As I read through a student story recently, I had the sensation that I was walking. It was a trudging sort of walk, one foot after the other; I was moving through scene after scene, each one skillfully written. But there was something that was a little flat in the story — all of the action and dialogue were weighted the same way. There was the sense that the narration was flat, always on one level, without pauses or breath or stillness. I stood up, suddenly, and I understood my response to the story — the scene didn’t have a nuanced sense of movement. When we read stories, we move along with them, our breath attending to the cadences of the sentences, the scenes, the shape of the action. My experience reading the many similar scenes felt like walking and walking in a straight line.
If scenes were breath, this is what the scenes in a story like this would feel like as you read them:
But a story with a varied pace, in which scenes have been shaped to highlight certain elements, does not feel like this as you read it. A story that is paced to emphasize a certain moment could look like this:
Or let’s look at a scene in terms of a phrase of movement. Here is a scene that is written so that all of the actions and dialogue are equally weighted:
Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa has ordered a salad.
“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.
“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.
“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.
A car drives into the front window of the restaurant. Glass shatters.
Jane and Lisa look up at the car.
“What just happened?” asks Jane.
“My salad is pretty bad, too,” said Lisa.
A man falls out of the door of the car. He is bloody. Jane gets up and helps him. He dies.
So if this story were translated into movement, it would be a straight line, like this:
The pacing of this scene lends equal weight to all of the actions. We don’t know what the author wants to highlight as important; we don’t know where to pause, what to invest in as a reader. The experience of reading is, in some ways, an experience of movement — you are swept along by the writer’s sentences, cadences, pauses, crescendos. So how do you slow down a scene, highlighting certain aspects and not others?
The experience of reading is, in some ways, an experience of movement — you are swept along by the writer’s sentences, cadences, pauses, crescendos.
Think of a scene as a phrase of movement. By slowing down and leaning into some moments, you help the reader pay attention to them — you lend them more importance. Watch this dancer’s phrase.
See what happens to the scene when you slow down, like this:
Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa has ordered a salad.
“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.
“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.
“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.
There is a thunderous crash at the front of the restaurant. Diners scream as a car drives into the front window of the restaurant; glass shatters, tables are upended, plates and forks and knives skid across the floor. Jane and Lisa jump up; a man falls out of the door of the car. His shirt is soaked with blood and he looks dazed. Jane dashes toward him and holds him as he closes his eyes.
In this scene, the pacing slows when the car crashes into the restaurant; this allows the reader to identify this as a moment of importance and it highlights and shapes the reading experience. Or another way to do it is this:
Jane and Lisa are eating lunch at a café. Jane has ordered a cheese sandwich. Lisa eats a salad.
“This is a terrible sandwich,” said Jane, putting it down.
“Really? Why?” asked Lisa.
“The bread is kind of soggy,” said Jane.
A car drives into the front window of the restaurant. Glass shatters.
Jane and Lisa look up at the car and continue eating.
“What just happened?” asks Jane.
“My salad is pretty bad, too,” said Lisa. She digs her fork into it. Jane leans over and contemplates Lisa’s salad. It actually looks delicious to her. The lettuce is green and lacy and a few tomatoes are scattered throughout the leaves, and the vinaigrette clings to the leaves like drops of rain.
“Let me try it,” said Jane.
Jane’s fork stabs the salad and she brings out a luscious dark red raspberry.
“Look at this,” she says.
They look eagerly into the salad while, around them, customers swarm around the car and a bloody man falls out of the door of the car.
Here the emphasis is a bit different; the narrative slows down and the salad, and the two women’s relation to it, and perhaps what it could represent, becomes the important element. In this case, what the author highlights reveals something about the characters and what they value, too.
Or what would happen if we really slowed down the action at the beginning and then sped it up.
Like this dancer:
When Jane and Lisa walked into the restaurant; they were meeting for the first time in years. It was the first time they had met since Jane moved across the country, and it was the first time Lisa had seen Jane since her divorce. When they entered the large, busy diner, they did not recognize each other for a moment, and walked through the roar of the crowd, wondering who each one had become. When they spotted each other, they stopped, walked quickly toward each other, and hugged, carefully.
They sat and each ordered. As they waited for their food, they regarded each other with interest.
“It’s been a long time,” said Jane.
Their food arrived and they began to eat it.
Here, when a writer uses exposition to set the scene, the pace is slower at the beginning, giving the reader the chance to look out, to draw a breath, to see what the landscape is in front of her. A beginning that is slower can give the reader context, can give us information on the characters, can set us firmly in a world.
Words reside on a page, but it can be helpful to remember: A scene is an arc of movement.
Words reside on a page, but it can be helpful to remember: A scene is an arc of movement. The reader moves with you through each sentence as the writer decides where each sentence reaches, stops, takes a breath. Sometimes the pace of the sentences is such that the sentences just need to walk, and sometimes they need to run and pause and reach. By exploring all of the possibilities for pacing within a story, for exploring all of the movement, pauses, and acceleration inherent in it, a story can be much more than walking in a straight line. You can explore the ways in which narrative can move and also the opportunities inherent in various levels of space. The narration unfolds the way a body moves. As you read a beautifully paced story, you sense in your own body, your own mind, the way the words can run, leap, and, sometimes, fly.
[Dancer is: Gina Kohler, Assistant Professor of Dance and Assistant Director of the MFA in Dance program at Hollins University. Video shot at Hollins University dance studio.]
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing my snowman.
If you come from a part of the world where snow does not exist, let me explain what a snowman is. A snowman is a bunch of snow, formed into a shape that vaguely resembles that of a man. Unlike a golem, however, a snowman does not actually come to life. Or does it? I decided to find out.
Magic isn’t something I ever believed in, so when David Copperfield sawed himself in half, I knew it wasn’t really attempted suicide. And when David Blaine coughed up live frogs, I knew it wasn’t Revelation 16:13 coming true — it was just a guy who swallowed some frogs for attention.
