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.

*

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. 

---

Degrees of Difficulty: An Interview with Julie Justicz

Jan English Leary: I met Julie in 2011 in a novel workshop we both attended and since then we have continued to exchange manuscripts. I learned that years earlier we’d just missed overlapping at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we both received MFAs. Over these past years, I have watched this novel grow and deepen. Julie is a brave writer, who throws out pages I would be proud to claim as mine, someone who digs deep, always challenging herself to find rich insights, compelling situations, and beautiful language. Her work is both dynamically plotted and psychologically complex, her characters appealing yet flawed, utterly believable. I am thrilled that her beautiful novel is at last coming out. It is all the more rich for the long gestation.

Your novel brings to mind the Tolstoy line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This book is about a family coping with the very specific challenge of a disabled child and also about how all parents struggle to raise children and allow them to grow up and individuate. I know that you originally wanted to focus on the four humors of the blood: air, fire, earth, water as indicators of personality. How did this concept inform your novel?

Julie Justicz: Jan, thanks so much for your kind introduction here. Our friendship, as you note, started in a novel workshop in 2011 and has continued over the past eight years in our own small writing group. Most of our time together has been spent discussing manuscripts and/yet I feel so close to you! In sharing our writing—especially early work that is vulnerable and raw–we serve a part of our soul. Thanks for being a caring and smart editor and a trusted friend. And thanks for doing this interview.

The early version of my novel was, as you remember, structured around the Four Humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—which according to Hippocrates and his heirs governed a person’s temperament—sanguine (upbeat, adventurous), phlegmatic (calm and unassuming), melancholic (quiet, depressive), and choleric (angry), depending on the balance/imbalance of humors. I’d started my novel in the first-person perspective of Ivy, the only daughter and oldest child in the Novotny family. But after writing several chapters in her voice, I found she came off rather angry, a bit brash and dismissive of her family. I wondered about her parents, her brothers . . . how would their experiences differ from Ivy’s? So, I experimented with the humors: that is, I wrote through four point of view characters, each dominated by a particular humor. That helped me complicate and then complete the story. In the end, I kept the four different voices—two parents and two kids—but tossed out the Four Humors as a structuring tool; they’d become unnecessary scaffolding by the time I finished the novel.

Leary: Your novel has four points of view: the two parents, Perry and Caroline, and two of their children, Ivy and Hugo. You did a great job of balancing the points of view, of making the novel focus on a family’s response to having a child with severe developmental issues. Was it hard to find that balance? Was one point of view harder to find and to maintain? Did one character fight to take over?

Justicz: I wrote in Ivy’s first-person perspective in the beginning; I had several chapters in her voice before I tried any other point of view. So, it’s probably understandable that she dominated the narrative through three or four drafts of the novel. I had to push her back, toss out some of her scenes, even a few chapters, and then rewrite her sections in a third-person perspective to get the balance I was seeking. Perry, the father, came quickly; I understood his “game face on and best foot forward” attitude. Caroline, the mother, and Hugo, the middle child, were harder for me to capture and to give full expression. I needed to find a way to show the mother’s melancholia, thwarted career desires, suppressed anger and still make her sympathetic. I felt judgmental about her and I had to go deeper into her character to find empathy and fully humanize her. And Hugo remained a cipher through many rewrites—the quiet middle child, not rocking the boat, perhaps a little too perfect to be true? How then to make him real? That took some time.

Leary: There are four points of view but five major characters. Benjamin, the youngest child, being almost completely non-verbal, appears on the page but doesn’t have a point of view. You do a beautiful job of describing him, giving him humanity and beauty. What were the challenges of creating this character?

Justicz: Benjamin, a boy born with profound disabilities, only makes one sound—“guh,”—which he uses to communicate with his family. I experimented with finding a narrative voice for him but what I wrote seemed too lyrical and didn’t jibe with his lived experience. Nonetheless, wordless Ben is the heart of his family and the needle in the heart of his family. I tried to show his needs, idiosyncrasies, desires; he is someone who literally jumps for joy, screams with delight, and gets frustrated when he cannot share his excitement or express his anger. He also feels happiest when he is with his beloved brother, Hugo. Because he doesn’t speak, I had to use Ben’s family–the four point of view narrators–to reveal his complexity. Ben’s parents and siblings live with him, care for him, and love him. They also have the responsibility of finding their own way in life, fulfilling their wants and needs and dreams, apart from Ben. If they can. What does this cost?

Leary: Having seen earlier drafts of your novel, I know that you wrote and then discarded some really wonderful material. I admire that nerve to shed what is both beautifully written and compelling. Is your process generally one of writing big and cutting back or was that particularly true of this novel?

Justicz: Because this is my first novel, I was learning a great deal as I wrote—through trial and a lot of error. I didn’t know anything about structure—I was putting ink on paper and persevering. I needed a lot of material to make a book and I plugged away. Turns out that many of the pages did not do much to advance the story. But I didn’t know what story I was telling—and what I could chuck out—until I reached the end. I also had the privilege of working with a smart editor, Marc Estrin at Fomite, who told me several times to rework the final section of the novel. I kept offering him minor changes that were not enough. Keep at it, he’d say. When I finally lopped off the last 100 pages and rewrote the ending entirely, I had what I needed.

Leary: I love the title Degrees of Difficulty. Everyone in that family faces a very specific level of difficulty. I also know that you considered other titles. How did you come to choose this one?

Justicz: I decided on Degrees of Difficulty after living with another title for several years. My editor pushed me to find a new title that referenced diving and somehow referenced the family. “Degree of difficulty” refers to a rating scale of the complexity of an athlete’s maneuver. Hugo is a champion diver, who channels his emotions into a strict and rigorous training regimen. So, the title is a direct reference to his sport and his physical achievement. The title is also a play on words, referring to the various struggles that every member of the Novotny family encounters. I like the notion that a degree of difficulty in athletics—a quantitative rating—is always multiplied by another number . . . a qualitative assessment of performance. So how hard are the various challenges each family member faces—and how do they manage these challenges? With humor? With anger? With grace?

Leary: Not to dwell on the influence of your own life, but I know that there are similarities to your family of origin, that you had a brother with disabilities. What are the challenges of writing fiction that is based, in part, on your family? Did you feel that the desire to tell a good story competed with a need to get the facts straight? How did you free yourself to write about people you know? Is it in the act of embellishing that you find the freedom or are you anchored by the kernel of truth?

Justicz: Wow, there are so many thought-provoking questions you’ve raised here. Yes, the novel had its roots in my family of origin. My fictional Ben has the same disabilities as my youngest brother Robert, who was born with partial monosomy 21. One of the first stories I wrote for my MFA program was about a young boy with disabilities and his relationship with two siblings. I tapped into some of my own feelings as a sibling—namely a profound sense of family loyalty, an incredibly deep and abiding love for my disabled brother, and, to be honest, a good deal of resentment, too. The resentment shone brightest in that story. Coming back to it years later as a starting point for my novel, I realized that I would need to add the voices of the other family members to give the story more breathing room.

Apart from Ben—who was based on Robert, the other characters in the novel are amalgamations. I used personal experiences and emotions to feed the fiction, if that makes sense. I had to give myself permission to embellish, exaggerate, make things up—and I had to ask my family to try to understand that my writing is not about recreating our experience or laying blame; it’s about me exploring the emotional truth that I carry, that may be nothing like their truth. What’s that saying? All of it is true; none of it happened.

Leary: How did you decide to have diving be a major activity for Hugo? And when did you land on the idea that Ivy would become an endocrinologist? You do a great job of showing people at work, a builder, an academic, a physician, a lifeguard. What is the importance, for you, of showing work in a character’s life?

Justicz: I knew I wanted Hugo to be an incredibly skilled athlete whose physical appearance would differ dramatically from Ben’s. I’m not sure why I settled on diving except that I swam in high school and I remember being fixated by the incredible feats of our divers. We swimmers were all about endurance, a group of knuckleheads packed into six lanes and churning out lap after lap after lap while staring at the black line. The divers, though, were athletes and artists.

