A Book and a Person I Love

"Starting from Here," by Paula Saunders - is OUT NOW. (Bonus Post)

Aug 28, 2025

Writing to you all today with the very happy news that my wife Paula Saunders’ new novel, Starting from Here, is out now. She’ll be reading and signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz next week, on Thursday, Sept. 4.

Starting from Here by Paula Saunders — This beautiful cover was designed by Kelly Winton.

I love this book so much and wanted to share some thoughts about it with you.

Many of you will, I hope, have read Paula’s first novel, The Distance Home.

This new novel picks up where that one left off, sort of, and follows the young protagonist of that book, Rene, as she goes out into the world to, theoretically, make a life for herself in the arts – in classical ballet, specifically.

This quest is complicated, to say the least, by Rene’s working-class South Dakota origins.

It's a beautiful, heart-rending ride that spoke to me as powerfully as anything I’ve ever read about that particular American dilemma wherein one’s freedom and sense of daring and aspiration – one’s love for the world, really – is colored and affected by material conditions.

I’m sure many of us here in Story Club have felt it; the way in which money and the pressing need for it can work against the engagement and joy and time needed to be an artist, and the way the culture sometimes seems to shrug, as if to say, “Well, art, yes, it’s great – but do we really need it?”

Well, Rene does need it – some of the most thrilling writing in the book describes the particular beauties of being lost in an artistic task – and so she, at a mere fifteen years old, leaves Rapid City and heads to Phoenix in search of world-class instruction.

But because of her family’s limited financial circumstances, she has to board with the parents of a fellow dancer; and this is the beginning of an epic journey across 1970s America, as Rene tries to find a place for herself, in dance, but also as a person.

Part of the power of the book, for me, is watching Rene (in Phoenix, and then in Denver, and finally in New York City) gradually come to realize that her more-affluent classmates have an advantage over her, right from the start: the advantage of affluence and the ease it brings.

Here’s a description of Rene, newly arrived in Phoenix, taking stock of her fellow dancers.

“The girls were stick-thin and sculpted, with sharp angles, honed edges unmistakable outlines. They were like line drawings – slight, single arcs of hip bones, cheekbones, ribs. And Rene understood that she was too soft and diffuse, her slender body too loose, her perimeter too amorphous and undefined. If she was ever going to join them – or even make them see that she was standing there – the first thing she needed to do was close the gap, starting with her own flesh…she was going to have to make herself indistinguishable from them, like a paper doll in a chain.”

Rene starts restricting her eating, and she’s living in a tiny room with the family of another dancer, a family that is far from welcoming…

So, it’s tough, and she’s a good kid, and a fighter, and doesn’t quite yet understand what she’s up against, and our hearts go out to her.

And when that happens – when my heart goes out to a character – I know I’m in the hands of a master.

To whom, in this case, I happen to be married.

Photography by the legendary Jill Krementz, at Bill Buford’s apartment - the first or second year of The New Yorker Festival.

In Rene, I see an archetypal example of a type of person I certainly was when young: someone who is slowly becoming aware that they are from a particular place, a place which, in addition to blessings, has also conferred limitations; someone being squeezed by his or her culture, even as that culture encourages her to ignore the squeezing and just, you know, buck up.

It’s a deeply engaging portrait and filled me with sympathy for Rene, but also (and this is the secret key to Paula as a writer and a person) with a sense of sympathy for all of us and even a little healthy outrage toward those systems that insist, in the name of competition, on crushing and demeaning us. It made me realize something new about our country, about the stresses people are under and, particularly why beauty finds it so hard to thrive here.

Paula writes largely from life and reading the novel reminded me of the effect that meeting her and hearing her tell me the story of her life had on me, all those years ago.

We met for the first time at the Syracuse MFA Program’s beginning-of-the year orientation (which took place about now in the year, i.e., late August).

Here was someone who had lived a bigger life than I had, in a wider range of milieus, and had already begun (in a way I hadn’t yet) to think about and theorize and contextualize her experiences – to consider what her experiences might tell her about the culture’s bigger, more systemic, tendencies. She’d been dancing in New York, returned home to South Dakota, and became the first, maybe only, person ever to have been accepted to Syracuse twice - she deferred the first time, thinking the offer was good for a few years, but no - and then the panel read new work from her and accepted her again.

Lucky for me (and for the Program).

