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- [00:01]
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- [01:16]
New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:20]
Chris Holmes
Chris. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter BurnedByBooks. Let's start the show. Imagine that you are running as fast as you can up a hill. Your legs are screaming. Lactic acid swells them and makes each limb feel like iron. Your lungs struggle to fill with oxygen and your heart pumps about a hundred beats per minute faster than normal. Add to this that you're being chased by a horde of teenagers and 20 somethings, each with seemingly limitless endurance and will, and you've done this to yourself on purpose. You might even love it. Stephanie Rentz's novel We Loved to Run takes us into the minds and pumping hearts of the Frost College cross country team, led by Kristen, the star runner from Boise. Danielle, the team captain. Harriet, budding feminist icon and possessor of an indomitable work ethic. Chloe, Kristen's main competition and frenemy desperate for the praise of her busy New York City parents, Live a talented also ran with a serious boyfriend and Patricia, an underclassman eager to leave Frost. We Love to Run imagines this team as both amoebic and a collective we speaking in a single voice and thinking of nothing but the run and as distinct individuals whose lives have just begun to bloom but already show signs of hurt and mistrust. Rather than a novel about running, We Love to Run is a novel that takes running as a nearly perfect metaphor for that agonizing and enigmatic irony that the perfect and powerful younger bodies of women are too often constrained and demeaned, asked to shrink and disappear by those around them. In this riveting novel that asks you to feel the pain of every step of a race and puts you in the running shoes of women who are ready to be seen and heard by the world, Stephanie Renz has brought into Perfect View a snapshot of small college life in the late 20th century that manages to be an eerie reflection of our absolute present. She also takes seriously the lives of young people and gives us the concept of the teammate as perhaps the epitome of how women and people in general might care for those who exist outside direct kinship but who are assuredly family. Stephanie Rentz is the author of the Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an editor's choice in the New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a biblio memoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy's blood meridian. She has twice received a no Henry Prize for her short fiction. Rents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years, a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Welcome to Burned by Books.
- [04:53]
Stephanie Rentz
Stephanie Rentz Chris, I'm so happy to be here. I love your podcast and thank you for such a beautiful introduction.
- [05:01]
Chris Holmes
Thank you so much. I am I'll just out myself. I am a runner of many many years and decades now and so when I saw this book existed I knew that I was going to read it and hopefully love it. And love it I did. And for so many reasons, even beyond the running. But one of the things that just captured me and mesmerized me about the book is how you use certain narrative voices to draw us into the world of this team. And I was wondering if you would read a little bit from the opening of We Love to Run.
- [05:38]
Stephanie Rentz
I'd be happy to. We loved running because we loved repetition. Breathe, stride, breathe stride, breathe stride, Getting lost in thought, the endorphins that flooded our brains after several miles and swept away obsession and weariness and narrowed our focus to covering each kilometer of the 5K cross country race at as swiftly as possible. We loved it because it was who we were, who we'd been in high school, who we hoped to be in futures we couldn't yet imagine. Strong and fast, fast and strong. We loved winning, but we didn't always love what was required. Cross training, pool workouts, the flotation belts that we wore while running in place in the deep end, serious stretching, form drills, walking backward, uphill, cooldowns that were more than five minutes and warm ups that were more than ten. Chloe really hated lifting. Harriet did too, though she put on a good show by doing high reps with almost no resistance. She wanted to like lifting because Professor Witt, an old school feminist who taught wags, swore by weight training women could be just as strong as men. Wit claimed they just needed to get over the social stigma of muscles. Whatever we thought, Wit had never run a mile in her life. We also hated rest days and easy laps between 400 meter repeats. Not because we hated resting, but because it was never quite long enough to recover. Anticipating a workout was always worse than finish. Finishing one. Fart licks, which the men pronounced fart licks, could make us puke. We growled when the men urged, go tits out, ladies. We hated that word, ladies more than we hated the word tits. Tits could be thrilling in the right context. We hated running on rainy days until the moment we were drenched sucking water from the end of a hank of hair. On hot days, sunscreen stung our eyes. But we could skinny dip in Puffer's Pond, and we did, especially if the men were doing a separate workout and we expected an ambush. We like the men's team, though screwing them could feel like making out with your brother. It could be nicer than that, too. It depended on how you felt about someone else's bruised toenails, bony hips, rock hard thighs. We loved to run and we hated it. To run you had to be willing to accompany yourself on long, lonely journeys. You might know the time, 90 minutes, 2 hours 45. But not the route. Maybe you knew the route through a shady residential neighborhood, through the park with a hill that looks like a camel's hump, onto the trail just beyond the tennis courts and then up, up, up the foothills opening in front of you like another world. The old military cemetery, the firing range, the corral where several weary horses shifted from hoof to hoof and ambled to the fence wondering whether you'd palm them an apple, even if you knew where you were going and how long it usually took. You could never anticipate what you would see along the way. Back home in New Mexico, Patricia saw rattlesnakes in late May and early June when they were coming out of hibernation. They draped themselves across trails seeking a sunny spot to warm their cold hearts. And Patricia hurled right over them. Chloe saw a skunk at the northern edge of Central park that might have just been a skinny dog. Liv got lost in cornfields in southern Illinois, where her dad's family was from. Danielle was chased. Chased and bitten by bats not just once, but twice over the course of two weeks. Just before sophomore year, she was running along the Soupy Sea Conch river in Providence. It was not a joking matter. Even there was. There was something inherently absurd about being bitten twice in a three week stretch and having to get all those rabies shots. Was she cursed if you mentioned it? You were courting Danielle's wrath. We sank to our ankles in mud. We slipped in snow. We got heat stroke in the summer, mild frostbite in the winter. But those were just minor hazards. The real obstacle underneath the sharp pain in a hip, the mechanical clicking of a knee, the weird way that teeth ached from huffing in winter air. The real obstacle, unchanging and always there was the desire to stop and the knowledge we couldn't. We could never stop. Because if we did, then we would know we could. If you stopped once, you might stop a second time. You might never run again.
- [10:22]
Chris Holmes
Thank you so much. That was so great to hear you read it. As. As I said, I'm very much a fan of your use of the we collective narrator. And it reminded me quite a bit of Jeffrey Eugenides virgin suicides. And I wonder why a collective narrative voice was the right one for you here. And how did you want to balance it with delving into each of the individual characters?
- [10:48]
Stephanie Rentz
That's a great question. I chose the we voice because I really wanted to capture the communal identity of the team and the experience of being on a team where the team has a kind of personality that is even greater than the sum of all the individuals on the team. And I wanted this to be a we voice that was very interested in itself and interested in its members rather than being a kind of we like a community we that's looking at like the kind of stranger comes to town sort of plot which you see in a story like a Rose for Emily. And so. So I. I wanted to have. I wanted to have a sense of. Of the team kind of speaking for itself and speaking about its members and Having a will that's greater than the sum of its parts. But I also wanted to have the ability to kind of sink into the point of view of a few characters and to reveal things about those characters that the team couldn't possibly know. So the team thinks it knows a lot, and sometimes it can say things about its members that the teammates can't say about themselves, the girls can't say about themselves, but sometimes it says the wrong things about them. And so I was interested in kind of creating a little bit of friction between what the team thinks it thinks it knows and what the individuals know about themselves.
- [12:18]
Chris Holmes
And it's interesting also that team members believe that other team members know most things about them. And in the case of Danielle and Harriet, this will become a major issue. So it's not just that they, they believe they understand things about their teammates. They believe that there's an organicness to the fact that their teammates will know things about them as well.
- [12:41]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I think there's a. There, there. There's a certain degree or a great degree of intimacy among the members of the teams. And there's a way that, for instance, that Danielle believes that Harriet knows something very important about her. And, and the idea that Harriet. And Harriet knows this particular thing makes it easier for Danielle to kind of to, to deal with what's happened. It's, I mean, I guess, like what I was trying to get at was the way that when you sometimes, if you can share a secret with another person, it makes it much easier to bear that secret. And I think that that's to a great degree what's happening among my, among my characters. My, my, you know, my runners, that they're, they're sharing a lot of secrets and they're not sharing some secrets, but if once they can share secrets, they can bear the pain of those. The pain of the secrets a lot, a lot more effectively.
