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Welcome back to Worth the Read!
If I can share one life tip with you all, it’s this: befriend interesting people with big ambitions. Sometimes, they end up becoming authors who write books you love—and you get to finish their spectacular debut novel on a sweltering summer day and immediately text them, “Oh my god, I loved your novel. Can I please interview you for my newsletter?!”
Which brings me to Claire Carusillo, today’s guest and the author of The Responsible Party.
A disclosure before we get into it: Claire and I have been friends since sophomore year of college, back when Obama was president, Snapchat had yet to be invented, and we all thought pranking each other with hidden Smirnoff Ices was funny (yikes). Perhaps my favorite thing I’ve ever written was in collaboration with Claire: a humorous, completely unhinged all-campus email encouraging people to come to our feminist publication’s end-of-year party (double yikes).
All of this is to say: yes, I went into this reading experience with a bias, but I also went into it with the highest expectations. Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for it.
“A terrifically comic debut novel . . . [that] succeeds by way of its outlandish story line as much as by its singular voice. . . . Carusillo is a master of the vigorous and inclusive aside, employing a crackling blend of high and low diction.”
—The New York Times
“A pleasurably busy and delightfully odd debut. . . . Intelligent, often hilarious, and teeming with stories and backstories.”
—Vulture
“Carusillo juggles the many plot threads with aplomb and proves to be a consummate prose stylist. This one has energy and ambition to spare.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Responsible Party is the kind of book that leaves you desperate to talk to the person who wrote it. How do you take a story rooted in your own family folklore and turn it into a novel for readers who weren’t there? How do you capture the essential truths—and lies—of storytelling? How do you make sense of your relationship with your mother on the page? And how the hell do you make all of that funny?
Lucky for me—and now, for you—I could simply ask her.
Q&A with Claire Carusillo, author of The Responsible Party
Credit: Antonia Allen
Claire Carusillo is the co-owner of Storyboard, a bookstore/skate shop/coffee bar in Midway, UT. Her first novel The Responsible Party is out now.
The Responsible Party
Out now
After police investigating a decades-old murder come looking for her mother, a disgraced influencer digs into her family’s past and uncovers the wild, tangled history of generations of women famous for surviving the impossible.
Much of the fun of the book, to me, is about how all memory is corrupt. It's complicated! I stand behind none of this, and yet, it's all sort of true.
The full Q&A is behind this wall.
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