Whole characters and story lines had been cut out from that book, and occasionally some of those characters would stick with me. I know that some of the characters appeared in the novel and then were cut out. Can you talk about how the characters you write stick with you after you’ve written them?ĬHELSEA BIEKER: Because I wrote the two books side by side, it’s a little hard to know what came first. SARAH NEILSON: Some of the characters from Godshot showed up peripherally in some of these stories. Heartbroke is an emotionally and intellectually moving short-story collection that balances darkness with humor and touches on the humanity of deeply flawed people.īieker spoke with Shondaland about inhabiting different characters, writing through her relationship with California’s Central Valley, centering humanity above all else, legacies of violence, and the freedom of fiction. Bieker expertly wrestles with the bonds between mother and child, her own relationship to Central California, and ultimately “trying to make sense of something that is really hard to name,” she says. Heartbroke explores the choices people make when there are few, if any, good ones presented to them. The characters in this collection are mothers, children, teenagers, sex workers, and, above all, people who dream, hope, desire, and act out of need or love, or both. Like Godshot, Heartbroke is set in Central California, but the new book’s lens on the place is wider.

Now Bieker is back with her first short-story collection, Heartbroke. The book made all kinds of best-of lists and was a finalist for both the Oregon and California Book Awards. In 2020, Chelsea Bieker released her acclaimed debut novel, Godshot, which followed an adolescent girl named Lacey May through the abandonment by her mother and the cult takeover of her small Central California town during a time of intense drought.

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