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Interview with Abby Geni

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by Cavenaugh Kelly

Your short story collection The Body Farm can be described as eclectic and genre defying, ranging stories about sharks, porcupines, and the neurodivergent, to the title story, The Body Farm, about a murder mystery involving a scientific research project on decaying corpses. How as a writer, do you go about researching and writing about such varied topics?

In truth, my research tends to find me rather than the other way around. I’ll be watching a documentary or browsing through interesting books at the library, and suddenly I’ll stumble across a fascinating fact about porcupines or the history of witches or the science of body farms, and down the rabbit hole I go.

I find my characters through their passions. What is the mindset of a scientist who happily studies corpses? How does someone find healing in learning about porcupines? Is it possible to work a magic spell in modern-day society? I learn what my characters know. I write about them doing what they love. That is how I discover who they are.

Can you tell us about your unique writing process, especially how you formulate everything in your head for quite a lengthy period before starting to write?

My approach to writing is almost entirely structural. I see sentences, scenes, chapters, and entire novels in terms of how they are constructed. There is a perfect architecture for each of these things, and my work as a writer is to find it. So I hold stories in my head for months or even years as I mentally put things into place. It’s like making a castle in the air. What is the staircase of the plot? What characters make up different wings of the house? What are the rooms of different chapters? Which windows look out on various scenes from the past? Just as a builder would not begin work on a house without a detailed plan, I don’t write a single word until I have a blueprint for the story in my mind.

What do you feel about the “writing rule” to only write what you know?

I love this rule, though I think it’s often misunderstood. Many people interpret it to mean Only write what you are. They feel uncomfortable writing outside their own identity; they feel it’s not okay for them to imagine the interior world of someone from a different background or race or gender.

And that’s a great instinct! We all need to be aware of our own limitations. I am a white woman who was born into a family of hippies, in the Midwest, as a part of a middle class that no longer exists. Given my own identity, I would not, for example, attempt to write from the point of view of a young Black man growing up during the early years of the Apartheid in South Africa in the 1950’s. I could research, I could interview, I could imagine, but I could never know enough to write that person’s story.

This does not, however, mean that I can only write from the point of view of people exactly like me. Sometimes I do stay very close to what I am. But other times I have traveled outside my own race, gender, background, historical context, species, and home planet. Only write what you know. The important word is know. Part of our work as writers is finding the balance between imagination and experience. If someone asks “Why are you the right person to tell this character’s story?” you must have an answer.

I knew a nurse anesthetist and pilot who said the use of anesthesia and flying were the same, it was all about the takeoff and landing. I think the same could be argued about short stories, so much is about the start and the ending. This is something that you are very skilled at doing in your short stories and I was wondering if you could walk us through your mindset when writing the start and ending to your stories, especially your skilled ability to almost dance around a great chasm of emotion but never fully give in to it.

First of all, thanks! Second of all, I totally agree. When I was a student at Oberlin College, I worked with Dan Chaon, who once told me that too many published novels could have been short stories, and that if you can write the piece as a short story, you have to.

A short story usually captures the beginning and end of a particular event: a love story, a job, a childhood, a life. That event is encapsulated in a series of scenes and flashbacks, and the reader is given enough to understand its meaning. If the story were fleshed out—if there were more scenes, more flashbacks, more characterization—the piece would become flabby and dull. It would lose its momentum and meaning. 

Novels, on the other hand, are almost entirely middle. They can’t be contained in a couple of scenes and flashbacks. I teach several classes on the novel, and one of the things I have my students do is write a synopsis of their novel. It’s almost impossible to do well, because every novel sounds insane if you summarize it. There’s just too much plot. There’s a reason novels are 90,000 words long. They can’t be shorter.

While your writing is very smooth and consistent in The Body Farm, the style, or format maybe, of the stories varies a lot. To me, as I read this, at times I felt like I was reading a more literary version of Stephen King, Roald Dahl, or even something like a Dateline episode. Where most story collections are preoccupied with relationships, I found this is to be very refreshing as a reader. What do you attribute all the different approaches to stories in this collection? Do you read widely? I know you’re a big fan of Dr. Who. Does it again go back to your wide-ranging curiosity and research?

I’ll start by saying that I was that kid who always felt annoyed that every single song on the radio seemed to be a love song. I wondered why nobody wrote songs about dinosaurs or space travel. There are a lot of brilliant short story collections out there that focus on relationships, but I would much rather focus on shark divers or serial killers.

It was my intention in this collection to play with format and style more than I ever have before. I’m fascinated by all the different ways a story can capture the reader’s attention. I love mysteries, speculative fiction, thrillers, romance, nonfiction, and graphic novels. There is so much we literary fiction authors can learn from other genres! The best mystery novels have perfect architecture. Sci-fi offers incomparable world-building. Fairy tales create childlike wonder.

All these genres filter into my work. You’re not the first person to mention Stephen King or Roald Dahl (though Dateline is new. Love it!). The title story of The Body Farm was chosen for The Best American Mystery and Suspense of 2024. I’ve been told my work is hard to classify; it often has elements of horror or mythology or thriller or mystery.

And yes, I do indeed love Dr. Who. Every story is bigger on the inside, isn’t it?

