In her latest release Death Valley, Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed, explores grief and survival with her trademark wit and humor. The hospitalization of her father brings the novel’s nameless main character to an isolated Best Western in the California desert, and when she sets off on a hike she discovers a magical cactus blocking her path. CJLC Editor Frankie DeGiorgio sat down with Broder ahead of Death Valley‘s release to discuss the novel, her writing process, Exodus, and Reddit. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Frankie DeGiorgio: First of all, I just would love to talk a little bit about your writing process. In the introduction of your poetry collection Superdoom, you talk about writing poems in the Notes app on your phone on the subway, and dictating the essays that would become So Sad Today in the Voice Memo app when you were driving. What was the process of writing Death Valley like?

Melissa Broder: I worked on Death Valley a little differently in the sense that I wrote it the way I would write a poem. Like, even from the first draft, I was really careful with each sentence and really chiseled it fully. I don’t take those kinds of risks in the beginning. Usually, my first draft is really messy, and then I sort of chisel away, and there certainly was a lot of editing on this, but that being said, I wrote each chapter kind of like poetry. 

FD: This novel feels a lot more personal than your previous ones. What was it like to explore those personal elements in a novel format, as opposed to, for example, personal essays like So Sad Today? 

MB: There’s definitely something extremely freeing about the novel form, in terms of being honest on a personal level. It’s funny, because when I was recording the audio book, the audio engineer asked me, “So is this a true story?” And I was like, “Yes, I really went into a cactus.” I see it as more of a sendup of autofiction. It was inspired by the death of my father; my father was in an accident in December of 2020, and he was in the ICU for six months before he died, and we couldn’t go see him because of COVID. I was driving back and forth between my house in Los Angeles and my sister’s in Las Vegas, trying to escape a feeling which, of course, is not possible. And I was driving through Baker, California when the first sentence of the book came to me. Then immediately after that, I came up with this idea of this cactus where you could go in and you could meet your loved ones at various stages of their lives. So from the beginning, there was definitely some basis in personal experience and my own reality, but then from there, it really departs, so it’s sort of like a send up, especially because the main character is a writer, and we’re always asking novelists, how much of this is true? It’s sort of a send up of that. 

FD: Going off of the cactus: in this novel, and in your previous novel The Pisces, you explore these abstract, almost fantastical story devices. I was curious what role you see these fantastical elements playing in your novels? 

MB: We all have different stories and we all have different life experiences, but the realm of human emotion and feeling is that one commonality. How do I, as a writer, render that visual? So I use archetype in order to convey that, because archetypes are really those images that convey those universal emotions. So, to me, grief is a lot like a desert in the sense that it feels endless. It can seem barren and lifeless, you can feel very alone. At the same time it is teeming with life, there’s all kinds of life going on in the desert, it’s just a different sort of life, like you’ve got these nocturnal animals who only come out at night because of the heat. And what do we do if we’re lost in the desert? We need to adapt. You know, hopelessness can certainly be an experience. But hopelessness is not going to get us out of the desert. 

FD: Your first novel Milk Fed and Death Valley are both about parental relationships, mother-daughter and father-daughter relationships, respectfully. What made you interested in exploring a father-daughter dynamic this time around? 

MB: It’s funny, if Milk Fed is a book where the only characters that we see who aren’t idiots are women, then Death Valley is really a book populated by — or at least as much as Death Valley is populated by characters — populated by men. You know, Milk Fed was obviously deeply inspired by Judaism, and it was a lot of my own questions about Judaism and the religion of my upbringing. In Death Valley, I used Exodus as an underpinning. We think of leaving the father’s land or the forefathers of religion. It’s a paternal archetype book, if you want to, if you want to look at it that way. I think I mentioned once in the book that it’s April, but for myself, and just in writing the book, and like, knowing when it took place, in my mind, it was set over Passover. So no one may know that, but that kind of structural choice helps to provide a scaffolding for that departure into fantasy. 

FD: The Death Valley narrator’s obsession with Reddit was a really compelling throughline of the novel. I’ve found there’s this kind of cultural conception that Reddit is this place for finding answers to your niche and profound questions. Do you think the narrator finds any answers on Reddit, or elsewhere on the Internet?

MB: I go on Reddit all the time. Sometimes I find good information, and sometimes I find terrifying information. The reason why I picked Reddit is it’s probably one of the sites where I do most of my info seeking. I just find Reddit very funny because comment sections in general on the internet are extremely funny places, and Reddit is a giant comment section. I thought, you know, I like to stay entertained while writing a book, so that was why I chose Reddit as opposed to her searching elsewhere. But I really used it, again, as a sort of way of scaffolding the book. So for example, when I was researching, I knew that the cactus in the novel was going to be a magic saguaro cactus. But I didn’t know that much about the whereabouts of saguaro, and when I was researching I found out they don’t grow in California. Now, it’s a magic cactus. That doesn’t technically matter, but it mattered to me. So I had to make it a plot point and I used Reddit for that. It’s such an internal book, so Reddit was a way of getting across information rather than through the narrator, and it becomes almost like a character.