Gina Nutt: The narrator in “The Style of Your Life” finds herself at a crossroads between college graduation and what comes next. Did you build the manuscript around this specific moment, or was there another seed that started this piece?
Brittany Ackerman: You hit the nail right on the head. The manuscript stemmed from a failure to launch situation, one very similar to what I faced my senior year of college when everyone seemed to have their lives mapped out ahead of them and I had no idea what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I still don’t know? I think that Millennial has become such a bad word, but I am a Millennial and my Millennial experience is one of being hyper-socially conscious, having quality time as a love language, placing my value in experiences, and contributing to the powerful purchasing force that is consumerism.

I grew up with the dawn of social media. I remember when the first iPhone came out! But I also remember a time before the phones when it was all cartwheels in the backyard and only speaking to your crush if you happened to see them in the hallway at school. I’d call it a more innocent time. Simple in a good way. We had to go to the mall if we wanted a new outfit; we couldn’t just buy it online. And that’s also where the impetus for the book came in—the mall as a dying location. I want to build a hedge of protection around the idea of malls as I know and love them by writing this book and creating the object of it in the world. The story is about what it means to live an authentic existence, and life here happens against the backdrop of a department store in South Florida in the early aughts.

GN: Connection feels central to this excerpt on both thematic and structural levels. The narrator picks up the phone to call her mother. She recalls a rift between herself and school peers bridged, even flimsily, by the Internet. There are echoes, but no direct contact, with the narrator’s father. And she finds herself taking direction, maybe even finding purpose, from a coworker in a new job. How do you see character relationships lending this story momentum?
BA: Once again, I think this is a very Millennial thing! We value meaningful relationships with friends and family. So much of our early existence was centered in our shared interests. Going online meant finding forums to chat about our dogs or our bodies or our favorite bands or our crushes. Back then, it felt like the Internet was a theater where we were all watching the same movie. And now, it feels more like a place to see something and then try to top it, one-up it, and win it like a sort of game.

I always knew I wanted to write a mother-daughter story, too. My own relationship with my mom is probably the most complicated one in my life. I came from her body, how can it not be complicated? As a mother now, I understand the difficulty in transitioning from having a baby grow inside of you to having her live outside of my body and it’s very surreal, very strange, but also necessary as is the way of life. She’s a part of me, every single particle of hers is mine, but she’s also her own person.

I think the momentum from all the relationships you mentioned above is organic and natural and moves in a way that my mom always explained as for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.

GN: The narrator takes a life-changing run that lands her on campus, a site of both transformation and stagnation. Yet it’s the surrounding nature—not the buildings and parking lots and professors—that she notices. How does the natural world catalyze the narrator? In what ways does this moment follow her into her new job?
BA: There’s a lot of longing for the natural world. The narrator went to college in the Midwest, which mirrors my own experience of leaving a coastal city for a collegiate town. She is, for the first time, face-to-face with nature. She can’t avoid it because it’s all encompassing. It’s the antithesis of the mall, the major setting of the book, where there is no nature.

Being in the mall day in and day out affects her physically and mentally. And this is also something that affects her mother as well. People aren’t meant to be inside all the time, and working long hours in retail can drive you crazy. You just want to be outside! You envy all the customers who get to buy a pair of pants and then head back out the exit and leave and go on into the rest of their day, into the sunlight, into the fresh air.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
BA: I'm going to give a list that’s tailored specific to the manuscript because that just feels right to me. The list is in no particular order:

Meet Me At the Fountain by Alexandra Lange, Auntie Anne’s, Mallsoft music, fountain Diet Coke, ornamental fountains and watershapes, Victor Gruen, Jon Jerde, parking structures, escalators, food courts, American Apparel, Borders bookstore, Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton, the Northern Mockingbird, the YouTube channel for the International Space Station, rolling racks, hangers, sensors, ink tags, The Cheesecake Factory, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, & Florida.