You asked about jobs. I suppose I wanted/needed each of my characters to have a gravitational pull away from homelife. I made Ivy a reproductive endocrinologist because I liked how it would highlight her reluctance to have children of her own even as she spent every minute of her day helping other people conceive. For Caroline and Perry, I found jobs that were, I suppose, inapposite—one deeply cerebral, one much more physical. I analyzed late Shakespearean plays for Caroline and explored new home construction for Perry. That part of writing fiction is fun for me. . .it allows for digression and exploration and yes, procrastination.

Leary: Could you talk about what you’re working on now?

Justicz: A second novel—I’m thinking of calling it the The Time-traveling Crawdad’s Wife.

Forensic Psychology and How to Be “Literary”: Nisha Singh on Her Bhrigu Mahesh Series

Nisha Singh is the creator of the Bhrigu Mahesh literary mystery/detective series, set in northern India but with international appeal.

She was inspired by Sherlock Holmes’ logical examination of circumstantial evidence, but decided to also explore the concept of forensic psychology in detective fiction and also its implications for real-life crime solving. She believes that at some point psychology may well become an exact science and advances this view through her books.

Cristina Deptula: Several reviewers have compared your two male lead characters to Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Do you think this comparison is accurate? How are Bhrigu and Sutte like, or unlike, the famous British pair?

Nisha Singh: I knew that this comparison would arise because Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have become the quintessential detective pair and for more than a century, mystery fans have identified either directly or indirectly, every detective with them, that has been created after them. Many mystery writers over the millennium have been inspired by this British pair and I frankly confess that am among them too. While reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I was awed and impressed by his eccentricities and the genius of deduction that he possessed but as I matured and read those stories again, I found that where they were perfect as far as reading the physical clues was concerned, they were quite inadequate in using those clues which we now call circumstantial evidence. That was the biggest flaw in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

While investigating, it’s the standard procedure to lift circumstantial evidence like fingerprints and other residues and Sherlock Holmes helped revolutionize the field of forensic science but it fell short on how those clues should be used. Circumstantial evidence is just the first line of investigation and from there you have to dig much deeper or else it would end up in a botched-up investigation. Therein lies their biggest shortcoming. Sherlock Holmes’s methods rely almost completely on physical clues and not in the least on mental ones.

My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, on the other hand, looks similar in temperament to Sherlock Holmes because he has a genius too but he is much more aware of himself than Sherlock Holmes and hence he is more mature. He understands that physical evidence just scratches the surface of a mystery and it should always corroborate the find and not dominate it. Bhrigu Mahesh goes behind the mind of his every suspect and lifts mental cues and that’s the reason why my every character is so well developed. Therefore, I should add that my books are a study in Psychology as if it were an exact science with no room for doubt.

In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes was the genius of the physical realm of an investigation, whereas Bhrigu Mahesh is the genius of the mental realm and through him, I have tried to prove that the former should always follow the latter and not vice-versa.

As far as their scribes are concerned, Sutte is like Watson in the sense that he appreciates the great talent of his dear friend too, but he isn’t a sidekick. He understands his friend and offers help and assurance every time that his friend reaches a crisis. Hence, he is as indispensable to Bhrigu as Bhrigu is to him.

CD: You’re known for your well-rounded characters. What do you think makes the detective character interesting? How do you create original characters without falling into stereotypes? (i.e. brilliant but socially inept, etc?)

NS: My characters are well-rounded because, as I said before, it is imperative to my story. If the characters aren’t fully developed, lifting of mental cues would be impossible.

The character of the detective is made interesting by his strong personality and also by the methods that he employs to investigate. My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, studies his suspects thoroughly and his scribe Sutte, studies him. For him, his friend carries a world in himself and he is on this exciting journey to unravel him. Hence, he devotes a lot of time writing about his every action and expression in a hope to understand his complex thought processes which he finds fascinating.

My characters are inspired from real life and hence they can never be stereotypical. Let’s discuss the nature of the word- “stereotype” A simple answer is when something gets repeated many a time, its gets stereotyped but I think this definition is untrue and can be used only for things that lack any depth. When the stories or characters are fuelled by your own observation and experience, it can never be stereotypical.

As some things, inevitably, could run parallel that could make it seem like it is the same but if someone feels that way for an original work, they haven’t read it thoroughly or have failed to look for the beautiful differences because they were too occupied looking for similarities. This bias is in the reader’s mind that gives rise to this feeling of an original work adhering to a stereotype. If my readers think this way about my books, I would request them to remove any biases from their minds which lets them concentrate on their preconceived notions. A broad-minded person with perspicacity and depth would never fail to see the real personality of my detective that runs throughout the narrative.

CD: Psychologically, are there any indicators that someone’s likely to be innocent, or have committed crimes? What indicates that someone’s lying or telling the truth? Do you agree with Bhrigu Mahesh that human psychology will eventually become an exact science?

NS: Yes, we can ascertain whether someone is lying or telling the truth by observing them and understanding their psychology. Every human brain has their own programming, as Bhrigu calls it, and if we are able to run that program, we will understand how he or she will behave in a particular situation. But this is a complicated program and every human evolves during their course of life which makes decoding it a very challenging task. It’s very important to understand how every brain is unique and similar too and is also given to be influenced by factors both internal and external. Hence, it’s important that we first try to understand the common factors and then specialize in that knowledge with our own personal observations. Statistical studies that are carried out by psychologists should be supplemented by individual studies that will help to get to the mother lode of this knowledge. Only then will we be able to make headway into understanding human beings, their behaviors and the patterns inherent in those behaviors. These patterns will then tell us all that we need to know.

When we get to that point, we’ll be able to conclusively say if someone is lying or not but for now, let’s hope that the lie-detector is still working!

Yes, I agree with Bhrigu that Psychology will become an exact science one day but we still have a long way to go and brilliant psychologists like Bhrigu Mahesh are rare to find. I have applied psychology in real life in order to understand the motivations of people and what influences their behavior. If we keep pushing the frontiers of this science which is still in its infancy, we’ll be able to make discoveries that will help us understand ourselves better. Evolution will then be just round the corner.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the word- ‘Psychology’. It is made up of two words, Psyche and logic. Combining both of them together, it would translate to the logical study of the mind. What needs to be done is to understand that if we have to understand our psyches we will have to approach it as logically as possible because logic never leaves room for doubt. Aristotle’s book, ‘Prior Analytics’ first explained the importance of logic and scientific reasoning. It has also a chapter that deals with the study of the mind and how it should be accomplished scientifically. For me, he was the world’s greatest psychologist and his works have laid the foundation for approaching the study of the mind through reason and perception. Today, psychologists are more focused on statistical studies to diagnose human behaviors and hence they leave great margins for error. The field of psychology should be studied like an exact science and only then it would one day become one. This can only be achieved logically, as Aristotle believed.

CD: How do you successfully incorporate comic relief into a story with tragedy, where people get murdered? How do you place the humor in ways that don’t trivialize the tragic events?

NS: Humor can never trivialize any tragedy. In fact, it only helps augment it. From the beginning of time, humor and tragedy have been considered two things that are mutually exclusive. Even Shakespeare used to write chapters quite separate from the main narrative which he used to call “comic-relief”. I know that this practice has stemmed from the fact that everyone believes tragedy can never exist where there is humor and this is very untrue.

My books are a work of fiction but they have been plotted to stay as parallel to real life as possible because it is a scientific work; the study of mind. As everything inspired from reality, humor is something that we come across on a daily basis and it gives us relief from our own problems as we enjoy the mirth of the moment. I have seen witty people entertaining their friends in the midst of great tragedies and I am sure that during the two most devastating events in history, The World Wars, the soldiers and their families must have tried to hold on to humor much more than they did otherwise. What I mean to say is that humor doesn’t come at the expense of tragedy but it is a thing just like oxygen. It is present in the atmosphere, as people need it to survive. And when there is tragedy, the reliance on humor increases manifold.

My first-person narrator Sutte is a satirist and hence he is naturally witty. He sees the world through the lens of humor and even in the most mundane details he sees something or the other that tickles his funny bone. Bhrigu, unlike Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t stop him from expressing himself and thus he writes in the very way that he sees the world. Yes, he goes to places that are shrouded in mystery and hence tragedy lurks round the corner but still his mental makeup allows him to find relief there too. This is the reason that he is indispensable to his friend Bhrigu Mahesh. His ability to see humor in the most stressful of times, provides relief to the great detective and makes him focus more on the investigation at hand which can sometime get too much even for him.

