Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Marie Ndiaye has had the attention of the French literary world since she published her first novel, As to the Rich Future, at seventeen. Born in Pithiviers, the daughter of a French school teacher mother and a Senegalese father, she won the 2001 Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe and the 2009 Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. Her latest, Vengeance Is Mine, is a true crime novel about a mother who has murdered her three children presented as an existentialist monologue by a troubled lawyer who holds onto her worldview with great strength (or stubbornness), even as her home, her relationships, and her body crumble. “I began thinking about this book at the same time as I was working with Alice Diop on the script of her latest film. Saint-Omer,” Ndiaye told me. “That movie is based on a true story that happened in France about twelve years ago: a woman who evidently had no particular problems, a woman who was educated, refined, drowned her sixteen-month-old daughter in the ocean even though she’d cherished her from the moment of her birth. Working on that movie led me to try to understand those ‘excellent mothers,’ loving and devoted, who very deliberately kill their children. As for my book itself, it’s an invented story.” Our email conversation spanned several weeks and many time zones, from Paris to Nebraska (for translator Jordan Stump to work that magic) to Sonoma County.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have the past three years of pandemic and global turmoil affected you, your work, the translation and launch in the US of this new novel, Vengeance Is Mine? Where have you been living, and how has COVID affected your residence?

Marie Ndiaye: During the confinement I was still living in the country, near Bordeaux. When you live in nature, you don’t have the same perception of what’s going on in the world, everything seems somewhat distant. I lived essentially the way I always do: writing, working in the garden. I was lucky enough not to be affected in any painful way by that time.

JC: The layering of placid conversation, deception, confusion, horror, and journey backward into unclear memory in this novel brings to mind the work of Stephen King. Is he an inspirati? Or Claude Simon, whose investigations are fragmented and searching? (He once noted, “The novelist today tries to make his way through a kind of fog; it isn’t really a question of irony, but one of vertigo: he just doesn’t know the answers.”) Others?

MN: Those are two writers who have an enormous importance to me, for all their differences. Claude Simon taught me, I believe, not to go “straight to the point” in writing to twist and turn around a secret or a mystery that language tries to get as close to as it can—and yet the writer knows he’ll never find the way into that core of darknesses and silences, he can only try to get close enough to knock on the door, and he hears the echo of that knock but he knows the door is not going to open. My favorite Stephen King novel is It. He knows better than anyone how to understand and describe the terrors of childhood. Joyce Carol Oates as well, whom I’ve admired since I was twelve years old. There’s also Anna Maria Ortese, Javier Marias, Russell Banks, Sigrid Undset, so many others!

JC: Vengeance Is Mine is set primarily in Bordeaux, where your narrator, a lawyer we know as M^e Susane (no given name), is based, with side trips to nearby La Réole, where she grew up. Your 2005 book Self-Portrait in Green (reissued this year in a hardback edition with Jordan Stump’s translation by Two Lines Press) also is set in this area “eternally under the threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne.” Is this a region of France you know well? Have you lived there?

MN: Yes, that’s the part of France I know best: I lived there for about ten years before I left for Berlin. When I set my characters in motion I need a very precise image of the roads, the streets they’re moving through, even if I don’t necessarily describe them. That’s why I have never, I think, made any character live in a place I haven’t seen.

JC: Your opening is enticing and mysterious. A new client “timidly, almost fearfully” enters M^e Susane’s office on January 5, 2019, to request her services on behalf of his wife Marlyne, who is accused of murdering their children. We follow your narrator’s thoughts intimately as she realizes she may have met this man, Gilles Principaux, thirty-two years before in the Caudéran neighborhood of Bordeaux, when she was ten and her mother took her along on a job: “he was the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago…” The question Who is Gilles Principaux to me? drives your plot. Did you begin with this opening? Or did it emerge as you worked on the novel?

MN: I never start writing a novel without having long reflected on an image that, for one reason or another, fascinates me. In this case the image was this: a woman—I don’t yet know who she is or what she does in her office—sees a man come in, and him too I don’t yet know who he is or why he’s come to see her, and she’s so shocked that she feels like she’s been struck right in the face. That was the image that made me want to write this novel, like a mystery I had to explore.

JC: M ^e Susane, her mother and her father have radically different memories of the incident in Caudéran. This conflict in what they recall leads to a rift in the family. It’s as if the unreliability of memory is a character in the novel. Is that what you intended?

MN: M ^e Susane is fighting off her father’s determination to make her a victim—he’s convinced that in that house she suffered something unnamable (he certainly doesn’t give it a name!). She doesn’t want to be the victim of anything or anyone. And even if it happened the way her father thinks, she’d rather be on the side of her enchanted memories than on the side of the truth.

JC: M^e Susane’s housekeeper Sharon, is an undocumented mother of two from Mauritius on whose behalf she is working to get legal papers. You portray vividly the lawyer’s inner turmoil at their relationship, her sense that Sharon pities her and doesn’t appreciate all the efforts she is making on her behalf (and Sharon certainly doesn’t signal that she is superior and admirable, which is what she feels entitled to). Sharon’s role in her daily life grows, yet there is no true connection between them, which makes her feel even more isolated. How can we understand what binds these two strong women whose roles and class place them so far apart?

MN: M^e Susane’s problem with Sharon is that she feels guilty. She doesn’t know how to be a boss. She mixes up friendship and a work relationship. She wants desperately for Sharon to like her, but Sharon isn’t interested in anything like that. And so M ^e Susane feels a sort of resentment, because it seems to her that she’s doing a lot to help her housemaid, which is true. But you can’t demand love in exchange for the help you give someone.

JC: Rudy, a former law firm colleague and boyfriend, calls on M^e Susane to arrange babysitting for his young daughter Lila, a process that grows increasingly complicated. Is Lila a doppelganger for the younger M^e Susane when she first met Gilles Principaux?

MN: Ah, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s interesting!

JC: Given the range of characters in this novel, how did you decide on the narrative point of view?

MN: I wanted the narrative never to leave the point of view of M ^e Susane, as strange as that might make it sometimes. I wanted the reader to be literally a prisoner of Me Susane’s mind.

JC: M^e Susane’s client, Marlyne, refuses to see her husband (although she does speak at length to her lawyer in a breathless ten-page section). Gilles Principaux rants at M^e Susane mercilessly, at one point without noticing she is bleeding from an injury, offering her a first-hand experience of his self-involvement. M^e Susane’s sense of horror builds as she begins to understand Marlyne as if from within her stultifying marriage. How is she to know who is the guilty one?

MN: I think she listens to Marlyne’s and Gilles’ respective accounts without really judging either one of them. That was another thing I wanted as I wrote this book: they both have a right to their own interpretation of the facts, their own account of their lives. But the fact remains, it was Marlyne who killed, not Gilles.

JC: How does the translation process with Jordan Stump, the translator of this novel and others (That Time of Year, Self-Portrait in Green)—and this interview—work?

MN: Jordan always asks me a few questions about the text, and from those questions I can see he’s an extraordinary translator: they always show a pertinence, a subtlety, and perceptiveness that fill me with joy and gratitude. Thanks be to translators! Without them how would I have access to literature from all over the world?

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Vengeance Is Mine by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Fire season in California goes from the driest months of summer until the first rains come, if they come. (Traditionally October 31 was the date to circle.) It’s a time when people stay alert to rising winds, the smell of smoke, sirens and alerts signaling that a wildfire is on the prowl and it’s time to evacuate. Daniel Gumbiner’s immersive second novel, Fire in the Canyon (after The Boatbuilder), captures the surreal landscape of the fire zone in the Sierra foothills and how it challenges and transforms the Hecht family and their rural community. Having evacuated from wildfires in Sonoma County multiple times, I read it as a richly detailed and truly told chronicle of our times.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have the past few tumultuous years been for you? Managing your work as editor of The Believer, which was folded by the University of Nevada, its archives sold, then resurrected after a community-driven campaign and change of ownership back to McSweeney’s with you as editor? Writing, editing and launching this new novel?

Daniel Gumbiner: They’ve been surprising and uncertain—but also quite rich. When the magazine was defunded, I really believed it was the end. So I started to look for other jobs, and was trying to think about what my next steps would be. And then there was this miraculous turn of events, where we were able to bring the magazine back to McSweeney’s, and that was an exciting, busy time. There was this outpouring of support from so many people who helped make that happen. And that was a really special thing to witness. We had a party for the first issue back and it was wonderful to see so many writerly friends all in one place. I think magazines are such important community hubs. As writers, we often operate in our isolated silos and we need excuses to come together. Like my friend Oscar Villalon said the other day: you can’t be a bohemian by yourself. 

JC: How does Fire in the Canyon draw upon your own life, your early years? What was the initial spark that began the project?

DG: I think it draws on my own life in many ways—and probably in ways I don’t even realize. I remember I first saw the impact of a wildfire when I was on a bus going up to the Sierras, to summer camp, in Desolation Wilderness. I was struck by the magnitude of what the fire had done. And also, honestly, a bit terrified by it. It was one of those moments where you realize that the adults in your world can’t control everything, that there are powers larger than them.

So since I was a kid, I think I’ve had a lot of respect for wildfire. And of course, in recent years, due to the climate crisis, we’ve seen increasingly destructive fires. Almost everyone I know has been affected by them in some way—some more than others. We could all sense that something was shifting. So I wanted to write about witnessing this shift, about the experience of living in the midst of these more intense fires.

Wildfire continues to be frightening and awe-inspiring to me. I was up in Placerville at my family friend’s farm a little while ago, and he took me over to Grizzly Flats, the town that was basically entirely destroyed by the Caldor Fire. We drove around the burn in that area, where loggers are felling trees to salvage the wood. We probably drove around for three hours or so and everything you saw was burned forest. The scale of that fire’s impact is just indescribable. It is so vast.

JC: Fire in the Canyon implies no way out. At least it does for those of us who have been evacuated during wildfires or followed the trajectories of disastrous fires. Is that what you had in mind with the title?

DG: I think there are a few ways you can read it. And I like that interpretation. One of the reasons I liked the title, too, is because the canyon is a kind of boundary, to the people in the town. There’s a certain way in which they’ve understood how fire works in their community, how it interacts with the canyon. But this dynamic is shifting, and that’s part of what the characters are confronting.

JC: You introduce Benjamin Hecht, 65, a former cannabis grower (he served 18 months at Lompoc for growing medical marijuana) turned winemaker who has lived for decades in the gold country. The fire season grows worse each year, yet he persists, with a farm that needs constant tending: “ten new chickens, two dachsunds, honeybees, a small flock of sheep, one guard dog, ducks, geese, several CBD plants, one acre of Primitivo, two of Grenache, two of Barbera, three of Gamay, and three of Syrah.” (Plus two baby emus.) How were you able to capture the daily routine of the farm over the months of the novel?

DG: I spent a fair amount of time hanging out on vineyards and meeting winemakers over the course of researching the book. I have several friends in that line of work too, so I relied on them at times. But I also just read a lot. I love getting absorbed in that kind of research, reading about sheep forage or what have you. In that way I’m a bit similar to Ben. He’s someone who likes diving into these new hobbies, new interests. In his case, he’s always adding these new elements to his farm.

I think I was drawn to writing fiction, in part, because I’m a generalist in this way. If I had to study one thing, one subject, my whole life, I’d probably get bored. But writing novels allows you to move through different universes, spend time with them, and then continue on. I think my fiction writing is a kind of odd ledger of my general interests over time, as a result.

JC: Ben’s farm is near the small town of Natoma. Is this based on a real place? How did you craft the details about the Gold Rush history, the shifts in the land and in industry, the ebb and flow of rain and wind and heat, in this region?

DG: The town is fictional but it draws on some aspects of other towns in the foothills. I’ve always loved that region. It was an area we used to visit as kids, and it always had a mythic quality to me. It’s kind of a passed over place, in some ways. Most people from the city go straight through it to get to the mountains. But it’s a beautiful region and I always thought it would be an interesting setting for a novel. When I started writing about Ben moving around on his farm, I knew he was in the foothills, but I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of town he’d be in, or what the setting of the story would be, more specifically.

So I began to build out the setting in more detail as I went. I really enjoy developing the setting of a story, though it’s always a challenge. For it to work, you need to weave setting into the fabric of every scene, through all these discrete details, like you mention: climate, history, etc. I know a setting is working well when I feel like I could keep spinning a story in that world forever. I could just open another narrative thread and let it unfurl in the environment that’s been created. So that’s the feeling I’m striving for. Once I get to that point, I know the setting has depth to it.

