Marie-Helene Bertino
“Hopefully that’s what fiction does—inhabits a character you would think you’d hate, and by the end you feel you know them. What fiction can do is show you a world you don’t know, a character whose experience you don’t get, and challenge your expectations of what that person can be.”
“Astonishing.”
“The triumphant latest from Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet . . . Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist’s alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine.”
“Marie-Helene Bertino is one of my favorite writers working today, and her latest is one rare gem of a novel. In Bertino’s hands, anything seems possible, from a dead grandmother returning in the form of a bird to finding unexpected wonder in our strange and broken world, profound redemptions of the heart. Parakeet enchants and enthralls”
“What is Parakeet about? It’s about an ambivalent bride. It’s about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, bad mothers, womanhood, monogamy and the nature of time itself. It’s about being a woman trapped by her subconscious and social conventions.”
“[Parakeet] could not be more perfect. It was everything that I wanted . . . bizarre, smart, heartbreaking, a funny, poignant story. The writing is almost ethereal.”
“Inventive, gorgeously written, and unforgettable.”
“The purely original construction of an irresistible story… Readers will fall in love…This assured, moving, brilliantly funny tale of music, mourning, and off-kilter romance entrances with its extraordinarily inventive language. Be prepared for a quick reread of this novel to try to answer the question: How did Bertino do that?” ”
“Marie-Helene Bertino’s stories are hilarious and heartbreaking and wildly inventive and her narrators are endlessly appealing and both fiercely proactive and stubbornly self defeating. That’s more than enough for me.”
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Parakeet (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice. and 2 AM at the Cat’s Pajamas (Crown, 2014), a NPR Best Books of 2014, and the story collection, Safe as Houses (University of Iowa Press, 2012), winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her fourth book, the novel Beautyland, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January 2024.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, Granta, BOMB, Guernica, and many others. Honors include The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize and two special mentions, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was the Walter E. Dakin fellow. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program.
In an interview about Parakeet with The Believer, Bertino was asked this about the role of trauma: “The narrator tells us, “The mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” Bertino responded, “The simultaneity of trauma. I hope you have no idea what I mean. I have experienced physical trauma and every time I think about it, it is as if my body is experiencing it again. So what is really the difference between what happened then and how I experience it again in the present tense? To be honest with you, I haven’t quite worked out how to hold these things in my past and not have them completely influence my present.”
A former editor for One Story and Catapult, she teaches in the Creative Writing programs of NYU and The New School. In Fall 2023, she will join the Creative Writing faculty of Yale University. In the past, she has taught for Institute for American Indian Arts, University College Cork (Ireland), and University of Montana as the Distinguished Kittredge Visiting Writer. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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