After earning a JD from Harvard University, practicing law in Europe, producing a critically acclaimed stage adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in Chicago and more, Alice Austen moved to Milwaukee in 2004. Austen’s play Girls in the Boat premiered at First Stage in 2018, and her first movie Give Me Liberty, filmed in Milwaukee with a mostly local cast, premiered at the Oriental Theatre in 2019.
Now her debut novel, 33 Place Brugmann hits shelves March 11, with a launch event at Boswell Book Co., where Austen will give a reading and take questions. Attendees can also pick up a signed copy of the book.
We spoke with Austen about the new novel, her career, and plans for her next projects.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
What do you hope readers take away from 33 Place Brugmann?
It’s a novel set on the eve of the Nazi occupation in Brussels, Belgium in a Beaux Arts Building. It follows all the residents of the building through Europe to the UK to the states over a span of almost four years.
Some writers I revere have written really wonderful things about the book, and some terrific reviews have come in. But when I hear that someone has read it, and they loved the experience of reading it, and they really cared about the characters – someone said it made them think, cry and laugh – that matters to me so much. Because I know how much books matter to me when I read them, and when someone has a response like that, it’s really exciting.
After studying at Harvard, you moved to Brussels and lived on Place Brugmann. How did that inspire this story?
It totally inspired it. The book opens with this description of how you can hear all the sounds in the building – and you really could hear everything in the building. After I’d been there for a while, I got to know some of the other residents, a couple of who had lived there before World War Two, and through the war in one case. Their stories were just unbelievable because the residents of the building had taken different sides, and they were acting on that, and everyone could hear everything except they didn’t quite know what the others were up to. It was an incredibly tense time. I wanted to capture that suspense of living in this place at that time.
Both 33 Place Brugmann and Give Me Liberty revolve around a group of people who live in the same place during a time of instability. What draws you to those themes?
I think I’m convinced that every story is like a detective story. We’re investigating who we are and what we really do when we’re confronted with difficult circumstances and have to make hard choices. Americans for a long time have almost seemed immune to the kinds of things that happen in the rest of the world. I don’t think we are any longer. We’ve started to see, even during COVID, how people who are living closely have to find a way to work together, to get along, to figure it out or not. I think those are the times when people are forced to confront who they really are.
How does Milwaukee reflect in your work?
I’ll start with the fact that I love Milwaukee, I think it’s the best kept secret in America. One of the things that Milwaukee has going for it, you know people call it Small-waukee. There’s this sense of community, and I think community is an extremely important and neglected benefit of living in a place in the modern world. We’ve kind of forgotten how important community can be, so I’m sure that is reflected in my work, this idea of people living in proximity, and that being more relevant than all the people you’re seeing on your screen who are often thousands of miles away.
Do you have any upcoming projects?
There are two films actually that have been written for Milwaukee, for Wisconsin. One is a project that was originated by Alfonso Cuarón and the producer on it is Mark Johnson, who’s terrific. He’s the guy who produced “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul” and The Holdovers. The other film I’m working on with [director] Kirill Mikhanovsky who I did Give me Liberty with, we’ll be shooting in the fall. Then I have two novels, and we’re deciding which one we go out with next. The one that I’m finishing now takes place in the 1970s in California during the massive labor battles between the teamsters and the United Farm Workers.
