Millennial Unemployment, Television’s Influence on Writing, and Viral Videos: An Interview with Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Mona at Sea
By Elizabeth Gonzalez James
June 2021
Santa Fe Writer’s Project
ISBN: 978-1951631017
270 pages
Millennials get a bad rep—lazy, entitled, addicted to the internet (and themselves). They also came of age and into adulthood during the Great Recession and have been identified as the first generation to earn less than their parents. For years I have wondered when I would find a novel that embodied the complexity of the millennial experience around employment and identity. Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ darkly comic Mona at Sea captures that experience and more. James’ debut novel is a portrait of an overachieving college grad who, despite her degree and perfectionist tendencies, finds herself unemployed and living back at home with her parents in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis.
With job security for many Americans continuing to be unstable as a result of the pandemic, Mona at Sea feels especially relevant to readers today. It is populated with outcasts, cynics, artists, and overachievers struggling to enter adulthood and navigate that precarious territory between who you are and what you do. If you’ve ever been terrified of failure or lost something you thought you earned, then this book is for you.
I spoke with Elizabeth Gonzalez James about unemployment, writing, viral videos, and her debut novel, Mona at Sea, via Zoom.
Shelby Hinte: Congrats on the publication of Mona at Sea. Could we start with how it came to be, from inception to publication?
Elizabeth Gonzalez James: Yeah, it was a really long path to publication. I started writing it in 2011. I’d never written anything before, and I didn’t know anything about writing a book. I had this idea to write a book about what it’s actually like to be unemployed because I spent all of 2009 being unemployed during the Great Recession. I applied for 300-400 jobs and I didn’t get anything. I couldn’t even get a part-time receptionist job. Nothing. So, I wrote the book and finished it in 2015. I got an agent and the agent sent it out to a bunch of editors. They all said, “It’s hilarious, but we don’t know how to market it so we’re going to pass.” It went on submission for about a year. Nobody picked it up.
I wrote another book and completely just accepted that [Mona] had failed. Then in 2019 I sent it to the Santa Fe Writers Project, thinking maybe I would get an honorable mention or something. I really didn’t think anything would happen. Then they offered me a publication contract. They put me with an amazing editor and we got the book to a place where I was really proud of it again and could be enthusiastic about it coming out into the world.
SH: In the book, Mona talks about the “sunk cost fallacy,” and she says, “No matter how much you invested in something, no matter if you spent ten years developing a technology or blew through millions of dollars, if it’s not working you just have to walk away.”
I was thinking about this book’s path to publication and wondered how you feel about the “sunk cost fallacy.” Do you ever think that there’s something that it doesn’t apply to?
EGJ: I never actually thought about [Mona] being a sunk cost, so now I’m like, Shoot, you’re psychoanalyzing me (laughs).
I was speaking about sunk costs in a business sense. When it’s an artistic endeavor though—something that you’re passionate about, something that is your whole heart, it’s difficult to walk away.
Is there ever something that you shouldn’t walk away from? I can’t answer that for anybody else because I did walk away from [the book] and then I came back to it. I’m actually really grateful that it didn’t sell the first time because the book just wasn’t as good in 2015 as it is now. I wasn’t as strong of a writer. Also, I failed. I fell flat on my face. The worst thing that can happen when you write a book happened to me and I lived through it. I was sad, but then I moved on and I wrote another book. It pushed me to be better and now I have that gift of knowing that I can pick myself back up again from failure.
SH: I read in a bio of yours that you’ve had all sorts of jobs—a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, an opera singer, and, of course, a writer. During the ten years that you worked on [Mona at Sea], what work were you doing to support yourself and develop as a writer?
EGJ: I got pregnant during the Great Recession, and it was not great timing. My husband and I were both unemployed and were living in my in-laws’ basement. My husband got a job, and I never did because I couldn’t get a job that would pay for childcare. I became a stay-at-home mom and then we had a second kid, so I’ve been a stay-at-home mom basically the whole time. I occasionally do grant writing, some freelance work, and some developmental editing, but I’ve been really lucky my husband’s been able to support the family on his salary. I haven’t had to string along jobs in the way that I did in my 20s.