- [13:37]
Chris Holmes
I think a lot about running as joining some of the other pure aerobic sports like Tour de France, cycling and cross country skiing, maybe throw in crew in there. As defined principally by a willingness of the athlete to endure pain, obviously there are skills involved and a certain base level of athleticism is required. But as opposed to something like baseball, where hand eye coordination is in part naturally had by a player and then developed and honed over years, competitive running is a deal with the devil in which you bargain with your brain to continue to let your body do something that feels horrible. Can you talk about that bargain and how the, the runners of We Love to Run come to terms with It.
- [14:26]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah. I mean, I think that you. I mean, you said it so nicely. They are making. They are making deals with the devil because running always hurts. And to a great degree, the hardest part about running is the lead up to. Running the lead up to a race when they're.
- [14:45]
Chris Holmes
I hate the 10 minutes before the gun goes off so much.
- [14:49]
Stephanie Rentz
Exactly. So when, when they're, when they have more time to think. Right. So when they're, when they're anticipating how much it's going to hurt and they haven't yet kind of flung their bodies forward into the act of running. And so that's why, I mean, it's like, you know, that's why my novel is called We Love to Run. That's why the first line of the novel is, you know, we hated. We hated running because I was trying to get at the kind of like the tension between. Between doing something that you love, but doing something that is also extremely painful. And I mean, and that. That's also true of their relationships. You know, the, the thing about cross country is that on the one hand, you're on a team and you can do very well as a team. If everyone runs well, you have a chance of qualifying for nationals, but at the same time, you're not totally dependent upon your team to excel at running. You can always do very, very well on your own and, and potentially, you know, move on to ever more competitive races if you're very fast. And that creates a really interesting tension with your teammates because you, you want them to run really fast because if they run fast, there's a chance you'll run faster. Right. But you also want to beat them. And so there's always this kind of push, push and pull, right? You're always chasing someone. You're always being chased. You hope you're chasing someone, and in a way, you hope you're, you know, you hope that there's someone behind you pushing you forward, because all of. Because that sort of, like those dynamics can only make you a better runner. But that also means you can lose to some of the people, you know, who you're closest to. And that's. That's quite painful as well.
- [16:33]
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- [17:03]
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- [17:28]
Chris Holmes
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- [17:41]
Stephanie Rentz
Fascinating.
- [17:42]
Chris Holmes
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [17:45]
Stephanie Rentz
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [17:48]
Chris Holmes
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- [17:53]
Stephanie Rentz
Liberty Liberty.
- [17:56]
Chris Holmes
And written by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Yeah, it also goes alongside a really lovely sentiment that you have in the novel, which is that your teammates believe that you can run faster and that you believe that about them as well. And that there is a kind of a mutual desire for best possible self to come forward, even if it might sometimes cost you the race. And that's. It presents this interesting tension between Kristen, who at the beginning of the novel is very much needing to win, needing to run away from things and run as fast as she can, and. And to take that spot from Chloe versus Danielle, who's very interested in a kind of collective having the best race for everybody. And I really like the fact that there's both that tension between wanting to win but also believing that your teammates can run faster.
- [18:53]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone, every character has a particular role to play on my team. And so, you know, so Danielle is the captain and Danielle is the one who's going to be the cheerleader and who is going to believe the best about her teammates and, and, and hopefully get the best possible performance out of each of them because that she has staked her success to their success. And then as you say at the other kind of the other kind of extreme or the other end of the spectrum is someone like Kristin who, who, who herself wants to be the best. But I, you know, I think like Danielle, what Danielle thinks is that everyone has a role to play on the team. So she's the captain. Chloe is for, you know, until this particular season, Chloe's the fastest one on the team. And that's okay because Chloe is also sort of socially clueless. Kristen is the beautiful one and the moment that Kristin wants to be both the fastest and is the beautiful one that threatens the kind of equilibrium that. That Danielle is working so hard to establish on the team. Harriet is the feminist, you know, Patricia is the outsider, and Liv has a boyfriend and I don't. And I think that these are things that oftentimes women will do in friendships, that they have a kind of little tally sheet of what each brings to the relationship and that it's very important that there's a kind of sense of balance between them.
