A Subterranean Kinship: Rachel Lyon and Leslie Jamison on Writing Separate But Related Books

As soon as I read Rachel Lyon’s riveting and lush new novel Fruit of the Dead—propulsive in my hands and heart, an intricate jigsaw of feeling—I had the unnerving sense of subterranean kinship between our two books, as if her novel, and my memoir, Splinters, had somehow been having a conversation without our realizing it, in some dark back room of our psyches.

Fruit of the Dead is a modern retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone that’s also a spellbinding account of a young woman’s hunger for freedom, the sordid underbelly of big pharma, and the siren call of addiction (plus, it’s set on a remote luxurious island!); and Splinters is about single motherhood, divorce, reckless love affairs, and urban rebirth; but both books are fueled, at their core, by the tangled bonds that endure between mothers and daughters.

We decided to have a conversation—about virginity, sexuality, mythology, melodrama, phantom partners, bull lust, and mistress genres—that ultimately felt as if it was simply catching up to the conversation our books had already begun.

–Leslie Jamison

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Rachel Lyon: There are so many eerie little echoes between our books, Leslie. The fierce, elastic love between mothers and daughters. The inclusion of children’s books, throughout. When I read your account of returning to Los Angeles, remembering “where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin,” I felt a pang.

I had to go back and reread my own passage in Fruit, when the teenage heroine walks home “dazed in the too-bright morning, passing churchgoers and runners, strangers that failed to see her and strangers that looked too hard, and her only thoughts were I’m not a virgin anymore and Can they tell.”

Leslie Jamison: The echoes, Rachel! For starters, I was immediately drawn to your book as a retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone: not only have I always loved this myth, but a few years ago my daughter developed an absolute obsession with it. (She even dressed as Persephone one year for Halloween, wearing her favorite flower-covered dress and clutching a pomegranate in one palm; and I still carry a not-insubstantial amount of rage toward the little boy who told her it “wasn’t a real costume.”)

I’ve wondered if my daughter’s particular connection to the myth had something to do with her life as a child shuttling between two homes, but I think the myth speaks to something even deeper: the pain and freedom of being a daughter who must separate from your mother, and the pain of being a mother who recognizes that your daughter is no longer part of you—that she is no longer part of your body, and that she belongs to worlds that are not your world.

I think of the myth even as I type these words to you tonight, sitting in a dark bar on one of the two nights of the week that my daughter spends with her father, feeling that there is a freedom in being here, but I’m also aware of its price.

I’d love to ask you a bit more about your relationship to the myth, both as a point of origin for your novel and as a theater of illumination: What did the myth help you explore about the fraught relationship between Cory and Emer? What did myth open up for you that psychological realism can’t quite capture? And how did myth help you develop or sharpen your sense of the characters of these two women?

I noticed the chapter titles were drawn from Hugh G. Evelyn White’s translation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and I appreciated the attention to Demeter’s flight here—this isn’t just her daughter’s story. I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which different versions of the myth figure Persephone’s agency in different ways—the underworld as prison vs. the underworld as a place where she gets to build a world apart from her mother—and that made me wonder how the differences between various versions of the myth might have offered you useful traction or inspiration?

RL: My relationship to the myth didn’t really begin until I noticed its premise and structure mirrored that of my own work-in-progress. I was already working on a novel about a young woman seduced by an older man, and his dark, unfamiliar world. On a mechanical level, I liked the idea of adopting the myth as a kind of scaffold for my plot, building my story upon an ancient foundation. On a thematic level, I felt that incorporating the myth would allow my novel to speak implicitly to the ancientness of this story about power, seduction, and betrayal.

More to your question, though, on the level of character, my main protagonist was young—as I drafted, she aged down, from her early twenties to about sixteen, before settling at eighteen, in the end—and the feelings and self-talk of people that age, in my experience, can feel so epic. Ditto for a mother in crisis. God, motherhood! Has anything ever made you feel more like an helpless screw-up failure, on one hand, and, on the other hand, simultaneously, like some pure and near-divine wellspring of love?

You write about this very problem with beautiful honesty in Splinters: “In recovery, I’d spent a decade trying to move past the melodrama of self-hatred. But, during my divorce, the siren call of extreme thinking got so powerful again—the urge to see myself as either innocent or diabolical, when of course I was neither….”

