What You’re Reading Next: Holly Goddard Jones
Holly Goddard Jones is a hell of a thing, the absolute real deal–her stories have been appearing for the last 6 or so years in the best journals (here’s an interview with her from the Kenyon Review), all of which are devastating—she’s just magic. She’s got a novel out now called Next Time You See Me which is even better than one could’ve fairly guessed or expected—the thing’s a riveting page-turner that should absolutely be what you’re reading if you liked Gone Girl (and if you didn’t like that, what the hell?). If you’re wondering whether or not fiction’s healthy in this country, Holly Goddard Jones is the resoundingly affirmative you’re looking for (she also writes phenomenal essays, like this one). Below is an interview we did over email. For real, though, get her stuff: Girl Trouble, her collection of stories, is worth whatever you pay for it.
You’ve talked about Bobbi Ann Mason’s influence, about which I can’t much ask because I know all of like two stories of hers. I’m curious if you’re…it’s weird: Next Time You See Me is still in Roma, but you mentioned that this feels like a closure of that phase of your writing life, of setting stuff in yr fictional hometown (or however you’d rather say that). Are you feeling or finding new influences, two books into your career and however many words in now? Or if not new influences than new tugs, new pullings in other directions?
I guess I am. I wrote Girl Trouble in draft as a grad student, and when I was a grad student that was my first time living outside of Kentucky. I was deeply self-conscious about where I was from, and defensive. I felt very passionate about representing my place and therefore myself in my fiction. Now that I’m older, I’ve lost a lot of that self-consciousness and defensiveness, and so it seems OK to me to stretch out into other directions. Mostly, I want to keep the writing fresh. I don’t want to keep telling the same stories. And I have new experiences to draw on. When I went to grad school, Columbus, Ohio, was the farthest from home I’d ever been. I’d never been in a plane, or seen the ocean. I was writing about the world I knew, and now my world is a little bigger.
Holy shit–you studied with Gurney Norman? I have no question other than: how awesome was that? Ignore this, actually. It’s not even a question, just sort of jealousy.
I didn’t ever have Gurney Norman as a professor, actually. He was never teaching the fiction workshops in the sequence that I was taking them, unfortunately. But Kinfolks was a book I read in freshman comp, and it made a significant impression.
I’m curious if you can address this—you mentioned in one of the other interviews that teaching makes you “more open and generous about fiction, more open to risk.” This is weird—I want to ask about what you’re writing now, but I don’t want to, obviously, for the prying aspect and everything. Maybe it’s better as a structural thing: do you buy this argument forwarded by David Shields (with which I feel compelled to note I 100% disagree) that linear narrative fiction is somehow no longer fit to tangle with the felt reality of lived experience? Are you feeling your way into new fictional structures or ideas? This might be a really dumb question.
No, it’s not dumb at all. And I don’t want to argue with anyone’s theories, but it doesn’t seem bold or radical to me to suggest that there’s a certain kind of writing structure or style that a person should or shouldn’t do. I’d say it depends on the writer and the story, and I’m Paul and that’s between y’all.
I suspect I think differently about risk and experimentation than some do. To me, taking a risk means doing something you’re not necessarily comfortable with. Experimentation doesn’t have to be some kind of crazy stream-of-consciousness thing, or a story told in the form of mattress tags. Some of the writers credited with being bold and experimental never take on a point-of-view character outside of their gender and race, or their class, for instance. I’d say that those are also experiments, and sometimes the riskiest kind.
How hard was getting the structure and movement of Next Time You See Me nailed down? It’s so satisfyingly plotted (the comparisons to Gone Girl feel real apt) and reads like something that’s been very cunningly designed to give maximal pleasure to the reader. As a corollary: why’d you pick, essentially, a literary thrilled as your first novel? You spoke in the book’s trailer (that’s the first time I’ve ever written that phrase) that the book sort of has its roots in an event that happened in your hometown, but it could easily have just been a sort of (not at all bad) noodly literary fiction about small towns/death/south/young experience, etc. Not this gangbusters page-turner that it ended up being. Any way you want to attack this’d be welcome.