JC: The novel unfolds as Ben, his novelist wife Ada, their son Yoel, who has stopped speaking to his dad but is visiting from Los Angeles, face evacuation as a fire comes precariously close. Your descriptions of the wind, the flames, the damage, are spot-on. Have you experienced wildfires? How many? Were you evacuated?

DG: I’ve never been evacuated for a wildfire myself. For those passages, I was relying on interviews I did, with friends and strangers, about their experiences with fires and evacuations. I also listened to a lot of oral histories about people who had been forced to evacuate. Friends would share photos and videos with me too. I really wanted to understand that experience as closely as I could. In a lot of ways, it’s the most common experience related to this crisis. Not that many people die from wildfire—though of course all these deaths are terrible—but many people are evacuated, many people lose their homes. And that is its own kind of devastation. So when I was thinking about those evacuation scenes, I tried to tap into my own experience of times when I’ve thought I might lose something really important to me. That helped me try to understand what the characters in the book might be feeling in those moments. What do you do when you’re on the precipice of that kind of grief? When you know something might be truly gone and there’s nothing you can do about it? I think that’s something we can all relate to. And unfortunately, it’s an experience that will become more common in the years to come.

JC: Fire in the Canyon could almost serve as a primer for a contemporary winemaker, as you trace the cycle of the crop, the harvest, the fermenting, and so forth. How did you learn so much about the traditional forms of winemaking in Europe, Argentina, California, as well as the new style of making natural wines, which currently fascinates those in the wine industry?

DG: I’ve always been interested in wine, but I never knew that much about it. The book was a fun excuse to explore that world in more detail. There’s something alluring and elemental about winemaking. As one of the characters says in the book, it’s kind of like midwifery: you are guiding something into existence. You take what the particular conditions of a season give you and you work with that. So you are not entirely in control—you’re responding to the natural world. I just really fell in love with the nuances of that process. Perhaps a bit too much at times…Part of the editorial process was trimming back some of the winemaking details.

For Ben, I think, growing grapes and making wine is a chance for him to reinvent himself. He was a cannabis grower for years, and made lots of money doing that, but then he was prosecuted for one of his grows, and ultimately, growing cannabis was no longer an option for him. Moving onto wine felt like a natural development to me. So many of the people I’ve met in the wine world come from unusual places. Often they’ve lived many lives. I’ve met winemakers who used to be club promoters, philosophers, pharmacologists. The craft seems to attract a certain kind of searching, experimental character.

JC: The community of Natoma—the winemakers, the new bar owners, the fusty sheriff, Yoel’s high school friends and the newcomers in his life, including Halle—arrive on the scene as organically as shifts in the natural world. You describe their interactions beautifully, including the awkward moments, the long-held grudges, and the helpfulness. Halle and her friends, Argentine natural winemakers Seba and Yami Garcia, help Ben and Yoel and Ben’s old friend Wick, whose band is popular in the area, and others at harvest time. The evacuations bring people into contact, helping strangers, reaching out to friends and neighbors by text. How do you think about plotting when you’re pulling together a community devastated by fire?

DG: One of the things I wanted to show was the way in which the fire puts all these characters into relationship with each other. This was a story I heard over and over when talking to people about how fires had affected them: it connected them with their neighbors in new and surprising ways.

I was interested in showing how a fire might shift the social landscape of a town. In terms of plotting, that was definitely something I had in mind. I don’t tend to plot out my fiction too meticulously, but in this case, I did know that I wanted a fire to set in motion the different narrative threads of the book. From there it was a matter of following the characters, considering how they might change and grow in response to it.

I met a group of people, up in El Dorado County, who banded together to help protect their property from the Caldor Fire. They called themselves the Ant Hill Army. This was a group of people that really ran the gamut culturally and politically. You had people who lived on communes working side-by-side with ex-Marine Trumpers, cutting a fire line in the forest. Some of them didn’t have insurance or they had bad insurance, so they had everything on the line, in terms of saving their homes. They worked nonstop for two days straight and they were successful in stopping the fire from moving in on their properties. And they’re all still closely bonded now. They had an anniversary party where they commemorated the fire together. And one guy who I was talking to there told me that they just don’t talk about politics together. Obviously, it’s not a perfect situation, but I find stories like that inspiring.

JC: Yoel joins other younger members of the community and an activist group called the San Andreans to protest climate change and the attitudes of fossil fuel companies. Are the San Andreans based on real environmental activists in these times?

DG: No, they’re not connected to any real activists, but I think they represent something that a lot of people feel, which is that the response to this crisis is still deeply inadequate. We are dealing with an existential emergency but we all go about days as if it more or less doesn’t exist, which is pretty crazy. I think Yoel, as a sensitive person, feels the desperation of the situation quite acutely. So he is pushed to action more rapidly than others are.

At various points in the book, Yoel’s sensitivity is a hindrance to him, and the family. I think, at times, he feels like it’s a challenge he needs to overcome. But it’s also kind of the source of his strength and value to others. I think the parts of ourselves we feel we need to reject are often the most powerful. I’m interested in the ways in which we can all be of use, despite our flaws or hang ups. 

JC: What are you working on next/now?

DG: I’m not sure. Have a few ideas I’m excited about but I don’t feel fully committed to any of them yet. Stay tuned!

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Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner is available from Astra House.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch is a dazzling and original masterpiece that evokes little-known aspects of the Civil War and its aftermath. The settings range from a sheltered ridge in the Appalachians to the Battle of the Wilderness to the West Virginia Lunatic Asylum that follows the teachings of a humane Quaker physician. The characters are idiosyncratic, consistent, vivid, and haunting. Phillips makes a case for this Civil War era as a prelude to our own turbulent times. “Night Watch is about the post-apocalyptic world of the Civil War years, the tribal divisions, the search for scarce resources, a specific family fallen apart and struggling to survive,” as she put it during our email conversation. “Now we seem to be living in a slowly unfolding apocalypse, climate emergencies everywhere, online-assisted conspiracy theology, ever-evolving viruses. It’s somehow reassuring to enter a turbulent (novelistic) past in which changed characters adapt, and stay in our minds. Time is a bellowing freight train, and it’s also the floating presence of all things, in all times.”

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been going in the post-quarantine world? How have the years of pandemic and turmoil affected the writing, editing, and launch of your new novel, Night Watch?

Jayne Anne Phillips: The pandemic closed down the world, but it was mostly during those years that I began to understand the layering threads of the novel, and I wrote the ending. I felt as though the isolation and turmoil, the need for safety and refuge, were present inside Night Watch—the cyclical nature of history, the cycle of creation/decline, felt compassionate, comforting, mournful, yet hopeful. Science and technology in the 1860’s-70‘s included railroads and daguerreotypes, whereas today technology is seen as both savior (Covid vaccines) and devil (the pathogen that escapes the lab, bots that agitate political dysfunction, disinformation that undermines trust of legitimacy itself). Launch of my novel? More and more stacks up against the literary novel, the book of poetry…Feeling a true passion for literature is almost like membership in a medieval guild, a time when artist monks wrote out illumined texts and comprised most of their readership. Flashing forward, one can imagine, after the dystopian Long Pause or Full Stop—the cessation of the machine, the end of readily available electricity—forest dwellers and urban survivors breaking into structures looking for canned food and…books.

JC: What drew you to write about characters immersed in the Civil War and its aftermath in West Virginia, your home state, with a focus on brain injury, trauma from sexual abuse, and the healing theories of the Quaker physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, who created the philosophy behind the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum?

JAP: I grew up twenty minutes from what began, in 1858 Weston, Virginia, as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. It was the only appropriation Virginia ever supported in the mountainous western “frontier” of the state. Many educated Americans don’t know that West Virginia seceded from Virginia to fight for the Union. And the asylum itself, like most of the vast State asylums built in that era, followed guidelines laid out in Thomas Story Kirkbride’s 1854 book, On The Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Kirkbride emphasized “moral treatment,” strict regimens of physical exercise and activities, the asylum as healing refuge with gardens, barns, dairies; he demanded a strict maximum of 250 patients, each with a private, well-ventilated room. Trans-Allegheny, its wings extending a fourth of a mile, enclosed nine acres of interior space on nearly three hundred acres of farmed land and marked walking trails. Today the asylum, part ruin, part restored fantasy, is open to the public and remains one of the largest hand-cut sandstone buildings in the world, second only to the Kremlin. I visited several times and took some of the photographs that appear in Night Watch; other images are documents housed in State archives.

But my novels begin with the voice of a character involved in an ongoing, specific situation; I saw ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, on a journey to the room I photographed in the “restored” asylum. War is trauma. Abuse of “civilians” and sexual assault of women is common, even weaponized, in every war, then and now. Soldiers maimed for life in the 1860’s remained devastated. Imagine, in an American population of roughly 30 million, 1.5 million dead, wounded or captured (according to the Battlefield Trust). Numberless widows and orphans. Night Watch invites the reader to survive that devastation in the experience of one family, already rendered nameless, fleeing one hard won refuge for another, and another…

JC: What inspired your title, Night Watch, and the character known as Night Watch, and John O’Shea, among other identities?

JAP: There are always those nameless, forgotten individuals who are moral fulcrums no matter what threat or loss they suffer. Dearbhla is such a character, and refers to her adopted son as “her one.” He’s known as “Sharpshooter” during the war, and later “lent” the name, John O’Shea. His identity shifts as he inhabits one ‘life’ after another. “Night Watch” is a position at the asylum, and namelessness is a theme in the novel. Even before the War, ConaLee, Eliza, Dearbhla, and her adopted son, keep their family name secret for reasons that unspool in the novel. Think of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” that massive, moody portrait of guardsmen charged with defending their cities. Night Watch is a moral and physical necessity, comprised within one man in the novel—a man secret even to himself—whose nature it is to protect, defend, survive, thrive, if given the chance.

JC: You begin Night Watch in 1874, as a mute mother and her daughter, who pretends to be her servant, arrive at the asylum in Weston, Virginia, and are welcomed by Night Watch and Mrs. Bowman. What research did you do to be able to re-create this asylum for 250 women and men with multiple activities, its chief physician, Dr. Thomas Story, and complex staff, including the Hospital Cook, Mrs. Hexum, with her staff and the group of children she nurtures?

JAP: The novel starts in 1874, nine years after the war, inside the immediacy of ConaLee’s voice. A twelve-year-old girl, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, she undertakes a journey with her mute mother and the man she’s been told to call “Papa.” And so our story begins, while the novel, after we “know” the characters, moves back to 1864, amidst the War, to reveal what made and changed them, though revelations continue throughout the novel. Research included Kirkbride’s book and books about him, my own preoccupation with the irony of “moral treatment” within such a brutal, tortured era, and, well, shelves of books about the War and the times: Ken Burn’s PBS series, “The Civil War;” The Civil War Told By Those Who Lived It, four volumes of diaries, military accounts, letters, published by Library of America; Rankin Sherling’s The Invisible Irish, Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and numerous books on herbal medicine and medical practices of the time. Realizing the enormity of national trauma and the myth of “the good death” as characterized in Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War, was key.

JC: You include illustrations—maps, photographs, drawings. How did you choose them?

JAP: There were originally many more illustrations, but those that remain are intrinsically connected to the narrative: the ladies’ magazine page, referred to as “thee and thine” in the novel; historical photographs of the asylum that comprise spaces the characters actually know. All are meant to. History tells us the facts, but literature tells us the story, and these images help underscore the reality behind the story. Night Watch almost begins with “You’ll tell the story,” a phrase tossed off to ConaLee as she’s left behind. Without story, we don’t truly penetrate history.

JC: Your characters Eliza, and her daughter ConaLee, the daughter of the sharpshooter, are at the heart of the novel. In 1864, Eliza knows about “woodcraft, home craft, trapping, hunting.” She and Dearbhla “used woods medicine, cooked, grew vegetables in sunny patches of ground.” I’m curious about the archival information about such homesteading in those mountains, and how you were able to detail the herbs, animals, garden produce used in these times?

JAP: Herbal remedies were the only medicine for most, and babies were born at home, in whatever served as home. I loved entering this world unspoiled by industry, in which nature dominated, when it was possible to survive in the mountains, devoting all one’s time to daily provisions and preparing stores for the next season. Living “off the grid” was hard, grinding work nearly two hundred years ago, when the grid itself was so limited; the resourceful and fortunate succeeded. Years of continual research, including films, books of photographs and Appalachian folklore, accounts of the past, family stories, and familiarity with real places still reminiscent of the wild, like New River Gorge and the “hills beyond hills” I saw from my childhood home.

