Helen Phillips Reveals Story Behind The Beautiful Bureaucrat
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by Helen Philips is your dream creative writing professor. She’s extremely relatable as a young mother of two who can easily be your cool next door neighbor. An accomplished author notably of the published collection Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) and the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, August 2015), she speaks thoughtfully and with a calm power that will that make you fall in love with literature even if you aren’t much of a reader.
At the Brooklyn Book Festival (the largest literary event in Brooklyn every year) two weekends ago, Phillips first shared about how the irony of her own day job at the time inspired the American Dream in writing for her. She states, “My book has been an 8-year journey inspired by a job I had inputting data into a database and thinking about the lives of those whose data I was inputting into the spreadsheet.” That is how The Beautiful Bureaucrat was born, a story of a wife stuck in a windowless place and her husband who disappeared a lot because of secrets from data that later arise.
Phillips reads a lot for the Franklin Park Reading Series and will be on the panel for the Gotham Series this Saturday, Oct 3rd. She is so involved with the literary scene in Brooklyn that I had to ask how she feels Brooklyn has shaped her writing. “I feel like Brooklyn has shaped me so profoundly as a writer. I have been in Brooklyn since I was 22 and so my entire adult life has been here. The Beautiful Bureaucrat never had a location that’s mentioned. It’s in a timeless, faceless city. But it’s most definitely Brooklyn. It’s scenes from Park Slope. Brooklyn is such a place of contrast. You’ll have the smell of urine but also the sound of the violin in the subway. I love contrast.”
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The book title also came to Phillips because of her love of contrast. It was the first thing that came to her, in fact, before the book was written. She was doing her data entry job feeling unbeautiful and thinking of how we often view bureaucrats as being negative or nasty. But when you use the word beautiful before it, there is a stark contrast. In sound they still go together though. There is alliteration that brings The Beautiful Bureaucrat together.
Most of all in a borough full of struggle but also wealth, Phillips provides great advice of how to write in this borough and overall in life. “Keep your day job. It’s not realistic to think writing will feed you and clothe you. The writing will be it’s own reward. Also, keep your rejection list. One day you will get accepted.”
For more of Helen Philips, you’ll find her schedule here.
