Katherine Hill and Alissa Nutting Interview
Katherine Hill and Alissa Nutting discuss their debut novels, slow writing, wonderful monsters, the pain of aging, exploitative TV, and knowing the end of the novel you’re writing before you get there.
Katherine Hill: You had a baby! And you’re publishing a novel, Tampa. Is it the same? Does the metaphor hold? I need to know.
Alissa Nutting: In both cases I think there’s a sort of vague disconnect with the final product. You look at it and go, “Really, I made that?” It’s an interesting comparison with Tampa because it’s this very adult, taboo book, and then you have the extreme cartoonish innocence of babydom. My world is a crazy Venn diagram right now where not much intersects in that regard. Although the US hardcover of Tampa is fuzzy, and I’ve been rubbing my baby’s feet with it. She likes that.
KH: Pretty sure I’d like that, too.
AN: Ha! Speaking of children, your incredible novel The Violet Hour closely follows several different characters. I was amazed at how they all managed to be interesting in unique and compelling ways — was this a struggle to pull off? Were there characters you were more drawn to than others? Or did you have a type of maternal appreciation for all of them, where you loved them equally?
KH: I loved them equally, I really did. Having multiple perspectives — chiefly a couple and their adult daughter — seemed to give me license to tell a really big story, and in some sense, a never-ending one. Because events that happen between people, particularly the members of a family, are constantly being revised in memory and argued over. The past is never past in a family. So it was fun to delve into all those unresolved corners. As for their individual personalities, I think we basically have two imperatives when creating characters: We have to make them whole and true, and we have to make them interesting to us, the writers. I personally find a lot of emotions and attitudes interesting that wouldn’t all jive in a single character. So I made many.
AN: Please enlighten those of us who are challenged at multitasking…I’m currently working on a novel with multiple character perspectives, and I haven’t quite gotten into a fluid groove of switching between them. Can you talk a little bit about your process — did you work on one thread at a time? Did you switch between them each writing session? Or was writing this book a constant party where all were invited each time?
KH: For me, the secret is taking my sweet-ass time. Seriously, if you saw how long it takes me to make my morning yogurt bowl, you’d understand. I’m a fast walker and talker, but everything else — especially writing — I do slowly. The Violet Hour took me seven years from start to finish, which means I was often working on one scene for months. Whole characters were born and killed off. Hundreds of pages discarded. I don’t think I ever worked on just one character at a time, but I spent a lot of time with all of them over the years. So I guess that’s my recommendation? Go slow?
AN: I think it’s true that you have to put in a lot of time with your characters to have them turn out well — that’s another parallel to parenting. My novel’s protagonist is such a handful that she ended up being an only child. I could only handle one!
KH: Well, I think she was worth every word. Seriously, Celeste is positively addictive to read. And she’s incredibly complicated, full of contradictions, like all good characters (and all people, good or bad). Can you talk a bit about the poles of desire and revulsion in Celeste? She’s a beautiful young teacher who has sex with her eighth grade students and who loathes older men and women equally. We deplore her and yet, she’s exposing something about our larger culture that’s pretty damning, right?
AN: In a troubled way, she’s mainstream culture’s ideal woman. She always looks immaculate and stylish. She polices her youthful appearance with a vast regime of products and procedures. She’s a trophy wife with the disposable income to be a constant consumer. And she’s secretly obsessed with sex. In a lot of ways, Celeste is like Jurassic Park. Society asks for all these traits in a woman, but they all add up to create a destructive monster. Celeste is alluring and entertaining and in our culture, that tends to give you a pass on bad behavior.
KH: Oh, totally. She’s a wonderful monster. I feel like she’s basically taunting us all: “You want nubile women to stay young forever? All right, you asked for it.”
AN: Exactly. I keep thinking of a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park after they’re being hunted by the dinosaurs. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Do you think the violation of restraint is kind of a mandatory trait within novels? It seems to be one of the compelling molecules of plot that’s often selected. The Violet Hour entertains some very interesting moral trouble spots. In what ways do you see the notion of morality entering into your text?
