Let’s Have Some Fun

“It took a while for my brain to not just be a pile of worms,” Kathleen Boland tells me. She’s recalling how the writing and publication cycle of her madcap debut novel, Scavengers, coincided with her becoming a mother. It’s amusing to hear the author of such an absurd and intricately crafted book describe herself as the kind of disconcerting sight that one of her characters might have side-eyed on their odyssey through the American West. Her easy humor is a throughline in a novel that’s as entertaining as it is shrewd.

Scavengers follows Christy and Bea, an estranged mother-daughter pair brought together by a chaotic opportunity. When Bea loses her Wall Street job and moves in with her eccentric shoplifter mother in Salt Lake City, she learns that Christy has been obsessively following an online forum dedicated to finding $1 million in treasure buried somewhere in the West. Bea resentfully accompanies her on what turns out to be a dangerous and transformative escapade. Over Zoom, which she joined from Portland, Oregon, Boland and I discussed mother-daughter relationships, the thrill and untamable nature of the wild, humor as a Trojan horse, and whether we can ever truly recover from childhood wounds.

Kirkus Reviews writes, “Christy is a character, not a caretaker.” She’s one of the most memorable literary mothers I’ve read in a long time—a scheming, bisexual disaster who can’t get her and her Wall Street daughter’s love languages to align. Where did her character come from?
Christy came before Bea, and she kind of came fully formed. She’s an amalgamation of so many characteristics I wish I had. She’s brave and unapologetically unconventional, and she has an approach to life and money that I find impressive. I’ve met people like Christy who somehow always get by without filing taxes or having a real job, and they fascinate me because, dispositionally, that’s never been me. And in the same way, Bea showed up as her foil. I see them as two sides of the same coin, which I think is true of so many mother-daughter relationships.

Bea, I would say, is not me, but probably a lot closer to how I live my life. Before I got my MFA, I worked at a hedge fund on a trading desk. From when I was 16 years old up until a couple of years ago, I always had a salaried job and needed that stability.

The desert turns out to be surprisingly fertile ground for facing primal wounds—like a vexed mother-daughter relationship—head-on. How did you go about crafting the setting?
I spent a lot of time, especially in my 20s, in Southern Utah. I did a lot of solo backpacking and hiking down there, and it blew my mind how magical and weird and wild that part of the country still is. It was completely different from what I grew up with in New England and what I lived with in the mountains in Denver. I wanted to do it justice, because I hadn’t seen a lot of fiction that had to do with that part of the country. A lot of the book is derived from my journals that I kept during those solo backpacking and hiking trips in Canyon Country and Red Rock. I would camp out in the Park City library and the Salt Lake City library and go through their archives. I wanted to be sure I did justice to this place, because I am just a fan and a visitor and not a resident.

While Scavengers is a romp, it’s also a nuanced exploration of the ruinous consequences of treasure-hunting in the American West and what it means to plunder. How did you thread that needle?
In the Southwest, you hear all the time about people who go on hikes with half a bottle of water and expect it’s going to be fine. That combined with the legacy of manifest destiny, the legacy and history of the American West, and a lot of ideas going back to when I was working in commodities on the desk, like how we value land and natural resources. What prices it, who values it, and who gets to decide how valuable those things are? I’d been thinking about Bea and Christy as characters at the same time that I was wandering alone in the desert with my journals, and I was trying desperately to get these two obsessions together.

What really provided that link was when I first found out about the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt. Forrest Fenn buried about a million dollars, which ended up being in Wyoming, and I stumbled upon a forum dedicated to it that brought everything together for me. I felt like it gave this lightheartedness and momentum to all these big ideas and purpose to the characters I’d been playing with where, finally, I could talk about wilderness, I could talk about money, I could talk about the desperation of people who would go out and search in the wilderness for buried treasure.

I love when narrators drop surprising, authoritative one-liners such as “But like most nice people, he was weird” and “He sounded like a mattress squeaking, which wasn’t the worst sound, but after a while, it could be.” How did you find your narrative voice?
A lot of it was just trying to make myself laugh and keep myself writing. It took me eight years to write this book, and to confront the Google Doc over and over, I had to be like, Let’s have some fun.

Returning to Bea and Christy’s fraught mother-daughter relationship, do you think we can ever overcome the injuries of our childhood?
Something that really motivated me was the maturity that comes with realizing that your parents are fully formed people who had full lives before you were born. That was something I realized only with time and especially after becoming a mother myself. I don’t know if [these injuries] can ever be fully healed, but you can definitely forgive, or you can manage with the perspective that [your parents] are not just this typecast of Mom or Dad. They make mistakes just like you do.

What does success mean for you?
To keep making art that makes me laugh. Percival Everett came to Portland last week, and it really spoke to me when he said that if you get someone to laugh, you can disarm them, and then you can convince them. That’s a real thing that I also believe in as an artist.•