The way I move as a woman through the world, and as a white woman, and as a citizen of America, how those influence the ways in which I am safe or I am at risk.

I watched a lot of Law and Order and SVU because that’s a preoccupation that consumes me in my daily life, the experience of vulnerability and of being in power or out of power, how other people treat me or how I treat other people based on our identities, and shaped by our identities. I grew up obsessed with stories of lost girls and endangered children and women, and I consumed so many of those stories. When I got there, I found that the preoccupations and obsessions I had, the way that I was learning about this place and receiving what other people told me and were generous enough to share with me, was all through the filter of my own existing obsessions, and the cultural context-the American cultural context-out of which I’d come. I didn’t know what form that would take and my intention and going there and living there for that first year was to find some stories and figure out what I was doing. As much time as possible, I wanted to have quite a wide scope and in whatever fiction I was working on, but I didn’t have any plot in mind. Julia Phillips: Yeah, when I went to Kamchatka I knew I wanted to write a work of fiction that covered as much of the region as possible, I wanted to have as many characters as possible, I wanted to cover as much ground as possible. Can you talk about the structure and what you were thinking about when you started writing this? I mean, you knew you wanted to go write a book there, but did you know the book that you wanted to write? They could be read as individual short stories, but they all link back to this disappearance and how it has impacted the people’s lives in the stories and how some of these people are loosely connected. The whole rest of the book is told with the structure of each month of the year that they’re disappeared, and it really kind of ripples outward to the community. Alyona and Sophia are sisters, and their mother is off at work, and they’re by a lake and they end up disappearing. Mitzi Rapkin: So your story is actually about two young girls who leave in a different way: they disappear.

This week on First Draft, Julia Phillips joins Mitzi to discuss her latest novel, Disappearing Earth, out now from Knopf.

Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in. First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts.

Disappearing earth book review