KH: Well, at the most basic level, plot is about two or more forces coming into conflict, right? And there’s no greater conflict than rule versus rule-breaker. I’m interested in the rules of intimacy — between parents and child, between lovers, between siblings — and the rules of the larger culture in which all these relationships unfold. So there’s definitely a fair amount of that in The Violet Hour. A lot of it is the same stuff writers puzzled over in the nineteenth century novel: adultery, inheritance, and so forth. They’re eternal questions.
AN: I want to circle back to the discussion of youth for just a moment. While Tampa’s critiquing the social requirement for women to stay young, The Violet Hour addresses the pain of aging — particularly how age can function as a barrier within those intimate relationships you mention. Your novel is filled with phenomenally wrenching, compelling lines, and one of my favorites is this: “It wasn’t fair that Elizabeth would never get to be young with her mother, or her grandmother, that the three of them would never sit together at a table like this one and conspire to take over the world, each of them hungry and fast, with indefinite time ahead.” In some ways, does your novel offer a brilliant cheat against that unfairness by showing various characters at different ages? It was so addicting to read Elizabeth’s character when she’s young and then also get to see scenes from when her mother was young. It gave me such a privileged, confided-in feeling as a reader, since I was getting to know her (and love her) in ways that her daughter never could.
KH: That’s something I’ve always loved about novels that unfold over long spans of time — those brilliant cheats. We get to witness whole lives, examined more closely, and with more meaningful layers than we’re capable of experiencing regularly in life, which just keeps advancing. Speaking of novels we love, you were obviously playing off Lolita in Tampa. What other books have fired you up as a writer?
AN: I’m such a fan of the grotesque and any art that outs the messy and disgusting truths of humanity. I’m attracted to literature that can get you behind the scenes of characters in a confessional way, where you’re hearing all the thoughts and urges they have that they’d be far too embarrassed, or too socially discouraged, to talk about out loud.
KH: Yes! We still live in a culture that loves to manage conversation. This is appropriate, this is not, this is how this athlete/politician/wife should behave, this is how not. The best fiction has the honest conversations that are policed just about everywhere else.
AN: Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel was a transformative read for me as a writer. In contemporary fiction, books with characters that are on the margins, unloved or exiled, really attract me. One of my favorite books, which isn’t a scandalous book at all, but a funny and uncomfortable and painful book, is Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, which follows the present and past of an unattractive teenage girl. What have been some essential books for your development as a writer?
KH: I have so many: The Age of Innocence, Mrs. Dalloway, The Remains of the Day. More recently The Lazarus Project, A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. The Tempest was actually the guiding spirit for The Violet Hour. But the most formative reading experience for me was probably a college seminar I took called Doomed Love in the Western World. Isn’t that just the best title? We read a heap of great tragic love stories: Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The House of Mirth, Death in Venice, The Satanic Verses, The Human Stain. For a long time after that it seemed as though everything I read extended the conversation of that class. So when I set out to write a novel, I had Doomed Love ambitions. I started with a family that tears itself apart.
AN: I feel like your novel plays with the macro and micro in wonderfully sweeping, dizzying shifts between very character-specific experiences and the life events that are essential and unavoidable to all of us, like death. It strikes me that the thought of focusing in on a family of three might seem like a narrow field of subject matter, but reading your book it was the opposite — we’re continually made aware of the universal through these three individuals. What sorts of global truths did you feel like you wanted the story of this family to illuminate? If it’s relevant, perhaps you can also talk a little bit about the wonderful last name of “Fabricant.”
KH: Well, for one thing, Abe, Cassandra, and their daughter Elizabeth are all three incorrigible individualists — very American. The book is full of only children, not just Elizabeth, but also Abe and another important character in Elizabeth’s life, Toby. I’m sure this is partly because I’m an only child (and so is my husband and so are many of my friends), but it also allowed me to explore this raw individualism that’s both troubling and attractive in Americans, however many siblings we have. As for Fabricant, I once went to school with someone who had that last name. I didn’t know him personally, but I loved the name and all its theatrical suggestions. The Fabricants in my novel prepare bodies for funerals; they pull off fakes and forgeries every day. What about the last name Price, in Tampa? It’s a wonderful choice.