- [20:26]
Chris Holmes
I'm gonna get myself in trouble for this, but having, you know, played little league baseball, I feel like I could write a short story that had elements of the experience of playing competitive baseball. I feel like if I had never run a race, I would not be able to represent the experience of running at the limit of one's physical capability. And so while I typically steer clear of authorial experience as a instrument for understanding novels, your time at Amherst and running for the cross country team there is, I think, deeply important to your understanding of running. And I wonder if you would talk a little bit about those experiences and, and whether they. And how they came into your descriptions of the experience of running.
- [21:12]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the, the team, my. The team in my novel, you know, the Frost Poets really is very.
- [21:22]
Chris Holmes
That name. I wish Amherst would change their name.
- [21:24]
Stephanie Rentz
To the Poets is quite. Is quite different from the experience I had as a runner at Amherst in the late 80s and early 90s. I think it would be putting it generously to say that Amherst, the Amherst women's cross country team, was building during those years, which is to say that we had a lot of trouble bringing. Putting like seven women on a cross country course at the same time. So my. I did not have the experience of being pushed by my teammates. Instead, I had the experience of coming to Amherst and being very disappointed that the team wasn't better than it was. But I did devote so many of my years, so many years of my life to running. And when I think back on some of my most ecstatic moments in my life, it really is. There are moments when I'm outside running. You know, I can remember a moment of being on the playing fields at Amherst at dusk and running intervals and just how incredibly transporting it was to feel so fast. The thing about running at dusk is that, you know, it takes away your depth perception. So before you know it, you know, you are where you weren't before. So it, it makes you feel very, very. And so, you know, I wanted. So I, I had like, a lot of memories of running that I could pull on for this book and I really loved remembering the kind of, some of the dynamics or strategies of racing. But the, the team in We Love to Run is really fully fictional and it was really fun to live with those characters for a period of time and to slowly get to know them and, and figure out what their stories were.
- [23:12]
Chris Holmes
So this is as much a campus novel as it is a running novel. And we get a fine grained portrait of life at Frost College as in many ways a stand in for Amherst and other small selective liberal arts colleges in the 80s and 90s. What were the aspects of culture, history and politics that you wanted to flag as indicative of that period of time and particularly what it would have been like to be a student at an elite liberal arts college at the end of the 20th century?
- [23:44]
Stephanie Rentz
Well, I think that I really wanted to talk a lot about the, like, the nascent feminist theory that was kind of. I mean, it's not. I suppose it seemed nascent to me, but I was, I was interested in sort.
- [23:55]
Chris Holmes
I think it was very much nascent. Like late second wave.
- [23:59]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, second wave. Right. Second wave feminism. Exactly. So I wanted to capture a moment where it felt to me, at least during that time, that language starts to matter a lot, that you start to think about things like whether you're going to call yourself a girl or a woman and the distinction between those terms you start to think about. You know, I was interested in, you know, having my characters begin to think about, well, what. What does it mean to be a feminist? What does it mean to have words to. To describe some of your experiences? So this is also a moment where terms like date rape start to kind of come into people's vocabulary. And it's a moment where I think that, you know, people start to have slightly, a slightly better understanding of terms like consent. And so those were some of the things that I was trying to capture in the novel. I was, you know, I really wanted to make. I wanted to make Harriet a sort of like a strident feminist who is reading Andrea Torkin and other feminists like that. And then I wanted to sort of like push back against that a little bit in characters like Danielle.
- [25:17]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, I. I mean, I was going to. You. You predicted my next question, which was thinking about that moment of feminism and particularly Andrea Dworkin, who was certainly a major figure for me as well, and, and such a kind of. I mean, someone who pushed the limits of how we might understand what feminism is. And, and what parts of the world it might encompass. And Harriet is, is part of this kind of awakening. And so she. But she is also, you know, someone who is fragile in a lot of ways and, and who is so slight. And so, you know, she's really starved herself over the years and, and almost to the point of disappearing. And I found that that tension between wanting women to have just all the agency and a voice and power and meaning in the society and then nearly disappearing because of society's expectations for that body. And so if you could talk a little bit about Harriet in that way.