 JC: In 1874 Eliza, now known as Miss Janet, is mute, admitted to the asylum. How were you able to render her trauma so powerfully through the flashback scenes leading up to the asylum days?

JAP: I was living inside her, I suppose. And Dearbhla and ConaLee were witnesses to pieces of her experience.

JC: The vision of Dearbhla, descended from Protestant Irish indentured servants, infuses the novel’s narrative throughout. Is she based on a real character? Or immigrant group?

JAP: Dearbhla is not based on a real character, but on what is known about poor Irish whites, illiterate for generations, who migrated with nothing and served long terms as indentured manual labor. The Irish in the South, particularly, were judged by the rampant alcoholism of the men, who could not find work in economies based on slavery, many of whom gave up, leaving their women and children to lives of bitter poverty.

JC: You describe the sharpshooter’s brain injury, the battlefield hospital where he recovers, his treatment, his gradual return to awareness and ultimate state, in great detail. What was the process of writing these scenes like? How much did medical professionals know about brain injuries at that time?

JAP: I’m fascinated by consciousness itself, by simultaneous time as reflected in the floating mind, the blinkered mind. Medical doctors knew very little about the brain then, or they subscribed to myths about “humors.” The Civil War hospitals in Alexandria, a city given over to the treatment of the wounded, were probably among the most enlightened of the day. “Old” Dr. O’Shea and his assisting nurse, Mrs. Gordon, are two more of the mostly unsung heroes in Night Watch. Their close attention, their common sense, their encouragement of the injured to help one another, their recognition of their patient’s innate abilities despite his maimed appearance and diminished faculties, are still at the heart of what healing humanity can manage.

JC: Are you visualizing the country’s current state of division as resembling this time in American history?

JAP: Absolutely. The Civil War, with its migrating populations, separated families, displacements and broken governments, entrenched points of view that lead to heartbreak and breakdown, casts a long shadow, and that shadow emerges more and more starkly. I see Night Watch as the third of a trilogy of war novels, beginning with Machine Dreams (the Vietnam war as experienced by one American family) and moving through Lark And Termite, which imagines a real event in the Korean War and its generational impact on two motherless children. In a sense, we are all those children. Statistics vary, but the Union that survived the War saw 4,743 lose their lives to lynching between 1882 and 1968 (NAACP). The Tuskegee Institute puts that number at 3,446, of whom 72% were Black, and 1,297 were white “provocateurs,” or those seen to be aiding Blacks. Entrenched institutional attitudes still reflect Civil War tropes. Foreign entities, effectively undermining what was once referred to as Western Civilization, actively support division and domestic terrorism.

A soldier character in Lark And Termite believes “It’s all one war,” implying that locations, weapons, ideologies, change, but the same fires flare up.

Yet the timeless nuances of human identity pull in an opposite direction, the direction of whoever and whatever stands as night watch, acting to protect and sustain despite chaos, to gather up, to survive to a time when all of us can finally say our names.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

JAP: I’m working on a collection “about writers and writing” that includes memoir and addresses the very recent lost past, and the idea of origins in a world obsessed with origin stories.

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Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Christian Kiefer’s most recent novel, Phantoms, reveals the sorrows and lingering guilt of wartime through the stories of Ray Takahashi, returning home to the U.S. after World War II, and John Frazier, a Vietnam veteran. (I so treasured the beauty of that novel that I selected it as a BBC Culture “best book of 2019.”)

Kiefer’s new novel, The Heart of It All, is a stunning next step. He details how life changes for an ensemble of characters in a failing Ohio industrial town struggling with heartbreak, betrayal and tragedy during the year after of Trump’s election. “Death brought casseroles,” Keifer begins, “and Tom took them, every one,…many warm from the oven, others cold so their foiled tops wept with moisture.” The novel unfolds through multiple points of view. There’s Tom Bailey, a factory foreman, his wife Sarah and teenage children Charlie and Janey; Khalid Marwat, who moved to the U.S. from Pakistan, bought the transformer factory, and considers the town “a kind of earthly paradise,” his wife Rafia, teenage children and parents; factory workers Mary Lou, who lives with her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Sam, whose racist jokes and growing interest in conspiracy theories unsettle his community; Paula, the “only Black woman in town,” who works at Kroger’s, and her nephew Anthony from East Cleveland. In powerful, lyrical prose, Kiefer offers a sympathetic portrait of a community in search of solace. Reading The Heart of it All creates a sense of possibility, that we might at some point engage in healing dialogue despite multifaceted divisions.

This email conversation spanned many days on West Coast time.

*

Jane Ciabattari: What inspired The Heart of it All? I couldn’t help but think of Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s long-ago portrait of small-town Ohio. But The Heart of It All incorporates most of the troubling aspects of the past decade. How difficult was it to weave political, racial and class conflicts into fiction?

Christian Kiefer: The country inspired, as it always does, in all its terrible beauty and ugliness. I’m not certain what brought me along the path that it took other than some absurd notion of hope that I harbor in my heart—hope that folks will understand that we’re all struggling and that, in the end, we don’t have much to lean on but ourselves. This is, I think, a lesson we find in much great literature both in and outside the canon.

You’ve asked about the weaving of politics and race and class and all the rest. I was speaking with writer-friend Kendra Atleework recently. We both live in conservative-leaning parts of California and it’s easy for the more liberal centers to throw stones from their bubbles. What I’ve found—and what Kendra and I spoke about—is the goodness inherent in people and how that looks unreconcilable at a remove. It’s fairly easy to find white people in our communities who might use derogatory language—based on race or sexual orientation or what have you—but who might also have a friend or coworker who matches that language, and whom they might consider a friend or even family member. “I don’t mean you, Bill, I mean those other %$#%$%s.”

So I was trying to push toward some essential humanity. At least that was what I held in my heart while I was writing. Everyone is just trying to get by and a lot of it is scary. Human beings tend to look for enemies and if we can’t find one, we’ll blame someone “other” than us. This is particular true of white Americans, of course, as our long history of racism and the incarceral state upholds. As Peter Hedges has noted, war is a force that gives us meaning.

JC: You begin with a tragic moment—the funeral reception after the burial of James, a six-month-old who died from a hole in his heart. Was this always your opening scene? How were you able to pare it down into such a lean but heartbreaking chapter?

CK: My youngest child, my only daughter, had exactly the heart defect that the baby in the book has. She had open-heart surgery at three months and survived. Much of the whole book was just imagining what my life would have been had the worst happened. That was always the opening scene but I had no clear idea what would happen next or how things would unfold. I generally outline and have a sense of the shape of the thing, especially where it’s going to land, but not this time.

JC: Your setting is a small town in Ohio: “In the best of times it is, truth be told, a haggard place, once a center of modest industry but that time is a century gone and what remains struggles for simple continuance, its citizens surviving paycheck to paycheck, on loan, on credit, on faith, a small town growing smaller as the years pass and the hard winters continue.” What draws you to tell this story in this Ohio town? Did you model it on a real Ohio town? What sort of research was involved?

CK: I run the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in Ashland, Ohio, which is to say that I direct the program from my home in California, flying back and forth as necessary for meetings and such. I was born and raised in California so I find the whole of the Midwest to be a fairly exotic place. Ohio, in particular, has been interesting to get to know. We have some downtrodden areas in California—most often areas of cities—but in Ohio a traveler might encounter an entire town that looks as if it is just barely holding on.

Ashland is not such a town, but it was easy to remove two big employers—the hospital and the university—and to imagine it more like some of the rougher towns I’ve explored. That was something of the blueprint. These are small towns based on some industry that is long since gone. Seems every town has an empty factory at its center, or a sense of some industry from which the world has moved on.

JC: You tell your story through an ensemble of voices. What led you to choose multiple narrators?

CK: I can probably blame two great, great writers for this: Kent Haruf and Richard Russo. Both are so good at this kind of ensemble narrative. I wanted to tell the story of the whole place, the whole town, in this particular historical moment, and the only way I could do that was the quilt it all together in such a way that, I hope, readers will see that it’s a quilt and not just a bunch of fabric scraps.

JC: What sort of challenges were involved in telling your story from the points of view of multiple generations? The teenagers, the middle agers, the elders?

CK: The biggest challenges were cultural. I’m a straight white cis-gendered middle-aged male writer and there’s a great deal of unearned privilege there. I feel quite comfortable imagining myself into most straight white characters but moving away from that—as I’ve done in this book and in the previous book—brings to the fore certain responsibilities and questions. Matthew Salesses has us asking why a writer like me (or any writer, perhaps) wants to write about people of color. It’s a good question and a worthwhile one, and one I hope I’ve answered in the book itself.

One of the choices I made early on was not to try to write in any alternative Englishes. So there’s no AAVE, for example, in the book. I don’t think anyone needs a middle-aged white writer trying to approximate any of that. Frankly, I don’t think anyone needs a middle-aged white male writer saying much of anything right now, but this is the only think I know how to do so I keep doing it.

JC: You write with great detail about the factory setting, how Tom and his co-workers socialize at lunch outside (and on smoke breaks) and Tuesday nights at the Bowl-O-Rama, Mary Lou’s interaction with Mr. Marwat (and later Mrs. Marwat). What sort of research was involved in this aspect of the novel? (Are you a bowler?)

CK: I worked in a very similar factory in Iowa, where I also took up bowling for lack of anything else to do. That stuff was mostly from memory. I worked in a very similar factory in Iowa, where I also took up bowling for lack of anything else to do. That stuff was mostly from memory.

JC: What were you doing in Iowa?

CK: Iowa was meant to be the start of my academic graduate work—not the writing program but American Studies—but I got a graduate degree in divorce instead, which really put things in perspective pretty quickly. For a time I was working a bunch of jobs all at once to make ends meet, in addition to doing grad work full time: delivering newspapers, being a farm laborer, working in an industrial printing office, and of course doing the factory gig. It was a mess but so it goes. This would have been twenty-five years ago or so.

JC: Among the aspects of the small-town you capture beautifully is the way people look out for each other. Paula keeps an eye on Charlie, when he comes to visit his friend Kent, whose father is a vicious man, and she also shows great empathy toward Janey. Tom helps Mary Lou process the changes in her life during this year, and drops by to visit Sam after he’s lost his job. Charlie helps out Mary Lou’s mom when he encounters her on the streets on a frigid night. And so forth. Does this come from your own experience? Research?

CK: I guess this is how I wish it was. Maybe it is this way in some places. Maybe it is this way in Ohio. But also, the ways in which the white characters take care of each other also separates the characters of color from the heart of the town. Paula is identified as perhaps the only Black woman in town and she looks after some of the white kids but who looks after her? No one, really. I mean that’s the division of emotional labor there. I hope that the reader falls in love with how much everyone cares for each other while also understanding that there’s real isolation happening at the same time. People do fall through the cracks all the time and some of that is via the same social systems that hold us together. Race, economics, chronic illness, country of origin: all of this plays into who has agency, what kind, and so on.

JC: Sarah, the grieving mother in the first scene, experiences months of depression and physical pain, which doctors seem unable to solve (they give her Oxycontin and other pain killers, antidepressants). Her dilemma gives a human face to the national Oxycontin epidemic. Was that a complicated element to include in this novel?

CK: Sarah feels very real to me. We have chronic illness in my family and I also know many fellow writers who suffer from ongoing illnesses—some diagnosed, some mysterious, and all of whom are women. We have a long history of tagging women as “hysterical” (Lauren Groff has commented on this), a gaslighting so painful that it comes to feel nefarious. And it’s not just the medical community but the insurance companies that make even getting a proper diagnosis difficult, not to mention any real treatment. It’s maddening. And it’s also totally fucked.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

CK: Gosh I wish I knew! I’m struggling to get the next thing together and to get some aspects of my life in order. Maybe when I get the second thing worked out I’ll have a better sense of the first thing.

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The Heart of It All by Christian Kiefer is available from Melville House.

Angie Kim’s second novel, Happiness Falls, is a fast-paced missing persons mystery narrated by Mia, a feisty brilliant twenty-year-old whose family is on the verge of falling apart from the first page. Kim tells me she was working on the novel during the pandemic. “I found it really hard to write,” she says. “I joined a ‘silent zoom’ writing group to force myself to sit in front of the computer, but I couldn’t focus. The pandemic was all-encompassing, with the whole society in emergency mode, and anything not related to it seemed unimportant.”

The pandemic also brought a breakthrough. “I decided to place Happiness Falls in June of 2020,” she says. “Somehow, imagining a family dealing with a crisis during the same quarantine my family and I were experiencing gave me a way into the story and inspired specific scenes and situations. Also, I have some close friends with autistic children who were having an especially hard time with the disruption to routines. Tensions were high everywhere, and my friends were worried about their kids with anxiety and sensory issues melting down in public, not being able to handle wearing masks, prompting bystanders to call the police or Child Protective Services.