But while magic could never make my snowman come to life, I knew there was a chance science might. Science can do some crazy things. So to give my snowman every possible advantage, I filled his torso with a variety of organs I purchased from the butcher. Just in case.
And if he did come alive, I wanted him to be able to procreate (or at least have a good time), so I carved for him a beautiful snow penis. It was exquisite. Much better than any existing penis on any animal I’ve ever seen. If my snowman was going to come to life, he wasn’t going to be one of those hideous, legless creatures with disproportionately weak arms and a smoking habit. He was going to be awesome.
Unfortunately, the raccoons could smell the organs through his snowy flesh and got to him overnight. Thank goodness I didn’t also sleep outside that night. I have way more organs and I’m a heavy sleeper.
I’ll never know if he could come to life, but I do know that if he did, I would have named him Juan and we would have been good friends.
BEST FEATURE: Juan’s mouth stones were repurposed as miniature paperweights. WORST FEATURE: I had to watch his remains melt away over the course of two weeks.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Satchel Paige.
Amy Adams spends most of her time in Nocturnal Animals reading. Her character, Susan, has been sent a galley of a book by her ex-husband, Edward. They haven’t spoken in nineteen years. Not only is the title of his novel a reference to the pet name he had for her when she couldn’t sleep (from which this film gets its name), but it comes with a surprising dedication: “For Susan.”
Even more surprising is that it depicts a thinly veiled version of the two of them as a blissful couple on a road trip with their teenaged daughter. Except in Edward’s book, which Susan reads feverishly in her beautiful if cold Los Angeles home, the character of the wife is raped and killed early on, the plot hinging on her husband’s subsequent search for justice. As director Tom Ford writes it in his adapted screenplay, the moment Susan realizes what kind of work her ex-husband has authored, “She is stunned. The deafening silence and the stillness of her bedroom is in sharp contrast to the scene she just read. It takes her a moment to calm down.” A thriller wrapped in a marital revenge drama, Ford’s Nocturnal Animals — like Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, the novel on which it’s based — is also a film about the imagined female reader.
Edward’s novel, with its titillating violence against women, thrills and terrifies Susan in equal measure — both for what it tells her about her ex-husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), as what it reveals to her about herself. To be sure, this is the promise of all great literature: a book, Kafka instructs us, “must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” Or, in Proust’s words, “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.” But Susan stands as a peculiar avatar for a reader because the book she’s engaged with is particularly designed as a weapon against her. In the book, as in the film, she is cautious about approaching it, preferring to read while she’s alone.
Jake Gyllenhaal as novel protagonist Tony Hastings and its author, Edward Sheffield, in ‘Nocturnal Animals’
Following the book’s violent opener — which sees Tony (Edward’s alter-ego in his novel, also played by Gyllenhaal in the film) standing helpless as his wife and daughter are abducted by three men on an otherwise empty West Texas highway — Susan begins to worry about what’s yet to come. She recognizes the genre Edward has opted for, and she knows where the story is headed. But since her identification has already been co-opted (she can’t, after all, root against the book’s protagonist, especially when it so clearly feels modeled on her ex-husband, whom she both pities and cares for), she begins to fear that Edward may be laying a trap for her, guiding her thoughts towards places she has gone great lengths to avoid. As in Wright’s novel, the process of reading Edward’s novel leads her to retrace their failed relationship, which among other reasons fractured because she was unable to champion his writing as much as he would have liked.
But there’s a deeper fear here too, one that speaks to the kind of danger a book can conjure for its reader. It is a fear which Wright’s Susan voices in the source novel, stating that “she hopes she’s not being manipulated into some ideology she doesn’t approve.” As a moment of character introspection, this admission is revelatory. Here is a reader all too aware of the way reading can lure you into places you wouldn’t otherwise visit. In Wright’s novel Susan resides in the suburbs, a wife and mother whose picture perfect existence might crumble if she allows Edward’s novel to rattle her. She lives cocooned from outside disturbances, something that Edward’s novel pointedly reminds her. The most fascinating aspect of Wright’s Tony and Susan is the constant frisson between Susan-as-reader and ourselves as readers. The chapter sections that deal with her reactions to the novel come across like a running commentary on the attachment of contemporary audiences to lurid works of fiction. “Tony’s [fictional] world resembled Susan’s except for the violence in its middle,” we are told,
which makes it totally different. What, Susan wonders, do I get from being made to witness such bad luck? Does this novel magnify the difference between Tony’s life and mine, or does it bring us together? Does it threaten or soothe me?
As if to drive the point home, the narrator tells us that these questions “pass through her mind without answers in a pause in her reading.” Wright’s novel is constantly making us aware of these kinds of readerly responses to the text, making us question our own involvement in Tony’s and Susan’s plights, and leading us to wonder whether (and why) reading such violent novels can be both soothing and threatening at the same time.
Edward’s “Nocturnal Animals” is not a far cry from the type of airport paperback thrillers that make it onto book club and bestseller lists, all the while bracketing their own violence as belonging to a fictional elsewhere, one unrelated to the comfortable home where you sit down to read them. Devoid of the inner monologue which Wright offers his character on the page, Ford merely presents us with shots of Adams sighing or looking aside as she sets down the book. There’s anguish in her eyes, giving us the sense that the icy cold woman she is today might be thawing — proof of the humanistic power of the printed word, an art form more earthly and able to connect with real people than the conceptual art she deals in. (It’s no coincidence as well that we frequently see Adams reading at home alone, without the harsh if elegant makeup she dons for work). This change in Susan’s demeanor, Wright and Ford suggest, has to do with being confronted with violence. There’s something in the experience of reading about the indiscriminate violence depicted in Edward’s novel that destabilizes her worldview, and even risks upending it altogether.
In many ways Tony and Susan is a probing commentary on a reader’s imagined safety when dealing with portrayals of violence. “The book weaves around [Susan’s] chair like a web,” we’re told. “She has to make a hole in it to get out. The web damaged, the hole will grow, and when she returns, the web will be gone.” It’s a clear metaphor for entrapment, one which imagines her process of reading as a helpless struggle and pinpoints the feeling of losing oneself in a page-turner, though it recasts it in a wholly sinister light.
If, as recent cognitive scientists suggest, reading fiction makes us more empathetic (and remind us that women are more likely to pick up a book of fiction than men), this figure, of a female reader as a damsel in distress caught in a web of her own making, is particularly illuminating. It not only reimagines the most reviled of readers — those driven by emotions and seemingly easy to manipulate — but specifically maps that other looked-down upon group of readers: women. That the two groups have, historically, been lumped together is not so much a coincidence as a matter of fact. And so, while ideas of empathy and identification, of sentimentality and imagination, are embodied by Susan whenever she picks up Edward’s novel, the male author is shown to wield those concepts as a means of punishing his female protagonist, making a mockery of her own self-indulgent, empathetic reading experience.
In the big screen translation, Ford further complicates this tension. The suburban reader who lives vicariously through pulpy novels, providing her a sense of danger from the comfort of her picket-fenced home, has been transposed onto a vacuous coastal elite who lives an empty life and has no contact with what’s “real” — here, quite literally, and in a Trumpian sort of way, geographically in the South. In this new iteration, Susan is an art dealer whose gallery show opens the film: naked obese women dance in slow motion on giant screens to the delight of a gawking, Angeleno crowd. Everyone tells her it’s a success. She thinks it’s just junk. Overall, the dirty and gory reality that Edward offers her in his book, about laconic detectives and chauvinist criminals, becomes all the more striking. The contrast is made salient thanks to the film’s visual style, as Ford takes the sterile world of Susan’s Los Angeles — with its minimalist design and monochromatic palette — and juxtaposes it with the grimy, dust-covered world of West Texas, which feels oversaturated in comparison.
In the film’s final scene, Adams’ Susan sits and scans around the restaurant where she’s supposed to meet Edward. A few drinks later she realizes he’s not coming. Ford cuts to black before we’re allowed to see what she will do with the understanding that this has been, among other things, a cruel joke at her expense. The empathy she has expended on the novel — and which Ford visualizes with the golden cross that Susan often fondles as she reads, and which we see Tony wearing in the film’s in-book sections — is diminished as meaningless, as hollow as anything adorning her expensive house, as aimless as the cars littering the many establishing shots of the Los Angeles cityscape that punctuate the film. She’s been manipulated, playing right into Tony’s game, caring too much for his characters and his new career only to have that sentiment mocked and dismissed.
That the film ends on such a nihilistic (and torturous) note makes apparent the gendered dynamic that Wright had already embedded in his metafictional page-turner. “If Edward couldn’t live without writing,” Susan “couldn’t live without reading.” In other words, man writes, woman reads. In Nocturnal Animals, which is eager to ogle and revere its male characters and quite happy to make Susan a prop on which to hang the misogyny and elitism she begrudgingly exults, this simple proposition leaves an unsavory aftertaste. Whatever irony there was in Wright’s prose has gone. What’s left is a disdain for the type of reader Susan represents, the type of audience we ourselves have been nudged to become. And like Edward, Ford ultimately gets the last laugh, leading us on in expectation without ever showing up.
Stuck on an idea for your next short story? Every now and then we gather news headlines that are strange enough to be fiction. Here’s a batch of headlines to get your creative juices flowing along with suggested genres:
Self-conscious to the point of inanity, [Franco’s] Actors Anonymous is built on a towering stack on unwarranted pretension that sporadically attempts to undercut itself with a scene where a professor tells Franco that his book isn’t very good. Also includes an oral sex scene in a public bathroom that ends with a character spitting semen on to an unflushed turd.
“Readable” has become the chosen term of praise in our times precisely because so many of us find ourselves unable to concentrate as we once could or still aspire to. But to praise readability is to embrace the vicious feedback loop that our culture now finds itself in.”
“She could see she was becoming a thoroughly unlikable person.” So begins Likable, the first piece in Deb Olin Unferth’s short story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. This unnamed, unapologetically self-aware character imagines her offensiveness growing as she ages, and ultimately embraces this quality as a pseudo superpower. “Likable”acts as a springboard for Unferth to explore the fairytale stock figure, the crone: a simultaneously wise yet repulsive, and often nefarious, older woman. Age serves the crone well in that it imbues her with knowledge, while conversely rendering her unpleasant and disagreeable. She is overlooked, yet powerful. Unferth both modernizes and lifts the curtain of this tried and true archetype to reveal complex characters with faults, victories, and desires.
In the books second story, “Pet,” Unferth’s present day crone takes the form of a single mother living in a basement apartment with her aloof and angry teenage son. The central plot is her struggle to care for two ailing turtles that once belonged to her sisters’ children. When the distraught protagonist attempts to return the turtles, her sister replies, “I don’t care what you do with those turtles but don’t bring them here. I’m the good guy for once. Their aunt stole them — it wasn’t anything I did.” These women feel a real danger associated with aging, and the negative societal implications that follow. By foisting the turtles upon the protagonist, the sister attempts to free herself of impending crone status at the cost of dooming her own kin. Unferth’s characters, despite their best efforts, find themselves exhibiting crone characteristics.
“In Unferth’s world, moving forward is an act of fortitude.”
The turtles themselves are a classic symbol of age and endurance. With the ability to live over 100 years, the turtle is a mystical and ancient being, and yet the protagonist carts around in a tool case throughout the story. She takes them to the vet and to her support group, but they are considered inconvenient, and their illness is not taken seriously. The comically dark trio fumble throughout the story, unable to get the care and respect they deserve. At the end of the story, they return to the protagonist’s basement apartment, only to have find feces covering the bathroom walls due to a faulty drain. Amidst this chaos, she receives an unexpected call from a man in the support group. He suggests she release the turtles in a local pond. The story ends with the protagonist imagining releasing the turtles into a pond, where the can commune with other turtles. She envisions them far from their artificial basement dwelling, and frees herself by proxy.
Unferth’s exploration of the crone raises a pertinent and wholly modern question: how does the middle age women exist inside this space of erasure? When a woman is seen as unviable in a sexual marketplace that hinges upon the male gaze, existence outside of this gaze is simultaneously delegitimizing and empowering. In the title story the protagonist, another unnamed woman, is an ESL teacher. She is underpaid, her students resent her, and she is apathetic to the ineffectiveness of her teaching. She does, however, reveal to the reader that she has a unique power. She knows when people will die, saying, “I can look into their faces and see if they have long to last. It’s like having a knack for math or a green thumb…people wear their health on their faces.” Despite her usual apathy towards the success of her students, she takes a liking to a pupil who she knows could die, because if he does not pass the test, as he will be forced to return to his war torn home country. His English is very poor, and her only hope of saving him is switching his grade so he passes. To change his grade, she must bribe a disagreeable office assistant by driving her to a traditional Native American dance ceremony. The drive takes hours, and the assistant taunts her by calling her “Mary,” a reference to a movie —
“…where the angel comes to earth and shows a man the future and how bad it’s going to be, and the man looks at the future and says, ‘But what about Mary? What happens to her?’ And the angel says, ‘You’re not going to like it George.’ And George says, ‘Well, I have to know. Tell me, Angel.’ And the angel says, ‘She’s an old maid! She works at the library!’ and the man says, ‘Noooooo!”
It is poignant that we never know the narrators name, and that the only identification we have is a false name concocted by a mean spirited, manipulative person, who has no name other than “the assistant.” The narrator ultimately gets fired and is not able to influence the outcome of the boys test, but despite this dreary plot line there is a hint of redemption in the very last sentence. The narrator says, “I may be an old maid, and I may spend the rest of my life loving people who never loved me, and loving them in ways that aren’t good for me, but I stepped around with her. I danced.” She realizes that being unwatched, albeit isolating, offers a greater freedom of movement. Unferth is a master of comic darkness punctuated by a glimmer of hope.
Unferth brand of dark humor echoes Voltaire’s Candide, and she directly references the classic satire in Voltaire Night. This story features another unnamed middle age woman who teaches a continuing education class, this time in fiction. The narrator describes her student’s writing as “nothing to shout about. Not good, mostly unreadable.” At the end of the term, she proposes a game: everyone must recount the worst thing that’s happened to them. Her primary motivation for this game is that she will be able to talk about a recent breakup and have a captive audience. Like Voltaire’s own Candide, the student’s tales of woe are abundant. Although the students revel in the opportunity to air their grievances, there is ultimately no prize to be won. No one’s suffering has currency. In true crone fashion, the narrator becomes leader of a strange and somewhat sinister cult. Students take the class again just to attend Voltaire night. Their stories become increasingly tragic, and she wonders if it’s all gone too far. Attendees seem to be under a spell. Voltaire night lasts longer and longer, into the wee hours of the morning.
Voltaire’s message that we must “cultivate our garden” despite continual and senseless setbacks is prevalent throughout Unferth’s collection. By the end of each story, Unferth’s characters, despite constant humiliations and degradation, manage to pick themselves up. They exercise their offbeat power and savor small victories amidst the erasure imposed upon them. In Unferth’s world, moving forward is an act of fortitude.
When I began reading Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel Idaho, I thought it was going to be a plot-heavy mystery. The book opens on Ann, a middle-aged woman living in northern Idaho, rummaging through her husband Wade’s truck and thinking about Wade’s two young daughters — June, who has been missing for 18 years, and May, who is dead. From there, the story unfolds not as a thriller, but as a lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and recovery. We learn early on that it was Jenny, Wade’s ex-wife and May and June’s mother, who committed the murder. The book spans over forty years, opening in 2004 and moving back and forth in time, from the mid-1980s, when Jenny and Wade were still together and a happy, young couple to the mid-2020s, when Jenny is released from jail. At the heart of the book is the relationship between Wade and Ann, who meet not long before the murder of Wade’s daughters and begin a romantic relationship shortly thereafter. Ann helps to care for Wade, who is suffering from genetic early-onset dementia, and she works to piece together his life with his ex-wife and two children before he is too sick to remember any of it. I spoke with Emily Ruskovitch over email about why this book needed to be set in Idaho, how she crafted its lyrical prose, and why she set a chapter eight years into the future.
Michelle Lyn King: In an interview with Salon, you mentioned how your childhood on Hoodoo mountain was an influence in writing Idaho. I would love to hear more about that. How exactly did growing up in Northern Idaho influence you? Why did this story need to be set there?
Emily Ruskovich: I never made an actual decision to set the novel in Idaho; Idaho was there from the very beginning, from the very first moment I started to feel my way around this story, and in that way, the story and the setting feel inextricable from each other. The feeling I get from these characters is the feeling I get from the mountains of Idaho. It is beautiful and quiet and secret and can also be very scary. The mountain where the Mitchells live is a version of the mountain where my family lived. Our houses look different, but the layout of the land is very similar. The rotting furniture and junked cars the characters find out in the woods were very familiar sights for my siblings and me when we would go exploring the land surrounding our own. It was not a very friendly place in a lot of regards, and it was often quite scary. People were often armed. There was a lot of racism and anti-government sentiment. I remember finding some haunting things out in the woods, and I remember that one day, our half-built chicken house simply disappeared. Even the cinderblocks that formed the foundation, all of it gone. We were in the middle of nowhere, on a property that was incredibly difficult to access, and yet someone had come up in the night to steal every last piece of lumber, right down to the last brick. Another time, very early in the morning, we were threatened by a dangerous man who was waiting for us in our garden, in the dark. These facts are shocking to me, of course, perhaps even more shocking now than they were then. I feel alarmed at them, because, in spite of it all, the mountain remains the place I love most in the world, because it was our place. My family carved out a beautiful and kind place, as many people did, in an otherwise hostile landscape, just as Wade and Jenny did when they were young. Our acreage, like theirs, was strange and beautiful. Streams of pinecones; the tree sap smelled like honey. It was a very wild place, and some of the best years of my life were spent there. There were a lot of wonderfully kind people to be found, if you looked. A couple who made knives for a living, who lived two miles up the dirt road from us, nearly at the top of the mountain, were our dear friends and closest neighbors. We relied a great deal on their help when we first moved there. The anecdote in the third chapter about Wade and Jenny buying the land on the promise that the road would be plowed by the county (because a school bus driver lived even farther up), was something that really happened to my parents. The man who sold them the land told them they did not need to worry about buying a tractor to plow. He spun a story about a school bus driver that didn’t actually exist, in order to convince my trusting parents to buy. So we were in a bind once winter came. We used to have to haul our groceries up the mountain in a sled, just like Wade does in the story. Sometimes we hiked two miles down through the darkness and the snow just to catch the school bus. .
MK: I wonder if you could tell me a bit about how you structured the novel. The novel spans forty years and provides insight into the lives of many characters, not just the three main ones. Did you know the framework for the book when you began it?
ER: I didn’t even know at first that this was a novel. The first chapter of the novel was once a stand-alone story that I wrote during my first year in graduate school at the University of Iowa. One of my teachers, Ethan Canin, told me that it wasn’t a story but the beginning of a novel, but I didn’t listen — or, at least I didn’t know that I had listened. I didn’t want to listen. The idea of writing a novel terrified me, and I worried that I would ruin the story that I very much loved by expanding it. But a few years later, when my editors suggested the same thing, I realized that I had been feeling the same thing, too. I realized that ever since Ethan Canin put the thought into my mind, the story had evolved, grown inside of me, almost subconsciously, so that when I devoted myself to it, finally, a couple of years later, many of the chapters came quite quickly, the voices already very real to me, especially that of May, whose voice is the childhood voice of my younger sister Mary. But the first perspective I wrote from, aside from Ann’s, was Wade’s father Adam. It’s strange that he was the one I chose to start with, as he was only mentioned once in the original story, just briefly, and his story isn’t integral to the overall plot, but I feel it’s integral to the feeling of the novel. The scene of him looking for his own home really haunted me. That scene seemed to evoke the tragedy of dementia differently than the Wade chapters. So writing about Adam was a way of writing about Wade, too. Once I wrote Adam’s perspective, the structure of the novel really opened up. I suddenly had a lot of freedom to explore.
MK: I’m very interested to hear about Eliot’s function in the book. You could have made the decision to never return to him, to have him just be this character that, in a sense, brought Ann and Wade together. I loved that we did return to him. Can you tell me about that decision and his character?
ER: My husband said something to me about Eliot recently that really struck a chord with me. He said that it was interesting that Eliot had built his whole identity around an absence. The absence of his leg. And what a fragile thing that was to do, to believe that the story of your life began the moment you lost something crucial. I’m not really sure how aware I was of this connection as I was writing, that Eliot has done the same thing that Ann has done, in a way: she has built her life around an absence, around Wade’s pain. Writing about Eliot was, therefore, a way of also writing about Ann. Sometimes Eliot feels the presence of his missing limb, just as Ann feels, everywhere and all the time, the presence of Jenny in her life — the start and end of everything.
But I was more conscience of writing about Eliot as a way of writing about June. June is the only member of the Mitchell family whose perspective isn’t in the novel. And so writing about Eliot was a way of writing about her. It was a way of getting close to her own vision of herself, without writing from her perspective directly, which I felt I couldn’t honestly do, since she is lost not only to her family, but to the novel itself, which never does provide a clear answer to what happened. But getting so close to Eliot was a way of getting close to June’s love. Eliot’s chapter also opens up the possibility that June is the one who set his backpack on the edge of the dock, that June has committed a mostly-accidental act of violence — violence born of love — by putting his backpack there, which resulted in the loss of Eliot’s leg. And I think this is an interesting and disturbing parallel to her mother’s act of horrific — and also almost-accidental — violence toward May.
So I feel that Eliot, even though he’s somewhat in the periphery of the main plot, is the beginning of everything, as you said. Without him, there is no Ann and Wade. And without his voice, we wouldn’t have what I think is this crucial access to June.
MK: Can you tell me about organizing the timeline? What goals does a nonlinear timeline allow you to achieve that a linear one does not?
ER: I think a nonlinear timeline, in this case, more closely mimics the way memory works, the constant intrusion of the past into the present. I also think that a nonlinear timeline allowed me to write more accurately about the violence of what occurred, because it allowed me to explore that violence somewhat outside of time. It is not a straightforward story, even though at the heart of the novel is an absolute event, an absolute moment in time from which everything else emerges. But the way that event is processed, understood, remembered, forgotten — all of that is very mysterious, and I feel that writing from various points of time, non-chronologically, helped me convey that mystery.
MK: There are sections of the book set in the not-so-distant future, in the year 2025. I thought this was such an interesting and bold choice. How did your arrive at the decision to set parts of the book in the future? Were you ever encouraged not to do so or did you ever consider not doing so?
ER: I think that the feeling that exists between Jenny and Ann in the end is more complicated and more intimate than a context can alter. Their interaction is so personal that I don’t think it will matter if the world is different in 2025. Ann will still feel this way about Jenny, and Jenny will still feel this way about Ann. It’s the same as reading a book about the distant past. Even though many of the things people struggle with in those stories are so vastly different than our present day concerns, we still feel for them, and understand them, and empathize with them. We still are them. We love our families. We worry about each other. We fall in love. We feel hope and despair and anger and joy. And those things are untouchable, even by time.
“We love our families. We worry about each other. We fall in love. We feel hope and despair and anger and joy. And those things are untouchable, even by time.”
And because so much of Ann’s story is an act of speculation, it makes sense that the novel itself would be speculative in this very traditional sense. Ann is always looking into Wade’s past, but she is also painfully aware of stepping toward her future — her life after Wade. And it’s true that the novel will arrive at its own future, too. It will one day arrive at 2025, just as Ann one day arrived there, and at that moment, the novel will cease to be speculative; that dimension of the book will be lost. But I think that’s okay. I think that’s really interesting.
No one ever suggested that I change the timeline, and, while I had some nervousness about it at first, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was an important dimension to the novel. The reason I first thought to explore it was simply a practical one: I really needed June and May’s childhood to take place in the 1990s because I myself was a child in the 90s, and I wanted their world to look the same as mine did, so that I felt their childhoods even more deeply.
MK:What was the research process like for this book? I’m curious to know how you went about researching women’s correctional facilities in Idaho or Wade’s disease. I’d also very curious to know if you returned to Idaho at all while writing this book.
ER: I didn’t do a lot of research as I wrote. I looked up statutes regarding the murder of a child in Idaho, and information about sentencing in Idaho. This I did online, in a fairly quick search. And I read one book called Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System by Silja J.A. Talvi that was extremely informative and so heartbreaking and shocking. I learned a great deal from it. But I would say that mostly, as I wrote, I just imagined as deeply as I could and hoped that imagining so deeply would mean that I had created something close to what was real. (There is some author who says something like this; a friend quoted it to me once and it really stuck with me. I wish I knew who the author was.) I did learn some things about how a prison is run from my dad, who worked as a counselor at a correctional facility for young people. And, for a brief time, I co-facilitated a memoir-writing class at a medium-security men’s prison. But I have never been inside of a women’s prison. In a way, the best research I did was when my husband and I drove to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pocatello, Idaho, and we just sat in our car in the parking lot, looking at the un-spectacular building that we knew held so much pain and longing, so many stories. It was heartbreaking to see the little plastic slide out in the yard, and imagine the women playing with their children when they visited, trying to make it a nice time for them, trying to be cheerful. We noticed the things that the women would see through the fence — the hills of sage and scrub-brush, the quaint garden that volunteers kept up just outside, and we just stayed there for awhile, trying to picture what it would be like to only know this one view, your whole sense of the world framed by a single window, your whole life defined by a single crime from many years before. It’s been something I have thought about a great deal since I was very young. I’ve imagined deeply, all throughout my life, what it would be like to go to prison, wondering if a person might find some way of protecting her interior life in spite of everything.
“I’ve imagined deeply, all throughout my life, what it would be like to go to prison, wondering if a person might find some way of protecting her interior life in spite of everything.”
I can’t quite recall how much research I did on Alzheimer’s disease, but I don’t think it was substantial. I know that I looked up whether or not early-onset dementia was genetic, and at what age symptoms begin to show. I am sure there were a few other facts I looked up, too, but mostly, I felt like facts weren’t as important as the stories I have heard or read, which have affected me so much. Ever since I first learned what the disease was, when I was young, I have paid such close attention to stories about people coping with their loved one’s disease, and I feel that just from listening for so long, that I have learned a great deal. But it wasn’t from any focused research, it was just from years of listening and feeling. It was actually from a work of fiction that I learned the most. I read Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain, and the way she evoked the perseverance of a self — in spite of extraordinary loss — was one of the most moving things I’ve ever read. It had a profound influence on me.
And, yes, I did return to Idaho as I wrote! I returned many times. My parents were still living on the mountain where the novel takes place, so I spent my summers with them, working on the novel.
MK:I’d like to end with the subject of language. The prose in Idaho is, in a word, stunning. I kept finding myself rereading sentences over and over again. In many ways, the sentences mirror Idaho’s landscape. It also matches the interior landscape of the book’s characters. I’m curious as to how the narrative voice of the book came to be. Can you please tell me a bit about that?
ER: This is a really wonderful question, and I am so glad that you thought the language was effective, but I’m not really sure I know how the narrative voice arose. It arose partly because I had such a strong sense of my characters, and I felt their voices and tried to evoke those voices on the page. But it also didn’t quite “arise” — it was something that I had to really work hard on and struggle with. The language was so important to me, and so I did a lot of rewriting, deleting, starting over. It was a very long process. A few of the passages I’m sure I re-wrote fifty or more times, first allowing some poetry on the page, and then pulling it back, and then stepping it forward, over and over again. I never wanted the poetic language to feel indulgent or exploitive or inappropriate or separate of the characters, but rather a part of their understanding of themselves. If I ever felt that I was risking dishonesty by using poetic language, I was very disciplined about getting rid of it. It was a delicate balance to strike: How do you write honestly with poetic language about something that is absolutely not poetic, that’s horrifying and ugly? It’s a very difficult question, and I feel that I managed it only by getting close enough to my characters that the language was a part of their perspectives. I never wrote, in absolute or direct terms, about the murder itself. The murder is explored only through speculation and through memory, both of which are necessarily very flawed, and there is room for poetry in those flaws. It was by focusing on language that I found a way to express the impossibility of ever getting close enough to what occurred to understand it at all.
“How do you write honestly with poetic language about something that is absolutely not poetic, that’s horrifying and ugly?”
Also, I pay a lot of attention to rhythm. When I write, I speak. I read every single sentence aloud many times. I have muttered my entire novel to myself more times than I can count. One review mentioned that the language is a kind of consolation to the reader, and I was very moved by that, and hope that it is true. In the novel, there are many questions that are left unanswered, but that was what felt right to me, what felt most real. And so maybe the poetic language is a way of giving the sense of an answer, just a sense of one, that the story itself is unable to provide.
The Ladykillers star and typewriter enthusiast is also an author
Tom Hanks can now add publishing a book to his extensive resume. The actor has written a short story collection, titled Uncommon Type: Some Stories. It’sdue out in October and is centered around his fascination with the typewriter. Wait, a typewriter-themed collection? Yes, that does sound a little odd, now that you mention it. According to publisher Alfred A Knopf, the seventeen narratives will include “a story about an immigrant arriving in New York City after his family and life have been torn apart by his country’s civil war; another about a man who bowls a perfect game (and then another, and another) becoming ESPN’s newest celebrity; another about an eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant on the hunt for something larger in America; and another about the junket life of an actor.”
