Making the insufferable sufferable.

Interview with Margie Sarsfield author of Beta Vulgaris

Today I’m thrilled to present an interview with literary horror novelist Margie Sarsfield about her astonishing debut Beta Vulgaris, one of my favorite new novels of the year.

There's so much I love about this book but the aspect of the novel that grabbed me from the start is the narrator's financial precarity. She's taken a job to work the sugar beet harvest but just traveling from New York to Minnesota stretches her finances to the breaking point. She can't afford to have anything go wrong and then, of course, things go very, very wrong.

Elise travels to the harvest with her boyfriend Tom and while I don't want to give too much away it's obvious from the jump there's a lot of tension between them. For instance, he's a musician in a hardcore band that she characterizes as terrible. The only clue as to what they sound like or why they're bad is that he likes Thrice, which is such a sick burn.

Beta Vulgaris begins with a conventional horror set-up: someone goes to a strange new place where things are not as they seem. In this case there's something deeply weird about the sugar beets. But to everyone else at the sugar beet harvest, Elise, who has a history of disordered eating, is the stranger getting stranger by the day…

Photo courtesy of W.W. Norton

Jim Ruland: At what point in the process did you know you wanted to make this novel about class?

Margie Sarsfield: Beta Vulgaris is based on my own experience as a broke twenty-something harvesting sugar beets, and I did run out of money midway through the harvest. I was very much in the red, with overdue payments on maxed-out credit cards. Looking back, I viscerally remember the fear of it. For basically all of my twenties, I was completely overwhelmed by anxiety over money — not having enough, owing it to other people, feeling like I’d never, ever get out of the hole. I was, like, suicidally stressed over $3,000 in credit card debt, never mind the student loans. I’m still not out of the hole, but I have more perspective now.

So when I was writing a horror novel, I wanted to honor the reality of that kind of anxiety. I wanted to give it shape and texture so people could recognize it as something true, maybe even see their own experience validated on the page. You’re asking about class, and I think putting “the horror of being broke” into a larger context of economic privilege across groups was actually the trickier part. There were plenty of times I asked myself if anyone needed to read a story about this particular person’s financial troubles when other people have it worse. And Elise thinks about that, too. Ultimately, I think I wrote this story because it’s one I would have benefitted from when I was in Elise’s shoes, and I hoped other people would find it helpful (or at least horrifyingly familiar), too.

Can you talk about this decision to use music as a kind of wedge between Elise and Tom? I think it's probably more common than not, don't you think?

I liked the idea of Tom being in a hardcore band because he has generational wealth, and that’s definitely a type. It’s like a variation of “guy who plays acoustic guitar at a party,” but with punk charisma instead of sadboy cred.

And yes, definitely, music can be a great vehicle for tension in a relationship. Being with someone whose music taste you have zero overlap with just seems like a form of hell to me. With Elise and Tom, maybe they can find some common ground when it comes to listening to music, but Tom’s in a band and Elise doesn’t like the band. That’s a huge source of pain on both sides, especially for a young couple. It would suck for your partner to think your creative endeavors are shit, and it would suck to be the one enduring your partner’s shit creative endeavors. It felt realistic, and like a very subtle time bomb.

Elise has a lot going on in her head. She worries. She fixates. She creates narratives to justify or explain away the worst-case scenarios she's constantly dreaming up. It's not that she's an unreliable narrator, but the volume on her interior monologue is so high that the reality of her situation at times feels distant, which is a perilous way to be. Was Elise challenging to write?

In earlier versions of the novel, Elise was intolerable for readers. My early readers were blunt about how being in her head was too miserable to bear. Every draft, I had to make her less and less of a black hole of anxiety and self-loathing. That was the hard part, honestly. I guess I’m really good at channeling the insufferable; less good at making the insufferable sufferable.

I’ve been Elise, so it was just a matter of letting my mental illness go absolutely buck wild on the page. The challenge was figuring out how much most readers are willing to endure. Having a third-person narrator helped a lot, because the narrator could poke fun at Elise’s cognitive dissonance even when she was in the thick of it.

In real life, you can be as self-aware as you want about how dumb your own thoughts are; that doesn’t necessarily make them easier to live with. That was a hard line to walk, too: how do I get at the way you can know your brain is doing the absolute most, at all times, for no reason, to the point where it’s funny, but also you take it seriously enough that it’s ruining your life?

