It was 1987. In New York City, the AIDS epidemic was taking hold of a population, St. Mark’s Place and Tompkins Square Park were hotbeds of iniquity, and “straight edge” had emerged as a subculture of hardcore punk, one that counterintuitively required its adherents to abstain from eating meat, having sex, and doing drugs.
This was where novel Ten Thousand Saints began for author Eleanor Henderson.
“It started with a time and a place,” she told me on the latest episode of WNHH radio’s “Book Talk.” “My husband was involved in the straight edge scene in New York in the late eighties and … I knew that I wanted to write about [this] world of really rich paradoxes. I thought, there must be some stories in that world.”
The novel tells the story of three teenagers: Jude, Johnny, and Eliza, all reeling from the accidental overdose death of another teenager, Teddy. As the novel opens, readers learn that he was Jude’s best friend, Johnny’s brother, and — as the result of a one-night stand — father of Eliza’s unborn child. The novel follows them over the nine months of Eliza’s pregnancy, as their lives intersect with the straight-edge New York scene.
I queried Henderson about her choice to end with an epilogue set in 2006, on a Lower East Side transformed by gentrification. “At a certain point I was walking up and down St. Mark’s Place in New York City,” she said, “probably late 2000s, the oughts, and I realized just how much that street and the city had changed. As I wrote the book that became more and more of a thread. And I realized I wanted to write a book not just about the coming of age of these [characters] but the coming of age of the city.”
Fellow reader Sam Purdy wanted to talk about the end too, even though we were running out of time in the studio. “For me, it felt like the neighborhood had gone straight edge. Not so much in content — in content it’s totally materialist and wouldn’t bear any resemblance to straight edge — but in the sense that, this was a good direction to go in, maybe, but maybe it’s gone too far.”
To listen to the full interview with Henderson, and the rest of my conversation with Purdy and other guest Shifra Sharlin, click on the audio above, or find the episode in iTunes or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”