Rough Animals, the just-out first novel from Rae DelBianco, is that rara avis: A fiction debut at once sure-footed, almost existentially gripping, and raucously, violently unexpected. DelBianco, 25, who grew up in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and studied writing at Duke, has transformed the raw material of her far-from-the-madding-crowd upbringing—raising and showing livestock; knowing her way around a weapon or two—into a freewheeling contemporary Western set in a lonesome territory of the American Southwest populated by hard-luck ranchers, small-time grifters, violent drug gangs, and a particularly wily young girl. We wanted to ask her how she pulled it off.
When did you first start writing—and where did the first grain of an idea for this book come from?
I started writing my freshman year in college—I think you really become a writer when you look at your career prospects and ask yourself, Is this something I could be homeless over? And you say yes. But I dropped my premed plan and worked on an apprentice novel—about my college experience—for a full year after college. I rewrote it two or three times, and it just wasn’t working. Then I set that book aside and wrote the beginning of Rough Animals. It was only the first scene—these cattle, someone’s livelihood, dropping like flies—but I wanted that enormously destructive feeling to set off the story. That was all I had for several months, but then I hopped a plane to London for Curtis Brown’s novel-writing course, and for six months worked 14- to 16-hour days to finish a first draft. After that, it was another two years of intensive editing—and over 50 rejections.
There’s a description of Rough Animals on the back cover that describes it as Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men. Is that fair?
When I was thinking about this narrative of a young man re-looking at what he really was through this course of committing an increasing amount of violence, it felt to me like a similar process of what the characters in Breaking Bad are doing—and it’s something that I take from Denis Johnson’s work as well. As far as No Country for Old Men: I absolutely love the character of Chigurh; I think he’s the perfect villain, and I was very inspired by the utter chaos that he causes and the almost god-like power and control he has over his surroundings, when I was creating the character of the girl in this book—that said, the girl was more informed by a combination of the children I met when I was staying in Bali a few years ago in a town controlled by a local gang. Still, the way that McCarthy is able to render violence in this manner so that you can’t look away—he gives it this visual beauty—was extremely important to this book.
You seem to have a real feel for the landscape you’re writing about. Did you live in the American Southwest, or is this just research?
I’ve visited the area a bunch of times, but never lived there. For me, placing someone in the scene was more about the dirt under the fingernails and the air burning your nose before you look up and see the mesas and the mountains. In my own experience, say, raising cattle, the rough, tactile feeling of being stuck in the mud or cutting your knuckles on a rope—those were more crucial to me than the idiosyncratic features of the landscape.
Tell me a bit more about this cattle-raising business. As I understand it, your parents didn’t farm or ranch. How did you go from, essentially, zero to raising cattle on your own?
I loved animals from a very young age, and I joined a 4-H club when I was 8 and got some goats. My parents didn’t farm—we did have some land—so I had to learn how to do everything myself: I bought a VHS tape from the local feed mill, and from that I learned how to make an electric fence, how to build sheds—everything had to be figured out on my own, which was an incredibly formative experience. But when I was 14, I wanted a larger challenge. The steers were the ones at the county fair that would require extra fences and caution tape because they were so enormously dangerous, and I loved the idea of taking an animal that was really such a Goliath—by the time you send them off to the butcher, they’re 1,500 or 1,600 pounds—and to work to be able to control and master that animal. It felt like such an achievement, and it really changed my outlook on a lot of things.
Did you invent this world of the book out of whole cloth, or is this something you’ve lived in—or a combination of both? I’m thinking about the description of what the inside of a split-open box elder tree looks like; how long fresh animal hides have to be salted.
A lot of it comes from personal experience—from the guns to the description of trees and wood to the animal hides—but I did have to, say, reach out to a butcher to know how much a fresh hide weighs. There’s a scene in which a character is carrying two hides up from a bonfire, and I realized that I knew how much they weighed dry, but not wet. I do get challenged a lot along the lines of “Where could all this come from?” or with people wondering if I have the experience to write about some of the things I write about. And I used to answer that by saying that I probably have had more hands-on in-the-wild experiences than most people writing books like this—but when it comes down to it, you don’t need permission as an artist to create what you want.
I understand you’re already at work on another novel. What’s the next one about?
I’m looking into the world of professional bull riding, as well as the opioid crisis and the world of livestock showing. There’s been a huge scandal recently in Texas and Oklahoma—they’re drug-testing the animals after livestock shows and they’re finding out that 8-year-old kids have been working with animals that have been illegally doped with clenbuterol, which redistributes calories from fat to muscle—it’s basically a steroid. But it’s hard for anybody to take action—a lot of times it’s the parents doing the injecting, but in a crowded fair it could be anyone. Do you ban an 8-year-old from showing for life? It’s hard situation to get a handle on.
In addition to writing, you used to work a bit as a model. Is that something you considered as an alternate career, or was it always in addition to writing?
It wasn’t something I was pursuing full-time. I’m short enough that I can’t really model much here, but I can model in Asia. I tried here anyway, and when I was going through a lot of rejections in writing, traveling up to New York and getting rejected to my face by modeling agencies again and again and again actually was a big turning point in my being able to accept rejection as a writer. It’s easy to hide from an email, but when somebody’s in your face telling you to get out of the room, you have to finally confront those feelings of rejections—and if you want to be a writer, sometimes you have to eat rejections for breakfast.
I assume you’ve moved on to healthier breakfast foods by now?
[Laughs] Yeah. I saw the book in a bookstore for the first time the other day—I just kind of stood there and stared at it for a good 20 minutes. I teared up a little—it was super-weird.