Sarah Gerard - an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success

Sarah Gerard, Binary Star. Two Dollar Radio, 2015.
sarah-gerard.com/

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.

With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.

Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success.

"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way."--Jenny Offill

"I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy,devastated, loving all of it."--Kate Zambreno


"Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard's young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity--ideological, mental, physical--comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is 'I want to look at the sky and understand.'"--Justin Taylor


"By now I've read Binary Star twice, and I've become so entwined with it that I'm reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I've never read anything like it."--Harry Mathews


"Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard's first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage."--Simon Van Booy

I think about what time might taste like after reading Sarah Gerard’s debut novel, Binary Star. The kind of time you eat is stale, liquid food. It has a past and a future and will feel too large to consume, but a single portion of time is actually quite small. In this way, time is a clever package.
In Gerard’s novel, the narrator, a young woman battling with an eating disorder, embarks on a road trip with her long-distance boyfriend, John. John struggles with alcoholism. The couple makes a pact – while they’re away, the unnamed narrator cannot purge; John cannot drink. “We’ll shed our lives in order to see ourselves clearly.” Binary Star poses questions. One of them: How much of ourselves can we control? Another: What does help look like?
The narrator is an astronomy teacher. We learn about the lives of stars; their phases are defined. At some point, the students are told to take notes and I, among them, do it. This story is told as an evolution – of a star, of an unstable relationship, of afflicted individuals. The couple gets in John’s car and drives along the perimeter of the United States. They are in orbit. They are held together, both in motion and in place, by gravity. This might sound like a heavy-handed metaphor, but it isn’t. The relationship Gerard draws between her characters and a star is natural. Her language verges on metonymy. Something strange happens with a passage such as the following:

A white dwarf depends only on density. A white dwarf isn’t burning.
It isn’t doing anything productive.
It doesn’t matter that I’m not burning anymore. I haven’t burned for a long time. I approach my natural state of being. Cold is my natural state of being.
I grow dimmer every day.

There is no difference or similarity between the narrator and the white dwarf star. They are each other. Gerard defines a thing, then follows with an example. She takes two ideas and makes them inhabit each other. It is a brilliant act for this character’s particular story. There is an odd effect of mental illness: it can feel like the line between your life and illness has been erased. Or like the line never existed.
Gerard’s sentences are sparse and short, lyrical without trying. You can take them in easily. The novel is made up of space and time as much as it is of words. The narrator, always awake; John, always asleep. Their days are uncontained. Time is marked by the place the characters occupy.
The white space on the page is a sort of suspending vehicle. Gerard writes:

I pretend to like Tabasco because it burns.
I need to burn.

For the majority of the novel, sentences stand alone. A sentence is a whole paragraph. I am seeing the words as much as I am reading them. I stop in the space to take them in. The experience of reading is dynamic. I have to pause; I have to keep going. I am in the narrator’s stream of consciousness and I don’t want to get out:

I want to look at the sky and understand.
I want to feel small.
But important.
Massive.
But beautiful.

There are sections of dialogue where I don’t know whether it is the narrator or John talking, and I understand it doesn’t matter. Or rather that it does matter. In the opening, the narrator says: “I help John become me. It is the cruelest thing I do.” How do you help the person you love when you yourself need help?
Gerard’s characters are aware they need help. There is no denial. There are lies to keep the sickness alive. For them, help is like trying to live against your will.
In one scene, they make a friend on the road and hit golf balls together on a . The narrator says: “He [John] didn’t want to come; he thinks he’s doing it for me, but I know we’re doing this for him.”
In another scene, the couple goes out to The Cheesecake Factory to celebrate the narrator’s birthday. The narrator has taken too many laxatives before the meal. As she is in the bathroom she says:

My legs are weak. My heart is pounding.
John.
I vomit and feel better for having done it.
John, help me.
I try to stand and collapse.
I spend the rest of the meal drinking water. By the time we leave, John is talking in his sleep at the table. This is how he wins every time.

If they can’t help each other or themselves, there is veganarchism.  There is a revolution to start on behalf of defenseless animals, animals that require liberation from their cages, from abuse, from their expedited deaths.  Here is the metaphor.  The metaphor, though, is not for the pleasure of the reader.  The desired liberation is for her – the narrator – and you want her to have it, even though it’s not entirely clear what that liberation would mean. Liberation is an escape from one thing as much as it is an advance toward another.  There is movement in liberation – we can get closer to escaping ourselves if we know where we want to go.
The narrator oscillates between self-control and powerlessness. She is manipulative and being manipulated by her own mind, by a culture obsessed with appearances and quick fixes. In her and John, we see two people who need each other. We learn that how two people need each other isn’t up to anybody, not even them. Between them is a force unseen:

