Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, tells the story of Celeste Price, “a young, recently-married, beautiful middle-school teacher — who also happens to be a sociopath who throughout the book recounts her systematic and relentless seduction of a fourteen-year-old student.” In an interview, Nutting differentiates between herself and her deviant main character:
I know that in my case — and I think this is true for so many authors — writing is the place where I mull over the things about the world that are beyond my comprehension: mainly death, sociopathy, and inequality. For me, being a writer is like going to the zoo, holds the same level of otherworldly curiosity — I can stand in front of a gorilla’s cage and have just an inch of glass separating me from fatal danger, yet feel completely safe. I can get right next to all these bizarre creatures I’d never, ever want to be close to otherwise. Writing Celeste was a lot like that. She’s so depraved that I didn’t really worry about people conflating me with her voice in any way… after all, this is a book that indicts the narrator instead of glorifying her. In order to do that, to truly capture the wrongness of what she does, and how much delight she takes in it, I needed to show the grittiest aspects of her transgressions. For the subject matter to be adequately disturbing, I had to push the writing until I’d thoroughly disturbed myself — that was the test I held the writing up to. And I did disturb myself, on a daily basis. I went through an incredible amount of antacid products while writing this book. Celeste is intense, to say the least.
The Dish 