***

About Abby Geni:

Abby Geni is the author of the novels The Wildlands and The Lightkeepers and the short story collections The Last Animal and The Body Farm. Her newest novel, Children of the Wolf, will be published in the summer of 2026. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Her short stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary publications, including Best American Mystery and Suspense, The Missouri Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, and New Stories from the Midwest. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequent Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

About Cavenaugh Kelly:

Cavenaugh Kelly, PhD, is a writer, occupational therapist, and teacher. His short stories have been published in Slice, Harmony Magazine, Pulse, Birmingham Arts Journal, Red Wheel Barrel, Braided Way, and other publications. At Husson University, as an associate professor, Kelly teaches in the School of Occupational Therapy, winning the Theresa W. Steele award for teaching excellence in 2022, and the Global Scholar award in 2025.  He has presented, taught, and published his research on the influence of literature on the empathy levels of healthcare students internationally and nationally, winning the Global Empathy Award at the 2022 International Global Empathy Conference in London, England, where he was a keynote speaker. He is a student in the MFA program at Converse University.

Interview with Penny Zang

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Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Doll Parts is a dual-timeline suspense novel about two best friends whose past at an women’s college—and a secret club obsessed with Sylvia Plath—comes back to haunt them. It’s also about grief, friendship, and the culture’s obsession with beautiful, dead women.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed creating my character Nikki, a college freshman who is grieving the loss of her mother. She listens to loud music (lots of Courtney Love), wears dark, smeared eyeliner and dresses she stole from her school theater department’s costume room. Every time I thought I knew what she would do next, she surprised me on the page.

Characters like this, who are at transition points in their life, are especially fascinating to me because those are periods of my life that seem to linger the most in my memory.

The most challenging character for me was writing Nikki’s daughter, Caroline, who appears almost twenty years later in the novel. I wanted Nikki and Caroline to feel and sound different but be similar enough (the ways mothers and daughters often are) that it echoed across the two different timelines. It took a lot of revision!

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The lows: all the rejection and insecurity that came early in the process. It never ends. Even once you have an agent, even after you have a book deal, there are rejections at every stage.

The highs: getting the news of my book deal will forever be the best memory because it was the most ordinary day (work, my son’s swim practice, making dinner), but suddenly my world changed. I also got to sign a copy of my book at ThrillerFest in NYC this summer before the book’s release. Such a surreal experience!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

My favorite writing advice is to step away. Pause. Take a break. Any version of that advice is what I tell my students and constantly have to tell myself. Things unlock when I walk away, and I know I’m not alone. Also, it isn’t healthy for anyone to sit for too long, staring at a computer screen. We need to move our bodies and tend to our other hobbies, our families, our pets. Every time I find myself getting frustrated with my writing, I remember that walking away, even for five minutes, always helps.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how little of my research actually made it into the book. I did so much research on Sylvia Plath, obsessively reading every biography (including the really big ones). It all added to the story in its own way in terms of tone and mood, and Plath’s legacy is very much part of the story, but the actual content of that research is hardly mentioned in the novel at all.

How did you find the title of your book?

I originally had a different title for this book, and I didn’t think anyone could sway me to change it. When my editor came to me with the title Doll Parts, which is also the title of a song by Hole, I emailed my agent the following sentence: “I kinda love it.” Not only does it feel a little creepy, but it brings forth images of girlhood and resonates with one of the larger themes of the novel: the romanticization of dead women. And for readers who know the song, the 90s vibes are strong.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes we might share?)

Well, my characters as college students eat a lot of sour candy and drink a lot of Dr Pepper. If you want an informal recipe for their favorite drink (which was, embarrassingly, also my favorite drink when I was much younger), mix Dr Pepper with coconut rum. It’s that simple. Bonus points if you drink it out of a TGI Friday’s kid’s cup with a lid so you can sneak it into concerts.

Interview with Denise S. Robbins

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A mysterious phenomenon called ‘the unmapping’ causes city streets and neighborhoods to entirely rearrange each day, leading to broken down power grids and other such chaos. Our two main characters, Esme Green and Arjun Varma, work in the New York City Emergency Management Department; Arjun is in love with Esme, but Esme has a fiancé, who disappears on the first day. The book is about climate change, about disasters, and ultimately about humanity. Also, lucid dreaming cults.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing from Arjun’s perspective. He tries so hard—at his job, at friendship, at love—and fails in ways that are endearing to me and generally brings levity to this disaster story with his particular brand of neuroticism.

As for the one that gave me trouble, each chapter features a brief perspective from an unnamed character, and the hardest one to write was one of these side characters known as ‘the wife’. Her husband is a disaster prepper yet he himself goes missing the first day, and the wife, meanwhile, stays locked up at home, full of fear, until she gets pulled into a strange lucid-dreaming cult. At one point, I realized I didn’t know very much about her—who she was before all this. That bothered me, the not-knowing. Then I realized this missing sense of self was actually perfect for the story—that’s the type of person who would get swept away in dangerous ideas. I thought her story was about fear, but I learned it was about a missing selfhood.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Three years elapsed between when I finished the book and when I got the book deal. In that time, as I secured an agent and my agent pitched out The Unmapping, I kept writing madly, finishing two more books: a novel and a novella collection. When I heard that Bindery had put in an offer to publish The Unmapping, it was both a high and a low, because I went back to my draft and realized how much I had changed as a writer, and how much I wanted to change in this book. I’d really grown in three years! Luckily, they were responsive to my wishes to make some pretty massive edits, which were in line with what they wanted, too, so I said yes, then embarked on an utterly insane two months of rewriting. It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and very difficult, but also wonderful, with my mind always at least one foot in the dreamscape of the novel. Since then it’s only been high after high, working with an amazing team on editing, choosing the cover, and everything else that goes into turning a book from words on a page to a physical reality.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I am a diehard reader of George Saunders’s Substack, Story Club. In many of his essays he talks about the importance of finding and following the energy of a piece. Basically, when you read back what you wrote, what is it that gives off little sparks? Follow that. Let that energy lead the story. Take it as far as it can go.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Writing this story involved discovery on every level. In a broad sense, when I was first working on this years ago, I didn’t realize I was writing a slanted analogy of climate change. I work in climate change advocacy, but considered my fiction as an escape from reality. Nope. It’s a disaster story very much about our own reality, even as it’s based on an unreal premise, and once I realized this, a lot clicked into place. On a smaller scale, when I was reviewing the book for copy edits I laughed out loud at a joke I’d included in the penultimate chapter—one I’d completely forgotten about. I took that as a good sign that I’d created characters with a life of their own.

