Melissa Febos is one of those authors that writes at the sonic level. Each sentence seems to be crafted with notes instead of syllables, many of which occupy a person’s mind like an earworm of a song. Since releasing her first two critically acclaimed memoirs, Whip Smart and Abandon Me, the Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award finalist has continued to command the literary landscape with her trademark lyricism.

Febos has always possessed a strong sense of self. In her new collection of essays, Girlhood, out now from Bloomsbury, she revisits her youth and examines how her definition of self changed alongside her body. Over time, Febos has continued to question the influence of growing up in a world that relegates the personal safety, happiness, and freedom of girls and women to the orbit of men’s feelings, pride, and power. Girlhood sets out to prove the nefariousness of the patriarchy and reframes the values and beliefs that women have long been taught to refute. It is, above all, a rejection of expectation and an acceptance of unfiltered selfhood.

Girlhood is searing and poignant, inviting complexity and allowing room for the bevy of emotions women have been conditioned to suppress. And while it is an anthem for generations of women, it is required reading for all.

The Millions: Tell me about how the idea for this collection came to be. Was the concept always simmering under the surface, or did it come together in pieces?

Melissa Febos: I had no idea that I was writing it for a long time. I like to trick myself into writing books this way. I would have resisted the idea of the book if it had occurred to me before I was already waist-deep in it, because I thought I had already written about girlhood. There was a voice in me that would have piped up: “Who cares?!” But I had never really faced my own girlhood, and that voice isn’t mine. It’s an internalized mechanism installed by the patriarchy that wants to keep me quiet about the ways our society might change. So, I wrote a bunch of essays that felt very autonomous, that just happened to be about my adolescence, and then suddenly, I saw that I was writing a book and it was too late to turn back.

TM: What was it like to face your own girlhood in this book as opposed to when you’d previously written about it?

MF: Well, it was analogous to, say, reading the SparkNotes and then reading the book, except the book has a drastically different plot than you thought. Not my best analogy, but you get the idea. It was full of surprises—the kind that often made me sick to my stomach, but that also were thrilling to uncover. Admitting the truth to myself has always been both painful and immediately liberating. It’s such a relief to put down the invisible weight of a narrative that is hiding the truer story.

TM: I can tell that every syllable is intentional. I mean, the sentences in this book! It’s like a record where every song could be a smash hit. I approach writing comedy this way; sometimes it feels more like I’m composing a melody. The sound of a sentence is just as important as its intent. What goes through your head when you’re putting together a sentence?

MF: Thank you. That’s honestly so satisfying to hear, because I labor intensely on my sentences. They are my greatest pleasure in writing, the work that I long to lose myself in. I try to wait until I have a draft before I get out my little watchmaker tools and go to town on the sentences, because otherwise I’d never finish anything.

I don’t think much goes through my head when I’m doing that close work; that’s part of why I love it. It’s all about relying on an intelligence that doesn’t think about what I’m doing so much as it listens. I’m just whispering to myself and tapping my knee, sometimes even rocking in my chair a little. It isn’t something I can do in public. I love that you used the analogy of songwriting! I suspect that a composer would absolutely understand that state.

TM: Oh my god, are you telling me you’re a fellow writer who can’t write in public? I can’t be one of those writers on their laptop at a café, ever. I like to pace, use my arms, sound things out. I chew on my sentences like they’re tobacco!

MF: Honestly, I’m really sad about it, because I used to love writing in cafés. I wrote huge sections of my first two books in Brooklyn coffee shops. But I have gotten more eccentric with every passing year, and have yielded more and more to the tics of my process, leaning in to the music. Ultimately I’m grateful for that progression, but it has had the unfortunate side effect of requiring isolation. I do also love to write in airports and on airplanes and that I won’t ever stop, because it actually sort of works as a deterrent for any talky seatmates. I mean, when airports are a place I go to again.

TM: In Abandon Me, it was pretty clear—at least to me, as the reader—that you possessed a strong sense of self as a kid. What was it like mining those memories when interrogating girlhood in this book? 

MF: It’s interesting because I absolutely did. I was very much myself: confident but secretive, independent, extremely verbal, hyper-emotional, funny, a kind of physical tornado. It was actually pretty heartbreaking to go back and closely examine the ways that I fought to suppress and tame and erase the most essential parts of me, and to what degree I succeeded at that project. In a way, writing this book was like running through the evil lab and unlocking all the cages, letting all my little feral past selves free.

TM: Another thing you interrogate, besides girlhood, in this book is language. Trauma, self-destruction, even deconstructing the word “slut” in “The Mirror Test.” Do you think language is moving to a place that is more inclusive of people’s experiences, especially when some of these terms don’t fit neatly into one box or another?

MF: I do. Language is so plastic! We like to pretend it isn’t, but it’s like identity or personality, just a set of many moving parts that are always changing and reacting to its circumstances. I love messing with words, pulling them apart to see the history packed into them, re-visioning them to hold different kinds of meaning. I think it’s important to look at where a word has been, to see what it carries, and just as important to repurpose words, or invent them to name the parts of us and our experience that have previously been unspeakable.

TM: Yes! I don’t think it’s ever meant to stop changing, because we’re never meant to stop changing.

MF: Exactly! We love to dig our heels into things and say that there is a correct way to speak/act/be/write when actually these conventions are always fluctuating and evolving and thank goddess! Imagine if they weren’t.