How those snippets will relate to Hanks’ love of typewriters remains unclear, but perhaps his typewriter app, Hanx Writer, will make an appearance.
The collection isn’t Hanks’ first foray into fiction. His story “Alan Beam Plus Four” appeared in The New Yorker in 2014. While the piece probably won’t change the way you think about art, it’s certainly a far more professional attempt at craft and narrative than the literature churned out by some of Hanks’ colleagues in Hollywood. To name just a few of our favorites:
— Paradise Alley: A Novel, by Sylvester Stallone, 1978: It’s a novelization of his own film. Also the title.
— Holy Cow: A Novel, by David Duchovny, 2015: This novel is from the perspective of a cow.
— Propeller One-Way Night Coach: A Fable for All Ages, by John Travolta, 1997: A children’s book written and illustrated by John Travolta, who likely had no training or experience writing or illustrating children’s books.
— Palo Alto, by James Franco, 2010: By most accounts not a terribly written collection of stories. However, Franco’s decision to star in the film adaptation of his own collection pretty much nullifies any sort of goodwill.
Then again, Hanks did recently make a movie with Sam Shepard — the actor, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and author of the acclaimed short story collections, Cruising Paradise and Day out of Days. Maybe Hanks will follow that path rather than the one blazed by Stallone and Franco? We’ll soon see.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The five stages of grief, also known as the Kübler-Ross model, were proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 to describe the process terminally ill patients go through when confronting their own death. Since then, this rubric has been applied more often to other kinds of grief: the deaths of loved ones, break-ups, and yes, terrifying outcomes of presidential elections.
By their very nature, the five stages of grief describe innate human coping mechanisms. If a key ingredient of a story is simply putting a character in peril, it’s no surprise that short fiction is full of characters making their way through this spectrum.
To help you cope with whatever you’re dealing with, we’ve unlocked 10 stories — two for each stage — from our Recommended Reading archives for a limited time only. For just $5 a month, members of Electric Literature get access to the complete Recommended Reading archives of over 245 stories — and year-round open submissions. Membership is tax-deductible, helps us pay writers, and keeps all of our new content free. So if you like what you’ve read, please join today!
This Dylan Thomas Prize-winning debut from British author Max Porter, tells the story of a father and widower in denial of the fact that his wife is truly gone. His grief takes the form of a larger-than-life crow that haunts his mind, dreams, and home, depicted in writing that is somewhere between poetry and prose.
My Last Story by Janet Frame, recommended by Etgar Keret
We can deny anything — even our own talent. Janet Frame died in 2004 and was one of New Zealand’s most distinguished authors, having received every literary award the country offers. Her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won the prestigious Hubert Church Award, convincing her doctors not to carry out a scheduled lobotomy. Thank goodness for that, and thank goodness “My Last Story” did not fulfill its title, because, as Etgar Keret writes in his introduction, her stories “remove the insoluble question of the nature of creativity from its permanent blind spot and place it front and center.”
McGlue, by Ottessa Moshfegh, recommended by Fence Books
In the Booker Prize-nominated author’s debut novella, the title character is an angry and abject sailor who inflicts cruelty on both his shipmates and himself. In this excerpt, he wakes below deck too drunk to know where he is, and whether or not he has killed a man, and if that man is (was?) also his best friend. But in Moshfegh’s hands, McGlue, like so many of her vivid creations, emerges as a character who’s terrible actions become entirely understandable.
La Moretta by Maggie Shipstead, recommended by Change-Rae Lee
In this chilling story by Maggie Shipstead, a husband recalls a trip he took with his wife across Europe, and a mysterious, violent incident that occurred. Chang-Rae Lee writes that the Dylan Thomas Prize-winning author’s “La Moretta” is, “as the title suggests, a dark tale, the sort which I think gives most people a special delight.”
Man V. Nature by Diane Cook, recommended by Electric Literature
In Diane Cook’s story, three friends become stranded on a lake that might as well be an ocean — a premise that almost seems like a metaphor for bargaining. Their desperate situation tests their relationships and presents opportunities for damaging honesty. From fighting for the last piece of jerky, to proclaiming affairs with the others’ wives, Cooks characters seem to believe that one-upmanship will make them immortal.
Blackass, by A. Igoni Barrett, recommended by Chinelo Okparanta
Okparanta, acclaimed author of Under the Udala Trees, describes the novel from which this excerpt comes as a retelling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: “A young man wakes up to the realization that he is no longer who he once was, but has become a different kind of ‘being.’ In Barrett’s version, the young man goes to bed a black man and wakes up white.” When Furo’s skin color-changes, he must renegotiate a city and relationships with which he was once intimately familiar, but has now become foreign.
Recovery by Helen DeWitt, recommended by Electric Literature
Depression has a way of cultivating strange habits. In this dark and funny story, Scott, an isolated former addict, believes that buying cheese in bulk has the power to improve his life because it precludes the daily battle of buying more cheese. He applies this line thinking to all aspects of his new outlook. The story spotlights subtle truths about coping, and perhaps inadvertently, one that many of us have known at one stage or another: eating a lot of cheese is central to recovery.
Samanta Schweblin, whose first novel Fever Dream was recently published, gives us another story about coping through eating, but with an even bigger twist. The reclusive and depressive daughter of a divorced father has taken to only eating live birds. In a test of his love — and the limitations of what love should look like — he must decide whether or not to indulge her disturbing habit.
A Faded Sense by Dina Nayeri, recommended by Electric Literature
Dina Nayeri’s captivating narrative follows Sara through love, sex, and dates she goes on “to calm [her] panicky friends, but really just for the stories.” A childhood injury has left her hands burned and covered in thick scar-tissue, and Sara must deal with how diminished sense of touch affects her experience of physical love. She knows the key to transcending her limitations must be acceptance, by others of her, and by herself.
