Profile: Becky Mandelbaum

Becky’s first collection of stories, Bad Kansas, won the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and was chosen as a 2018 Kansas Notable Book. She graduated from the UC Davis Creative Writing Master’s program in 2016.

Are there one or two books that were pivotal to you becoming an author? Do you remember your first encounter with them? What did they mean to you?

The three most influential books in my life have been, perhaps strangely, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, and Dear Life by Alice Munro. I read my first Sedaris in a high school English class. We were assigned his essay "Big Boy," which I still, to this day, misremember as "The Easter Poop." As a seventeen-year-old girl whose sense of humor was formed, in large part, by my two older brothers, I could hardly believe that, one, an essay existed about pooping at a party and that, two, it was considered of high enough literary merit to be read in a classroom. For the first time, I wondered if I, too, could write about the wonders of the human digestive system in such a way that others might enjoy reading it. Fast forward to my undergraduate career, when one my fiction teachers gifted me his battered copy of Portnoy's Complaint. I had the same Sedaris epiphany all over again (But it's so gross! It's all about his genitals!), an epiphany that allowed me to liberate my own irreverent voice from the iron cage in which I kept it.

The summer before moving to Davis to study with fiction juggernauts Pam Houston, Yiyun Li, and Lynn Freed, I picked up a copy of Alice Munro's Dear Life at the Tattered Cover in Denver. Only a few weeks before, I'd emailed Pam Houston to ask what I could do to prepare for my time at Davis. "Notice everything," she'd written back. "Pay attention." Reading Alice Munro, one realizes that her work is so powerful because she pays attention--to every twitch, desire, and cruelty perpetrated by her characters. At the root of this attention is a love so deep and pure that few other authors come close, save for maybe George Saunders and James Baldwin.

In their own way, each of these books guided me toward my own aesthetic. Without these writers, I'd still be writing--there are many other great books that have kicked me in different parts of the butt--but I wouldn't have felt that sense of admiration that I took, as a young writer, as permission to do whatever I pleased on the page, reader be damned.

You can find out more about Becky and her work here.