On doing whatever helps you move forward

I’m so curious how long you spent writing Treasure Island!!!—it was published in 2012—but how long did you work on the novel?

Maybe ten years? It started when I was a professor of non-fiction writing at the University of Iowa. I was stalled after publishing a handful of nonfiction, none of which I wanted to collect into a book. When you’re tenure-track, you’re supposed to have a big project, and one day this older male colleague came across the hall and asked, “Who are your favorite essayists?” He was trying to fluff me up. When I said I liked Robert Louis Stevenson, he got excited and cried, “Treasure Island!” I was like, “What the hell?” I’d never read it. I hadn’t read any of Stevenson’s novels, only the essays on prose style, walking, and riding a donkey. I wanted to write short crystallized things. At Brown where I’d done my PhD I’d focused on short prose forms: essays, stories, prose poems, aphorisms. I remember saying as an undergrad, “I’ll never write a novel.”

You said you would never write a novel?

Yes. I had a teacher in undergrad, who was giving me feedback on my short stories, and he said, “And, of course, given the marketplace, you’ll need to do long form.”

I had an adolescent reaction: “No way. I don’t have to follow the marketplace. I’ll just write what I want to write.”

But after this guy got all lit up about Treasure Island, I went to the library and got a copy, and that itself seemed funny. I was a feminist, and there I was reading a boys’ book. Soon after that I left Iowa, which meant I didn’t need to write a nonfiction book to get tenure. But I wasn’t working on Treasure Island!!! steadily. I abandoned it many times.

So you worked on it for ten years, off and on?

Yes. The germ was around 2000, and then I got a new job, moved house, had a child, wrote other things. Actually, I finished it around 2010, and then let it sit in a drawer for a year. Then it took another full year to sell it.

What was this germ for the novel? Did a particular scene or idea implant itself in your head first?

I wrote an imaginary conversation with my mother, which included a list of all the qualities Jim Hawkins has that I don’t. It was a few pages long. I thought I’d write an essay about adventure fiction and gender—because I’d been hired in a nonfiction program. And because I’d gotten a PhD and thought I was supposed to write criticism. But that really wasn’t my bent.

When I was a grad student, I’d been invited to teach an open-topic seminar, and I pitched a class on unreliable narrators. Then when I was hired at Iowa, I managed to teach unreliability in nonfiction. Which is nervy because a lot of what you do in an essay is try to sound balanced, trustworthy, reliable. But as a counterpoint to the balanced voice, we looked at some peevish and hyperbolic narrators, and places where nonfiction verges towards insincerity. I must have baffled my students.

I think I always had a very strong desire to write a voice that was off-kilter. So when it came to this idea of writing an essay on gender and Treasure Island, I thought, “Well, that’s boring. I’d rather write about the book in a totally overwrought voice. I’d rather write it funny.” I definitely didn’t want to write as me because I was an English professor, and whenever someone says “campus novel” my eyes glaze over. (Though I love Nabokov’s Pnin. And most of Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution.) I didn’t want to write autobiographically. I was consciously trying to swerve from that.

So I began the novel as an experiment. I knew someone who’d written several scholarly books and he’d just started to write a play, and I was impressed. Not because the play was particularly good, but because he was trying a new form. I thought, “How stupid that I said I’d never write a novel! Why don’t I let myself try?” It felt bold to take it seriously as a project.

But I was still sort of reluctant and embarrassed, so I scaled down the ambition. I thought, “I’m just going to see if I can do long form.” In my head my audience was my husband and two friends: would they think it was funny?

But why did it take me so long to write it? This is a big, sort of embarrassing question. I think it was partly a loss of faith. At some point I read Robert Olen Butler’s book From Where You Dream, which is about how you can’t write fiction from your head. You have to get away from concept and abstraction and descend into a sensual dream space. I liked Butler’s fiction, so I took his advice very seriously, and was just, like, fuck. My book is totally coming from my head. After all, it started out as an essay on gender!

Writing from the head, sort of editing as you write, and guarding the gate?

Yeah. I decided I was being overly cerebral and therefore doomed. Butler talks about writing from your unconscious. I haven’t looked at that book in years. It’d be interesting to look at it now cause I’m a little more savvy. Probably I was already discouraged, so I just used the book against myself, and became more discouraged.

It’s alarming, when you’re working on a project, that anything can be a landmine or an obstacle, if you’re looking for one.

Right. I’m not dissing Butler’s book. It was so much about where I was at that time, that I was willing to use that book against myself. On his podcast Creative Pep Talk Andy J. Miller talks about how as an artist you have to choose yourself. It definitely took a while to finish Treasure Island!!! because I was doing other things. And because writing is hard. But I think a big problem was I hadn’t chosen myself. I kept putting the book aside because it was “an experiment.” I think I was uncomfortable with the commitment to isolation that art-making requires. I made myself available to other people when I might have been on a schedule. You know the story about Colette’s husband Willy locking her up so she could write the Claudine novels? Obviously that was a bad dynamic, but I used to joke about wanting a husband like Willy. But you have to lock yourself up, so to speak. You have to choose yourself, especially when there seems to be no logical reason to do so. I didn’t understand to what extent writing is an act of faith, so when I read From Where You Dream, it was really easy to just say, “Oh, my book is garbage, because it’s written from the head.” I had not chosen myself at all.

