An Interview with Gracie Bialecki
By Ethan Widlansky, Pomona '22
After graduating from Pomona, Bialecki lived in Brooklyn and worked at a fellow Pomona alum’s start-up for five years. During this time, she was also writing Purple Gold and acting as the assistant to a celebrated bookseller, Michael Seidenberg. Michael ran his bookstore, Brazenhead Books, out of his Upper East Side apartment, and it was a perfectly New York gathering place for writers, bibliophiles, and artists of all sorts. In January 2018, Bialecki quit her job and moved to Paris, where she has lived since. It was there that she finished Purple Gold, launched her literary consulting business, and embarked on many other writing projects.
Unfolding across the freeways of LA, Purple Gold--Bialecki's latest novel and the object of our discussion--follows a dreamy stoner, Alana, who falls for a weed dealer named CJ Smith. As their relationship unfolds, Alana spends more time cruising with CJ than she does at college, and soon she's caught up in his smoke-filled world. Purple Gold is about losing yourself: thinking you’re going somewhere, only to realize the car is breaking down and you’re stuck in a place you never could have imagined.
Before we start talking about Purple Gold, I’m interested in your running career; I run for Pomona Pitzer cross-country and track. Do you involve running in your writing process?
I love running before I write; it calms you down. I'm a morning runner now. I ran at Pomona and so we’d obviously had. I started just in track and then got into cross-country too and now, I ran a marathon two years ago, but I’m pretty chill now. I rock it with the Casio stopwatch, like no Garmin, no smartwatch. My first draft of Purple Gold was actually four different perspectives. Alana was one of the characters, there were three other characters, and one of them was a runner and the book went through her senior year. She finished school through graduation. CJ left the narrative when he went to jail and then there was this whole other thing... and then I reread the draft and 70 percent of it was Alana chapters.
You were clearly more interested in Alana?
Yeah, I was like: "This is clearly a story about her—I don’t know why I’m trying to make it a story about all of these other things."
Did your scrapped characters make any cameo appearances in the final draft?
No. Her friends Lillian and Sienna are still in it, but all the things about running were cut. I would still like running to find its way into my writing—I’ve written some short stories.
You mentioned that Purple Gold was somewhat autobiographical. There’s a lot, I hardly need to remind you, going on in this text. What, if any, emotional processing purpose did your writing serve?
Maybe I misphrased it—inspiration came from personal experience, but I wouldn’t say that it’s heavily autobiographical. It’s a work of fiction. I took a lot of elements that were close to me and also came from other people and other ideas, and then I wove them all together. For me, it’s a lot easier to make a work of fiction than it is to make the events of your life fit into a narrative arc. The idea of two different worlds being so close to each other—the world of Mission College and the world outside of L.A., also the idea that you can inhabit a space but do you really belong there. At the end of the book, that’s what Alana’s thinking about. She went so many places with CJ so she feels like she’s part of that world (CJ’s), but was she anything more than an observer? Was she a participant? I think the book helped me process those questions, but I don’t think at the end I was like, "Here’s the answer, I figured it out!" I was just like, "I thought about that for a while, uh..."
Absolutely! It feels a lot like, especially on some runs, spectatorship. Like we’re there for eight months out of the year and then we leave and our experiences "in" L.A. have no real purchase on our lives. It feels like a simulation. And I feel like the virus has only made that feeling more pronounced.
We used to run the bike trail that goes toward Upland—like how many kids at Pomona have just never been on that trail before? Or have never even seen Upland? I love, too, that Pomona is on the county line and you can just cross into San Bernardino. And then you just go back to campus and leave and forget. There’s so little interaction—there can be so little interaction with your surroundings.
What prompted you to choose CJ as Alana’s guide to the outside world? What was the motivation behind his character?
He had just been a character from earlier. I had mentioned that I started writing a version of this story as a senior and that just kind of came to me naturally—it was an interesting story and one that was close to me. Have you heard of the book Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis?
No, I haven’t.
Rules of Attraction takes place on a college campus and I was like, "Okay I can just write a book like Rules of Attraction. Just about some kids at college— nothing crazy." But at the same time, it felt like it would all just be melodrama. Only taking place in that microcosm. SoCJ was also a way of expanding outside of that world.
Feeling like there were real consequences as opposed to…
Oh you’re gonna get a B—I don’t know. And also I love the idea of Los Angeles as a character.
Like a Dickensian deal?
