A Conversation with Barbara Bourland

While both of your novels share your incisive wit and flair for vivid detail, Fake Like Me is a very different book from your debut, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead. What brought you to this particular story? Are there ways in which you see this as a continued exploration of a certain theme in your work, or are you just following your creative instincts wherever they take you?

The tones are of course quite different, as each book matches [its] tone to the subject material. Personally, I see more similarities than differences: Both books are about women’s work; women’s bodies; women’s selves as self. My work focuses on women as we stand, not in terms of our relationships to others (mother, wife, daughter, etc.). Both novels focus extensively on the costs of our lives. In terms of IEWID, I don’t want to know what makes a beautiful woman “feel beautiful”; I want to know how much it costs her. It’s the same with Fake Like Me: I don’t want to hear some lyrical romantic fairy tale about women’s artwork. I want to know how hard it was. How much does making a painting as big as Joan Mitchell’s or Helen Frankenthaler’s cost a person, exactly? What does it cost to be ourselves?

One of the most unforgettably immersive parts of this book is the way the narrator abandons herself to the creative process; the descriptions of oil painting are so real as to put the reader inside the work herself. Do you have a background as a painter? If not, how did you make this part of the artistic process come so alive?