“Once I was done, I realized how much elements like wearing masks, the racial tensions involving police interactions, and our society’s changing baselines and expectations not only added to the plot, but reinforced some of the themes I wanted to explore.”

Our conversation explores these themes, and focuses especially on Eugene, Mia’s younger brother, who has a dual diagnosis of autism and mosaic Angelman syndrome (AS).

* 

Jane Ciabattari: You open the novel with a mystery: ‘We didn’t call the police right away. Later I would blame myself, wonder if things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t shrugged it off, insisted Dad wasn’t missing missing, but just delayed, probably in the woods looking for Eugene, thinking he’d run off somewhere.” What drew you to write a novel about a missing person—specifically, a missing man?

Angie Kim: To me, missing person cases are the deepest, most intriguing mysteries because the range of possibilities is so vast, encompassing everything from the most horrific (kidnapping and murder) to the most innocuous (took a fun trip without telling anyone). I don’t outline or figure out the plot before drafting, so having this father go missing to begin the story got me to stop procrastinating and start writing—because I knew that was the only way I’d figure out what happened to him.

As for the missing person being a man, you’re right that that was a specific, intentional choice. I have a footnote in the novel that says: “Based on my perusal of the genre, most of the missing are girls/women (87.9 percent), with the missing-men stories all being espionage-or mafia-related.” (That percentage comes from a spreadsheet I made after discussing the missing-girl/woman trope with writer friends several years ago.) The feminist interrogation of women-in-peril stories is nothing new, but I wanted to use this story to explore an additional facet I hadn’t seen: the stay-at-home father overwhelmed (physically and/or emotionally) by the strains of being a full-time caregiver to someone who requires a lot of care, like Eugene. How does the fact of the missing parent being the father, rather than the mother, change the analysis?

JC: How did you develop such a driving plot? Were there particular influences, practices, goals while writing the novel?

AK: It came from my trying to reconcile two somewhat contradictory tendencies I have as a writer. One is that I don’t outline or know what’s going to happen before I write. I wish I could—it would certainly make writing a lot more efficient—but I find that I have to do a ton of freewriting to get to know my characters and what they’re doing and thinking before I can start drafting the actual story. With Happiness Falls, I did several years of freewriting (off and on) and ended up with so many seemingly unrelated stories I wanted to tell about this family: different members of the family experiencing different types of racism in Korea vs. the US, the mom teaching the kids Klingon, Mia being called stupid because she looks Korean and can’t speak Korean.

At the same time, I’m a total nerd when it comes to story structure and architecture. I love deconstructing books I admire, finding patterns and trying to figure out how/if they fit into classic storytelling structures with the key plot points coming at certain parts of the book.

I reconciled these two things—loosely-connected stories on the one hand and story structure on the other—by using the missing-person hook as a Trojan horse of sorts. The investigation became a device, a container to hold together all the stories I wanted to tell; by virtue of the father being missing, I wanted readers to consider disparate facets of the family’s past and current lives. The key, though, was that I had to find a way to link the story to the family’s current plight. So many of the twists and turns I could never have thought up ahead of time came out of this process.

I didn’t do this consciously, but looking back, this is what I tried to do in Miracle Creek as well, with the courtroom mystery element serving as a hook to keep the readers turning the pages—with the stories of seven people’s lives inside that frame. It’s not surprising that I love linked stories (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno are two of my favorites), and my favorite form of novel is linked story collections in disguise—books with disparate stories connected by such a strong throughline or mystery element that the stories become unified into one story. Some of my all-time favorites are in this form—David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Emily St. John Mandel’s books, and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods—as well as some recent books I love like Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea and Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth.

JC: Why did you choose the independent, inquisitive, scientifically brilliant twenty-year-old Mia as the narrator and lead investigator of this mystery?

AK: Mia’s voice has been with me for years; she was the narrator in a short story I wrote over a decade ago and she just stuck with me. When I began this new story about the same family, I knew Mia would narrate at least a part of—if for no other reason than that I had so much fun with that voice and missed it. Her curiosity was infectious; writing in her voice forced me to research any random thing that happened to pop into my head.

I did consider switching to others’ points of view. But I wanted to do something different from Miracle Creek, which has seven close-third POVs. I came to consider it a personal challenge to stick with one POV for the whole book. A year or so into drafting the book, I fantasized about being in someone else’s head for a while, with the added benefit of learning more by switching perspectives, Rashomon style. That’s when I realized that staying with one character—the claustrophobic isolation, anxiety, and bewilderment—provides a literary taste of what it might feel like to live through a missing-person case, the fear that you might never know what happened to this person you love.

JC: It’s clear from Mia’s account that she knows her family is atypical. As she puts it, there her “boy-girl twin thing” with her brother John, their biracial mix (Korean and white), different last names (“Parson for Dad, Park for Mom—mashed up into Parkson for us kids”), untraditional parental gender roles (working mom, stay-at-home dad). And “indubitably, inherently atypical is with my little brother Eugene’s dual diagnosis: autism and a rare genetic disorder called mosaic Angelman syndrome (AS), which means he can’t talk, has motor difficulties and…an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter.” What influenced your choice emphasize the atypical in this novel?

AK: The answer is probably rooted in my experience as an immigrant. I moved from Seoul to the suburbs of Baltimore when I was 11. Middle school is not a good time to be radically different from everyone else. I craved normality, fitting in—probably not an unusual feeling for preteens and early teens anywhere, but especially for immigrants like me who were bullied and shamed for the differences in the way I looked, dressed, ate, smelled, played, and sounded.

As I grew up and matured, I came to be more comfortable with, and even proud of, my cultural and ethnic heritage, of my non-standard background. But then I had three kids who suffered various types of medical ailments as babies. (They’re all fine now.) Once again, I found myself envious of the normal, the typical—albeit in a different context this time. Why couldn’t I have what everyone else around me seemed to have? Why couldn’t I just fit in?

In many ways, my debut novel was a juxtaposition of these two experiences from my life, as an outsider in a racial/cultural/linguistic sense and as an outsider in a parenting/medical sense, explored primarily through a prism of parenting sacrifice. Happiness Falls does the same, but for one family through the prism of a child—an Asian-presenting, English-speaking daughter and sister who has been labeled as “different” in both Korea and America and who feels like an outsider even within her own family.

JC: What sort of research was involved in creating Eugene’s character—his perceptions and frustrations–and shaping the family life around him?

AK: A lot of my initial research came from real life. I initially thought Eugene had autism, just as his family does at first, and I know a lot of autistic children from group hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), the subject of my first novel, as well as through speech therapy and auditory processing therapy for one of my kids, who was born deaf in one ear and had dyspraxia (oral motor issues) as a toddler. My spending time with these families over the past 20 years or so definitely shaped Eugene’s character and his family life.

Several years ago, I was researching a particular type of letterboard-spelling therapy for nonspeaking autistic children, and I saw a reference to it being used for children with Angelman syndrome (AS). When I looked it up, I got chills, because what I read matched how I’d seen Eugene in my mind—a huge beatific smile (even when he’s making high-pitched noises out of pain, frustration, or sensory overload), drawn to water, motor impairments, nonspeaking, often diagnosed alongside autism. I instantly knew Eugene had Angelman syndrome (a dual diagnosis along with autism) and that this would play an important role in his family’s story.

My initial research into AS came from reading the medical literature, parent blogs, and advocacy group websites, but by far the most important research came from meeting (in person or via Zoom) families and experts in the tightly-knit Angelman community. I am very grateful to have gotten to interview and spend time with extremely generous people who shared their experiences and knowledge with me and opened their homes to me. Some served as beta readers for early drafts.

JC: You create several key episodes around Eugene’s work to explore the possibilities of being able to communicate with a letterboard. How does this reflect the current research in this area?

AK: To me, this is the heart of the book, so it was crucial that I get it right. If there’s one thing I hope people take away from Happiness Falls, it’s to question the deeply seated assumption most people have that oral fluency is equivalent to intelligence. This is deeply personal for me because of my experience immigrating to the US when I was eleven, not speaking any English. I went from feeling like a smart, talkative, and happy (albeit very poor) girl in Korea to being frustrated and utterly isolated. I felt stupid, judged, and ashamed. Less than. I became fluent in English within a few years, but that experience shattered my sense of competence and confidence for a long time.

My situation was temporary and limited, nothing compared to those with lifelong disabilities, who have beautifully formed thoughts they might never be able to express in any form their entire lives. It impacted me profoundly when I found out that a friend’s nonspeaking autistic son—whom everyone had assumed were severely cognitively impaired, unable to read or write—had learned to express himself by pointing to letters on large boards. It turned out that his inability to speak was due to motor impairments, not cognitive issues. I read essays he’d written—so beautiful and sophisticated that I was skeptical at first, wondering how much “help” the therapist had given him.

I visited therapists and observed sessions in person, and eventually sat with nonspeakers and had conversations with them, with me speaking and them spelling out their responses with no one touching them or helping them to move their arms. I eventually started volunteering at a therapy center nearby, teaching creative writing to nonspeakers. I currently teach three sessions per week—one in person and two virtual—and it’s humbling and astonishing, watching as my students point to letter after letter, all the thoughts they’ve been editing in their heads for so long coming out in polished, complete, gorgeous sentences and paragraphs.

With the caveats that Happiness Falls is a work of fiction and that I’m not a researcher or expert myself, I tried my best to have the novel reflect current research and debates. The most recent studies I’ve seen deal with the concern (discussed in the novel) that nonspeakers are somehow being cued to move their arms to specific letters on the letterboard: a peer-reviewed eye-tracking study out of the University of Virginia by Professor Vikram Jaswal (which I actually mention in my novel) shows that spellers are authoring their own message, and a brain-wave-pattern study by Alexandra Woolgar, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, to study language comprehension in nonspeakers.

JC: Your title references in part the “happiness quotient.” Mia’s missing father had been studying this concept, she discovers in a notebook found at the park where he disappeared. She is able to study this and the HQ files she finds in his backup hard drive, password protected, which signals her they are important. How did the title evolve?

AK: I’ve been fascinated by theories about happiness for as long as I can remember, and many of Mia’s father’s musings are based on my own scribblings on the topic throughout the years. The first time I heard about the so-called “lottery-winner happiness study,” I recalled my friends in Korea telling me how lucky I was to be moving to America and my parents comparing our family visa to winning the lottery. The disconnect between what I was told I should feel and what I did feel when we immigrated to the US—utter joy versus misery—is something I puzzled over in college as a philosophy major, researching and writing about theories of objective versus subjective happiness.

When I started working on this novel, one of the first things I did was to build spreadsheets in an attempt to reduce my ideas about happiness into concrete numbers. (I became a management consultant after I left the law and I love building spreadsheets.) After fiddling around with various hypotheticals, I arrived at a formula involving division, with the quotient representing the predicted happiness level. That’s when I thought, Happiness Quotient, which I thought was the perfect title—I love quirky things, and words with Q in them are inherently quirky, I think—but sadly, no one else particularly liked it. We went through so many iterations of Happiness xyz; my favorite for a while was Variations on a Theme of Happiness. Finally, my UK editor (Angus Cargill at Faber) said, “Have we thought about Happiness Falls”? And everyone kind of fell in love with it, probably all for different reasons (because falls has so many different meanings within the context of this story).

JC: Mia’s father’s study on the “happiness quotient” includes his experiments on his own family re: the question, “Is it possible to manipulate happiness levels, to change your (or your family’s) mindset to maximize happiness and minimize sadness?” Mia’s reaction is complicated, and revealing. How does this HQ concept underpin the novel?

AK: A key aspect of Mia’s father’s HQ concept is that your happiness is relative to your baseline—not based solely on the experience itself, but on the comparison of that experience to your expectations based on your “normal.” As we discussed above, Mia is very sensitive to the concept of normality to begin with, so it made sense that she would evaluate the dramatic ups and downs of the events in the story against this framework (and, conversely, evaluate the HQ framework against what’s happening to her family).

Of course, Mia is not just a character, but the narrator, one who’s writing the story after having gone through these events and after having digested her dad’s HQ writings. So there are aspects of her storytelling itself that incorporate this concept. Her father talks about preparing your loved ones for coming bad news by giving out warnings that get worse over time, little by little. She does this for the readers throughout the story, telling them when something she did will end up making things worse or when something bad is about to happen.

