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Sadie and Alice have been best friends since high school and now live on opposite ends of California. When budding actress Alice comes back to the Bay Area to perform in a basement-theater production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, she expects reliable Sadie to attend opening night. But her friend has special plans of her own. Sadie intends to finally lose her virginity that day. She begs her mother, Celine, to go to the play in her stead. Celine, the notorious author of a landmark feminist treatise on sex and identity, is currently struggling to write her new book. As she watches Alice’s performance, she realizes her daughter’s best friend has become an entrancing young woman. Soon, Celine and Alice begin a secretive affair.
Cerebral and subversive, Alice Sadie Celine is a story about motherhood, daughterhood, and friendship, about authenticity and betrayal, and about repercussions when the lines between relationships blur. In precise prose, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright offers a detailed character study of three complex and distinct women. This novel explores the rift between our inner and outer lives and how it plays out in our most intimate relationships.
Blakley-Cartwright is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books and associate editor of A Public Space. She also runs “The Artist’s Library,” a series in Ursula magazine featuring conversations with artists on their most beloved books. Blakley-Cartwright is the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, Red Riding Hood, a fairy tale thriller she wrote at a young age for Warner Brothers. Alice Sadie Celine is her adult debut.
I connected with Blakley-Cartwright over Zoom and we took a deep dive into topics like motherhood and sexuality, the nuances of narcissism and desire, and the boundaries we enact with loved ones.
Jenny Bartoy
How did this story come to life? Where did you get the idea for this book?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
The love triangle came to me abruptly and instantaneously. It’s the story of a girl who falls in love with her best friend’s mother—or vice versa because, with the rotating point of view, we hear from each character equally. Can the daughter allow them to explore this love? I saw a rich opportunity in that.
Generally I plunge into a story, rather than ponder and mull over the subject, weighing different ways of approaching it. And this time, blessedly, finding the story was not a fraught experience. It does not happen that way every time. But, like an apparition, the three characters materialized fully formed. They were always exactly who they are, from the first word on the page. They never changed. That helped me to be very grounded while writing the book.
Jenny Bartoy
Falling for your best friend’s dad (or your dad’s best friend) is a popular trend in the romance genre apparently. With Alice falling for her best friend’s mother, you flip this cliché on its head by changing both gender and sexual orientation. How intentional were you in crafting the parallel with and divergence from other more “traditional” May-December narratives?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
I only recently learned that a May-December romance refers to a younger partner, usually a woman, being in her springtime and the older partner, usually a man, being the winter, at the far end of his vitality. But of course, it’s not only men who take advantage of disparities in power. I substituted the gender very deliberately. I never write a novel with a point to prove, but I noticed that opportunity and wanted to explore that. Celine is a female chauvinist, which we don’t see all that often in literature. She’s a person of immoderate appetites. She worships her own autonomy and self-determination. She’s a person who has sex with whomever she wants. And she believes what she’s doing is noble. She thinks this is humanist progress. And who are we to judge? Maybe it is.
Jenny Bartoy
Culturally we don’t tend to think of mothers as sexy or erotic. Mothers are supposed to be nurturing and protective. So your novel’s premise inherently causes an interesting discomfort, in a way that it wouldn’t perhaps if Alice had fallen for Sadie’s father. Alice Sadie Celine is subversive in this way, it sort of pokes at this discomfort, both because Celine is not a typical mother and because of this affair with her daughter’s best friend. Was it important to you to be critical of our assumptions about mothers, of our comfort with patriarchal dynamics?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
I had a baby this year. So assumptions about mothers are at the top of my mind, especially pertaining to sexuality. My parents were never really together, and certainly not together during my lifetime. My father, who’s a lovely and sensitive person, had many girlfriends throughout my childhood, this series of powerful, very embodied women. They all stayed friends with both me and my father, and I only realized as an adult that none of them had children. So to me, witnessing this as a girl coming of age, the sexual female body, if we want to reduce it, was always childless. And it’s possible that my father didn’t want another child in his life or it’s also possible that people prefer women whose bodies have not been through that calamity. [Laughs] Western culture, as far back as the Christian cult of the virgin and probably earlier, has always tried to dissociate sex and motherhood, when they’re, by the simplest definition, inextricably linked.