You've said in an interview that you don't think horror has to be scary to be effective. While I agree that Beta Vulgaris is more unsettling than scary, I think it would be a terrifying movie. Were there versions of the novel that were more or less scary?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if it was ever more or less scary, exactly. It used to have more unsettling things in it, but I don’t think those made it more unsettling. I can get carried away making things strange just for the sake of making them strange; that feels like a pure expression of creativity, and it’s a little addicting. When I was paring back, it became a quantity-over-quality thing: the volume of weird stuff hit a point where adding more wasn’t actually making it more effective. I was actually worried about making it scary in a “killer beets!” kind of way, even though that’s a fun way to describe it to people. It was important to me that the horror be more creepy and tendril-y, like a root system rotting away in bad soil (because it is still about beets, after all).

It took me a while to grasp that someone with Elise's past going to the source for much of America's processed sugar would be comparable to an alcoholic taking a job at a haunted distillery. Can you talk about how this idea evolved?

I think there’s this really weird creative dichotomy between the things that are emotional compulsion — like, your id is manifesting itself without your permission on the page — and the things that are intentional artistic choices. You’d think that because disordered eating is a hugely personal issue, that part of the book would have been the former, but it was actually the latter. I was already thinking and writing about consumption as an aspect of capitalism and the idea of labor being consumed by corporations, and eating disorders just fit so neatly right there next to that.

I think what specifically triggered the idea was thinking about packets of sugar. It definitely wasn’t a part of my initial concept for the book; I remember being in the final stages of the first draft and feeling like there was something missing from the story and from Elise’s character. It was a “what the hell is this book even about” moment; I was like, “it’s about…sugar? Sugar? Sugar? Oh, right. Sugar. Duh.” I was a strictly sucralose-and-aspartame girlie for most of my life. Reaching for the pink and yellow packets was automatic and ingrained. Obviously no shade to Splenda, there’s a million reasons people might prefer it, but it’s as much a part of diet culture as celery being “negative calories.” It’s the kind of thing that people who don’t have histories of disordered eating maybe don’t think about at all—you either like sweeteners or you don’t, whatever. But for someone with an eating disorder, sugar is terrifying; you feel like if you put it in your coffee one time, your whole life could fall apart.

So once that element landed, it deepened Elise’s character, gave me more tools for horror—because hunger and obsession are inherently surreal—and added another layer to the consumption theme. It was very much an intentional “this makes sense to put here, and it’s in my wheelhouse” thing.

Horror is often pegged to a sub-genre: vampire, zombie, slasher, haunted house, etc. Although we're seeing more climate horror, your book wrestles with the horror of capitalism in a very unique way. Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or new wave of horror writers?

I’m very happy that people are identifying Beta Vulgaris as “weird girl lit” (which I think can be horror but isn’t always). It’s super visible and trendy right now, but it’s not necessarily a new genre; there’s Rebecca, The Yellow Wallpaper, A Jest of God, Trash… I’d even argue Pink Flamingos is weird girl cinema.

As for horror lineage, the whole “are they losing their mind or is reality warping?” setup goes way back, too—Images, The Haunting of Hill House, Possession, House of Leaves. So I definitely feel like I’m in conversation with those works. But, yeah, I feel very at home amongst the feral woman cohort. Vive la femme féroce.

What has your experience of bringing Beta Vulgaris into the world been like?

Honestly, the weeks leading up to pub day were rough. I’m not the most emotionally stable person in good times, so even amazing things can send me spiraling. I kind of want to normalize that more, because no one talks about how disorienting it can feel when your lifelong dream finally comes true and you still feel like garbage.

I just felt like I wasn’t ready, I was afraid of how it would be received, I was afraid of putting something that was so personal out in the world, and I was also afraid that nothing would change and no one would read it and it would be hugely disappointing. I also hate self-promotion and have no clue how to market myself. So, it was a lot of panic attacks. But then I went to the bookstore and saw my book on display, and the anxiety definitely took a backseat and I got to feel the joy I’d been hoping to feel.

Since then, I’ve just been incredibly grateful. It’s literary horror—not a guaranteed blockbuster genre. But every reader, every library request, every TBR add means so much. The best part has been seeing people picking up what I was putting down. I didn’t write this book for everyone, but I did write it for someone, and it’s really nice seeing those people "getting it." I hoped people might find validation or see their pain taken seriously, so if even one person has had that experience, then that’s just amazing to me.

It’s an amazing book! Are you working on any creative projects at the moment?

Yes! I’m working on a new novel about online communities, parasocial relationships, Twitch streamers, and people secretly living inside other people’s houses. Like Beta Vulgaris, it involves disappearances, which I guess says something about my psyche.

This one’s a departure, though. It’s not lowkey about me, and I’m writing it in a different POV for the first time in years, which is exciting but also really slowing me down. I keep reminding myself: write the worst first draft ever, then fix it. That’s the mantra.

Order Beta Vulgaris from Bookshop now.

Thanks for reading! Next week I’ll have a dispatch from the Underground Garage Cruise aka the Punk Rock Navy.

If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

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