When Barista of Bloomfield Ave. editor-in-chief Debra Galant isn’t training her Internet eye on local goings-on, she applies her talents to longer-form literary pursuits. In her debut novel, “Rattled” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), she skewers the sacred cows of suburban land development, McMansion affluenza and mothering-as-a-competitive sport with true Jersey ’tude and the deadly aim of a (endangered) rattlesnake disrupting high-priced notions of paradise.
With tongue firmly in cheek, Galant nails the quirky tensions of suburban sprawl and maternal warfare in this tale of shady developer vs. endangered creature and its champions vs. a glam wife and mom who just wants to have it all in her fabulous new subdivision home.
The setting for this book is not Montclair, but a Tomahawk Lake/Pine Barons-type community inspired by Galant’s journalistic travels to the southern and northwestern parts of the state. The Tomahawk Lake area “was beautiful country, a lot of pines and trees, but every time I went up there, there would be new land cleared, and signs up,” she said.
Galant said she’d wanted to be a writer “from about 7 years old. I always wanted to write a book, particularly a novel.” That the novel would be humor in the form of satire wasn’t always a given, though. “I wouldn’t have always considered myself a humorist,” she said, crediting her husband for helping to “shallow me out and make me funnier and less earnest.”
She especially enjoyed writing the “crazed suburban mom” sections, which, she said, were “exaggerated versions” of her 13 years as a parent in the Glen Ridge public school system. She doesn’t share her protagonist, Heather’s do-or-die determination to snag the alpha position of Class Mom. “I think I was Class Mom one year, but that was very much an aberration,” she said. And when there’s baking to be done for school events, her children “ask their dad to make his cinnamon rolls.”
The “process and puzzle” of writing her first book “was very pleasant and challenging,” Galant said. “One of the things that’s very hard for those of us who are journalists who get paid by the word is the idea that you’re doing something so totally speculative that you might not even get published, let alone sell,” she said. “I was just proud of myself for finishing it.”
The response to “Rattled” has been encouraging so far, she said, including early reviews “which I’m too innocent to know not to read.”
Now about halfway through her second novel, a humor-satire “about an uptight yoga teacher in a place that’s much more like Montclair,” Galant said that researching and writing “Rattled” has made her more of an anti-sprawl advocate. But she stops short of preaching or proselytizing. “I want readers to enjoy it, to have fun and just sort of laugh at the things having to do with how seriously we take ourselves and our homes and our schools. But the more serious side of it is just the idea that we’re all sort of fighting for the same space.
“It’s the same thing with the bears coming into more and more suburban areas and like deer coming into Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield – the sense that we’re all competing for the same right to be here, and just because you buy a house doesn’t mean you automatically win.” TARESSA STOVALL