AN: Because of my deep love of satire, I have a fondness for overly obvious or meaningful names in the Dickensian style. I thought that the word “Price” was hopefully falling into that tradition without being overly groan-inducing. She herself, her exterior beauty, is a form of currency — one her husband and society wholeheartedly buys into. She’s part of his net worth as a man, which I think makes it easier for her to conceal her behavior from him — he’d be wary of having to address any truths that devalue his stock, so to speak, as his masculine social standing.
KH: I love the way it links money and beauty: perfect for a Florida story. We’ve come to see the state as a den of iniquity, sort of the ugly-beautiful catastrophe of all our consumer excesses. I’m thinking about a rash of recent movies in particular (Magic Mike, The Queen of Versailles, Pain and Gain, the outrageously wonderful Spring Breakers) but also internet memes like Florida Man on Twitter. What was your motivation for making this a Florida novel?
AN: I mean this in a very complimentary way, having lived in Tampa for many years and loving the city — it really can be a cipher, which I think speaks to its great multifaceted nature: It can be whatever you want it to be. If I’d set the book in L.A., I’d have to in some way address Hollywood.If I’d set it in Orlando, I’d have to in some way address the whole Disney complex. Tampa is free to be a warm, tropical location that’s the backdrop to the character’s secrets. What do you see as the role of beauty in terms of your two main characters, Cassandra and her daughter Elizabeth? Both are very attractive redheads.
KH: I think it’s actually similar to what you say about Celeste. Their beauty is a source of blindness in others. Other people idealize them, which creates unfair expectations for how these women ought to be, and it also allows them to treat other people poorly and get away with it. Everybody loses. It’s maddening. Some of my very favorite characters in literature are the beauties who are wrecked by their own vanity. Of course I love the idealistic Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (we’re supposed to) but I love Rosamond Vincy just as much. She’s educated to be a society lady, so when her upwardly-mobile ambitions falter, she’s just devastated. Her pain is less morally admirable than the pain of someone who’s subjugated into slavery, or who’s persecuted by an unjust law, or whatever, but as a character she’s bracingly human and no less a product of her society.
AN: Yes, and the restrictions of that idolization are so interesting: be beautiful, be young, be wealthy. Be always engrossed with either trying to be those things or trying to maintain them.
KH: Speaking of lovely ladies, what are some of your other muses? Movies are so important to me as visual narratives, and it seems like most writers have other art forms that fuel them in some way.
AN: I’m obsessed with exploitative television. I can’t break away from it. The rise of the shock-talk show, Jerry Springer et al., happened during my teenage years, and it’s embarrassing but true to highlight just how formative that was for me, in terms of beginning to understand social messages. I’ll say it at the risk of being highly judged: I feel super compelled to write after watching Teen Mom or Hoarders. Television that disturbs me and throws me off-kilter is an invaluable source of inspiration. Film wise I love anything horrifying that engages questions of gender — Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, de Van’s In My Skin, Lanthimos’ Dogtooth.
KH: I can’t judge: I grew up on The Real World. All that barbaric shouting. It was incredible. And oh my god, I am obsessed with Dogtooth. The family as totalitarian state, governed by its own bizarre rules and self-justifications. It’s so extreme what those parents do to those kids, locking them away from the outside world, and yet, how different is it — universally speaking — to what any parent does to any kid? Even the most loving, supportive, sympathetic parent creates a world for the child to inhabit and walls for the child to knock down. It’s a brilliant movie.
AN: It is. It frames the damage we inevitably do to those we love in a very overt way. Did you feel it was important that one of your main characters be an artist? The other two are a doctor and a medical student.
KH: The people we identify as achievers in this country are generally funneled into the prestige professions (medicine, law, and frighteningly, finance) whether or not they really enjoy them, or even believe in them, so I got to play with that in Abe and Elizabeth. Cassandra, the artist, is a yearning and regularly dissatisfied person. I mean, seriously, aren’t all artists fundamentally dissatisfied in some way? It’s what fuels us. Or maybe I’m just speaking for myself. I always want to make my writing better.