All that is to say that I really feel for Celine’s predicament, at the same time as I hope I would never do anything similar to my own daughter. But I can see how it could be very frustrating to have a body that has lots of desires. It’s almost not her fault.
Jenny Bartoy
Sadie describes Celine as a “narcissist” early on in the story. While this word has become commonplace in our cultural lexicon, it refers to a personality disorder with specific traits. You do a fantastic job writing Celine’s narcissism—she is charming and larger than life, but also maddeningly self-centered, manipulative, and childish. How much research did you do to understand the psychology of this character?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
You know, I did zero research about personality disorders. I shy away from assigning strict personality types, or a mental disorder, to my characters. That’s probably so that I can make sure that they have a full variety of characteristics and not just the ones in the symptoms list, like “Five Signs of Narcissism,” which would have reduced her, I think. She probably fits the definition in many ways, with her self-importance and arrogance and often stunning lack of empathy to the other characters. I also wanted her to be very likable, which may be a sign of narcissism too.
I did accidental research by hearing a conversation between Eileen Myles and Jill Soloway in 2016 at the Hammer Museum in LA. I was struck by the casual, taken-for-granted intimacy between them. They were exes, and I was really inspired by the way they approached each other, that you could live for yourself and not take everything so seriously, not be so attached, no “this is mine, and this is yours.” They were a power couple who just happened not to be together anymore. And that’s what Celine is trying to convey to these girls. Why take everything so seriously? That really helped me in the genesis of Celine, a mother who wants to resist every given inference about mothers, but who also loves her daughter deeply and loves to be a mother in her own crazy-making way.
Jenny Bartoy
Part of this character’s complexity is the boundaries required to navigate a relationship with her. At one point, Sadie thinks: “Celine had to be mitigated. She was always trying to get too close.” Sadie seems hyperaware of the barriers she needs to maintain around her mother and this need for control translates to her other relationships. Tell me more about this character.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Sadie is trying to work through her mother’s sexuality to get to her own. At the start of the novel, she feels fundamentally disconnected from her body. She ends up undergoing a sexual emergence at the same time as her best friend, which I think is interesting. And it turns out to be really enlivening for her. Maybe her mother was onto something after all! But she can’t let her mind go there because across town, dot dot dot, she can’t bear to think about what’s going on at her mother’s house.
In a way, Sadie was the perfect person for this affair to land on. I wanted to see how somebody like her would handle it. She is very resolute but she’s not confident. She’s slow to things—pride can often make a person immobile. She’s not like Alice, who’s supple, able to contort herself by virtue of being flexible and easygoing, which is how she gets into the situation in the first place! Sadie weathers this relationship, she sort of agrees to suffer it, to withstand it, which is her style. She doesn’t fight—she distances. It’s self-preserving. And this is a strength of hers. She can pull back enough from the situation to become curious rather than emotionally overtaken. Her mother can’t do that. Her mother loves to be emotionally overtaken, to be in the eye of the hurricane.
Sadie, like us all, doesn’t have much choice in what the people in her life choose to do. Unfortunately, they have their free will. But Sadie loves an itinerary, which is why this rattles her so badly. She is used to being the controlling force in her friendship with Alice. So this turn of events is completely unexpected. In a way, she’s grieving for the loss of two of the most important relationships in her life and also grieving her own loss of control, which she had thought was well established.