Hands down, the biggest surprise and delight of encountering this book’s reception has been hearing from people that the book is a page-turner. I mean, I probably worked harder on pacing issues than anything as I was revising the draft—the manuscript shrank by over 40 pages, and I did a lot of rearranging. But one of the worries I had was that people would say it’s too literary to be a page-turner and too genre-informed to be literary. My fear was that I’d gone for both and succeeded at neither.
My fiction has always been pretty dark, and I’ve written before about murder, so the subject matter felt natural enough. In the earliest drafting stages, the book probably was a bit more noodly, to borrow your excellent term. And I just wasn’t happy with the lack of urgency. So I kept whittling and honing, and I forced myself to think consciously about causality. That was key. Instead of “this thing happened and then this other thing happened,” I wanted “this thing happened and therefore this other thing happened.” Then the book eventually became what it is. I was thinking more about the effect I wanted to achieve than the genre I was trying to write in.
You also mentioned that Emily was the hardest character to write, and Tony the easiest (or more fun). And that Emily was sort of the entry character for the novel, for you (or at least you sort of hint/nod in that direction). Yet, at least to me, the book ultimately sort of escapes Emily pretty thoroughly—not in a bad way, just that there are thicker tethers to other characters. How far along into the process were you before you realized that? (if that sounds forward or anything, I’m sorry–it’s certainly not intended; I just really like that this book ends up being not really *about* anyone, not tied hard to anyone, yet it doesn’t, ultimately, feel like Emily’s book to me. Who knows. Maybe I’m 100% off [I don't know who's book I'd say it feels like, though: maybe Ronnie and her sister, maybe it's theirs. I'm not sure]).
Well, to clarify, Tony wasn’t the easiest by any stretch. Tony was pretty hard and scary to write, because I wasn’t sure if I even had the right to try to represent his experiences as a black man in a small town.
I wouldn’t argue that the book is Emily’s story more than it is anyone else’s, but for me it was as much her story as Susanna’s or Wyatt’s. I’m not sure what realization you’re asking about…when I realized the book was tethered more to other characters? I’m not sure if that’s a realization I’d own, at least in those specific terms. I do agree that there’s a remove with Emily, but that’s in part because Emily herself is kind of a removed character—a character who engages in some pretty heady disassociation to function. And that’s partly what made her scary, because I felt with her that I might be verging into behaviors that weren’t merely strange put pathological, and how important is it for me to make her diagnosable? I ultimately decided it wasn’t important, at least to me.
This might be a stretch, but I don’t read your stuff as *southern* stuff—I guess mostly because it’s not *deep* south, and stuff in Kentucky sits in that middle area of the country—Virginia, Missouri, etc.—that to me is like this weird southern midwest place. I don’t know. What I end up feeling about those places is that they’re *between* places—neither one nor the other. I don’t know. I wonder how much regional distinction stuff even matters—the story’s glorious or it’s not. This isn’t even a question, I’m realizing. I was going to ask if you got sick of the BS notion of Southern Writers, and how you’d change the terms of that catchall, if you could.
I appreciate this question a lot, because I have some of the same thoughts. On the one hand, being branded “southern,” as a writer, is a good and helpful thing, because the region embraces its own. It gets you some notice that you might not get in wider circles. But it can also have kind of a flattening effect. If you’re a southern woman writer whose fiction has any grit, someone is going to compare you to Flannery O’Connor, whether or not your writing actually bears any resemblance to hers. That’s an example. (Not that a comparison to Flannery O’Connor ever hurt anyone.) I agree that parts of Kentucky feel as much like the Midwest as they do the deep South, and Kentucky itself is so different from one part of the state to another.
What’s the view out your window?
The window where I write? Well, my writing desk is upstairs, in a spare bedroom. It looks out on the neighbor’s house and an ugly gravel drive that the owner of that house put down about five minutes after my husband and I closed on our house and moved in. The drive leads to a big parcel of land in the middle of the block, where the guy now stores a half dozen junked cars, a couple of campers, chickens, a loud-ass rooster, and mounds of yard waste that he’s supposedly going to mulch and sell. If my desk faced the back of the house I’d probably just stare at that junkyard until a vessel burst in my eye.
I work all over the house, though. I like to be on the couch, down in the living room, with my laptop on my lap, my feet propped up on the coffee table, and a dog on either side of me.
