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Being a teenage girl is hard. Especially on Long Island during the summer of 1999. No one knows this better than Forsyth Harmon. Author of the illustrated novel Justine, Harmon digs deep into the lives of two high school friends, Ali and Justine, using their multi-layered relationship to explore all the complexities and confusion that come with adolescent friendships. Do you want to be her, or do you want to be with her? Is this love you are feeling, or is it hate? Is it all of the above? And, seriously, how do you keep a Tamagotchi alive? Harmon’s evocative prose and drawings put the reader right back into the tension of that age, flush with all those tricky feelings. Justine is an immersive experience that reminds the reader what it’s like to be a teenager – for better or for worse.
I had the privilege to speak with Harmon about creating Justine, the process of making art, revisiting ‘90s issues of Vogue, and dead cats.
E.B. Bartels
What was the origin story of Justine? Did the book begin as your MFA thesis?
Forsyth Harmon
Justine started as a short story that I wrote ten years ago. I brought that short story with me to my MFA program, where I started to expand on it. At the time I was working a lot in watercolors, and the book had these full-color illustrations. But then a prominent novelist gave me the feedback to remove all the illustrations because he thought it was “more serious” than an illustrated book. I was crushed by that, to be honest.
E.B. Bartels
You were told to remove the illustrations? But the illustrations are my favorite part!
Forsyth Harmon
Yeah, and I did actually remove the illustrations for a while. I rewrote the book as a traditional novel – and I learned a lot by doing that – but I was just passionate about pursuing the illustrated form. I knew the images had to be in there. As I reworked and edited the prose, the writing had become a lot more economical and minimal, and I realized I had to do the same thing with the images. So, I redrew them as black and white line drawings instead of the original watercolors. Even though the form and style have evolved a lot, I think I stayed true to my original intention. Initially, I just didn’t have the skills and confidence to execute on it.
E.B. Bartels
It’s interesting to me that you revised your drawings to mirror how you revised your writing, but, in general, what are your writing and drawing processes like? How are they similar or different from one and other?
Forsyth Harmon
My process has been different for every project, but I am always super grateful to be able to move between the two. The process of writing is more intense for me, especially when I’m writing an auto-fictive work like Justine – writing feels like repressed-trauma-dredging. But drawing is meditative, relaxing. The images in Justine came a lot more easily to me – they almost drew themselves. Interestingly, I am writing a sequel to Justine, and now the writing is coming first this time. In general, though, my writing and art-making processes are not methodical. I don’t get up at 5 am every day. Sometimes I am writing and drawing every day – sometimes I don’t do either for weeks or even months.
E.B. Bartels
What about when you are collaborating with someone else, like your work for The Art of the Affair by Catherine Lacey or for Girlhood by Melissa Febos?
Forsyth Harmon
My task for Girlhood was so different – and really fun. I scanned each of Melissa’s essays, looking for images that felt symbolic or for important lines. It was like sifting for gold. Then I created the images based on what I found.
E.B. Bartels
You mentioned that Justine is a work of autobiographical fiction – I know that you also grew up on Long Island, and you are about the same age as Ali and Justine. As someone who writes nonfiction, I’m always curious about the choice to fictionalize something from real life vs. embracing writing about it as memoir. Why did you choose fiction for Justine?
Forsyth Harmon
I actually did try writing both memoir and fiction, and, in the end, I felt like I could get more at what felt emotionally true by alchemizing the facts. In Alexander Chee’s title essay in How To Write an Autobiographical Novel, he says: “Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.” It’s kind of like Lauren Slater’s book Lying, which she describes as a “metaphorical memoir.” Justine is true to my emotional experience, not my physical experience. Although, in some cases I didn’t change a single thing: the grandmother character in the story is my grandmother. But regardless of whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, if it’s based on real people, don’t ever write anything you aren’t ready to have a direct conversation with them about.
E.B. Bartels
I’d love to hear more about what drew you to writing about this kind of turbulent, complicated adolescent friendship between the two main characters, Ali and Justine.
Forsyth Harmon
I don’t think these types of friendships are relegated to the adolescent experience. The sequel to Justine actually is looking at Ali’s friendship with another woman, when they are in their mid-twenties. I used the project to interrogate my own relationship patterns: is Ali losing herself or finding herself in this relationship?
E.B. Bartels
There also seems to be a blurry line between whether Ali and Justine are just friends or more than friends. It seems a lot of people are seeing a romantic relationship between the two girls – O, The Oprah Magazine called Justine an “LGBTQ book.”
