This Daring New Novel Will Be Your New Obsession
I first met Sarah Blakley-Cartwright in 2018. It was a party in a brownstone somewhere in Brooklyn, celebrating The Believer magazine, which was, at the time, launching its winter issue. Magazines sat propped up on the fireplace, champagne was served in plastic cups, and coats collected in the mudroom. I had been living in New York only a few weeks, fresh from sunny L.A., and I held my glass of bubbly near as I self-consciously scanned the room. Blakley-Cartwright was sitting comfortably in a velvet chair. I was captured by her belle époque face and struck by how she resembled the women in Parisian café posters. Her limbs relaxed, her mouth a red-lipsticked smile, she held an inherent elegance, a comportment of a person who had been in many rooms and felt at ease in this one. She grasped my hand as we were introduced. The handshake quickly turned into a hug. She was warm, guileless, and looked at me with her big brown eyes—or, more aptly, as she describes a character's eyes in her new novel: “saucers that seemed to engulf anything they set upon.”
In that new novel, Alice Sadie Celine (out this week from Simon & Schuster), women propel the narrative and empower the story, a love triangle of an original kind. Not three lovers—more like two, with a complicated third: mother Celine, daughter Sadie, and Sadie’s best friend, Alice. The novel tells the trio’s story over the decades, each woman narrating a chapter. This wise construction fuels the narrative with mounting tautness, as points of view spar, contradict, and clash. In many ways, Celine is the powder keg of the story. Celine is a lesbian, a professor, a woman of letters (her seminal text is The Body Borne), and a gale that endangers whatever it touches. Susan Sontag meets Jenna Lyon, a titan who commands any room, even in Converse high-tops. A mother Sadie withstands—and, to Alice, an irresistible force. Blakley does not shy away from this power dynamic nor from the sex scenes between Celine and 20-something Alice. She delivers the reader the same skip of breath one might feel in the moment of a first touch—when Celine moves her hand under Alice’s waistband, we, too, feel it. In this era of Barbie feminism, maybe we crave more complexity from female-driven narratives. We’ve seen the dynamics of May-December romances, we’ve seen the power dynamic of the established professor and ingenue—but typically when we see this in contemporary fiction, at its center is a man, with his desire operating as the nucleus. As mother and sexual being, Celine’s power and weakness imbues the novel with an intellectual edge, but also vulnerability.
Unbeknownst to me when I met her, Blakley-Cartwright had in fact inhabited many spaces, and the ease I noticed at that party was the result of those experiences. Penned when she was 22, her first book, Red Riding Hood, was a no. 1 New York Times bestseller, published worldwide in 38 editions and 15 languages. Filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the 2011 movie starring Amanda Seyfried and Gary Oldman, wrote the introduction. It was at Hardwicke’s request that Blakley-Cartwright adapted the movie’s script (based on an idea from Leonardo DiCaprio, who produced the film); the director asked her to “create a novel to explore the tangled web of emotions,” for a deeper look at the characters inhabiting the small town where the story takes place. Hardwicke goes on to explain in the introduction that, after accepting this extraordinary offer, the young writer flew to Vancouver, interviewed the actors, sat in rehearsals, and even danced across hot coals set for one scene. Blakley-Cartwright remembers the book signings: “I wasn’t prepared for it. Teenage fans are something else. I’d have events where 200 teenagers showed up, 70 percent of them in costume as the characters, screaming and fainting when I walked on-site.”