Gravity is how we fall together.
If you’re able to love, you can tell me what it means.
The way space-time curves around it:
Love is a black hole.
Undetectable except by the way it affects other bodies.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator spends almost sixteen hours in the library. She describes having eaten apples, celery, almonds, and time. Time is what I’m left thinking about hours after finishing the book. The small space of the present. This is where the prose of Binary Star lives. It is a clever package. The language moves through darkness and lightness, between being and unbeing, between past and future. But its center is always in the present. It is the only space where you can exist and disappear at the same time. Gerard leaves you there:

Someday I’ll be a perfect black body. I’ll be perfectly smooth and white. I’ll be obliterated.
Dark matter. Antimatter. Unseen, unfelt, unmatter. I unbind myself.
I don’t matter. I am matter. I matter. I’m in the mirror. - Marisela Navarro

  

Author photograph: Josh Wool.

In reading Sarah McCarry’s review of Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon’s Nothing on ‘The Rejectionist,’ I really appreciated when she referred to Two Dollar Radio as “a press that keeps putting out great, boundary-pushing work by women.”

Sarah Gerard is another boundary-pushing, exceptional, and fresh female voice, and I’m really excited to be working with her. Gerard is a former bookseller at McNally Jackson, who currently works for BOMB Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine (the Cut), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, New South, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, and BOMBlog. Her chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, about her participation in a topless march, was published last fall by Von Zos. We’ll publish Binary Star, Gerard’s debut novel, one year from now, on January 13, 2015.

Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a roadtrip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they’ve found a direction. It is an intense, elegiac portrait of young lovers as they battle extreme personal afflictions, toy with veganarchism, and traverse the American countryside.

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Q: You wrote an excellent piece for the New York Times about your struggles with anorexia. The unnamed narrator in Binary Star, her hunger owns her existence. It is her addiction and her affliction. How hard was it for you to mine your own life for material?

It was difficult insofar as I had to inhabit a character that was, herself, very sick, and reinhabit the logic, or illogic, of disordered eating. It’s a kind of insanity: to want to be sick, to want to suffer horribly, to force that upon oneself and justify it by saying, “I’m only valuable if I’m in pain, I’m only valuable if I’m wasting away. I don’t deserve to be healthy.” And it was compounded by the fact that I was literally alone while doing this. I purposely arranged my life so that I had no support structure while I was returning to this way of thinking. There was no one around to remind me of what was healthy or unhealthy for me, at this point in my recovery, or tell me that I was enjoying this obsessive way of thinking too much, which was a real danger.

At the same time, the narrator’s obsession forms the engine of the book; her hunger is literalized in the driving, urgent voice of the story. I’m a big fan of Lydia Davis’s book The End of the Story, and thought about it a lot while I was writing Binary Star. Her narrator’s need compels her to act in a way that actually works against her. It feeds itself, and drives the story forward. In a strange way, Binary Star’s narrator finds a sick satisfaction in never being satisfied, at least not in a way we’re accustomed to recognize. When I finally decided to get help for my eating disorder, I confessed to an emergency room nurse that I hadn’t slept in weeks. This was partially because I had been replacing food with diet pills. But it’s also because hunger is a motivator – it forces us to act, to stay alive.

Q: In many ways, our culture contributes to keeping us sick. Or needing. Or wanting. Our unnamed narrator struggles with eating disorders. She is a preferred pharmacy shopper – drinking Red Bulls, consuming diet pills, splurging on gossip rags with their weight-loss secrets and fascination with celebrity diets. Can you talk about this?

I would never argue in favor of this reaction, but it seems to lend itself to the explanation that an eating disorder is a radical stance against this culture of consumption. Some studies place the number of people suffering from eating disorders in the U.S. at 10 million; others place it as high as 30 million. Eating disorders are most prevalent in Western cultures by far, with the United States consistently ranking highest, and the number of people suffering from eating disorders in the U.S. has gone up each decade since the 1950s.

There’s a false understanding of people suffering from eating disorders which says that, if you’re starving yourself, you’re not consuming. That is absolutely not true. You consume almost constantly. One of my favorite things to do, when I was starving myself, was buy and read gossip magazines. I had hundreds of them in my kitchen. I knew all the stories. The months before I finally sought help, when I was deepest in my sickness, coincided with one of Hollywood’s many “scary skinny” crises. Nicole Richie was my favorite; I coveted the shadow between her thumb and her wrist when she held a cup of coffee. I tried to emulate it when I held my own cups of coffee five or six times a day. I ate that shit up. I knew all the tricks. I acted on every single diet pill ad – Walgreen’s was right down the street from my apartment. I hid the pills everywhere: in my dresser, under my mattress, behind books on my bookshelf, anywhere where I thought my roommate wouldn’t find them. More than once, in a state of paralyzing fear, I threw them all away. Once, I gave them to my friend and begged her to keep them away from me. Then I went and bought new ones.

