Where did the idea for Saint Monkey come from? The Rumpus: Let’s start at the beginning. I recently called up my old mentor to talk about life and writing, and in the process I learned more about her than I’d ever known, from her love of Morocco to her surprising (and forgotten) pre-novelist career. In the intervening decade, she wrote Saint Monkey, which came out this spring from W. She was funny, smart, and helpful, and I learned more than I can remember from her. As a teacher, she always gave me well-considered critiques and pragmatic advice drawn from her own considerable experience. I had no idea that even as she circled ‘to be’ verbs in my poorly written first attempts at fiction (as Jacinda taught me, ‘is’ verbs are weak and if overused they rob sentences of their vitality) publishers were rejecting her first manuscript. Throughout, the language dazzles.Ī graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Townsend had just come to teach at the university where I studied when she finished her first novel. Above all, the book offers a new take on the American coming-of-age novel and on how teenage girls form friendships, interact, and ultimately grow up. The book challenges readers to examine their assumptions about the 1950s-from Jim Crow to sexism to rape-by telling a compelling story, sentence after dazzling sentence. The novel’s crosscut structure alternates between Audrey and Caroline: each girl tells her own story as their stories intertwine, diverge, and collide. Audrey finds solace in playing the piano, a vocation that takes her to New York City to pursue a career in music, while Caroline struggles to take care of her aging grandmother, struck and semi-forgotten in Mount Sterling. After a brutal murder shakes the town of Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Audrey Martin and Caroline “Pookie” Wallace, misfit childhood friends, start to drift apart along different life paths.
Jacinda Townsend’s debut novel Saint Monkey depicts race and small-town life at the midpoint of the twentieth century through the eyes of two friends who grow into very different women.
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