Things couldn’t have gone much better for a 28-year-old debut author in 1996. There were blurbs from Jay McInerney (“a funny, sad, nasty little gem of novel”) and Tama Janowitz (“hilariously enthralling”). Madonna optioned the film rights—and wanted to direct. “Best new novelist,” declared Entertainment Weekly. “I think I was in 14 magazines at the same time, on a newsstand on my corner,” Jennifer Belle says via Zoom from her art-cluttered apartment overlooking New York City’s Washington Square Park.
And then there was the dead fish. A bucket of them, to be precise, brought to Belle’s first Greenwich Village apartment by a photographer on assignment. “We spent a whole day shooting,” she recalls, “and somehow in the end, the picture—a full page in New York magazine—is me with a real dead fish on my head. There was a really nice one, where I’m kind of leaned over. Like, I have a headache and I’m holding the fish like a hot compress.” She recreates the pose with her iPhone. “But that’s not the one they used.”
If ever there was a debut novelist who didn’t need a prop, it was Belle. Her downtown “it girl” resumé would have been enough to make Chloë Sevigny jealous: the daughter of poet Jill Hoffman, Belle dropped out of high school at 15, lied her way into a job at a Bleecker Street bar, played a young Penny Arcade in the performance artist’s shows at La MaMa theater, and started her novel, Going Down, to have something to read at her mother’s writing workshops. By the time the book came out, she was selling luxury apartments for the Corcoran Group. The one job she’d never had, Belle informed New York’s profile writer, was the occupation Going Down’s 19-year-old protagonist takes up to pay for college: call girl.
“I was so surprised at how interviewers always wanted to turn it into a nonfiction experience,” Belle says. “They would ask me these questions about prostitution, which I didn’t have any answers to. They seemed to have trouble thinking this is one girl’s experience. I’m just writing one character.”
That frustration may explain why—27 years, three novels (High Maintenance, Little Stalker, The Seven Year Bitch), and one picture book (Animal Stackers) later—Belle is quick to point out where the experiences of the sharp-tongued and hilariously exasperated 14-year-old heroine of her latest novel, Swanna in Love (Akashic, Jan. 2024), diverge from her own.
“What happened to me in real life is, I was at summer camp having the time of my life, and I got on the bus to come home, anticipating a wonderful reunion with my air-conditioned bedroom,” Belle recalls. “And I was pulled off the bus, and I was at the camp for hours and hours and hours. Then my mother showed up with her new boyfriend and took me and then my brother to an artist colony that didn’t allow kids.”
That is indeed what happens in the summer of 1982 to Swanna Swain. Her parents, like Belle’s, are recently separated. Her mother, like Belle’s, is a Guggenheim-winning poet. Her interests, like Belle’s, would run screaming from the snake-infested woods of Vermont, where her mom’s new boyfriend has a room at an artists’ retreat, and toward the landmarks of 1980s Manhattan: Canal Jeans, O’Neals’ Baloon, Woody Allen.
Then the novel, which Akashic describes as “a kind of inverse Lolita,” reaches its midway point, and Swanna does something Belle never did. “I never got into an older man’s car and went to his house for two days or three days while his wife was away in England,” she says. “It’s more of a composite of older men I dated, which was not unusual back in 1982 or ’3 or ’4 or ’5, or probably today. I mean, I don’t know anybody who didn’t make out with the bartender at their friend’s bar mitzvah or the limo driver at the prom.”
Is it wise for a novelist with a history of being confused for her characters to write about a teenage seductress? Maybe not. But Belle, who’s girded herself for her first interview in 12 years with bright red lipstick and a pair of miniature Barbie doll earrings, is the type of raconteur who can’t resist a good punchline, even when she knows it’ll get her in trouble. “Your editor thought you’d be a good match for a book about pedophilia?” she quips, two minutes into our conversation.
In a more reflective moment, Belle says that Swanna “never feels like a victim. I think she probably is a victim because she’s 14 and she’s having an affair with a 37-year-old married man. But she doesn’t feel that way for one minute. She thinks she’s in control and she really thinks she’s in love.”
Though the parallels to Lolita are clear, a different novel served as the inspiration for Swanna’s story: Charles Portis’s True Grit. Belle, who was given a copy by someone in her writing workshop—she runs four of them out of her apartment and has helped shepherd into print novels by Nicola Harrison and Marilyn Simon Rothstein—says it “looked like nothing I would be interested in whatsoever. It has a gun on the cover. But something about reading this book about a 14-year-old girl who sets out to avenge her father’s murder—and she’s unapologetic and she’s cool and she’s tough—something just went off in my head. That I could tell my story the way I wanted to tell it. But I had to make the book more than just being picked up and going to this artist colony that didn’t allow kids. So, I added stuff.”
Of course, it’s the stuff Belle added that may land her in hot water. Why take the risk? Partly, she says, because she’s “so unhappy with the state of publishing—the censorship going on all over the place.” Asked for an example, she points to a former member of her workshop, Jeanine Cummins, whose 2020 bestseller American Dirt met with fierce backlash from Latinx writers who accused Cummins and her publisher, Flatiron Books, of exploiting their stories.
“Basically, every single publishing house wanted this book,” Belle says. “And by the end of her journey, she was canceled. All the publishers should have stood up and said, ‘We wanted this book. We decide who gets to tell what story. Not one person on the internet.’ ”
Belle notes that when her agent, Sterling Lord Literistic’s Doug Stewart (who also reps Cummins), sent Swanna in Love “around to all the big people, they said, ‘Great writing. We love her. But we don’t have a vision for it.’ That was the word I got. I thought I’d be on Zooms with people, and they’d say, ‘Let’s make her older,’ or, ‘Let’s make him younger.’ But what I found were no Zooms, just this language about ‘vision.’ ”
Belle counts herself lucky to have landed at Akashic, which she’s admired “from the very beginning” (her friend Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up was the indie press’s first release, in 1997). And while the crusader in her is ready to defend the idea that “people have the right to write whatever they want,” the novelist in her is mainly just thrilled to have unlocked a story she’s been trying to tell for a long time.
Originally planned as a flashback in another novel, Swanna in Love came “pouring out” of Belle during Covid lockdowns, when she spent 14 weeks with her husband and two sons in their Hudson Valley country house. “I had never spent 14 days in that house,” she says. “And what I discovered is, I really don’t like it there. I just hated it so much. Something about connecting with that feeling of powerlessness, of having no control over your environment, like when you’re 14 or 15 or 16, brought this character out of me.”
“I have spent a decade helping other people get published,” Belle says at another point in the conversation. “And writing also, but not writing what I wanted to write. And then something changed. I got brave. Maybe I’ll change my mind. I’ve regretted everything I’ve ever done in my life, so it wouldn’t surprise me.”