How did you find the title of your book?

I initially called it “Sidewalk n.” I graduated undergrad with a degree in statistics, so this is a super nerdy math reference, because in statistics, instead of solving for “x,” you work with “n,” which is the number of observations in your sample. The idea was that if all the sidewalks rearrange (along with everything else), the one you’re looking at is “n”: it could be anything. Also, the name sort of rhymes with “sidewalk ends.” My husband also loved this title because he’s also a big math nerd, but I secretly knew it was too esoteric, that no one would get it, and right there on the first page people were talking about cities becoming “unmapped,” so it just became obvious that I should name it after that.

Interview with Lori Ostlund

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The nine stories in this collection explore class, identity, loneliness, and the specter of violence that looms over women and the LGBTQ+ community. For personal reasons, I spend a lot of time with characters who  try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. I often say that I write sad, funny stories, and I think that is true of this collection.

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

The answer to both questions is the same: the final story, which is a short novella entitled “Just Another Family,” gave me the most trouble and the most pleasure, probably for the same reason. That is, when you struggle for a long time with a story, as I did with this one, the pleasure of finally figuring it out is considerable. I don’t know when I started the story, but my records indicate that I got my first rejection in 2015. I kept rewriting and sending it out, and it kept getting rejected. I set it aside finally for around five years, and when I returned to it in late 2022, the voice just kicked in and pulled me along, and the story nearly tripled in length. In the process, the story became more hopeful, the humor darker, the main character more dynamic.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

During the pandemic, my former agent went out with a novel that was not quite ready. She was struggling with the pressures of the pandemic, as we nearly all were, and the submission process fell apart. We had always had a good relationship, so it was with some sadness that I parted ways with her. By this point, I had stopped writing, a fallow period that lasted a couple of years. I wondered whether I would ever write again, but then one day something turned back on, and I sat down at my desk and opened up the novella that I mentioned above. I wrote several more stories, and these combined with stories that I had written and published in journals earlier formed the basis of ARE YOU HAPPY?, which meant that I found myself in the awful position of having to query agents with a story collection. I was lucky enough to secure representation by an agent I had long admired. The process of selling the collection in some ways went smoothly, and in other ways was stressful as hell. I got an offer from Emily Bell, whom I had nearly worked with on my last book. Since then, she had moved from FSG to Zando, and shortly after I accepted the offer for a two-book deal, she moved to Astra House, ultimately taking me with her. There were lots of twists and turns along the way, but that is the tame version.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to write for an audience of one. The advice, on the surface, seems counterintuitive, but the most unusual voices—which is what I am always drawn to—details and observations evolve out of this advice, I think. In my case, if my wife—who is my first and usually only reader—laughs or understands the nuance, I go with it.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Oh, lots of things surprised me, but one of the things that surprised me only later, when a reader pointed it out during the galleys process, was that there were lots of cats in the book and they were all named Gertrude. I have never had a cat named Gertrude, but I thought it was a funny name for a cat, I guess, and somehow the joke just kept getting retold.

How did you find the title of your book?

When I submitted the book to my now agent during the querying process, I had tentatively titled it JUST ANOTHER FAMILY, which was the name of the novella. The title works for the novella, but felt flat as a book title, not memorable. Another story was entitled “The Peeping Toms,” and I had toyed with that as a title also, since some of the stories deal with themes of voyeurism and being or feeling watched. When my agent and I had our first conversation about the book, he said, “Why not call it Are You Happy?” That was the name of another story, yet somehow I had never considered this as a title, but as soon as Henry said it, I knew that this was the title.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

In “Clear as Cake,” several of the scenes take place in a dive bar that I spent a lot of time in during college, and the only food available came from a huge jar that sat on the counter. It was filled with pickled gizzards, which I occasionally sampled. In the story, I went with pickled eggs.

Interview with Michelle Herman

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reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

If You Say So is a set of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing, loneliness, friendship, community, and family. It’s also about grief, and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

“Enjoy” is such a funny word when it comes to writing! (Or is that just me?) I mean, if I’m not writing (something, anything), I feel pretty miserable, so just working on a new essay or story or novel is enjoyable by comparison (my paternal grandma used to say, if I complained about being bored and unhappy, “Go bang your head against the wall”—presumably to make me better appreciate the feeling of not banging my head against the wall—but I digress). Still, I guess I could say that the two essays I most “enjoyed” writing were the one called “Old House” (both because it required me to do research on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century house I’ve lived in for going on four decades—and research with a personal angle is one of my favorite things—and because I wrote it in the months directly following my retirement from full-time university professing, thus wrote pretty joyously all the livelong day) and the one called “On Balance,” because I wrote it very fast and with great certainty, clarity, and ease, which doesn’t happen all that often (and which, come to think of it, is a pretty meta thing to say about this essay).

