Author Interview: Emily Fridlund
The Author of History of Wolves on bucking bildungsroman trends, the freedom of associative logic in narrative, and more
Emily Fridlund’s debut novel History of Wolves is best misunderstood as a coming-of-age-story-cum-psychological-thriller. For one, the reader learns that a principle character will die by the second paragraph. For two, Fridlund’s protagonist, Linda, is consumed by her “moral education” well into, and likely beyond, the present from which she relates the story.
Sure, many thrillers reveal an ending and build towards its ‘why.’ And yes, often the coming-of-age tale examines how a singular moment in time shapes a human being, but so often that moment stays locked in the past. It comes soaring back when a particular song is overheard on a pair of airplane headphones, say, and perhaps retreats into memory when the plane sets back down; it is related, classically, from some kind of safe, foggy maturity. Perhaps people really reach such a state, but not here.
As Michael Schaub raves for NPR, “History of Wolves is as beautiful and icy as the Minnesota woods where it’s set.” Its story, of how a young girl reckons, in the course of a year, with two sudden and discreet events and how those events stick through to her adult life, is not a closed loop delivered with a neat bow. It is a gut punch of hard questions about fate and knowledge. The illuminating pain of those questions, if you let them, ought to linger.
Emily Fridlund reads at Literati on Friday, February 17th. I spoke with her about the novel’s composition, and her approach to its inventive construction and themes.
As a fellow suburban Midwesterner, I feel we have a weird and fraught relationship with nature. We’re not quite city people, and we’re not quite rural. Any journey into nature always seems to be a reminder of this — the loneliness of walking into the woods, for me, as a kid, was always at first a profound excitement that gave way to a creeping mournfulness. You feel at first freed from the routine of suburban life, but then in the silence your thoughts circle back around to the limited time you have out there on any given afternoon, and the eventuality of your return to the “ordinary,” to which you belong.
Linda, the novel’s young protagonist, lives in a fairly rural environment — a cabin and former commune compound near dense forest and a sizable lake, mostly visited by tourists, people looking for a good fishing spot. She seems to both resent the faux-familiarity of seasonal visitors to Northern Minnesota, but also — in the ways teenagers do — the crushing routine of even her own unorthodox family life and the small town provincialism it orbits.
I think that’s most devastatingly captured in the following excerpt describing the beginning of the summer during which most of the novel’s principal action takes place: “You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there’s always something wrong. Everywhere you look, insects thicken the air, birds rifle the trees, enormous, leaves drag the branched down. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters.”
History of Wolves, among other things, seems to be about a kind of fatedness in how we experience our lives, despite clear moments of choice and immense moments of regret. And natural cycles — when we pay attention to them — seem to be an ominous reminder of this. I wonder if you felt the natural world around Linda (not to mention her clear attachment to its seemingly free agents, the wolves) working as almost another character, even a foil — not to just Linda herself but the human dramas she is engulfed by?
I do think for those of us who were raised in the suburbs it can be fairly easy to romanticize wilderness. I grew up with a scrappy woods of buckthorn and poplar in my backyard, a murky pond we called a lake on the other side of the next-door parking lot. Pond and parking lot, woods and lawns: each appeared to have pretty distinct borders. There were entry and exit points, it seemed, almost like gates. Later, when I camped with my family as a kid up north, it was hard to dispel that feeling of strict boundaries between “nature” and everything else: forest / campground, wild / human.
Of course, when I was building the world in History of Wolves, these distinctions didn’t make any sense at all. For Linda, there is no entry or exit point to the woods. It is everywhere, even inside her. I wanted to think through the way she has been shaped by the intense weathers of her northern Minnesota habitat, the way she carries the cold and thaw within her and projects both onto the world around her. And though she feels far more at home in the woods than I ever did, I never saw her as one to venerate it. The quote you mentioned about summer comes to mind, but also this one: “[The woods] was never magical to me: I was never so young, nor so proprietary, as to see it as that. Year by year, the woods just kept unfurling and blooming and drying up, and its constant flux implied meanings half-revealed, half-withheld — mysteries, yes, but mysteries made rote by change itself, the woods covering and re-covering its tracks.”