TM: Speaking of language, I want to discuss the term empty consent, which is something you write about in detail in “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself.” It wasn’t until I read about it in your book that I realized how many times I had given empty consent to a number of previous sexual partners, all of whom were cisgender men. I realized I prioritized my partners’ desires before mine; I didn’t want to disappoint them. My selfhood was filtered through their eyes. It just goes to show how pervasive patriarchy is—an invisible and odorless gas not unlike carbon monoxide. What are some things you would like to hear discussed in more detail when it comes to patriarchy affecting spaces outside the cisheteronormative dynamic?

MF: Ugh, I know! I’m so glad it occurred to me to name that experience, because as soon as I did, I had so much to say about it. I hadn’t realized that my whole life was a timeline of consenting to forms of touch I didn’t want, or felt ambivalent about—with men, with women, it didn’t matter. There was a way I felt I owed my body to anyone who wanted it. Filtering our selfhood through other eyes is such an essential part of the experience of living as any kind of marginalized identity—we are conditioned to identify with the dominant group, to subjugate the parts of us that don’t fit its ideals, and prioritize its needs over our own.

I love that analogy of patriarchy as an invisible gas. It’s impossible not to be breathing it constantly. I think we basically have to be talking about it every day, cultivating an awareness of how it’s affecting us—otherwise we internalize it and can’t tell its voice from our own. I’d love to see a more nuanced conversation about consent, for sure. I’d like to see more conversations about how patriarchal dynamics can function within queer relationships, how abuse can easily go unseen because the perpetrator doesn’t look like a straight white cis-man. I’d like to talk about fatphobia for real, which seems to me to be one of the last places it’s generally okay to act/talk like a bigot, even among folks who are really careful about their language when it comes to gender, race, and ability.

TM: As a kid—and there’s been research done on this—we know who we are at a very young age. For example, I knew I was gay for as long as I can remember—since utero, as I like to say. It wasn’t until I started picking up on societal cues that I realized that my desire to kiss a boy in my third-grade class named Chris was deemed weird at best, an abomination at worst. I thought about this—self-awareness at such a young age before we’re exposed to the culture around us—when I read the line, “Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body.”

MF: I’m so grateful for that grace period, if we are lucky enough to have one. I was. I discovered my queerness and my sexuality before it was totally defined by society at large and that really gave me a space to build a relationship to it. I write about this in Girlhood, but, like, even when I hated my body and hated all the early sexual experiences I was having, I still loved masturbating and never felt shame or anything bad about it. It amazes me, now. When it came to being seen or touched by other people, there was so much interference—other people’s wants, cultural messaging, etc.—but no one ever said anything about (female) masturbation (a big problem with the sex ed. curriculum, actually) and so I was free to experience pleasure in total privacy. I’m so glad that my queerness was never an issue with my family, too, because that gave me a lot of space to get comfortable in my own identity before my self-esteem was decimated by the culture at large.

TM: As someone who lives with chronic pain as a result of a series of traumas, there were a number of sentences—especially in the last essay, “Les Calanques”—and including the line, “It’s better to choose your pain than to let it choose us,” that captured so many of the feelings I’ve been contending with for years surrounding my chronic pain. I wanted to burst into tears. And even though the context in which it’s written is different from how I applied it to my own life, there still seems to be an overlap when it comes to co-existing with an unruly body. It reminds me of a concept I’ve been learning in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): radical acceptance. Have you come across this practice, and, if so, have you tried applying it to your own life?

MF: I haven’t come across that practice, but I’m going to look into it immediately! My heart just squeezed so hard for you. The physical experience that I described in that essay ended up being just a prologue to a much longer relationship to chronic pain. I’ve been through a lot more of it since then and it has really changed me. Mostly for the better, because the kind of humility and strength required to live with pain is way beyond what I asked of myself before it. There is definitely an analogy between the kind of acceptance I’ve come to with my body in terms of its other unruly aspects, but pain is also different. There isn’t an option to exile it, to starve it, to argue with it. Fighting only makes it worse! I haven’t always met it with grace, but it has taught me so much about the nature of acceptance, how healing it can be, what mercy there is in yielding to that which I cannot change. 

TM: I love to ask authors this question, but I’m particularly excited to hear your answer: what is one thing you learned about yourself while writing this book?

MF: That I have the power to change my own thinking. There are so many ways to get free.

 Bonus Link:
—My Body Is Mine

Few debut story collections feel as accomplished as Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas from 2015. “I’m lucky to know a lot of really good, generous people, but they don’t fall into any of those standard narratives of saintly lives,” Quade has said. “They’re people who just keep on trucking and being good in the face of a lot of injustice and ingratitude.” Night at the Fiestas tells the stories of those everyday saints, whose encounters with faith, doubt, and grace feel absolutely authentic.

I’m not the only one who was thrilled to hear that Quade decided to turn one of the stories into a novel. It is a significant feat, but Quade is uniquely positioned to make the shift in genre and form. Her stories teem with a generous sensibility; a recognition that each life is deeply, mysteriously complex.

Quade won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The New York Times. Quade is an assistant professor at Princeton.

We spoke about how bodies are essential to fiction, the ways myth and folklore sustain her writing, and the challenges and revelations of reimagining a short story as a novel.

The Millions: The Five Wounds begins during Holy Week—the climax of the most dramatic liturgical season of the year. What does Lent conjure for you as a storyteller?

Kirstin Valdez Quade: Lent is a season of introspection and penance and making amends, which are all themes in The Five Wounds. My novel is about healing from the wounds of the past, and part of that healing requires looking closely at oneself and one’s place in the world and the hurts we have caused.

Amadeo discovers early on that making amends for the way he’s failed the people in his life cannot happen in a single gesture—it has to happen over and over, incrementally, and it can’t be performative.