There’s also so much—the weed culture—there’s so much texture to the way the city looks and feels. There’s so much atmosphere. You’re able to get those L.A. moments.
You can taste it. The weed being so prominent definitely gave an extra sensory dimension to the novel. As you might imagine, cross-country runners don’t smoke a whole lot of weed. I can certainly imagine it being a big part of L.A. culture, I just have to look for it next time I get back, whenever that might be. The whole time I was pretty mystified by CJ. On one hand he was the most interesting character, but I also feel like I never learned anything about him. I feel like you’re putting the reader in the place of Alana, you get so close in proximity to this enigmatic figure and yet you never really get close.
You wanna know what the deal is.
Yeah! It felt like metafiction—a fictional character in a fictional novel. Was that intentional?
I do have a backstory. I wrote it like that because there are certain people that you meet and that you know and your perception when you first meet them is like so; it’s almost like they’re a cardboard cutout. You’re like, “This is a glamorous figure.” And as you learn more about their lives, it feels weird or more like wrong to actually discover that they have a messed up family and all of these other things and you have all of these quotidian problems. I think there was a part of Alana that didn’t want to know or was afraid to ask because that might ruin the illusion, but also she didn’t feel like she had the right to know.
Because she was a spectator and not a player?
Yeah. And she was really taking what she was given at that point. In my mind, and I don’t know how much of this became clear in the final draft, but in my mind he was an R&B artist and had been part of a group that had ultimately broken up in hostility. It hadn’t been an amicable business breakup and then they had taken the rights to his music, so he lost money and then because of that… I think he probably had always been dealing weed. He’s just like the kind of person who has been doing it for so long. But he had to go back to that because he was in a difficult financial position because of the breakup of the band. It was also kind of about if you’re coming from a precarious financial position to begin with and you make it as an artist and you suddenly have money, that can quickly go away again. And you’re not in a position where you can bounce back from that. CJ was kind of screwed by that and society, but also Alana was also not the kind of character to say, “Okay, we’re gonna sit down and talk about it, tell me everything.” He was so caught up in it, not talking to her about it and kind of dealing with it but not dealing with it.
What’s your feeling around memory? There was this kind of nostalgic component towards the end of the novel when he was looking back. The reason I ask is because one of my friends, sobering up now but he still deals a lot, had memory problems for a solid two years and never slept because of weed. His case is very physiological, but I wonder if weed and memory were things you were thinking about and tensioned in the book?
Memory is so subjective. What Alana is getting at at the end is: “I need to go home and tell someone what happened because I’m the only one who knows what happened.” But what really, actually happened? You need another witness to verify it. It’s unclear if she’s going to see CJ again or what the trajectory of their relationship will be. None of her friends even met him. Memory is so unreliable, and if you’re only going on that it’s almost like none of it happened.
Did that have something to do with your choice to use the second-person narrative? That was what struck me at first because I don’t think I’ve read anything with the second person. It felt almost accusatory.
To me it was adding a layer of recounting and memory between the actual events and the remembering of them. If you just say, “I walk down the street to go to the store" that’s very much something happening. But the “you” was as if Alana were telling the story to herself. You walk down the street--
It’s like a self-affirmation? Convincing herself, “This happened to me.”
Exactly. And actually at the time I had the first draft with the four different characters, it was in third person so it switched around. Then when I cut everyone else out, there was a draft where it was still third person and all Alana’s perspective. But it was kind of stiff, because third person is a bit distanced, you know, it’s not even a close third. I thought, "Well, why is this?” I had been journaling a lot and writing in second person just to myself. I have no idea why; I just got in the habit of doing it. So when I decided to rewrite it, I made a decision at a certain point to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and did that in the second person. I finally knew CJ’s character a lot better and developed the plot arc, so I knew exactly what I was writing toward and had an ending so that Alana didn’t finish the rest of her college career. I was able to rewrite it and let it flow.
You mentioned in your written responses Professor Lethem. What role did he play in all of this? I guess this is more “Pomona student interviews former Pomona student!”, but how did your experience at Pomona play into writing this novel?
I wrote a draft of this-—it was 40 pages and none of the plot, I think the characters were similar. None of the plot in that story made its way into Purple Gold. But in the workshop environment that year, a lot of people were taking it seriously and working on novels. It was very much “this is a thing that people do,” it felt a little bit realer than a thing like, it’s just another class where by the end of the semester I read some books and wrote a paper. At some point I decided, “I’m gonna stop waiting around and write a novel and I already have 40 pages, so I probably just need to write another 100 and I’ll be fine."
