Katya Apekina on Talking to Ghosts
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Today, Katya Apekina discusses her new novel, Mother Doll, as well as using humor as a coping mechanism and a vehicle for intimacy, sex scenes, giving a ghost a voice, being inspired by her grandmother’s memoirs, generational trauma, time as something stacked rather than something sprawling, ambiguous endings, and so much more!
From the episode:
Katya Apekina: My grandmother left me these memoirs. She learned to type specifically so she could type them up and give them to me. I had them for years and didn’t read them. And then the night of her funeral, I started reading them, and they were in Russian so I also started translating them, because I was thinking my daughter might want to read them one day. In the process, I also started annotating them, or making notes with questions, or arguing with things she was saying. It was like a conversation I was having with her after she died. And that’s very similar to what’s happening in this book–a person talking to a ghost.
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Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.