I’ve always been interested in engaging with myth and folklore in my fiction. When I started writing, Angela Carter’s feminist reimaginings of fairy tales were real inspirations. When I think about the stories from the Old and New Testaments, it’s always been the human conflicts that interest me most. In those wonderful crowded Renaissance paintings of the crucifixion, I’m always drawn to the characters in the crowd who are going about their own business, holding a falcon or chasing a dog or looking wistfully at a friend.

TM: Last year we talked about your wonderful story collection, Night at the Fiestas, which includes a story that evolved into this novel. Among the great things you said that day, I often come back to one line in particular: “You can’t write your own story without fictionalizing it.” In a related way, I believe that we become the stories we tell—even the ones that are fiction, especially ones that we live with for years. You’ve lived with Amadeo and Angel for some time now, so: in what ways do you inhabit their story yourself?

KQ: I think you’re exactly right that we become the stories we tell. The short story “The Five Wounds” was published in 2009, so these characters have been with me a very long time. I am in every single one of the characters to varying degrees. I’ve felt Angel’s impatience with the members of her family, and her hopefulness and idealism, too. I’ve felt Amadeo’s longing to be a part of something important and his delusions of grandeur. I’ve definitely been nerdy, bookish Lily in the corner, judging everybody from behind her fat novel.

TM: You write so exquisitely about bodies: bodies in pain, penance, love, longing, and in fear. There’s a great moment when Amadeo is waiting for Angel, his daughter, to have her child. You describe his body perfectly: he is “filled with an electric jangling fear that doesn’t expend itself.” He prays to Jesus, who seems inadequate to understand Amadeo’s situation. Then he prays to God, but can’t picture him “except as a wooly jovial guy.” Finally, he prays to Mary, who gets it, “having had a kid herself and having had to watch that kid go through big troubles.” In this novel, as well as your stories, there is a Marian sensibility—which is of course distinctly Catholic, but also cultural. How does Mary exist in this story, in the lives and imaginations of these characters?

KQ: Bodies are so essential to fiction; I can tell when I’m not fully immersed in the writing, because I’ve somehow forgotten that my characters have bodies—they become just these floating consciousnesses. Paying attention to the physicality of the characters anchors me in the scene and makes the fictional world more vivid.

Mary’s story is, as much as her son’s, so much about the body. I imagine her shock at finding out that, without any say in the matter, she was suddenly pregnant. And sure, even if she thought it was an honor to be impregnated by God, I’ve got to think it was a complicated moment for her. I always focus on the book in her hands in paintings of the Annunciation. Who knows what other plans she had for her life?

The focus on Mary in the Catholicism I grew up with made a lot of sense to me. My family is absolutely a matriarchy; all the women are incredibly strong-willed and competent. They are the ones who hold the family together and get things done.

Likewise, Yolanda is the head of the Padilla family, the center around whom everyone circles, the person they go to for everything they need: allowance, affirmation, comfort. And she’s also completely taken for granted by her offspring. Her illness, then, comes as a shock, and they’re forced to grow up in a way they’ve managed to avoid.

TM: “Saint Amadeo. It has a dignified, archaic ring to it.” Amadeo dismisses the droning priest at Mass and his abstractions, and instead wishes that people would appreciate Amadeo’s own visceral passion: “His performance wasn’t just a performance, but a true crucifixion.” You’re great at mining the dual ambitions and anxieties of your characters—their desires to be saints while accepting their lives as sinners, as humans. If you had to choose a character from this book to be a saint, who would it be, and why?

KQ: Oh, wow, I don’t think I’d wish sainthood on any of them! Amadeo certainly has a penchant for extremes. I suppose I’d say that Angel has the most promise, since she’s most able to consistently think about other people’s needs and experiences. I like the name Saint Angel. Plus, we could use more lesbian saints!

TM: What did you discover about yourself as a writer—and perhaps in general as a storyteller—in the shift from the structure and style of short fiction to the expanse of a novel? What can a novel accomplish that a story might struggle to achieve?

KQ: The short story ends with an epiphany: Amadeo, who longs so deeply to transform his life, is on the cross, looking down at his pregnant daughter. In that moment, he truly sees her for the first time, and he understands that any hope for transformation will depend on his showing up for the people who need him.

That kind of epiphany works for a short story, but the question kept arising for me: What next? What happens the next morning when he wakes up in the same cramped bed in his childhood bedroom? What will Amadeo do with his new understanding? And I suspected that Amadeo, like many of us, might require more than that one epiphany to actually change his life. The novel grew out of my wanting to see what happens to these characters the next day, and the day after that.

As I expanded the story, the more I cared about the characters: Amadeo, whose efforts are so misplaced; vibrant, forceful, funny Angel who is trying so hard to give her son a good life and who falls so completely in love; and Yolanda, who, after devoting herself to her family, now finds that she must to attend to her own life. I didn’t know how they’d navigate the first year of Angel’s baby’s life, and I wrote to find out.

