Lucy Ellmann, a Great American Novelist Hiding in Plain Sight

Up until last week, Lucy Ellmann was the greatest American novelist no one in America had heard of. In addition to six previous novels, three of which garnered prestigious awards in the UK, Ellmann is author of the most audacious and brilliant novel of 2019 (which has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Ducks, Newburyport, published in the US by the small Canadian press, Biblioasis.

Ellmann’s writing has been hiding in plain sight from American readers in no small part because although American by birth, she hasn’t lived in this country since 1970. She relocated to England with her parents at the age of 13 and today lives in Scotland with her husband, the novelist Todd McEwan.

Ducks, Newburyport is a sui generis novel. It is not enough to say that Ellmann depicts the thoughts and feelings of her unnamed narrator—a frazzled, middle-aged wife and mother of four in rural Ohio who contributes to the family’s income by baking and selling pies from home. Rather, you sense that this fictional housewife has seized full possession of her author’s mind, her inner voice released in a dazzling torrent of text largely unbroken by sentence or paragraph breaks. She worries about it all, from gun violence, Trump, and polluted drinking water, to soft boiling eggs, cleaning behind the refrigerator, and perfecting a lemon drizzle cake recipe.

The result is a work that is innovative, intelligent, and simply extraordinary.

–Lori Feathers

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Lori Feathers: It has been many years since you’ve lived in the US, yet in Ducks, Newburyport you’ve captured the mindset of a midwestern American housewife with incredible poignancy and authenticity.  How did you go about creating her voice?

Lucy Ellmann: My mother-in-law was born in Ohio, and has written a lot about Ohio history, work rich in detail.  Also, my formative years were spent in Illinois, so I feel a bond with the Midwest, and with Midwestern speech cadences. I was a very unwilling exile!

But my narrator could be from anywhere. We all have thoughts, memories, worries, associations, dreams. I was interested in burrowing deep into a consciousness. Don’t we all long to know what other people are really thinking? You never even know what you yourself are thinking, or not without years of therapy anyway. But we know a lot about how Emma Woodhouse thinks. It’s what novels are for.

Ohio is meant to stand for America as a whole. I wanted to show the way American women are cornered, ignored, and brutalized—by the media, politicians, and criminals (i.e., racists, rapists, wife-beaters, and gun-toters). But I also wanted to fill my fictional landscape with Indian mounds, with which Ohio is plentifully supplied. America’s genocidal past, in the extermination of native people and the exploitation of slaves, has to be looked at if you want to see what this country is really made of.

The narrator has a brand of politeness I associate with certain American women I have known (some of them from Ohio). She hesitates to swear or say a bad word about anyone and tends tirelessly to the needs of others. I wanted to explore a sort of well-meaning innocent, battling with forces that vary from minor to monstrous. I like her. But I don’t actually believe refraining from saying the word “ass” is going to help anything. We’ve gone beyond the point where primness can save the day.

LF: Mothers and motherhood are the central concern of Ducks. In the novel’s secondary narrative, a lioness devotes herself to her cubs. Similarly, the narrator’s thoughts constantly turn to her four kids and her own mother, now deceased. Why did you decide to base your novel on the love of good mothers in contrast to most current fiction’s focus on bad mothers?

LE: I’m just sick of motherhood being discredited. It’s an indirect way of attacking all women (both mothers and non-mothers): it disparages the whole history of women’s bodies. Misogynists can’t stop bitching about female biology.

Overpopulation is also an undercurrent in my novel: the narrator clearly has too many children. But in essential mammalian terms, motherhood has value. What sort of society would seek to diminish that? Only a society more interested in death than life, a patriarchal society devoted to greed, rape (of women and the environment), and perpetual war. Matriarchal societies protected and respected women. Find me a death-besotted society that does.

LF: A number of your novels feature women artists whose work is under-appreciated. In Ducks, the narrator takes painstaking care in creating pies. Still she undervalues her work. Do you think that creativity is validating for women in the same way that it is for men?

LE: A pie should honor fruit. That is the job of a pie. Making pies is a craft and a business venture for my main character, and a product of her bent for cozy, habitually “feminine” pursuits. But cooking IS an art form of a kind, you’re right, and female cooks are as under-appreciated and underpaid as female writers and painters.

