Grubbie Debuts: Hanna Halperin with Steve Almond, Something Wild [Virtual]

A searing novel about the love and contradictions of sisterhood, the intoxicating desires of adolescence, and the traumas that trap mothers and daughters in cycles of violence.

One weekend, sisters Tanya and Nessa Bloom pause their respective adult lives and travel to the Boston suburbs to help their mother pack up and move out of their childhood home. For the first time since they were teenagers sharing a bunk bed over a decade ago, they find themselves in the place where long-kept secrets were born, where jealousy, comfort, anger, forgiveness, and repulsion coexist with the fiercest love and loyalty. What they don’t expect is for their visit to expose a new, horrifying truth: their mother, Lorraine, is in a violent relationship.

As Tanya urges Lorraine to get a restraining order, Nessa struggles to reconcile her fondness for their stepfather with his capacity for brutality. Their differing responses to the abuse bring up the sisters’ shared secret—a traumatic, unspoken experience from their adolescence has shaped their lives, their sense of selves, and their relationship with each other and the men in their life. In the midst of this family crisis, they have no choice but to reckon with the past and face each other in the present, in the hope that there’s a way out of the violence so deeply ingrained in the Bloom family.

Told in alternating perspectives that deftly interweave past and present, Something Wild is a magnetic, unflinching portrait of the bond between sisters, as well as a psychologically acute exploration of the legacy of divorce, the ways trauma reverberates over generations, and how it might be possible to overcome the past.

Hanna Halperin is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, n+1, New Ohio Review, Joyland, and others. She has taught fiction workshops at Grub Street in Boston and worked as a domestic violence counselor.

Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His new book, the novel All the Secrets of the World, will be published in 2022. His short fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Mysteries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. Almond teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and Wesleyan University, and lives outside Boston with his wife, three children, and considerable anxiety.

Register to join the event on Crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/somethingwild