Five minutes with Joanne Ramos

Posted on 30 August, 2019

The Farm is the debut novel by New York-based author Joanne Ramos

Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, daily massages—and all of it for free.

In fact, you’re paid big money to stay here—more than you’ve ever dreamed of. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else.

We caught up with Joanne ahead of her In Conversation with Zoya Patel at Harry Hartog ANU on Tuesday 3 September.

The Farm takes the combination of surrogacy and capitalism to a sickening extreme–what sparked your fascination with these two concepts?

The Farm is my first book, and I didn’t start writing it until my forties. But the ideas behind The Farm have obsessed me for decades. These ideas are rooted in the experiences, and people and stories I’ve come to know, as a Filipina immigrant to Wisconsin in the late 1970s; a financial-aid student at Princeton University, where I befriended trust-fund kids who would never need to work a day in their lives and took this privilege as a given; a woman in the male-saturated world of high finance; and a mother with deeply conflicted feelings about my generation’s obsession with giving our kids the best of everything.

In particular, The Farm is rooted in my questioning of the story of meritocracy on which I was reared: the narrative that with hard work and savvy, anyone in America can “make it”; the notion that, by and large, one gets one’s just deserts in life.

The notion of meritocracy reinforces capitalism, because it justifies the inequality that’s an inevitable consequence of a competitive system like capitalism. As far as surrogacy—I happily stumbled upon this idea after reading a short article in the newspaper about eighteen months into the process of writing the book.

A luxury surrogacy facility seemed the perfect vehicle to explore the ideas I was interested in: it pushes to the extreme the idea that inequality starts in utero and often has nothing to do with merit.

The ‘baby farm’ where the wealthy pay for women to host their babies is called Golden Oaks–what is the significance of the name?

When I was considering names for the surrogacy facility in my book, I put myself in the shoes of the people who run the company. How would they market such a place? I thought they would probably market it the way so many luxury food/drinks/fitness/lifestyle brands currently do: as all-natural, wholesome, aspirational, empowering, and, even, virtuous.

So, the Farm is marketed as a pristine oasis where the scions of the wealthy get an edge in life starting in utero, but also where the impoverished women carrying these fetuses get paid the kind of huge sums that can change their lives for good. Because one of the selling points of the surrogacy facility is its pure, bucolic setting, I wanted to take its name from the natural world.

Oaks start as seedlings and grow into huge trees that are at both beautiful and strong, which seemed a nice metaphor for the Clients’ babies. And these oaks are golden!

Why do you think surrogacy is such a charged topic, especially now?

I think surrogacy, and in particular commercial (paid) surrogacy, is charged because it sits at the crux of so many relevant and controversial issues: a woman’s agency over her body; ever-widening wealth inequality and the potential for the abuse of desperate women with few good options to improve their lives; and the discomfort people feel, whether acknowledged or not, with the steady encroachment of the market into spheres once deemed private, if not sacred.

Some reviewers have called The Farm a dystopia, some a present-day reality–on which side of the line do you fall?

The world of The Farm is meant to be our world pushed forward just a few inches. I didn’t want to create a world so far ahead of ours that the reader could dismiss it as “sci fi” or highly improbable. It was meant to be our world amplified and changed just enough that a reader might see her reality with a new perspective.

In truth, almost everything in The Farm already exists. Although I didn’t research them before writing the book, surrogacy facilities operated in Thailand, Nepal and India before the industry was banned several years ago; commercial surrogacy facilities still thrive in the Ukraine.

Already, poor, immigrant women world over leave their children to care for other, wealthier people’s children. Already, products of all sorts are marketed to us as empowering and aspirational—promising us not just a nice smoothie or handbag or workout, but a healthier/more glamorous/more love-filled/more fulfilled life. And already, some of us feed our kids all-organic meals, wheel them around in $2,000 strollers and enroll them in Mandarin and music classes as toddlers to give them a good start in life, while other kids have much bleaker, more constrained possibilities.

Creating the world of Golden Oaks wasn’t that much of a stretch from where we are today.

Where did the character of Mae Yu, the self-serving Harvard Business School graduate who manages Golden Oaks, spring from?

My initial idea for a book was a more intimate story about a young Filipina baby nurse who leaves her own newborn at home to care for a wealthy person’s child. When I came upon the idea of a luxury surrogacy facility, it allowed me to broaden my lens to include the story of meritocracy and capitalism.

I wanted a character in the book to be a beneficiary of, and believer in, our current system—and she became Mae Yu. Mae Yu’s character is drawn from my own experiences, particularly those working in finance, but also those of acquaintances of mine who’ve attended business school or work in the corporate world.

I don’t see Mae Yu as a villain. In many ways, she embodies the American Dream, and to the people in her orbit, she is a good friend, boss, daughter and mentor. And yet, she runs a company that manipulates and commodifies women.

I’d hazard to guess that many readers know someone like Mae, if in a much milder form: someone who is fundamentally a good person but who has compromised her values for lifestyle or job or necessity or convenience—say, the friend who works at a university with an endowment invested in oil companies; the banker who donates money to environmental causes and also drives an SUV and owns several enormous houses that she barely uses but keeps air-conditioned all year; the museum that accepts donations from pharmaceutical companies that make opioids. I think maybe Mae Yu is such a polarizing character because we know her best.

When you sat down to write The Farm, what books did you place on your desk to inspire and guide you?

My influences in writing the book were varied. They were writers who made me love the written word—like Virginia Woolf, especially A Writer’s Diary; Marilynne Robinson and her trilogy comprised of Home, Gilead and Lila.

Certain writers sucked me in because of their subject matter and sense of mission: the stories of George Saunders impacted me a great deal; so did Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Zadie Smith’s essays; Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers.

What’s on your TBR (to be read) pile?

I’m currently reading Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. On my TBR pile is Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman in Trouble and The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert.

the essentials

What: Joanne Ramos in conversation with Zoya Patel
When: Tuesday 3 September from 6-8 pm
Where: Harry Hartog ANU, 153-11 University Avenue, ANU, Acton
Cost: Free, register via Eventbrite