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Atherton-raised writer Janelle Brown worked for Wired magazine in the 1990s, where she observed the start of the dot-com boom and felt like technology was going to change the world for the better.
Now, feeling like she was a little bit naive at the time, the New York Times-bestselling author explores the dangers of unchecked technology, familial relationships and whether utopias can exist in her sixth novel, “What Kind of Paradise.”
The book, released in June, is a mix of historical fiction and suspense. It follows a teen living alone with her father in rural Montana during the ‘90s. The girl is mostly shut off from the outside world during the beginning of the digital revolution.
“It really took me almost three decades to figure out how to write about my experiences at the beginning of the digital revolution and my ambivalence now about how I feel about what’s happened,” said Brown, who graduated from Menlo-Atherton High School before attending University of California, Berkeley.
Brown, who resides in Los Angeles, found inspiration for her latest work in novels like “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin, which chronicles the beginning of the gaming industry, and other coming-of-age stories like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” and Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch.”
The book was a Jimmy Fallon Book Club finalist.
The following interview has been condensed for clarity and space. It has also been edited to remove spoilers.
Embarcadero Media: How long did it take to write “What Kind of Paradise”? Where do you do your writing now? (You previously said you work in a co-working space with other writers.)
Courtesy Penguin Random House.
Janelle Brown: It usually takes me about two years to write a book. I still have a co-working space. We actually had to move a couple months ago, which was a bummer, but we had been in the previous space for 13 years. The building was bought by a new owner, and he evicted us, but we found a new space. We just moved this summer.
Embarcadero Media: What do you like about writing in that type of space?
Brown: I find that I’m more focused and more motivated when I’m in a separate space just for writing and also being around other people who are writing makes me spend less time surfing the internet, doing online shopping, and more time being like, “Well, they’re being productive, so I should be productive too.”
Embarcadero Media: Technology plays a huge role in this book. How much of your upbringing in Silicon Valley influenced that?
Brown: I grew up just down the street from SRI (International) and my father (now a Woodside council member) worked kind of in adjacent parts of the tech industry. Our nextdoor neighbors were venture capitalists. … Growing up in the Bay Area, it was just part of life. … I had a little more distance from it that I was able to be like, “Wow, that was a really kind of interesting place to grow up.” I had these influences that I didn’t even realize at the time. I certainly explore some of that.
Embarcadero Media: How do you personally balance using tech with your other offline interests like reading?
Brown: It’s a constant battle. Writing is so easy to distract yourself from. You have to have no outside distractions. We live in this era of constant distraction. I mean, your phone is pinging. There’s so many things to surf on the internet. I see it with my teenage children. It’s even harder for them, because they’ve been kind of built in this world. And it’s definitely one of the things that I wrestle with and that definitely found its way into the book.
Embarcadero Media: How did you come to choose Montana as the setting of the novel?
Brown: My family had a cabin in Montana for a while when I was in my 20s. We would go out there and be out in the woods. As I was working and developing this idea, and I was thinking a lot about the push and pull of the ‘90s. … I remember feeling when I spent time there in Montana in the ‘90s and the early 2000s it felt like such a departure from my tech world in San Francisco.
Embarcadero Media: What was it like writing the main character?
Brown: She was such a great character because she’s intelligent and so overly educated in so many ways, yet so naive in every other way. It was also a challenge to write a character who’s full of those contrasts, who’s so naive about social and personal relationships, but desperately wants to connect with the world and has so much excitement and open-eyed wonder about what she’s experiencing. I thought that was really fun to write.
Embarcadero Media: Is there a message that you want people to take away from the book?
Brown: I want people to think about the world in less of a black-and-white way, and look at the nuances of gray areas in between. I feel like we’re losing a lot of that in day-to-day life. Technology has done wonderful things for us, but it’s also a big problem and my book lives in the gray areas. … That’s what I want people to think about. It’s not always good or bad, but life is somewhere in the middle, and we need to find an equilibrium.
Embarcadero Media: How involved are you in the adaptations of your book “Pretty Things” and “What Kind of Paradise” for TV?
Brown: I’m an executive producer on both of them, so involved as much as you can be. You just have to kind of learn to be very zen about the whole process because it’s incredibly maddening; it’s a very, very complicated industry (Hollywood), and everything takes forever. You have to be OK with letting your books become something else when they go to the screen. It’s never going to be an exact copy of your book, and learning to let go and just let it be what it’s going to be in this next form is kind of exciting to be honest.
Embarcadero Media: Are you working on any other books now?
Brown: I’m just getting going with a new book, but it’s kind of too early to talk about it.
Embarcadero Media: What books are you reading right now?
Brown: “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden, “Broken Country,” “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, “Show Don’t Tell,” which are short stories by Curtis Sittenfeld for my family book club. I get together with mom (Pam Brown) and sister (Jodi Carter). … My family started one during the pandemic … and we get together over Zoom and talk about a book every couple of months.
Embarcadero Media: Do you find reading fiction is helpful to your own writing?
Brown: I find it very, very (helpful), especially when I’m feeling stuck. If I just sit down and read someone else’s book, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s how they did it.” It just gets my brain moving.
More information is available at janellebrown.com.
