In Death Valley, Melissa Broder (Milk Fed; The Pisces) brilliantly dissects the intersections of grief, loss, and depression (heavy topics, all approached with an unexpected sense of humor) through her protagonist, an author ostensibly seeking inspiration for her next novel. The unnamed woman flees to a desert motel in hopes of finding not just a story, but an escape from her own life--only to learn that escape in the desert can prove more dangerous than she ever might have imagined.

Pulling into a Best Western well outside of Los Angeles, the woman reflects on the weight of the emptiness she carries around inside. In desperation, she reminds herself that her "doominess isn't baseless," but borne of a life in L.A. that feels unmanageable (as though that reminder might somehow make it feel more manageable). "There's something to be said for manufacturing a crisis (a crisis can be simpler than just living)," she reflects, though she has no need to manufacture crises when life has offered her plenty of them. Her father has been in and out of intensive-care units and on the brink of death for five months, following a tragic accident, alternating between prolonged bouts of unconsciousness and surprising revivals. Her husband has spent nine long years with a debilitating and seemingly undiagnosable illness that leaves him bedridden for months on end. It seems her whole life has been about taking on other people's feelings as hers to manage, as the eldest daughter of a depressed father and a mother unwilling to acknowledge--let alone speak about--emotions of any sort: "I came to escape a feeling--an attempt that's already going poorly, because unfortunately I've brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out to infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person's coma all about me."

The Best Western receptionist encourages the woman to order the blueberry muffin for breakfast (and definitely not the breakfast sandwich), and then to visit a local hiking trail. There, she finds huge cactuses--one so enormous she believes she can enter its cavity through a splice in its side, and so much larger-than-life that, once inside, she sees within it her father as a guitar-playing boy in his prime. She is entirely sober (refusing even cough syrup after struggling with addiction and recovery), and the image is clear enough to present as reality. "Does having visions inside a cactus count as a relapse?" she ponders to the sand and rocks. With the discovery of the revelatory cactus--which the staff of the Best Western insist cannot and does not exist--Death Valley slips out of reality and into something akin to a fever dream, with the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined (and what, perhaps, is a mirage) ever blurring along the way.

Self-described as a sober woman of many years, struggling with depression, the heroine is overly prone to "trying to solve a problem, the problem of me and my mood, rather than just experiencing it. But how do you just experience things?" This question, so pivotal to her desert flight to begin with, becomes moot when she takes a wrong turn on the trail, and finds herself thoroughly and completely lost in the wilderness: alone, unprepared, with limited water and just a bag of motel to-go breakfast for sustenance. Her only conversation partners are the rocks she's found and named (and granted personalities: The Egg, Grey, Door, etc.). And thus, her experience is reduced to just that: an experience, devoid of emotion, empty of the things that used to scare her. Instead of obsessing about "doom, mood, magic daughter, anticipatory grief, husband illness, bed-vortex, Montezuma Cypress, not good enough, the sky," she is--and must be--focused on survival: sips of water, shade in the daytime, warmth at nightfall, the limited battery in her phone, and continued lack of signal to call for help.

Within this desperate (if unanticipated) desire to simply survive, she finds a kind of presence she's not known before, one brought to life in Broder's elegant descriptions of the unexpectedly beautiful details of desert wilderness that appears barren from afar: "The crystallized beavertails. The rising sandstone wall and the steepening drop. Pistachio moss, chartreuse moss. Yellow flowers. Eroded ghost emoji log." (The latter representative of her enduring sense of humor, even in the darkest of moments.)

Ultimately, Death Valley is a story centered on survival: what it means to survive in a landscape not primed for human thriving, be it the literal desert or the more emotional world of anticipatory grief and loss, and what it means to survive a deep, unfathomable sense of loneliness while craving aloneness with a kind of wild desperation. In Broder's skilled hands, a story that could read as hopeless and desperate proves heartfelt and tender, moving seamlessly between the surreal and the all-too-real and back again. At times disorienting, at times familiar, and beautiful throughout, Death Valley is a smart, darkly comedic novel that reimagines the experience of grief in inspired and unexpected ways. --Kerry McHugh

(photo: Ryan Pfluger)

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces; the essay collection So Sad Today; and five poetry collections, including Superdoom and Last Sext. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine's "The Cut." A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Broder has published poems in Poetry, the Iowa Review, Guernica, and Fence, among others. She lives in Los Angeles. Her third novel, the darkly comic Death Valley, about a woman writer who goes to the desert to escape the tragic developments in her life, will be published by Scribner on October 24.

This book is, in a word, unique! (I loved it!) Where did this project originate for you?

In 2020, my father was in a car accident that put him in the ICU for six months before he died. He was on the East Coast, I was on the West, and no one was allowed in to see him for the first months because of Covid. I was powerless--and I needed to escape a feeling. But you can't escape a feeling because a feeling is inside you. Still, I tried, driving back and forth through the desert between my home in L.A. and my sister's in Las Vegas. I was driving through Baker, Calif., home of the world's largest thermometer, when the first two sentences of the novel came to me.