- [26:23]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I mean, I think what's really interesting to me about Harriet and, and the kind of feminism that she's practicing is, is the idea that the, the personal is political and that you're, you know, that, that Harriet has in a way, like, disappointed herself or to some extent, like, betrayed her own sense of herself as a feminist by also being. Having an eating disorder before she comes to Frost. And to a certain extent, while she's still at Frost. I think like, in the kind of late 80s and early 90s, women were negotiating ideas around like, well, what did it mean to be a feminist? And if you did declare yourself a feminist, like, how did you. How did you need to behave? And what choices would you make that would show you were a feminist? And what choices would you make that would suggest that you weren't as good a feminist as you. As you thought? I mean, I think like, Harriet to some degree is like policing everyone's behavior in the novel, policing her teammates behavior. She's always saying, whenever Danielle uses the word girl, Harriet says, you mean women. You know, she's always correcting everyone. She wants to use. She wants to kind of like, use the most vulgar version of words, like to just kind of like she wants to take the romance out of everything or she wants to take the. Or even like the romanticization out of things to just call, you know, call a spade a spade. But at the same time she's very tender. So like, so I like in. I think in Harriet, like, I just, I guess, like, I wanted to show the ways that. That you had to kind of at least that. That you might be expected to kind of perform your feminism in order to be a true feminist. But it was always. It always seemed to me that it was a lot more complicated than that.
- [28:14]
Chris Holmes
Well, she has. She ends up having kind of quite a romantic whirlwind intimacy with this other woman who sees her in very romantic terms, I think. And it, and it is sort of jarring for her, I think.
- [28:29]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, exactly. And she could never, you know, she has like, she has presented herself to the team as kind of like jaded about everything, but in fact she's like in the process of falling in love and really falling in love for the first time with, with a woman or with anyone for that matter. And so I think that, you know, I just think it's like, interesting the kind of like the contrast between how you behave in public and how you behave privately and, and what you think you need to do in order to be a good feminist.
- [29:03]
Chris Holmes
So I, I mean, to pick up again a little bit on this idea of women's bodies and, and eating and how they are by society. You get to the point directly in the novel that competitive running is simply different for men and women. On the one hand, you know, running acts as a, as a metaphor for women's strength and the possibility of their bodies. And on the other hand, it signifies all the ways in which society demands that they shrink away. And you've got these terrible scenes that the coaches doing weigh ins with them and commenting on their body. And none of this happens to the, to the male runners. And so I, I would love for you to just weigh in a little bit about this contradiction and this divide between how competitive running lives amidst the two genders here.
- [29:53]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I like your use of the word weigh in this stuff. I do think it's the case that there's. That men and women's bodies are similarly surveilled in, in running, that there is a kind of competitive advantage that you potentially have by being a little leaner both for men and women. But I do think, like, I think where it is different for women is that that kind of surveillance intersects with a lot of cultural surveillance that happens around women's bodies. And so not only do you have coaches saying, you know, as the coaches in my novel do, you know, weighing, weighing my runners and telling them that they all need to lose weight or that if they gain weight they're going to have to lead the workout, so punishing them for any sort of minimal microscopic changes in their bodies. So you, you have that happening and then, and that that also just like totally plays in to kind of bigger cultural narratives about how women's bodies are supposed to look. And so I think like, you know, again, like, I do think that I don't think that men are immune from being like feeling pressure to be lean as runners, but I just don't think it has the same sort of cultural weight. I think it's easier. I think it's easier for women to get seduced by the idea of making themselves disappear, whether they're runners or not. But it's particularly potent when you're a runner because that can give you a competitive edge, not for very long, but for a little, for, you know, a short period of time. I mean, ultimately, we know that when you starve yourself for too long, you end up hurting your body. Yeah. You end up with stress fractures and you end up, you end up not being able to compete in the way that you'd like to.
- [31:49]
New Books Network Announcer
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- [32:17]
Stephanie Rentz
Jason Disney asked me to do this podcast thing. I need some advice.
- [32:19]
Chris Holmes
You've got to have banger guests.
- [32:22]
Stephanie Rentz
Walker and Leah, Daniel Diemer, Tim Simons, Adam Coveland.
- [32:25]
Chris Holmes
You're the one asking the questions.
- [32:27]
Stephanie Rentz
How have they better answer?
- [32:29]
Commercial Narrator
I don't know anything epic this season.
- [32:33]
Stephanie Rentz
Is just make a quest. I'm Ariyan Samadry. Welcome to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians official podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. And watch season two of Percy Jackson, streaming now on Disney and Hulu. Learn more@disneyplus.com whatson Close your eyes.