In his new collection of essays, Homo Irrealis, André Aciman contends with the state of mind we spend most of our lives in: the irrealis mood. Aciman defines this mood as “a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen”—that is, “the might-be and the might-have-been.” It is a mood sometimes called fantasizing, or nostalgia, but it is really more multifaceted, informing our experience of art, desire, and even our own mortality.
The Millions spoke with Aciman about the collection and how it blends the autobiographical with artistic criticism—all while circling around this particular mood.
The Millions: Do you think that writers, in particular, contend with the irrealis mood?
André Aciman: I do think that writers can focus on it more. It doesn’t mean that they suffer from it more. I used to work on Wall Street for a while, and people on Wall Street follow those ticker tapes—they’re very much in the present. But you mention the irrealis mood to them and they will say, “Oh, yeah, of course, I live there.”
There’s no way you can avoid it, but it’s not a negative at all. It’s a way of basically adding a dimension that we don’t normally know how to speak about. We call it fantasizing, but how about, “What might happen that already did happen once, or could have happened once, but never did? But would it happen again? Would I know how to seize that opportunity once it comes back, if it ever comes back?” These are questions that we have every single day in varied guises.
For example, I was sent to write an article on a particular square in Paris. But it was only in coming back to New York that I could write about what Paris was for me. And I captured something about Paris in that piece that people say to me, “Oh yeah, that was really Paris. You captured Paris.” No, I captured my memory and my fantasy of Paris. I always write in the past.
TM: So living and writing from the irrealis mood extends our sense of time and each experience?
AA: Perhaps. But eventually, whatever you write can sometimes displace what actually happened. And that happened to me. I was writing about a scene in Egypt when I was a boy. Eventually, I went back to Egypt and wanted to walk down that street, which I describe very accurately in my book. I couldn’t remember if I actually made up that street, and I can no longer know. Writing has a way of overwriting the “document” of our lives.
Maybe that’s why we write. Life may start making sense as you write, but it’s an artificial construct. Your real life does not necessarily make sense, if you think of it. Your career makes sense. Your parents make sense. Your love life makes sense. But the life itself, as it has been organized, is just a series of fluke incidents. Plus, even if you swear to every god you know that what you’re writing is exactly as it happened, the fact that you use a particular adverb—God, you’ve already colored everything! So in writing truth, the act of writing already changes things, even if you swear the story is factually true.
TM: As you write in Homo Irrealis, “It’s a mirage of the world that artists long to hold.”
AA: Every work of art is also implying something that it cannot quite get itself to say. The critic’s job is to see what that implication is and to let it speak, even if it’s taking a risk. Even if it is very, very specific to me, good criticism has to address somebody else. In good criticism, I must make space in my sentence for somebody else to sort of slip in and find their own voice in my voice.
TM: Do you think writers fear death more? And that’s why they have to get that “organized” version of life down?
AA: I just think writers talk about it more. But nobody really believes that death is part of life. Have you ever heard that one? “Death is a part of life, you’ve got to accept that. You know, it happens.” No. That is a big, big, huge, erroneous, shameful mistake. It’s a mistake that God didn’t even foresee. Look what you did, God—we’re going to die! It’s a terrible thing.
The worst part of death, as I write in one of the essays, is that you will forget the people you love, which is the worst thing that could happen. I’m going to forget my children. That’s what happens when you die. They may remember you, but you will forget them. That’s almost like a crime in itself. And every day that passes by means that you’re closer to the rendezvous.
Art is a way of saying, “Carry this, don’t lose it. It has me in it. It’s better than me.” Writing can sometimes allow us to organize our lives and to give ourselves the kind of chronicle that our real lives cannot have. You can’t put the pieces together in real life—they just don’t fit. But on paper they can. The paper does things to life. It kind of argues for you—for a better version of your life.
TM: Yet even once you’ve done that, you might find yourself returning to revise that version of your life later on.
AA: On one hand, I like to say to people, “Don’t bother me about my adolescence and my childhood. It’s out in paperback now.” That resolved it. Guess what? A week or two later, the same themes just resurface again.
If you’ve ever suffered from obsession, such as obsessing over someone, at some point, you say, “Okay, it’s over and done with. I found out who this person really is—a disgusting human being. I have no respect for them.” Then, two weeks later, you start fantasizing about them again. What’s going on? You wrote a story about it. You put it out in paperback. And now it’s back. That’s the story of my life. The same things come back constantly.
If you look at the stuff I’ve written in my life, it’s all very much the same. Simon and Garfunkel wrote, like, one song they kept composing and recomposing every single time in a different way. But it’s the same song. That’s all great writers, I think, and all great composers. They are composing one or two ditties and that’s it. The rest is just variations—profound variations.
Bonus Links:
—Writing Isn’t a Career, It’s a Mission: An Interview with André Aciman
—Bridge Life: On André Aciman’s ‘Enigma Variations’
—In Search of Lost Dream Time: Two New Books by André Aciman
—Ivy League from the Outside: Andre Aciman’s ‘Harvard Square’
—Journeys to the Past: André Aciman’s ‘Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere’

The piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.

In 2017, the French publisher Don Quichotte éditions published Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (En compagnie des hommes), a slim powerhouse of a novel telling the story of West Africa’s Ebola crisis from the perspectives of a wide variety of its survivors and victims: doctors and nurses and patients and family members, but also government officials and undertakers, bats and trees, and even the virus itself.
In late February, a little more than a year after the first case of Covid-19 in the United States was confirmed, Other Press published an English-language edition of Tadjo’s novel.
The Millions spoke with Tadjo about putting out this novel during a global pandemic, the storytelling traditions behind its structure, and more.
The Millions: This book was originally published only a year after the Ebola outbreak ended. Now, its English-language edition is out in the midst of another pandemic. Has your perspective on this book changed since its original publication? How?
Véronique Tadjo: When I first wrote the book in French in 2017, Covid-19 was not in anybody’s mind. The two situations are not comparable. However, while doing research at the time of the Ebola crisis, I came to realize that many aspects of our lives were connected: the degradation of the environment, climate change, and our health. Reading medical experts “reports,” it was easy to see that the threat of more epidemics to come was real unless structural changes were carried out in Africa and in the world in general. I am struck by how close to the bone some of the themes I develop in the book are to the situation we are in at the moment: the isolation and the loneliness; the tearing apart of family ties; the issue of trust in government; the violence and resistance at times; the heavy burden on the medical profession; the economic crisis; and so on.
The big issue today is vaccine equity. Because we are in a pandemic, a global solution needs to be found. Therefore a campaign for vaccines against Covid-19 needs to be put in place and recognized as a global public good. After a period during which vaccine nationalism took over and many governments from rich countries pre-ordered or ordered far too many vaccines for their populations, a system is gradually taking shape. The Covax international system aims to get coronavirus vaccines to low- and middle-income countries that have been cut out of the vaccine race. Let’s hope that it will be a successful attempt at redressing an imbalance that puts the whole world at risk.
TM: The novel is told from a multitude of voices. How did you come to realize that the novel required so many perspectives? Why did you choose this method of storytelling?

