Death, Women, and Dead Women: A Conversation between Cathy Ulrich and Lindsay Lerman

Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere (Clash Books), and Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press), recently talked writing, intent, and audience.

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Ulrich: My first question is (kind of an obvious one!): This novel focuses on a woman grieving her husband. What led you to write a book about this topic?

Lerman: Okay, so, what led me to write a book about a grieving woman? The simple answer is that I found a character I liked and she happened to be a woman whose life was pretty suddenly devoid of meaning. The more complicated answer is that I’ve always been fascinated by grief and how it suspends our ability to do the work of following social rules and norms. We just get consumed by it — it takes over — and overnight we can go from being someone who is always polite and mild-mannered and self-sacrificing to being someone who just can’t do it anymore, who wonders what all those niceties really do, what they’re for, what the cost of adhering to them might be. A grief story like the one I wrote also opens up questions about identity and meaning and purpose. It’s no accident that my book features a hetero (or presumably hetero) woman who no longer has the one thing good girls and women are supposed to have — a man — and that this fact results in her realizing that she no longer has scripts to follow. (I think this is compounded by the devastation and destruction of the natural world around her — the sense that we’re on the brink of something that is making all scripts suspect and possibly useless.) She tries to follow other scripts throughout the book, but they don’t seem to be working for her. She’s adrift. She has to ask herself why she has been who she’s been. Mourning and grieving are natural opportunities for this, and we can take them if we see them for what they are.

Now I want to ask you: what led you to writing about dead women and girls?

Ulrich: I love this answer — about how grief changes people and what society expects from women are really interesting kicking-off points for a story like this!

What led me to writing what I’ve been calling (for lack of a more clever name) the Murdered Ladies stories was basically this whole trope of “a woman’s death sets the plot in motion.” You see that in fiction a lot, and it’s a good trope, don’t get me wrong! Starting a story with a murder is a really powerful way to hook a reader and really delve into things like grief and crime and societal expectations. But a lot of things focus on the killer, whether it be finding the killer or understanding their motivations, and that, just, to me, isn’t interesting. I’ve never found killers interesting. They just take things away; they don’t create. I’m much more interested in creation, in finding lost things, in stories that have been left untold. So these stories are a way for me to do just that: find lost women, tell their stories, “create” them, as it were.

Your answer brought up an interesting point for me. In your book, Claire turns to two old friends, it seems, for comfort, but perhaps she is also looking for a way to become — again — the woman that society expects her to be. Do you think she completely understands her motivations here?

Lerman: I love that you thought of your book as an opportunity to “create” the murdered women who are often erased (or simply absent) in murder stories. In the book, I can feel how seriously you took them as individuals, as actual protagonists with complicated lives, not just plot devices. I tried to make sure the men in my book were taken seriously as more than mere plot points (to begin answering your question), but Claire needed to be the focus, so there was only so much space I could give them. (Funny to think that I use a dead man to set the plot in motion for my book.) I don’t think Claire fully understands what she’s doing when she turns to men in the book. Her life is suddenly devoid of meaning (or at least it seems this way to her), and it makes a kind of sense that she would turn to men to find meaning. It’s so complicated being constituted by others’ understandings of us. It can be positive — I can feel and understand that people think of me as kind and smart and self-sacrificing, and that can help me continually reshape myself to be those things (smart, kind, etc.). The darker side of that, especially for girls and women, is the possibility of only being “real” in relation to male desire. I think this is something that Claire slowly comes to understand throughout the book, but at the beginning, when she’s letting herself be drawn in by them, she doesn’t see it clearly, can’t articulate it, but I think she feels ill-at-ease about it.

Now that I’ve realized that I used a death to set the plot in motion (though my dead person doesn’t really disappear), I wonder if you were ever tempted to fall back on the conventions and write a few sections or chapters that featured the surviving loved ones or friends of the murdered ladies in bigger ways. Or did you always know you wanted to focus on the erased, the invisible, the dead? 

Ulrich: These stories were each written as stand-alone flash fiction pieces. Though some were intentionally written to be part of this collection — once I knew it was going to really exist — I still went in to every story thinking of it as its own separate thing. So each story has its own focus, unconnected with the others. Some do focus more on this or that person, whether it be a family member, or a girl at a frat party, or a queen, but I think (I hope!) that focus works in service of each piece on its own merits.

