Nathan Jandl
When I sit down with Chloe Benjamin by a sunny window at Ground Zero Coffee on Willy Street, she stands out among the other patrons who are staring at their laptops. The young novelist is engaged in an old-fashioned pursuit — hand-writing thank you cards to people who hosted her on book tours. Benjamin has been on the road a lot since her latest book, The Immortalists, was released by Penguin Random House in January. The novel is getting rave reviews and debuted in the top 10 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list.
Benjamin is an accidental Midwesterner. “It was a really big surprise to me that I fell in love with the Midwest,” says Benjamin, who moved here in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts at UW-Madison. The San Francisco native attended college at Vassar in upstate New York, and, after graduation, her classmates began the great migration to Brooklyn — or California.
Now Benjamin lives on Willy Street with her husband and a cat. And unlike the restless characters that populate The Immortalists, Benjamin wants to stay put. “I’m always singing [Madison’s] praises to snobby coasties who don’t know how much great stuff there is in other parts of the country.”
Benjamin’s first two published novels explore mystical themes.
The Immortalists is driven by a fascinating question: How would you live if you knew when you were going to die? The rich saga starts in a Jewish tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where the Gold siblings — Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon — visit a fortune teller who delivers a prophecy telling each of them when they will die. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where he comes out and becomes a dancer in the era before there was a name for what was killing gay men. Klara pursues her dream of being a magician. Left back home to tend to the family, Daniel becomes a military physician, and the introverted Varya studies calorie restriction in a primate lab. It’s the kind of research-heavy writing that could stall a narrative, but The Immortalists is a page-turner, with vivid characters animated by juicy motivations.
“I think that theater really shaped my writing,” says Benjamin, who danced and acted as a teen and whose mom is a professional actor. “I think it helps my ear for dialogue and my rhythm and my blocking — thinking about when somebody is speaking, what are they doing with their hands as they cross the room? All those things got in the bloodstream. When I write scenes I want them to feel cinematic and alive and breathing.”
And though all the characters are “completely fictional,” says Benjamin, she does draw on facets of her life. Her father was raised Jewish and her mother, Presbyterian. Judaism and mysticism play heavily into the story, and all the characters wrestle with questions of faith.
Since the book was released, Benjamin has sold the movie rights and appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. She quit working at Domestic Abuse Intervention Services to pursue writing full time in 2016. Her debut novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (2014), was well reviewed, but The Immortalists is definitely her breakout.
“This is not my first book, but it’s my first book that has really gone somewhere,” says Benjamin. “I am much more aware of the incredible gift of having a readership, which means that I don’t have to worry about the next book selling to a publisher. But at the same time I have people with expectations — and I can’t recreate this book.”
She will teach a workshop at the UW-Madison Continuing Studies Write-by-the-Lake conference, June 11-15, where she hopes to share what she’s learned with other aspiring writers. “It’s gratifying to give back to the writing community and to make information available to people so they don’t feel publishing is an impenetrable fortress,” says Benjamin, who taught at Edgewood College and works as a freelance consultant for writers.
Writers need to read, says Benjamin. “It sounds kind of obvious, but you need a constant nourishing diet of reading. Other writers are my teachers.”
In addition to balancing her touring and writing, Benjamin says she is trying to cultivate “acceptance of quiet.”
“I tend to be someone who has a super over-anxious brain, so taking walks without having to listen to music, doing yoga, trying to do a little bit of meditation. Trying to let myself experience life and not have to be productive all the time, that’s a big challenge for me,” says Benjamin. And she also believes in consuming other kinds of art.
After she sold The Immortalists, she treated herself to two tickets to Hamilton.
Benjamin will be working as a volunteer bookseller at A Room of One’s Own from 12-2 p.m. on Independent Bookseller Day, April 28. That evening, she will read from The Immortalists at Mystery to Me at 7 p.m.