VT: In a way, I have always written in this style. Right from my first novel, As the Crow Flies (Heinemann, 2001), first published in French, I have adopted a non-linear approach. I find that it is closer to the way we live. We always have multiple stories in our minds. A soldier can be aiming at an enemy but at the same time wondering when he will ever go back home or if he will ever see his wife and children again. I also believe that we are what we are because of others. So you are never alone when you tell a story. Many voices interact.
TM: The novel, at times, almost reads as if it is made up of first-person, nonfiction accounts of experiencing the Ebola pandemic. What sort of research did you conduct in order to flesh out the details of each character’s experiences?
VT: I read a lot in French and in English. I also looked for testimonies of Ebola survivors and medical staff involved in the fight against the disease. I watched television documentaries. I also discussed with doctors as much as I could and went to conferences. I became more and more interested in the social dimension of the epidemic. People had been affected in many different ways and each time I researched one aspect, it led me to another one. It was important for me to get as close as possible to what had happened on the ground. But I had one restriction: it had to be done through the medium of literature.
TM: Some of your characters are not human—the Baobab tree most prominently, but also a bat and even the virus itself. Why did you choose to include these chapters? How did you need to think differently as an author when writing those sections? Were they challenging to get right?
VT: I have been raised in the oral African tradition in which the storyteller can call on many different genres, from poetry, historical narratives, songs, myths to political language. Animals and nature connect with human characters on an equal basis. In many folktales nature speaks. So you could say that it wasn’t that much out of the ordinary for me to make non humans speak. It also suited my purpose very well because I wanted to show human beings as part of nature and not above nature. This way of looking at the world has also appeared in the works of a number of Western authors who influenced me. Jean de La Fontaine, one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century comes to my mind. I read his book of fables when I was young and I remember one in particular entitled “The Animals Stricken by the Plague” (les animaux frappés par la lèpre). I admit that in the case of the virus, it was a bit tricky because I did not want it to be the villain of the story. On the other hand, I wanted him to tell a few truths so I had to get the balance right. The bat attracted me because of its dual nature, mammal and bird. For me she is the symbol of complexity and the diversity of nature.
TM: This novel is very attentive to the intersections of human development and the natural world, and the way human encroachment on nature leads to viral outbreaks. What’s an example or two of something you learned while researching what humans can do to avoid, and be prepared for, pandemics that were particularly interesting or surprising for you?
VT: Through my research I learnt how important communication was. Science alone cannot work. People have to feel empowered to fight against diseases. They hold a big part of the solution in their hands. But for this to happen they need to have confidence in their leaders. They need to trust the system. If they feel marginalized or if they do not have a good grasp of what is happening, they may retreat in false beliefs. Without adequate communication there can be resistance and protest.
I was also surprised by the importance that traditional medicine still holds. In fact, the majority of the Africans in rural areas and in many popular areas in big cities still consult a healer. This is because conventional medicine has failed. Big dilapidated hospitals are considered as places where people die. Added to this, medicine is expensive so most of the time people can’t afford the prescriptions they are given. Once scientists observed habits, they were able to seek the collaboration of healers. They trained them so they could influence their patients. They became active actors in the fight to eradicate the disease.
TM: Which was the most difficult chapter for you to write from a technique perspective? From an emotional perspective?
VT: From a technical point of view, the difficulty was to condense information that spanned the three affected countries: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. I wanted to create a spaceless and timeless territory because viruses know no borders. Emotionally, it was the chapter on the dying mother because it was about religious faith in the face of death. Where was God? The other difficult chapter was the one about the lovers because I had the choice of “saving” the fiancée or not. After reflection I decided that a happy ending would not be appropriate. At times love cannot make miracles. But it certainly makes us more human.
TM: Science and anthropology both inform this book significantly, but so does myth and folklore and music. What do you hope readers take away from the inclusion of oral storytelling and songs in a novel about a contemporary crisis?
VT: Oral storytelling is ancestral and common to all the cultures of the world. This form of narration has the added advantage of touching several generations. For example, most folktales can be understood at different levels of complexity. A young person may grasp only one aspect of a tale whereas a more experienced person will be able to decipher the symbolism behind the story. It is very comforting for a writer to work from the premise of a universal genre. Tales are timeless therefore it is left to the storyteller to adapt them for a new audience. Also human beings’ survival on Earth remains a contemporary theme for literature.
TM: Did any of your own lived experience influence this book? Can you share how?
VT: I was born in Paris and raised in Abidjan. I am familiar with the West African region. It was a miracle that Ebola did not spread to Côte d’Ivoire as the country shares borders with Guinea and Liberia where I have travelled to many times. All the health restrictions were in place and everybody was on high alert. I have friends who are doctors and they were following events closely. We had long discussions. The health systems are more or less in the same dire state in the region. On one of my visits to Abidjan (I was based in Johannesburg at the time), I went to one of the Ebola centers that had been quickly built in the eventuality of an epidemic. It was located within the perimeter of a hospital in a popular area. There was a huge tree casting its shade over the building. I thought to myself, if Ebola had come to this city, what would the tree have witnessed? This is how the idea of Baobab was conceived.