It’s high time that humor shouldn’t be segregated from the main narrative to make it look “serious”. Life is full of light moments and hence despite the greatest of tragedies we see the light of hope to move on. If serious writing means the death of humor, it would be akin to saying that your light moments would be the death of your serious pursuits. If the colors of real life are so complex, its time that fiction should follow suit or else it would suffer genre segregation that would only make it more fiction and less real.

CD: What makes a detective novel, literary fiction, as opposed to those mystery and novels that are genre fiction?

NS: First of all, I would like to say that it is wrong and confusing to remove genre fiction from literary fiction. Literary fiction is a broader term which includes several genres and so separating them makes no sense at all. We just give genre fiction a name to make it more specific, that’s all. Literary fiction is an umbrella term only and should never be used to alienate genres that fall within it.

Literary fiction is the creation of complex characters that make us feel alive by bringing us closer to our own emotions that sometimes need words for expression. Also, we are a part of our surroundings and hence imagery plays a vital role in bringing out our own identities. So, characters and imagery are the two pillars on which rest the works of great literature, be it any genre.

CD: Was there a real-life event or place that inspired the story of The Witch of Senduwar?

NS: Yes. This story was inspired by a real-life event that happened in Senduwar, which is an actual village in the Rohtas district of Bihar. An excavation of a mound found buried treasure and during the monsoon, the odds and ends of that treasure got washed away and seemed to rain gold on the inhabitants. Many used inverted umbrellas to siphon this washed up gold and one or two of the natives got a good influx of money when they sold this gold in the market. I was so amused by this event that I decided to weave the net of my first mystery around this incident.

CD: If you were to set Bhrigu and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world, where would you choose? How much does location matter to your story?

NS: Well, this is a very interesting question and something that I have pondered myself. Bhrigu and Sutte are universal and they can thrive in any location but I have used the villages and cities of India as the location for my stories as I was born and brought up here. Hence, I am acquainted with its cultural diversity which makes for a colorful and sensual writing. I only use the elements that I find captivating; right from the mean streets to lofty temples, and then graciously blend them in Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s world.

If I were to set Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world then I would select a place which has a great culture. I have always been fascinated with South America which is replete with its mysterious, indigenous tribes and the great Amazon River which floods every year but still the natives depend on it for their livelihood. I would love to set one of my stories among the Amazonian tribes like the Waodani people who love their forest and enjoy a unique lifestyle.

South America has always been an exotic place to me, wrapped in mysteries and its every country has a unique culture that’s very interesting to read. From the legendary mountains of Peru where the Incas lived to the multicultural Brazil, everything about this continent is very appealing. I have also read that there are many indigenous tribes living in total isolation there than anywhere else in the world which only goes on to add mystery to this strange continent which is ruled by the awe-inspiring Amazon. I would love to explore Latin America’s many hidden secrets, art and culture by choosing locations that reflect its beautiful soul.

Morocco is also a charming place which is still steeped in old values and its Andalusian culture has always held a great fascination for me. I have read many travel articles about this place and how it has always been a sweet spot for writers like Tennessee Williams. It has also played a pivotal role in the creation of modern literary works of great value and Marrakesh is known for its glorious libraries and book shops. The old-world charm that is reflected in its villages is unparalled and if I ever get a chance in future, I would surely like to visit and explore Morocco whenever I am in need of fresh inspiration.

From my choice of locations, it must have become abundantly clear that for me, mystery is a very important factor. Fascinating cultures make for a unique reading experience and they blend seamlessly with elements of mystery fiction, adding charm and sensuality to the stories. Hence, any place which has an old-world charm and has still retained its roots will become ideal as a background for mystery novels. 

CD: Who are some other authors you admire, mystery writers or otherwise, and why?

NS: I am a great fan of Isaac Asimov. His accurate prediction of events based on the scientific knowledge of his time is unparalleled and hugely interesting too. I also admire the golden era of detective fiction as that era gave us some very interesting detectives. I like the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he had created a bold template for the quintessential detective. I also like Edgar Allan Poe and his stories of Dupin, especially his short story, “The Purloined Letter”. We see the very first marvel of logic-based deduction in this story which has influenced countless mystery writers and has also gotten the gears of my brain to move as I admired and challenged it all at once.

Also, I like R. Austin Freeman and his character of Dr. Thorndyke with his perfect tools of deduction. His inverse detective stories are something that I have hugely enjoyed. I am also a fan of Jacques Futrelle and his detective, The Thinking Machine. His story, “The problem of Cell 13” is also a marvel in logical deduction which really thrilled me when I first read it as a teenager and also fuelled my desire to develop it even further.

I have read many mystery writers from the golden era of detective fiction, and I’ve seen authors like Anton Chekov, Mark Twain and P.G Wodehouse get inspired enough to try their hand at writing some. This only goes on to prove that mystery is something that no mortal can resist and if a detective is even more interesting that the mystery, well, it’s just icing on the cake.

CD: Why do you think so many authors have created mystery and detective books throughout time?

NS: The mystery genre has always been a compelling one because when executed well, they can captivate anyone. There is mystery everywhere and when one is solved, it leads to discovery and every new discovery introduces new knowledge. Hence, mystery has always been associated with the creation of new knowledge. Many great authors throughout time have dedicated their lives to writing in this genre because such stories are hugely entertaining and have an appeal not just for the readers but the creators too. There is a thrill in creating great characters/suspects who are a mystery to the readers and this room for doubt makes them rack their own brains in an effort to remove that doubt and reach their own conclusion. Hence, both the writers and readers are working together on a mystery but their intentions are different. One is creating the puzzle and scrambling the pieces while the other is busy collecting them and putting them in a neat order. This brain exercise is exhilarating; almost euphoric and hence like a potent drug, it is used again and again.

The genre of mystery is also appealing because it organizes the elements of fiction in a way that other genres can never achieve. For the creation of a brilliant mystery, it is very important that every ingredient is present in just the right amount or else the recipe for magic will never come alive on the pages. The work is technical and needs an expert to blend every element in order to create works of great fiction that captivates one and all.

For me, the charm lies in the creation of characters that are mysterious but real and to give a spin to real life experiences that charms readers and they are left wanting for more. I like many genres including science fiction but mystery is something that I love the most because it gives me the power to create an engaging plot where the reader has no option but to be glued till the last page, figuring out the mystery and connecting all the dots. Such a compelling reading experience can only be found with this genre and hence it has enjoyed such an overwhelming success form time immemorial. Also, it provides the framework to explore themes and issues of the modern world and also to explore complex ideas through the narratives of the characters.

Many authors have exploited this genre to use as a framework for telling their colorful and complex stories. No other genre provides such a support as this one and the fun of storytelling is magnified when the platform used is popular and enjoys mainstream success.

CD: In your opinion, what was the world’s first detective novel?

NS: Well, here the opinion may differ, but for me the world’s first detective novel was ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins. Although, as far as creating a logical detective is concerned, Edgar Allan Poe was the pioneer but his were only three stories and he never attempted a novel. Collins was the first who introduced social commentary in his detective novels and thus laid the stone (pun intended) for the introduction of mystery genre into classic literature.

His plot is also attractive because it uses the Tippoo diamond of Seringapatnam. The plot is set in the east; Imperial India under Queen Victoria. India has always been the perfect location for mystery novels and Wilkie Collins also succumbed to this temptation by creating a work of detective fiction that is hailed as one of the finest that he ever produced in his lifetime.

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part One

Authors Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters got together for a conversation on their new works, and talk about poverty, violence, faith, and coming to literature a bit later in life. Here is Part One of their conversation.

*

AEK: I thought I would begin by saying that in my novel, Union Square, my main intention, other than to tell a good story the best way that I could, was to describe this place that was such a mixture of so many realities, people, skin color, religious belief. I wanted to set up the story so that that they all could (in theory) find each other in this small neighborhood, relate to each other, and within the strict confines of the time, not see each other as particularly unique or exotic. In part, I was trying to both address identity and provide a foil for some of the more excessive expressions of identity politics, which in my view, at least in literature, has something of a short shelf life. I also wanted to show how important the veneer of respectability is for the people of such a place, that has to do with race, but I would say much more with class and poverty.