SH: In the book, Mona is an unemployed millennial and she’s going to these job seekers’ meetings where she really grapples with the relationship between her career and her identity. Eventually the woman who runs the meetings says to her, “A job is just a job. It’s not who you are.” Do you feel like this need to have separation between work and identity is uniquely millennial?
EGJ: I don’t think that millennials are opposed to having an identity that is driven by their job or their passion, but when have the majority of young people had the opportunity to have a job that treats them well, and treats them with respect?
It’s different if you got a job at GM in 1950 and you got a pension and health insurance and were able to buy a house. Of course, you would have loyalty to your company and feel that you were an integral part in that company’s success. Now companies treat employees so badly—like they’re disposable. The slightest downturn in a stock price and there’s layoffs. Why would you identify with a company or with a job that gives you nothing? Of course, I know people who love their jobs and who very closely identify with them, but I think as a generation it’s difficult.
SH: ‘Sad Millennial’ is the title of the first chapter, and it’s also the name of a viral video in which Mona is caught on camera after she’s just arrived on Wall Street post-graduation for a finance job that no longer exists because of the market crash. In the video she cries, “It’s not fair. I did everything right. I ate all my veggies.” It felt so mortifying and true to the millennial experience of being able to fail in public. How much do you think existing in public plays into millennial fear?
EGJ: That’s been a pretty big preoccupation of mine over the last 15 years or so. I think I was the last class to graduate from college before YouTube, Facebook, and camera phones became ubiquitous. Millennials were the first generation to have to come of age in a world where everything we did was potentially on camera—like every stupid decision you ever made or drunken spectacle at a party could be uploaded and memorialized on the internet. That’s difficult to grapple with.
I’m a geriatric millennial, but there are millennials who are 10 years younger than me who had to go through this crap in high school. I’m so lucky I didn’t. If something like that had happened to me, I don’t know that I would have made it through. I know kids committed suicide over some of this stuff and I completely get that impulse. That kind of public shaming could potentially go on forever. I think about if I was just having a bad day and I like snapped at a TSA employee or something and then it’s on camera, and then it’s just out there. It’s like there’s no empathy, and I think that’s what worries me.
SH: It seems that it’s dangerous to ever just experience being human when you live in a place where anything can be documented. Of course there are benefits to this—like holding people accountable.
EGJ: That’s of course the flip side of it. Camera phones have been so helpful in holding people accountable and so I struggle with that too. I see the benefit of it in instances like with [Amy Cooper] in Central Park who called the police on the birdwatcher. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about people who are just not having a good day and have it blasted all over the internet.
SH: There are a lot of dark elements to the book. Mona recites this mantra each night before bed which goes something like, I’m unemployed, I hate myself, I’ve never had a boyfriend, etc. And even though she is a bit privileged, her experience of the world still feels dark and yet the book is also laugh out loud funny. There is such levity to it. How do you navigate writing about dark emotional content while also allowing humor to exist?
EGJ: I don’t know, is the short answer (laughs). I just have a weird sense of humor. I don’t know if it was growing up watching too much Ren and Stimpy or what. I just always go for the dark, morbid kind of jokes. That’s just my taste level.
When I originally conceived of the book I wanted to see if I could write something funny about cutting. I don’t know why. Because I’m messed up in the head, maybe. I think that the advantage of humor is that it lets me talk about really disturbing, awful things in a way that’s more accessible, and maybe takes the sting out of them a little bit. It also allows me to get pretty close to the subject matter. I think if I had written this book as a drama, it’s just too much. It’s so sad, you know, somebody who’s engaging in self-harm, repressed memories, unemployment, and watching her family fall apart. It’s just too much.
SH: I read in another interview that you never knew you wanted to write a book. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to writing and what your influences are?
