Feeling and Fiction: A Brief Conversation Between Michael Kimball and Karen Lillis

Karen: I was thinking about the fact that good, emotionally-resonant experimental narrative is more rare to find than the heady or detached kind. I've been meaning to ask you, who were your prose influences when you started learning to write like you do now? I was really influenced by some European women writers a friend turned me on to—Marie Redonnet, Fleur Jaeggy, Annie Ernaux, Anna Kavan. And also, Kathy Acker and Clarice Lispector.

Michael: I especially like Annie Ernaux out of that list and she creates an interesting distinction here. The sentences are not really experimental, but her narration is; in Simple Passion, we don't get a linear narrative or a plot-driven version of the relationship, but a kind of thematic narrative of how she comes to understand the relationship. And you're right, though I've never really thought of it that way, experimental and emotional don't often go together. For me, there were parts of Faulkner, and some Richard Brautigan, also early Michael Ondaatje (up to In the Skin of a Lion, when his narration becomes much more normative), and Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster. But mostly it was processing my sensibility, my desire for feeling, through an aesthetic that was trying to write novels in different ways. What was it about those European writers that appealed to you?

Karen: I remember I was really struck by a tension in Redonnet's novellas—between some huge, deep emotions being expressed, but the narrator's voice was very controlled and even repressed. There was this struggle for voice, this struggle for the narrator to tell the story, although the writer was telling the story beautifully, because the story WAS that tension. Jaeggy and Kavan had that quality as well, that kind of dissonance. It spoke to the female upbringing for me. Ernaux was much more open-throated, I connected to her work in perhaps the opposite way, there was this pure joy of telling exactly the story she wanted to tell you. Like the adult woman getting her chance to tell the truth, finally—the truth about the very things we are encouraged to keep in the dark. And Acker certainly had voice going for her too, but she was at a whole different level. Acker amazes me—she manages to be able to write at a cerebral level at the same time that she’s conveying urgent desire and intense, large feelings. Speaking of it as text, I’d say she’s combining symbolic imagery, poetic narrative, and moments of speaking very directly to the reader—in other words text as image, text as rhythm, and text as voice. Lispector uses these three elements in her most ambitious narratives, too, but in a different emotional register for yet a different effect. But both Acker and Lispector write with an openness of heart as well as throat.

Michael: One of the common threads between the books that we're both talking about is voice, and the way that using a particular voice allows the writer to get at emotional content that they may not be able to convey in other ways. In Ernaux's Simple Passion, the story easily could have become sentimental, but it never does; she gives us this stripped down, straightforward voice, a rare simplicity that allows her to tell the reader honest things about emotional and physical need. In Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster, the character of Ellen Foster has a child's innocent voice, and an innocent understanding of events, which allows a terrible story to be told. And it's something that I put to use in The Way the Family Got Away. The child narrators are only able to tell us those extreme things the way they do because they are child narrators, because it is in first person and because the children are talking like children. They don’t understand what is happening, but they try to tell the story anyway. If the story is told another way, that feeling is lost.

Karen: Yes, “If the story is told another way, that feeling is lost”—that’s it exactly. The voice IS the story. I loved The Way The Family Got Away, and I really connected to the narration—to the child narrators. They’re telling the story in simple statements but it’s heart wrenching to read because you’ve embodied these simple—deceptively simple—words in these particular grieving children. You created this dissonance, which then creates a compassion. Adults tend to avoid grief by staying busy, but it’s hard to avoid grief when you have a very pared-down view of the world. This simple narration—it’s something I also used, in The Second Elizabeth. My narrator is not a child, but her voice regresses to a child-like one. Everything is described as if in slow motion. I had readers who thought the narrator sounded autistic. She regresses to this voice but the emotional trajectory is not downward—she needs to get very simple in language in order to tap a certain grief and then move past it. What did you think of Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life?

Michael: My Happy Life is such a great book, narrated by a woman who seems to have been abandoned in a mental institution and who only sees every terrible thing that has happened to her in the best possible terms. I'm so glad that Soft Skull is reprinting it. It is a great example of what we're talking about. There is a double narration going on in it—as there is in The Way the Family Got Away—what the narrator is telling us, that story, and then a second story, the sense that we as readers make of it. I read My Happy Life a few years ago and nobody else I knew had read it. I tried to pass it on to everybody. I don't know if you can tell that story with therapists or any other kind of narrator really. If you do, then that world, the narrator's world, is broken open and the energy somehow gets diffused.

Karen: I loved discovering the narrator's worlds in Redonnet's Hôtel Splendide, in Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline, in Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. , and yes, in Ernaux's Simple Passion. I loved these writers for finding ways to voice the stories that no one around me was telling. I needed these books. I was just hopscotching from one novella to the next, finding more words for my own life story and expression for my own emotions.

Michael: Those stories get told in different ways through the experimentation with the narration. And it does turn into a personal thing. Writing fiction, in the most basic way, can't not turn into a personal thing.

