Jen Beagin Books in Order

Jen Beagin grew up in Torrance, California, then moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, while she was young. Her novels often follow people who are trying to get through messy circumstances without pretending they have everything figured out.

Her path to fiction wasn't straight.

Before she began publishing novels, Beagin worked as a house cleaner and pursued visual art. While cleaning, she made photographs in clients' homes, including self-portraits. That work gave her a close view of private spaces, class differences, and the odd things people leave behind, all material that later found its way into her fiction.

In her mid-thirties, she took a creative writing course at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She initially wanted fictional settings for the photographs she had been making, but the class led to early stories about Mona, a cleaner with an observant eye and a habit of landing in complicated situations. Beagin later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

Those stories grew into Pretend I'm Dead, first published in 2015. The book introduces Mona at twenty-four, working cleaning jobs and volunteering at a needle exchange before a bruising relationship sends her from Massachusetts to Taos, New Mexico. Mona's voice is blunt, funny, and alert to the strange behavior around her, even when she can't yet see a clean path for herself.

Beagin returned to Mona in Vacuum in the Dark. Mona is still in Taos, still cleaning houses, and still carrying old family pain alongside new romantic trouble. The novel looks more closely at her past while putting her in the orbit of clients whose lives are just as tangled as hers. Readers who enjoy these books tend to respond to the mix of deadpan jokes, uncomfortable encounters, and real sympathy for people making poor choices.

Then came Big Swiss, a standalone set in Hudson, New York. Its central character, Greta, transcribes sessions for a local sex therapist and becomes obsessed with one of his clients, a married Swiss woman she privately calls Big Swiss. The book takes a riskier, more outwardly comic setup, but it keeps Beagin's interest in secrecy, grief, desire, and the stories people tell about themselves.

Her characters are often cleaners, artists, drifters, clients, and outsiders. They may be wary, impulsive, or stuck, but Beagin gives them room to be funny and vulnerable at the same time. Homes matter in these novels too, whether they are temporary rentals, clients' houses, a crumbling farmhouse, or a place someone is trying to make feel safe.

In 2017, Beagin received a Whiting Award in Fiction. Pretend I'm Dead was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and Vacuum in the Dark was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.

Beagin lives in Hudson, New York. The town and its surrounding Hudson Valley landscape helped shape the setting of Big Swiss, including its old houses, dog parks, small-town connections, and clashes between private history and public reinvention.