One cannot help draw a line from that initiation of performance and production to the new novel’s opening. Alice Sadie Celine begins on opening night of a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in Claremont, California. Alice is onstage playing Hermione. Perhaps it is due to Blakley-Cartwright’s experience on movie sets and her eye for the divine detail that she stealthily places us backstage—who doesn’t want that pass? She does not miss a beat of specificity: “The curtains were cheaply made: by no means velvet, not even velour. The sound operator had been munching Pringles before showtime and the can stood upright on the audio monitor beneath the call board.” As in the opening of another emotionally charged novel, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, that also begins on a community theater’s opening night, the promise and the folly of what is to come is built into the setup. Alice remains an actor throughout the book, and descriptions of sets are peppered in with great and humorous accuracy. Blakley-Cartwright did have walk-on parts in her youth, but she expresses zero interest in theater. “I didn’t want to be an actress,” she says. “I had no talent for it, but also, I didn’t want to be judged all the time. I had a lot of foresight. I thought, I’m going to want to be able to get older without anyone bothering me about it.” A whisper of the film industry graces the novel: Chloë Sevigny—known, fittingly for her roles playing strong and difficult women—narrates the audiobook; she also blurbs the book alongside Busy Philipps.
Much of Blakley-Cartwright’s family on her father’s side is from New York, and her daughter is, as she puts it, a fifth-generation New Yorker (“Los Angeles was just a stopping-off point”). As an only child raised in joint custody by two artists, Blakley-Cartwright’s childhood was unique. She describes her single mother, Oscar-nominated singer and actor Ronee Blakley (Robert Altman’s 1975 magnum opus Nashville is among her many credits), with great affection as “a tightrope-walking, madcap artist.” She remembers her mother’s forthright creative spirit: “I grew up waking up to the sound of her on the piano most of the night.” Alice Sadie Celine is dedicated to Blakley-Cartwright’s father, screenwriter Carroll Cartwright (What Maisie Knew); she also credits him in the back as one of her loyal readers. Being raised by two artists has imbued her own practice. “I structured my life around writing,” she says. It’s always been the most important thing to me.”
Blakley-Cartwright went to school on the West Coast, but eventually found her way back to New York, where she has been an associate editor at literary magazine A Public Spacefor nearly a decade. She calls the publication “an incredible literary education, to have had that kind of exposure, to essays, poetry, fiction, art portfolios, and oral histories.” This is where she has met many burgeoning and established writers, such as Jamel Brinkley, Ed Park, and Lauren Acampora.
Novelist Megha Majumdar (author of 2020’s best-selling A Burning) fondly recalls when she was starting out, and the time she spent with with Blakley-Cartwright. “Sarah is a gem in the literary community—gracious, frank, and unfailingly generous,” Majumdar says. “Years ago, when she was already a best-selling author and I was an intern at A Public Space, she made me feel … invited, and included. I haven’t forgotten it.” Blakley-Cartwright has also been publishing director at the Chicago Review of Books for four years, and editor of “The Artist’s Library” for Ursula magazine. Now, of course, it makes perfect sense that I met her at a literary magazine event. She is the rare breed of writer who can work as an editor in the arts nonprofit space and play such a supportive role to artists. Blakley-Cartwright’s world seems destined, in its fabric, to be amongst writers and makers.
She revised the final draft of Alice Sadie Celine very pregnant—determined to finish it before her own daughter was born. Five days after the birth, she did her final copy edits. “I have precious memories of that time, her new little body fastened to mine, figuring out how to keep her alive, both of us in diapers, the printed manuscript on my lap,” Blakley-Cartwright says. That strength was transfused into the novel’s female characters—and much of the resilience originates from her own matriarch. “As I wrote my novel, about a mother who has an affair with her daughter’s best friend, I began to think about my own voice. It is because my mother fought so hard to keep her voice that I can use mine. There were many times in her life when people tried to take away her voice. But she never let them. The cost for this was high.”
The book asks two surprising questions: How does a woman like Celine fail her own daughter, Sadie, in so many ways, but foster and afford so much intimacy to her lover Alice? And how does Sadie in turn learn to mother herself in the absence of a model? Speaking about Sadie’s resolve, the author says, “The daughter’s strength is in her dispassion. It’s an armament she has over, or a shield against, her mother, who has never paused to reflect in her life. Her strength is distance.” Blakley-Cartwright has harnessed her voice to illuminate the complicated dynamics born out of mothering, and how, ultimately, that love shapes us.
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