Little Islands of Faith: The Millions Interviews Tupelo Hassman
Early in gods with a little g, the story’s teenage narrator, Helen Dedleder, describes a night with her friends: “And on one of those early evenings as the light in Rosary was fading, back in the early days when the glow from those first beers still warmed us all the way home, we were christened.” The syntax and sound of the sentence represents one of Tupelo Hassman’s gifts in this novel: her ability to capture the beautiful fragility of those teen years.
That fragility is created from the novel’s tender route between grief and faith. Helen lives each day with the memory of her mom’s death—and what that has done to her dad: “he fell right apart, and I’ve been collecting the pieces of him since.” He begins to date a woman named Iris, who “is the type of person who ends statements with question marks. She is the type of person who will use the word love in sentence after sentence until it is empty as a deflated balloon on a dance floor.” Yet Helen loves her dad—which makes her skepticism of Iris complicated. Love complicates everything in gods with a little g, Hassman’s second novel. Her first book, Girlchild, received the American Library Association’s Alex Award. She has written for The Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. The first American to win London’s Literary Death Match, she earned her MFA at Columbia University.
Hassman and I spoke about faith, doubt, and the