- [32:48]
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- [33:17]
Chris Holmes
I mean, so as you were saying that, I was thinking that while Harriet seems to, you know, want her body to disappear, Kristen literally disappears off campus. And so you have these two versions of needing to disappear to be unseen. And I thought that was really clever to have her, you know, exist in this kind of limbo world of that kind of off campus. What is it? Is it a house?
- [33:43]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, it's just an abandoned farmhouse at.
- [33:46]
Chris Holmes
Abandoned farm.
- [33:47]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah. Yes.
- [33:48]
Chris Holmes
So, yeah, I'm just Interested in that there's two different kinds of disappearing.
- [33:53]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, Well, I mean, I think like. I think Kristen's trying to disappear in a lot of different ways. Kristen's trying to disappear or escape what happened to her over the summer. Kristen is trying to, I think, like, subjugate her feelings to a kind of like, promise she makes with herself. I mean, she promises in the book, she says to herself, you know, if I'm the fastest runner on the team, I'm going to be okay. And, you know, that's a kind of. I think that's an act of disappearance like that, you know, I'm going to ignore how I'm feeling by, by, you know, by doing this thing. Right. I'm going to pretend like that, like if I'm fast, it's going to make everything okay. And, you know, and then she, like, you know, she literally, you know, kind of like at some point can't. When she's failing in the deal that she made herself, her only choice is to kind of like, literally disappear. And, you know, and I think like, the novel is about how is she going to emerge from what happened to her over the summer. And, and, you know, it's not that she's not going to. And just acknowledge that she doesn't have control. I mean, so much of this novel is about control and the kind of like, illusion of control that we often have when we're young.
- [35:16]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. And, and, you know, I'm thinking about your two. I mean, you, you, you live within the, the worlds of all these different runners, but it's really Kristen and Danielle that act as our protagonists. And each of them carries this ghost of, of a terrible trauma inflicted on them by men, and they run from that ghost. So they're, they're, they're operating in this world where they need to run all the time physically, but then they're also running emotionally and psychologically. And, and, and that ends up being this making at various, various periods of time running this terrifying thing. And, and I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about your two protagonists and how they deal with running after or running away from these ghosts.
- [36:07]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, I mean, I guess in, in Danielle's case, I'm not sure she's. I don't know that she's running from her ghosts. She certainly, she's, I think she's like, drinking herself away from her.
- [36:20]
Chris Holmes
That's true. That's true. Yes, she is.
- [36:23]
Stephanie Rentz
Which.
- [36:23]
Chris Holmes
She's, yeah. Doing a different kind of dissolving.
- [36:26]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, doing a different kind of dissolving. Right. Just like. And. And I don't. You know, I think, like, like her. Her behavior is not extreme. I wouldn't. I think it's very typical of, like, a lot of college students who are. And in her case, I think, like, it's a way for her to. To become more vulnerable, to treat herself weirdly enough, like, to be kinder to herself in those moments when she gets. And when she drinks too much. In the novel, she. In. In one situation, she dances with Kristen, and Kristen is standing on a table, and Danielle, who's very, very tall, finally feels like she's not towering over everyone. She's able to feel a. Cherished by others or supported by her teammates. Like, it. I think it feels to her like she's not. She's not having to bear everything on her own. I think, like, with Kristin, Kristen is certainly running from what happened to her over the summer, and. And she's doing it by. By making deals with herself, and she's also doing it by imagining that she could have controlled the outcome of what happened over the summer. If only she had known she could have run away. And.
- [37:43]
Chris Holmes
And I think she knows she could beat Jed in a foot race.
- [37:47]
Stephanie Rentz
Exactly. Exactly. She knows she could have beaten Jed if she'd known what was gonna happen. She could have just. She could have run from him, and she would have run much faster. And I, you know, and I. I think that that is just such a kind of. I think that idea is so alluring, right, that you can. That if only you'd known you could change. You could change what. What happened or. I mean, the other thing that's so alluring about it is just like that. Like, shouldn't your. Shouldn't your strength and your power matter? Right? That's what these girls are so invested in, being strong. The women on the team are so invested in being strong. Shouldn't it matter? You know, that's what they've. They've spent their whole lives training to be fast. Shouldn't that matter? And. And the answer is, like, sometimes it doesn't matter. Right? That is like that. That. That is the kind of cruel truth of being a woman in this culture. Sometimes you cannot run fast enough to get away from. To get away from the things that happen.