Jenny Bartoy
A certain sense of duty and guilt seems to govern Sadie’s relationship with Celine. Celine meanwhile is estranged from her own mother and throughout the book she reckons with this state of things while processing some grief toward her mother. Celine never felt loved or accepted by her mother, which she expresses poignantly to Sadie at one point. Yet she also admits to having neglected her mother. Do you think children owe their parents loyalty and care, or is distance warranted in certain cases?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
In terms of Celine and her mother, sometimes caring for a parent later in life provides the opportunity to rewrite certain narratives. And those conversations gain urgency as the parent ages: you’re running out of time. Celine has to face up to the fact that if you don’t have those conversations now, you won’t have them. But this question is interesting, because it’s not a given or a fixed absolute that it’s always the right thing for a child to fall on the sword in service of the parent. It’s different for everybody. People will have different margins for how much misbehavior they’ll allow, and for when that misbehavior or disrespect crosses a line and becomes abuse or trauma.
Jenny Bartoy
On a related note, both Sadie and Alice seem eager to walk away from their upbringing, to craft their own lives almost in opposition to their respective mother’s personality and life philosophy. For Alice, this reactionary approach goes beyond just her mother. She follows her instincts and desires as a default modus operandi. Her decisions seem impulse-driven, whether they come from a sense of empathy or of contradiction. Tell me more about this character.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
I think Alice is in fact very intrepid, venturing into this relationship with her best friend’s mother, and I want to give her credit for that. It’s quite daring, and she’s forced to meet herself head-on in that relationship. Another of Alice’s strengths is she’s nonpartisan, really from the start to finish of the novel. The other two characters shift alliances; they’re more strategic and bloody-minded. Alice doesn’t know how to be strategic. It’s not that she’s dispassionate or detached. It’s that she’s flexible, while the other two characters are very dynamic. And that side of her is very alluring to the other two.
I wanted to write a sexy book, and this aspect of Alice was a big part of that. Everything doesn’t have to be hard. Alice is a person for whom things are easy, and that’s appealing. Sadie is a person for whom things are hard. Alice is instinctual; Sadie overthinks. For Celine, things are easy because she puts herself at the center of everything, though of course this leads to repercussions. For Alice, things are easy because they roll off her back. But she lets herself be led, which also leads to repercussions—one of which is that she falls into an affair with her best friend’s mother.
Jenny Bartoy
This book is about mothering and being mothered, but also about authenticity, truth, and friendship. In light of the complex and fraught family relationships that emerge, Alice Sadie Celine also seems to me a bit of a love letter to chosen family, to the special friendships that sometimes offer more of a home to us than our blood relations. Do you agree with that?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
I would not say I’m making that point as the author, but my characters are certainly struggling with this question. Sadie wants her mother not to be her friend, but to be her mom. And Celine treats her daughter as a friend. She doesn’t treat her as someone she’s responsible for protecting. And, going a step further, it could even be said that Alice wants Sadie to be a sister. She’s trying to insert herself in this family edgewise, even if she has an odd way of going about it! But then we all tend to go at things we want slantwise, don’t we?
Jenny Bartoy
Not to give too much away, but your last chapter jumps forward in time and introduces a new point of view. Why did you make this narrative choice? Why was it essential to the story?
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
The first draft and the draft that my editor accepted did not have this ending. I had the characters go from A to B to C to D. But this plodding plotting, if you’ll forgive the alliteration, felt obligatory to me. I realized that I could give the reader a breath of air by leaping forward and introducing a new character who could shed light on these women, with a fresh set of eyes.
I really tussled with the ending. Was I going to leave these three women, whom I cared so much about, permanently estranged? The character who’s made the least peace with the idea that our future is uncertain is Sadie, and that will continue to be her lifelong struggle. But with the ending, I wanted to take away some of that anxiety for the character and for the reader, who by the final pages hopefully cares about her as well. Maybe our futures aren’t as uncertain as we think. And I wanted to ask, what if these characters could make peace with each other by simply accepting each other? They haven’t changed and that’s the point. What if, in spite of this and in spite of everything they’ve been through together, they figured out a way to sit side by side?
FICTION
Alice Sadie Celine
By Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Simon & Schuster
Published November 28, 2023
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