This was just one of many sections in the book with which I found myself identifying to an almost spooky (divine??) degree—in much the way that, in a recovery meeting, you’ll often hear someone say, “You told my story.” When your daughter needed a Band-Aid, it was my daughter I seemed to remember whimpering on the toilet seat, showing me her bleeding “little ham.” When things between you and C were becoming intolerable on the page, I started a real-life argument with my husband! (He talked me off the ledge.)

On a literary level, I feel like you achieve this through some kind of alchemical sleight-of-hand, in which you seem to cast the reader as your “phantom partner,” the companion you keep turning to, to share your meditations on a hundred different things, to exchange a look about something sweet your daughter did, to convince us of these minute moments’ unbearable grace. I loved playing this role, as I read, becoming your phantom partner, and it made me think a lot about the sometimes almost obscene intimacy of readership!

In the book you quote a colleague as saying that she had to give up (certain kinds of) men, in order to do her life’s work. For me, the energy it takes to write has always felt very similar, if not identical, to the energy of a love affair. And now I find myself asking a very love-affair sort of question: Does it feel that way to you, too?

LJ: I’m thrilled and unnerved by this vision of the reader as a phantom partner; I feel the tender embarrassment of being witnessed. It makes me wonder about the inverse question: Do I somehow want partners to be, on some level, readers of my experience? (An audience?)

The framing makes me think of that lovely quote from the critic Susan Stewart, that there’s a fundamental loneliness embedded in the experience of reading: the writer speaks to a reader they can’t see or touch; and the reader listens to a writer they can’t see or touch. There’s a sense of communion, often—and that’s the part we most frequently talk about—but there’s also a persistent gap that isn’t ever fully crossed.

I think that’s part of what you get right about mothers and daughters: that sense of simultaneous communion—a deep mutual formation—but also that sense of perpetual disconnection, the varieties of feeling that get lost or distorted in translation: the texted photo, for example, meant as a gesture of intimacy that ends up feeling like a flaunting of distance; or concern feels like reprimand.

I’m wondering whether you find it easier to write moments of connection or disconnection—between Cory and Emer, and more broadly—and how writing each state brings you back to the other one with sharpened curiosity or focus? I’m particularly curious how you came to think about granting Cory and Emer moments of connection after they begin the narrative so far apart—what was important to you in thinking about the vexed and moving ways you bring them into closeness again? Not a simple closeness, but a closeness that holds the texture and sharp crackling edges of real love.

RL: This will probably be unsurprising to you (!), but as far as I can recall, I think I wrote almost all of the material for Cory’s sections before I wrote Emer’s—which is to say, in my first few years of sobriety, before I became a mother, during that painful time of self-examination when I was consciously “trying to move past the melodrama of self-hatred.”

Emer’s sections came later, after the birth of my son; I finished the book when I was pregnant with my daughter. Emer and Cory’s voices are interspersed now, but they didn’t start that way.

In my experience, writing fiction feels like dissolution: one selects and isolates discrete aspects of the self; allows them each to live and grow into beings of their own; and then, you know, sort of sets them free to disagree, to hurt each other and reconcile, or not. To live their little stories. Splinters, meanwhile, feels to me, at heart, like a project of reassembling and reunifying the self after a series of traumatic ruptures.

There is a moment in the book, though, when you mention working on a piece of fiction, and refer to this curiosity it takes to understand the points of view of two characters, simultaneously, as “surrender”—which I loved. As a writer in multiple genres and forms, how do you understand the opposite, perhaps complementary means, by which you and I are each approaching, with these books, our similar themes and tensions, our similar stories?

LJ: I love this distinction between memoir as an act of self-assembly and fiction writing as an act of self-dissolution: allowing these aspects of the self to live their little stories. Which makes me wonder, of course, what are the parts of yourself you surrendered or channeled or set free into the various characters in Fruit—not only the mother and daughter, maybe, but the children, the dark lover, the first wife—and what happened to them when you set them free?

RL: It’s freeing, isn’t it? I am reminded of a rude question I was once asked by this guy I know, something like, “Do you think you write because, so often, you don’t know what to say?” It stung—in part because, of course, I didn’t know what to say!—and in part because his question pointed to a truth in me.

