Rate My Baby, Hopefully You Like It: An Interview with Nini Bernt by Evangeline Lim
With her debut book, There are Reasons for This, out now, Nini Berndt is an author you’ll want to keep on your radar. I first heard her name through her flash fiction, “Windings,” which was published during the peak of my internship here at Split Lip. I fell in love with the way she used voice and tone so deliberately. That same artistry is infused in her new novel, which follows protagonist Lucy, as she moves to Denver after her brother’s death and becomes entangled with his former lover, unraveling a strange, storm-ridden world that blurs family, desire, and the search for connection. Her writing is something that sticks out in all the best ways. So, when I had the opportunity to interview her, I was overjoyed.
Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida and the author of the novel There Are Reasons for This. Her short work has appeared in One Story, The Southampton Review, Subtropics, Split Lip, Adroit, Passages North, and elsewhere. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.
She and I chatted over Zoom about her publishing journey, sweet tooth, and the craft of building characters—among other things. The interview has been edited slightly for length.
Evangeline Lim: In honor of your flash fiction, “Wingdings,” what is your favorite sugary treat?
Nini Bernt: Oh my gosh. I like all sweet treats. I’m a big sweet treat girl so picking just one is really hard. Hmmm, I love crepes. If I am making a treat just for myself I’ll make chocolate crepes with raspberries.
EL: That sounds really good! It’s impressive that you know how to make it, because I always buy it at the store.
NB: Haha! And I’ll eat it like a little squirrel. I’ll make a crepe and eat it, and then make another one and eat it.
EL: That’s the way to do it! Okay, shifting gears, I just want to say I loved reading “Wingdings!” I especially appreciated the lack of traditional dialogue tags. It really gave the piece a breathless and blurred quality. How intentional was that in shaping the reader’s experience?
NB: Yeah, definitely intentional. I mean, I feel like that sort of breathless quality that it has was really important. And it was really important for it to feel like—especially up until those last couple of paragraphs—like we’re in sort of the collective head of all of these kids. So lack of dialogue tags helps with that collective voice.
EL: Yeah for sure. I think intentionality is really important, especially in shorter forms of work. Is there a line from your writing—whether in “Wingdings” or elsewhere—that feels particularly deliberate or really like you?
I think the line in “Wingdings”: “No more pudding no more lemon cake no more chewing gum no more Coca Cola no more ice cream no more Fruit-by-the-Foot no more raised-glazed no more Pop Tarts no more maple syrup no more Captain Crunch.” That line for me was the sound that I wanted from the piece. There’s a deliberateness there of it not being lineated by commas—it’s got that sort of headlong quality. I love the sound of raised glazed, so that line was like, super, super deliberate. But every line in this piece, especially, is really deliberate.
There’s also the interplay of these more staccato center lines. We end that long headlong list with “With pulp, only, some mothers said. For the fiber.” So there’s that staccato line, and then these longer, sort of run-on lines, and the interplay of those two things gives it the sound and the movement that it needs.
EL: Yeah I really, really liked that line when I was reading. I want to segue now to talk about your debut novel, There Are Reasons For This! Can you walk me through the journey you went with this book—from initial spark of inspiration and first drafts to publication and promotion?
Yeah, it’s a long journey. So I started writing this book in kind of like mid 2020, but in a much different form. It originally was a collection of linked stories with Lucy sort of like the through line. And then once I started working with my agent (who is amazing and I adore), she really helped shape it into a novel.
We took away a lot of characters. Originally the novel was built around this property that I saw in Denver called St. Catherine’s home for working girls, where all of these women were living in this building. I really loved all these characters. So it’s always strange to take out these people that you have this kind of relationship with and you feel bad because you’re like here you have to just go live in this drawer now for an undetermined amount of time.
And so there’s that sense of How does the novel take shape? How does the story take shape? And my agent really helped me think through what that story was. The center was this relationship between Lucy, her brother, and Helen, and that triangulated relationship becomes the focus of the book.
I had been working on it for probably just under two years before my agent was like I think that we’re pretty much done and we’re ready to go on submission. It was the first time that I was doing that and so it felt wild.