I forget when I told Jonathan that I was working on it. He was super nice about it! He read one early version and now I’m appalled that I let him read it. I was like, “Wow, I totally wasted your time. I hope you didn’t spend a long time reading it,” but he was nice about it and gave me some helpful feedback. He was also really positive which at that point was great to hear because I was like, “I have no idea what I’m doing,” and he would say, “You’re doing a great job!”
Do you wanna talk about the title a little bit? There was that roll-credits moment at the end when the phrase “Purple Gold” comes up. What’s the idea?
To me it’s supposed to be the moment, that L.A. sunset moment where you’re driving and it turns from that 4pm afternoon light to the evening light and the hills start go get purple but then you still have the sun catching in the dry, dusty bushes. I had also originally thought of it because I was like I wanted to call it something that sounds like weed, like “Blue Dream,” but that was too obvious. Then I thought of “Purple” and the rest is history.
I like that! And I was thinking gold as in currency.
Exactly! And then I hadn’t even realized it, but I was talking to an editor and they said, “Yeah! Those are the Lakers’ colors.” But I’m not--
I didn’t even think of that either.
Yeah. I’m totally not one to get a basketball or sports reference, but I was like, "That works really well!"
What a great coincidence. Do you want to talk more about your experience with editors and what that was like? Getting this from a manuscript to its published form?
It was a long process. Usually you sell a book to an agent or you get an agent to represent you, and the agent sells the book to an editor. Actually, Jonathan put me in touch with an editor who had asked him if he knew anyone who was working on new stuff. So I had been directly in touch with this new editor from Simon and Schuster, and he didn’t read the whole thing; he just read the beginning and gave me some feedback, but it was not super helpful for me because it was kind of just spitballing ideas, like I know you probably haven’t read the whole thing and I don’t think you know what I’m doing here. It was more like “If I were to publish this, maybe I would do these things.” And I was like “Hm, I don’t know.”
I spent a lot of time revising it myself, especially going through all those rewrites. I had a friend who was also a writer, this British man in his 60s who read through the entire thing and really helped me with it: “This is too long, this is dragging on.” So I did a lot of self- and peer-editing. And then my final publisher sent me back edits, and I would read them and respond like “Oh my God, you’re totally right—I do need to fix that.” One of them was the first time CJ and Alana sleep together and then it just skips to a new scene and didn’t talk about it. He said, “This is a big moment, can you talk more about it and just like expand it? This feels like a bait and switch.” You’re working on a book and you’re so close to it, and you’re working on individual chapters and then I felt the need to stop and read the whole thing and see how it was all fitting together. And even though I’d done that, there’s still a moment where you just have a different set of eyes on it and you’re like, “You’re totally right.”
Thanks, Gracie!
I love running before I write; it calms you down. I'm a morning runner now. I ran at Pomona and so we’d obviously had. I started just in track and then got into cross-country too and now, I ran a marathon two years ago, but I’m pretty chill now. I rock it with the Casio stopwatch, like no Garmin, no smartwatch. My first draft of Purple Gold was actually four different perspectives. Alana was one of the characters, there were three other characters, and one of them was a runner and the book went through her senior year. She finished school through graduation. CJ left the narrative when he went to jail and then there was this whole other thing... and then I reread the draft and 70 percent of it was Alana chapters.
You were clearly more interested in Alana?
Yeah, I was like: "This is clearly a story about her—I don’t know why I’m trying to make it a story about all of these other things."
Did your scrapped characters make any cameo appearances in the final draft?
No. Her friends Lillian and Sienna are still in it, but all the things about running were cut. I would still like running to find its way into my writing—I’ve written some short stories.
You mentioned that Purple Gold was somewhat autobiographical. There’s a lot, I hardly need to remind you, going on in this text. What, if any, emotional processing purpose did your writing serve?
Maybe I misphrased it—inspiration came from personal experience, but I wouldn’t say that it’s heavily autobiographical. It’s a work of fiction. I took a lot of elements that were close to me and also came from other people and other ideas, and then I wove them all together. For me, it’s a lot easier to make a work of fiction than it is to make the events of your life fit into a narrative arc. The idea of two different worlds being so close to each other—the world of Mission College and the world outside of L.A., also the idea that you can inhabit a space but do you really belong there. At the end of the book, that’s what Alana’s thinking about. She went so many places with CJ so she feels like she’s part of that world (CJ’s), but was she anything more than an observer? Was she a participant? I think the book helped me process those questions, but I don’t think at the end I was like, "Here’s the answer, I figured it out!" I was just like, "I thought about that for a while, uh..."
