Texas Book Festival 2017: Connecting … Connecting …

Novelists Lindsay Hunter and Alissa Nutting preside over a small underground room in the Capitol building. Joking in glee that the setting is really doing something for her Law & Order fantasies, Nutting says hello and sets the tone for the panel “Connecting… Connecting….”

Alissa Nutting (l) and Lindsay Hunter (Photo by Jana Birchum)

Writer Maris Finn accompanies them to moderate the panel, which officially begins with Nutting and Hunter reading from their novels Made for Love and Eat Only When You're Hungry, respectively, to interjecting audience laughter.

Both excerpts show their characters navigating unfamiliar relationship scenarios, finding the obligations and expectations of the parent/child relationship unexpectedly ruptured. They encounter the surprise of suddenly seeing your family, the people you feel you should know best, as individuals you may not know at all, with sex lives, regrets, and vices.

(l-r) Maris Finn, Alissa Nutting, and Lindsay Hunter (Photo by Jana Birchum)

After reading, Nutting speaks on this, saying that a lot of getting through a novel – and life – is trying to sort out what is true and what is untrue, often encountering things before we’re really ready to process them. “We see and understand things often a long time before we’re ready to see and understand them,” she says.

Responding to an audience question about whether there are any topics that she wants to write about but has trouble facing down, Hunter reveals that one such topic is central to her latest project. Having family who has dealt with all sides of addiction made the task of writing about it seem tricky and untouchable, Hunter says, even as she knew she had something to say about it. “Just write the thing,” she ultimately advises.

(l-r) Maris Finn, Alissa Nutting, and Lindsay Hunter (Photo by Jana Birchum)

Both authors’ works are set in Florida, and they agree that their experiences growing up in the wacky tropical state have shaped them and their work. “My blood is made of tiny palm trees – I can’t get away from it!” Hunter jokes. She talks about the state’s abundance of both beauty and horror, side by side, and the way that can cultivate a humorous treatment of sad subject matter. Nutting, whose characters find themselves in hilariously improbable situations (like, say, an arm lodged in the back of the throat of an elderly father’s sex doll), says that humor is necessary. It creates a venue to talk about and deal with pain. “We don’t live in a society that is very comfortable with pain,” Nutting says. “Humor, to me, has always been a really desperate act,” she concludes.