- [38:56]
Chris Holmes
Do you. One of the things I was struck by is as much as this is a portrait of late 20th century life and. And specifically life for young women, it felt so eerily as though we were boomeranging back from any gains that had been made in. In how women might feel less afraid of their environments, less afraid of men, less afraid of. Of being alone at night. And I wonder if. If you, as you were writing, saw that kind of reflection in the present and in a way, that's, that's quite sad.
- [39:34]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I. You know, one really interesting thing, Chris, is how different women of different ages have responded to what happens to Kristen in the novel and to. I wanted to write something that. Where it was. It was clear that. Kristin, I'm going to go ahead and give away the book, but it's. It's clear that Kristen has been. Has been sexually assaulted, but it's also clear that. That I think that many women might see in Kristen's experience an experience that they themselves have had of, like, saying no until they just kind of give up and don't say anything at all. And, and, you know, a friend of mine who's around my age, you know, who's 50, read that, read the novel and said, like, well, it's not such a big deal what happened to Kristen. I mean, this has happened to a lot of people. And then I had a younger person read the book who was like, in her late 20s, and she was just like, you know, she, she was just outraged by what happened to Kristen. And so I do think that we. I think we live in a moment where we have. We have a much better understanding of consent, and we have many more conversations about consent and what it means. But I also think we live in a moment where things haven't changed as much as they should, you know, as much as we'd like them to. So that was definitely on my mind. I mean, by setting it in the 90s, it's. People have called it an historical novel. But I also wanted to sort of challenge readers to think about, well, how much has actually changed since the 90s.
- [41:17]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:18]
Stephanie Rentz
And. And certainly when it comes to, like, surveys around. Around consent and. And day rape, things haven't changed as much as we'd imagined, you know, so. So that, so that is definitely the case.
- [41:34]
Chris Holmes
The incident with. With Jed, which happens. They're in Boise or, or are they outside of Boise?
- [41:42]
Stephanie Rentz
When I go see, they're in the Sawtooth Mountains, so sort of.
- [41:45]
Chris Holmes
Oh, in the Sawtooth Mountains, Central Idaho.
- [41:46]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah.
- [41:47]
Chris Holmes
This is really the, the one geographic locale that, that we spend a lot of time in. That, that one section is. Is pretty long, and we have a sense of. Of Kristen's life in. In such a different environment than the one she lives in in. In Frost. You know, they've just gotten Their first, you know, real coffee shop. Yeah. And people are coming in and not sure what to order. And. And in comes this guy who sort of seems to know things about coffee and maybe about the world. But I'm interested in how, craft wise, this scene that's really the one major scene outside of Frost came into being.
- [42:27]
Stephanie Rentz
Oh, that's a great question. I think I wanted to convey the idea that things like what happened to Kristen and Danielle could happen anywhere. They could happen at Frost at a small New England college. They could happen in the mountains of Idaho or in Boise that, you know, that it's not bound. Certainly not. Not bound by geography. So. So that's one thing I was thinking about. I was also thinking about the fact that I wanted to. I wanted to sort of spend more time with Kristen because I wanted something to happen to her that it was going to be difficult for her to ever describe to any of her teammates.
- [43:07]
Chris Holmes
Huh.
- [43:08]
Stephanie Rentz
And. And I. You know, and so that, like. And that's. I think one of the tensions in the final third of the book is that. That she has a sense that she can't possibly explain what was so terrible about what happened. And I think the reader starts to have a sense that, like, that the. That her teammates and her friends, they really love her, but they have to keep like, kind of like reducing what happened to her to just like a couple words because it's kind of like beyond the experience itself is like. Is beyond anything that Kristin can explain or really fully represent. So I wanted to have. I wanted the reader to have the. This sense of kind of sinking into that experience and it's like. And just how strange and disoriented and horrible it is. And then to watch her try to explain it to people who really care about her and just to see that it's. It's. It's almost impossible to capture what is so terrifying about what happened to her.