JC: One of the most powerful and distressing elements of Happiness Falls is the attitude Detective Janus and other law enforcement officers investigating this missing persons case have toward Eugene, and their subsequent actions. This lack of understanding and empathy toward a nonspeaking teenager makes Mia’s own investigation central to finding the truth. What research and crafting was required to create this layer of your story?

AK: This is one of the elements that came directly from the stories I was hearing from my friends with autistic children. As their kids were getting older, going through puberty and getting taller and stronger, they were having to contend with strangers misunderstanding their sensory overloads, meltdowns, and loud or physical repetitive behaviors, and calling the police or Child Protective Services, with everything escalating into out-of-control chaos. For many people I know, this is a constant fear.

On the law enforcement and judicial aspects, I’d had some experience based on handling pro bono criminal cases as a lawyer and working at the DC Public Defender Service and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I also spoke to lawyers, police officers, and advocates with experience dealing with similar situations—teenagers with disabilities, particularly nonspeakers, who get thrust into the criminal juvenile system. It’s a rapidly changing and growing area, which made it challenging but also fascinating; for example, Virginia passed a statute establishing a new autism defense when I was in the middle of writing the story, steering it in a totally different direction.

JC: What are you working on next?

AK: I’m at that stage of my work when I’m in love with the idea—kind of like the beginning of a romance, when it’s more of a crush and you’re not quite sure how it’s going to develop—so I’ve decided to let it be for a while without talking about it for now. I have a footnote about this in Happiness Falls, how giving voice to an idea triggers you to evaluate it, thereby exposing the flaws that the initial excitement blocked. I’m not ready to see the flaws in the idea quite yet, so I’m holding it in like a delicious secret even though I’m so excited about it and dying to talk about it.

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Happiness Falls by Angie Kim is available from Hogarth Press.

Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, begins with her stressed-out narrator Daphne grabbing her toddler from day care and taking off from her job at the Al-Ihsan Institute in Berkeley. She drives to the mobile home her late grandparents left her in Alta Vista in the high desert of Northern California, where she encounters a neighbor aligned with the radical right State of Jefferson movement and a sympathetic older woman who has spent time in Turkey. Meanwhile, Daphne’s husband is in immigrant limbo at his mother’s house in Istanbul after being tricked into giving up his green card. Based on this multi-textured and sparkling debut, Kiesling was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree.

Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, also tracks a single narrator on a journey. When we first meet Bunny Glenn she is a bored, boy-crazy fifteen year old “diplomat brat” living in Baku, on the oil-rich Caspian Sea, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her travels as she comes of age and becomes an aspirational worker in the oil industry carry her around the globe, ultimately back to Baku. Kiesling offers richly detailed scenes set in Athens, Baku, Beamont, Houston, Yerevan, and other spots where oil is central, and captures the varying levels of luxury during plane flights over the years.

How much research went into these elements of the novel? I ask Kiesling. Did she live in any of these locations? “I am a foreign service brat, like Bunny, and my family had postings in Athens and Yerevan, among other places not explored in the book,” she responds. “So there was a lot of travel and a lot of flying, and those experiences definitely fed the book. I traveled to Baku last year before I began the revision process. My father is originally from Houston and I grew up hearing about it, but had spent almost no time there at all, so I likewise traveled to Houston and the Golden Triangle area around Beaumont last year to solidify my descriptions.”

Kiesling’s gift for setting brings solidity to her novel as she explores the limits of willful innocence about the damage being down to the land, the air, the sea—the Earth—by extractive industries that put profit above all else. Our email conversation took place in West Coast time shortly before her book launched.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life, work, and the writing and launch of your second novel been affected by these recent years of pandemic and turmoil?

Lydia Kiesling: The writing was very affected by the pandemic–it basically ground to a halt. I spent months stewing about the very nascent draft of the book while juggling my small kids and paid freelance work. I finally ended up finishing the book in a series of trips to rustic rental cabins every few months, when I would work in two- or three-day bursts. I don’t want to speak to soon, because Covid is still with us, but I feel I was fortunate in the timing, because by the time I had sold the book I was able to travel for a bit of research before starting the editing process, and (knock wood), I’m able to travel for events now. But anything could happen!

JC: I’m curious about the origins of Mobility. When did you begin to conceive of this new novel, and what triggered the interest? What models, if any, were on your mind as you developed this narrative? Why this title?

LK: I started writing it in 2017, i.e., spent two out of 365 days of that year typing it, and noodling around with ideas about setting and character. Essentially it began as a story about a callow teenager living in a country that is unfamiliar to her, and it grew from there. In the beginning I didn’t really know where I was going, but as the story began to take on more momentum I was very influenced by Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, mostly because it is a work of somewhat didactic but still entertaining fiction, and Madame Bovary, because for me it renders questions about a character’s “likeability” somewhat irrelevant, and also uses one woman’s story to talk about a lot of other different things. Later in the process I read Shirley Hazzard and Annie Ernaux, and they gave me a kind of permission to follow my interests in depicting women’s lives against a broad stage. The title is thanks to my brilliant agent, Claudia Ballard. To me it felt perfect, from its evocation of ExxonMobil, to its class and professional associations, to the way it describes both the movement of fossil fuels, and the movement fossil fuels can facilitate (at costs that are now very evident). Bunny, the protagonist, experiences many forms of mobility in the novel.

JC: Why choose as your narrator Bunny Glenn, who we meet in 1998 when she is fifteen, living in Baku on the Caspian in the newly independent Azerbaijan, where she is the daughter of American foreign service public information officer and a former stewardess? What advantage is there to giving us a sometimes naïve, sometimes foolish narrator who is trying to parse the world around her as she is shaped by it? Did you consider multiple narrators? Including one more experienced “expert” narrator?

LK: I was influenced by Upton Sinclair’s use of a teenage boy named Bunny in Oil! as a vehicle for observation and exposition for his readers. His novel is preachy, but it works because Bunny was a reasonable enough character to follow around learning beside. Oil! the novel was very concerned with the worker’s struggle and class politics, and Bunny was very useful for carrying Sinclair’s ideas. My Bunny performs a similar function, so her naiveté and foolishness are important for her to be effective in that capacity, although it’s a tightrope walk since I’m aware some readers may throw the book down in impatience with her—even if ultimately her foolishness is important not just is as a device but as a theme of the novel. I also think that teenage girls are ideal, possibly underutilized devices for exposition in fiction, because they are often so observant, perceptive to a painful and perhaps paranoid degree, and broadly underestimated.

JC: By 2010 Bunny is living in Beaumont, Texas, working for an oil company. In the years to come, she becomes a mid-level executive for Turnbridge Oil Company and then Turnbridge Energy Solutions, a family owned business, and participates in “women in energy” gatherings spanning the globe. In the course of her career, she learns more about the history and complexity of the oil business, as do readers. That’s an intriguing element of the novel; at a certain point there’s an “aha” moment about the role of the oil business in the history of the last century, and our lives. Intentionally crafted in that manner, I assume?

LK: I wanted to write an oil novel, because oil has been fundamental to human history in what I hope will not turn out to be a final, decisive way, but will be if we do not change course. The novel is very much built around the inexorable and unconscionable logic of extractive practices generally and oil companies specifically.

JC: How did the novel’s structure, with multiple scenes embedded in three sections—Upstream (1998/$13.45/$8.03), Midstream (and Downstream (2015/$312.52/$178.12)—evolve? How far along in the writing process did you settle on it? (And what do the prices mean—high and low prices of oil that year?)

LK: The prices are the high and low of US crude oil that year. It’s a bit of a cute device (and one I later learned the writer Erika Bolstad also used for her great memoir, Windfall, which is about the North Dakota oil boom among other things), but it was actually helpful to me to organize the events of the book, since oil prices do have a significant role in other aspects of the economy, both as a driver of events and as barometer of events. I wanted to gesture at the wild economic swings that have characterized the time period described in the book. I learned while researching that the Oil complex has so many incredible metaphors and imagery built into it. I was struck by the idea of Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream as a way to think about cause and effect but also that aforementioned inexorable logic of oil and how it shapes our world.

JC: What sort of research was involved in tracking the trajectory of the oil industry from 1998, when the dissolution of the USSR led to a “gold rush,” into the future, in 2052?

LK: The oil rush in places like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan as the Soviet Union was dissolving (described very well in Steve LeVine’s book The Oil and the Glory) also led to a rush for journalists. There were a lot of somewhat breathless accounts of Baku from the mid-1990s, because it was such a boom that there was plenty of colorful material for foreign journalists, who flooded the region at the time. I also read a lot of memoirs, often self-published, by “Oil Men”—engineers and geologists and executives. These were incredibly illuminating. I also researched particular companies and relied a lot on the work of journalists who have covered this industry for decades.

JC: You write of “Mr. Five Percent” (Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian oil engineer who brokered the merger of the Royal Dutch oil company and Shell and getting them the rights for the oil in Iraq), and of a man who participated in the “Contract of the Century,” after the Soviet Union collapsed, as well as Frank Turnbridge, the founder of the company where Bunny works. Which of these are “real” characters, or based on real characters?

LK: Calouste Gulbenkian was real, and a very important figure in the oil history of the region. Many of the Baku characters were sort of composite characters inspired by real people. That part was a bit tricky; I wanted the freedom of fiction, but it’s also the fairly recent past. I wrestled with the desire for accurate depictions and the fact that some of the people were not necessarily public figures even if I read about them in books. So there was some stitching together and biographical tweaking. One notable exception is Gina Haspell, who makes a cameo in the book and was in fact in Baku at that time (although the brief moment she appears in the book is of course imagined). Frank Turnbridge is likewise a figure of my imagination, although inspired by some real oil men.

JC: You have several journalists in the novel. There’s Charlie, who is reporting for The Inter-Caucasian Times (aka The Intercock), when Bunny meets him as a teen in 1998 in Baku (he tells her, “There’s basically never been a better opportunity for graft in the history of the world than right here, right now”), and whom she reencounters years later. And Sofie, the Swedish investigative journalist who is Bunny’s brother’s partner. They offer a counternarrative to the oil company founders, executives and staffers in Mobility. How did you create this alternative angle?

LK: Sofie was very important to me as someone who is completely unlike Bunny, i.e., someone who seeks out information rather than putting her head in the sand. It was important to me that she be a kind of foil to Bunny, but one that Bunny finds so compelling and attractive she ends up *almost* listening to her, or at least envying her. There’s a corollary in Oil! again, because in that novel the boy Bunny is very influenced by an older oilworker named Paul, who is very much the noble figure of the novel. Having that alternate view and sort of teacher was important. Charlie the journalist likewise provides a more accurate view of the realities of our political and economic systems, but is himself a flawed man.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

LK: Right now I’m taking a break, but I’m sort of marinating the ideas for a new book, one that will involve no research at all, ideally! I’d like to do a story that’s close to home—a neighborhood story about people who live in close proximity to one another, and see where it goes.

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Mobility by Lydia Kiesling is available from Crooked Media Reads.

Jimin Han’s The Apology features a straight-talking 105-year-old narrator and her centenarian siblings who travel to Chicago from Seoul for a wedding that shouldn’t happen because it uncovers a family connection long held secret. It’s a novel about how generations and siblings are separated by the war in Korea, and the experience of immigration to the U.S. Did she draw upon her own family background to build this story? “Separation is a theme that preoccupies me, absolutely,” she says. “My parents’ accounts of being torn from their families during the Korean War as children were talked about so often that I felt this kind of particular disaster was always an imminent possibility for me too. Not knowing is the part that is most painful for them.” Our email conversation took place in East Coast/West Coast time zones.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have the past years of pandemic and tumult been for your writing, your life? How have the writing and publishing and launch of The Apology been affected?

Jimin Han: My husband and I have some health issues so while pandemic precautions have eased we still mask indoors. I hate that it’s continuing like this for us and so many others. When lockdown started I had no idea how much our lives would change. I’m home a lot more, feel more isolated. Focusing on the limitations of the body were top of mind when I was revising The Apology. The pandemic made it easier for me to think about Jeonga’s circumstances and how frustrated she might feel as a centenarian. Overall, for me now in my life, there’s more of an urgency to getting books written—some of it because of the pandemic and facing my own mortality after my mother’s death and the death of so many in recent years. My friend Brian Rogers died of brain cancer in 2021. He had so many books he wanted to write. I think about him a lot. In terms of promoting The Apology, the publishing team at Little, Brown has been very protective of me. Covid protocols are discussed with venues and they make sure I’m comfortable wherever I am. Masking makes it possible for me to promote the book relatively uninterrupted.

