Sarah Cypher
Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine), an ALA Stonewall Honor Book long-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and winner of the 2024 Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others, and she has been a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. She grew up in a Lebanese family near Pittsburgh and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife.
Q: How did the idea for THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL come about?
A: I was working on an early draft in the mid/late-2000s, in my twenties and with a head full of a lot of things: my Arab identity post-9/11, the work of learning how to write a novel, and the rich magical realist approaches to the form--especially how writers like Gabriel García Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Isabelle Allende, and other writers from postcolonial backgrounds infused a Western form with new life. I was writing a scene of my own, and a blue baby was born to two of my characters. I didn't know what to do with that element, but it felt essential to the project. It led the way through all of the drafts and years to follow.
Q: What was the writing process like for you? Did you follow a strict outline or did some parts just come to you? How did the story evolve over the drafts?
A: I tried everything over the 15 years it took to write the novel, putting it down and picking it up again. Making an outline helped me finish some early drafts, but it shackled me to a linear arc and conventional ideasabout storytelling that ultimately didn't serve a queer cross-cultural narrative. Rewriting it from scratch during my MFA (2017–2020) helped me embrace the parts of this tale that are nonlinear, allowing it to be ABOUT storytelling—as an act of subversion and personal agency.
Author Photo credit: Jen Joseph Photography.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our March 2024 author. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