This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.

If you set your novel in interior Maine, there’s a better chance that a moose will stray into your narrative than, say, if you situated the story in Nevada. Still, it’s a rare writer who’d be so accommodating to the moose’s sudden appearance, and only a truly daring and inventive one who would allow the animal multiple point-of-view chapters. Nor, in Marcia Butler’s Oslo, Maine, is doing so a gimmick. You think there’s nothing going on in a moose’s brain? You think there’s neither love, nor pain, nor loss in her heart? Think again.

I’ve known Marcia Butler for a good decade now and my admiration for her has grown to something closer to envy. As a young man I used to play guitar and sing semi-professionally (I was paid, but not much). When I decided to become a writer, I put the guitar in the closet and never took it out again, convinced that I would only have enough creative energy for storytelling. Butler—a first chair oboist, novelist, and documentary filmmaker—proves that we needn’t make such choices, needn’t reject gifts. All we need to be is fearless and devoted to craft. That Marcia is all that and more will become evident in our conversation below.

Richard Russo: You have more than a tourist’s knowledge of Maine, where your fictional town of Oslo is set. How did you come by that?

Marcia Butler: When I was a professional oboist, and for many summers, I performed at a music festival in central Maine. We musicians were housed with local residents who graciously opened their homes to us. My host was an older widowed woman who happened to be a gifted storyteller. It was through her that I learned about the town’s doings and human dramas. Celebrations and illnesses. Who’d given birth, who’d passed away. Those who separated and then reconciled. All the profound and minor aspects of life in rural Maine. Weirdly, I never met any of these people yet found myself becoming emotionally invested—and increasingly so with each passing summer.

I also heard lots of stories about moose which I soon became obsessed with, especially because for years I didn’t see one. I’d hear about a sighting on the other side of Bridgeton and race to the location. Of course, the moose was no longer there. But I kept at it, jumping at the vaguest mention of the animal, till finally I was rewarded. A moose cow with her calf. What a day that was, and particularly sweet because it happened to be the final year of my tenure at the festival, and, in fact, my career as an oboist. I retired from music but never forgot that moose or the Mainers, one or two of whom serve as archetypes in my novel.

RR: The novel has several point-of-view characters, the most unusual of which is a moose. In the hands of another writer this device might have come across as a gimmick. How did you avoid that pitfall?

MB: Indeed, this was daunting to consider. A few author friends suggested I read other novels with animal points-of-view, but I didn’t want to be influenced in any way—sort of like not listening to another oboist’s version of the Mozart Concerto. And I felt somewhat (naively) qualified because my obsession with moose has continued past my Maine years. I’ve probably YouTubed every video of a moose in existence and spent a lot of time researching the way they manage their world—all before I ever became a writer. Moose are stunning animals: efficient, intuitive, a miracle of survival. They’re born knowing that the only place they can get a vital nutrient is at the bottom of a lake and they’ll dive twenty feet to access that plant. During the winter they eat up to seventy pounds of leafless twigs a day to survive the season. Just two of many jaw-dropping factoids. My moose, and what happens to her, is the lynchpin of Oslo, Maine because though she remains a background character, almost all human action flows from this animal’s presence. Specific to her point-of-view, I needed to convey what she observed in a manner that was both understood by the reader and still remained animal-like. I made decisions along the way that straddled those imperatives, achieving what I felt was believable anthropomorphism. She also, at times, contributes dramatic irony in that through her point-of-view the reader is clued into events that human characters have no awareness of. My moose is probably the most sympathetic character in the book because she operates purely and without guile. A thing to behold and something humans might aspire to but will never achieve.

RR: Some of the characters in this novel do some pretty reprehensible things, but you seem remarkably non-judgmental toward them. You appear to suggest that just as the moose is going about its business of being a moose, your characters are simply human and doing what comes naturally. It’s their nature to be violent and venal, but also to be kind and generous. Can you source this non-judgmental tone in the book? It seems pretty remarkable given the age we live in, where social media judgment is swift and vicious.

MB: Big topic. Yes, my characters are messy. But life is messy—beautiful, ugly, painful, blissful, and filled with people mostly doing their best while failing miserably. This is the world I grew up in and it is the world we all continue to live in. This bandwidth of human nature is what I am interested in exploring through my novels; to draw complex, interesting, and unknown people. To place them in situations where the human stakes are high, yet their solutions may not seem ideal or even good enough. In other art forms such as music, there are certain norms that one adheres to, such as always, always make a beautiful sound. I believe that one of the reasons I was so drawn to contemporary music is because the thrust and difficulty of that type of composition demand priorities other than a pretty sound. I ended up making lots of beautiful and unusual noises on the oboe!

So as a writer, when a character shows up and he/she behaves not so pretty, I am curious as to where this person will end up and I loosen the reins in order to find out. It is a necessary process of discovery that my novel deserves. Then, if that character remains through many drafts, I keep in mind that someone loved this person despite their bad acts. Which brings me back to the source of the nonjudgmental tone in my novels. I know firsthand about bad acts and that most people don’t set out in life to commit them. I try very hard to give people, and my characters, a pass.