JC: Your opening lines grab us: “Fleeing in a panic is not recommended. A week ago, my last day alive, I was at my grandson’s house in Chicago, America.” Why did you decide to open this novel with notice of the narrator’s death? And draw us at once into the ghostly realm as she narrates from the afterlife?

JH: In general I like to ease into things, whatever it is—which you wouldn’t know from both my novels. Hah! The credit for the beginning of the novel goes to my editor. She asked me to reconsider the original first chapter which began with Jeonga ruminating on epilogues, but after we talked I knew she was right. We understand Jeonga’s flaws and strengths much sooner with this change. Her enthusiasm for the new pages I submitted made me feel more confident about moving ahead with it and now I can’t imagine the book beginning any other way.

JC: Your narrator, Jeonga, is 105 years old when she leaves Seoul to travel to the U.S. to help resolve a complicated situation involving a family secret. Do you have a real-life model for Jeonga? How did you create her voice?

JH: With all that my parents talked about, there were other people and events about which they said very little. That fanned the flames of curiosity too. A memory of watching my grand aunt cry at her son’s gravesite has stayed with me all these years. My father said hardly anything about her but her clothes and her composure during that short encounter with her made me wonder about her and her life decades later. She would be 105 if she were still alive. What isn’t said takes up space inside a narrative too. It’s what invites me to a page or blank screen, the space to fill in with my own imagination. In terms of her voice, I guess I remember my own grandmother’s voice—she was my main caregiver until I was four years old—and have always found people in my grandmother’s generation fascinating. They lived through so much. I always asked my mother and aunt to tell me more about their mother.

JC: Jeonga has three sisters. Mina the oldest (110), Aera (108), the one who keeps track of “news about viruses and illnesses and scientific studies” and Seona, who she loved most and still misses (Seona eloped 89 years before; her husband and son came south during the Korean War, but she stayed in the north with her daughter). All three have strong dramatic roles in this novel. How did you develop their characters?

JH: Dialogue isn’t usually what I start with when I write but with these women, their chatter came first. They had so much to say so I wrote down their conversations like a script in early drafts. The rest of the details came easily after that about the places they were in and their gestures because it was all referenced in their conversations. I had so much material I had to cut a lot of pages. It was very necessary, but it was really hard to do because I wanted them to each be able to show who they were.

JC: How did you work out the details of Jeonga’s daily life as a centenarian—her clothes, her diet, her longtime aide Chohui, her emotional state?

JH: I confirmed some details about where someone like Jeonga might live and how she might have a young aide from my cousin who grew up in Seoul and who returns to visit her parents often, and I was in South Korea twice in 2016. But a lot of Jeonga’s very privileged life is drawn from my visit back when I was eighteen and spent the summer in South Korea. Since my mother didn’t travel with me, it was an odd experience to have a group of her childhood friends who were financially well off swoop in and take me to their luxurious homes and fancy restaurants. They were very kind to me but I was such a child to them and there was a language barrier though I understood more than they thought. As for humor, my mother and her sisters had a dry sense of humor that I hope comes through in the novel. One of the phrases that my uncle told me my aunt would say was never spit when you’re lying down looking up at the ceiling. She’d say this if she heard anyone criticizing another person. I think as writers we are a sponge for things like that, but I have to work hard to remember them. I’m constantly recording on my phone or trying to write phrases down in my notes app.

JC: The sibling rivalry in The Apology revolves around competing for status, bragging about their children (Jeonga’s only son died young), struggling to maintain a pecking order. How are the family ties maintained despite this ritualistic in-fighting?

JH: Such a great question. In my mind, the sisters know how far they can push each other. And I think Seona’s absence has upset the balance so the three of them struggle now without her. Their history together is key. Their love of their parents and the childhood they shared are more important than their insecurities? I’ve seen people of all ages suddenly appear to be very young when they’re with their siblings or parents, but particularly siblings.

JC: Several plot twists reveal the secret Jeonga is keeping, beginning with the letter from Seona’s granddaughter Joyce, who is living in Chicago with a seriously ill son Jordan and needs financial help. This letter initiates the trip to Chicago by the sisters that leads to Jeonga’s death. Was it always part of your plot? How did you create it?

JH: It’s all about character, right? Jeonga is an avid reader of books and isn’t on KakaoTalk or any form of social media. I thought a letter had to be the only way she could be reached by Joyce in the United States. There’s the language barrier too. I worried at first that it was too much of a device—a letter—but then I thought the “how” is more important than the “what” that gets Jeonga’s quest started. I didn’t have to invent something new, the letter was right there—a way we still communicate and even more meaningful in some ways now that we’re all emailing and texting each other.

JC: Most of the book is narrated from the afterlife in which Jeonga is taught by various ancestors, including Seona, to interact with the living in hopes of righting a wrong for which she feels responsible. How did you research and construct this section of the novel?

JH: I’ve always been fascinated by shamanism in Korea and have done some research on it. Shamans are usually women. Also I was interested because my father always said we weren’t religious but then he and my mother had strong ideas about death in particular. I only discovered this by accident. My mother saw my driver’s license once and got upset that I’d agreed to be an organ donor. So we had a talk about all these ideas she had about the afterlife. And I realized there had been clues throughout my life about my mother’s beliefs. I’d considered them superstitions but they were more than that. They were more seamlessly part of how she saw life and death. I put some of those into the novel, and after her death I found myself drawn to KDramas and Korean movies about death to learn more about what she might have believed. It was particularly interesting to me to see which ones were popular in South Korea. Korean society is rather diverse in terms of religion so I thought there might be common threads in what people found moving. Hi Bye, Mama is a KDrama and the movies Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds and Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days were three that were notable, but I allowed myself the freedom to veer off and shape the narrative toward Jeonga’s hopes and fears.

JC: What are you working on next?

JH: I’ve had some enthusiastic support from my agent and my editor on a new manuscript. It’s very new and will take a while to develop, but it makes me hopeful. Facing a blank screen is always terrifying.

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The Apology by Jimin Han is available from Little, Brown and Company.

Cristina Garcia’s revelatory first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, a finalist for the 1992 National Book award, revolved around the del Pino family, its matriarch Celia, her children and grandchildren as they negotiate disagreements, dislocations, and reconnections in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.

With Vanishing Maps, her eighth novel, Garcia revisits the del Pino family twenty years later. Her scope has expanded to cover Miami, Los Angeles, Moscow, Prague, and Berlin, in addition to Cuba and New York, as family members reunite and reminisce. Time passing means shifts in perspective—regrets, painful memories, renewed love connections—all of which Garcia manages with great grace and wit.

What drew her back to this cast of characters? I asked the author/playwright. “My interest was ignited when I began adapting Dreaming in Cuban for the stage, at the behest of a young New York City director/producer named Adrian Alea,” she explains. “After a quarter-century, I reread the novel several times and, you might say, I got reacquainted with my own characters. Then I had the good fortune of having a talented group of actors literally bring these characters to life before my eyes. Their interpretations amplified my own understandings of the del Pino family. Central Works Theater Company in Berkeley did a lovely production of Dreaming in Cuban just last summer, directed by Gary Graves.”

I was enchanted by the transformation from novel to play when I attended a performance of Dreaming in Cuban one Sunday evening in July 2022 in a carefully distanced, masked small theater in Berkeley. Garcia distills the stories of three generations of women divided by La Revelución into a potent, at times poignant dreamscape.

Scenes with matriarch Celia del Pino, a stern and unflinching revolutionary, and her daughter Lourdes, an anti-communist exile who runs the “Yankee Doodle Bakery” in Brooklyn, are particularly powerful in delineating the conflict and heartbreak within this divided family. The ghost of Celia’s late husband Jorge appears from time to time, as if making amends. Celia teaches her eleven-year-old grandson Ivanito Russian and makes plans for his education in Moscow while his mother Felicia fades away in depression. Celia’s rebellious granddaughter Pilar, Lourdes’ daughter, maintains a spiritual connection with her abuela—and with her homeland—as she comes of age as an artist.

Vanishing Maps is a remarkable follow-up. It’s a haunting novel with freshly envisioned characters, including a fourth generation, whose lives, shaped by the past, offer resonant commentary on the present. Garcia tells me she wrote virtually all of Vanishing Maps under lockdown—“as the world as we knew it was morphing into a new, more frightening reality.”

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Jane Ciabattari: In Dreaming in Cuban, you traced the reverberations of the 1959 revolution on each character, from Celia, the most ardent follower of El Líder to Celia’s daughter Lourdes, among the most anti-communist exiles. As the decades passed, and Castro died, new generations emerged. “Everyday Cuba fades a little more inside me and it’s only my imagination where our history should be,” you write. How did the revolution leave its mark on the twenty-first century?

Cristina Garcia: I think the Cuban Revolution is one of those historical watersheds around which people continue to battle fiercely. On the one hand, millions of people were dispossessed and subjugated to a brutal dictatorship that continues to this day. Others would argue that Cuba has served as a beacon to small nations struggling against the political and economic dominance of larger, more exploitive countries. But no matter one’s perspective, Cuba’s interdependence with global events is undeniable (note the effects of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the island). As a country always at the crossroads—and in the crosshairs—of history, Cuba continues to receive a disproportionate share of the world’s attention.

JC: Vanishing Maps is an intriguing title. How did it emerge? Was it your first choice?

CG: It seemed to me that the borders and alliances I knew as a child (I belonged to a geography club in fourth grade) and analyzed as an international relations graduate student, had irrevocably changed. When I came across these words—No border holds forever—in Günter Grass’s novel, Too Far Afield, I knew I was on the right track. The phrase also serves as my novel’s epigraph.

JC: I’m wondering how you settled on the characters whose stories unfold in Vanishing Maps. Celia del Pino in Havana and her five grandchildren are scattered around the globe—in Los Angeles, Miami, Moscow, and in Berlin (her one-time lover Gustavo, who is in touch after sixty-six years, is in Granada).

By juxtaposing these cities, you illuminate their histories—places with long-ago roots in Spain and the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century divisions between East (the USSR) and West (the U.S. and allies), followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. the shifting allegiances among Havana and Miami Cubans. What was your process in drawing these global narrative lines?

CG: I was keenly interested in exploring the fallout from these myriad historical upheavals on the lives of the principal characters from Dreaming in Cuban. Not one of them is unaffected by the radically changing world around them. The maps they once relied upon—both internal and external—are indeed vanishing to unrecognizable degrees. And their divergent, diasporic journeys speak to the complexities of their Cuban and multiply hyphenated identities. How do they survive? Reinvent themselves? Find new moorings and allegiances? Vanishing Maps attempts to explore these issues through the struggles, mishaps, and comedies of four generations of the del Pino family.

JC: Ivanito Villaverde, in Berlin, works as a translator by day, and by night transforms into La Ivanita, a drag diva in the Berlin night club scene (he sometimes embodies the iconic La Lupe). From boyhood Ivanito has been an otherworldly creature. In Vanishing Maps we see him develop a halo that tightens at times; then he begins to see his late mother Felicia in increasingly disturbing visions. How do you think of this element of the novel, which in some ways echoes passages from Dreaming in Cuban?

CG: I’ve always invited the otherworldly into my works—elements we can only dimly perceive, or explain. There’s just too much that’s inexplicable, porous, and logic-defying for us to pretend otherwise. What I’m most interested in is trafficking in the borders between worlds, transgressing the purportedly fixed boundaries between life and death, between your history and mine, between competing ideas about time. Ultimately, I’m trying to acknowledge, often baroquely, that everything we’ve experienced and inherited continues to live inside us.

JC: Ivanito’s artist cousin Pilar, and her son Azul, Celia’s great grandchild, come to visit him in Berlin. “It was as if his younger self were rising inside him like a watchful shadow, observing them both,” you write. “Ivanito sensed their histories converging, past and present melding into a dangerous, borderless whole.” Azul begins to see Ivanito’s ghostly mother, and Ivanito fears she has come to take him away. This element of the novel draws out Ivanito’s protective side, which, combined with his own fears and traumatic memories, brings a crisis. How did you set about ordering the scenes that draw upon family secrets, the layers of trauma evident within the generations, and tracing them back to Cuba?

CG: This is a variation of my response to your previous question. That the answers aren’t simple, and we may never know the full extent of their contours. But the (fictional) fact is that Ivanito, his dead mother, and his six-year-old nephew are inextricably linked. This tidal pull of family is inexorable whether people—or one’s characters—choose to ignore it. You can’t escape your history but there are certainly countless ways to deal with it. Those choices and negotiations and attempted escapes are, fundamentally, what my novels are about.