It’s unjust and infuriating that our culture preys on its weakest members. It cripples our thinking, and proceeds to take advantage of our disability. When I finished the first draft of Binary Star, I broke down in tears and cried for several minutes. I had never been so angry, because I finally saw how I’d been lied to. Everything I had been taught about beauty, and health, and eating, was a big, evil lie. And not only is it false, it had been used against me. It almost killed me. And it happens to millions of people every day.

Q: Much of the action of Binary Star occurs during a roadtrip the young couple takes circumnavigating the United States. To satisfy my own interest in the subject, can you tell us something about your time hopping trains cross-country?

I talk about this a bit in the New York Times essay, but I didn’t have a whole lot of space to elaborate. I also tried to write a novel on the subject when I returned to Florida, after the accident that I talk about in the Times, but honestly, it’s very hard to write about being on a freight train for someone who’s never done it before. It’s a completely sensory experience. William Volllmann wrote about it well in Riding Toward Everywhere, and I also enjoy Ted Conover’s book Rolling Nowhere, although both of them focus more on the hobo culture around train hopping than the feeling of being on a train going 75 miles per hour through wilderness in the middle of the night, while you’re slipping in and out of exhausted sleep. There are no words for that.

We weren’t just hopping freight trains, though. We were also hitchhiking and scraping together money for Greyhound buses, and sleeping in very strange places, and walking a lot. We were outside pretty much all day, every day. We went all the way up to Maine and stayed with my boyfriend’s uncle on the coast for two weeks, and helped him paint his house, and read books, and spent a lot of time at the Goodwill in town. I was reading Loren Eiseley’s book The Night Country, which at this point occupies a very fuzzy place in my head, all mixed up with other images from that time.

We only hopped a few trains, and only up the east coast, before we jumped from one in Buffalo and were both injured. I ended up with a hundred and fifty stitches in my face and a missing tooth, and he ended up with a lot of cuts and bruises and a sprained wrist. Later, he left again to hop trains with some people and I’m not sure where he went exactly, but it was clear that, even after our accident, he hadn’t had enough of that lifestyle. That should tell you how addictive trains can be.

But before I leave everyone with the idea that they should run out and catch a train on the fly, let me say this: riding trains illegally is extremely, extremely dangerous. Your body is no match for the force behind thousands of tons of steel. If you get on or off a train the wrong way even one time, you will lose a limb or die. I’ve heard hundreds of stories.

As thrilling as it was at the time, and for all of the funny stories I took away from that brief excursion, what I did was incredibly stupid. By all rights, I should be dead today. I’m lucky.

Q: How is the language of the stars the language of the body?

Another way to say this might be, “The psychology of stars is the psychology of the body.” While I was writing Binary Star, I was also doing a lot of research into the life cycles of stars, in particular white dwarfs and red giants, and the cycles of stars in binary relationships. Stars are vulnerable. They react to each other. They’re born and are alive, and their lifespans are determined primarily by their mass, which is an incredibly useful concept for someone writing about an eating disorder. The burning of a dying star became an analog for the cold burn of starvation.

Stars burn out and die, or explode from pressure, or “run away,” or “dredge-up” material from their cores. They’re luminous or dim. They orbit each other. They’re drawn to each other. They’re violent, unstable. Hot and cool. How is their language ours? It just is.

Q: You wrote much of the book during the course of a single month, when you rented a trailer and rarely left. What was that like?

I knew that, in order to write this story, I would have to place extreme restrictions on my social life in order to remove every restriction from my psychological life. I anticipated going completely insane by the end of the month, which is exactly what happened. I think I showered once. I lived on mostly raw vegetables and coffee, with few exceptions. I turned off my phone and set an away message on my email and went dark on social media. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, except for a handful of people, which included my parents and my husband. My husband and I talked for about 30 minutes a night. It helped that he was also away writing at the time.

The trailer was in a 65+ retirement community about twenty minutes from my parents’ house in Florida, and was completely pink inside. My neighbor had a recliner and a huge plasma-screen T.V. on his screened-in porch, and a light-up electric palm tree decoration by his front door. I wrote about him a few times in letters to friends. There were many adult tricycles. It stormed a few times. It was the quietest place in the world. So, in other words, it was heaven.

I woke up at 7:00 every day and read until 10:00, then wrote until I couldn’t write anymore, which was usually around midnight. I finished the final draft as the sun was rising on the day of my high school reunion. - twodollarradio.tumblr.com/post/73528136866/author-photograph-josh-wool-in-reading-sarah

Sarah Gerard's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine's "The Cut," Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of The New School's MFA program for fiction.