90210 & Suburban Spaceship: A Conversation with Novelist and Journalist Margaret Wappler

Author of NEON GREEN and A GOOD BAD BOY: LUKE PERRY AND HOW A GENERATION GREW UP

Oct 25, 2024

Two contests with fall deadlines: Yale Younger Poets competition (48-64 pp - poetry collection - now open to poets of any age) – annual submission period is October 1 – November 15.

River Teeth Journal Nonfiction Book Prize - “manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced, and between 35K-85K words long (approx. 150-350 double-spaced pp). Winner will receive book publication with the University of New Mexico Press and a $1,000 honorarium. Submission period is August 1 - October 30.

Opening soon for submissions: Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize (novel - 90-1,000 double-spaced pages) - annual submission period - early bird: November 1 - 30; regular: December 1 - January 31

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A quick thank-you to Randall Albers, novelist and former chair of the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago, for suggesting that I connect with Margaret Wappler, today’s interviewee. (Randy is a good friend and champion to many writers, myself included, and was one of Margaret’s professors when she was an undergraduate at Columbia.)

Margaret is the author of two books, a fresh, poignant, and extremely fun novel Neon Green, and A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up, both of which I had trouble putting down. (I didn’t watch Beverly Hills 90210, but I remember the craze and was fascinated by what I learned about Perry, the show, and Wappler herself—A Good Bad Boy is both memoir and biography).

Margaret and I met over the summer, and I managed not to ask her 2,000 questions about her work as a critic and journalist in L.A. She’s interviewed a lot of actors and musicians, but as you’ll be able to tell from her replies to my questions below, she couldn’t be more charming and down to earth.

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Christine/Bookish: Neon Green is a paean to the earth, to family, to the suburbs (and Chicago), and the 1990s. Its delights are numerous. Did it possibly begin with you sitting down to write a short story (about the Allen family who have won the dubious prize of a spaceship parking in their backyard)? Or did you know from the start it would become a novel?

Margaret Wappler: Thank you for recognizing that Neon Green is a love letter to one of Earth’s most trash-talked but secretly beloved incarnations: the American suburb. As far as the book’s genesis, your instincts are correct. The germ of the story was one image—a nuclear family, standing in their suburban backyard, reacting to the arrival of a classic B-movie-style flying saucer. When I zoomed in, they each had a different expression, ranging from elated to horrified. Weirdly, none of them were shocked. Why weren’t they bowled over to see a flying saucer docking on their grass? Some 40 pages later, I was horrified, elated and shocked to find myself deep into the story, with more questions than answers about this family and its interloper.

CS: The Allens have a name very similar to "aliens." I'm guessing this isn't an accident—would you comment on this?

MW: I love playing with synchronicity and resonance in novels. Naming the Allens something close to the word “alien” was a cue to the reader that perhaps these two entities are more connected than we might think. Who is the real interloper here, the aliens or the Allens? Who or what is “natural,” or belongs here, and who or what is “alien,” or foreign?

CS: You grew up in Oak Park, Illinois (also Hemingway's hometown), the basis of Prairie Park, where most of the events in Neon Green take place. You’ve lived in L.A. for many years now, since you moved out here for graduate school school at CalArts, if I'm not mistaken. Did you ever consider setting Neon Green elsewhere? And what were some of the pleasures and sorrows of writing about your hometown?

MW: Yep, CalArts brought me to Los Angeles in 2002. I was also born out here and lived in Claremont till age 5 when my family moved to small-town Alabama for four years but that’s a whole different novel, as of yet unwritten. I moved to Oak Park at age 9 and spent the rest of my formative years there, including high school and Columbia College. I still go back to Chicago a few times a year; it’ll always show up in my writing because it’s a spiritual home for me, one that stirs up old sorrows and the unfettered joys of being a free-roaming kid in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Obviously, L.A., which I also count as a spiritual home, is an incredibly dynamic place with more avocado varieties than I personally can tackle, but it wasn’t right for Neon Green. I wanted a place without a whiff of glamour. I wanted Ernest, the patriarch of the book and a staunch environmentalist, to be so staunch that he’s defending the most humble prairie landscape, not something grand like Big Sur or the Sierras.

For a while, I played with the setting as Any American Suburb but with the book’s sci-fi fabulist elements, it needed a world that felt deeply lived-in. The friction between the world being familiar and then really unfamiliar was very generative for me. I had a great time tapping my memory for exactly what the Oak Park mall was like when I was 11, wandering it for hours and making small-time trouble. There’s a wig store that Alison goes into which is 100% a setting from my childhood.

Writing into my own nostalgia was a way to honor the past, and build a monument to it while also mourning for all that’s been lost. The ‘90s and early aughts were such a pivotal period in our culture, in a way that we haven’t fully processed yet. We were giddy for the potentials of the “informational superhighway.” We had no idea how our thoughts and attention spans would soon be relentlessly harvested for clicks and likes and manipulated by various nation states, all of which still feels insane to acknowledge as a feature and not a bug of our world.

CS: Let’s talk now about A Good Bad Boy, your latest book. Did you begin this book with its unique structure of a memoiristic personal narrative combined with Luke Perry biography, or did that evolve after you were well into the first draft (or a later draft)? It's highly original and also such an affecting narrative duality—we follow you from adolescence and the loss of your father when you were 15 to present day, and we’re on a similar trajectory with Perry in the sections that cover his life.

MW: When Luke Perry died in 2019 from a stroke, people were crushed because they felt like they’d lost a piece of their childhood. Not many celebrities or actors trigger that kind of reaction. We may mourn an actor’s loss but the grief doesn’t often feel intrinsically tied to our youth and what’s been lost (and gained) since in our lives.

Very early on, I recognized that the reaction to Luke’s death, and his cultural position as a larger-than-life teen idol who was on his way to a second act, opened itself up to something beyond a traditional biography. Luckily, my editor was enthusiastic about the idea, and through a series of conversations, we figured out what parts of my story connected to his. Throughout the whole writing and editing process, it was a balancing act. My story could never overwhelm his; the priority was always to find all the rich ways the two lives dovetailed and resonated with each other.

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CS: What have been the most surprising results of this book’s publication for you, both creatively and professionally?

MW: The biggest professional surprise is, well… ask me in 2025 when I can talk about it! All I can say now is it was a very exciting project to be a part of and his fans are going to love it. Creatively, publishing A Good Bad Boy gave me more permission to follow in equal measure what gives me pleasure and what scares me. If I’m scared, then I’m taking a juicy risk. If I’m steeped in joy, I’ll keep writing.

CS: What are you working on now?

MW: A novel. I don’t want to jinx it by saying too much, but on the good days, my brain feels consumed by the most delicious fire. On the tough days, well, I take a walk or I eat a nice salty chocolate chip cookie.

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Margaret Wappler is the author of the novel Neon Green and A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up. She has written about the arts and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, The Believer, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.