JC: Also visiting Berlin are Ivanito’s twin sisters Luz and Milagro, and two unexpected relatives, newly reunited twins Irina, who was raised in Moscow and Tereza, who grew up in East Berlin. The two had been separated at birth in Prague and reunited only months earlier at a lesbian tango party in Berlin. They’re still trying to unravel the mystery of their birth, which includes a Cuban father—Ivanito’s uncle. How unusual is it for such unexpected family connections to occur in communities of exiles and immigrants?

CG: There are so many fixed ideas about what Cubans are, and aren’t, on both sides of the Straits of Florida—and beyond—that are woefully out-of-date. Vanishing Maps tackles, in its own sinuous ways, the realities of a growing and far-flung Cuban diaspora—and the dislocations (and opportunities) that ensue when merged with other seismic historical events: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the persistence of the Cuban Revolution. These events continue to alter identity, belonging, and allegiances in profound ways. Under the circumstances, such an unexpected family connection might be unusual but it wouldn’t be unheard of. In my novels, Vanishing Maps included, the personal and the political are one.

JC: Seven photographs from Pilar’s past serve as interludes in the novel, offering glimpses of her at age two with her mother in 1961 (“It’s the moment we leave Cuba”), with Ivanito at CBGB’s in 1984, “stoned out of our minds,” and finally with the newborn Azul in 1993. How did you pick Pilar’s idiosyncratic “family album?”

CG: I wanted to have intermittent sections in Vanishing Maps that would be analogous to Celia’s letters in Dreaming in Cuban—providing context and family history in a distilled, poetic fashion. It seemed natural that Pilar Puente, who inherited her grandmother’s letters, would carry on this tradition in a visual format, as she’s an artist.

JC: What are you working on next? Another novel? Another play? Both?

CG: I’m working on a theater adaptation of Carolina De Robertis’s extraordinary novel, The President and the Frog, which I recommend to everyone. I also have another play, The Palacios Sisters, opening at the Gala Theater in Washington D.C. early next year. It’s an adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters set in 1980s Miami. Very wild! As for another novel, I’m not quite sure. I’ve been working on one but also toying with the idea of not writing, of indulging my curiosity in new ways.

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Vanishing Maps by Cristina Garcia is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Ruth Madievsky’s first novel begins as a tightrope walk across a neon-lit LA, with an unnamed teenage narrator in thrall to her older sister Debbie, struggling to unbind from her psychotic mother, living in a desultory relationship with a man who pays the rent, hanging out at a dive bar where she day drinks and experiments with the drug of the day. After a violent break from Debbie, she tries rehab, finds work in an ER, falls in love with a psychic woman, who travels with her to their homeland of Moldova, and begins to see a future unspool.

The narrative voice—raw, outrageous, iconoclastic, often hilarious—spins this novel into place, transforming the harsh realities of the narrator’s troubles into a sort of radiance, making All-Night Pharmacy a memorable debut. In our conversation, I learned about the author’s influences and how this novel emerged after years of hard work and a hectic multitasking life.

“I was working as a clinical pharmacist at a hospital in Boston when the pandemic hit, taking care of patients with cancer and with HIV,” she told me. “Sometimes I also covered whichever unit had been designated the COVID-19 floor. It was a wild time; our COVID-19 treatments were changing constantly, and I was learning something new every day. It was terrifying and deeply rewarding. My agent [Mina Hamedi at Janklow and Nesbit] offered to represent me in March 2020, the week that everything shut down. What a hopeful thing in such a chaotic time: two strangers agreeing to make art together.”

She moved back to Los Angeles and started working outpatient as a primary care and HIV pharmacist. “We went on submission with All-Night Pharmacy while I was training at the new job, which turned out to be a great distraction from checking my email every two minutes. Between 2020 and now, I also got married and had a baby. Giving birth three months before your debut novel publishes… extremely chaotic! I’m bringing my baby on tour and look forward to leaking milk across America’s indie bookstores.” Our conversation by email was based on the West Coast.

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Jane Ciabattari: What inspired All-Night Pharmacy, your first novel, which revolves around two sisters in a destructive relationship? (As you put it in your opening line from your eighteen-year-old narrator, “Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus.”)

Ruth Madievsky: Neon signs, Los Angeles dirtbaggery, the opioid epidemic, intergenerational trauma, toxic Russian talk shows, the legacy of the Holocaust, absurd family stories in the face of a destroyed archive, fraught sisterhood, addiction and recovery, urban loneliness and gentrification, who has the privilege of being a mess and who doesn’t, queer-coming-of-age, and Jewish mysticism.

JC: How did the novel evolve, adapted from short stories? (And how did T.C. Boyle, who you studied with at USC. influence those early stories?)

RM: I never thought I could pull off writing a novel. Sixty- to one-hundred-thousand words in service of a cohesive plot? Hard pass. While I was in pharmacy school, T.C. Boyle would come to USC’s campus once a semester to meet with Creative Writing Ph.D. students by appointment. I was very much not in the Ph.D. program…my classes were on another campus entirely. But I attended the program’s readings so often that I think the administration assumed I was involved? Or they could smell the desperate stench of FOMO on me and threw me a bone?

Either way, I met with T.C. Boyle several times, and he was the first person to see the linked stories that became All-Night Pharmacy. He has a light touch when it comes to feedback. Mostly we talked about what my stories were doing, and he encouraged me to find an agent and keep going. That was 2014-2016, I believe. I pretty much only wrote new stories in the All-Night Pharmacy universe when T.C. Boyle came to town.

In 2019, a literary agent reached out after reading some of those published stories online. I called my manuscript a novel-in-stories to make it sound more commercial (they’ll never see through that one!). Five years of work had amounted to forty-eight double-spaced pages. The agent, who I ultimately didn’t end up signing with, suggested I rework the book as a novel using some of the themes that linked the stories together as narrative throughlines.

I didn’t have a lot of faith in my ability to pull it off, but I decided to try. I forced myself to write 500 words a day for a month, which I emailed to my writer friend, Billy O’Neill. Exchanging pages every day was the only way I could get out of my own head, and it’s how the first draft got written.

JC: Did your writing of poetry help shape this novel?

RM: Definitely. It was mostly a blessing, and occasionally a curse. I bled over every word. Early drafts paid too much attention to the language and not enough to the plot and characters. Why make difficult craft decisions when you could string a bunch of mic drop moments together instead? With a poem, anything—narrative, structure, mood—can be abandoned in pursuit of beauty. That’s how I was used to writing. Revising the novel involved cutting a ton of lines that were basically a flex and weren’t serving the book. I actually have a Craft of Writing essay coming out in Lit Hub that elegizes my departed bangers. Every word that made its way into the final draft fought tooth and nail to be there. 

JC: Which writers were you reading while working on All-Night Pharmacy? 

RM: *Takes a deep breath* Jean Kyoung Frazier, Jean Chen Ho, Kyle Lucia Wu, Kimberly King Parsons, Kristen Arnett, Melissa Broder, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, Ilya Kaminsky, Brandon Taylor, Natalie Diaz, Andre Aciman, Rufi Thorpe, Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Torrey Peters, Mohsin Hamid, and Miriam Toews—to name a few!

JC: The narrator’s mother’s “kaleidoscope of diagnoses” possibly include major depression with psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Her grandmother is a “hard woman” who immigrated from Saint Petersburg in her twenties, after her father was murdered as an enemy of the state. Her great-uncles, great-aunts and cousins had perished in Nazi death camps decades earlier. How is the narrator shaped by this family history?

RM: I was interested in the ways that historical trauma manifests in those who are generations removed. Our narrator’s mother, who was born in America, is deeply paranoid that her family’s experiences under Soviet terror will be repeated. The narrator hasn’t had her life threatened by the state, but she gets into perilous situations constantly. She knows her relationship with her sister is toxic, but she’s unwilling or unable to cut ties. She’s haunted by an emergency room patient complaining of Shoah grief and gets drawn into a psychosexual relationship with an alleged psychic from the former Soviet Union. All of that is connected to the legacy of her family’s experiences under state-sanctioned antisemitism. But how exactly these things are connected can’t be distilled into a concise explanation. Intergenerational trauma is much too slippery for that. 

JC: What research was involved in writing the scenes set in East Hollywood bars like Salvation and tracing the drug scene and sobriety networks in Los Angeles?

RM: I’ve lived in Los Angeles for most of my life, from the time my family immigrated from Moldova in 1993 until I moved to Boston for a few years in 2018. I’ve done my time vibing with fellow misfits in hazy bars. LA is such a beautifully weird place. It’s equally likely that the screenwriter you meet at your friend-of-a-friend’s birthday drinks has a deal with Netflix or is collaborating on an erotic Harry Potter musical with his dentist.

My pharmacy school education gave me a lot of esoteric knowledge about the legal requirements of dispensing opioids and benzodiazepines and how my narrator could scam the system. And, without getting into too much detail, I can say that my experiences as a clinical pharmacist helped me intimately understand how substance dependence looks and feels and how it’s treated. I wasn’t comfortable writing about marginalizing experiences outside of my own or those of people I was in community with. 

JC: Did you travel to Moldova, your birthplace, or recall scenes from previous travels to write about the narrator’s journey there with her psychic girlfriend Sasha?

RM: In July 2019, I visited Moldova with my parents for the first time since immigrating when I was two. I had no memory of my birthplace, so I was essentially experiencing it for the first time. Itinerary-wise, my trip was very similar to the narrator’s. I visited the Jewish cemetery in Kishinev, which was as grim and run-down as I described in the novel. I saw the abandoned banquet hall where my parents got married, the hospital where I was born, and my parents’ former schools and apartments, including the one where we lived right before immigrating. I visited Saint Petersburg as well, and while we were there, the queer activist Yelena Grigoryeva was murdered, just as I described in the novel.

I took that trip a few months before I started reworking what was then a linked story collection into the novel that became All-Night Pharmacy. I have no idea what this novel would have become, if it would have existed at all, had I not taken that trip. And between the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine, I don’t know when I’ll be able to visit the region again.

JC: Your narrator works night shifts in an emergency room at her therapist’s suggestion. Was your work as an HIV and primary care pharmacist useful in writing the ER scenes? Is this where your title comes from?

RM: Working as a hospital pharmacist for several years was totally instructive for writing the novel. Though I didn’t take care of ER patients on a daily basis, I did respond to code blues (patients in cardiac or respiratory arrest), many of whom were in the ER. So I had a sense of how ERs function and how the narrator could lose and find herself in the work.

As for the title, the image of an all-night pharmacy, with a neon open 24 hours sign set against a dark LA sky, felt fitting for a novel where our narrator is always out too late in places she shouldn’t be with people who don’t have her best interests in mind. The narrator, with her prescription drug scams, is an all-night pharmacy herself. And recently, the writer Maria Kuznetsova observed in an interview that my book is a sisterhood story, a queer-coming-of-age story, an immigration story, an addiction-and-recovery story, and a detective story rolled into one—like an all-night pharmacy, there’s all kinds of shit in there.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

RM: I have a second poetry collection that’s basically done and which I hope to start shopping around soon. I’m working on some personal essays and interviews with authors I admire. I haven’t figured out my next book-length project yet. Hopefully another novel! I need a new voice to grab me by the throat. It’s the only way.

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All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky is available from Catapult.

Ana Menéndez’s dazzling new novel-in-stories expands upon her revelatory chronicles of Cubans and Cuban-Americans that started with her first story collection, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (with its unforgettable opening line, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd.”). The Apartment is an evocative, haunting narrative weaving in multiple voices over a span of decades (even centuries, including the opening pages) and including immigrants from points around the globe. All are connected through an art deco building in South Miami Beach.

Our conversation tilted toward influences (John Cheever, Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo) and subtleties of process, creating a master class on the page. Menéndez’s career as a fiction writer, as well as her wide ranging journalistic and academic careers, have shaped the global perspective and deep understanding of the craft of writing that shine through The Apartment.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been during these times of tumult and uncertainty? Where have you been living during the pandemic? At what stage was this new novel when it began? How was the progression, the launch, affected?

Ana Menéndez: I’ve been much luckier than most during these times of pandemic and tumult. We lost neither loved ones nor employment—in fact I began a new faculty position in the middle of lockdown, August 2020. When the pandemic began, I was in—I don’t know—revision number 1,000 or something. I had started the book in 2011, but the writing was slow going: first because of a new baby, then a new job (creating a writing program from scratch at Maastricht University), then another new job and a move back to the States, and finally an administrative position at FIU which was wonderful and creative, but which left me with little time for writing. After the pandemic, we were all in a kind of numb limbo, even those of us who were lucky.

