Unveiling Secrets: Karen Palmer’s Shocking Journey Behind She’s Under Here
LL: I understand the first few chapters were originally an essay you wrote and submitted to the Virginia Quarterly Review. Someone picked it out of the slush pile and Leslie Jamison later selected it for Best American Essays. What a thrill. Was that catalyst enough? What were some of your early drafts of the book like?
KP: I spent five years on the book before that essay was published in VQR, and at that point, I’d largely given up. There were a couple of versions driven solely by events — this happened and then this happened — with very little emotional content or self-examination. I think it was just too hard for me to face. That essay (“The Reader Is the Protagonist”) was written as a standalone account of my family’s first week in Colorado after landing as other people in Boulder. It’s about having interviewed for a job as a copyeditor at Paladin Press, which published survivalist guides and instructional manuals on bomb-making and assassination and how to establish a new identities; given our circumstances, perusing their shelves was a deeply weird experience and I wound up running out of their office. The essay about all this initially felt extraneous to the book, but it wound up giving me another way in. It allowed me to widen the lens.
