."

I just finished Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, so perhaps this is something that I'm thinking about way too much. I'm writing an essay about it right now. One reason I wanted to write about this mermaid was that there was something about the idea of this creature being ungendered or not living according to the kind of binaries and the kind of visibility that we always associate with gender. The society that I kind of evoke for mermaids is this kind of sisterhood in which love and affection shoots out in all directions, instead of being something that binds two people together. And these are totally utopian, ideal ways of thinking. But at the same time, if you can't imagine that under the sea, and if the deep sea doesn't give you space to imagine a kind of utopian world in which desire is purely support and purely love, then I don't know where else can you imagine it?

HH: Yeah, I think about that a lot when I think about feminist discourse as well, especially just speaking to that idea of who gets to control a narrative. And I think that the patriarchy really benefits from asserting itself and defining the world around it. I loved how your novel also plays to that notion of a mermaid always being sort of caught in a state of in-between and also representing a state of becoming. And I feel like your novel also plays with that sort of binary, that discomfort of living in in-between states, because you have to always define yourself as becoming something. You mentioned Penelope being a teacher with these students. I love how you use that phrase, a state of becoming, to refer to these teenagers who she's teaching and to look at adolescence, because that's also the time of sexual maturity and when you are expected to get those urges. I'd love to know what interests you about exploring these types of in-between experiences, especially in regards to this novel?

JL: Well, so firstly I just want to go back really quickly to this question about feminism and just say that what's been really interesting to me is the way that male readers have responded to this book. Actually, some of my earliest readers when I was writing this book were friends of mine who happened to be men. And I never thought of it as a book for women. It's a book about personhood, and it's also just a book about the kind of conversations we have about representation and representing ourselves and being seen and whatever. And the two screenwriters, the male screenwriters that Penelope gets paired with in Hollywood, yes, they're kind of jerks, but they're actually also kind of lovably hilarious. And there are a number of male characters in this book that I think are also trying to figure themselves out in a world of precarity and so on. And so I think this maybe utopian space that I'm imagining in which gender is sort of not this all-defining thing is something that's also appealing to men, and it is a space that they find interesting to imagine as well. So yeah, that's been really interesting to me.

Okay, so second, this thing about the state of becoming. So, I got a PhD and then I ran off and I was a research fellow at Oxford, so I taught at the University of Chicago and then at Oxford and some other places intermittently, and mostly teaching kids between 19, 20, 21. They were really my kind of model for these high school students that I was dealing with. But the thing that I love about the students that I worked with was that they just stumbled into profundity. They stumbled into really good ideas. You know your mind when you're a grown-up, you've already decided what your strengths and your weaknesses are, what kind of books you like, what kind of things you're good at. But when you don't have that stuff figured out yet, you actually have this really wild chance of being freakishly good at suddenly understanding profound things about art, about books, about theory.

And I found myself dealing with these students and just really getting so much out of them. I know that sounds kind of happy-clappy and cliché or whatever, but the fact that they didn't know who they were is a strength. That's not a problem to be solved. That's actually a strength. And so I drew on that for the characters, some of the characters, including some I find hilarious. My favorite characters in this novel are the teenagers that show up. I absolutely love them. I want to hang out with them. But the strange power that they have, and that ultimately it's the teenagers that show up and really try to save Penelope, the writer teacher figure, in a way that's not insurrectionist and anti-authoritarian, but really comes out of kind of love and humor and just openness.

HH: I love how Penelope does recognize that as well when she's trying to figure out and look deeper into her own character. And then she goes and asks her students to read her novel to find more insight about Sylvia, I think is so great.

JL: The teenagers that she meets are not her students, but they are like students in that the text that they've been inside, that they're reading, is her life. They're bringing the intelligence that she usually cultivates talking about Edith Wharton or whatever, to reading her to figure her out.

HH: Right. There's that part where she's reading at a panel and this one girl raises her hand and sort of starts to criticize her. And what struck me about that moment is how Penelope almost grapples, herself, with embracing her own vulnerability. I think there's also a line about how teenagers and people of that age are able to find the vulnerability in other people despite being in a vulnerable stage themselves.

