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Cecilia Rabess's debut novel, Everything's Fine (Simon & Schuster, June 6, 2023), explores the unlikely and complicated love between a liberal Black woman and her conservative white male colleague in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Rabess has worked as a data scientist at Google and a financial associate at Goldman Sachs, and her nonfiction has appeared in various publications, among them McSweeneys, FiveThirtyEight, Fast Company and FlowingData. She lives in San Francisco.
What would you say Everything's Fine is about?
In a sentence, it is about two very different young people who fall passionately, reluctantly, complicatedly in love.
When the two of them meet, there is an immediate and obvious tension, which is what powers the story: this idea of two people who are attracted to one another trying to navigate the tightrope of their differences, but the stakes for Jess are clearly much higher than for Josh--what's "politics" to him is deeply personal to her. That is the central tension of the novel.
Beyond that, Everything's Fine is a coming-of-age story about a young Black woman whose relationship with her blackness is constantly being tested--by her own insecurities and by the man that she loves. It's also a bit of a workplace novel, about the compromises required, personally and professionally, to survive in cutthroat corporate environments. And it's also an examination of race and politics and identity and the insidious nature of white supremacy.
The novel reveals itself slowly, I don't think it truly tells you what it's about until the very last word. It also intentionally asks more questions than it answers. I wanted the book to accommodate different readers' different perspectives, biases, hopes, fears, frustrations, etc., and so in that sense it intentionally reads like a Rorschach test--which complicates the experience of reading the book, certainly, but I hope makes it a much more interesting and rewarding experience, too.
You've worked as a data scientist and at Goldman Sachs (where your character Jess also works). How does your own experience show up in Jess's story?
In ways that will probably feel familiar to other Black women who have spent a lot of time in predominantly white spaces: the feeling of being overlooked and underestimated, or like you have to work twice as hard for half as much, or like you don't really ever get the benefit of the doubt, like you're invisible but also somehow super-conspicuous. All of these feelings show up at various points in the novel and were informed by my own experiences. Otherwise, even though I do share a few key biographical details with Jess, our stories are pretty different.
The novel takes place in the years leading up to the 2016 election. When did you start writing? And did the ever-shifting context of American politics in that time period change what you'd envisioned as you wrote?
I started writing in 2018... a lot has happened since then. As you note, the cultural landscape is ever-shifting, the zeitgeist changes so quickly, the discourse is incredibly dynamic. So just to remember where we were in 2018: it was two years post-election, but I think we were still processing. People were trying to make sense of everything that had happened. On the left, in particular, I think a lot of people felt like they knew who we were as a nation, and then suddenly felt like they didn't. People were trying to understand. This rhetoric of "reaching across the aisle" took hold, which was frustrating because it seemed to minimize the very real threats people were feeling to their safety and security as Americans, but at the same time it was trying to get at the root of something. People were looking for answers. I certainly was. And out of that reckoning, this book was born.
I didn't actually set out to write a political novel per se. To be honest, when I started writing all I had in mind was a love story. I've always loved a good love story, but even the best ones can often exist in binary: bubblegum rom-com on the one hand or war-torn lovers and somebody dies at the end. I really wanted to write something in between, something that felt real and nuanced and contemporary. Something that celebrated as much as it subverted time-honored romance tropes. But I wasn't completely sure what that would look like. I didn't really have a plot or characters or a setting. Then I read an article in New York magazine called "Donald Trump Is Destroying My Marriage" that kind of blew my mind. I just could not imagine in our polarized society how these opposite-side-of-the-aisle pairings existed, much less were thriving (spoiler alert: they weren't). So trying to imagine what such a relationship could look like was my way into the story. It allowed me to tackle some of the questions about race and class and politics that were haunting me, but also, I hope, to write a smart, funny love story.
Initially, I was simply trying to work out how these two people could work. How they might find their way to one another, what their dynamic would look like, what particular conditions would need to exist for their story to make sense. When I started writing I conceived of the story as a will they/won't they. But as the cultural landscape shifted, as we became more polarized, as the threats to our democracy loomed larger and larger, it ultimately became a should they/shouldn't they.
That shift from will they/won't they to should they/shouldn't they feels monumental. Even after I finished the book, I still wasn't sure if I was rooting for them to end up together or apart at the end, and which version would constitute a "happy ending" to their unlikely romance. Or if I even wanted them to get a happy ending!
Everything's Fine is a love story and it's funny (I hope!), but it's not quite a romantic comedy. It's a novel about first love and figuring out who you are and who you want to be and who you have the right to be... but it's not quite a coming-of-age story. And it's about first jobs and financial precarity and money, but it's not fully a workplace novel, either. It's none of these things, because really it's all of these things. --Kerry McHugh