She was one of the most articulate and interesting people I’d ever met and I remember being so taken with her intellectual hunger and, especially, with how honest she was – fearless, really. I thought, “Ah, so this is what intellectual engagement, turned toward one’s life experience, looks like.”

And I thought: This is a person I need to know more about and stay close to: knowing her will benefit me in a thousand ways and help me grow and get me to live my biggest life.

And I did all those things, and I was right.

So, in addition to falling head-over-heels in love with her all those years ago (we got engaged in three weeks, still a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record) I found, in Paula, an artistic role model; someone whose opinion (of me, the world, my work) still matters more to me than anyone else’s, period.

Just married, 1987, Rapid City, South Dakota.

I was especially moved, back then, and changed, by her ideas about what it meant (and cost) to be a woman in America.

Starting from Here is set in the early 1970s, and a particularly thrilling aspect of the book is the way it takes concepts like “feminism” and “Me Too” and “class anxiety” and all of that and embodies them – makes them feel real, three-dimensional, and visceral.

It’s one thing to be “against,” let’s say, sexism. But to be really against it, we need to understand it as it occurs in the wild, so to speak. How was it (how is it) enacted, in reality? What does it feel and sound like? How does it proceed? Above all: what does it do to the person on the other side of that oppression, who is, yes, its “victim,” but is also a non-victim, a full person, with love in her heart and a desire to live a good life, a desire that the oppressive forces are suddenly starting to mess with? How might she resist? Where does she find the courage to do so? Are there people along the way who might be willing to help her?

So, the questions asked in Starting from Here are particular to Rene but also general to all of us. What do help and compassion and courage and resilience and heartbreak look like, on their feet, in real time?

Author photo by Stewart Shining, who is not only a legend in the fashion industry, but was also Paula’s next-door neighbor in Rapid City.

Paula studied with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger at Syracuse and, just after we were married, was granted a Schweitzer Fellowship to study with Toni Morrison (she was one of three writers chosen by Morrison for that honor). Early on, Robert Stone discovered her work and asked her to do a reading, introduced by him, for PEN.

I invoke these mentors to give you some idea of the lineage out of which Paula’s style comes: efficient, realistic, carefully and passionately revised, with bursts of beautiful, earned lyricism.

She gets a lot of world into her sentences. Here, for example, is a description of the inside of a high-end New York City dance company studio:

“Studio B had sky-blue walls with inset gold-leaf cameos of garlanded cherub, mahogany cross-beams on the ceiling – inlaid with so much red, gold, and royal blue they seemed to have come straight from the Vatican – and a fireplace on the back wall with an ornately carved stone mantel of such great breadth and height that four or five dancers could have stood inside without touching an edge.”

Paula learned a particular mindset about revision, from Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger (and with the spirit of Raymond Carver, who was still in Syracuse at the time Paula arrived here), that results, in her work, in two qualities I very much admire: 1) an extraordinary polish in the sentences which, though ostensibly realistic, are highly poetic, in their efficiency and compression and 2) as mentioned, a state of almost unbearable mercy that develops, over many drafts, toward her characters.

Well, it’s good luck, in this life, to find an artistic role model who changes forever the way we understand art, who make us take it more seriously. Also good luck if we find a best friend – someone who sees you just as you are and (still) accepts you. Also, pretty nice if we happen to find a soulmate.

But the best luck of all is when these turn out to be all the same person.

I’ve tried to keep this all very professional/analytical but let me close by saying: I’m wild about this book and as wild about this person I’ve been married to for 38 years as I was long ago at that MFA orientation event at Syracuse, when we met and I felt, correctly, that I’d never met anyone like her.

Congratulations on Starting From Here, dear Paula – so grateful that you and your powerful work are in this world.

I’m so thrilled that this book is out in the world. I hope you’ll all find it and that it will find you, as it did me.

“The sharp physicality of Paula Saunders’ writing hooked me; it was utterly engrossing to feel chills, hunger, and lust through the body of this young dancer — and as a mother it was bracing to remember that getting lost is how we find ourselves.”

Miranda July

“….a stirring, stunning novel about the desire for a certain kind of life and the quest to find it. Saunders has written an ode to independence, transformation, and coming of age that is also an evocative time capsule brimming with memory and feeling. What a wonderful book this is.”

Meg Wolitzer

“I read Saunders’ page-turning second novel in one intoxicating gulp. The story demands it. It’s a mother-daughter wrangle and our Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.”

Story Club with George Saunders

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