Let Me Fix That for You by Janice Erlbaum

Not knowing what was going to happen or who she was going to meet was thrilling. The narrator’s voice came out right away, and that gave me the momentum I needed to press forward without a real-life series of events to draw from. I tried to put myself in the head of someone like the girl I knew, and it turned out I empathized with her more than I’d expected. What the hell is that? What makes somebody do that? What does it feel like to need attention so badly you stick a needle in your eye? She injected yeast into her eyeball to simulate the fungemia caused by late-stage AIDS. My second memoir, Have You Found Her, is the true story of my relationship with a young woman with Munchausen’s Syndrome who faked her identity, lied every time she opened her mouth, and repeatedly risked her life so that she could be hospitalized.

So I decided I’d take a short break and do a fun exercise for myself only and write about something I’ve been fascinated with for years: people who lie and manufacture illness. Last May, I was working on a memoir about the death of my mentally ill mother, and it had become excruciating, but I wouldn’t let myself quit, because that would be quitting. I had been afraid to move away from memoir I’d written some novel drafts, but they weren’t well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that “memoir outsells fiction two to one” (not sure if that’s true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate. Janice Erlbaum: Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. The Rumpus: Having written two memoirs, how was it changing gears and jumping into fiction mode with your first novel? I interviewed Erlbaum via email recently about the subjects she haunts, unavailable parents, the state-of-the-nation homelessness, living the faux life and lighting out for the territory. As Nietzsche wrote, “No being without chaos in them can give birth to a rising star.” This is a novel of reinvention, of women and their relationships with each other and themselves. As Elizabeth grows older, she begins to wonder which of her own myths are true.

Erlbaum incorporates her experience with the street and families into her new work, telling the story of a young daughter, Elizabeth Madigan, hell-bent on squeezing some love from her self-absorbed mother and indifferent stepfather.Įrlbaum masterfully weaves a tale of frustration and longing between mother and daughter, the latter who will create any story to collect some time in the maternal spot light. Her two previous memoirs, Girlbomb (2006) and Have You Found Her (2008), recount her homelessness on the streets of New York and subsequent recovery. Janice Erlbaum’s debut novel, I, Liar, is centered on the fragile patchwork that exists between mothers and daughters.

Let Me Fix That for You by Janice Erlbaum