It takes me a long time, sometimes, to get to what I mean. You write beautifully about the ways that, over time—albeit rapidly, too rapidly!—our choices are whittled down from near-infinite to a finite few; our selves become self. And it can feel like grief to watch those possibilities narrow, then disappear. So I do find a kind of existential freedom in writing multiple characters and allowing parts of myself to speak through them; it can feel like, you know, reopening those windows, if only briefly, if only on the page.

But I also think I (and probably many fiction writers) work from a place of, like, pathological empathy. I am really drawn to the work of trying to tease out how it might feel to be different people. How might it feel to be a powerful man who feels entitled to toy with people? How might it feel to be a near-sighted, neurotic seven-year-old?

LJ:  When I write personal narrative—and even when I’m not writing personal narrative—I think of the self as an entity that’s always multiple, and always perched between disintegration and coherence. This sounds abstract but really I just mean: I always feel I’m part falling apart, part holding myself together, and I find it a fascinating challenge to represent these simultaneous or vacillating feelings on the page.

I think of this moment from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was so give her face point. That was her self—pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one center, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy.

Which is all to say: I’m interested in writing memoir that summons the radiant diamond but also the incompatibility (maybe this is akin to those various parts of the self “hurting themselves and reconciling” in various characters, as you put it so beautifully) and that’s part of what the title Splinters means to me, actually: both rebuilding a self and a life in the aftermath of rupture, but also feeling the delight and freedom and terror and possibility of falling apart, a bit, letting various parts of selfhood splinter away.

Being someone slightly different on Sunday and Wednesday nights. Being someone with my daughter before bedtime and someone throwing a slightly sweaty, overly hot dinner party in a crowded kitchen-living-room afterward. Being a mom and a girl (not a virgin!)  having a teenage-esque love affair.

RL: Yes! Being all those people, and then more, too. Your title works so eloquently on these different levels; as I read I wondered whether it also referred in part to the way the book is composed?

Your short, several-paragraph sections reminded me, both in style and in substance, of an interview I once read (and, of course, was never able to find again!) with Zadie Smith. Asked about her formal / stylistic choice to divide a certain book (NW, maybe?) into a series of short chapters, Smith replied that she was writing it while her children napped. I love that for its lack of pretension, and the way it makes frank room for the very real and inescapable way the facts of a writer’s life affect her work.

You write in the book about the way that, in early motherhood, time itself seems to change, evolving from “an instrument of…ambition,” which is to say a medium for work—and, through work, a way to justify one’s existence—into “an element to be gotten through, swum in like water, rather than a currency to be traded for the talisman of some accomplishment.” I’ve also felt an elemental shift in my experience of time, since becoming a mother. It can make that shift from work to parenting, and back again, incredibly disorienting.

I’m also just endlessly interested in what I always have to refer to as “time management” on the page, in fiction. Can we talk about that thorny intersection between style and form and art and parenthood and time?

LJ: I used to think I wrote best under certain conditions—in long, unbroken chunks of time, untainted by the internet or the needs of other people—which, yes, sure, give me the empty lake house with no wireless and a personal chef, great; but I’ve also found there to be something at once pressurizing and loosening about forcing myself to write under other conditions: in stolen pockets of time after bedtime or during naps, in frantic bursts at the airport gate on a work trip; in the last half-hour before school pick—as I am doing right now!—which I’ve found to be wildly generative, there’s a sense of the water picking up speed before the waterfall, a sense of the encroaching horizon, but also I think an implicit lowering of expectations—like, I’m probably not going to write anything good in these last few minutes, but dear god let me write something! That can sometimes be freeing.

But I’m curious about how you’d answer your own question to me: How do you experience the intersections between parenting and writing and time and all these aspects of ourselves we move between when we turn between these zones of our lives? What has most surprised you about the ways parenting has changed your writing life?

RL: I was far less obsessive about this manuscript than I was about my first book, which I edited and polished, over and over, many times, down to the sentence. Which I did a whole pass on, just to remove a few hundred commas! The time that took. It feels incredibly luxurious to me now. I can’t imagine taking that much time to do something so (relatively) unimportant.

But also, I think, I trust myself more. Not just because I’ve grown, some, as a writer and as a human being, but because I have to. In parenthood I’ve found—and in my work I’ve had confirmed—how poisonous a certain kind of self-doubt can be.

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Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon is available via Scribner.