Q+A with Nora Lange about Day Care
In September 2024, we released Us Fools, the debut novel by Nora Lange, which went on to be a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a best book of the year at The Boston Globe and NPR, and win the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, for which Joy Williams wrote the award citation. Now, we're thrilled to be publishing Nora's second book, a story collection called Day Care, on April 7, 2026 in the U.S., and on April 30, 2026 in the UK.
We describe Us Fools as a love story between two sisters growing up during the farm crisis of the 1980s in rural Illinois, while Day Care deals with issues of identity and belonging, while navigating overbearing mothers, marriage, young hip neighbors in a competitive housing market, eccentric bosses, and new motherhood in a style that is rambunctious and hilarious. If you're curious to take a peak (and I hope that you are), the story "Hot Spot" was excerpted by The New Yorker last summer, while Granta just published the title story last week.
Hannah Pittard, author of If You Love It, Let It Kill You, says "Lange is unwilling, uninterested, and unsympathetic to storytelling that traffics in the maudlin, mundane, or murky. The stories of Day Care are brutal, hilarious, and relentless; they are pedal to the metal, which is to say: divine and not a little bit insane.”
Following is a conversation with the author about her work.
Question: You’ve had quite the year. We’ve spoken on the phone countless times, but the only two opportunities we’ve had to meet in person have been this spring at award ceremonies: at the National Book Critics Circle Award in March, and at the ceremony for the American Academy of Arts and Letters a few weeks ago, when they presented you the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. You got to hang out with Rita Bullwinkel, Ed Park, Amy Hempel, and we got some amazing pictures of you with Joy Williams, who actually wrote your award citation in the processional. Did you expect any of what transpired when Us Fools was published in September 2024?
Nora Lange: Absolutely not! This might be the easiest question for me to answer of all time–thank you for that. The chronology of ‘awesome’ went something like this: Two Dollar Radio made a pitch to me about the novel. Eric and I spoke on the phone where he said some really catchy things, which had me near tears. It was the house for the book, full stop. Then nice things began rolling in, like blurbs from writers I admire that I had worked hard to attain. At the time I was working a new job and living alone caring for our one-year old daughter M-F, which is to say I was feeling pretty depleted. I remember when I received the email from Kimberly King Parsons telling me that she loved loved loved the book, I did cry that night. I felt elated. From there, it was just one delightful ripple after the next. Looking back, I think me and the Two Dollar’s team gelled in such a stunning way that this feeling must have been good for the universe, right? As in–nothing could have gone badly as we were sailing along in our little ship together, and from there things could only get kinder.
Plus, the novel is clucking good.
Q: To follow up on that, has it impacted your approach as a writer? Do you feel added pressure now when you’re considering new work?
NL: I feel like I get to say without hesitation that I am a writer. (Though, to be honest, even still those words feel clanky in my mouth.)
Pressure? Keep in mind that any moment my toddler might take a dump in my shoe. (True story, I was holding her and she took a shit in my Ugg knockoffs back in January–the size of a horse’s shit. Kid you not.)
Q: Us Fools was praised by Molly Young in the New York Times as the “Great American Novel,” and called “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. This new collection also taps into American consumption, contradictions, and identity. As Eleanor Henderson so eloquently stated in her review in the New York Times, how do you feel as though you’re able to “[map] the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we’ve been and the America we want to be?”
NL: I am hopeful. I am skeptical. I also don’t try to do anything other than resolve, or attempt to, the puzzles that puzzle me. America is one such riddle and I am grateful when a reader wants to sit captain with me, or allows me into their caravan. I have no answers. I am an explorer. I work really hard to both feel myself out alongside the topics or conundrums I wish to pursue. That–the personal (eye and body), which meets the terrestrial universal,(nation and academy)–is the fabric I weave, it so seems.
Q: We were on the phone a month or two ago, and I couldn’t stop laughing as I essentially recounted what happened in your own story, “Heart Beats.” Which you of course were especially familiar with having written it, so thank you for bearing with me. I don’t believe that humor is easy to write, and so much of it is about pacing and precision, yet you seem to make it appear effortless, while also using it as a vehicle to be particularly insightful and even scathing at moments. How important is humor in your writing?
NL: Humor is everything. My dad has a bumper sticker that was pinned above the microwave that I saw every time I was visiting his house in rural Oregon, which said: Guilt is the Gift that keeps on Giving.
Sometimes I mishear things. My partner says that I hear the things I want to hear, but genuinely I believe that the sentiment came from the person’s mouth, which it turns out hadn’t. The point is I begin to laugh uncontrollably. Nothing can stop my crouching over in laughter. Everyone around me thinks I am a lunatic–I am laughing too hard to share what I’ve heard, which wouldn't matter since nobody heard what I did. And all because of a fiction.
Q: You’ve mentioned that one of the newer pieces you wrote for the collection, “A Celebration,” is more tonally similar to a longer novel you’re at work on. I don’t think there’s as much humor or introspection there. Is this a new direction you see yourself moving in?
NL: “A Celebration” was written after I had heard from Cressida at the New Yorker, who was open to seeing more work. The issue for me when her email came in, was that I was heavily back into my second novel, Proofs, and felt like I needed to stay with it. So, instead of turning elsewhere, I simply looked at my pages and created a new short story from them. This allowed me to “stay in it”; in the project and not veer away. So, in that respect it's a part of a longer novel project in progress, and other parts of this project are indeed funnier. I do think the story has snippets of humor, such as the ex getting pregnant by the fishmonger who ran a fish shop on the ground level of the apartment building. It's just a tamer humor? More subterranean? Less overtly ironic, perhaps not now that I think about the character, a performance artist, who goes by Simone Deux who is the heiress to the Tootsie Roll fortune. But tonally, yes, I think in that regard the piece is very different. Less punchy, if you will. Also, I think it's entirely about introspection. Though that process–of maneuvering our personal insides–is happening as our protagonist moves through the world with these other characters. In that sense, it could be compared to the way Bernie, in Us Fools, sees herself, forms her character, in relationship to her sister, Jo.
Q: Some of the pieces might also be considered autofiction, such as the stories “Last Boob Feed” or “Landfills.” What about the form intrigues you?
NL: I woke up at 3am with a pukey child and I was thinking about how writing for me, in each instance, despite the differences between projects (novels v. short stories v. essays), I am writing a letter to readers. The form provides a different way to access the material of life, and therefore to connect with a reader. Nonfiction, such as it is, reminds me of the stage, of theater: where “real people,” “irl,” perform or play characters, either based on real people, or fictional ones, sometimes alive, sometimes not, but those people are bringing those people to life before an audience. Just think about it. I am thinking about it and about fictions v. nonfiction, so forth.
In general, I am not a fan of sharply delineating between genres. I do not think it was a big preoccupation in the past. I do realize it’s a market-driven interest, but I don’t like when Google suggests that I look at something that’s “for me”. Besides, if there’s a writer writing there’s an ‘auto’, which in Greek means ‘self.’
This, ours, is a culture of longing, to be safe, to have fuller lips, a fuller ass, to love fully, to get it right, to reach others. So much more.
Q: Who are some writers who you feel have influenced your work?
NL: Lydia Davis, Catherine Lacey, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rachel Cusk, Roberto Bolano (huge time), Percival Everett, Carole Maso. Gosh, so many. I’d give you a noogie if you were here asking me this question in person!
Q: If you weren’t a writer, is there another profession you could potentially see yourself working in that you’d enjoy?
NL: Scientist, in ecology. A dancer, forever. Despite my spinal fusion, I love to bend.
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