Can you discuss the inspiration behind Bunny Glenn’s character arc?
One of my inspirations for Mobility was Oil!, the novel by Upton Sinclair, which tracks the formation of a young man (nicknamed Bunny!) and his political awakening over time in the early 1900s. I started out with a girl who was a teenager during the time I was a teenager, and as I wrote, I ended up imagining how her personal politics might be formed in that completely different era.
How did you approach balancing the personal and political elements of your novel?
I started out trying to describe a person who had a very similar upbringing to mine, living in places outside of her home country with the foreign service. I was interested in the larger forces around her, to the point that during the writing process, they tried to take over and make the novel something completely different. To make sure they didn’t overtake the character’s story or make the book polemical, I often had to pull back and make sure to root any larger observations in the specificity of Bunny and her particular experiences.
Why did you choose 1998 as the starting point for this story?
For one, I was born in 1984, and it was important to me that Bunny’s teenage memories match my own. Crucially, 1998 looked to me like a decisive turning point where the Cold War was left behind, the former Soviet Union was well into its new era, and the United States was moving on to the war on terror.•
MOBILITY, By Lydia Kiesling
CROOKED MEDIA READS • AUGUST 2023 • 368 PAGES • $28 HARDCOVER
In this whirlwind bildungsroman, Lydia Kiesling introduces readers to foreign service brat Bunny Glenn. The narrative travels from Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1998, when Bunny is a teen and foreign companies are rushing in to seek oil, to Athens and to Houston, as she ends up climbing the oil-industry corporate ladder herself. Bunny’s many desires guide her life, and Kiesling’s critiques of late-stage capitalism strike a chord.
Elizabeth Casillas is an assistant editor at Alta Journal. A graduate of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, she has previously written for the Poly Post and Enspire Magazine.
