Oakland University professor reflects on personal, historical journey behind her new novel

For Susan McCarty, associate professor of English at Oakland University, writing her novel "2008" was less about capturing a single moment in history and more about making sense of a period of profound personal and cultural change.

"'2008' took me a long time to write - about 10 years," McCarty said.

The novel grew out of her experience of the 2008 Midwestern flooding, which displaced several members of her family and reshaped how she understood the world around her. "At the time, the flood was referred to as a 500-year flood except a flood of this magnitude had happened just 15 years prior," she said. "In some ways, this was my awakening to the threats of climate change."

That same year marked a turning point in her own life. McCarty was leaving a career in publishing in New York to begin a Ph.D., stepping into uncertainty as the financial crisis unfolded. "After the flooding happened, it was really difficult to leave my family in Iowa, in temporary housing, but I had to do it to start the next phase of my life," she said.

She began writing "2008 " several years later, using fiction to revisit that period from a distance. "I started this novel…as a way to write about the sadness and difficulty of that time of life-losing a home, leaving for another life, starting over," McCarty said. At the same time, she was interested in the broader social realities emerging in the early 21st century, including housing instability and the shrinking middle class.

Those themes were shaped in part by her academic work. While completing her doctorate, McCarty engaged with theorists such as Georg Lukács, Gaston Bachelardand Walter Benjamin, whose writing on home, memory and modernity influenced her thinking. "I was really interested in theorists who write about home as a conceptual and even political space," she said.

That intellectual foundation also informed the novel's structure. McCarty experimented with blending genres, pairing two protagonists with different narrative impulses - one drawn to romance, the other to mystery. "I wanted to write a novel where there were multiple fiction genres circulating at once," she said, curious about what might happen when those forms intersect.

Over time, however, the project became less about theory and more about character. "Eventually, I lightened my touch with the critical scaffoldings because…I had to focus on the characters and their becoming in order to continue and finish the novel," she said.

That balance - between experimentation and storytelling - proved to be one of the book's central challenges. "For me, there is a big push/pull between…experimental writing…and a well-plotted story with resonant characters," McCarty said. "I always want both. And I wanted my book to be both, but it is really, really hard to do right."

Set during a year marked by rapid change, "2008" unfolds against the backdrop of the financial crisis, the early rise of social media and shifting political dynamics. Rather than centering those events directly, the novel explores how they shape everyday lives.

"All these little seeds of crisis…were just starting to sprout, which makes 2008 a very interesting year to me," McCarty said. "I don't think this novel is necessarily 'about' any of these things per se, but they affect and influence the ways the characters live their lives. Just like us."

For McCarty, that connection between past and present is key. "I guess that's also what I want people to take away - a feeling of knowing and recognizing these characters and these times as part of our shared and common histories."

Now at Oakland University, McCarty continues to bring that same blend of critical inquiry and creative practice into her teaching and writing - encouraging students to explore how stories can illuminate both personal experience and the larger forces that shape it.