EGJ: I originally wanted to be a screenplay writer. I took one semester of screenwriting in college, and I got into that because I was an art history major and I used to sit there during art history lectures and space out and daydream about the art. I got really into Hieronymus Bosch. His paintings are so weird and wonderful and completely sparked my imagination, so I wanted to write a screenplay about Hieronymus Bosch and the creation of The Garden of Earthly Delights but I was like 20 and quickly realized that was so far beyond my capabilities. But I was like, Well this screenplay writing thing sounds cool, and so I studied it and I started a bunch of screenplays, but I couldn’t get very far with them and then I thought, You know what’s easier? I’ll write a novel. Haha, the joke was on me (laughs).
SH: Craft wise, you have a unique way of capturing the way people repress certain thoughts in order to have socially acceptable communication. There are all these moments where, before Mona’s dialogue or response to another character, she has this whole internal monologue. The internal monologue she has is always the wrong answer for the person [Mona’s] talking to, and even if she doesn’t say the right thing, it is still less offensive than what she was thinking. How did you develop this style around dialogue?
EGJ: It’s all part of her voice, right? The voice just came out acerbic and strong when I was writing. I’ve had to pull it back a lot because I think she was like a 15 out of 10 angry in the first drafts and now she’s like maybe a 6 out of 10. I think that internal monologue is maybe the little bit of fury I allowed her to retain in the last version of the book.
In terms of putting it before what she actually says, I feel like TV writers do that a lot. Don’t they? They’ll have somebody speak internally or they’ll have an aside to the camera and then they’ll pop back in and answer the question they were asked. Fleabag came out after I wrote the book so I can’t say that it was an influence, but I feel like Fleabag does that a lot. I’m a huge TV and movie watcher. I get obsessed with shows and I’m sure TV had a big influence on crafting the voice. Eastbound and Down, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and all the other stupid shows that I watch. It’s all in there, I’m sure. Oh, and Peep Show. When the book was already finished I watched all eight seasons again and I was like, Hot damn, I think I was very influenced by that show.
SH: Who are some writers that have inspired you?
EGJ: I love Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders. I think they both have a similar style, voice, sense of humor, and they’re so empathic. Especially George Saunders. He just loves his characters so much. I’m always trying to get to the George Saunders point where somebody is just screwing up but you love them anyway. And Kurt Vonnegut is so delightfully weird. Their works are so steeped in Americana and they feel so American. They feel like the truest expressions of America. I think because they’re so weird and so flawed and they both see the lie at the heart of capitalism.
SH: I never thought of George Saunders as an incredibly American writer, but hearing you say that, I think I have to agree. It actually makes me think that Mona at Sea is a truly American novel. It captures such a specific experience with the Great Recession which also speaks to the economic upheaval we’ve seen during the pandemic. What has it been like publishing during the pandemic—especially a book concerned with experiences similar to things that we’re seeing now?
EGJ: Yeah, I’m getting a lot of questions in interviews about the recession and economics and what the job market has been like for millennials. It’s a little scary for me because I’m certainly not the spokesperson for millennials or anything like that, nor would I ever want to be. I can just talk about what my experience was. I didn’t anticipate when I signed the [book] contract that we were going to be heading into another economic downturn, but I’m really lucky that the book is coming out exactly when it is because I’m actually going to be able to do a hybrid book tour. I have some in-person events and some virtual events. If my book had come out a few months before, that wouldn’t have been the case. I haven’t felt the full brunt of it the way that I would have a few months ago or last year. I have some friends who debuted last year and it was rocky. Everything had to be cancelled. Everything had to be shuttled online.
SH: Lastly, what writing advice do you have for newer writers?
EGJ: My favorite writing advice is an oldie but a goodie. Henry James said, and I’m paraphrasing, Try to be a person upon whom nothing is lost. I take that to mean, just move through the world taking everything in. All five senses. All the time. But also, move through the world with your heart open, and just try to have empathy for other people.
Before becoming a writer, Elizabeth Gonzalez James (@unefemmejames) was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She’s an alum of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. In 2021 she is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog. Her first novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and was published in June 2021 by the Santa Fe Writers Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.
Shelby Hinte (@shelbyhinte) is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate award. She is a contributing writer for Write or Die Tribe. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, Entropy, Vagabond Lit, Witness Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere.