Self-Portrait with Nothing

by Aimee Pokwatka

AT THE TIME of her disappearance at age fifty-four, Ula Frost was already a mystery.

Dear Reader, Thank you so much for joining me in these annotations of Self-Portrait with Nothing. I love reading annotations of other writers’ books, and I’m thrilled to share these behind-the-scenes notes in gratitude to you for reading. This book had many seeds, and mystery is at the heart of all of them. For my entire life, people have been telling me they know someone who looks like me, or they saw my twin at the grocery store—I’m fully convinced there are doppelgängers of me all over the place. The allure of many multiverse stories is getting a glimpse of those doppelgängers—versions of a character living a different life—but in reality, we can never know how we or our lives would be different if we’d made different choices, and thinking about those possibilities (or obsessing over them, as Pepper does) can be a true thief of joy. Ula Frost is a mystery at the beginning of the book and in some ways remains so at the end, because parents, like other versions of our selves, are often impossible to know fully. It’s both the seduction and the frustration of the unknowable that I wanted to explore in this book.

The population showed signs of treponemal disease—non-venereal syphilis—a fact she shared selectively with new acquaintances, deploying it as a kind of personality test.

Pepper’s research is based on my own experience as an undergraduate as part of a research program funded by the NSF. Like Pepper, my research involved a collection of archaic-period human skeletal remains from Kentucky that showed signs of treponemal disease (endemic syphilis). We believed the remains had come from a seasonal burial site, because the bones had gnaw marks on them, indicating they’d been buried shallowly and animals had gotten to them, and because there were cut marks near the joints, indicating the bodies had been disarticulated before being moved to a more permanent burial site. My own research was on general indicators of the population’s health—if you stop growing as a child due to illness or famine, often there’s a record of that in your bones or teeth—but we didn’t find anything statistically significant in our sample of the population. I did, however, as part of the same research program, work on a statistics project in which our subject was “Responses to Public Flatulence,” in which my classmates and I planted someone with a fart machine in various stores and recorded people’s responses to their “flatulence.” We did, in fact, find a statistically significant difference in the way people responded to female versus male flatulence.

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, there was a version of Pepper with perfect posture and tailored suits, who answered the attorneys’ questions with confidence and poise. But not in this one.

Pepper spends a lot of time imagining alternate versions of herself, but for Pepper, many of those versions are really just fantasies about being a better or happier person. It’s not just that Pepper’s life is different in those fantasies—she herself is fundamentally different because she’s free of her insecurities. It’s an interesting question to pose: how might your life be different if you’d made different choices at various points? Are those versions of you happier and more fulfilled, and if so, is the reason purely circumstantial or because of a fundamental difference in your alternate self’s personality?

It wasn’t that Pepper didn’t love him, she just couldn’t stop herself from imagining universes in which her life wasn’t locked in with his. She was different in those universes. Lit up.

The character Ike is very much based on my own husband (who I love dearly despite the fact that he does fill my brain with useless trivia and sneeze louder than anyone I’ve ever known), and as I wrote the book, I felt more and more that the book itself was a love letter to him. It’s easy to fantasize about happier versions of yourself; it’s harder to recognize your own happiness when you’re folding a giant mountain of kid laundry with a bad movie on in the background, though it’s those mundane moments that do hold so much of our happiness, whether we recognize it at the time or not. Pepper slowly realizes this over the course of the book, and writing the texts between her and Ike was one of my favorite parts of writing the book. I do, in fact, sometimes text "sos sos sos" to my husband. Recently, upon waking one morning, I opened my eyes to see a spider hanging over the bed. I texted my husband, who was already up, a single word: spider. Reader, he came running in a matter of seconds.

Pepper looked in the box and found five squirming kittens, so new their eyes were still shut.

Before I went to graduate school for writing, I spent five years working as a veterinary technician, and much of the animal-related scenes in the book are based on that experience. (We did have a dog escape from our kennel who showed up a week later in its owner’s backyard missing a tail! We did have a woman who brought in a dog to be checked for snake bites along with a tiny baby snake in a baggie, chopped to pieces.) The reason I included this scene where Pepper first assists with a euthanasia and immediately moves on to caring for kittens is because working in a busy clinic often means you have to move from a room of grieving owners to a new puppy visit with no time between—it’s work that requires the ability to compartmentalize. Compartmentalization is necessary and healthy sometimes, but it is possible to be too good at compartmentalization, and I think most of us have moments where we compartmentalize an experience because it’s easier than processing it.

She was rewarded with a gigantic sizzling potato pancake smothered with applesauce.

I spent a summer in high school as an exchange student in Leverkusen, Germany, which is just outside of Cologne. One of my most distinct memories of that time is eating a potato pancake (reibekuchen) covered in applesauce outside the cathedral.

“Nothing compares to the dew of your body. I am trapped in your head, I search for you in my dreams. I press my whole self against your breasts, your nipples…”

On the day I received audiobook narrator auditions, I was with my family at an aquarium, so I was unable to listen right away, though I was dying to. I was finally able to listen in the car on the way home, with my kids (boys, then ten and twelve) listening along in the backseat. We quickly discovered that this was the scene chosen for the audition, so my kids had to listen to this line about nipples three times (and they were scandalized each time). I love that they shared this moment with Pepper—hearing something absolutely cringe-inducing about a parent/written by a parent—an experience that I think is pretty universal.

Sometimes they left messages with only the sound of a clicker, because they’d accidentally clicker-trained Pepper to sit when she was three, while training a puppy, and the sound of a clicker had since reminded her of their laughter.

This detail had much more significance in the earliest drafts of the book, which had a totally different ending. In the original ending, more than one Ula chooses to remain in this universe, and when Pepper returns from her trip to repatriate her burials, she finds her mothers have clicker trainer both the puppies and the Ulas to sit and offer either a paw or a hand for a shake. The last line of that ending: "Pepper did the only thing she could do, in this universe that was somehow her own—she went down the line and shook, puppies and Ulas alike." This ending eventually changed, because, though my intention was to show the Ulas developing a sense of humor and thus changing in a way this universe’s Ula never did, it felt incorrect to end with those Ulas being reduced to animals.

But I would draw the entire table’s worth of stuff, just shrink the whole scene down to fit on the page, with plenty of white space around it. The teacher was always telling me I was very compressed.”

Like Pepper, I have no artistic ability, and like Pepper, I did take an elective art class in grad school in which my drawing style was described by the teacher as “compressed.” Interestingly, I think my writing style has the same tendency to be compressed. One of the pieces of advice that most changed my writing came from my thesis advisor David Treuer (whose books are extraordinary). David pointed out that my writing tended to be subdued, so I should aim for melodrama, and my natural restraint would balance it out. This encouragement to go bigger had a huge effect on my writing and the stories I felt capable of tackling.

A few years ago, he’d taught a summer course in Amsterdam, and while he was gone, Pepper had subsisted mostly on birthday cake. The woman at the bakery had offered to pipe on the recipient’s name, and in her shame, Pepper had given a fake one.

I spent five years in Syracuse, NY, a place where the winters are gray and oppressive and where I was often seasonally affected for several months of the year. One of my coping mechanisms was birthday cake. And you know what? I still recommend it. If you’re feeling a little down, why not buy yourself a small birthday cake? I'm in favor of gathering joy where you can find it.

Her face was androgynous, long with thin lips, and her graying hair was lanky and unkempt.

I don't cast characters in my head as a write—in general all my characters are much less attractive than performers in my mind. Ula is the exception in this regard. As I wrote her, I imagined her looking very much like Patti Smith.

“I simply got bored.

We later learn that boredom is not Ula’s full motivation, but Ula’s nonchalance about ruining people’s lives stems from an obsession on my part with art monsters. In Jenny Offil’s (beautiful, perfect) novel Dept. of Speculation, she talks about the fact that most art monsters are men, because women are still burdened with the work of running the household and raising the kids while making art of their own. I loved the idea of writing an art monster who was a woman, and who was monstrous not simply because she was more interested in making art than in childrearing, but because she did something actually monstrous. As a society, we have a complicated relationship with art monsters—there’s no shortage of artists whose work is exceptional but whose actions confound our enjoyment of that work. It’s difficult to reconcile our connection to a great artist who is also a terrible human, just as it’s difficult to reconcile our love for a family member whose actions harm us or others.

She’d been terrified the whole time, but Ike had kept saying it wasn’t an adventure if it wasn’t at least a little unpleasant, their motto when things went spectacularly wrong. Things were always going spectacularly wrong when they traveled—injuries and storms and lost reservations—but somehow the disastrous trips were always the ones they remembered as being the most fun.

“It’s not an adventure if it’s not as least a little unpleasant” is my family’s motto, which originated during a semi-disastrous trip to Washington, D.C. when my kids were young and we got caught in the rain and ended up soaked. So many of my fondest travel memories are marked by this kind of minor disaster—someone ran a fever, someone cried in the car the whole way home. And yet, those memories are often our fondest, when we have enough distance to see through the discomfort to everything else that came with it.