Jenny Jackson
Jenny Jackson is the debut novelist you’re going to need to fill your Meg Mason hole. An Editor at Knopf, a Mum to two, and evident word-wizard, Jackson’s delivered a novel that’ll make you popular at your bookclub, at cocktail hour, and at dinner. You’re going to want to talk about it, a lot. It centers on the dysfunctions of inherited wealth with three very different women at the fold all connected by the exceptionally, beyond-imaginable, wealthy Stockton family of Brooklyn Heights. It’s told from the perspective of Darley and Georgiana, who are the daughters of the wealthy Stockton family, and Sasha who married their brother and has been labelled the “gold-digger”. It’s got the politics of The Peltz-Beckham wedding and the glamour of Tommy Hilfiger’s existence, as well as belly-aching humour, uncomfortable politics and the kind of family discomfort you hope for in an episode of Architectural Digest. And better yet, Jackson has delivered on the interview - she is, quite clearly, hilarious...
1. What does a day in the life of Jenny Jackson look like?
I’m a book editor at Knopf and I have two small children, so my day looks like that of a lot of moms—an ongoing disaster of lost library books, mad dashes to the bus stop, subway delays, sad desk salads, and calls from the school nurse because somebody’s “waist hurts.” When I’m in a good writing groove I get up at 4:30 or 5, write until 6:30, serve my children yogurt and granola in the plastic dinosaur slushie cup they got at “Jurassic Park Live” that requires hand-washing (ugh!), get them packed, dressed, and off to school, then write more until 9. Then I change out of my Batman costume (pajamas) into my civilian clothing and take the A train to my office in Midtown. I have editorial or marketing meetings, I sometimes eat lunch with an agent or a writer, I write copy or look at jacket art, I work with finance on deal terms, and I run around the office gossiping with my colleagues and preventing them from doing their own work. I head home at 6 in time to engage in a heated negotiation over how many carrots one must eat to earn an Oreo, read bedtime stories about a rude half-dog-half-cop, and then collapse in bed with my iPad to read manuscripts.
2. How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?
I’m smartest in the morning and then it’s all a steep decline downhill. If I don’t write when I first wake up then the day is a total wash. I also find that running (or even long walks) is really good for my writing process. In an ideal world I wake up and write for a few hours, then go for a run and let my brain work on plotting, and then come back and scribble down whatever I have figured out before it totally vanishes from my brain. I have also been known to yell ideas and phrases into the voice memos on my phone while I’m running. Needless to say, I run alone.
3. Why Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights?
I was living on Pineapple Street while I was writing. In the beginning of the project, in the fall of 2020, we were all still working remotely and so I was stuck in my neighborhood and all my walks and runs took me along the streets of Brooklyn Heights. I became fascinated with this one huge, fancy apartment on my block, and I sort of modeled the house in the book on it.
4. Darley, Sasha and Georgina are three women tied to the exceptionally wealthy Stockton family, and they each have different attitudes to their wealth. What was the catalyst for writing about how the other half in America (or rather the 1%) live?
I was influenced by an article in the New York Times by Zoe Beery called “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism” about socially conscious millennial heirs who reject the fortunes they are set to receive. I found these kids incredibly admirable but also fascinating. How did their parents feel about their rejection of their trust funds? Also, how did their friends feel about them and their hundreds of million dollars in an age of gross income inequality? I wanted to explore what it might be like for a rich family to have a moral awakening.
5. Were these women based on people you know, or how did these three characters come to life?
The woman are all invented, but each has little bits of me or little bits of my friends. Darley is a math genius and a passionate aviation geek. I am not. But Darley is a mother or two wrestling with work-life balance. That’s me. Georgiana is a spoiled rich girl who grew up in Brooklyn. That wasn’t my life. But, like her, I did once work at a not-for-profit and develop a crippling crush on my co-worker. (He never actually noticed me.) And Sasha is an artist from a wild Rhode Island family who has married into extreme wealth. Not my story. But Sasha and her husband banter and joke the way my husband and I do.
6. I adored the descriptions of the architecture and interiors of houses on Pineapple Street and beyond. It was akin to watching an episode of Architectural Digest. It made the reading experience wholly immersive. Why was it necessary for you to place such emphasis on these women's homes?
I love this question! I am a bit obsessed with real estate (as are most New Yorkers) and I spend countless hours scrolling listings for apartments I could never buy, pursuing design magazines and drooling over lighting fixtures that cost more than a car. I think our homes show our personalities even more than our clothing does. We wear clothing to signal to the world who we want to be. We feather our nests in a much more intimate way—to give ourselves comfort and happiness.
7. Some authors immerse themselves in a setting, or research a particular field of interest, to make their plot as authentic as possible. Did you have to immerse yourself in a lifestyle of excessive glamour, partying and dinners to get a feel for how the Stockton’s might live? I imagined them as a Tommy and Dee Hilfiger set, but with more drama…
Oh, I WISH I had immersed myself in glamour! Instead, I wrote from a place of homesickness. It was lockdown and I was missing my friends and I was missing the chance to gossip and laugh and flirt and so I just let my characters do all those things! It’s no coincidence they are always going to parties—I really missed parties!
8. The way the novel’s structured is that each chapter’s told from the perspective of one of three women. This gave us, the reader, an opportunity to be in each of their circles looking out, judging the other two women. I was swinging to and fro with who my sympathy lied with - ultimately lying with them all. Is there a message in this, that maybe we shouldn’t be so judgmental because we can never truly know what’s going on? Or why did you choose to structure it as such?
One of the funny things about writing a domestic comedy is that you aren’t getting tension from those traditional big narrative drivers—there is no murder, no scandal, no theft. Yes, there are a few big dramatic moments in Pineapple Street, but most of them come from interpersonal conflict. When you’re writing about people who ultimately love one another, that tension is going to come from misunderstanding. So my characters misjudge and misunderstand one another all the time. The two sisters, Darley and Georgiana, think Sasha wants their brother’s money. They nickname her “the Gold Digger.” But when the reader is in Sasha’s chapters it is revealed that the sisters have totally got it wrong. Midway through the book Darley thinks her sister Georgiana is behaving erratically and she has no idea why, but the reader knows from Georgiana’s chapters that she has suffered a terrible loss. So this structure allows a loving group of women to have fun, have fights, and fall into intense drama.
9. There’s racial politics, sexism, adultery, snobbery, greed, lying, debauchery, fractured mother-daughter dynamics, strained in-law relationships, medical dramas, claims of gold-digging within the family, and beyond - it’s all in here - when writing Pineapple Street and interlacing these themes, what message were you hoping to deliver?
I think we are all walking through this world trying to be good. For some of us that means volunteering or running for office or recycling. But for those born into extreme privilege it can mean something different. Rich people can not only give money but can impact tax laws, can lobby the government, can set up foundations, can try to close the income gap. I wanted Pineapple Street to be joyful and fun and a really happy read, but I also wanted for readers to think about what it means to make the world better. Georgiana really engages with this question and eventually she gets her family to think about it too.
10. Why was it necessary to bring the perspective of Sasha into the fold, a humble outsider who married into wealth, rather than have, say, another wealthy sister?
You know how when you walk into someone else’s house you can immediately smell if they have been baking cookies or burning a sandalwood candle or really ignoring that diaper pail (ew)? Sasha walks into the Stockton family house and she can smell things that everyone else in the family is oblivious to. For Darley and Georgiana it is totally normal that their mother obsesses over the Yale alumni magazine, that the Social Register has a summer edition with the names of members’ yachts, that their closets are full of black tie gowns. But for Sasha there is a smell… and that smell is money.