Does your work start with a kernel and evolve as you write? Or did you outline and plan this book in some way?

Always a kernel first: a magic cactus; a merman; two women in love--one zaftig, one eating-disordered--and a pile of frozen yogurt. Then comes an outline. But my outlines are like the ship of Theseus. Piece by piece, they change as I move through the draft. By the end, it's a different ship. And yet the same ship.

This book's outline changed when I did a "desert recon" trip midway through the first draft. I took a little hike in a touristy area of Death Valley where nobody gets lost. Well, I got lost. My phone had no service. I had no water. Only Coke Zero like a fool. I was crying. "How long have I been out here?" Half an hour. I panicked after half an hour of being lost. And in my panic, I scraped myself up getting back.

But once I made it back, I was very pleased despite my injuries. Now I knew what had to happen. My protagonist was going to get lost in the desert. And she would get lost for longer than half an hour.

Can you talk a bit about the parallels you see between grief and wilderness survival? That connection feels very present in the novel in imaginative and unexpected ways.

Grief is so physical. It's shockingly physical. The heaviness, the ache, the exhaustion. As I write this, it's the two-year anniversary of my dad's passing, and the aftermath of a friend's death by suicide, and I'm wrecked. And I want to not be wrecked. I'm frightened by the wreckedness. But wanting to not be wrecked, or judging ourselves for being wrecked, doesn't make us less wrecked. Similarly, wanting to not be lost in the desert doesn't make us any less lost. Grief is a force. Nature is a force. In both cases--grief and desert lostness--we keep walking. But we can't see, and we're scared, and we wonder: Will this ever end? Will I be okay? Will I survive this?

The main character here is fleeing: her life, her dying father, her ailing husband, her grief and her depression. But in the process of fleeing, she also seems to be seeking something. Do you see fleeing from and seeking something to be related to one another? Two sides of the same coin?

In my experience, fleeing and seeking can be two sides of the same coin, because seeking is often a form of escape: seeking to be other than we are; seeking for reality to be different than it is; seeking refuge. Also, both actions always lead me back to a fundamental, if annoying truth, which is that acceptance is the only answer.

She is also deeply alone, and yet very linked to others, both in person (the hotel reception staff people) and electronically (her sister, mother, father, ICU nurses). What might you say about that tension between solitude and interconnectedness, especially as it relates to depression and sadness?

It can be challenging when a person has depression and anxiety--or is in a state of grief, which resembles many of the symptoms of depression and anxiety--to be with people. There's the fear of judgment, the heightened nervous sensitivity, the constant checking of one's mood against one's performance. But at the same time, depression feeds on isolation, and genuine human connection is healing. So, the question is: What do we do when we need people but are kind of scared to be with people? I'm still figuring this one out.

Did the pandemic in any way shape the role of technological communication in this novel?

Absolutely. The first two months my father was in the ICU, when we weren't allowed in, my sister and I FaceTimed with him every single day. Sometimes he was unconscious, and the nurse put the phone on his pillow, and we just talked to him. Sometimes he was fully lucid and cracking dry jokes. The day before he died, I was there with him, and I made sure to FaceTime in my sister. He really felt like she was in the room, too. When I was leaving, he said, "Melissa, take your sister with you."

I loved the ways that the visions she sees in the cactus are directly connected to old family photographs, and the stories told about them across the years. How do you see photographic moments shaping memory and recollection, in this novel and/or in your own experience?

I'm not a very visual person. My melatonin-dreams are the most imagistic I get. In fact, I often create word banks of nouns--lists and lists of juicy nouns scattered all over my house--and weave them into my texts when I'm editing. With this book, I took a lot of gorgeous nouns from vintage copies of Desert magazine that I bought on eBay, just to make sure the text was steeped in that specificity of imagery. So, I don't personally use photographs when I write. But I grounded a lot of the fantastical elements of the novel in photographs, Reddit posts, and images that the protagonist had seen, because I felt it was important to "earn" the fantastical, archetypal elements of the book. This comes from having a poetry background, I think, in which a teacher once said to me, "You have to teach the reader how to live in the world of the poem and then you can do whatever you want." It's like Chekhov's gun but in reverse. Chekhov's cactus.

While I've not spent time in the desert myself, the concept of a mirage is closely linked in desert stories. Do you consider Death Valley to be a "mirage novel," to make up a new genre of sorts?

I think the line between reality and mirage is so blurry to begin with, which is why I'm always confused by the term "unreliable narrator." Like, aren't we all unreliable narrators? People often ask me if the merman in my novel The Pisces was "real" and I don't know how to respond, other than to say, "He's real to the protagonist." But I do like the term "mirage novel!" Now I'm thinking of a number of mirage novels, which, although not set in the desert, weave the subjectivity of the human psyche into physical wilderness: The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas. Down Below by Leonora Carrington. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain... now that's a mirage novel! --Kerry McHugh