I just want to ask a quick question.
How long did it take you to write the novel?
Oh, wow.
So the book took 13 years probably.
But I didn't realize I was really writing a book.
I just was writing essays.
Do I need to use the mic?
So I just was writing essays, because I love them.
And then I had some space and time to think.
And I just started putting what I'd written together
and then said, oh, maybe this is a book.
There are similar themes of family, power, subversion,
humor--
although, that one's not that funny.
Although, there are strange little comic moments, I think.
But yeah, so I think the first essay was 2003.
And I think the last one was 2016.
I was writing other stuff between.
But it takes a while.
It takes what it takes, though.
Are you writing too?
No?
But it'll take whatever it takes.
And don't rush it, right?
You've got plenty of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
or New Jersey, Atlanta--
Oh, the Atlanta girls are so good.
Where's the Real Housewives of Tucson, though?
We need that.
Right?
Ander, would you be a real housewife from Tucson?
Happily.
That's great.
I was wondering if you could speak
to how or if the poetic mind is different than the prose mind
when it comes to your own work.
Is there a division or is there a lot of overlap?
Yeah, so I definitely think you use--
I think differently in a poem than I do in an essay.
And that's true.
So at the end of a line, you know that you've got to change.
You've got to transform or it's got to do something.
It's got to turn on itself.
There's a rudder moment, right?
And in an essay, you can give yourself
whole paragraphs to do that.
You can really set something up and tease stuff out.
So when I was writing that essay that I just read,
it was fun to write it sentence by sentence
and sort of like poetry, but allowing myself more room
to think about something.
They're similar, though.
In a poem, you stumble on a metaphor.
You're like, oh, let me pull on the threads of this
and see what else I can get.
And that's true about--
when I stumbled on naming, I didn't
know what that was about.
And I was like, wow, this is--
I'm fascinating myself.
I'm teaching myself something here.
What is that about?
So that's similar modes, I think-- ask and question.
I wanted to-- we talked a little bit about this in my class
earlier, but to ask you to talk a little bit more about what
the--
they're not exactly even comic moments.
I mean, some of them are.
The Adventures in the Old Lady Land, I think,
is just a delightful essay with a lot of really comic moments.
But there's two moments in that essay--
the one that we talked about a little bit in my class--
his biggest regret was that his uncle had never
molested him, which is just a horrifying thought.
But it's also a funny one.
And then there's the other one where your mom says, oh, that
explains--
And I have a hard time not--
I was the only one who really laughed there.
But it's not exactly-- it's like, ha-ha.
But this sort of awfulness almost
has to come out in some kind of utterance.
And I'm wondering if you could talk
a little bit about, I guess, the use of humor or the comic--
I'm not exactly sure.
But it's not funny, but it is.
It felt better for me to laugh in that moment.
I think of those moments as really funny too, honestly.
I mean, he's twirling his pasta with his fork
saying this terrible thing.
And, what, I'm supposed to feel bad that your uncle didn't
molest you?
OK, eat your pasta.
Yeah.
Drink your juice, Shelby.
It's going to be OK.
But it's just-- so I love the darkly comic.
Because I think it really kind of--
it's absurd.
And it's ridiculous.
Like in Harry Potter, if you can laugh at the terrible thing,
that it also reveals something about its own terror.
Then it has less power.
So I think of it as sort of subversive.
And then just providing tension as a sort of craft moment,
like here's something terrible.
But there's still comedy in the world.
There's still something beautiful.
I was really conscious in that essay too of music,
of making something as beautiful as I could,
although flattening tone sometimes.
Because, god, isn't that what beauty does?
Isn't that what comedy does?
Sort of save us from the terrible awful things
of our lives.
And that's how I live my life anyway too.
I'm always laughing at the wrong thing.
And like my mom-- like, oh, that explains a lot about you.
Oh, really, mother?
What does it explain?
And she really did think--
she had a whole theory worked out in seconds.
Like, mom, you can't do fractions,
but you can do that math?
That's amazing.
It's weird.
Anyway, I hope that helps or it answers.
But comedy is really just subversion of what you expect,
right?
And certainly, I think all of that
was not what I expected from him too.
Yeah?
[INAUDIBLE]
You brought up just now that you thought a lot
about the musicality of that piece specifically.
Can you speak a little bit to your drafting process?
Well, that one was weird.
[AUDIO OUT] mostly-- so in the narrative, I'm driving here--
I didn't write that sentence by sentence.
But most of the statement-driven sections, I wrote a sentence.
And then I stopped.
And I left the room.
And then I came back to it.
And that's just what the piece needed.
You can only look at something for so long
and contend with it, really, before you
get a little exhausted.
And it really did feel like I was contending a little bit
with him-- a little bit with myself--
and I don't know--
that falling in love with wanting to hurt yourself
was really fucked up and also fascinating.
I didn't know what was happening to me.
You know what I mean?
And I thank god I'm a writer, because I
don't know what I would have done
if I had let that live in me.
Because it wasn't me.
It was completely outside of myself.
And thankfully, I came to Tucson and rediscovered joy.
One more question and then I think we'll--
How old were you when that happened?
Oh my god.
[AUDIO OUT] So I was--
it was 2008.
I'm bad at math.
Nine years ago.
Yeah, it was like--
Ten years ago.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
No, it was--
I just moved--
I'm throwing the thing.
It was 2006 when it happened--
2007.
Yeah.