KJB: That’s such an interesting observation about the shelf-life of identity politics in literature. I hadn’t thought of that with particularity when writing An Imperfect Rapture, but I have been chaffing at the narrowness of our individual (and collective) apertures for some time.

AEK: In terms of family violence, I guess the advantage I have in this conversation with you is that I’m discussing a work of fiction, while you are talking about your life, your relationships and family. So while the themes are certainly in accord, I can kind of side-step some things if I wish, at least as regards the novel. Someone asked me, “So, you are Catherine, right?” No, I’m not Catherine—I wish I had been Catherine. As a matter of fact, in this novel, there are only a small handful of instances drawn directly from my life experience. For example, for the novel’s denouement, I put together eating a cracker I found on the floor of my babysitter’s house when I was seven years old with waking up at a party when I was fourteen or fifteen, where I didn’t know anybody, sick from having taken God knows what, placing the party of the novel in a house on Charles Street I always wanted to go into but never had the chance.

Having said that, the greatest fear for me has been in people reading the book and saying, it was never like that, these people are not like that, she got it all wrong, who does she think she is—and these would be fears or questions that relate to memoir and non-fiction rather than fiction, but that was and is still hard to grapple with. So that gives an idea of the weight of writing the book, with the last question obviously the most crippling. I think if we heard as kids, Who do you think you are? once in a week, we heard it a hundred times.

The other difference in terms of the violence experienced in my own life is that there was not a person, as with your father, who believed he had the right to punish the members of his household. Though you and I both lived in a certain kind of very familiar poverty, and the massive disruptions that come with it, the only real continuity of family I had was with my two sisters and in my grandmother’s house. So a lot of my memory is very disturbed and discontinuous, and the terrible episodes of violence were less predictable and were not only from one or two other people. The violence and viciousness between me and my siblings was also less predictable and more explosive than what you describe. But I feel that the hallmarks of both our situations come directly out of poverty and the particular violence that goes with it, because I think that violence is so often fueled by shame and a desire for some kind of power, however meager. I suppose not everyone would agree that poverty violence is any different from violence engendered elsewhere, but I think it is.

KJB: I don’t think I fully grasped the connection between violence and poverty or violence and religious fundamentalism until writing this memoir. Even more importantly, perhaps, I hadn’t made the connection between my experience growing up in that particular American shadowland with some of my own rage and inability to navigate the world with any measure of equanimity or inner calm. I practiced employment discrimination law for a lot of years, and have a near-pathological commitment to justice and fairness, and yet the legal system is singularly unfair and unjust to the poorest members of society. One of the things I hoped to do with my writing was to show the rest of the world what it means to be ignored or abused because of one’s class, and to try to open the eyes and minds of readers to how impermeable the barriers to class mobility (at least from poor to middle or upper class) are in this country. It’s a fallacy to think that without intentional, guided assistance people born into poverty – especially generational poverty – have any real chance of getting out of it.

And I do think poverty violence is more pervasive and relentless than what the middle or upper classes choose to believe. I also think you’re right about it being fueled in part by shame and the desire for what one is excluded from – any sense of power or true autonomy — and the rage this fuels is something few writers explore. One of the first (and only) contemporary memoirs that really puts this on the page (in my opinion) is Townie by Andre Dubus III. He does a brilliant job of showing the continual micro- and macro-levels of violence inextricably bound up in the experience of being poor in this country. In truth, poor kids are far more likely to be raped, sexually abused, physically assaulted -to be targets – and perpetrators – of all kinds of violence. Middle and upper class folks are able to ignore or discount this fact by telling themselves, “Well, they’re doing it to themselves. We’re not driving down from our estates to beat up some poor kid.” That’s a subterfuge. Cause and effect aren’t that linear. Every time the wealthy classes choose to ignore or discount the truth of those living in poverty, they are affirmatively reinforcing the oppression of the poor.

I had a girlfriend in law school who came from the wealthy classes – huge money – but she competed with me for a $5,000 scholarship intended for law students with financial need. She knew the judge. She had connections. She won the scholarship. I was already $65,000 in student loan debt – a debt that felt so burdensome as to be almost unbearable – while her family traveled the world and spent summers sailing around the Maldives. How does someone like that justify applying for (let alone taking) a scholarship intended to help the truly disadvantaged? That’s just one small example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about when I say that too often those with means fail to see (or don’t care) how their conduct oppresses, damages, and degrades the poor.

Almost every time I give a reading or talk to folks about my book, I get asked about one of two recent memoirs: J.B. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” or Tara Westbrook’s “Educated.” With respect to both of these writers and the difficult circumstances they surmounted through ivy league educations (Yale and Harvard, respectively) the truth is that this isn’t a realistic formula for more than the teensiest percentage of kids born into poverty. The message strikes me as not only unrealistic but actually damaging because it allows the middle and wealthy classes to (continue to) remain willfully ignorant of the prison generational poverty creates for most people born into it. I didn’t even know what an ivy league was when I was in high school, let alone have the slightest notion of how to get into one (or the slightest chance of getting into one).

That’s not to say I think education isn’t – or can’t be – part of the path out of poverty, and it certainly affected my life and world view, but it doesn’t address the ways in which our culture condones and even encourages the emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor. I’m probably misquoting my own work, but at one point I’m writing about the experience of discovering classical piano in college – and how, ultimately, I realized that no matter how much I loved it, how much talent I may have had, how many hours I practiced, or how much I longed to be a classical pianist, I could never make up for the years I’d lost. I quote Yeats’ comment about Keats growing up looking through the window of a “Sweet Shop.” Some of us grow up not even knowing a Sweet Shop exists. And, not to be cynical, but I often wonder if the greater culture prefers it that way.

AEK: This gives me so much to think about! And is perfectly expressed. You could describe the “emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor” to those who have no idea first-hand what it means until the cows come home (presuming you even knew when that was), but I don’t think there any way to let them know. For me, there is no very good way to understand why they don’t know, or can’t, whichever it is. There was a wonderful penny-candy store on the way home from one school I attended in 4th and 5th grade, just a little thing run by a little old lady, but the view of the potential world from that “Sweet Shop” where I spent a penny on the afternoons I had one (mostly during the milk surplus when milk cartons were less than a penny each at lunch time) was the first place of longing I can remember fully–and it was in part because I had read “The All-of-a-Kind Family” books in second grade, that had a memorable scene of two little poor girls and their wild indulgence in penny-candy store wares.

Beyond that, I was really lucky–a relative plucked me out of Baltimore to Washington State, just at the moment in junior high when I was about to succumb to drugs and promiscuity. Whatever else that experience was about, there is no doubt that it saved my life. Had I not left, if I were still alive it’s doubtful I would have the tools or the psychic energy to reflect on these matters, much less to have this conversation. What I find with Mr. Emerson, for example, is that readers either get him immediately, or don’t really understand his place in the book. He represents that psychic and intellectual stunting, which he overcomes for a brief period in his life, until the entirety of his circumstances overwhelm him again, and finally.

KJB: Well, that’s one of the aspects of your novel I loved so. You didn’t over-tell or over-explain the characters, which I suppose will leave some readers thinking they don’t get Mr. Emerson or some other character, but really it’s brilliant to leave that measure of mystery. You offer the reader the best gift a writer can, I think. It’s so much more interesting to read work by a writer who trusts the reader’s intelligence and imagination.

AEK: Thank you so much for that—I feel the same about your memoir, that even when you write about getting older and more able to articulate your ideas and beliefs, you don’t insist that the reader accept them or be converted by them.

We also talked a little bit before about both of us coming, if not to writing, to publication pretty late in life. That in my case was fueled by the twin sisters of fear and recrimination, what someone I know calls the very real consequences of breaking the family rules. For twenty years, I didn’t write anything, and just thought, well, you know, I guess I’m not going to be a writer after all. Every time I took up the pen, I thought I was going to die of terror. I suppose that’s not something everyone can related to, even if you have a massive case of writer’s block, but for me it was the thought that someone was going to show up at my door with a shotgun and that would be the end of that.