And so you get to this place where you’re like, oh, this is going to be, like, a real book, which feels crazy. So we went out on submission and Tin House bought the book less than two weeks later, which was great. So it was this whirlwind period of like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting—and I almost didn’t have time to be extremely nervous.
Then I started working with the team at Tin House, which was amazing. Masie Cochran is my editor there, and she’s just incredible. The wonderful thing about Tin House is they just make you feel at home right away, so I felt in very, very good hands always with them.
And then all of a sudden, one day, you’re like, oh my gosh, this is a book. You’re working on your book cover, and you’re working on layout, and you’re working on font and design. And then in December, I got my galleys, and this thing arrives that is a real book, in your hands, with your name on it and your words on the pages, and it’s crazy.
Then pretty quickly you’re doing publicity and you’re doing marketing. It’s weird to self promote. It’s weird to put this thing out in the world for people to, in some respect, judge. My wife will be like, it’s like your baby. And I’m like, yeah, but it’s like having a baby and then putting that baby on the internet. Being like can you rate my baby, hopefully you like it. And that’s such a strange and unfamiliar place to be.
EL: Wow that’s such an interesting and inspiring journey—do you have a favorite moment from throughout the entire process? Would you say it’s when you found out you were going to be published?
NB: I mean, that was really exciting—that’s once in a lifetime. That first book deal feeling is really, really special. There have been so many wonderful little moments that were really incredible. I think it’s important to celebrate each of those moments, each milestone—getting your cover, getting your galley, getting to hold your book for the first time, getting your proof. All of that stuff is important to celebrate, because it’s fleeting. I think we all as writers know that the wins—that feeling of like oh, I’ve done it—is a fleeting feeling, because there’s going to be rejection—there’s going to be some sense of what I didn’t get. So you should hold on to those celebrations and put some sort of capitalization on those wins.
EL: Yes! I definitely think you should cherish every win and every win going forward with your writing career as well. I want to ask you more about the content of the book itself. In There Are Reasons For This the protagonists’ brother, Mikey, is dead, but it seems like his absence is felt everywhere. What do you think absence allows you to do in fiction that presence doesn’t?
NB: That’s a great question. I think we are always sort of filling in the blanks of who somebody is, and it’s much easier to do that—or it’s required to do that—when somebody isn’t there. We have to sort of construct that person in their absence.
Mikey then gets to be who Lucy sees him as, who Helen sees him as, and for us as the reader, we are constructing Mikey both through, some of these moments in which we see him presently, but also in these fragments of how Lucy and Helen continue to see him.
So I think that’s an interesting idea that I think about a lot. How do we construct the idea of a person? Because that’s always what we’re doing to some extent, right? We’re constantly creating an idea of who we believe somebody to be. We’re never able to see them in their entirety. So when somebody’s absent in such a final way there’s a different relationship to that, because there isn’t this person who then gets to make some sort of claim over what is or is not true. In some ways, we don’t ever get to do that. Who we believe somebody to be is in some ways just as real as who who they believe themselves to be.
El: You talk about constructing the idea of a character. How did you go about constructing these characters—writing their backstories, their relationships, their complexities?
NB: It’s such an interesting process to have somebody sort of come alive. Of these characters, Helen was the first one. Helen and her job as a cuddler—that was a short story that I was working on first. Helen was always sort of first, and in some ways because I‘ve spent the longest with her. She’s always the most fully formed for me, and the most real.
And then Lucy and Mikey came later. Lucy actually took a really long time for me to figure out. And in some ways, I’m still trying to figure Lucy out. And I think that there’s something nice about that because it means that they are more like living, breathing people, rather than somebody who is just on the page like a set piece that I move around and position. I think me still trying to figure Lucy out is actually really nice, because it gives her this malleability for the reader.
I think Mikey and Mrs. Mcgour both characters are based much more on people that I know. Mikey is some amalgamation of my brothers—of boys that I grew up with. I know Mikey in a different way. And Mrs. McCorvey is, in many ways, my grandmother. So I think that there’s a different intimacy there.