Your book, speaking of focus, really sticks to the three main characters: Claire, Andrew and Luke (and the specter of John that haunts them all). Other characters make appearances, but the focus stays with this trio. Had you ever considered enlarging the cast of characters, or did you always want this connection between them to be the spotlight of the book?

Lerman: I did have another character in the book, early on in the book’s life, but I ended up cutting him out. It felt too crowded with another life in the book. I realized it was best for the book to have a tight focus, for the narrative to have an almost bottled quality. I was kinda sad to let that character go — it sort of felt like I was killing him off, haha — but ultimately, just having the trio felt right.

I was re-reading some parts of your book today and thinking about place. My book has only just come out, but people are starting to notice the attention I pay to climate (and ecological catastrophe) in it, and although the desert — the place — is crucial, I think I understand the book to be kind of place-less. What about your book? There’s no clear “setting” for yours. Was this intentional? Is it a result of the book growing out of flash fiction?

Ulrich: These stories take place in all sorts of different locations. Some are technically set in Montana — one in particular is based on a real-life murder that happened in a nearby town — but “place” in these stories isn’t important because they really are things that could happen anywhere. I do think of them, though, as being American murders, if that makes sense. I keep thinking of writing a “murdered tourist” story and having it set elsewhere, but I haven’t found the words for it yet.

I don’t really focus on place much in any of my writing. I’ve lived in Montana my whole life, but I love traveling, and I’ve never felt as connected to the land as I know some of my fellow Montanans do. So for my writing, I think, connecting it to “place” would be really unnatural, because I don’t feel that connection myself!

And I was planning to follow up with the climate catastrophe aspect of your book — I love how the characters go on like usual, because what else can you do, but sometimes they stop and think about the awful situation they are in. How dire is the situation for them? 

Lerman: What a complex question! I think the characters in my book don’t know how dire the situation is for them, like the rest of us. They let themselves believe they’ll keep being as lucky as they’ve been. (They can still afford to eat, they have roofs over their heads, and though they know it likely won’t last forever, they don’t let themselves really KNOW this.) This echoes what we see happening now. Those in power have no reason to believe they’ll be forced to go without anything, those of us barely managing to hang on know we might have to go without, maybe even soon, but we don’t know how to convince those in power to do something about it, and the many who are forced to go without (food, shelter, health care, safety) are pushed aside. We are really resilient creatures. We can carry on like normal in the worst of circumstances. This is both a tremendous strength and a devastating, terrible weakness.

I’d like to ask you kind of a meta question, if you’re up for it. I can think of a lot of people I’d like to give your book to, people who’ve never stopped to ask why they are offered the stories they’re offered — stories in which the women and girls are murdered and disappeared and otherwise tossed aside — and I wonder what they would think of your book. Are there people that you hope your book reaches? People who you hope will find it meaningful or challenging?

Ulrich: This is a great question, and I’m not sure I can answer it without getting myself in trouble! I can think of, specifically, a person in my family who tends to blame women when they have been victimized (“if she hadn’t been wearing that,” “in my day, girls didn’t go to bars alone,” “why did she get in the car with him,” etc.) who could really benefit from reading these stories, but 1) they won’t read them; 2) even if they did, they’d miss the point anyway. So I would love for my book to reach people like that and get them thinking, but … I don’t know that it would.

And to turn that point back on you — Claire, I’ve seen you mention in interviews, has really bought into that “disappearing into a relationship” standard. Are there people you would like to have read your book and take a second look at themselves and their ideas on women and relationships?

Lerman: It’s a rough truth, I think, that the people who might need access to a work of feminist art (to really broadly categorize what we “do” in our writing) might be some of the least likely to have access to it. Next week I have a meeting with a translator who has expressed interest in translating my book into Turkish, which is really exciting (I used to live in Turkey), but also deeply depressing. Turkey has atrocious female literacy rates. The people who might need a book (and not just my book — any book) to help them think through the conditions of their existence simply cannot read them. But that said, I worked hard to make my book feel accessible and approachable, despite the heaviness. And it was important to me that it reflected real life for more than just the bourgeoisie, though certainly some of the characters in the book might be approaching petit-bourgeoisie status. I hoped that its brevity might attract some on-the-fence readers who could be lured into thinking about identity, ecological catastrophe, feminism, etc., even if they don’t typically find themselves thinking about those things. All I can really say is that I hope people who sit with it find it meaningful in some way. 

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