Slowly, though, and by grace is how I would put it, since I love to write, I began to write poetry, not just because it’s a quick in-and-out (which I think is why a lot of people start with poetry), but because the sheer pleasure of making that music had always been what I loved more than anything. And then I wrote a small book about how praying the Rosary helped in healing post-traumatic stress disorder. From there, I started taking classes in creative writing at the university where I was working, and had some idea that telling stories was pretty great, too, and here I was with this monumentally hilarious and tragic and fascinating backdrop from which to tell a good story. The fear is far from gone and in many ways hardly subsided, but I have learned some tricks and strategies to jump the fence. Teaching for a few years also helped enormously, because I could see that the strategies I had developed for myself as a student were also helping blocked student writers in my classes. Not much has been as professionally rewarding as that, so I thank those students from the bottom of my heart.

KJB: We’re so alike in this! I started writing poetry in high school (actually I plagiarized the hell out of Rod McKuen when I was in grammar school trying to impress my childhood sweetheart) because I loved the feel and sound of language, and the way I thought poetry let me write truths that I didn’t have the courage to admit otherwise. But as you know from the book, I got derailed from that path pretty early on. I actually married a poet the year after graduating from law school – and I think part of me had a fantasy of being in this romantic relationship with a poet who would love and encourage my work until I could find a way to make a living writing poetry, so, you can see I’ve always had a pretty rich fantasy life. Once we were married and I started practicing law full-time, I stopped writing anything but legal briefs. For over two decades. In my early 50s I experienced a major depressive episode, and started seeing a Jungian therapist. He was the first person to help me realize that much of the depression stemmed from the way I’d compartmentalized my life, and how I’d hidden so much of myself and my past from everyone in my life. It was literally killing me.

Now I see that long hiatus as necessary to writing An Imperfect Rapture. I wouldn’t have had the courage or insight to write this book in my 30s or 40s. At some point, it meant more to me to leave this message – the best way I knew how – my particular imprint. Not to get all maudlin, but I recently had a health scare. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing, but when I got the call to come back for additional tests, I remember thinking if it turned out to be bad news, I was grateful I’d written this book.

AEK: That makes perfect sense—and though I’m sorry you had the scare, so glad it meant you put the book out into the world. For me, the starting place was learning about haiku and Biblical literature in 6th grade—I thought, MAN! This is amazing, I didn’t even know you could do this yourself! And then high school, too, I tried to impress a number of young gentlemen with my chops, not to much avail, but still. And I don’t think you can come from anywhere and succeed with words without that rich fantasy life (especially if the fantasy is making some money!). I mean, I still have imaginary friends, so.

Click Here for Part Two of this Conversation

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part Two

Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters continue their conversation about the writing life, their experiences of faith, and the legacies of poverty and violence in this conclusion. Click Here for Part One of this conversation.

*

AEK: And of course, as you so movingly and astonishingly describe in your book, you take all the rules you learned as a child with you into adulthood, and continue to play by them, consciously or unconsciously. The main reason I created Carmen as a mixed race person, other than to represent the real mix of black and white in that neighborhood, was because, first, I needed a renegade who was a woman; and I needed a woman who would have very good reasons not to care about anything. Carmen turns not-caring into an art form from a very early age, and part of that for her is passing “as white,” though in fact her mother is White. In Carmen’s mind, race is something that, at least consciously, she doesn’t think about as applying to her. But again, I think in that location, this is something that would be possible where it would not someplace else.

The rage and inability to navigate the world you identify I also understand well, even though, like you, it took a lifetime to recognize and understand how directly these came from being poor. It is a very long time since I have not had enough to eat or enough money to buy shoes, and beyond that, I have a Master’s degree and a doctorate, though both were achieved pretty late in my life. For that reason alone, I will never not be a privileged person again, no matter what my material resources. But as author Ruby Payne would say, I have those resources but still lack understanding of social rules. Among my so-called “peers,” I still never really know what the rules are, and see how I still break them all the time. I have lost friends and relationships this way, and experienced a great deal of social isolation. In that respect, I would say that most places at most times of my life, I have been passing as a middle-class person.

For the story of Union Square itself, I also chose to use the Rashomon technique for the first four days of the narrative to replicate the fracturing and isolation I wanted to convey, that as far as I can see is not a part of middle class culture as a rule, while exploring this place and the kind of people who lived in it. Young Emerson represents both the neighborhood and the social isolation that comes with not having been taught how to take on an adult set of rules. Catherine likely represents the more healthy, though immature side of myself, or as I say, who I wished I had been. Petie is the solid guy who is provoked to violence as nearly his default response to every situation—he’s the kind of hot-head who populates such places, though he’s a good person. He’s also the one who really belongs to and understands the environment as such. And Paddy and Carmen, of course, represent the sum of what it means to be broken by such experiences, and how they break everyone else in their turn.

KJB: One of the most compelling and risky aspects of your nonfiction work, I think, is how you directly embrace your faith. Your novel does so as well, albeit more obliquely. I wonder if you get asked about this when you’re reading or talking with folks about your work. How (or why) does one retain her faith despite having witnessed or experienced deeply wounding betrayals by the human representatives of that faith?

AEK: Yes, that is definitely one of the hardest parts of all of this. Mostly, people don’t ask that question directly. I get the feeling they sort of put up with that part of me because they respect me as an artist, for which I’m grateful, but I do find it amusing and yet often frustrating.

The early days of my childhood in the Catholic Church were mixed of fear, awe, and love, and there’s no other way to say that. I have very hazy memories of incidents that seem to have involved clergy members. I can’t say more than that, because I don’t really remember, but the feelings about it are both strong and often debilitating. But I have always had a feeling of “knowing” the presence of God, even in my nominally atheist teen years—and in fact, they were not atheist years, but anti-religion years. I had a hatred of fundamentalist Christians that would have burned your eyebrows off—but that was the embedded rage against all things religious.

The change for me came when I (against all expectation) decided to go to Creighton University here in Omaha for my undergraduate degree. At the time you had to take what now would be considered a dual minor in theology and philosophy, and I ultimately majored in theology. We thought we had discovered the Holy Grail of Catholic truth, Vatican II, and we were taught by lay professors and Jesuits, many of whom I owe a great debt of gratitude to, for their intellectual honesty as well as their care and kindness for me as a young person. In those years, I had a conversion experience, came to understand Jesus as a person, and I’ve never deviated from that since. I went on after graduation to work as a volunteer for a year, and taught high school religion for three years after that. Our family, my husband and daughter and myself, are not what I would call deeply religious, but thoroughly religious. This is simply a matter of fact, not of any kind of superior stance or any assumption.

But having faith and hope in the reforms of Vatican II have obviously been no sinecures for the terrible abuses that came to light over the past four or more decades. As an adult, college and beyond, I have known some truly horrible clergy members. A handful tried to seduce me, or I knew of them seducing or attempting to seduce other young men or women. A priest I held in the highest esteem turned out to be a child molester, maybe a child rapist, I don’t know. Any number of them had adult relationships which, had they been married, would have made them adulterers, and as I understand it, that’s actually one of the commandments you’re not supposed to break. The scope of the revelations of 2002 that were followed by the film Spotlight were shattering, and at one point I was not sure I would survive them.

So, it’s a complicated situation to say the least. Like A. Richard Sipe, I consider myself Catholic, and though I try to be part of a faith community, that is not always possible. Many of the poems I have written are essentially “problem of evil” questions, as Union Square is in many ways a problem of evil novel. No one can get to the bottom of such matter—I certainly don’t pretend to. On the other hand, I also believe that no one has the right to rob you of how you express your truth and belief. So much of the Church right now is bad, but I still think that its core is the revelation of God that I am meant to follow. Though I have tried, I’ve never been able to completely deviate from that stance.

I wonder how your answer will differ from mine, as clearly you were equally part and parcel of your faith and that world as a child. Have you had to reconcile how that influenced you, and have you made a new choice or a different one?

KJB: I have so much trouble with that question. In part because I can’t say I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish, or otherwise claim some presumably concrete theology. When people ask (as they do) “What do you believe now?”) I’m stumped. I spent years dragging my husband and daughter to every church within a ten-mile radius of our home, trying to find a church I felt comfortable in, but after weeks or months, or sometimes years, I’d walk away feeling disillusioned, and often angry. It was usually a tithing sermon that sent me over the edge. I grew up in a church that prioritized tithing over everything – including buying decent food or clothes – and I can’t stand to hear sermons on tithing. In any event, every church experience was ultimately a let-down. I stopped attended services three or four years ago.

