Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney on Nest Eggs and Working Hard

What happens when a dysfunctional family’s nest egg disappears almost overnight? Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney’s hotly anticipated debut work,“The Nest”—the tale of four adult siblings and a trust fund in peril—seeks to answer exactly that question. She will be reading passages from “The Nest” and signing copies of the novel at the Harvard Book Store on Wednesday, March 23. In advance of this event, Sweeney spoke with the Crimson about her writing process, inspiration, and feelings about wealthy New Yorkers.

The Harvard Crimson: “The Nest” revolves around a dysfunctional set of adult siblings. What prompted you to write about family, a tried and true subject for literature, and how did you go about it in a new way?

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney: I think that one of the reasons I wanted to write about grown-up siblings is because I grew up in a really Irish and Italian Catholic environment, and everyone around me had lots of siblings. In fact, there were four kids in my family, and I always thought we had a small family because everyone had six or seven or eight or ten kids in their family. I'm just fascinated by adult sibling relationships because they just become increasingly more complicated. How did I go about it in a new and different way? I didn't think about that when I was writing; I had this idea in my head about these four people who wanted to meet for lunch and wanted to have a drink first but didn't want to have a drink with each other…. I had been trying to work on a story about adult siblings, and it wasn't going that well. And as soon as that image popped into my head, I wanted to write that story—about who they were, and why they needed a drink before they got together, and why they couldn't drink in front of one another, and why they were upset with one another. So once I started answering those questions, the story took on a life that I could follow.

THC: Your novel is set in the world of the New York leisure class. What interested you about that group?

CDS: I lived in NYC for 27 years, and I lived amongst and worked amongst all different kinds of people. When I started the book, I started thinking about the Plumbs and their entitlement that's based on… not much. I was really thinking about the financial crisis of 2008 and how it affected so many people I knew and people in NYC in ways that were curious to observe—in the sense that people were upset because the value of their two million dollar apartment was suddenly maybe a million and a half. This was so shocking for some people that there would be an end to that bubble, and it really wasn't a surprise if you were paying attention. I was trying to capture a little bit of that sense of unearned entitlement and what happens when the bottom falls out and you don't really have the resources to deal with it.

THC: That wouldn't typically make for a very sympathetic portrayal. Were you interested in making the Plumb family sympathetic to your reader, and how did you try to do that?

CDS: The way I did it was by having empathy for them myself. And I think that if a writer has empathy for characters, then the reader will. And if the writer has contempt for characters, the reader will. I think that unsympathetic characters behaving badly that you can have empathy for, to me, is the most interesting combination and the most satisfying for a reader. And the way I did that was by learning to love them. But when I got through with the first draft and I looked back on it, I remember thinking that some of the characters were flat on the page, and those were some of the ones I was more interested in skewering than anything else. And I knew that what I had to do was make them vulnerable in some way and that by exploring their vulnerability I would have empathy for them. And then they would become a little more complicated on the page, and that would be a better approach.

THC: Your novel has been described as "cinematic." Do you see a movie in the making? Would you be in favor of one?

CDS: Well, it would depend, but there is some discussion about that going on. If the right person steps up, sure.

THC: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers of fiction?

CDS: Writing is a really solitary pursuit, so I think that it is really important to find community, and then I think it's important to listen to other writers talk about what works for them, but everyone has a different approach. I think you have to write a lot, and you have to figure out which of all the advice that you hear resonates with you and might be helpful for you. But I think you just have to do the work—you have to put in the hours—and that's the only trick. Sometimes when you're writing, especially when you're working on a longer project like a novel, you can get hung up on whether or not you've had a productive day based on how many words you've written. And I try to remind myself all the time that even if all I've done all day is sit in my office chair… and try and figure out how to write the next few pages or figure out what was wrong with the pages I don't like, then that's working. Thinking is working. Reading is working. As long as you have your brain involved in the project, you're working, but you need to make some kind of silence and space around that to really let yourself concentrate. That's where the good stuff is; it comes to you in those times when you turn off the internet or put your phone in another room and let yourself focus without distraction on what's in front of you.