Go Forth (Vol. 39)

An interview with Val Brelinski

Val Brelinski is a woman unstuck in time. Raised in the rural town of Nampa, Idaho, she grew up unaccustomed to the innovations and upheavals happening in the more thoroughly gridded parts of the country in the 1970s. Add to that her Evangelical upbringing, which forbade things like bowling and dancing. Now she lives in the Bay Area, more aptly referred to as “The Future.” She’s written a novel about her past, which is itself couched in the idea of memory and time. I met with her in the backyard of her grown son who, because Brelinski looks so young, is often mistaken for her partner. He himself has just run away from home in Northern California and started a new life for himself in the rocky west, mere hours away from—you guessed it—Nampa, Idaho.

“Jory was quite sure she had forgotten that incident completely,” the narrator in Brelinski’s new novel, The Girl Who Slept with God, tells us as her main character recounts a painful childhood memory. Her narrator spends the novel slipping in and out of memories, in and out of childish innocence, in and out of Brelinski’s actual life. It’s a nautilus. It’s quite a ride.

The largely autobiographical novel charts several months in the life of the Quanbecks, an Evangelical family in rural Idaho composed of a scientist and devout man of God, his depressed and quietly intricate wife, and their three adolescent daughters. Frances is the youngest, Jory, the protagonist, is the middle child, and Grace is the zealot who comes home from a mission trip pregnant, allegedly with the child of an angel. This is where Brelinski’s novel begins.

Throughout this compassionate and deeply honest book, the reader glimpses bits and pieces of Brelinski embedded in the prose—her memories, her fascinations, her playfulness, her abiding tenderness. What you can see of her in the novel is exactly what you can see of her in real life: a person who can look around and recognize the value in experience, even the painful ones, even the ones it takes a long time to understand. That, and her unruly head of sandy blonde curls, shared by Jory.

I met with Brelinski in her son’s backyard. I drank water, she drank a Diet Cherry 7 Up, and at one point she momentarily left the interview to let her son’s whining dog out of the kitchen. We talked about religion, mercy, Freudian notions of adolescent independence, and the deceptive convenience of revelations. We started with what we weren’t talking about, and ended with the future.

— Hannah Withers

I. “This seemed like the ultimate betrayal.”

VAL BRELINSKI:...