And then there was the terrible political situation, the attack on the capital. But, thanks to the new faculty position, and lots of professional and personal support, I was able to find time and mental space to keep writing. I met the wonderful Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint and the edits were going well and then… I finally came down with Covid in the summer of 2022, which delayed us a bit.

But here we are, at last. I say this in the acknowledgements, but all books are communal projects and this one was no exception. So grateful for the wonderful editing I received at Counterpoint. And for the unwavering (and often unremunerative!) support of my agent, Joy Harris.

JC: I’m fascinated by the way you structure The Apartment—linked stories revolving around Apartment 2B in one building, the Helena in Miami Beach—over decades, indeed centuries. Is there an apartment building like this one in Miami Beach?

AM: I think so—all over the old Art Deco district in Miami Beach, in fact: wonderful buildings that activists worked hard to preserve (and are still working—just this year there was another move to try to “redevelop” that district). Many of the buildings came up in the 1930s and 40s. Too many stories to recount inside all those walls! I myself have lived all over the beach, near 41st, near Third (before the area was built up) and finally in a building very much like the Helena on Jefferson Avenue. Though, of course, The Helena is the product of imagination, much of the life and circumstances would be familiar to anyone who lived on the beach over these past decades.

JC: On my first read of The Apartment, I thought of John Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple in an apartment building in New York City begin to hear conversations by their neighbors over a new radio they’ve bought. And of the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which describes years passing in the empty house at the shore where the Ramsey family and friends have summered. (“The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.”) What was the origin story for The Apartment? What gave you that first inkling of the novel to come?

AM: I’m not familiar with that Cheever story! But Cheever remains a huge influence, if not so much in style, in philosophy. Every time I pass through a new housing development, I remember a line from one of his stories about “everything smelling like shirt boards.” And the strangeness of “The Swimmer” continues to inspire me, a reminder of all the magic that literature is capable of, no matter where a story is set.

And absolutely on Woolf—another guiding light. I don’t know how many times I’ve read To the Lighthouse, each time (as with Cheever) with awe at what literature can do. That section you quote no doubt had an influence on this book, as did her short story, “A Haunted House:” “”Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—”

Still gives me chills.

I’ve been such a voracious and eclectic reader for so many years that there can’t really be a single origin story for any book I write. But the initial spark for The Apartment was lit in 2010 when I read, for the first time, Georges Perec’s remarkable work, Life: A User’s Manual (La Vie Mode d’Emploi). I had to catch my breath after finishing it—it was so exhilarating. Just the density of lives and ideas and even banalities in that single apartment building. And the structure fascinated me—each “story” is written according to a series of elaborate constraints and their appearance in the novel follows the Knight’s Tour of the chessboard.

So: very formally precise and inventive and unlike anything I had ever read. The first drafts of this novel were titled That Awful Incident on the Villa Baldini and took place on a suburban street, hewing pretty closely to Perec’s structure and formula. With time, I dropped many of the constraints and the pastiche. Then (I can’t remember when exactly) my husband’s tenant left behind a suitcase in the apartment he was renting (I wrote about this in an essay that Lit Hub will publish this month I believe).

And I became very curious about this suitcase. Why leave it behind? What does it contain? And that led to questions about other travelers in the apartment. What did they leave behind? One of the reasons this novel took so long (apart from all that was going on in my life) is that it grew very intuitively, which is to say slowly. I rarely have any idea what I’m going to say in a book, just some curiosity, some question, some problem I’d like more clarity on. And this novel was especially free-form.

So much of it developed in conversation with my generous early readers, notably the scholar Isabel Alvarez-Borland. As I wrote and she and I talked, I returned again and again to the idea of what we owe one another. That beautiful line of Seneca’s: “Our common life is founded on kindness and harmony; it is bound in a compact of mutual assistance, not by fear, but by love of one another.” (Ward Farnsworth translation).

JC: What were your other influences as you shaped this novel? (In addition to Woolf, Perec, Cheever, I think also of Alejo Carpentier.)

AM: Yes, Alejo Carpentier remains an influence on everything I write. Also Juan Rulfo and César Aira, whose enigmatic short novel Ghosts delighted me. More recently Elena Ferrante for the brilliant way she often avoids sense-making in favor of almost disorienting moments of magic (seems a reduction of what she’s doing in the Neapolitan Quartet with the shattering pot or in Days of Abandonment with the disembodied woman to merely call it “magic”).

And Olga Tokarczuk’s work is a constant source of awe to me as a writer. There are so many more I could mention: Italo Calvino, Jean Toomer, Daniela Hodrova, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin (for the way his fiction is powered, for example, by connection and interconnection). And the work of Svetlana Alexievich has been hugely influential: the voices she gathers in Secondhand Time. So devastating and brilliant. Really, the list is very long. I do consider myself a reader before I consider myself a writer.

JC: Your opening shows us a woman “collecting the eggs of nesting sea turtles this evening…” She lives in the time generations before the arrival of Menendez de Aviles, who claimed Florida for Spain in 1565. You end that first section with a comment to the reader: “But you who exist outside of time, look: The setting sun drops its boulder of night. Within heartbeats, the land disappears.

In the morning out of the mangroves rise hundreds of new buildings, smooth and whiter than sand—dazzling in their monstrous beauty.” What inspired this perspective, and the poetic sections that follow, which seem to be from the point of view of the place itself ( “Time, spooky and fickle. Not arrow, but snake” and “The apartment is between tenants again…. The curtains are drawn, the lights are out”)?

AM: Again the influences are many, but I’ve been interested lately in the way the reader is situated in the novel. Reading is itself a temporal act, but it’s outside the temporality of the novel itself. So in many ways the “voice” in a novel, which is the reader’s voice as well, leaks out of the pages, joins the contemporary. We learn these three basic POVs in school, of course, and they’re a good enough short-hand.

But if you read a lot, you realize there is so much gradation there: narrators who sit just aslant of the story they’re telling, unreliable narrators, judgy narrators, and in the case of Woolf, buildings and time itself that tell stories. I earlier mentioned Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most exciting innovators writing today. In her Nobel speech she talked about the “fourth person narrator” (From her speech: “I also dream of a new kind of narrator―a “fourth-person” one, who is not merely a grammatical construct of course, but who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time.”)

It’s a style that’s on full display in her book House of Day, House of Night, for example. And some of those ideas undoubtedly influenced me as I was thinking of who or what is telling this story. Incidentally, it was Dan Smetanka’s idea to include this section before recorded time, to return to what the land was and I’m really grateful to him because I think it opens up the story in a way that emphasizes what I think is one of the central ideas in the book—that interconnected sense of history with a small “h”.

JC: Your first resident, newlywed Sophie, moves into apartment 2B in the Helena on January 8, 1942, as the wife of an officer in the U.S. Army Corps, which has requisitioned the building. “Some days, when there’s a strong north wind, the smell of gunpowder fills the apartment,” you write. Sophie sees the building as a “remarkably egalitarian, village… Everyone a transplant from somewhere else; everyone united in the war effort.”

But that doesn’t last long. German torpedoes strike in the night, leaving a neutral oil tanker burning. Sophie loses her innocence in that moment. “War is a tunnel bored through the darkness. All of us riding blind, unsure what awaits us in the shadows until a flash reveals the faces of fiends.” You build the story toward this moment. And the other stories of residents of the Helena, as well. Did you write these stories in search of these moments of realization, moments of truth.

AM: I think so, yes. Why do we tell stories? For me, I’m interested in what learning takes place. What foundation is shaken? What idea is abandoned? What new understanding emerges from the actions the characters either enact or passively receive? More than conflict, what drives the stories I care about (both mine and others’) is this idea of connection and disconnection; of previously held beliefs that give way to new information, perhaps even new ways of living.

JC: Ultimately, this novel includes characters affected by decades of conflict—World War II, the fall of Batista and Fidel Castro’s regime, including the “special period,” when so many were in dire straits, struggling to find food; the Vietnam War, with PTSD still afflicting veterans; the fall of the Berlin wall and the Prague Spring, the Tajiks fighting against the Taliban under the leadership of Massoud, who was murdered the day before September 11, the violence in Honduras, which has had the highest murder rate in the world between 2010 and 2015. This creates a distillation of moments, immigrants and troubled souls who arrive at the Helena from various points around the world, seeking shelter, seeking home. How did you choose the conflicts to include, reaching far beyond this region?

AM: Thank you for noting this, Jane. I was a freelance reporter and photographer in several conflict zones about twenty-five years ago and the experience left a life-long mark on me. I certainly didn’t do the work long enough to call myself a war correspondent, but it was long enough to see the warping effects of violence, both at the individual level and at the societal.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how the trauma of war and displacement plays out across generations. So this was one of the main ideas I wanted to explore in the novel. Many of the conflicts in this novel have ties to the United States, which of course can sadly be said of many conflicts in the world today. We are all implicated. But simply on a craft level, as a writer, there were some conflicts that I wanted to include for personal reasons.

The conflict in Lebanon is one of them, as my great-grandparents fled to Cuba following early conflict there at the turn of the last century. The violence in Cuba and its long aftermath is of course a special obsession as the daughter of Cuban immigrants. And the conflict in Afghanistan looms large for us as Americans and for me personally as I spent ten unforgettable days in the country in 1998.

JC: How did you build your catalogue of characters, residents of this building from Sophie to Eugenio, the Cuban concert pianist turned wedding player who left Havana in 1952 as Batista was about to be deposed, and is still in the apartment ten years later. Pilar the journalist, recently “involuntarily separated” after eighteen years at the “Miami Horror,” and forced to move back in with her parents; Lenin Garcia, a young Cuban man who worked as a prostitute (”It was the fastest way to obtain hard currency after the special period”) and dies in 2B in 2011, and Lana, a painter who has relocated to Apartment 2B from Cairo and learns of Lenin Garcia’s death from her neighbors.

AM: Oh in the early Perec-influenced version, there was really a cast of thousands! These are the ones who passed the audition and got call backs. I can’t really say how I settled on them. They just felt right. I did want them to reflect a range of experience and outlooks. I didn’t want them to be merely ciphers for my ideas (though perhaps it is inevitable that our characters become that unless we have the powers of Dostoevsky).

JC: By what process did you arrive at the story told by Lenin Garcia’s disembodied voice?

AM: Like everything else in this eternal novel, it was a very long process. I wish I would have kept a journal while I was writing it, because I’ve forgotten why I made some of the decisions I did. All I can say is it just felt right, which I know is very unhelpful. Initially there was much more about Lana’s story in Cairo and then I thought it was not right for a person like her to be divulging so much.

The disembodied narrator was an early decision, spurred partly by this curiosity of who tells the story and also as a reaction to a slightly infuriating presentation I went to a few years ago from a “digital humanities” professor who used AI to scan thousands of novels. Up to this point, I was fine with it—the field of digital humanities has made a lot of interesting discoveries that might not otherwise have been made (no one human being can read every newspaper ever published between 1900 and 1999, for example, let alone draw conclusions about the evolution of language). It’s when this researcher started make sweeping statements about being able to predict what POV a book is written from the first page, or some other nonsense like that, that I got annoyed. I thought, well that can’t be right.

As I recalled, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz’s groundbreaking novel, seemed to start in one POV and end in another. And how do you even categorize a POV such as you find in Pedro Páramo? So I thought, I’ll show that smug researcher and throw a POV twist in this story! Yes, writers can be that petty. But more broadly, the book for me began with Lenin’s story—the story of the Cuban immigrant who must really struggle, who is not necessarily embraced by the earlier “historical exiles,” and who finds himself without the social support that earlier exiles enjoyed. He is our brother, he is us, and I suppose I wanted a reminder.

JC: What are you working on next?

AM: My suntan! No, only partly joking. I do feel I need a break from the writing, and have gone back into my beloved books. Looking forward to finally reading Trust by Hernan Diaz on the plane this summer. Along with Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Life and The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala (which happens to be translated by my friend Anna Kushner).

And I’m right now reading and am loving Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise. Also looking forward to painting a little bit—our wonderful Indie store Books & Books here in Miami has been kind enough to put on an exhibit of some of the paintings I made while writing The Apartment. It’s all amateur stuff, but as I tell my students, every writer needs a separate, incompetent, art that is empty of expectation or the sometimes crippling demands that come with knowing a subject well.

All that said, I’m not trying to be coy: I do have a new novel in the works. It’s about a woman who misses her flight and decides to stay on in the airport. It’s a light-hearted story, I promise. I’m calling her Mrs. Diaz-Wakefield.

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The Apartment by Ana Menéndez is available from Counterpoint Press.