Five notable books of teenage misadventure

Amber Dermont received her MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Dave Eggers’s Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, and Jane Smiley’s Best New American Voices 2006. A graduate of Vassar College, she received her Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. She currently serves as an associate professor of English and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

Her debut novel is The Starboard Sea.

With Sophie Roell for The Browser, Dermont named five top books of teenage misadventure, including:

Caucasia
by Danzy Senna

Let’s go through your books. Your first choice is Caucasia, which is about a biracial girl growing up in 1970s Boston. Tell me why you’ve chosen it.

The author, Danzy Senna is just a brilliant, remarkable woman, who is a hero of mine. This novel is about two sisters, Birdie and Cole, their father is black and their mother is white. Birdie looks like her mother and Cole looks like her father and it creates this really conflicted dynamic within the family. The mother is Boston blue bood, but she’s rejecting all that in favour of becoming a civil rights activist and she is married to a man who is very active politically. The two of them together are very aware of how they look to the outside world and how, even for the 70s, their marriage is radical. When things start to go wrong between the parents, the sisters react by creating this private language that they speak and they have this really profound intimacy. There’s this sense that the government –someone – might be after the parents because of their political activities and as their marriage is falling apart they split up and the father takes Cole, the daughter who looks most like him, and the mother takes Birdie. They go on the lam separately, Cole and her father go to Brazil, Birdie and her mother go to New Hampshire. Birdie’s mother betrays her in this really complicated way by asking her daughter to pass for being white. She actually poses as being Jewish. It’s just such a powerful book about the time period, about what it means to have a complicated identity, and then to have that identity compromised by a parent, a person who is supposed to know best. Then there’s the political drama that fuels the book. But really it’s a beautiful love story between sisters and how they end up saving each other.

One online reviewer speculated the author must have biracial parents, because the details in the book ring so true.

Yes. Danzy Senna’s mother is a poet called Fanny Howe and her father, Carl Senna, is a writer and editor, and their relationship is sort of similar to the dynamic in the actual novel. But the book is all from her imagination. That’s the great beauty of fiction, you draw on features of your life but then make it something entirely different.

Read about another book Dermont tagged at The Browser.

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The Page 69 Test: The Starboard Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue