A Review of St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon’s slim, yet layered fifth novel, St. Ivo, takes place mostly during a weekend getaway. Sarah and her husband, Mathew, visit their long-estranged friends, Kiki and Arman in upstate New York. The story, however, is far from linear. There are secrets in the background. There are masochistically overplayed memories and one, looming, life-defining mystery about Sarah’s absent daughter, Leda, that will keep you turning pages, as if you’re reading a thriller, even though you know it is not that. 

St. Ivo is a story about one woman’s search for connection. Sarah struggles to connect with others while she struggles to connect her past and present lives because something happened with Leda that cleaved her life in two. There is before and there is after and Hershon’s mastery lies in her ability to show Sarah’s disjointedness, while making her story, as a whole, feel connected and complete. 

Sarah lives inside a hardened shell, an all too familiar mechanism. As with Sarah, as with ourselves, the shell stems from pride, from a secret fear of not being enough. To avoid judgement, we keep thoughts, wishes, hopes, facts to ourselves. Habits, money, geography — other obstacles wedge themselves between relationships so that if we don’t make an effort, if we don’t share our secrets, our vulnerabilities, we lose touch. Our shells harden. 

This isn’t new information. We know we have to be honest and open to connect with others, but it’s so much easier to digest this fact when we see the world through Sarah’s eyes, when we see how disconnected she is from her best friend, when we watch her seek out hollow connections with strangers because she can tell them lies. The lies provide only a temporary balm, a way to keep her hurt private and intact. 

Sarah’s pain defines her and it takes the whole book for her to acknowledge that “Leda’s absence…was the center of her life. She’d chosen to make it so.” Here is the crux of all sustained misery, which Hershon drives uncomfortably yet satisfyingly home — more often than not, it’s of our own making. Yes, some things are out of our control but once the waves pass and we pick up the pieces, we can either choose to move on or we can stay put and polish our shells. 

Hershon doesn’t tie everything up with a bow. There are questions left unanswered. There are levels to Sarah that might never be known, even to her, but we are left with hope. We are reminded that the spaces that form between true friends and partners are never permanent — they can deflate after just one, honest conversation because genuine connection breaks down our barriers and allows life, the ebb and flow of it, to come rushing back. In Hershon’s words, “they were breaking apart. They were coming together. They came and went with the tide.”

---

Say Yes: An Interview with Lindsay Hunter

Don’t Kiss Me, Lindsay Hunter’s stunning second story collection, is a negative imperative: at once a warning and a challenge. With its title and vaguely menacing cover (a tube of red lipstick nestled between glimmering, dagger-sharp letters), the book lures readers in and then dares them to resist.

Similarly, the twenty-six stories inside Don’t Kiss Me attract and repel. Hunter’s characters are women who kiss their much older teachers and lust inappropriately after nine-year-olds. They take terrible advice, they stay with abusive men, they overeat, and they accumulate far, far too many cats. Hunter presents her readers with humiliating, demoralizing, hopeless-seeming situations, and challenges us, in the midst of it all, to laugh at the jokes, connect with her characters, and appreciate every little glimmer of hope.

As with her stories, there is, refreshingly, no pretense with Lindsay Hunter. Her twitter feed is a dizzying, hilarious string of self-deprecating jokes and confessions. Her blog is a mix of meaningful ruminations on writing and gender roles, pictures of her beautiful baby, and fart videos. She is every bit as eccentric, entertaining, and irresistible as her writing. I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Lindsay over email, and to hear her thoughts on reading aloud in public, keeping friends at the dog park, and being grateful for the writing life, even when it keeps her up at night with a pounding heart.

*

Liz Wyckoff: First, Don’t Kiss Me is a killer book title. And the cover design is such a nice complement: there’s a toughness, a sharpness to the book, but also something kind of inviting. Was it hard to choose the title, or did this one speak to you right from the get-go?

Lindsay Hunter: It was very hard! I went around and around. Initially it was going to be called Trash/Treasure. As in, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” But my husband was like, “That’s real easy fodder for the critics.” Ha! Then I wanted to call it All Them Skies because the sky is in basically every story, and I’ve gotten shit for using the sky so much, and I kind of wanted to be in your face about it. But that didn’t seem to fit either. I always really loved the threat and challenge of Don’t Kiss Me, which was the title of the final story in the book, and I realized it was the perfect title for the book as a whole, which to me is like you said—tough and sharp but desperately, desperately inviting.

Liz Wyckoff: In what ways does this collection feel different to you, as compared to your first collection, Daddy’s?

Lindsay Hunter: It feels more sure of itself. Maybe because it’s my second book, and not my first, and so I’m projecting those feelings onto it? But there was a special kind of self-torture in putting my first book out; I remember being convinced that everyone would hate it, and then I had to ask myself why I’d put something I was convinced would be hated out there. I had to come to terms with it being mine, and trust that even if it was hated, I loved it, and that was enough. So I had all of those battle scars in me when Don’t Kiss Me became a thing, and I had become more sure of the stories I wanted to tell, of the “mineness” of them. And it was like a maturing for me, much in the way that the stories in Don’t Kiss Me feel more set in adulthood, while those in Daddy’s feel set in adolescence.

Liz Wyckoff: Many of the stories in Don’t Kiss Me are written in the first person, narrated by women who are really struggling—to overcome fears and loneliness, to make sense of awful things they have done or awful things that have happened to them, to pull themselves up out of some pretty mucky situations. These women are unquestionably unique, but they occasionally share a similar outlook or sense of the world. How do you go about inhabiting these characters?

Lindsay Hunter: I usually hear a sentence they’re saying, and I’ll write that down, and their voice kind of reveals itself to me as I go. Like it’s already there and I’m just kind of brushing away the debris hiding it. I just learned that Elmore Leonard said something like “if it sounds like writing, I rewrite” and YES to that. I want it to feel like life. Ha! As if that’s some kind of revelatory statement for a writer to make. But it’s nonetheless true.

Liz Wyckoff: I’m interested in the rules that govern your stories—what I’ve heard Kevin Brockmeier describe as “ground rules.” For example, “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula” is arranged into three long paragraphs describing the three things we should know. And the narrator of “Like” inserts the word like into almost every one of her sentences. Do you consciously set constraints like this when writing?

Lindsay Hunter: I do, sometimes! Not always before I sit down to write. But as I’m going these constraints I’m suddenly following become clear. With “Like,” I wanted to show how the way these girls were talking simultaneously removed them from reality while also revealing it to observers. Like, like, like. Instead of “is” or what have you. With “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula,” I think I originally set out to just write a series of random facts about Peggy Paula, and it became three essential things.

I will say that, as the former co-host of a reading series where everything had to be under four minutes, I’m very used to writing stories that fit within that time constraint, so that might be one I set unconsciously for myself.

Liz Wyckoff: I just read a really rollicking conversation between you and Alissa Nutting on the FSG Originals website in which you two talk about “gross stuff.” You (and Alissa, too) seem to be really comfortable with the grossness in your work—the barf, snot, turds, and farts that make an appearance in almost all of your stories. Was there ever a time when you were less comfortable with it, or anxious about what readers might think?

Lindsay Hunter: I think, actually, I kind of blindly assumed people wouldn’t be so shocked by it. I remember writing “The Fence” in an afternoon and reading it to my class the next day, very excitedly, and looking up to see people looking kind of choked by their collars. I’ve always been the type of person to want to just get past politeness or artifice, and the way I do that in my personal life is to immediately start talking about all that “gross stuff,” which, to me, is an essential part of life. But yes. Now I’m anxious about people’s reactions, now that I fully understand how shocking some of this stuff is to people. Like when my dog park friends wanted to read Don’t Kiss Me, I felt sad, like, “Well, there go our evenings at the dog park.” (But happily I was wrong!)

Liz Wyckoff: Has your relationship to readers, or that vague idea of “audience,” changed over time?

Lindsay Hunter: Definitely. Well, maybe it’s more that I go back and forth between kind of nervously hoping what I’m writing will land well and writing toward an audience that’s cheering me on. It depends how strong I’m feeling on that particular day.

Liz Wyckoff: Speaking of writing for an audience, as you mentioned earlier, you’re a co-founder of Quickies!—a bi-monthly reading series in Chicago. What does reading (specifically your own work, aloud, in public) mean to you as a writer?

Lindsay Hunter: It means everything! I encourage all writers to read their finished stories aloud to themselves, a partner, an audience at a reading, whatever you can get. It reveals so much. Forming the words in your mouth is a different thing than typing them onto a page. For me, it helped me take ownership of both my physical voice and my writing voice. I needed reading practice badly, and Quickies! gave me that, and it gave me a slightly buzzed audience who were all mostly listening.

Liz Wyckoff: Interacting with other writers seems to be a pretty big part of your life. Do you find that there are good and bad things about surrounding yourself with writer friends?

Lindsay Hunter: A professor once told us we should say “Yes” to everything, because it would open up so many other opportunities for us. I took that to heart and began saying “Yes” to reading at my friends’ reading series, writing stories for their journals, going on tour, doing interviews, etc. Before I knew it I was part of something. That professor was so right! Being a part of a writing community keeps me involved, challenged, aware, all of which, if you want to forge any kind of writing career, is so important, and so easily lost.

The bad part about being part of this community is all the envy and self-doubt and constant comparing. It’s a very dangerous place to find yourself, but I think every writer goes through it. “Shit, this guy wrote two novels in a year AND publishes a story like every week. I watched Breaking Bad all weekend and wrote a single tweet. Therefore I am worthless!” You have to live the life you want to live, and celebrate that. Part of that life is being surrounded by incredibly talented people, so let yourself celebrate them, too.

Liz Wyckoff: I was really moved by one of your recent blog posts called Real Talk. In it, you discuss your decision to become a writer, the importance of showing gratitude, and the recurring theme of trying. You describe the decade between your initial decision to start writing and the publication of your first book as a decade “full of love and travel and fear and doubt and tries and tries and tries.” It sounds so simple, but I think trying can be really terrifying! Do you feel terrified, too, sometimes?

Lindsay Hunter: Always! Just last night I laid in bed, wide awake, even though I have a cold and I’m exhausted and there’s no telling when my son will wake up, so I should have been sleeping, but I couldn’t. I was filled with terror about my novel, and what comes after, which I in no way can see clearly. But if someone had said to me in January 2000, when I decided to focus on writing, “Hey, guess what, it’s going to be an entire decade before you get a book published,” I would have been paralyzed. So you just keep pushing through. You keep living your life, loving the people in it, being grateful for all of it, all of it, instead of worrying about what you don’t have or what you don’t know. Sometimes it’s easier said than done and you find yourself listening to your husband and child and dog snore the night away while your heart pounds itself to a pulp. But you try.

Liz Wyckoff: You’re writing a novel! Other than keeping you awake with a pounding heart, how’s it going?

Lindsay Hunter: It’s going! But there is that issue of having time, which I don’t have enough of these days. So I fear my novel will suffer because of it. Like a neglected child. Still a child, but something is off. I just keep telling myself, Well, it HAS TO BE FINISHED AT SOME POINT. And on that day I shall drink the largest goblet of Sauvignon Blanc the world has ever seen.

An Interview with Amelia Gray

For this series I’m asking the writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Amelia Gray about Airships by Barry Hannah.

* * *

Colin Winnette: Can you talk a little about what brought you to the book? What were the conditions that led to your picking it up for the first time, and why did you want to talk about it here with me?

Amelia Gray: This great book! I first found Barry Hannah teaching at Texas State, during my first year of grad school. I was 22, and here was this motorcycle-riding troublemaker writing the best fiction I had read in my life. Can you imagine? I couldn’t handle it.

CW: Oh wow, so you studied with him? How fortunate! Were these workshops? One-on-ones? How was it structured and what was it like?

AG: I sort of studied with Hannah. Really, I was a bystander for the others who were studying with Hannah. We were only allowed one workshop semester with a visiting writer and I figured I was a young idiot (I was right!) and that I should hold out for Denis Johnson in my last year. Still and all, I feel very lucky about it.  I sat in on some one-off workshops and he was about how you might expect — feisty, intimidating, kind in his way. He was approachable. He liked to shoot the shit.

CW: It’s interesting, knowing your work, but not knowing before that you studied with Hannah, I would have probably listed him as one of your influences. Is there anything about your approach to writing, or even living, that you trace back to him specifically?

AG: One thing he said in a Q&A I’ve since quoted to other people a million times, to the point that I’m paraphrasing it, but he said that a story starts as a diamond in his mind, perfect in every way, and when he sits down to write, the diamond crumbles into dust. It crumbles a little more slowly as he gets older, but no matter how many times he sits down to write, it crumbles. That idea has always been a comfort to me.

CW: Some might say you can never recreate/re-present an idea, which occurred to you in a specific context, and in a specific way, so every time you sit down to write, you’re not destroying what was there before, you’re just not able to make it again as it was. You can’t. You’re making something else.

AG: I don’t think it’s willfully destructive so much as it is a simple study in the imperfect leap from brain to page. Like the lady who destroyed the fresco last month — she had an image in her mind and she did the best she could.

CW: When we were setting up this interview, you mentioned you only recently came to Airships. What was your initial reaction to this particular book? Did it differ from the work of his you read as a 22-year-old?

AG: Well, so I was young when I met his work, and so star-struck that I had him sign two of his books: Bats out of Hell and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. I was working my way through Bats out of Hell, reading his stories aloud to boyfriends, but I found I didn’t feel comfortable reading the book. I mistreat books, I break the spines and leave them face-down on the sink while I’m washing my hair and whatever. I wanted to read this book and mistreat it but I couldn’t bring myself to, maybe because he wrote in it and he was mythologized in my head. Every story he wrote was brilliant and changed my writing, and that was a little scary. I was afraid to break the spell. Then he died and I was too sad to read him for a while. Then, finally, recently, I was neither sad nor afraid. Turned out I’d read half the stories elsewhere so it’s not quite true that I hadn’t read it anyway.

What a book! What mastery in such considered writing that seems loose and funny! There’s so much life and air and love and light. I feel lucky that I didn’t read some of these stories when I was 22, that I saved their first experience for when I had the heart to appreciate it. I’m borrowing argument from the Catholic virgins here.

CW: Yes! There is irresistible heart at the core of Hannah’s stories, even the more brutal, such as “Coming Close to Donna.” I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn’t shy away from love. Some kind of intense love is at the heart of almost all of these stories, and few writers other than Hannah can so boldly and confidently say something like, “Love slays fear,” (“Escape to Newark”) and make us really and truly feel it, while at the same time keeping it in voice, buried in the characters in the story, distancing himself from it. Is this something you’ve felt while reading, and, if so, can I ask you something as simple as, how do you think he does it?

AG: Yes, exactly. I’m glad I wrote that paragraph above about love and light before I read this one, because now I feel we are in a synchronicity. “Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell.” I suspect he does it because all of his characters have enough of him within them that they each can burst forth with this unique, authentic voice. He’s really writing the same story over and over again, his own heart, the song of himself, whatever you’d like to call it. That he does it so damn well is where you’ve got to sit up and pay attention.

CW: I’ve had this itch about Airships for awhile now, or a curiosity, and it’s about the way Hannah uses religion from story to story. It feels a little different each time, as if he’s approaching it from a variety of angles, and I begin to wonder about this personal relationship to religion. Having known him, what do you make of the biblical references scattered throughout Airships?

AG: Hannah had a near-death kind of experience right around the time I knew him and he told us that he found Jesus in that time. I think I remember him saying that Jesus actually came into to the hospital and sat with him. He wrote in one of my books: “Christ is the strength that you do not have to pray for. Thereness, my lass.”

CW: I’m tempted to let that hang, because it’s beautiful and strange and I really love your answer, but not knowing about your upbringing/your relationship to religion, I have to ask what that meant to you? His message, and his honest belief that he was visited by Jesus? Just as a reader of his work and a fan.

AG: I found it to be an honest belief from the man, the belief that he was visited by Jesus. I was raised in the Presbyterian church and have heard that stuff enough that I don’t find it that strange. I hope that if Jesus ever visits me it’s cool hospital Jesus and not freaked-out jail cell Jesus.

CW: Is there a story that best exemplifies, for you, what this collection can do? Is doing? I think of a story like “Testimony of Pilot,” its range, the strange violences, the characters brutalized by love and the mere passing of time, it feels like this story shows so much of what Hannah is capable of, and he seems so completely in control of all of it. It feels vast and airtight.

AG: Actually I was thinking ‘Testimony of Pilot’ too. There are others that are tighter in terms of plot but I just love ‘Testimony of Pilot” for just that organized appearance of chaos. “Appearance of chaos” instead of “chaos” because there is that work there, yes, though the seams are all stitched tight. And it has one of my favorite lines of all time.

CW: Not to ruin it for those who haven’t read, but I’m guessing it has something to do with a dragon?

AG: Oh yeah, you got it.

CW: There’s a brilliant move in TOP, where Hannah allows his narrator to get sort of out of control, to work himself up to a frenzy — I’m thinking of the recital led by Quadberry — and (credit where credit’s due, Adam Levin first pointed this out to me in a writing seminar at SAIC) Hannah acknowledges it, owns it, and sort of cuts right to the heart of how storytelling works and why we bother to do it. The narrator gives us a nod, after it’s all said and done, and he admits how memory distorts and that he got carried away. He’s mythologizing. What are your thoughts on that reading? Is Hannah writing this self-reflexively? And where else does he exhibit these kinds of acrobatics?

AG: That recital scene is exactly what I’m considering when I think of the appearance of chaos. It feels out of control because we’re not used to that kind of structure in a long story like this. It reminds me of some other writers, ‘How to Tell a True War Story’ by Tim O’Brien, parts of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

CW: What’s your position when it comes to control over a story? Do you let a story run away with you, or is each piece carefully plotted beforehand? 

AG: Every time I write, I’m trying to run away from the careful plot, but the plot drags me back in. It’s like one of those bungee runs or the third Godfather.

CW: If you could only recommend one story from the collection?

AG: ‘Love Too Long’ gets me every time.

Péter Nádas's Parallel Stories

How does one encapsulate Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas? Where does one even begin with this nearly 1,200 page monster? I wonder, even, if it makes sense to recommend it, as many will probably hate it. Hate it, even, for all the reasons I love it and can’t stop thinking about it.

Starting at the beginning: I’m a huge fan of Joshua Cohen, especially his novel Witz andA Heaven of Others, and so I sort of Internet-stalk his every move, but don’t tell him. And so I came across his review / interview with Péter Nádas. I had never heard of Nádas and my only experience with Hungary was my cancelled trip to Budapest back in the spring of 2009. But, reading Cohen’s piece, I had that strange and surreal feeling when I know a book was made for me, all the more strange since he began writing it around the time that I began living.

And it was for me, and I love it, and even five months since finishing it, I’m still talking about it, thinking about it, pushing it at people, trying to get them to just read even a few pages, trying to figure out how he did the things he does in this novel. He does so many things, and so many of them shouldn’t work, shouldn’t even be possible for a book so large with so many character. But he does and I truly believe Parallel Stories is the most impressive novel I’ve ever read, more than Ulysses or The Waves or The Magus or Moby Dick or even — and it almost hurts to say — The Brothers Karamazov.

And it’s an unlikely love, even though I expected it to consume me. Nádas speaks frankly and at great length about sex, and especially about the physical mechanics of sex to such expansive and minute detail that the act becomes almost absurd and grotesque. And, if you know me, which some of you reading this may, you probably know how boring I typically find sex in literature. It really is my least favorite aspect of most books, though that’s a discussion for another day, but what Nádas does is almost beyond comprehension. This disturbingly detailed description of sex, the way he stretches a single moment over forty or eighty pages is somehow — against all reason or probability — mesmerizing. He turns sex into so much more than an act, ejaculation so much more than a biological function.

And this level of detail exists throughout the novel, past sex or personal ruminations, making a short and awkward drive to the hospital gargantuan in scope, where the past and present bleed together, where every breath and word and pause becomes significant to an almost comical degree, and you’re burning through the pages, at the edge of erupting in frustration and gasping at how perfect every sentence is, and the effect makes you weak in the knees, slack in the mouth, and embarrassed in whatever muscles allow you to write, because you know you can’t do this. You can’t even begin to try.

It’s the relationships that push you on, and the prose that carries you. Parallel Stories‘snarration crosses time and space, diving in and out of characters at a sometimes dizzying rate and you’re swimming as fast as you can just to stay ahead of the current that keeps sucking you in.

But what is this novel about? I don’t even know if answering that makes sense here. It’s about so many things, from Nazi eugenics to masturbation to Jewish and gay and German and Hungarian identity to choosing one’s underwear. Stretching from pre-WWII Germany and Hungary to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, covering genres from mystery to romance all in that modernist style I feel was made for me, this novel is massive in scope and density, but, perhaps it’s not really about any of those things, not even about the people, so carefully wrought, who populate its pages.

If I had to say one thing that it seems to be most about, I’d say it’s a war over what it means to be Hungarian.

If this novel were an animal, it would be a giant squid, its tentacles stretching in all directions and somehow never reaching a conclusion. And, for me, that’s part of its perfection, Nádas’ fearlessness, his willingness to, as Cohen says, build a grandiloquent cathedral and leave it incomplete.

And though the narrative threads end abruptly without resolution, Parallel Stories is a deeply satisfying novel. And, for me, about as perfect as novels get.