Regarding the current treacherous territory of writing unattractive or controversial people in fiction, I am aware that as I write these words I am also considering censoring myself. Right now. And that’s a shame. The truth is, I’m all for likable and relatable protagonists, but I don’t ever want to feel that I must tamp down (or gussy up) my characters in order to appeal to a certain readership who might be put off or to avoid a backlash on social media. I strongly believe that with any creative endeavor real art, and perhaps ultimately important art, will emerge from the freedom to defy some of the rules—and, if necessary, break every single one. As writers, we are naturally limited by the personal prism through which we see the world. We fight this every day and when we break through, this is how imagination takes flight. It is tragic that we might allow someone else’s limits to constrict what we write!

So, in this current “cancel culture” environment, defying popular talking points takes bravery. I always seem to go back to music, but when Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913 it was met with near riots in the audience and was deemed nothing less than demonic: “a barbaric and puerile barbarity”. Clearly, popular culture was less than happy. Yet, there is no doubt that this one composition changed the course of music for the next century. I shudder to think what might have happened if Stravinsky censored his creativity because he was afraid of offending popular tastes. So yes, I occasionally made a strange sound on the oboe and I’ll create a father who, despite loving his child deeply, hurts him. And yes, we must break all the boxes we possibly can. Because when things fall apart, how we decide to reassemble might help people understand each other.

RR: One of my favorite characters in the novel is a boy named Pierre who, after a head injury that wrecks his ability to form short term memories, is saved by music. I know that music has been a vital presence in your own life, but did it save you? How about writing?

MB: The beauty of a prepubescent kid who’s not yet become jaded can spot irony without even knowing what it is, and notices the absurdity in the adults around him, well, that sort of kid captures my heart. Pierre, indeed, finds relief from his injury and those who fail him through his violin. I relate very much to how learning an instrument demands a focus we rarely achieve during our everyday lives. Music itself creates a space and time where the past and future are suspended—it anchors your entire being to the now. There is no doubt that if I’d not discovered music at age four my life would have played out very differently. Music served as my only friend while navigating a bad childhood. Then, throughout subsequent difficult adult years, my mantra became “as long as I can play the oboe, I’ll be okay.” Now as a writer I’ve discovered a different freedom of expression, one that feels more interior, more personal. And while writing is not performative, I do lose myself to the process every day and for many hours. I feel lucky to be able to “go there”. In many ways, the introvert in me finds making up worlds preferable to real life.

RR: Your novel shows great reverence for teachers, which suggests you must’ve had a few pretty good ones yourself?

MB: Oh, yes. I believe teachers are boots on the ground first responders – saviors, really. They are, after parents, the adults who shape children’s minds, sometimes without the child knowing the full impact until years later. When I was in seventh grade my history teacher taught the Roman Empire through the love affair between Antony and Cleopatra. Though it was embarrassing to listen to (I wasn’t even sure what a love affair was) I’ve never forgotten how absorbed I became with a subject that otherwise would surely have been dry and tedious. I couldn’t wait for class to find out what happened next; the teacher was a master storyteller.

While in music conservatory, my oboe teacher was the primary source for the musician I became. He encouraged me to step up and dedicate myself to a profession where the odds of success were slim. Most valuable was emulating his strict sense of discipline, which continues to serve me to this day. He did all these things and then went farther. During my first year, I was experiencing emotional turmoil such that it impacted my ability to progress on the oboe. He found a benefactor to pay for a shrink. I believe his insight and this pure act of kindness, in large part, cemented my future in music. He cared and he saved me. Then, years later after I sold my first book, which is non-fiction, I made my first ever stab at a novel and was accepted into a weeklong workshop with a well-known author. My pages were filled with point-of-view problems and terrible dialogue, but he gently brought me through all the mistakes and ended the session by advising me to take heart. The craft stuff was easily fixed. But the best news was that the story premise was “golden.” That word meant everything, and those nascent horrible pages turned into my first published novel. Ah, pedagogues: to lead the child of any age!

RR: What’s next? Have you started a new book? Some other project?

MB: I don’t know what I’d do with my day if I wasn’t writing, so, yes, I’m well into my third novel. As of this morning, it involves a twenty-year-old woman of Northern Irish extraction, a financier from Belarus, a washed-up British rock star. And a plumber.

Bonus Links:
—A Year in Reading: Richard Russo

A heron made of storm. A squid culled for its ink. A society broken by coup and disintegration. Floods, droughts, hiding in caves, and offering blood to the seas. Robbie Arnott includes it all in his sophomore novel The Rain Heron, a beautifully poetic, hypnotic, barreling ride through symbiotic characters and landscapes, churning its nimble feet with environmental and existential angst. It is as delightfully brutal as it is captivating.

Born in and still residing in Tasmania, Arnott’s debut novel Flames was released to critical acclaim in 2018. The novel was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. Arnott was also a 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist and won the 2019 Margaret Scott Prize in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes.

The Rain Heron is sure to garner just as much attention. It is as pitch-perfect a second novel as could have been anticipated. Bringing darkness with light, chaos tinged with resolution, and a magic and myth-encrusted world that sings and stings, Arnott displays stunning talent on every page. Connected halfway across the world, Arnott and I spoke about the influence of environment, literary inspirations, external versus internal pursuits, and the complicated notion of symbiosis between nature and society.   

The Millions: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me about this brilliant novel. The Rain Heron is a stunning blend of mythologies, grim society, and fatefully interconnected lives, and I’m curious to know, what was the origin of the book? Was it a particular line, an image, an idea?

Robbie Arnott: The writing of the book began with the first section, which details the legend of the rain heron. I was trying to invent my own myth, of a creature that was emblematic of both the beauty and savagery of nature. I tried a few different things until I realized I was trying to describe a storm, and the way a storm can be as captivating as it can be deadly. Once I figured that out, I turned a storm into the only creature that I believed could embody its grace and power: a great, wondrous bird.