AN: Now that you bring that up, I’m realizing that of the three of them, only Cassandra seems truly plagued by self-doubt. Is that another artistic curse?
KH: I think so. For women especially. If only Celeste had been an artist! She has no self-doubt at all — which was frankly refreshing in a female protagonist. Oh no, am I way too sympathetic to her? I feel like I am. Please don’t call the cops. I am happily married to a fully-grown man. What about you? Do you suffer from the curse of self-doubt? How do you combat it?
AN: Ha, it’s true — Celeste is confidence incarnate. I wonder if that was part of why I was drawn to her character as a writer. I was able to write in a very no-holds-barred tone without having to second-guess it or be self-deprecating in the way that I would with a character who was based on an extension of myself — the nerdy, unnoticed, unaccepted characters of my short stories often have shades of my own self-doubt in them, and I was able to shed that entirely when writing Celeste, which was liberating. I think ritual is a big component in how I manage self-doubt. Sitting down at my desk each afternoon with a caffeinated beverage, I know that I’m there to write. It’s a part of my day. That helps me to manage the panic of, “Wait, I’m writing a book here? Help!” What about you?
KH: I battle self-doubt with stubbornness, too. I’m terrible at the every day regimen, but I’ve always made choices in my life to put writing above everything else. (Except love.) I’m also really public about it. From day one of writing this book, I told people who asked what I did that I was working on my first novel. How arrogant is that? My first novel. But it forced me to be serious. I didn’t mind failing at other things as long as I didn’t ultimately fail at this. Of course I failed in a million ways along the way, but that’s what revision’s for. What’s your process like?
AN: I do very long obsessive sessions and try to write first and revise later, though sometimes I can’t help but go back and pick. Revising while you’re still writing the initial draft can be like a mosquito bite your parents tell you not to scratch. It’s all the more tempting to do it because you’re telling yourself not to.
KH: I pick at mosquito bites, too.
AN: It’s kind of a must. Are there lessons you learned that you’re going to apply to your second novel?
KH: The novel I’m working on now has a much clearer outline — that is, I basically know the arc already — which is probably a reaction to my more exploratory experience writing the first book. For the first few years, I had what I thought of as this great, explosive beginning and these characters I loved, but no real sense of where they were going. I took them down many false paths before I finally got it right. I’m happy with the way it turned out, but I’m also happy to have the initial outline for this new book. It gives me a chance to think about form in different ways. Though I’m sure it will change as I go. Without giving too much away, when did the ending of Tampa come to you? Did you know at the start how it would end?
AN: I did and I didn’t — actually it’s useful to go back to the birth analogy here. You know that at the end of your pregnancy, you’re going to have a baby, but you have no idea what it’s going to look like. It was a lot like that; the specifics slowly had to reveal themselves to me through the process of writing the book, then I had an “Aha!” moment and saw it. I actually wrote the novel’s last line when I still had several chapters left to go — it came to me and I was sure about it.
KH: It was similar for me. I knew the end before I’d gotten there, but only after I’d spent several years already immersed in the book.
AN: How was it to end your time with these characters?
KH: It was definitely hard to step away from these characters after seven years, and at the same time very freeing. They exist now. They’re out there, breathing on their own. And to completely mix metaphors, I’m currently involved in a passionate love affair with my new character. Thank God for that, actually. What about you? Do you miss Celeste?
AN: I missed the satisfaction of familiarity. It was a great feeling to be able to sit down each day and know exactly what I was doing with the writing. It was a really disorienting feeling starting a new book; I kind of had to mourn a little and get very humble and understand that I was lost, I was left with nothing and had to earn it all back. It was like winning the highest level of a video game then having to start back at the first level with no points. You mentioned “love affair” and I think that’s accurate. You have to be seduced into caring about your manuscript, loving to work on it.