The one that gave me the most trouble was the book’s final and title essay, “If You Say So.” I started writing it in the immediate wake of a close friend’s death, while still in the thick of dealing with it (not just my grief, but all of her belongings and everything else that a death leaves behind), which in itself made it hard to get my arms around (but I felt I had no choice—I had to write it, then and there; I feared that if I didn’t, my heart and brain would explode), but I also had to figure out what it was “really” about, which took a while and a bunch of drafts.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I could tell a long version, full of heartbreak, but as I went on at such length in my answer to the last question, I’ll just say this, about the lows: My former literary agent read it and said, “Nope, can’t send out a miscellaneous essay collection! Nobody’s publishing them.” My current literary agent declined to read it at all (“What’s the point?”). And so I sent it out myself, carefully–agonzingly. The “high” in this road is having landed at Galileo Press, where working with my editor, Barrett Warner, has been a dream.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

If you’re stuck, it’s most likely not a writing problem—it’s a thinking problem.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I wrote each of these essays separately over a period of about five years. When I put them together—and especially when I read the final one in the context of the others—I was stunned to see the threads that ran through all of them and bound them tightly together. So, not a “miscellaneous collection” at all! When I revised them as a whole, now thinking of them as a whole, I kept that surprise in mind . . . and let myself be surprised along the way, all over again.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

This book is a love letter: to my friend Judith—who used to say, “If you say so,” sweetly and utterly insincerely, whenever I said something she didn’t agree with or just didn’t want to hear (which was often)—and to the tight community of serious amateur dancers we were, and I still am, a part of; to my father, who looms as large in my life a decade after his death as he did for the six decades before it; to all the rest of my human family, as well as all the animals (the dog who was supposed to be mine, but who was singularly devoted to my father; the dog who was supposed to be my daughter’s, but was singularly devoted to me, and was my closest companion and only consolation after my father’s death; and all the others—including, most painfully, the pandemic-adopted puppy whose life story is at the heart of the essay “Animal Behavior”) I have considered family; the Victorian-era house that has come to feel like part of me; and, well, to be completely honest, just about all the other things and people that constitute the story of my life. (Except for a few things/people that it’s the opposite of a love letter to, like my high school boyfriend, or a love/hate letter to, like the cigarettes I smoked for fifteen years.)

Interview with Marianne Jay Erhardt

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Lucky Bodies is a collection of essays on motherhood, imagination, and care. The essays range from the personal to the political and include subjects such as Aesop’s Fables, 90s television, mythology, family lore, fairy tales, religion, and Busby Berekly chorus girls. These essays take inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers. Together, they imagine how we might make and inhabit stories that cultivate an ethic of care.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

“Blueberry Hill” was the first essay I wrote for this book. I was reading Richard McClosky’s Blueberries for Sal with my son — 5 or so at the time — and he asked me why the mother in the book didn’t have a name. We then turned to other storybooks on his shelf and saw that those mothers, too, were nameless. I wrote “Blueberry Hill” as a letter to Sal’s mother. It was the first time I’d written creative nonfiction in years. And I felt a whole world of possibilities open up…how I might explore personal questions through some of the stories that have made me.

I struggled with writing “Relentless Healing.” This essay has been many things, including a deep dive into a 1990’s TV show (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). I struggled with allowing it to be as odd and focused as it is. The essay itself is interested in what is worth remembering / saving / writing about. In one episode I discuss, the town gets ready for its Founder’s Day celebration and prepares a time capsule. There is a debate about what to include. A bottle of whiskey? A newspaper? Hair clippings from the barber shop? The characters argue. Are these things artifacts or symptoms? As I wrote this section, I realized that this is a question that lives in me every time I sit down to write. Why this? Why this? At present, I think what’s important is the attention, and not the object or subject of that attention. Put anything in the time capsule. It will tell the story.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I pitched this book to a number of agents, some of whom loved it but said they couldn’t sell an essay collection. I submitted to different presses and contests and was a finalist for a number of prizes. Along the way, I published many of the essays individually. Last year, I made peace with the fact that this book might never be published as a book, and I was happy enough that a number of the essays had found a home. Soon after, I learned that I won the Iron Horse Prize!

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

At a Tin House Winter Workshop lecture a couple of years ago, Paul Tran said something that I now think of every time I sit down to write: “Write the thing that will set you free and then give it a body.”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised at how winning the Iron Horse Prize brought me a clearer vision of the book. I knew what I needed to revise (and I revised a lot!) More importantly, I knew when the book was done. I was shocked to find myself at the end of it!

How did you find the title of your book?

The word “luck” shows up more than 25 times in the book. At one point in the essay “Luck Now,” there is a 20-year gap in time between a formative teenage experience and my marriage. I wake up next to my husband “many lucky bodies later.” The bodies here are mostly mine — the versions of me that have had good fortune, or narrow misses, or bad experiences that could have been much worse, and also the things I have worked for and earned but have been dismissed as mere “luck.” The bodies are also the essays themselves. Lucky to be written, published, gathered in a book. (Maybe they don’t feel lucky; I will never know.) For a while, the book was called Lucky Bodies Later but eventually I settled on Lucky Bodies.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

In the essay “Relentless Healing,” we spend some time in a 1996 television commercial for Kellogg’s Rice Krispy Treats. If you were to make them as they appear in the ad, simply use the standard recipe. Once they are cut and cooled, stay in your kitchen reading and eating them alone. Call out to your family, “These things take time!” When you have had your fill, smudge your face with flour. Sprinkle yourself with water from your kids’ fishtank. Make it look like these treats were a lot of work. Carry the plate into the next room, where you family waits, perpetually hungry.

Interview with Nicole Graev Lipson

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Mothers and Other Fictional Characters explores the world’s strange and relentless desire to reduce women to stock characters, and how easy it is to find ourselves complicit in this process, until we no longer know what parts of us are real. I mine this territory by writing as intimately and honestly as I possibly can about the ways fiction has infiltrated my life—as a girl, a young adult, a mother, and a woman at middle age—and by searching the work of my literary foremothers for clues to truer ways of being. In some ways, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is as much about the subversive power of reading as it is about womanhood.  