TM: Landscape plays one of the largest roles in the story, particularly through weather and environmental changes, which makes me wonder how much you gravitate to the outdoors? How much does the environment around you inform your daily life, or your writing process?

RA: I’m fortunate enough to live in a beautiful, somewhat remote part of the world, where stunning landscapes and environments are all very close, so I spend a lot of time outdoors. If I’m stuck for something to write about, I start describing a landscape I’ve visited recently—a forest, a stretch of coastline, an ocean, a mountainside—and then see if a story or plot line curls off it. It’s not necessarily intentional; I’m just easily influenced by the world around me.

TM: The landscape in the novel is rendered geographically anonymous though—generalized in title as mountains, forests, rivers, seas. Is this to make the plight more universal, to drive the story forward as a more collective mythology?

RA: Absolutely—I wanted it to feel universal, and unanchored to any places in the real world. If I placed the story in my homeland of Tasmania, for example, the setting would bring along all the things that readers already associate with the island. The book would be imbued with an inherent Tasmanianness, and I wanted to avoid that. Instead, I wanted it to feel clean and new, as well as being recognizable, although not as anywhere specific.

TM: In terms of literary influences, I’d love to know what writers and artists inform and inspire your work?

RA: I’m heavily and unashamedly influenced by the descriptive prose of Annie Proulx. I think she’s a wizard. My work is also heavily in debt to Richard Flanagan, Jeanette Winterson, and Susanna Clarke, as well as many other writers. I love the clean and revelatory prose of Kazuo Ishiguro. When writing about landscapes and nature, I think I’m probably inspired by non-fiction writers as well—people like J. A. Baker and Helen Macdonald.

TM: The Rain Heron is built on minimal dialogue. Is that a style particular to this novel, or an aesthetic you cultivate across your writing?

RA: It’s probably both. I generally don’t use a lot of dialogue, probably because I’m naturally drawn more to description than conversation. For this book, I wanted to portray the characters almost entirely through their actions and reactions rather than what they said or felt. It felt right to do it that way—to flesh them out through their behavior.

TM: Does the sparse dialogue tell us something about the novel’s take on internal pursuits versus external influences?

RA: I hope so. I hope it draws out a sense of tension and conflict between motivations that can technically be justifiable, and things we inherently know to be wrong. Sometimes there are no good choices.

TM: Ren, our anchor point character throughout much of the novel, only relinquishes her solitude when the landscape around her is endangered. Is this a commentary on valuing the world itself above the individual?

RA: Yeah, I guess so, although I don’t know if I conceived of it that sharply. Human destruction of the environment is unavoidable in real life, so I thought it should be unavoidable in the book. Yet we still like forests, mountains, and rivers. I wanted Ren to experience a tension between her love for nature and her unwillingness to interact with other people. If that plays out as a commentary on valuing the natural world, then I guess I’ve done part of my job.

TM: That begs the question then: What is the other part of your job?

RA: To entertain, I think. And hopefully to enrich. I love books that both drag me in and mess about with how I see the world. If I wrote anything like that, I’d be over the moon.

TM: Throughout the book, there’s a focus on nature versus humanity, specifically society’s desire, and yet inability, to fully control or dominate nature. Do you think we’ll ever truly see a genuinely understood symbiosis between society and nature on a global scale?

RA: Many communities and groups of people have done it before, for long periods of time. It’s not hard to cast around and find examples of civilizations that existed harmoniously with their environments for hundreds of years, sometimes thousands. I don’t know if it will happen again—at the moment, it seems unlikely. But it has been done before. It’s tempting to hope lessons can still be learnt from the past.

TM: At one point Ren also says that she wishes she’d been “less cold” to other people. Beyond the influence of the environment, how much do our relationships build who we are, affect who we become?

RA: We’re just a sum of our experiences and relationships, really. And we don’t often get a say in how they affect or shape us. It’s out of our hands. I’m not a total believer in determinism, but I do think we are largely molded by forces outside of ourselves, rather than through internal machinations of the mind.

TM: Through some slick and smart perspective shifts in the novel, the notion of antagonist and protagonist is muddied. Do you see that typical dichotomy as outdated or flawed?

RA: Not necessarily—there are lots of books with typical antagonists and protagonists that I love. But I didn’t want to write a book like that. I’m interested in the messiness of people, the hesitations, the self-justifications, the swirl of kindness and selfishness. I wanted to create characters who embodied those things. I don’t think standard protagonists and antagonists need to be done away with, but I do think there’s room to write stories about people who are neither wonderful or evil, and whose singular actions don’t necessarily define who they are.

TM: Have virtual events been any sort of silver lining to releasing a book during a worldwide pandemic?

RA: I’ve met some incredible writers I wouldn’t have otherwise, and have been able to talk about my book to people who never would have been able to make a traditional bookshop or festival event. So that’s definitely been a surprising benefit. Everyone has adapted so quickly.

TM: From your first novel to this second one, what has changed in your approach, style, or intent as a writer?

RA: I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but if my writing has changed, it’s probably because I can figure out what’s not working more quickly. I think my instincts have sharpened through experience. I’ve done away with a few styles I played with in my first book and focused more on what I believe are my strengths. Although my writing process is still a giant mess. It’s chaos. I don’t know any other way.

TM: Can you tell us about some remarkable Australian authors you think might be deserving of more international recognition?

RA: Oh hell yeah. I love the work of Ryan O’Neill, and can’t wait for his next book. Jane Rawson is phenomenal, too—From The Wreck is a work of tremendous skill and imagination. And I desperately hope the world doesn’t sleep on Laura Jean McKay and her remarkable novel The Animals In That Country. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years.