KH: Well, yes, the humility is there, for sure. Though I think I might actually feel more comfortable in this phase. It’s all still potential. I have all the time in the world to make my perfect bowl of yogurt. How did you come to writing? Did you write as a kid?
AN: I did. We didn’t have cable; all our television served up was Dan Rather. I read constantly, and wrote stories for myself as well. Often verbal ones — I lied a lot. Compulsively, actually. That didn’t truly stop until I got my first serious boyfriend. Suddenly someone was around me all the time and could say, “Wait, that didn’t happen that way.” I remember in kindergarten one of my more popular narratives was that we lived on an enormous farm and I had to get up really early each day to milk cows. In reality we lived on the side of the highway and had a Labrador.
KH: Ah, the pastoral fantasy, of course. Did you have siblings you could strong-arm into your imaginative schemes? Or were you like me, an only child building her own worlds?
AN: Definitely the world-building. I grew up as a kid in rural Michigan, and I was a total accident and much much younger than my siblings — they went off to college when I was a toddler, so it seemed like I was an only child in a lot of ways. What about you?
KH: I wrote my first books at age five or so, on legal pads. My recurring heroine was named Ida. I had initially written them in the first person, but then, in a bizarre act of self-censorship, I converted every “I” to “Ida.” I think I thought I wasn’t allowed to write first person stories because most of the books I’d read at that point were written in the third person. I also built crazy Lego civilizations and staged all kinds of performances. For a while I wanted to be an actor, but looking back, storytelling was clearly the common thread. I liked creating lives. My parents are college professors and we used to get the freshman facebook every year. I had to make my own: I drew all the faces and made up the names and towns where everyone was from.
AN: Speaking of college, you went to Yale but the character Elizabeth goes to Harvard. Did you feel conflicted at all shipping her off to a rival school?
KH: Harvard seemed right for her: slightly more science-focused, and still (alas) the most famous school in the country. Of course, post-college, she loses her soul in the pre-professional gauntlet, so maybe that was my dig at Harvard. Not that Yalies don’t lose their souls. Or other college grads for that matter.
AN: It’s true. I did my BA and MFA at two schools notorious for rivalries — Florida and Alabama. That’s actually a neat writing exercise: write about a character who attends a rival college.
KH: Circling back, I wanted to ask you about humor. Tampa is so, so funny. Do you go after it, saying to yourself, “OK, I need a laugh here” for the sake of rhythm or narrative suspense or whatever, or do you let it surprise you?
AN: I’d try to continually crack myself up. I’d especially try during the most uncomfortable, awkward moments of the novel, of which there are many — there’s an innate absurdity to this novel at its most basic premise. Celeste is absurd; what she wants and desires is absurd. It seemed right that she needed to go full-throttle with her craziness and be extremely ridiculous and funny. And she hates almost everyone she has to interact with; humor is how she deals with that. She’s always making fun of someone in her head.
KH: Given that you’re trading in transgressive stuff, the humor is doubly clever. Great comedy so often pushes the boundaries of taste. Speaking of “transgressive fiction,” do you think it’s a valid category for what you’ve done?
AN: I think it’s a good categorization. Writing Tampa, I was aware that to actually capture the wrong-ness of what was going on, to represent it in a complete and true way, I had to make sure I kept pushing the events further and further, really make myself squirm. Oh dear, there’s another baby-having parallel: pushing! What aspects of your novel were most difficult to write? The shadow of very heavy topics looms large throughout: death, divorce, loneliness.
KH: They are heavy subjects for sure. The Violet Hour is not autobiographical, though I did borrow from life in a kind of alternate-history game that I think many writers play. The biggest challenge for me was fleshing out each relationship. I wanted to get them “right” — the expectations they would have of each other, the resentments they would harbor, the embarrassments they would feel about particular little things. I wanted to get at all the messy, complicated ways people treat each other that we’d rather not discuss. I mean, I want to discuss them. But most people probably don’t. There are fantasies and fictions out there — about love, about family, about society — that many people work hard to maintain. It’s my job to tear them down.