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

My whole purpose in writing this book was to break boundaries! The boundaries imposed on women to keep us in our place, the boundaries between the surface stories we tell about ourselves and the messier truths below, the boundaries between our genuine selves and the selves we’ve been conditioned to project.

To crack through these boundaries, I knew I had to be as honest about my experiences and internal weather as possible, which often led me into territory considered taboo, especially for women. In one essay, I write about my brief but utterly destabilizing extramarital attraction to a younger man when I hit middle age. In another, I explore the tension of being both an introvert and a mother of three, and my recurring urges to flee my family for solitude; and in another, I write about the difficult chemistry between me and my middle child, whose temperament is so different than mine.

These are all things we as women aren’t supposed to feel or admit to. We aren’t supposed to lust after other men when we are happily married; we aren’t supposed to fantasize about abandoning our family; and we aren’t supposed to talk honestly about the difficult aspects of our relationships with our children. But these urges and desires and complexities are precisely what make us human. I’ve tried to show in my book that when a woman stifles her own complexity, she stifles her humanity—which I’d argue, in a patriarchal culture, is precisely the point. In her beautiful blurb, Kelly McMasters describes Mothers and Other Fictional Characters as an “urgent searchlight, shining across the most complicated parts of existing as a multidimensional woman in a binary world.” I love this description so much. This is preciselywhat I longed to do on every page.

In terms of courage, I have my children to thank for this. Becoming a mother magnified all of the concerns and injustices that had always consumed me, because having children made the stakes more urgent than ever. It was one thing, say, for our culture’s misogynistic beauty standards to turn me against my own body, but the thought of my daughters one day despising their own perfect bodies, or of my son suppressing his tender spirit to adhere to masculine norms, pulled me to the page in whole new way.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

One of the high points has been the incredible creative community writing and publishing this book helped me find. I began the writing process in a very solitary way—it was just me and a vision and the page, and this could often feel scary and lonely. But over time, working on the book became a portal to incredible friendships and connections with other writers and aspiring authors, both here in Boston where I live, and elsewhere–thanks to the internet, online writing groups, and conferences. I’ve drawn so much comfort and inspiration from these relationships.

I wouldn’t necessarily call this a “low,” but one challenge I grappled with was navigating writing about loved ones. My story is so rooted in domestic life and the nuances of family relationships, and it was impossible to tell such a story without conjuring the people who animate the landscape of my daily life: my husband, my children, my parents, and my dearest friends. I wished so often that there were a single hard and fast rule I could follow to ensure I would handle this flawlessly, but really, I just had to feel my way through, making sure at every turn that I’d rendered the people in my life with truthfulness, compassion and kindness. I don’t mean a saccharine or glossed-over sort of kindness, but rather a spirit of deep regard for the humanity, complexity, and struggles of others. I don’t think what we as humans most deeply yearn for is to be seen as perfect. I think we yearn to be seen in all of our complexity and imperfection, and loved nonetheless. It was this type of love that guided my choices on the page.  

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I’ve recommended Brenda Ueland’s totally charming craft book If You Want to Write to so many fellow writers and aspiring authors over the years. It’s frank, big-hearted and full of helpful wisdom. Ueland wrote the book in 1938, which is miraculous to me because her insights feel so modern. You’ll have to excuse the dated universal male pronouns in my favorite quote from the book, which is: “Everybody is original if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self, and not from the self he thinks he should be.”

This is such simple but profound advice. I know firsthand how easy it is to default to writing from a place of should, which in the end is a pretty dreary place to write from. While I was working on Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, pushing past should to write from a place of what is—in all its messiness and weirdness and beauty and splendor—made the writing process far more interesting and unexpected than it would otherwise have been. And I’m hopeful that this openness of spirit shows up in the writing.  

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

As a bookworm and former high school English teacher, I knew that my encounters with literature would be an important part of the book. From the start, there were some writers I knew I’d focus on—like Kate Chopin and Adrienne Rich—because their influence has been so central to my life. But otherwise, the process of weaving in literature was very organic, and I was often surprised by the connections that emerged between my reading life and whatever lived experience I was writing about: Philip Roth shows up in an essay about raising a son. Gwendolyn Brooks shows up in an essay about trying to decide what do with my unused frozen embryos. Michel de Montaigne shows up in an essay about my love for my closest friend Sara. I wasn’t aware how much these writers had shaped my world view until they showed up unannounced in my work!

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I want readers to know that I wrote the book for them. Over coffee recently, a novelist friend of mine mentioned that he never thinks about his audience when writing. “The moment I picture a reader,” he said, “I start doubting myself, ruining the entire process.” While I was working on Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, my feelings toward my own imagined readers could not have been more different. I wrote with an awareness that my words—like any writer’s words—were only half the story, a tale lying dormant until another human stepped in to give it pulse and meaning. My greatest hope for the book is that it helps readers feel seen, understood, and a little less alone.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

I love this question! I had to go back through the book to jog my memory, and a few tasty things do appear in its pages, including cherry wine, birthday cake, mint chocolate chip ice cream, cheese fondue, tostones, hamburgers, macaroni, Runts, lasagna, canned soup, potato chips. It’s dawning on me that I may need to see a nutritionist.

Interview with Ellen Birkett Morris

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by Bradley Sides

Memorable characters guide much of the work of Ellen Birkett Morris. Her story collection, Lost Girls, gave us a splendid cast of female protagonists dealing with loss, grief, and acceptance in and around Kentucky. Her new novel, Beware the Tall Grass, goes even further in developing strong characters. It tells the story of the inexplicable connection between Eve Sloan, a modern mother whose young son has past life memories of war, and Thomas Boone, a young soldier in Vietnam. This is a book ripe with the truth of its characters; this is a book that successfully explores the big themes of life such as loss and love and family. As we read page after page, we want to know–have to know–how the stories of Thomas and Eve will end.

It was a pleasure to be able to talk to Morris about her writing.

Bradley Sides: Ellen, you are so good at creating and building characters. I want to start by asking you about them. As you begin a project, whether it’s a story or a longer project like Beware the Tall Grass, how do you find your characters? Do you feel like you know them well as you get started? Or do they develop as the project grows?

Ellen Birkett Morris: Thank you. I built the character Eve with the idea that I needed a character who would have the hardest time with the uncertainty and pain of her young son being traumatized by memories of war. Eve had a rough childhood and dreams of giving her son the perfect childhood, so Charlie’s challenges were a nightmare for her. I have come to believe that my job is to develop a character with specific traits and then put them in situations that test their nature in every way, forcing them to find a new way to look at the world.

One way I get to know them as I start is to give them passions (sculpture for Eve, horse for Thomas), past memories, friendships, family relations. These choices begin to come together to form the characters. The more I populate their world with specific detail the more real they become to me and readers.

Eve developed as I wrote, her emotions got deeper, and her understanding of relationships got more nuanced. It was fun to see her develop on the page. I had to take my time to let that happen. The same was true of Thomas, who went to war as a naive boy and had his values tested at every turn.

BS: With the kind of depth they have, do you ever have trouble letting them go once the story is over?

EBM: The women and girls from Lost Girls have stayed with me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come up again in short stories. I think I have told the stories of Eve and Thomas to completion. That said, I think of Thomas a lot. I love his character and commitment to doing the right thing.

BS: Expanding just a bit, but how did your writing process differ from creating stories for Lost Girls to creating a longer narrative with Beware the Tall Grass?

EBM: I really considered myself a short story writer when I started writing the novel. I was so used to drawing characters sharply in a small space and dropping in on their peak moments. So, I wrote Eve’s story as a short story first. I was published in Upstreet under the title “Landing Zone Albany.” I was at the Antioch Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs when my instructor Erin Flanagan suggested the story would make a good novel. I knew I needed a way to make myself comfortable with the process, which for me meant pretending I was writing something much shorter and tackling it short chapter by short chapter. I also knew I needed another POV character, so I came up with the idea of a soldier fighting in the same war that Eve’s son Charlie has disturbing memories of. Adding Thomas’s story allowed me to create a braided narrative that had echoes between each section and held more meaning and significance. I also made sure I had a narrative roadmap for each character, a step-by-step sense of places they would go either in the quest to help Charlie with his disturbing memories in Eve’s case or areas/battles in Vietnam in Thomas’s case. I won’t lie, the writing was hard work. I jokingly compare the creation of this novel to chipping away at a mountain with nail scissors.

BS: To play off construction, I’m always so impressed when I read novels that balance multiple perspectives and timelines as well as yours does. Did you write the book going back and forth with Thomas and Eve? Or did you write the stories separately and later combine them to form a cohesive narrative?

EBM: I wrote the novel alternating between the Thomas and Eve sections. I like an intuitive approach and knew that I could clean things up later if needed. The best thing this did for me was to allow for unconscious (and later, in revision, conscious) echoes in the text, repeated images, tone or mood that helped heighten the bond between the different sections for the reader. One example is a section midway through the book where Eve revels in a peaceful evening at home, while Thomas goes walking in the night and encounters deer. Both characters got a moment of grace before the drama ratcheted back up.

BS: Beware the Tall Grass explores the idea of past lives, which I find to be absolutely fascinating. When did the inspiration come?

EBM:In 2014, I was on a road trip with my husband and heard an NPR story on the University of Virginia Medical Center program that attempted to corroborate the past life stories of young children with the experiences they describe. These children talk about being in war, the Holocaust and being present during terrorism. The researchers would hear the stories and look at news accounts and records to see if they matched the details of the story the children told. A surprising number of times they did match. The idea was so big, so fascinating. The only way I had the courage to try to tell a story based on this phenomenon was to let myself off the hook when it came to explaining the unexplainable. I wrote the story in as straightforward a fashion as I could, deeply exploring each character’s experience of it and letting them draw any eventual conclusions as to what was going on. I was anchored in the telling by my desire to explore a truth we all know: the life we get often isn’t the one we expected to get. We are all tested. What matters is how we rise to the test.

BS: In what ways, if at all, do you see your books as being in conversation with one another?

EBM: I think they are both books about courage in the face of adversity and what we will do for love.

BS: Since we both graduated from the Queens MFA program, I think it’s only fitting that I ask you this question to end our time together: How did earning an MFA impact your writing career?

EBM: It reinforced lessons I had already learned about craft and provided me with a wonderful community. The most important thing it did was help me grow in confidence as a writer. One of my mentors, Steven Rinehart, called me a “prose stylist.” Susan Perabo said she believed the truth of what was happening in a short story I shared with class. David Payne has been a great supporter of my work post-MFA. That has been an enormous gift as I have found my way as a writer.

***

Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, and the upcoming novella, The Volcano Keeper, which will be out from Regal House in the fall of 2026. His fiction has been featured on LeVar Burton Reads. He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. For more, visit www.bradley-sides.com.

Read more about Ellen Birkett Morris: https://www.ellenbirkettmorris.com/

Interview with K.E. Semmel

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This interview is reprinted with permission from Work in Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

THE BOOK OF LOSMAN is about a literary translator in Copenhagen with Tourette Syndrome who becomes involved in a dubious and experimental drug study to retrieve his childhood memories in a tragicomic effort to find a cure for his condition.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Daniel P. Losman—who goes simply by Losman—was very much a fun character to write. I’ve written 7 completed manuscripts over the past 30 years, five novels and two collections of stories (there were more manuscripts I simply abandoned). Nearly all of those manuscripts contain stories and characters that involve background research. This is especially so with one manuscript, a retelling of Beowulf set in the Southern Tier region of New York State. I spent 10 years writing that book, which is called IN THE COUNTRY OF MONSTROUS CREATURES. To do it properly, I had to read and reread Beowulf, I had to research the process of fracking (which plays an outsize role in the novel), and I had to invest a great deal of time learning more about this region of the state. I am from New York State—I love New York!—but I grew up in the Finger Lakes. There are great differences between these regions. Since I was after a certain degree of verisimilitude, research was necessary.

I pitched agents and eventually signed with one who loved the Beowulf retelling. He shopped it around and I got a lot of wonderful responses from major editors and publishers, though all of which were, ultimately, rejections. So I ended up giving up on the novel. Now it’s just a lonely Word doc on my laptop. I mention all this because, with The Book of Losman, I wanted to tell a simpler story, one that didn’t take a decade to finish or force me to spend countless hours doing research. I felt I knew Losman from the start. The two of us share some commonalities. He is a literary translator with Tourette, like me, and because of this his character traits slotted into place rather easily. Also, he lives in Denmark as I once did. Losman is not me, far from it. But because my life experiences are close to his, I didn’t have to do as much research. As a result, I was able to write the first draft in less than two years. 

The hardest character for me to write was Losman’s crush, Caroline Jensen. She’s an artist, and a bit of an odd duckling. I had to figure out a way to create her character without resorting to caricature. I didn’t want to write a story with a traditional romance, either, so there’s this awkward tension between them throughout the novel. Balancing that tension took some effort.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

One interesting tidbit: this book actually started as a memoir. But the writing felt forced, and I limped along, not certain how to go about putting together a memoir. Besides, I kept asking myself, who wants to read a sad story about a boy with Tourette? I sure didn’t. I wanted to write something that contained both sadness and humor but was still entertaining. I’d been chewing on one particular idea for years—What if there was a pill that could return our childhood memories to us?—and it dawned on me that this was the perfect story for that idea. So I pulled one small scene from the memoir, the “truest” scene, and reimagined the entire book as fiction. Once I did that, the flood gates opened and the writing gushed. Fiction has always been my preferred medium. (Though I will add that I published a personal essay in HuffPost that served as all I wanted to say, or would have said, in a memoir.)

My agent loved this manuscript too, and he gave me some feedback that I incorporated. The book went out on submission but, like with the Beowulf retelling, I ended up getting only rejections. They were nearly all uniformly praiseful of my writing, but such praise often feels hollow when it’s accompanied by the words “it’s not right for us” or “we hope it finds the right home.”

While the book was out on submission, I began writing a middle grade novel. Once it became clear that The Book of Losman was going to suffer the same fate as In the Country of Monstrous Creatures, I made the decision to drop my agent (it was an amicable split; he does not represent middle grade books). I assumed, wrongly, that I would be able land another agent. I still don’t have an agent—and it’s not for lack of trying!

But I never stopped believing in The Book of Losman, so I submitted the manuscript to SFWP’s Literary Awards Program two or three years ago. I’ve known the publisher, Andrew Gifford, for years. SFWP published my translation of Simon Fruelund’s collection of stories, Milk, in 2013, and I even published a number of interviews with translators at SFWP’s online literary journal for a few years (“Translator’s Cut,” I called my interview series). Since I playfully incorporate stories and characters (and themes) from Simon’s work in The Book of Losman—the opening chapter is very much a reimagining of Simon’s story “Kramer” from that collection—the manuscript found fertile soil at SFWP. The manuscript didn’t win the contest, in fact it only made the longlist, but Andrew liked the story and decided to take a chance on publishing it. Around the same time, another indie publisher offered me a contract to publish the book, but I knew SFWP was the right choice. This has absolutely proved true.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Don’t take rejection personally. Your work can be rejected for many reasons, but you’ve got to keep plugging away, chasing your vision, and getting better. Once you find your stories, good things will happen. It may take 30 years, as it did for me, but if you’re patient and willing to work through all the rejections, you’ll publish your work eventually.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I don’t write with an outline. I put a character in a situation and see what happens, building the story as I go along. So in this sense, everything that happens is a surprise. It’s this kind of creativity that excites me enough to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get back to work. It’s not until after the draft is complete that I go back and make sure things connect properly. Sometimes I have to rewrite or remove scenes, but generally speaking, in the first draft, I want to write as though I’m a reader engaging with this story for the first time. Which I am.

The biggest thing that surprised me in this particular novel is just how much Simon Fruelund’s work influenced the story. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, since I’ve known him for more than fifteen years and I’ve translated three of his books. Simon’s ideas on literature and fiction have also proven hugely important to me. And he’s a friend. The Book of Losman is, in a sense, an homage to his work.

Still, even though I deliberately began The Book of Losman with a reimaging from one of his stories, I didn’t quite anticipate that Losman would share certain character affinities with Pelle, say, the main character from Simon’s novel The World and Varvara (published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023) or that Losman would also be working on a book, like Pelle, with a publisher breathing down his neck. It was only after writing the manuscript that I realized how deep the connection ran. I don’t mind this at all. I love Simon’s books, and I think it’s wonderful that my novel is engaged in a dialogue with them.

How did you find the title of your book?

The Book of Losman has been the title for as long as I can remember, though I did hem and haw a bit once I realized there were already a lot of books that included “The Book of—” in the title. I debated just calling it Losman. But I couldn’t shake one important thematic significance that would justify me calling it simply Losman. There’s a kind of meta-quality to this novel, right from the opening sentence:

“When he moved to Copenhagen with his Danish girlfriend, Kat, fifteen years ago, Losman imagined his life like a Fodor’s guidebook, rich with possibility and adventure.”

Simply put: As a character, Losman is a kind of “book” to be read, translated, and understood. The narrative follows a circular pattern that only becomes clear at the end. So, to me, The Book of Losman always had to be the title. I’m happy with it.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

My favorite Danish pastry makes an appearance: Tebirkes! They are hunks of buttery deliciousness.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://kesemmel.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Losman-K-Semmel/dp/1951631374/

Interview with Jody Hobbs Hesler

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Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When Noreen is eight years old, her beloved aunt Nonie dies from suicide. This loss, compounded by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. The same age now as her aunt was when she died, Noreen is a young mother stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage whose imminent crisis will force her to choose between allowing history to repeat itself or setting a new course. (More details below!)

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Both Noreen and her aunt Nonie act as point-of-view characters. Of the two, Nonie arrived in my mind more fully formed. She’s a deeply complicated person who struggles with self-worth and mental illness, but I enjoyed every moment of bringing her to the page. I loved her whimsy, her close-to-the-bone vulnerability, and her big, beautiful heart.

Noreen’s character demanded more from me. The sweep of the novel’s timeline encompasses a much broader swath of Noreen’s life than Nonie’s, following her from eight to twenty-seven years old. Rendering her character consistently, but with believable growth across decades, was tricky. Sometimes I resorted to writing letters to her in my journal, posing questions about her personality and motivations. Asking the questions implied answers could exist, so the rhetorical exercise nearly always yielded them.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

By the time the world started opening up again after pandemic lockdown, I had two books ready to shop around—my story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and Without You Here. I’m a careful vs. high-volume submitter, so I curated my way through lists of agents before turning to small presses and curating my way through them, over months and months. Without You Here came awfully close to acceptance at a different publisher in spring of 2021. That rejection after a particularly close call, punched me in my hopes. I felt like I’d already queried the universe, so where was I meant to turn now?

In a wacky turn of events, Cornerstone Press accepted my first book, the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, in September of 2021, then that December, Flexible Press accepted Without You Here. Going from zero books to two within three months after achingly long years of near misses, new projects, rewrites, and busts, knocked me sideways—in the best possible way. For a long while, it felt like a few hamsters were galloping on their wheels in my head, stopping short every now and then to say to each other, “Two books? Two?” before hopping on again. And both presses have been truly lovely to work with.  

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I have a couple. In a writing conference workshop, someone asked Tim O’Brien about how to avoid sentimentality, and he said, “Don’t worry about sentiment. Worry about fraudulence.” Which I love, because a lot of writers favor action over poignancy or skew in the opposite direction by overtelling emotional reactions. So don’t avoid feeling, embrace it. Show its ugly neediness or extravagant beauty with precision and honesty.

Another favorite comes from Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” Which is something I tell students and fellow writers when they’re trying something wild and new. Yes, it could work—Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible just because it hasn’t been done—but don’t expect it to be easy.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The final (hard-won) draft of this book follows a nonlinear structure. I knew from early on that maintaining the pressure of a past event over the course of twenty years of Noreen’s life would require something different structurally, but I had no idea what. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, which explores a host of nontraditional plot shapes, assured me that an asynchronous timeline could work, and my adult children helped input chapter descriptions into a spreadsheet then organized them into a potentially functional sequence. I wasn’t sure until I’d finally fit all the pieces together that this spiraling timeline could achieve what I’d wanted it to; realizing that it did was a happy surprise.

Along the way there were plenty of other surprises. Nonie and Noreen are bigger risk takers than I am, so I had to create misadventures for them that I would never have joined. I was always surprised, and relieved, when those episodes rang true. It was also interesting and surprising when snippets of my own life experience showed up in a scene here or there, disguised completely as belonging to the characters in the book.

How did you find the title of your book?

For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title worked for me because it showed their fondness for each other and the depth of their affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, but they strike me as cutesy and saccharine. This isn’t a cute story, so I didn’t want anyone making the same association.

A late-stage revision generated a scene where Nonie says to Noreen, “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” and that line resonated right away. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. Almost as soon as I wrote the line, I knew I’d found the title.

****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

www.jodyhobbshesler.com

ORDER THIS BOOK:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/without-you-here-jody-hobbs-hesler/21428898?ean=9798988721383

Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of WITHOUT YOU HERE (September 10, 2024; Flexible Press) and WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BETTER (October, 2023; Cornerstone Press). She serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. You can visit her at jodyhobbshesler.com.

Synopsis for WITHOUT YOU HERE (September 10, 2024; Flexible Press)

Noreen, twenty-seven, is the same age as her beloved Aunt when she died by suicide.

When Noreen was little, she had a special connection to her Aunt Nonie, her namesake and kindred spirit. They seem to understand each other in a way that no one else can. But what Noreen is too young to understand is that her aunt is spinning out of control, her grasp on reality slipping, her alcohol use accelerating, her personal life in shambles. Noreen’s mom, Nonie’s sister, tries to help—jobs, housing, counselors—but Nonie is not getting better.

The only thing Nonie can hold onto is her niece, who she loves more than anything in the world. But when Noreen is playing on a tire swing under Nonie’s supervision there’s an accident, sending Noreen to the hospital and Nonie into a spiral from which she will not recover.

From that day in 1980 to the last months of 1999, Noreen’s life spirals around the axis of Nonie’s suicide, tightening the past’s pressure on the present.

Now an adult, Noreen finds herself a young mother trapped in a marriage with a controlling, manipulative husband. Or is she? She is haunted by the memory of her aunt, and she is afraid her own grasp on reality is slipping away. In the end Noreen is left to ask: Will her life forever be defined by her aunt? And can she stop history from repeating itself?