Absolutely! It feels a lot like, especially on some runs, spectatorship. Like we’re there for eight months out of the year and then we leave and our experiences "in" L.A. have no real purchase on our lives. It feels like a simulation. And I feel like the virus has only made that feeling more pronounced.
We used to run the bike trail that goes toward Upland—like how many kids at Pomona have just never been on that trail before? Or have never even seen Upland? I love, too, that Pomona is on the county line and you can just cross into San Bernardino. And then you just go back to campus and leave and forget. There’s so little interaction—there can be so little interaction with your surroundings.
What prompted you to choose CJ as Alana’s guide to the outside world? What was the motivation behind his character?
He had just been a character from earlier. I had mentioned that I started writing a version of this story as a senior and that just kind of came to me naturally—it was an interesting story and one that was close to me. Have you heard of the book Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis?
No, I haven’t.
Rules of Attraction takes place on a college campus and I was like, "Okay I can just write a book like Rules of Attraction. Just about some kids at college— nothing crazy." But at the same time, it felt like it would all just be melodrama. Only taking place in that microcosm. SoCJ was also a way of expanding outside of that world.
Feeling like there were real consequences as opposed to…
Oh you’re gonna get a B—I don’t know. And also I love the idea of Los Angeles as a character.
Like a Dickensian deal?
There’s also so much—the weed culture—there’s so much texture to the way the city looks and feels. There’s so much atmosphere. You’re able to get those L.A. moments.
You can taste it. The weed being so prominent definitely gave an extra sensory dimension to the novel. As you might imagine, cross-country runners don’t smoke a whole lot of weed. I can certainly imagine it being a big part of L.A. culture, I just have to look for it next time I get back, whenever that might be. The whole time I was pretty mystified by CJ. On one hand he was the most interesting character, but I also feel like I never learned anything about him. I feel like you’re putting the reader in the place of Alana, you get so close in proximity to this enigmatic figure and yet you never really get close.
You wanna know what the deal is.
Yeah! It felt like metafiction—a fictional character in a fictional novel. Was that intentional?
I do have a backstory. I wrote it like that because there are certain people that you meet and that you know and your perception when you first meet them is like so; it’s almost like they’re a cardboard cutout. You’re like, “This is a glamorous figure.” And as you learn more about their lives, it feels weird or more like wrong to actually discover that they have a messed up family and all of these other things and you have all of these quotidian problems. I think there was a part of Alana that didn’t want to know or was afraid to ask because that might ruin the illusion, but also she didn’t feel like she had the right to know.
Because she was a spectator and not a player?
Yeah. And she was really taking what she was given at that point. In my mind, and I don’t know how much of this became clear in the final draft, but in my mind he was an R&B artist and had been part of a group that had ultimately broken up in hostility. It hadn’t been an amicable business breakup and then they had taken the rights to his music, so he lost money and then because of that… I think he probably had always been dealing weed. He’s just like the kind of person who has been doing it for so long. But he had to go back to that because he was in a difficult financial position because of the breakup of the band. It was also kind of about if you’re coming from a precarious financial position to begin with and you make it as an artist and you suddenly have money, that can quickly go away again. And you’re not in a position where you can bounce back from that. CJ was kind of screwed by that and society, but also Alana was also not the kind of character to say, “Okay, we’re gonna sit down and talk about it, tell me everything.” He was so caught up in it, not talking to her about it and kind of dealing with it but not dealing with it.
What’s your feeling around memory? There was this kind of nostalgic component towards the end of the novel when he was looking back. The reason I ask is because one of my friends, sobering up now but he still deals a lot, had memory problems for a solid two years and never slept because of weed. His case is very physiological, but I wonder if weed and memory were things you were thinking about and tensioned in the book?
Memory is so subjective. What Alana is getting at at the end is: “I need to go home and tell someone what happened because I’m the only one who knows what happened.” But what really, actually happened? You need another witness to verify it. It’s unclear if she’s going to see CJ again or what the trajectory of their relationship will be. None of her friends even met him. Memory is so unreliable, and if you’re only going on that it’s almost like none of it happened.