I think it’s still pretty rare for women’s creativity to be taken completely seriously. Otherwise there would be equal numbers of acclaimed male and female artists right now, and critics too. How many female artists have been lost to us, through prejudice and male competitiveness? When I started to play the cello as a child, I was told only men play the cello. I played it anyway. When I was at art school and wanted to become a sculptor, I was told to go into painting: only the male students were being taught sculpture. I flunked out.

Weirdly, when forced to acknowledge something creative has gone on inside a woman, some people still insist on attributing it to male influence: teachers, fathers, husbands, male artistic forbears. . . . As Ducks gained recognition in the UK, several guys piped up, hinting I’d had help from a man in some way to write this book, either because my father was a Joyce scholar, or because my husband is also a novelist. Accepting female creativity seems really hard for some people!

The arts are humanity’s greatest achievement, and the best check on the amorality of science. I don’t think anyone should be excluded from that activity. For what it’s worth, I WROTE MY OWN DAMN BOOK.

LF: One of the things that I most admire about Ducks is your depiction of the narrator’s helplessness in the face of her delivery man’s frequent, unwanted visits and persistent claims for her attention. They unsettle her, but she suffers in silence. Was your writing affected by recent, heightened public awareness of how widespread this type of insidious behavior is?

LE: No, it was affected by a lifetime’s knowledge of male behavior and how it cripples, inhibits, silences, and often frightens women. Men are threatening presences. This has long been a pretty universally recognized inconvenience (to say the least).

LF: The female protagonists in some of your prior novels enjoy sex and have a lot of it. Not so the narrator of Ducks, who is very attracted to her husband yet misses the sex they used to have and worries about her inability to initiate sex. Is there something about the way that we live today that limits women’s sexual agency?

LE: What sexual agency? We live in a society devoted to male sexuality. What is porn for but to limit knowledge of women’s erotic complexity? This is one debilitating influence on modern marriage. Another is the automatic insistence on having children.

My narrator is a woman who has had the unromantic experience of cancer, caring for four kids, and spending much of her time alone because her husband works out of town. She feels unsexy, she feels her age, she’s tired, she’s lonely, she’s troubled by all the devastation around her. The barbarity. These conditions are not ideal for the libido!

I assume most people go to their graves wishing they’d had more sex. Some of my previous books explored female sexuality. It deserves exploration! But here I was trying to convey the poignancy of a loving couple prevented by circumstances—practical, financial, physiological and political—from expressing that love in bed much of the time. Or anywhere else in their crowded house. They need a gazebo or something.

LF: Your novels have a signature, renegade style: you incorporate lists and taxonomies; employ upper case, bold, and italicized words here and there, seemingly without rhythm or reason; insert snippets from songs and advertisements; and line up loosely affiliated words in sequences of mischievous wordplay. How do these practices afford your work more flexibility?

LE: “Without rhythm or reason?” I object! There is always a reason. AND rhythm! It’s not about flexibility. I say things the way they need to be said.

Fiction is like a rock that sits there in your way. How do you break a rock? You give it everything you’ve got. It’s up to each new writer to clear the path. A writer exists to question form. Otherwise nothing new would ever be written.

Art is play. The form emerges as you go along, through play. I decided this novel should all be one sentence, as it follows an unending spring of thought. And I liked the plaintive repetition of “the fact that,” so I built the book around that. (I think I’ve now used up all the “the fact that”s our teachers forbade us all to use at school!)

I’ve been rudely criticized in the past for using too many capital letters, but you know what? I DON’T CARE. What is wrong with using all the techniques at our disposal? I’m not spraying anybody’s linguine dinner with air freshener, I’m just reconsidering form. It’s not a crime. Yet.

I like illustrations too, and wish I had more. I don’t see why only children’s books get to have pictures.

LF: What made you bring a mountain lion into this novel?

LE: There’s just too little mention of animals in most fiction—the result, I fear, of the lingering distinction we make between ourselves and nature, the arrogant assumption of human superiority. Look at an ant colony. There may not be a whole lot of individualism going on, but boy do they have a knack for the common good! They work within nature, and form sustainable societies. Humans are just wrecking balls.

We live in such a sterile, sanitized, almost animal-less world, in which animals are valued only if they serve us in some way, or we find them cuddly. We have got to get them center-stage again. One of the best pieces of writing in English is Christopher Smart’s poem about his cat. Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World also gives animals their due. Some of my previous books included an animal, but the lioness in Ducks has a much more starring role. She mirrors the Ohio mother, in both being mothers under threat. But the lioness has clearer priorities, and a really good sense of direction!