Photo by David Enloe
Chloe Benjamin next to her novel 'Under Story.'
Chloe Benjamin arrived in Madison from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., at age 21 to earn a master of fine arts degree from the UW, intending to stay for only two years. But she wound up living here for the next 15 — writing The Anatomy of Dreams, a 2014 psychological thriller set in the capital city that didn’t generate much buzz, and 2018’s The Immortalists, a bestseller about four siblings from New York City who as children visited a psychic who revealed to each of them the day they would die.
Now comes the epic Under Story, a literary-leaning blur of science fiction and fantasy that revolves around a couple straddling two universes. It bursts with big themes: love and loss, family and parenthood, science and nature, and risking everything for a second chance. It also geeks out on physics and fungi.
Madison-area references abound. An apple orchard at the root of main character Laurel Salter’s childhood was inspired by Door Creek Orchard in Cottage Grove, where Benjamin picked apples for 10 years. State Street, Tenney Park and Lake Monona also make appearances. And in Under Story’s alternate reality, Culver’s is a vegetarian restaurant.
“I wrote all of this book in Madison, and some of it during COVID,” says Benjamin, who relocated with her husband, Nathan Jandl, in June 2025 from Madison to the San Francisco Bay Area, adding that the first draft took five years to finish. “Madison is a wonderful place to be a writer. It’s a creative and complex place that draws all kinds of people, and I found a wonderful community there.”
Benjamin will return on Sept. 9 for a Wisconsin Book Festival event at Madison Central Library, where she’ll be in conversation with novelist Christina Clancy.
In 2020, Benjamin learned about ANITA, short for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna experiment, at isolated McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The study involved tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. Initially, Benjamin explains, the study’s results were speculatively linked to the idea of a two-sided, symmetric universe.
“A universe that has two parts — one that moves forward in time and one that moves backward — was soon disproven as the explanation for the ANITA results,” she says. “But I was really inspired. I took that and ran with it.”
In Under Story, Laurel is a biologist on a break, working as a dishwasher at McMurdo. When a surreal light known as the Arc persistently appears across the ice, it attracts a group of physicists that includes Laurel’s ex-husband, Eli. Burdened by memories of the couple’s tragic past, Laurel is convinced the Arc offers both of them a massive do-over. To reveal much more of the plot, though, would require several spoiler alerts.
As part of her research, Benjamin shadowed scientists working in caves, attended a “women’s mushroom conference,” and interviewed physicists and clockmakers. The pandemic and other restrictions, however, prohibited her from visiting Antarctica. For those scenes, among the book’s most memorable, Benjamin relied on Brian Bezalel, a former McMurdo steward who replied to “tons of questions,” she says, with about 30 single-spaced pages of answers.
Complicating the research and writing process was Benjamin’s struggle with migraines, which began when she was a teenager. She credits much of her recovery to a virtual care program designed to treat chronic pain using neuroscience, pain psychology, and mind-body techniques.
“This book took more out of me than I’ve ever experienced with a novel,” Benjamin says. “I can’t imagine writing another book that didn’t feel ambitious in some way, because that’s what I’m excited about writing. But I think that there can never be another Under Story.”
