A CONVERSATION WITH JEN SILVERMAN

What is There’s Going to Be Trouble about? 

There’s Going to Be Trouble is about protest, love, and how we live with the consequences of family secrets. It’s about a woman who flees her small American town in the aftermath of a public scandal, to Paris in 2018, where she is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist. And it also follows a man whose involvement in the 1968 Harvard student protests against the war in Vietnam ends up having dangerous and far-reaching consequences.

What was your inspiration for writing this novel?

 I was in Paris in 2018 when the Gilet Jaune, or Yellow Vest, protests began. I was with my partner and an American friend, and we wandered by accident into the middle of one of the early actions. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was struck by how multigenerational the crowd was, along with the wide array of class backgrounds – Sorbonne professors next to truck drivers. The vibe was joyous and boisterous. And then there came a moment in which things shifted. It was like a switch being flicked – you could feel the air get violent. The police were pressing in on all sides, and there were some drunk guys behind us who started breaking glass bottles, and my friend became really anxious. The crowd was surging this way and that, and even when we made our way to the edge, the gendarmes weren’t letting anyone through. In desperation, my friend said, “We’re American, we’re tourists.” And the gendarmes let us through immediately.

Though that was completely true – we were Americans and we were tourists – I felt this absolute crushing shame. That we had had that card to play, and that we had played it. The shame stayed with me; I couldn’t shake it. And the more I thought about my reaction, the more I found myself thinking about what it means to be a foreigner witnessing mechanisms of change. What is owed, and what is meddling? In what ways was I projecting my own context onto the context around me? And then bigger questions about my own context: What does it take to effect change on a national level? What do mechanisms of change even look like? Are we actually getting anywhere, or are we just replicating our parents’ failed attempts?

Both There's Going to Be Trouble and your first novel, We Play Ourselves, feature a character who is fleeing scandal. What is your interest in fugitives and shame?

I find shame to be an absolutely fascinating engine because it is such a powerful emotion – more than anger, more than sadness. Shame demands that we change, that we crawl out of our current skins and into different ones. In We Play Ourselves, the protagonist Cass has done something scandalous that she herself is ashamed of, and she feels the need to change. In There's Going to Be Trouble, Minnow has done something that she feels is necessary, and the way it destroys her life becomes the fuel for her conviction that the world needs to change.

I think, in all of my work, I’m constantly asking questions about transformation: can we actually change who we are? Do we become different, or do we just drag our core self from place to place and dress it in new behaviors and new convictions? Anything that motivates transformation – like shame, like escape – is catnip to me.

 Minnow and Christopher both have passionate love affairs, ones that change the course of their lives. What are you saying about how love and activism intersect?

On the most atavistic level, we believe in ideas because of how they make us feel. Don’t we? We can talk about our ideologies in such dry pragmatic ways – one set of ideas vs another – but we’re humans, we’re motivated by love and desire and fear and ambition. In both sections of the book, it was important to me that Minnow and Christopher experience a political awakening alongside a sexual awakening. That they can for the first time imagine creating a different world because, having fallen in love, the world now feels different to them.

Where did the title There’s Going to Be Trouble come from?

I’ve always loved the Allen Ginsberg poem “America” – how unapologetic and unpalatable it is, how he manages to be both irreverent and sincere, how raw and unflinching he is in naming the ugliness around him, how he can’t help but let a kind of anguished love slip through too. The full line that the title comes from is: My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. I love that it is both prophecy and promise.

What made you set the novel against the backdrop of activist movements? Is there a direct parallel you’re drawing between America in ’68 and Paris in 2018?

Yes and no. The novel is interested in cycles more than two data-points. It’s about how we repeat our parents’ patterns and hopes and mistakes. The ways in which we replicate their striving for change – and what happens (to them and to us) when we see them stop striving. The disparity between what our parents hoped for, and what they were able to give us. And of course, how we have inherited the world they shaped, what we are trying to do with it, and the failures our own children will find us guilty of. And what they will do with those failures.

Do you think There's Going to Be Trouble is more about passionate romance in an environment of heated political protest or a novel about family and reckoning with the mistakes of our parents?

 For me, it’s both. And perhaps the two themes are inextricable. We protest against the world our parents gave us; we fall in love with the people who demand a better one; we grow older, we are forced to understand our parents’ limitations because we begin to recognize our own.

 What are you working on now?

My new play SPAIN premiered in November 2023 at Second Stage Theatre in New York, followed by the premiere of my play HIGHWAY PATROL at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. I was a writer and producer on the second season of JT Rogers’ show TOKYO VICE on Max (formerly HBOMax), and I’m looking forward to that dropping in February! I’m also in the early stages of the next novel for Random House, which is also set outside the country, and seems to be turning into a thriller.