- [44:07]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. Because she's got. She's both gotta describe an assault that she doesn't quite have the words for. And then also the lunacy of what she's made to go through. This. This performance of, you know, being. Having to pretend to be a bear all of a sudden when she's thought she's having this, you know, fairly normal, if adventuresome date, all of a sudden she's being asked to live in a. In a fantasy world that she has no interest in.
- [44:37]
Stephanie Rentz
Exactly. Exactly. And that's. That is just like, so disorienting. Right. And so not only is the situation scary that she's decided to go off and go backpacking with a person she doesn't know very well, but then his behavior is so bizarre that she sort of like. I think she loses her sense of, like, of what's up and what's down. Right. She, like, she's just completely destabilized by his behavior, and then she has to try to get out of there all by herself in the dark.
- [45:12]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. And she keeps getting lost and.
- [45:15]
Stephanie Rentz
Right, and lost. Exactly. And she gets lost and she blames herself. I mean, I think what's. I think what I was really interested in digging into with Kristen is just, like, how easy it is both for her to believe that she could have changed the outcome, but also how easy it is for her to give away her power, her sense, her, like, her willingness or her ability to say what happened was wrong. She keeps. She gives him, you know, psychologically, she gives him every chance to say, oh, this was just a big understanding misunderstanding.
- [45:54]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. No, it's. The whole thing was totally terrifying.
- [45:58]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah.
- [45:59]
Chris Holmes
But lest I leave us on a. A terrifying note, I'd love to know if you have things that you've been reading lately that you're excited about and maybe you'd like to share with my listeners.
- [46:11]
Stephanie Rentz
Yes, absolutely. So one thing I'll say is that I think that we need more novels about women athletes. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was just to kind of like, reflect the fact that there are so many women who are amazing athletes, but we don't have a lot of fictional depictions of them. So the first book I'll recommend is A Sharp Endless need by Marissa Crane, and it is a girl's basketball novel. And I.
- [46:42]
Chris Holmes
Did this come out last year or.
- [46:44]
Stephanie Rentz
The year before it came out? Last. No, it came out this year, actually.
- [46:47]
Chris Holmes
Oh, it did, okay.
- [46:48]
Stephanie Rentz
Earlier this year. Yeah, exactly. I think in the spring of this year. And I just love it. Crane just does such an excellent job of. Of capturing the kind of. Just the. The power and athleticism of being a girl's basketball player. And it also includes a heartbreaking love story as one. As one girl falls in love with another and. And, you know, and just kind of faces. Faces. Her love interest. Fear of desiring another. Another woman. So it's a. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous book.
- [47:28]
Chris Holmes
My son plays college basketball, so you're gonna have to. Have to buy this for him.
- [47:34]
Stephanie Rentz
It's really great. And then the second book I would recommend is Charlotte Wood's novel Stonyard Devotional.
- [47:41]
Chris Holmes
Which just was named one of the 10 best by New York Times.
- [47:45]
Stephanie Rentz
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great. I read it like a year and a half ago, and it is this lovely meditative novel about a woman who goes to a, just a. She goes to a religious community just kind of on a weekend retreat, and she thinks that the, the women who live there are just so odd. She can't imagine anyone making that sort of decision to live in, to live in a religious community. And then the novel jumps forward six months and she's back and she's, and she's decided to stay there. And it's just, it's an, just an incredible book about. Yeah, it's. I, it's, it's about spirituality and faith and living in community with other people.
- [48:32]
Chris Holmes
Well, it sounds. I was already interested, but I'm doubly interested now and I. These are great recommendations, but I really want my listeners to run out and get We Loved to Run by Stephanie Rentz. It doesn't matter if you are a runner or despised running, you will find yourself falling in love with this team, with its individual members, and just about the way in which they want to swallow the world whole at this time of possibility and blooming, while also running as fast as they can away from ghosts and traumas. And I was totally preoccupied with it and it's going to stay in my mind for a very long time. So thank you for talking to me about it, Stephanie.
- [49:18]
Stephanie Rentz
Thank you so much for having me. Chris.
- [49:27]
Chris Holmes
Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Stephanie Rentz for coming on to talk about her novel We Loved to Run. You can find links to purchase We Love to Run and all of Stephanie's recommended books at the website burned by books dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been Burned by Books.
- [50:03]
Stephanie Rentz
Sam.