JL: Yeah, when she's at this reading, she's reading from her book, and this teenager raises her hand and says, "Actually, I didn't really like your book." And the next thing that happens is that Penelope suddenly finds herself kind of reeling internally, but she feels alone with this young girl. She suddenly imagines that they're just alone on a beach towel talking. And that actually there's a way in which this teenager's willingness to just throw the truth at her in this really unguarded way makes them suddenly kind of intimate, like gives them a closeness. And I think you're right that Penelope's somebody who uses humor a lot and has a lot of kind of interior thoughts that she doesn't share. She's quite guarded, right? I think another part of her journey is, how does a woman in the world who wants to stay sane and finds ways of coping with the world by being guarded, by being arch, by being funny, how do you live depriving yourself of some of the good things that come with vulnerability and the good things that come with desire? I think what we know about Penelope, what we learn about her, is that she's going to let the world in a little bit more.

HH: Totally. Speaking to the humor also, it all completely lands, especially with Tara Sands' performance of this audiobook. I thought all of her comedic delivery was just perfect.

JL: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about that.

HH: I was curious what you were looking for in a narrator to bring your story to life, because she was so great.

JL: I love listening to audiobooks. Especially the contemporary fiction I consume, I consume via audio. The thing that I have a problem with is when it's overly actorly, you know, which may work for certain kinds of literary fiction, but it would've absolutely murdered this book. Honestly, everyone that they ran by me was really good, would've done a great job. But what I liked about Tara was that she just had great vocal fry, a willingness to fry that just felt so real and so LA and so contemporary. It's tough doing a 50-year-old doctor and teenagers and a 30-something year old woman. I mean, there's all kinds of people. I think at some point there might be like an Irish fisherman, right? There's a lot for her to have to grapple with. I think she's a fantastic actress and I’m really impressed.

HH: Totally. She completely brings it to life, every character. Which, speaking of bringing characters to life, I wanted to talk a little bit just about what fascinates you about the process of book-to-screen adaptations and that process of bringing a novel to a movie and translating all of the characters. Do you have any thoughts on what you like to see get translated there?

JL: So, two things. One, as I mentioned, I used to do a lot of comedy, so the people that I came up with in my 20s, people I did comedy with, have become screenwriters or directors or TV writers or whatever. And so there's no way in which the villain here is Hollywood. I have so, so much respect for the kind of storytelling that gets done visually and for the kind of writing that happens in the world of mass culture, of TV and film.

"Laughter is often something that you can follow to the profound."

We were talking earlier about categories, right? And I think that it's much harder to bring something to that world without being really clear about categories. I guess ambiguity is something that's really hard to preserve in TV and film. And maybe it's just not filmic, maybe it's not visual, the kind of parts of human nature that a book can get to. I think about the kind of interiority that you experience when you're reading Henry James or Tolstoy or whatever, there's nothing visual about that sometimes. That feeling of inhabiting a body or knowing knowledge, or sometimes the most exciting parts about literature are just so precisely not filmable, right? To me, it's actually just a fascinating exercise to think about just the moment when you have to bring something into the world of the visible, you have to put labels on it. I must give you a race. I must give you a skin color. I must decide on your accent. There are these things that cannot be ambiguous.

HH: So American Mermaid I think has that interiority in it. At the same time, I do think it has a good amount of fun dialogue. And then there's a lot of discussion about those excerpts from American Mermaid and a lot of discussion of, “If you were to bring this to the screen, how would you do it?” So it'd be really meta, but do you think you would ever like to see this book adapted itself?

JL: Oh, absolutely. I think that this would make an amazing adaptation for the very reason that it's about adaptation. And so you could not just visualize it, but you could play with different ways of visualizing it. You could have something like one of the male screenwriter’s visions of a scene or visions of a character. And then how hilarious would it be to juxtapose that with the way Penelope visualized it? You could play different versions of it off of itself. I think it'd be a very good comic adaptation, and also, as you said, there's a lot of dialogue in it, so it's full of jokes already. I mean, and there have been some conversations, so we'll see what happens.

HH: That's great to hear. Speaking to the audiobook, there's a lot going on in it, and I know that it's one that I can listen to numerous times and make a new connection each time I listen to the way that your themes of gender and creative control and vulnerability and so on connect. So speaking to the audiobook and its state right now, I am curious, what do you hope listeners will take away from your work upon first listen?

