It's been a banner past few months for an oft-neglected genre: short stories. Short stories by women, even. First, there was Kristen Roupenian's viral New Yorker piece, "Cat Person." Now, there's author Danielle Lazarin's years-in-the-making and worth the wait, acclaimed debut collection "Back Talk."
With her tales of the intimate connections and disruptions of day to day life, Lazarin has created one of the most buzzed about books of the year. Salon spoke recently to the New York City native about her inspiration and about bringing literary domesticity back.
The fact that someone could sell a debut collection of short stories is mind boggling to me, Danielle. That’s an ambitious thing.
I had an undergrad degree in creative writing and a master's, and when you're in those programs, you cut your teeth on short stories. That’s what you're doing, and for a good reason. Short stories are great places to experiment and try things out and put your hands in everything. But outside, you're always told that you'd better have a novel.
I was working on a novel, and it just wasn’t quite coming together. I had that in my mind as, “This is what I need to.” Then I just had this moment where I was like, “But I want to work on these stories and I have a lot of them and they're good. What is my work worth if it can’t do what I really want to be working on?” So then I just committed to being like, “This is the book I’m working on. This is the book I want to find an agent with. This is who I am, and I'll cross that bridge when I come it," which is how I approach a lot of things. All I can control is what I’m working on, and if I can make the best version of it, then it should be enough. If it’s not enough, then hopefully it’s not because of anything I’ve done and I’ll just move on to the next thing.
So I was cautiously optimistic, but I’d been on the receiving end of enough, "You're never going to sell a short story collection."
I think there are two kinds of artists. There are the kind who have an instinct for, “I know what people want and I know how to tailor my work to that,” and then there are the ones who are, “I literally can’t do anything but what I love and I have to figure out how to find the people who are on board.”
I know that my career is just having the privilege to keep writing and to keep making work and hoping it connects with enough people that I can keep making it. I’ve never thought, I’m going to sell a short story collection. I think if I had gone on thinking that way, I would have been seriously disappointed. That’s the advantage also of being older and not having the same expectations I might have had ten or 15 years ago, when many people do sell their first books.
You’ve lived within so many of these stories for a long time.
When I look at the collection — I don’t think this is something that other people can necessarily see — I can see where I was and what I was trying to figure out about what it means to exist in that phase in my life. I was clearly looking back on what it means to be a child or what it means to be a teenager. I wrote a lot of stories about being a mother before I was a mother. Those stories are so much a part of my thinking about these questions of a woman through different points in life, and they represent all that experience up to this point.
You've talked about reckoning with the idea of domestic stories and the domestic as a legitimate subject for fiction.
I spent so much time kind of putting that aside. One of the best things that’s been written on this is Claire Vaye Watkins' essay on pandering. This idea that we all are like, “Well, I want to write more male-pleasing stories,” and you find yourself doing that. I wasn’t doing that, but there were stories where I thought, “I can’t write another story about teenage friendship. I cannot write a story about a mother who lives in the suburbs and who maybe doesn’t love her life.” It felt like I was going into the space that I knew people were dismissive of. As much as I have always considered myself a feminist and a bigmouth about it, there was this period in my 20s where I just started to buy into that in an internal way, and it was affecting my work. I was avoiding these stories that were important to me and important to women I knew and also, I should say, men as well.
I always say my stories wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. They're about relationships, often between men and women and families. I think the domestic sphere is also not just a sphere for women. One of my favorite domestic novels is James Salter’s "Light Years." That’s one of the most domestic novels ever written, and I remember reading it and being like, “This is super domestic and it’s compelling and it’s beautiful. If he can do it, I can do it, goddamn it.” This was part of something I took into the book, that I had put aside my own experience. And we can’t do that. We can’t do that to ourselves. Then the stories I'd avoided writing, once I wrote them, were the ones that came out really quickly and the ones that other women were very responsive to. They felt it because I think I felt it.
You're looking out at the world through a particularly female gaze and through the gaze of friendship and family at different stages of life. Why was that so important, to be so intentional about that?
I think we look to fiction for many things. We look to see ourselves sometimes, and sometimes we look for very different experiences — to learn more about experiences that we can’t access that take us out of our world. Or, I think, in a really great way, experiences we just don’t have access to because they're not identities that we have.