And yet, I have never lost my faith. When I try to answer that question about faith – what and why I believe – I am reminded of Jung’s late-in-life answer to that question. He declined to reveal or write about his own faith until he was in his 80s, fearing that to do so would marginalize his work. But in his posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he never lost his faith. His faith came to him experientially, he wrote, and thus he could never lose it. It’s precisely what you said earlier. You can’t lose faith you gain through experience, that is, you can’t un-know the experience of knowing.

And, like you, in the midst of all the pain and craziness, there were moments of knowing and transcendence. I include a few of those moments in the memoir. The times when, inexplicably, I experienced moments of grace – miracles, if you will – that I can’t discount. I suppose that’s the best explanation I can give for why, despite everything, I have never lost my own faith. Sometimes I’ve felt the door closing between me and that knowing, and I work at faith then, because I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to bear the darkness alone.

AEK: “You can’t un-know the experience of knowing”—wow, that is exactly how I was wanting to say that, thank you.

I guess I would end with the question of culpability and forgiveness, which in a novel is really not the same kind of issue, as long as you don’t condescend to any of your characters by making them holier than everybody else, or more evil than they are. Paddy was the best exercise in this for me, and my aim was to get as close inside the head of such a person as I could, so as to (at least for a while) deliver him as a person and not a cipher or a cartoon. But in memoir, you also have the choice about whom to picture as the enemy and whom the beloved, and you have the duty to take responsibility for your own sins. I believe the accuser and the accused can be unjustly conflated far too easily, that we can put ourselves to blame and shame far more readily than those who hurt us. And I suppose you have already gotten comments from readers who wonder how you could forgive especially your father, and how you could write about that. But that is where I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts, as you must have wrestled with them greatly.

KJB: I have had a few readers ask some iteration of “I hate your dad, why don’t you?”  That just makes me think I didn’t do what I set out to do, which was to work against stereotypes and caricatures with intentionality – to write difficult characters with enough of their experiences and contradictions and complications on the page to make the reader empathize with them – even when the reader may not want to. I feel most heartened by responses like one I received in an email the other day, where a woman said she felt like she should hate my dad but she ended up loving him instead.

It’s deeply complicated, of course, and it brings to mind the Watson research from the ‘60s (studying, among other things, the effect of maternal negligence and abuse on chimpanzee babies, and how the babies kept trying every strategy imaginable to evoke love or tenderness from the parent, no matter how many times the mother ignored or abused the baby – it’s really heartbreaking, but pretty eye-opening, too) concluding that babies and children are so hard-wired to love their parents it’s almost (almost, but not completely) impossible for a child not to love her parent.

Also, I believe that with very few exceptions, if we really get inside the skin of another person, if we can move around in that person’s interiority long enough, we will find empathy and compassion – and love – for that person. I think I spent my whole life prior to writing this memoir trying to figure out the why of my parents’ abuse, the why of what prompts someone who loves you (and who you love with the wide-open heart of a child) to also hurt you. My dad died in 1996, long before it occurred to me to ask that question directly. My mom is still alive, though, and I recently asked her some version of that question. It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. She’s in her 90s now, and has some cognitive challenges, so I didn’t think anything would be served by pressing it, even though her answer was to blame my dad.

AEK: I have pretty well spent my lifetime trying to extinguish my need to walk around in those people’s shoes, but the difference is likely that your father and mother clearly loved all of you. But there is a point at which I just have to say, forgiveness is God’s job, not mine. As one pastor said to me a long time ago, if one of those people showed up at my door and was truly contrite and asked for my forgiveness (and, when your father, Kelly, does that, it changes everything about him for the reader), then I would have a choice to make. I never had to make that choice.

My private feeling is that the betrayal of the mother is worse for most of us. Whether she is the abuser or complicit in abuse by father, sibling, whoever it is, she is the one who is supposed to not be that person. And I would think someone like your mother would have to blame someone else. I agree with you that there is a point at which hammering out the truth despite the expense just isn’t worth it. It doesn’t make us less authentic, I think, but really more so.

And I have to compliment you in turn: what you achieved was obviously a breath-takingly delicate balance of what is, in your life, the truth, the authentic. It is an incredible accomplishment. I love your book and hope there is another one to come, and that we can meet again.

KJB: Thank you so much, Adrian. I was already a huge fan of your work before we had this chance to chat, but getting a peek at the person behind the work has been a thrill. I hope our paths cross again.

Deceptively Understated: A Review of Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone

While You Were Gone follows the lives of three sisters over a period of 15 years, from 1995 to 2010. It is, more than the history of a family, a portrait of adulthood in general. The drama is primarily domestic and psychological: there are no earth-shattering events, no dramatic plot twists. We are witnessing the regular lives of three normal, unremarkable people unfold gently, punctuated by all the ordinary milestones – marriages, births, deaths, break-ups, career changes. Throughout all this, adulthood is depicted as a quiet, understated process of slowly letting go of the dreams of youth, at times painful and at times peaceful.

The middle sister, Shannon, opens the novel as a teenager with grand ambitions. She wants nothing more than to go to college and escape life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which she sees as leading inevitably to mediocrity and failure. Out there, she imagines, revolutions are brewing, social changes are waiting to be documented. But Shannon’s youthful dream of “changing the world” fades little by little: the job that was to be her springboard towards a career in journalism turns out to be dead-end; an unenthusiastic marriage proves unable to measure up with the idealized image she has formed of Ben, her old crush from college. Almost unnoticeably, every small failure results in one goal adjustment after the other, until Shannon’s aspirations, turned solidly domestic and middle-class, bear no resemblance to the idealistic dreams she started out with: “She no longer dreamed of that kind of life. She wanted love, and, yes, a child, but with a proper husband, and a job that she enjoyed.”

In contrast with Shannon, the youngest sister, Paige, seems to be living the dream – at least for a while. She writes music, goes on tours with her band, and is apparently on her slow but steady way to fame, all while living the life of the quintessential rock star: drugs, drinking, partying and multiple short-lived affairs with anonymous women. But when she is fired from her band, she has no choice but to return to her hometown. Here she meets an extremely talented but reclusive musician who refuses to record his songs and wishes to die in obscurity; his music, he believes, is only alive when he performs it. This causes Paige to have her own epiphany, one of the fine moments in the book where a personal truth expands beyond the limits of the psychological, reaching cosmic dimensions:

Was that what she was afraid of, dying in obscurity? He was right: sooner or later, everyone did. One day even earth would end. One day everything and everyone would be forgotten. Why did it matter one way or the other what her—or even her band’s—brief spot on the world amounted to? Only moments like this mattered, and they would be secret and unknowable to everyone except her and Billy.

Claire has always been the responsible one. She cared for her mother as she was dying and then took on a parental role for her younger sisters; she married early, had two children, and crafted a successful career for herself, all exactly as planned. The problem is that after years of being the person who has done everything by the book, she no longer knows who she is outside her roles – mother, daughter, worker. She somewhat inexplicably starts an affair with a young intern at her company. It is in the intensity of feeling that he causes in her that she finds what she thinks is a kind of re-encounter with her own self, unmediated by roles and responsibilities and domestic life:

…now she knew there was something unnamable, unseen. It was not the accretion of days, the small moments people claimed that mattered, it was not the daily patterns that varied so little from human to human. It was not life. It was not death. It was a force of energy that made those things feel small and sad and ordinary. It wasn’t Joseph even, it was what Joseph had brought her, what she was seeking.

Without giving away too much of the plot, all members of the family carry secrets. But the function of the secrets is not so much to create narrative tension as it is to further our understanding of the characters’ psychologies. Family, for all three sisters, is where they come for comfort, the place they inevitably return to as their life aspirations turn out to be not what they expected, yet it also represents the locus where the individual self is in danger of losing its distinctness from others. For all the characters, secrets, benign or not, symbolize their attempts at carving up a space that is only their own.