Forsyth Harmon
There is definitely romance between Ali and Justine. An earlier draft actually had a more explicit sex scene, but I ended up editing it out because of the adult gaze on two young girls. But I like the way different readers are seeing different things. I am okay with a lot of silence in a book, not filling in all the blanks. I got a lot of blowback in grad school for not writing a lot of interiority for my characters, but I like the reader being able to meet the book where they are.
E.B. Bartels
In terms of the main characters in Justine – we’ve talked about Ali, Justine, and the grandmother, but what about the non-human main character, Marlena? Who was the inspiration for her, and what value do you think a non-human character adds to a story?
Forsyth Harmon
Marlena is based on my childhood cat, Serena, who died when I was in high school. Serena’s death was hidden from me for a few days, actually, just like the grandmother in Justine hides Marlena’s death from Ali. I was about to take the SATs, and my family didn’t want to upset me, so they kept up this whole, “Oh, Serena went outside, I just saw her” rouse until I had taken the test. In terms of making Marlena one of the main characters – her role grew over the revisions. Ali has a hard time communicating with other people, but with Marlena, Ali can show her love without fear. Some reviews have described my prose as “clinical” – which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing – but I think the moments with the cat are a tender spot in Ali’s life, a place of intimacy and warmth. Animals are a lifeline. It won’t surprise you to know that my son, husband, and I do a lot of meowing to our two cats—and to each other. My son actually prefers to be called “kitty” now and he uses she/her pronouns when he is in his role as “kitty.”
E.B. Bartels
I really loved the setting of Justine – probably because I also was an adolescent in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. What kind of research did you do to really bring that era to life in the book?
Forsyth Harmon
One character, Ryan, is especially knowledgeable about ‘80s and ‘90s tristate hip hop, so I did a lot of research on that. I spent time listening to De La Soul, who are from Long Island. Their albums had been important to me as a teenager; it’s not very often that the name of the small town in which I grew up is mentioned in popular music: “To all the girls out in Huntington!” I also read up on skate culture, Tony Hawk, and the X Games for Ryan’s character. I studied up on all the fashion models of the time – I ordered old copies of Vogue off of eBay, the same issues I had read as a teenager, and it was amazing how familiar they still were. Those images had really seared into my memory. I also did a lot more research than I probably needed to about the abandoned psychiatric center that comes up in the novel – Kings Park Psychiatric Center – like Blair Witch kind of videos and stuff. That was a research black hole I delighted in.
E.B. Bartels
What other things influenced your writing of Justine? Can you paint me a picture of your mood board for the novel?
Forsyth Harmon
I actually have a picture of the mood board I put together for the book back in 2011. It has images of Kate Moss, EPMD, a map of the village of Northport, Long Island, a photo of the mural at Kings Park Psychiatric Center…
I was also very influenced by ’90s indie films, like Larry Clark’s Kids. I feel like Justine is a book about the suburban kids who watched Kids. Also anything with Parker Posey or Christina Ricci. I dressed up as Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo ‘66 two Halloweens in a row. And the graphic novel Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, which is also about an intense relationship between two young women. Queer zines, comics, and serial illustrated literature – I like the episodic rhythm, and I’ve been thinking about Justine as a trilogy.
E.B. Bartels
Writing Justine was clearly a long haul – who supported and encouraged you along the way?
Forsyth Harmon
The image of the solitary writer doesn’t work. You need so many people along the way. I get constant encouragement from my husband, Paul Stephens, who is also a writer but a literary and art critic. It’s nice because he gets it, but is in a different circle. Sanaë Lemoine, the author of The Margot Affair, is probably the person I text the most. She is the friend who most recently went through her first publication, and it’s so helpful to have someone to lean on who has just been through it all. Melissa Febos has had so much wisdom to share. And my mom, too – she had a premonition when she was pregnant with me that I would be an author and illustrator. I really wanted to make her premonition come true.
E.B. Bartels
What other upcoming 2021 books are you looking forward to? What are you reading now?
Forsyth Harmon
For books getting published this year, I’m looking forward to: Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck, Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, Dantiel W. Moniz’s Milk Blood Heat, and Kristen Radtke’s Seek You. In general, I’ve been reading a lot of fiction by Japanese women: Mieko Kawakami, Yoko Ogowa, Hiroko Oyamada, and Yūko Tsushima. Also blowing my mind right now is W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction. Oh, and I can’t wait for Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book. Ishiguro is probably my favorite living writer, and Klara and the Sun came out the same day as Justine which feels like fate.
FICTION
Justine
by Forsyth Harmon
Tin House Books
Published March 2, 2021
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