Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts’s sophomore novel, follows a young married couple from New York City on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest in November 2018. As wildfires rage and the Colorado River faces ecological collapse, the couple grapples with personal turmoil—Lewis mourns the recent loss of his mother, while Eloise slowly begins to suspect she might be pregnant—that unfolds against a backdrop of environmental decay. Eschewing the futuristic, sci-fi renderings of climate change, Watts depicts a contemporary version of cli-fi, in which the routines of everyday life—falling in love, navigating loss, getting pulled over for speeding—endure even as catastrophe looms.
I spoke with Watts about writing in the second person, the private grief of living a reproductive life in America, and ambiguous endings.
Marisa D. Wright: The novel’s epigraph is a quote from Roland Barthes which reads, “You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you),” and it seems connected to how the novel is addressed to a particular character. In a Substack post from last August, you wrote, “Epigraphs are a gesture of confidence I make towards myself.” What were you gesturing at with this epigraph?
Madeleine Watts: When I’d read A Lover’s Discourse in my early-to-mid 20s, I had underlined a line addressed to “you.” The whole time I’d been writing this book, I’d been very aware because I did an MFA that you should never use the second person. People don’t like it. I had tried to write the book in first person, and I tried to write it in third person, and it just never worked. It started coming out in second person, so I was always trying to reason with myself about why it needed to be second person. I was trying to think through and frame why the narrator would be speaking in this way. Because the book is so much about grief and loss, my experience, at least, is there is a kind of conversation that’s always happening in your head that is addressing that person—like telling them things that you might want to tell them that you can’t. What that epigraph framed for me was to speak to the lost person is to make them present and invoke them. It’s conjuring through language. The very act of speaking and telling a story can bring them to life again.
MDW: This novel has many strands: a road trip through the Southwest, a climate crisis lurking in the background, a family loss, and a marriage story. How would you describe its genre? Does “contemporary climate fiction” feel right?
MW: It’s kind of like a genre mishmash. I started writing it during the pandemic, so I was physically stuck and couldn’t leave the house, so there’s a road trip element. It’s a love story, and it’s also self-consciously about climate change. When I started writing this book, I would do interviews and events, and I would be asked these big questions like “Do you think there’s hope?” I was really trying to think about my answers to those questions. To some extent, this book is an answer and kind of an extension of a lot of the things I was thinking of in the first book. At the same time, I was beginning to teach and think in a much more academic way. If you write a realist novel but fail to mention climate change, it will still be there in your work because you live in it. It’s in the air you breathe. I think anything that I’m ever going to write is going to have that awareness in it because it’s in the ambient atmosphere of my social relationships and the way that I’m thinking about things.
MDW: In your first book, The Inland Sea, the narrator says, “I liked this idea of the writer’s [life]; that I was in some way undercover in the real world, reporting from the front lines of my own experience.” Does this quote capture what it feels like for you as a writer?
MW: Yeah, I think that’s still the case. When I wrote that line in the first book, I was a bit more wedded to the romance of it. I do feel there’s a part of my brain that’s always writing. When I see the way that other people live their lives, I often think they’re able to experience something that I don’t necessarily feel like I’m able to experience because I’m always sort of undercover writing in the background. I don’t think my sister, who is a pastry chef, necessarily goes through the world like that. I find that sad to some extent. I don’t love it, to be honest. And I think I thought I would maybe love it more when I wrote that line.
MDW: Both of your novels feature depictions of pregnancy and abortion. Why does that thread feel important for your work? How did writing about reproductive events differ between your first novel, which is set in Australia, and your second, which is set in the United States?
MW: Some things are always going to capture my imagination. Writing through and thinking about the body is really interesting. For me, that comes down to reproductive events. In the first book, there’s an abortion and a traumatic IUD implantation event, which is about control, about bodily autonomy. That book is all about emergency. The narrator is trying to regain control, but her body won’t let her do it. The second book is different. It’s me thinking through those things seven to 10 years later in a reproductive life. I was writing the book when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and living in America. It was awful, and it was so frightening. I remember being on the subway that day and seeing women crying. People cry in New York cry all the time in public, but it felt like people were grieving, and it also felt like people were grieving alone. It felt really, really private. And I think that’s a reality of reproductive events—they’re incredibly private. All those sorts of things make it really sticky for me. I’m interested in bringing those sorts of things to life.
MDW: Interestingly, you included endnotes of sources and references, and each chapter is preceded by an index. Why did you make those editorial choices?
MW: It’s a gesture towards being community-minded. This book is fictional, but it is also deeply researched. I’m a novelist, but I also write nonfiction. If I were writing a book of nonfiction, I would name everybody and cite the sources that had gone into my thinking. It began to feel disingenuous that I wasn’t naming some of the books that I referenced. If somebody’s influenced your thinking, I think even just in the acknowledgments, you should thank them. Claire Vaye Watkins was a big influence on me, and she acknowledges books that were important for her in her novel Gold Fame Citrus.
Originally, I wrote the indexes almost like a prose poem of what to expect in each chapter. You don’t need to read them to understand the book. They provide a kind of guide, and as chronology starts to deliberately become a little bit murkier, they’re a way of stressing that this idea of rationality—which comes from scientific travel literature based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of enlightenment thinking—doesn’t exist. This world might be knowable, but it’s not.
MDW: I’ll be vague here, but I want to ask you about the novel’s ending and the mirroring of personal grief with ecological loss. The fate of one of the characters doesn’t become clear until late in the novel. Can you tell me about writing toward that kind of ending?
MW: When I first started writing it, I had absolutely no idea what the plot was. I started off with ideas like the Colorado River, the Southwest, and these two people, but I didn’t know what was going to happen to them. It became clear over the course of writing, partly because I had to think about why it was addressed to “you.” It became clear to me that this book was an elegy and that it was about grief, so it became clear how it needed to end.
It also became clear how that ending had to be ambiguous. I’ve already had one or two people ask me, “But what happened at the end?” You’re not meant to know. There isn’t meant to be closure. I was thinking a lot about grief and loss and how a lot of those things don’t have clear-cut endings. Grief is sort of cyclical, and it comes up again and again, and it’s got these peaks and flows. It never really ends. There’s no conclusion—your life just begins to grow around grief.
