Your story in this week’s issue of the magazine, “Separation,” centers on Kate, a young woman whom we follow through a run of life changes. The story’s fairly short, but you touch down at various significant moments in Kate’s life. What are the challenges and rewards from taking in such a long scope of time in a short story?
I started writing this story during a period of my life that seemed to me to lack narrative coherence: no defining features, no unifying theme, characters who came and went with alarming finality. And yet I was familiar enough with the way people tend to narrativize their lives that I assumed from some future point in time I would find this “phase” all too easy to sum up: oh, yeah, my twenties. I’m interested in our tendency to bracket life like that. It’s an authorial tendency, I think—which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. Does this ordering impulse contain us? Liberate us? Relieve us? So I wanted to write a story that took those brackets (milestones, I guess, we call them) and considered the ways in which they’re completely arbitrary and the ways in which they’re profoundly illustrative. Because I think they’re both! We can’t understand Kate’s life by reading this story—so much gets left out—but we can understand something about how she understands it.
By the end of the story, the reader realizes that the beginning must have happened many years before, and yet it feels fresh and current when it’s first encountered. Is this sense of timelessness—or of the current moment—something you think about while writing, and how do you insure that it works?
About halfway through the story, we encounter a man named Felix. At first, we don’t know his name; he’s introduced only as Kate’s “second husband.” Every time I read that (even though I’m the one who wrote it), I think, How awful! That we’re so beholden to chronology, that it’s always a matter of firsts and seconds. Because does it ever really feel that way? Can’t that day at the reservoir, a quarter century ago, feel as close as that day in the shower, just a few years ago? Or—flip it—can’t that day in the shower feel as far away, as foreign, as that day at the reservoir? Writers are an especially chronology-dependent bunch, and I’m not the kind who throws it all out the window; you’ll notice that he’s still the “second husband,” no matter how many times I flinch. And maybe that’s because what I’m hoping to do is somehow capture both sensations of time—the immediate and the remote, how sometimes one bleeds into the other, and how other times they’re two separate rivers.
Writing certain scenes in this story felt like remembering them, not because they actually happened but because that strange kaleidoscope of nostalgia, of distances collapsing and expanding, was always there while I was putting words on the page. I wrote the ending about a dozen times, but I wrote the beginning only once.
When Kate’s daughter turns fifteen, she stops eating. How does this complicate Kate’s narrative of control over her own life? And does it feel ironic, or weird, for you, as the person pushing these characters around the page, to have to grapple with ideas about control and parenthood?
The intersection of creativity and control is so mysterious to me. So interesting, too. I know I’m “pushing” these characters (gently! or maybe not so gently), and sometimes it feels that way—usually at the beginning of a story, when they’re (I’m) just starting out. Characters never walk into my head or speak to me. I’m always surprised, and a little envious, to hear other fiction writers describe it like that. But there does come a point in writing when I realize I’ve ceded a lot of the control that I began with. Ceded it to the story, I suppose: as in life, each narrative choice made along the way narrows the range of possible endings. But ceded it to the characters, too—or that’s how it can seem. There’s a scene in “Separation” that takes place in a bathtub, in which it becomes clear that Kate and her daughter might have two totally separate understandings of what has just happened. A huge gulf of understanding opens up between them. You might think that, as the author, I’d get to be on both sides of the gulf—that I’d know both sides of the story. But, really, I’m in the gulf. I think it’s the most creatively generative place to be.
“Objects of Desire,” your story collection, comes out this summer. What are some of the commonalities in its stories? And what do you hope to turn to next?
I answered your first question by talking about the idea of “narrative coherence.” There are eleven stories in “Objects of Desire,” and they’re very different from one another, but I think they’re all circling that idea. How do we cohere? When do we start cohering? And what happens when we stop—when we fall apart?
I’m writing a novel now. It’s written, in part, through a series of letters. The letters are pieces of something, and when I figure out what that something is—when it coheres—I’ll be excited for you to read it.