Did that have something to do with your choice to use the second-person narrative? That was what struck me at first because I don’t think I’ve read anything with the second person. It felt almost accusatory.
To me it was adding a layer of recounting and memory between the actual events and the remembering of them. If you just say, “I walk down the street to go to the store" that’s very much something happening. But the “you” was as if Alana were telling the story to herself. You walk down the street--
It’s like a self-affirmation? Convincing herself, “This happened to me.”
Exactly. And actually at the time I had the first draft with the four different characters, it was in third person so it switched around. Then when I cut everyone else out, there was a draft where it was still third person and all Alana’s perspective. But it was kind of stiff, because third person is a bit distanced, you know, it’s not even a close third. I thought, "Well, why is this?” I had been journaling a lot and writing in second person just to myself. I have no idea why; I just got in the habit of doing it. So when I decided to rewrite it, I made a decision at a certain point to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and did that in the second person. I finally knew CJ’s character a lot better and developed the plot arc, so I knew exactly what I was writing toward and had an ending so that Alana didn’t finish the rest of her college career. I was able to rewrite it and let it flow.
You mentioned in your written responses Professor Lethem. What role did he play in all of this? I guess this is more “Pomona student interviews former Pomona student!”, but how did your experience at Pomona play into writing this novel?
I wrote a draft of this-—it was 40 pages and none of the plot, I think the characters were similar. None of the plot in that story made its way into Purple Gold. But in the workshop environment that year, a lot of people were taking it seriously and working on novels. It was very much “this is a thing that people do,” it felt a little bit realer than a thing like, it’s just another class where by the end of the semester I read some books and wrote a paper. At some point I decided, “I’m gonna stop waiting around and write a novel and I already have 40 pages, so I probably just need to write another 100 and I’ll be fine."
I forget when I told Jonathan that I was working on it. He was super nice about it! He read one early version and now I’m appalled that I let him read it. I was like, “Wow, I totally wasted your time. I hope you didn’t spend a long time reading it,” but he was nice about it and gave me some helpful feedback. He was also really positive which at that point was great to hear because I was like, “I have no idea what I’m doing,” and he would say, “You’re doing a great job!”
Do you wanna talk about the title a little bit? There was that roll-credits moment at the end when the phrase “Purple Gold” comes up. What’s the idea?
To me it’s supposed to be the moment, that L.A. sunset moment where you’re driving and it turns from that 4pm afternoon light to the evening light and the hills start go get purple but then you still have the sun catching in the dry, dusty bushes. I had also originally thought of it because I was like I wanted to call it something that sounds like weed, like “Blue Dream,” but that was too obvious. Then I thought of “Purple” and the rest is history.
I like that! And I was thinking gold as in currency.
Exactly! And then I hadn’t even realized it, but I was talking to an editor and they said, “Yeah! Those are the Lakers’ colors.” But I’m not--
I didn’t even think of that either.
Yeah. I’m totally not one to get a basketball or sports reference, but I was like, "That works really well!"
What a great coincidence. Do you want to talk more about your experience with editors and what that was like? Getting this from a manuscript to its published form?
It was a long process. Usually you sell a book to an agent or you get an agent to represent you, and the agent sells the book to an editor. Actually, Jonathan put me in touch with an editor who had asked him if he knew anyone who was working on new stuff. So I had been directly in touch with this new editor from Simon and Schuster, and he didn’t read the whole thing; he just read the beginning and gave me some feedback, but it was not super helpful for me because it was kind of just spitballing ideas, like I know you probably haven’t read the whole thing and I don’t think you know what I’m doing here. It was more like “If I were to publish this, maybe I would do these things.” And I was like “Hm, I don’t know.”
I spent a lot of time revising it myself, especially going through all those rewrites. I had a friend who was also a writer, this British man in his 60s who read through the entire thing and really helped me with it: “This is too long, this is dragging on.” So I did a lot of self- and peer-editing. And then my final publisher sent me back edits, and I would read them and respond like “Oh my God, you’re totally right—I do need to fix that.” One of them was the first time CJ and Alana sleep together and then it just skips to a new scene and didn’t talk about it. He said, “This is a big moment, can you talk more about it and just like expand it? This feels like a bait and switch.” You’re working on a book and you’re so close to it, and you’re working on individual chapters and then I felt the need to stop and read the whole thing and see how it was all fitting together. And even though I’d done that, there’s still a moment where you just have a different set of eyes on it and you’re like, “You’re totally right.”
Thanks, Gracie!