Karen: I like your phrase "my desire for feeling." Tell me more about that. What is your relationship between reading and feeling, or writing and feeling? Where do different kinds of novels figure in this for you?

Michael: My desire for feeling, it's something I've had to live with for as long as I can remember, both good and bad, but I wasn't finding anything similar in much of the fiction I was reading. Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter was a really important book to me. I can still remember the specific chair that I was sitting in, the apartment I was living in when I read that book. I read it in one sitting and I remember trying to finish it before it got dark. I didn’t want to turn the light on. I thought it might break the spell. I still have an emotional attachment to that book. In a lot of ways, it is those kinds of books that I read for and it is that kind of feeling that I am always working with in my own fiction. How Much of Us There Was was written out of a great affection and a need to resolve grief. How does feeling work its way into your fiction?

Karen: In some ways, everything I’ve written has been absolutely straight non-fiction. But the emotional POV made the elements of the stories heightened and less like what we call “everyday life.” Often when I write I’m holding a microscope up to unseen realms—literally, realms that are just out of sight—train tracks that are walled off by trees and vines, freight trains that disappear and then return, interior life we can't see, things that happen in the dark of night, lovers who are far away in time or space. When I’m working on a novel, I’m experiencing these things in my daily life as non-fiction, but as writing it comes full circle to land in the realm of imagination again. So, I guess I write literary fiction by trying hard to capture my emotional life as it coincides with exterior life.

Michael: It’s not unlike what some of my actor friends would say about working up a different role. Also, there is some interesting psychological research on memory and emotion that suggests that the same parts of the brain are activated when we experience something and when we remember experiencing that thing. I've never seen any research on it, but I have often thought that something similar is happening to writers when they are writing in their fictional worlds. We experience those feelings we are creating and they become a kind of emotional memory for us. Staying with the idea of feeling, are there stylistic things that you're doing, or not doing, to help you to convey that emotional content?

Karen: Stylistically? Let’s see, I tend to avoid college-level vocabulary. I’m careful about what I read, because I’m a sponge for the tone and cadence of other writers. (Sometimes I arrange a reading list like a hopeful recipe.) I pay attention to the words that come into my head first thing when I wake up—in that liminal space between night and day that Djuna Barnes writes of in Nightwood. I usually read my prose aloud to myself and make sure it scans well—the aural rhythm is a helpful guide for me. One shorter piece I wrote called “NY/LA Whirlwind Romance” was composed entirely of one-liners that a fellow said to me. It was a memory exercise, but an emotional one. I remembered verbatim the words that had seared their way into my infatuated heart, for better and then for worse. Not unlike the way you recalled where you were when you read Coming Through Slaughter. For me, a lot goes on in preparing to get to the page, moreso than making style choices after I get to the page. What about you? Do you sit down and try things out, like writing exercises? Or do you tend to work off of inspiration?

Michael: I've never done writing exercises and inspiration seems rare to me, though every once in a while something happens in my writing that feels like inspiration. Actually, Dear Everybody wouldn't exist if not for a rare bout of inspiration. But mostly, I work off of work. Once I have a voice, a way of speaking, everything opens up. But I don’t want that voice to be a normative way of speaking. I want it to be skewed somehow, in both thought and language. And then I let the voice tell me where to go and how to say things. The words the voice has already spoken, so to speak, will determine the words that the voice is going to say—and in that way many of the words in the English language, most of them, are eliminated from any particular piece of fiction. And I think you're onto something by avoiding college-level vocabulary. John Gardner was a big influence on me in this, the distinction he makes between the Germanic and Latinate parts of English, the Germanic being closer to feeling, the Latinate further from it.

Karen: That's really interesting—I've never heard that about Germanic vs. Latinate roots. But myself, I don't always avoid Latin. It was an early passion in my life, I starting studying it at age 12. I still see Latin roots in words and that becomes another method for playing with word choice when I'm writing. But it's not the thing that gets me to the page. Again, you got it exactly right when you said, "Once I have a voice, everything opens up." Finding writers I connect with helps me with that. I read three or four books of Redonnet's, and one day I woke up with The Second Elizabeth wanting to be told. It seems like certain stories, or emotions, are locked away inside me until I figure out which voice can bear to tell them.

Michael: In a sense, I don't think it matters how a writer approaches language as long as they do it in a strong and consistent way. It can be through the exclusion of certain words, the inclusion of a particular class of vocabulary, a particular approach of prefixes and suffixes, any number of things. I'm always trying to figure out new things to do with language that create affect. Karen: We've talked a lot about books we read a while back. Have any experimental books or writers come into your favor more recently? I think two of my last favorite prose discoveries were The Double Standard by Kathe Burkhart and Waking by Eva Figes. Michael: One very recent book of shorts, Kim Chinquee's Oh Baby, is full of invention and feeling. And there is a memoir that came out a few years ago—The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman that is innovative and heartbreaking. Also, everybody should read Will Eno's plays if anything we've said is of interest to them.