I almost never start with the idea of a character. A character develops in every draft, and in every iteration the character is growing and changing. I have some sense of them, so I think getting that right backstory or the ways in which they interact in the world, those things for me develop slowly in drafts. A character’s wants become much more specific as you go, and that's just what drafting does.
EL: Yeah I think character building is honestly one of the most interesting parts about talking to other writers, or even when I write myself. I think I’m very much a character person, as opposed to a plot person.
NB: You can’t have a compelling plot without compelling characters. And compelling characters need to develop, I think, really organically. We have to let ourselves be surprised by them, and let that build over time. The most exciting feeling, for me, as a writer is when I learned something new about a character because then we get to go to all of these new interesting places.
EL: Yeah, definitely. When I even think about myself growing up, I used to read like Percy Jackson. What drew me to that story was the main characters. I love the plot, but it was definitely the characters that got me invested into the story. So I think it’s really true across the board. I want to ask you more about what you do outside of writing. What does a typical day off look like?
NB: I have so few true days off. I have a really boring corporate tech day job that I have to do every day. I have a family. I have a teenage son, which is crazy. And I’m a really disciplined writer, so I try to write every single day.
If I’m really taking a day off I’m going to a museum and going out to brunch and going to dinner with my wife. I think if I really want to take a day off I have to be out in the world doing stuff because when I’m at home I will naturally sort of just be like, Oh, I should be writing. It’s really hard for me to be at home and not sort of just naturally go into that mode so I force myself out into the world and do in the world stuff. My favorite activity is just going to eat food. That’s the best thing for me.
EL: Same. I’m such a foodie. When I went to college I was trying new food an absurd amount of times.
As we’re wrapping up here, what’s a question you’ve never been asked in an interview that you wish someone would ask?
Oh my gosh, that’s a hard one. I mean, I love craft questions. I love that you opened with this craft question about intentionality and line. I think an interesting question that I would want to ask people is how do you think about voice as it pertains to longer work? Because for such a long time I almost exclusively wrote short stories, and particularly very short stories. So the way something sounds, the way that the line sounds, is so important. And if you get a word off, if you get a comma off, it’s sort of like, in my mind—it ruins it, there’s something that happens that martyrs it in a way. And in a longer project, when you’re working on something over years, the voice is so different.
I think about people who work on a novel over the span of a decade. How do you maintain that consistency of voice and that consistency of stance knowing that you are undergoing tremendous change over the course of that period of time?
I don’t even have a great answer for this, but I think it’s something interesting to think about and something I’m thinking about a lot right now in relation to the book I’m working on right now, because I can see the voice shifting as I get closer and closer to the voice that I know I want the project to have.
But maintaining that kind of consistency of voice when writing something over a year or two years or three years, is much different that doing that in the span of a few pages.
EL: That’s really interesting. I’ve never really thought about voice like that. I feel like something clicked in my mind right there. That’s really cool—I really liked that answer.
Since you mentioned that new book that you’re working on right now, can you give us a little teaser of what that’s about?
NB: I’m excited! You know, I think there’s a lot that’s still developing, but it is about a woman contending with being 38 in a world that she feels is increasingly strange and hard to live in, and she’s trying to decide whether or not she wants to have a baby by participating in this sort of experimental research study that essentially determines whether or not somebody can be a good person.
EL: Whoa. Wait, that’s interesting. I’m going to have to pick it up when it comes out. I’ll count the days!
And finally for my last question: If this era of your life had a soundtrack what song would be on it?
NB: I think I have listened to a lot of LCD Soundsystem in this era of my life and I think there are different songs for different moods. Probably “I Can Change” is the song that I think about and have listened to probably most in this season of my life.
EL: I’m going to have to give that a listen after this interview.
NB: Yeah, you should.
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Evangeline Lim (@ev.angline) is currently pursuing English and Media Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is an intern at Split Lip Magazine and a weekender staff-writer at The Daily Californian. Outside of reading and writing, she loves trying new restaurants, watching romcoms, and her pet turtle, Murdtle.