The book’s writing style is as deceptively understated as its plot. It is in the subtle depiction of change and evolution that Baker excels. A sentence or a paragraph can cover weeks or months, depicting small, seemingly insignificant actions which add up little by little into something greater that can only be fully grasped once the book is finished. The structure of the novel is just as carefully crafted. Time is measured out from one birthday of the three sisters’ father to the next. In the first three quarters of the book the narration moves slowly between birthdays; after the father’s death, time is compressed, the birthdays succeeding each other at shorter and shorter distances and losing their significance as a marker of time in the sisters’ minds. This is both a reflection of how time seems to pass faster as one gets older, and a bittersweet manifestation of how all characters have grown and let go of the past.

What is missing from While You Were Gone is a broader awareness of the social and historical environment in which the three sisters live and of the way it affects their lives. Here and there, short passages tantalizingly give us glimpses into what the novel might have been. Shannon’s dream of being an award-winning journalist fades gradually because she is “born in the wrong era”: no grand revolutions for her to document, printed press dwindling away with the rise of the Internet. The novel is populated with places heavy with the history of the Old South, with sites of lynchings and Civil War battles, with intricate family trees which reach out to the time of the plantations, but this setting does little more than providing the background for the family drama. Claire’s attempt to reconcile her motherhood with her role as a career woman occasion some meditations on the 1990s’ feminist dream of “having it all”, while Shannon’s visit to a fundamentalist Christian dentist briefly throws her into an inner monologue on privilege and difference which functions to reveal her general apathy on the issues more than it does to make any specific statement about them.

Ultimately, everything converges back into the consciousness of the characters. In one of the most poignant moments of the book, Claire, in a desperate state, seeks refuge in the cemetery. This is a place where the ancestors of her family are buried, which carries the graves of lynchers and Confederate soldiers. She has, for a brief moment, the sense that her entire known world is weeping with her: “Can’t you hear them all weeping? […] All the dead people. Soldiers, Indians, slaves. They’re all here beneath us.” But this moment represents the climax of a personal crisis, a defining point of Claire’s trajectory as a character — the weight of history is used as a device for emphasizing the dimension of Claire’s sorrow, not the other way around.

But despite all this, the relatively confined world of While You Were Gone never feels claustrophobic. Although made up of mostly mundane events, the arcs of all three sisters are gripping and even suspenseful as the reader wonders whether any of them will be able to successfully negotiate a workable path between their ideals and the reality of the world they live in. The book will resonate deeply with anyone who’s tried to navigate through adulthood, changing expectations, failures and disappointments; indeed, I would recommend it not only for the quality of its writing, but also for the cathartic effect that reading it can produce.

Sins of the Mothers: A Review of Laura Catherine Brown's Made by Mary

There is no happy ending to Laura Catherine Brown’s second and latest novel, Made By Mary, but rather an unsettling continuation after losses and distorted perceptions. This may not be readily apparent, as readers may sigh at the inevitable disappointments but assume triumphs in what remains and rises from the ashes of misplaced loyalties and intentions. We must decide if what is left augurs any hope or just a perpetuation of the misguided lineage of generations doomed to repeat mistakes and subsequent tragedies. Brown explores the classic dual desire to cling to the assumed support and security of our parents, particularly our mothers, and the need to separate and to become our own person in an ancient, perplexing conflict. Are there simply inherent flaws in the human condition that preclude us from escaping the entrapment of expectations and mutual, unhealthy dependencies? Or can we make conscious assessments and choices? Brown asks us to examine critical aspects of the mother/daughter relationship. The guilt and the responsibilities flow in both directions. She often treats serious situations, indeed life and death situations, with a subtle, perhaps even black humor. It stirs a hesitant smile within us, but there’s no hearty laughter in her astute observances of the foibles and problems that result from our inability to face truths and heal our wounds. These characters hold onto one another like pieces of a splintering life raft, and the consequences are frequently devastating.

Mary, a child of Woodstock and the sixties hippie generation, is mother to Annapurna Peace Moonlight, or Ann, as she prefers to call herself. Ann resists Mary’s values and influence every chance she gets. She responds to Mary’s open and often careless approach to life with strict, repressed attitudes and accusatory postures, much as Mary’s carefree life of avoidance responded to her own mother’s strict, repressive personality. Ann is struggling with her identity and sees motherhood as the answer to finding her value and her place in the world much as Mary once did. Born without a uterus, Ann already feels less of a woman and desperately wants a child. Right from the opening paragraph we see who she is, a pre-school teacher who merges with her little charges “…like crayons melting together in the sun.” The solace she assumes at the pre-school mirrors a desire to capture her own lost childhood. She’s out of touch with her deeper self and any accurate barometer of her own worth. Ann is a talented, gifted musician, but this is insufficient to satisfy her as she continues to measure her value against others and distorted, unrealistic standards. In one scene, Ann looks at her dog, McKenna, thinking to herself that his unconditional devotion is not enough, although “…his gaze is pure love.” It might be a subtler point, but it asks us to examine how we view love, what is “enough,” and if it matters where that love comes from. Is love only justified if we can wrest it from those who are unable to give it or are not even born yet?

Ann is married to Joel Solcombe, a musician and owner of his own construction company, who is struggling financially while building their dream house in upstate Sullivan County, New York. He and Ann are living in a trailer on the property until the house is completed. They both play in a band at local establishments, which is where they seem to derive most of their personal and creative satisfaction. Joel and Ann compose music together, which is symbolic of their true ability for mutual creation. Why wasn’t this inspired expression enough for them individually and in union with one another? Why was having children more of an affirmation of their creativity and existence?

Joel has issues with his own mother, Betty, a chain smoking, mean spirited woman, whose anger at her life and being abandoned by her husband is put upon her son, while she pins small remnants of hope on the prospect of having a grandchild. We learn that, “She would not permit Joel to live in ignorance of her unhappiness.” Joel vacillates between hatred and distain for his mother and trying to coddle up to any tidbit of emotion or concern she might offer. These feelings transfer to Ann in his desire to please her by doing anything and everything to help them achieve parenthood. Joel feels “duty-bound to Betty,” which causes him to suppress any negative feelings he has toward her and her behavior. We see how this translates into his relationship with his wife when he observes that Ann’s “contempt added to her beauty,” emphasizing how we are attracted to what we have not healed.

Joel is recognized as a talented musician and band leader but admits he hasn’t played in a while since their bass player had a child. We are shown early in the story that we sacrifice so much of our lives when we become parents. The questions Brown asks us to consider are deeply probative. How much are we meant to forfeit of our lives just to bring in another who will feel indebted to do the same? Are we simply fostering a lineage of obligation for others to fulfill us? What are our true motivations in becoming parents?

After a disastrous attempt at taking in a pregnant teenager, Jessica, with the anticipation of adopting her child, Joel and Ann find themselves embroiled in an in vitro surrogate mother situation with Mary. At age fifty and already overweight, Mary sees this as an opportunity to win Ann’s love and prove herself as a mother. She has no consideration for her own health and wellbeing in a desperate mission to prove her worth. Her litany of self-absorbed lovers, both male and female, illustrate her inability to take care of herself, and to accept her talents as a creative person in her own right. Mary feels it’s better to receive comfort from “someone who hurts you” rather than receive none at all.

It is not enough for Joel and Ann to express themselves as musicians and in their love for one another, and it is not enough for Mary to accept herself and her own gifts as a jewelry designer. In fact, she designs braided, intertwining wedding rings for Ann and Joel along with one for herself “…as if the three of them were married.” Here we see a prime example of misappropriation and intrusive interactions in co-dependent relationships. When Joel first meets Ann, he thinks he has finally found “…someone I can make happy.” He fails to realize that we are responsible for our own happiness. We can share that with someone else, but we can never make someone else happy. Huge resentments build among all the characters when they feel they are sacrificing themselves for others and are not fully appreciated for playing the role of victim in order to gain another’s love and attention. In their desperate struggles, they fail to see that this only leads to distain and anger from those whose approval they seek. It never ends well when we ingratiate ourselves to others by capitulating to their wants and desires at the expense of our own. We earn their respect and love when we honor ourselves as separate individuals with our own needs and aspirations. This may not coincide with accepted standards or a majority consensus, which is why we may need to leave those who do not accept us for who we are.

