Janna Brooke Wallack

​JANNA BROOKE WALLACK'S debut novel Naked Girl has been named a Finalist for both the 2024 Publisher's Weekly BookLife Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, and it won the 2024 CIPA EVVY Silver Medal Award for Literary/Contemporary Fiction. Naked Girl also won the Reader's Favorite Five Stars Award and Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion and BookViral's prestigious Golden Quill. 

Wallack's short stories have been published or short listed by literary publications such as Hobart, Upstreet, Glimmer Train Press, American Literary Review, and many more. Her short story "Campaigning" was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. This novel's prologue "Five Pictures" was a finalist for Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and her story "Cat and Rose" received a Pushcart nomination by The MacGuffin. 

Wallack grew up in Miami Beach in the 1970's and 80's, a landscape and childhood that inspired her debut novel. She now resides in New York's Hudson River Valley where she writes, works, and never gives up trying to lose ten pounds.


​What inspired you to write Naked Girl—was there a moment or memory that sparked the story of Sienna and Siddhartha?
Although Naked Girl is a work of fiction, it is so representative of my emotional journey as a Generation X kid growing up on Miami Beach in the 70's and 80's. Sienna's experience is just an example of the overexposure and confusion of coming of age in that time and place. I wrote some memoirs of my own childhood and quickly realized I would have more freedom and creativity with the narrative if I invented a different story. Sienna and Siddhi's lives are more layered and interesting than mine ever could be. 
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Sienna and Siddhartha’s childhood is both chaotic and oddly magical. How did you strike the balance between heartbreak and humor in their story?
This balance of irreverent humor and deep pathos is the key to the story's appeal. Though Sienna and Siddhi's lives are often dark and dangerous, the quirkiness and hilarity that sneak in, the moments inside of the moments, are the tricks fate uses keep us all hoping for redemption. Writing that balance into their story was my favorite part of this book, and it is key to the kids' lovability. 

The character of Jackson Jones is charismatic but deeply flawed. What was the most challenging part about writing such a complex father figure?
Jackson is a Narcissist. And a Narcissist begins as a person so abused and devalued, he develops such a protective, candy shell that it becomes impossible to find the original person inside. It was most challenging to write a character who at first seems impossibly selfish, self-obsessed, and self-gratifying, but upon closer inspection, reveals his own vulnerability and humanity and the original wounds that so corrupted him. 

You paint 1980s Miami Beach with vivid detail—how did that specific time and place shape the mood and message of the novel?
Naked Girl is in part a love letter to the Miami Beach where I grew up, a small town shtetl of mostly Jews, Hatians, and Cubanos all displaced and creating communities with immigrant spirit and pride. The Miami Beach of my childhood was clawing its way back from recession. It was insular, safe, tropical, colorful, ethnic and calm. The most expensive neighborhood could have the BeeGees living down the street from a boarded up home grown through with vines (we used to break in and explore them as kids). Current Miami Beach is vibrating at a much higher frequency than the island of my childhood. Setting the novel in my childhood era Miami Beach was a way to revive and preserve the privacy of a place where "greatness" was not yet on the menu. 

What role does the ideal “home” play in Naked Girl, especially when it’s constantly shifting for your characters?
The commune in the book would have been entirely possible in the 1970's-80's Miami Beach. And like the Beach itself, Xanadu is a character in the novel. Home is vital to family and stability. Xanadu is an unreliable and chaotic, yet ecstatic and intriguing place. The living, ever changing landscape of the commune in the story is a catalyst for much of the sadness and joy in Sienna's and Siddhi's stories

There are strong cult-like and counterculture themes throughout the book. What did you want to explore about freedom, control, and belief systems through Jackson’s communal utopia?
All of it! I find it fascinating how so many people are so threatened by the unfamiliar that they use culture and religion to qualify all measures of life as "normal," and I think normalizing particular childhood tropes is one of the ways humans get into a ton of trouble. When we decide THIS is what normal people do or feel and THAT is what troubled or disturbed or abnormal people do or feel, we ostracize and pathologize ourselves away from our commonality and community. That being said, humans also love to abuse and test the limits of freedom, and that is equally fascinating to me. The best part of writing is inventing a specific character, and then subjecting them to their own life, and being there to witness what unfolds for them.

Sienna’s coming-of-age arc is raw, resilient, and deeply moving. Was her voice difficult to find, or did it come naturally to you?
Sienna's voice is very similar to my own. It was far more challenging to write the others in the novel. Sienna may as well be my little sister or my cousin or best friend. I utterly "get" her.

What has it meant to you to see Naked Girl hit the Amazon Top 100 in multiple categories as a debut novel?
It took me twelve years to write Naked Girl (while I was raising my littles), and to see it get great reviews, top Amazon charts, and be a finalist or winner of nine independent book awards is one of the great highlights of my life. I am honored and humbled by how much love the book receives, and my most favorite part of the whole experience is the messages and letters I receive from readers who relate to and love the story and its characters.

Many readers describe your writing as both comic and compassionate—who are some of your literary influences or favorite authors?
Oh I could make such a long list here, but I do have some real literary crushes: Jeff Eugenides, Karen Russell, Junot Diaz, Gabriel García Márquez, Zadie Smith, Hanya Yanagihara, Otessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Coleson Whitehead, Jonathan Frantzen, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Paul Beatty... and tops from my formative years are Kurt Vonnegut, Anne Frank, and J D Salinger. There are more. So many more!  

What do you hope readers take away from Sienna’s journey, especially those who may relate to growing up on the fringes?
The hopeful takeaway is that family has no prescription. Every life is loaded with humor, pain, trauma and delight, and there is always room for redemption, healing and hope. Smack in the middle of all the dys-fun-ction, you can always find some "fun."

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Website: https://www.jannabrookewallack.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jannabrooke.cohen
Instagram: @jannakowan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janna-brooke-wallack-05b05636/

Purchase the book here: https://amzn.to/4nEm1nd