This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shoshana von Blanckensee, whose debut novel, Girls Girls Girls, is out today from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. In the summer of 1996, best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the legendary queer paradise of San Francisco, liberated from the judgement of their neighbors and the strict expectations of Hannah’s Orthodox Jewish mother. But when the financial pressures of the West Coast push the girls to start stripping, Hannah feels trapped. Sam wants Hannah at the club, but Hannah hates stripping almost as much as she hates disappointing Sam. Then Hannah meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. In an effort to stay in San Francisco and away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement. As Hannah falls into Chris’s world and Sam meets new queer friends, distance grows between the young women. A piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and confounding search for ourselves and home, Girls Girls Girls is a vibrant novel about first love, heartache, and growing up queer in the nineties. Of the novel Catherine Newman wrote, “Girls Girls Girls floored me—the nostalgic angst and agony of it, the heat and beauty and tenderness. Shoshana von Blanckensee puts it all on the page so viscerally: lust, hunger, death, sex, grief, love, and every other thing a human body is and does. It’s completely extraordinary.” Shoshana von Blanckensee lives in Berkeley, California, with her partner and kids. She is an oncology nurse by day and a writer by any available moment.
Shoshana von Blanckensee, author of Girls Girls Girls. (Credit: Chloe Sherman)
1. How long did it take you to write Girls Girls Girls?
I began writing Girls Girls Girls around 2005, initially in the form of short nonfiction prose poems. Over the course of the last twenty years, I’d step away from it, return to it, leave again out of frustration or lack of time, then return again. Even without consistent effort, the sheer number of hours over the years paid off. The prose poems started to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I began fictionalizing the work more and more to create a cohesive story with plot and momentum. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I delved back in with a promise to myself that I’d stick it out until it was a completed draft of a full-length novel.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I was the most challenging thing about writing the book! I have, and have always had, a loud, rude, and disruptive internal critic. I don’t think I can control how I feel, but I can make an intellectual decision to not let cruel thoughts prevent me from completing the work. When I promised myself I’d finish the book it was with one caveat: that it could be the worst book ever written. It didn’t have to be good, it just had to be done. It’s amazing how many impossibly intimidating things you can get yourself to do, if you’re willing to be an incompetent beginner at them. I hope to let myself be an incompetent beginner at writing no matter how many books I publish in my life. There’s so much freedom in that mindset.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m an oncology nurse and a parent as well as a writer, so I have to be creative and flexible with my writing time. Much of this novel was written in one-hour increments during my lunch breaks at work. I’d close myself in an empty exam room and pull up my Google doc. Now I’ve dropped my work hours a bit and I have Tuesdays and Fridays for writing. It feels luxurious to have hours at a time.
4. What are you reading right now?
Loca (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Alejandro Heredia, and I’m absolutely loving it.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Miller Oberman. He’s a poet, and poetry overall doesn’t get the readership it deserves. I recently read Miller’s book Impossible Things (Duke University Press, 2024), and I was floored by it. It’s a heart-aching exploration of fatherhood, manhood, child loss, and grief.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
This is probably a common complaint, but I need more hours in every day. I want four hours of writing, a six-hour nursing shift, a two-hour walk in the woods, eight hours for friends and family, and eight hours of sleep. Why is that too much to ask for?
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
One of my editors is also a writer and told me the first editorial letter would feel overwhelming, discouraging, and maybe impossible. She said it would take at least a week to process. She was so right! At first I worried I didn’t have the skill to implement it, but after a couple weeks I was able to break the work up into incremental steps and set a series of goals. It took me a couple months, and it was the hardest part of this process, but also the most gratifying.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Girls Girls Girls, what would you say?
I was so young and deep in survival mode before I started Girls Girls Girls. I needed love more than writing advice, more than a promise everything would end up great in some distant future. Honestly, I think I’d just hug her.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Girls Girls Girls?
You’re going to get a very honest answer here. I wouldn’t have felt right writing about stripping if I hadn’t worked as a stripper when I was young. There are so many misconceptions about sex work, who chooses it and why, and it was important to me to show something other than the caricatures that are so prevalent. Stripping was hard, but it offered me total financial autonomy when I was a young, depressed, queer person with a high school diploma. It offered ample cash and ample time to get my brain and heart in better working order. I have more regret about a few of the minimum-wage jobs I suffered through than I do about stripping.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If you put the hours in, the work will work itself out. I don’t write to a word count or a set number of pages. I promise myself a specific number of butt-in-chair hours per week. This method means you don’t have to feel bad if you rework a single paragraph for four hours straight. It’s just work working itself out.