I also think that sometimes we just need to write our own stories — not that these are literally my stories. They're obviously fictionalized. I think there’s as much effort and work that goes into these stories of women’s lives as anything else that’s fictional.
There’s one story in particular that I had started writing, the one that takes place in New Jersey and a mother has three sons. It’s meant to be very mundane, and I kept putting it down and then I was just like, “This is the kind of thing women are afraid to write about.” They're afraid to write about motherhood because the motherhood identity is meant to subsume everything else. It was really important for me in that story, and many other stories where there are mothers, to remind people that mothers are people. They're not just a vessel for children. A mother won’t behave a certain way because she is a mother. That mother has a name. She has a character inside that experience of a kind of daily suffocation of having kids on a physical level. There’s a lot of blood in that story, which I’m very proud of. And then also being inside this woman’s head and all that’s going on, and trying to get those women out there as both mothers and people was really important to me.
It’s so funny because there's this really absurd idea that the world of women is so pristine and neat and tidy and we have to have chips that don’t make too much noise. In reality, this private world of women, this world that men don’t necessarily always see, is incredibly visceral.
Women’s bodies are always changing. Whether or not you choose to have children, from the time you're in your early adolescence through the whole of it, every four weeks or so, your body goes through a physical change, and it’s never the same. If you do choose to try and have children yourself, then there’s also that that you're dealing with. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t work. We have a tremendous body consciousness that we put aside to just get through the day. It’s not a big deal but it is a big deal. We deal with a lot physically, just in ourselves, and then if we end up being caretakers for other people, that just gets magnified and amplified and you just kind of plow through it.
One thing that always makes me crazy is, I don’t have to love it. It’s not fun cleaning up the nosebleeds or what's in the diaper. There’s physical mess in all of it. I wanted to have that physicality in the book in as many places as possible and to normalize it. And, you know, women get together and talk about their periods or whatever. We talk about it.
We talk about all fluids. All of them.
Yes. We don’t talk about how crunchy our chips are. Do you?
No.
But there is the world that is the outside, and that is male. The world is male, and then these experiences that half the world have is somehow not the world. Periods and morning sickness and cleaning up other people’s poop and dealing with male body fluids and all that stuff that we deal with — the default is that we don’t necessarily talk about those things in public because then somehow that is not the world, that is not the culture. It’s just so secret. And that’s a big theme in your book — secrets.
I’ve been talking about this book as the stories women tell each other behind closed doors. The reason we do that is because on the internet, the office, wherever, having these conversations in any public sphere is exhausting. God forbid a woman has an opinion in public. Women are constantly told that what they think is wrong no matter what it is. You want to get married, you're a bridezilla. You never want to get married, there must be something wrong with you; you're a cold person. So no matter what we do, there’s this sense that we’re always being watched and judged. There have to be safe spaces to have these conversations, and they're usually with other women and they're usually off the internet, lest you risk the wrath of complete strangers. Even if you don’t get attacked, it’s annoying to be told that what you feel or think is wrong when it’s literally your experience, your life, your body, your choices.
And it’s not just from men. I think about the whole thing where it’s like, someone else has had experiences that aren’t my experience, ergo they must not really exist. They couldn’t possibly, because it’s never happened to me.
I think this especially happens for marginalized groups. I’m a white straight woman. I don’t get a fraction of what people of color get that's just like, “Oh, your experience is meant to be universal.” Clearly I'm not writing for all women. There's so little space for these kinds of stories. It’s like the more marginalized you are, the louder the shouting is to make that voice go away.
Also, the idea that anything you write in fiction is an endorsement is fascinating to me. Sometimes you write things because they're interesting, and not everything that my characters do I think is a great choice, personally. Sometimes you write stories because stories need to be told.
When you present your art to the world, there is this implication that you're presenting yourself in an entirely confessional way.
And this idea of, "This is me, and don't you approve of everything here?" Which takes out all the nuance. As a fiction writer, I think most of us just feel like we create characters and then we let them do what they're going to do, which sounds very woo woo. But if you create somebody who’s real enough, they start to have their own volition. So many characters make bad choices. You have to create somebody and then put them in a situation that’s interesting. Then something comes out of that situation that is worth examining more closely, not because this is what it should mean to every person and there's no other way to look at it.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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