In this story from the Norwegian short story master Askildsen, a man has been widowed after his wife died in a tragic car crash. But sympathy is far from our first reaction to the character, who is narrating the story. Get ready to be inside the head of a man Becky McMullan of Dalkey Archive describes as, “a brother, a husband, a possible murderer, an incestuously minded creep, a self-centered jerk,” who is alarmingly well-adjusted to his circumstances.
Many of my friends are talking about escape these past few months, about what country would be the best to run away to: Spain or New Zealand or Sweden, Canada, or India or close your eyes and spin the globe. Warming our feet after standing in the cold at rallies, conversations turn to visas and citizenship, and not just because we’ve been protesting the travel ban. Even as they fight for the rights of others to come here, to be safe here, some are planning to leave.
I get it about disappearing. I have disappeared before — packed a backpack and put my things out on the street. I’m a believer in the geographic cure and have lived outside the country for years with no plan to return. My new novel — Running — set in Athens, Greece, is about that expatriation.
I have also stayed, for years, in places I didn’t like, or couldn’t afford to leave. And that requires a different kind of disappearing — headphones on or book open. In the last few months I’ve turned to my library to expatriate. If you’d like to come along here’s a map:
1. Leave the Planet
The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber
A love story about a missionary separated from his wife, coping with life on a distant and different world, at a time of upheaval on earth. It is truly one of the strangest and most beautiful books I’ve read in the last five years. In many ways it’s the ultimate expatriate novel, full of hope, longing, curiosity, and good will for all things other. The protagonist makes sacrifices for his faith, then ultimately reverses these decisions for love.
2. Visit A World Without Men
Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig
If you liked the women’s march you will love Les Guérillères. Wittig’s 1969 classic ring cycle about a society of women. It’s violent and sexy and full of drunkenness and adventure; Wittig forms new legends while delivering an amazing parody of traditional heroic literature. A great read if you are tired of the debate about likability and women characters, or if you want to see the patriarchy get what’s coming. Fans of Mad Max Fury Road will want to snap up a copy of this ASAP.
3. Escape to the Parisian Underworld
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
A giant of transgressive literature written by Genet in prison (twice! The first draft was destroyed by guards, the second was published anonymously and was originally sold as erotica). The John Waters star Divine gets her name from this semi-autobiographical novel; a shabby, baroque luxurious story of drag queens and criminals in Paris in the 1940s. The language is poetic and fierce, and Genet’s takedown of polite society and the straight world is stunning. This is an essential outsider novel, one that influenced a generation of thinkers, particularly Sartre.
4. Live Alone Beneath the Nigerian Sun
The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
A family saga set in Lagos, and an amazing story of the fallout of colonization. With rich, well wrought characters, and a plot framed around a romance, a kidnapping, a rescue and an elopement, this intergenerational novel is vivid. It’s full of love and cruelty, superstition and clear-eyed understanding of hardship. It’s also about the struggle to make choices, and live with integrity on your own terms. Emecheta, who was born in Nigeria and lived in Britain, wrote twenty books and was outspoken on the universal experiences of women in the world.
5. Visit a Timeless Landscape of the Absurd
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
I am partial to this play because I staged it in my garage when I was ten, with my little brother playing the part of Nagg, delivering his lines from inside a cardboard box. This is a quick read, and funny, (as the character Winnie says “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”). It’s also a great way to dive into Beckett if you’re not familiar with his work, or have only read Waiting for Godot. Having your children perform an absurdist existentialist play by an Irish man writing in French is good escapist fun, especially if they have speech impediments.
6. Slip in and Out of Time in the Bengali Jungle
Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil
Based on the diary of a missionary working to rehabilitate two girls found in the Bengali jungle in the 1920s, known as the “Bengali wolf girls,” this poetic, hybrid text is also the story of Kapil following a film crew into the jungle to revisit the tale, and a remembrance of Kapil’s father. Themes of colonialism, domestication, and questions about what constitutes love and violence, and of and what life will be like for future children make Kapil’s gleaming spare prose profoundly moving. The book is an escape not from meaning or reality, but directly into it.
7. A World Without People
The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
Put it next to your bed and read it every night. This is the stuff survival and escape are made of. The rain bird? Swedenborg’s Angels? Trolls? Thermal Beings? Banshees and Antelopes with six legs? We need them now more than ever. This catalog of beautiful folkloric strangeness helps put things in mythic and historical perspective. You will be smarter and better and happier for reading it.
8. Explore the Afterlife
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola
A hilariously funny, meticulously detailed, episodic, slapstick adventure story. A young boy is abandoned in the African forest and encounters what seems like every type of ghost imaginable (nameless ghost, hopeless ghost, spider-eating ghost, reverend ghost, television-handed ghostess, etc). It takes him more than twenty years to find his way home. This novel is an odyssey of strangeness; mythic, cartoonish, surreal and reminiscent of Dante. The book is largely about caring for people, and learning from the dead so you can return to the world. It’s also a fun book to read out loud.
9. Believe in Salvation
The Lives of the Saints by Alban Butler
This list of Catholic Saints to go with every day of the year is a catalog of magic and torture and resilience. A few years ago I had a residency in the South of France in a sprawling 14th century building in a village that had been devastated by the black plague and was close to the ruins of other villages that had not been rebuilt after. If you know history, you know the plague was largely blamed on Jews, and marked the beginning of the first attempted genocides against them throughout Europe. Part way through the residency the people who ran it told me my room had also been used to hide Jews fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s and ‘40s. When I was not writing at this residency, I was sitting by the gardens in the courtyard reading TheLives of the Saints, and thinking about how every torture endured by these religious icons was something put into actual practice by mobs and governments and faiths and ideologues throughout history; and that each saint represented tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands who suffered a similar fate and whose names we will never know.
About the Author
Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novels So Much Pretty, Be Safe I Love You, and now, Running. She lives in New York City.
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