As Brown extends these issues in a larger context, she asks us to consider societal assumptions and traditions. Throughout the story we get a sense of what is expected or even obligatory from women: to revere our maternal forebears and to relish becoming mothers. Women who are unable to have children are pitied, and others become stigmatized for not wanting children at all. In order to have a baby, Ann works against all her natural instincts. She feels that “So much of her life occurred beyond her control.” That is because she has willingly relinquished control without recognizing it. Interestingly, in a book all about motherhood, no one seems particularly “motherly.” Mary refers to the children of her friend, America’s daughter Cassidy, as “rug rats,” Jessica states, “I hate kids,” and Cassidy tells Jessica that at least she “…has the wisdom to give them up.” Then later on Cassidy cries about America never loving her, and we see the way she treats her own daughter, Sky, when she observes Sky’s attempts at affection by stating, “It’s not love, it’s a survival tactic,” and that her own mother never loved anyone, “not even herself.” But they remain tethered to hopes of connection, just as dying soldiers do on the battlefield, who can’t escape that instinctual need to cry out for their mothers, as we do so often in desperate and needy instances. Jessica cries out for her mother during labor, not for Ann who has taken care of her for nine months. Mary does the same while she is in labor. Jessica’s mother rejects her, yet she shows up at the hospital for the birth and claims her daughter and her grandchild.

Ann has an unrealistic, dreamlike vision of what motherhood will be, how she’ll be different from all the others, especially Mary. Her vision of a baby becomes her personal salvation and a barometer of her worth. Yet how can she expect to love another when she is constantly so critical of herself? This is where transference of such feelings becomes dangerous and distorted. These characters live in the illusion that their will can manifest their desires. Ann sees herself as being able to “bend reality to her will” and convinces herself she is not afraid. This is deep denial, as we see nothing but fear in all of these characters. What they lack is an acceptance that we do live in a fearful and precarious world. This creates an inability to see oneself clearly and to connect with reality. It is why Mary feels better about herself “in fragments.” Most often the characters reinforce their illusions through the use of alcohol, drugs, and elaborate demonstrations that are supposed to invoke the powers of the mystical in finding answers. In another misguided instance, Ann thinks she has “lost her vigilance against misfortune,” and this undermines and jinxes her happiness. She gives away her power once again to a perceived outside force. These modalities offer escape instead of a grounding in reality. In a moment of lucidity, Ann sees beauty in simple things around her and asks herself, “You’re alive…isn’t that enough?” Unfortunately, she loses the opportunity to go deeper into that realization.

There’s a lot of New Age rituals, symbolism, and artifacts that strive to give meaning and supernatural credence to decisions and actions taken by the characters. There are communal conjuring circles, ceremonial offerings, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. Instead of relying on their own intuition to guide their paths, they seek affirmation in external signs, interpreting circumstances through the prism of their hopes and desires rather than being grounded in truth. Instead of offering clarity, it clouds their vision, and offers misguided confirmation of their choices. There’s a menstrual party that comes across as something falsely celebratory, as opposed to the mutual comfort of this monthly ritual as detailed so beautifully in Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent.” There is a forced imposition of frantic festivities without acknowledging the mixed emotions and discomfort that accompany so much of the human condition. The hippie, New Age dictums, and actions of Mary and her cohorts seem disingenuous and desperate rather than affirmative. But all the spiritual babble, tokens, and totems never offer true solace or hide the fears that they strive to assuage so ardently. The characters lie and deceive one another time and again, something a symbolic piece of jewelry or sacred chant can’t mitigate. They can’t replace lost dreams, wishful thinking, or revisionist history, all places where these characters reside. Their memories are revised and cloudy. Joel recalls loving parents leaning over his bed when he was a child, an example of the supposed halcyon days we spend lifetimes trying to recreate when they actually never existed. It becomes “a memory of a memory.” But he continues to ask himself why he can “access the past so easily but never the future?” Mary’s insistence that Ann was born at Woodstock during the famous festival of the sixties is an attempt to escalate her own importance and infuse the birth with meaning. But it’s a lie. She knows it and Ann knows it. But she would rather live in a lie than accept the truth, and it destroys her life.

The tragic losses of this story illustrate the very selfish and misguided reasons so many people seek parenthood. So much of it is the result of what they never received from their own parents and imagine that, somehow, they’ll be able to correct and recover this in a child of their own. But without the necessary introspection and examination of their actions and desires, it begs a critical question: how many lives must be sacrificed to prove that another one has value? Of course, we can see how this plays out on a macro scale in global conflicts, battlefields, and even the horrors of genocide, just as it does on a micro level in our own private interactions and our interior landscapes.

Perhaps the book’s title gives us some of the best insights into its message. Made by Mary suggests something manufactured and less than organic. Mary feels she has “made” Ann and shouts, “…I can make another you,” as if birthing another human being will give her a second chance to correct mistakes that she has made with Ann. As Brown observes of Mary, “Genetically unable to back away from perceived disapproval, she filled it with herself.” She is in a constant mode of compensation for what she sees as her own shortcomings. This is when she resorts to magical potions and incantations in desperate attempts to fix things. We learn early on that Mary’s motives for carrying Ann’s baby are less than altruistic when she sees it as an opportunity to promote her jewelry business and to get attention.

As Ann succumbs more steadily throughout the story into Mary’s world of external, spiritual validations, her actions simply mirror her desire to align with her mother’s illusionary world. Ann sees moving forward as choosing “love and life, as Mary had done.” But it is difficult to see how Mary accomplished this. She never chose to carry Ann’s baby out of love but rather to affirm her value to Ann. And she didn’t choose life but sacrificed it.

Brown names sections of the book for the four elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire that span the years 1999 to 2000 and concludes with the section Spirit 2000. The elements are meant to help us locate our strengths and weaknesses in order to address them. Air represents intellect and intentions, earth links us to family and roots and is a grounding force, fire represents transformation and inner strength, and water is emotional release and intuitive connection. We don’t see any of these characters as particularly grounded and their mental capacities are distorted and unclear. There are moments of emotional release, but they don’t actually lead to intuitive power. The fire they experience is ultimately less than transformative. But perhaps this is Brown’s point, to show us what we miss when we choose not to see.

Made by Mary gives us tremendous insights not only into the feminine and maternal journeys but into human nature as a whole. It asks us to examine what we sacrifice for others and why; how we derail our own train by trying to hitch it to another. She asks us to examine the impetus behind our desire to create another human being when we feel our own humanity is insufficient. What does it mean to give life? To have life inside of you? Do we have no life if we do not bring another one into this world? What does it mean to live one’s own life? These are the critical questions she asks us to consider in a story that sometimes appears deceptively lighthearted on the surface. There’s a fine, delicate equivalence between outrageous humor and very serious subject matter. For the most part, Brown is successful in achieving that balance. Language is sometimes raw but is evocative and appropriately representative of certain situations. Her astute observations give depth and clarity about the misguided ways in which we interpret our own lives and sacrifice them at the altar of external acceptance and norms.

Brown shows us clearly that our fears of being forgotten and misunderstood, and our denial of the realities of death, are intense motivations behind our desire to procreate, and to live on through something we believe we have created. In truth, each soul has its own journey, and we are merely vessels in bringing them forth into the world. Creativity is not passed on through another but is an expression of the passion in each individual spirit. The consequences for characters in this story shows us that the burden of our own worth should never be put upon another. Whether we adapt or rebel, it’s only two sides of the same coin. We are still not individuals living in our own bodies and owning our own truth. We go back and forth between rejection and craving attachment. We become children again, the child inside of us who was raised deficiently and still seeks connection and approval. At times we might find it difficult to feel compassion for these characters. We become exasperated with their lack of self-reflection and their ability to deflect truth and honesty. If this angers us, it’s because we see these flaws in ourselves, which means Brown has been successful in prompting us to identify them in a very personal way.

If the reader isn’t mindful, the desire to find redemption in the losses suffered by the characters will overshadow the more crucial messages of the story. Brown has done a fine job in elucidating very pivotal issues if the reader mines the gold within. What happens when we choose family, or any other option, over truth? As Ann faces the future with her own daughter, we are left to decide what lessons she will take with her, or if she is doomed to repeat legacies of dysfunction. Rather than wrapping up her story in a neat package, Brown wisely leaves us with that question. Perhaps, the epigraph by W.B. Yeats at the beginning of the book sums it up most aptly: A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.