You’re continuing to work with the form of the novel—you recently revealed on a podcast, Lindsay Hunter’s I’m a Writer But, that you have a new novel coming out next year.

Yes, it’s called The Hitch. Roxane Gay just bought it for her imprint at Grove Atlantic, which is wonderful. Years ago she wrote about Treasure Island!!! in Bad Feminist, back when I was getting lots of feedback about people not liking the narrator. (I’m just kidding. I still get that feedback!)

Are you able to talk about The Hitch yet? I’m curious what it’s about.

It’s about an uptight woman who’s happily looking after her six-year-old nephew for a week when his soul gets taken over by a dead corgi. It messes with the “possession plot” in a way similar to how Treasure Island!!! messes with the conventions of adventure fiction.

I wanted to ask, given your background as an essayist, about the relationship between Treasure Island!!! and the form of the essay? The novel has been called essayistic.

When I started, I thought it was going to be an essayistic novel. I’d use the language of grant proposals: “I’m interested in fusing the spiraling, expository form of the essay with the velocity of boys’ adventure fiction.”

And it sounded fun to me. But once I was further along in the book, I realized, “These essay bits, are like, longueurs, they’re sort of boring.” The story doesn’t require a seven-hundred word digression on gender bias and exclamation points! So, I cut most of that. The narrator has a somewhat writerly voice, but she’s not trying to figure anything out. She’s soap-boxing and hiding things. So I wouldn’t call it an essayistic novel. That was just a scaffolding that let me make the building, and then I took it down.

Sometimes on a project you need that scaffolding of excitement, no matter what it is, or how much of a red herring it turns out to be.

Yes, the idea that I was writing an essayistic novel gave me a bit of confidence since I’d studied the form and did feel relatively easy in its contours. Like, “I may not know how to write a novel, but maybe I can do a fictional character who’s writing in an essayistic mode.” The novel is such a daunting task; you have to do whatever helps you move forward, and not worry about being wrong, or about changing your mind.

It’s hard to feel like it’s okay to dismantle the whole thing, and for the project to actually be about something else.

I think a book teaches you what it wants to be. Which is why it’s so important to be a good reader. Because you need to read your own drafts for clues.

Speaking of moving between genres and forms, when you’re not writing, do you have any side projects or hobbies?

I’m doing a drawing project now. That’s what I was working on today.

You draw?

I don’t like to say that I draw because I have no training in drawing. But I do like to draw. Between writing Treasure Island!!! and The Hitch, I wrote a book that I’m not publishing. And after I abruptly decided not to publish that book, I didn’t know what to do. So, I drew. That was what I did every day when I would have been writing, and it was so wonderful. It was terrifying.

I love Lynda Barry— the cartoons, the coloring book, the songs and answering machine messages on The Lynda Barry Experience. But I especially love her work on creativity. She talks—maybe in What It Is—about how everybody has something that they doodle. Even people who say that they don’t draw, they have a go-to figure or “little guy.” She talks about that neurological connection between the hand and the brain. Yeah. So, drawing is one thing I do. Or am doing now.

I also love to cook. It’s satisfying because it takes so long for me to finish a piece of writing. So, it’s so great to make a loaf of bread, because you just get instant gratification, in comparison. And you get to eat it. And it’s so sensory. I feel like, because you’re in your head with writing so much, you’re wrestling with the sentence, all day. So, it’s so gratifying to make a spice mix.

I think we’re often scared to do something in another discipline, because we think it’s going to damage our “primary” discipline. We don’t want to take time away from writing to cook, like, “Oh, I need to funnel all my time into this one thing.”

I’m just cribbing this from The Artist’s Way.

I think you’re right, and it’s funny. Maybe fifteen years ago, I opened this beautifully photographed cookbook by Celia Brooks Brown and decided to make her chocolate mousse, largely because she recommended serving it in shot glasses, each one with a strawberry, dipped in white chocolate, and a little silver dragée on top. I was like, “I’m going to make that. I need a break from writing.”

You just saw it and thought: “I need to recreate this image”?

It was so charming. Ten little truffle pots. The fun of it, I thought, would be going to thrift shops, and finding the shot glasses, sourcing the little candy, making the mousse, and in the process of doing what was supposed to be this delightful, light-hearted, pleasurable activity, I started to get so freaking tense.

While making the mousse?

Even before I got to the mousse. I was like, “Oh, I don’t like that glass. It’s got a football decal on it. I want to find a perfect glass. I want a tiny silver ball. Why does the grocery store only sell jimmies? Damn it, my strawberries aren’t all the same size!” And then I realized, “This is what I do. This is the energy I’m bringing to my writing.”

And I needed that adjacent practice to see clearly how I was getting in my own way in my writing. So, I feel like doing something else is actually really helpful.

Instructive.

Yeah, because you can see more clearly what attitude you’re bringing to the work, if you’re being kind enough to yourself, or not.

It’s like how you go to therapy to recreate situations from your life, then you can look at them from the outside.

Yes. But, at least with this, you get to eat the chocolate mousse.