Rachel Stark didn’t return to her hometown of Perris when she was writing her debut novel, which is set in the Inland Empire city. It’s not that she didn’t want to visit her mother, who still lives in the house Stark grew up in — the two connected in other places. She just knew that the Perris where she was raised isn’t really there anymore.
“I didn’t want to go back and visit because I wanted to write from my memories of it, because Perris has changed quite a bit,” Stark says. “The Perris that I grew up in was so magical to me, and so alive in my memories, that I wanted to be with that.”
Stark’s “Perris, California,” set in 1999 with flashbacks to a decade earlier, follows Tessa, a 27-year-old mother of two who is expecting a third. She and her husband, Henry, live in a trailer on land belonging to his mother, Angie. Tessa’s world is shaken when she runs into Mel, the woman with whom she fell in love when the two were in high school. Mel’s appearance brings back memories for Tessa — not only of happy ones of the pair’s romance but traumatic ones about the horrible abuse she suffered as a child.
Stark, who now lives in southern Colorado, answered questions about her novel via Zoom. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: Did you always know that you wanted to write about your hometown?
No, I didn’t. In fact, I resisted it. I started the book when I was in grad school, and people would ask, “Where is this taking place?” And I’d say, “I haven’t decided yet.” I wanted to make it somewhere that wasn’t Perris because it just felt too close to the chest, in a way to have it set there. However, I realized I want to honor the place, and I feel like I tried in the book to convey how much I loved it there. As I was working with the characters and the story progressed, I just realized I couldn’t write about anywhere else, and placed this story there.
Q: Tessa and Mel have this intense relationship when they meet in high school. What do you think Mel represents to Tessa? Is she someone she really cares about, or is she also representing a kind of freedom or possibility of escape?
Mel was someone that loved her and that is not something Tessa had known: A love that was uncomplicated, someone that understood her and genuinely wanted to help her. She also is just her first love, and so there’s the purity of that. That’s what she represents for her, that whole new world that opens up when you realize that kind of love exists for your heart, for your body, for all of it.
Q: I would imagine it’s hard to write about young love, because 16 is such an emotionally fraught time for everyone. There are so many big feelings. Did you find it difficult to write about that particular experience?
I think not, because it was so specific, and I knew both of those characters so well. At that age, we all feel like the first love is like, “No, no, you don’t understand. This is different.” And in their case, I really feel it is true. It’s a unique love for both of them. It’s so meaningful and transformative and healing, and also just like, “God, this person sees me and no one else has taken the time to see me in this way.”
I also think that they’ve both experienced different traumas and had parents that didn’t, in some ways, give them what they needed. That just makes a kid grow up really fast. So the timing of the relationship and who they are makes this really interesting mashup of pure, innocent first love, but also so much wisdom behind it. They don’t have the words for it, but seeing the complexity in each other, and understanding that maybe the other people in high school aren’t really this caring and this knowing, that they don’t have this perspective on life that these two girls do.
Q: Tessa still feels some resentment towards Mel. Why do you think that is? Mel’s mom initiated the breakup, but do you think that Tessa doesn’t realize or doesn’t fully believe it, and that’s why she still feels some anger towards her?
Tessa has been abandoned before, so that’s the deep wound that it hits on. She felt very abandoned by Mel, and especially after Mel was this grace for her life. And then to have that taken away and feel like Mel could have maybe reached out, she just felt very abandoned. There’s part of her that knows better, but also she’s confused because she’s met with this Mel that’s pretty guarded, and she’s confused by that. So it’s a very defensive place that she’s coming from, ultimately because Mel means so much to her.
Q: Another relationship in this novel is between Tessa and Angie. Tessa seems to have an ambivalent relationship with Angie; she feels a bit smothered, but there’s also a lot of love there. How did you go about capturing that complicated dynamic between the two?
It’s a complicated relationship for sure. It’s clear that Tessa loves Angie, and it’s very clear that Angie means well. In a lot of ways, Angie does know better than Tessa, which is a tough pill for Tessa to swallow. And Tessa, because while she completely trusts Angie and loves Angie and does see her as a mother, she hasn’t really known that love since the beginning. So there’s a lack of words and language for how she feels about her. And there is this feeling of “I’m being smothered,” but then the right after that is the feeling of, “I feel guilty for having that thought because this woman has done so much for me.” In a lot of moments, it goes back to Tessa feeling this lump in her throat because she can’t say the things that she wants to say because of self-preservation, or the fear of hurting someone, or just not knowing the damn words to say. When there’s so much trauma, it can be very difficult to make sense of your own feelings, let alone express them.
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