JL: I'm a people pleaser and I compulsively need to make people around me laugh. I want people to be at their kitchen sinks and in their cars and in their backyards or whatever, laughing. I really, really want you to laugh out loud to this, and I hope you do. That would be very gratifying. I really miss performing, I miss doing comedy. And one of the best things about doing comedy was just hearing people laugh. And so I won't be there to hear it, but knowing that people are listening and laughing would be great.

I've been getting messages from people who've read it and said, "This made me laugh so much." And it never gets old. It never gets old. It always makes me so happy. Something that changed from the very first drafts of this book to the later drafts was that I think I was afraid to put too much heart in there. I think it was all a comedy. And I think that one thing that my really wonderful, really, really wonderful editor did was to kind of say, "Don't worry. You're not going to lose people if you take a minute and feel some feelings here."

One thing that really surprised me was one reader recently said something like, "You know, I really wanted to spend more time with Sylvia." Sylvia is the mermaid. "I feel like she just found herself, I want more of her." And I just assumed if anybody wants more of anything, they want more of the dry, self-deprecating source of hilarity, right? The funny world. So, it's really kind of touching to me that people want to spend more time in the sincere world of profound thoughts and feelings. That's nice too.

HH: Yeah, I loved both halves of this novel. I will say you didn't hear me, but I did laugh out loud as well.

JL: Good. Yay.

HH: I could be happy to have more Sylvia too, if you ever returned to her story. I loved her character as well. I was curious, lastly, in addition to American Mermaid, you've previously published an art history nonfiction book and a plethora of essays on food, travel, and culture. Where are you excited to go next with your writing?

JL: Well, I don't want to jinx it, but I'm more than halfway done with another novel, which is in the hands of an early reader right now getting some feedback. So, I'm pretty excited about that. And that's, again, a comic novel, but it's not as slapstick-y, put it that way. And my art history, it is a strange thing that I wrote this very academic book, which is really written for a college class and it's based on like 12 years of archival research. It's really, really in-depth. It's just trying to change the way that this field is done.

So, it's very strange to have that published in 2022 and suddenly pivot to this fiction book. And I don't expect people who are interested in fiction to go read the academic book at all. But, actually, they are related, because the academic book is about the way that comic artists, caricaturists, these real people who were seen as kind of scurrilous and lowbrow were actually the smartest people in the room when it came to understanding changes happening in art in the 19th century. I mean, understanding what we now call modernism, modern art, impressionism, right? That it wasn't always the highbrow critics and the people with the vocabulary. It was these people who were trained to make people laugh that got it, that got the serious art best, or got it as well as anyone.

And so I think that's also something that runs through my novel, runs through American Mermaid, is that laughter is often something that you can follow to the profound. I mean, certainly, historically, in the work that I was doing, it was seen as a sign of ignorance. People who laughed at art were considered ignorant audiences. For me, I think there's a whole world in which books that make you laugh are considered light, or comic literature is something that maybe is associated with light experiences. But for me, like the Evelyn Waugh or Edward St. Aubyn, Patricia Lockwood, people who've really made me laugh, but also just dragged me into like the deepest, profoundest truths with that laughter are the writers that I care the most about. So yeah, I'm really interested in the way that being profound and intelligent and understanding things is connected to hilarity.

HH: There's got to be a connection. You're making me think a lot about Shakespearean fools and how the fool is funny, but he is also like the wisest character always.

JL: I think there's, yeah, Shakespeare got it. It's not that laughter's always been associated with idiocy or anything, but I think that even there have been some reactions to American Mermaid where people seem kind of confused that they're laughing so much, like they're doing something wrong. And I kind of want to say to them, "No, it's okay that you're laughing. There's nothing wrong with you, you're not an idiot for laughing. We're both intelligent and we're connecting on the field of play. And that's okay."

HH: Well, I love how you're able to translate that age-old very human reaction and reality about that profound insight and humor to these different stories in these different settings. I definitely can't wait to listen to what you have next and I would be interested to return to your nonfiction book. But thank you so much for your time today, Julia. I really appreciate you stopping by to chat about American Mermaid.

JL: Thank you for your very, very careful reading and listening.

HH: And listeners, you can get American Mermaid by Julia Langbein on Audible now.