Kas, the plucky and sarcastic central character in Elaine Szewczyk's comic novel "I'm with Stupid," isn't so much a victim of bad luck in love as having quite a run of romantic wipeouts. Having taken a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go on African safari with two of her closest friends, she discovers the hottest park ranger ever flirting with her. One short fling with this Adonis of the bush and all seems well, right? Not so much.
We spoke with Szewczyk, a New York resident and current fiction editor at "Kirkus Reviews," about her romantic misadventures...and how close to home they really hit.
Where did the idea for this book come from—the "I'm with Stupid" t-shirts?
Actually, I'd gone to South Africa on a press junket sponsored by an alcohol company...and booze definitely helped me write this book, you could say. I'd never been on any safari and they're really interesting-sort of a "Gosford Park" set-up where rangers are really like your servants. They're supposed to be there to eat dinner with you, talk to you whether they like you or not, and obviously they're there to drive you around to see wildlife.
Are the rangers as hot as the one you write about in the book?
Let's just say there's something perverse about a bunch of rich people going on safari and these guys. They get hit on by lots of married women and they check wedding rings to make sure they're not talking to the wrong women; many women take their wedding rings off. I thought it was an amusing scenario.
You have Kas in New York after the safari and William, the ranger she hooked up with, coming to see her...
Well, it's a comic novel about disappointment in love, and what better way than to have this protagonist sleep with someone after knowing him for 10 hours and thinking he's so wonderful and romantic, this handsome man in uniform who's tall and so gorgeous...and then having him be this ridiculous mess when she gets to know him better.
Is William modeled after an actual ranger?
I didn't have anyone in mind for any of the characters when I was writing the book. They are people I'd like to know and spend some time with, though. Obnoxious as they can be, they're the kind of people who make things fun; they're catalysts for chaos.
How about your super-rich, hyper-horny 17-year-old Manuel from Mexico character?
He's completely a figment of my imagination. The only thing, if you want to draw parallels to real life, is I'd once gone on a Carnival cruise with my cousin for free—I'd never pay for a Carnival cruise—and it was two weeks on this boat, just filled with insane people. It was New Year's Eve and we're about to toast the millennium, and this group of early 20s, extremely obnoxious, foreign, totally entitled boys shows up. You wouldn't call them men. And they're spraying everyone with champagne, whether you like it or not. One of them would talk to every girl that walked by—a young man going totally ballistic because his father has money. He stuck in my mind for whatever reason.
How long did it take to write the book?
The first draft I wrote really quickly, two-and-a-half weeks in a total frenzy. Then I ended up with this huge manuscript that sat in the corner of my apartment and I'd stare at it and be sort of scared of it because I couldn't imagine how all those pages came out of my brain. I put it aside for a year, which I highly recommend. Writing anything is like falling in love or being smitten. After two-and-a-half weeks you're like, "I'm gonna win the Pulitzer!" The more time you let pass, the more you're grounded—you just wrote a book, calm down!
Then you edited and edited...
I rewrote it 10 separate times. Like with anything, there's a lot of stuff that's total garbage and self-indulgent. It all exists in that first draft. You think you're being funny? Well, reread it a year later. Was it really that funny? No, that joke was pretty lame, I guarantee you.
You don't want lame in a novel with "stupid" in the title.
The only trouble was with my parents. We were born in Poland and we immigrated to the U.S. when I was in grammar school. My dad doesn't speak or read in English, and my Mom reads some English and speaks it, but we only communicate in Polish. And no one in my family has ever written a book, so it became a situation. Like my mom calls—she says, "Listen, I have question for you. Your aunt says she read about your book. But it must have been some other book. What's it called? ‘I'm with Crazy?'" A couple days later my mom calls again and says, "You'll never believe your father, he's so embarrassing." I said, "What did he do?" She says, "Somebody asked for the name of your book." And my father raises his chin with pride and says, "I'm Stupid." I said, "Mom, what do you want? You're the one who called it ‘I'm with Crazy.'"