This idea was compelling to me as a writer. I was intrigued by a kind of storytelling that would represent a more cyclical experience of time. The classic coming-of-age novel can feel teleological in its temporal structure, everything in the story seemingly arranged to show some kind of forward progress, to justify it. To me, the flux of seasons feels far more interesting and true. We see repetition with change, return with difference, and this is a structure that can offer, in its way, outcomes that are potentially far less fated than the more classic bildungsroman. No, we are not free agents within this system. We are creatures of our environments, subject to our communities, and our contexts, and our experiences in the world. As with so many young people, this is hard for Linda to accept and she spends much of the book trying to escape the circumstances into which she was born. She leaves for a while as a young adult only to return later on to sell off part of her parents’ land and care for her aging mother. Her return is not to the same place, though. A nearly-suburban subdivision has replaced her beloved woods. And she is not exactly the same person, either. As a teenager, she failed in a fundamental way to take responsibility for her babysitting charge Paul, but she takes responsibility, now, for the mother who may not be her mother. She is the same, but with a difference — and both these things, the sameness as well as the change, were important to me to represent.
I wanted to shift into that human drama, as well, without giving too much away. Linda, in the span of her 14th year, is somewhat peripheral to and then critically involved in two significant and unrelated (to each other, at least) series of events. There is a question as to how her perceived knowledge functions in these events. In the former case, Linda seems intent on deriving a revelatory knowledge, or at least interpolating a knowledge she thinks she has upon a scandalous relationship at her high school in which she is not involved. In the latter case, events transpire before Linda that point to something she could, perhaps should have known. Both epistemic limits end up haunting her, they pose questions that in many ways remain unresolved. Linda is also a keen examiner of gender roles — those she could be said to participates in, those she doesn’t, those she perhaps yearns to invert or control or transform, and a limit of knowledge seems critical to how she positions herself with regard to them. What attracts you to examining the psychological ramifications of, to paraphrase one character, “what we think we know”?
This is an incredibly meaty question, one that gets to the heart of the book. In both of the plot lines you mention, Linda uneasily negotiates the rough limits of her knowledge. When her classmate, Lily, reveals in confidence to Linda that she has invented an elaborate rumor about their teacher, Mr. Grierson — a man who has been accused of possessing child pornography — Linda finds the revelation of this information, at first, intimate and exciting. Even when she realizes that she is probably not the privileged recipient of Lily’s secret, she still feels more closely bound to her enigmatic classmate. She finds herself thinking, one could even say fantasizing, about the story Lily has told, so much so that the fantasy comes to feel almost real to her in its vivid specificity, even when she knows it is not. I was interested in the way the mind plays with the materials it is fed, the way it extrapolates from and transforms those materials. I was concerned with the way stories carry their own power, even when we know they are just that — stories. And I think it can be said that one of the things that Linda admires and envies, and perhaps ultimately resents, in Lily is her unexpected ability to tell such a powerful story that it provides Lily with an escape from difficult circumstances.
In the case of the Gardner family, Linda sees evidence fairly early on that there is more to the family than they say, that something might not be right with Paul. But she fails to put the pieces together because of her youth and her limited experience with the world. As the novel progresses, questions are raised (in Linda’s mind, looking back) about the extent to which she allows her initial ignorance to transform into self-deception. In Lily’s case, it could be said that Linda over-imagines, thinks past what she knows to be true, and in the Gardners’ case she exhibits what could be called a poverty of imagination. She doesn’t allow herself to grasp the consequences of what she increasingly knows to be true out of self-interest, her desire to maintain as long as possible the little bubble of happiness she has found.
In both cases, I was interested in the way the mind interprets and composts events, as much as in those events themselves. In relation to your point about gender, I was fascinated by the question: Who controls the stories that come to be accepted as true? Part of the reason Lily’s story succeeds is that it relies on a truth about Mr. Grierson; but, equally, it relies on gendered assumptions about Lily, that is to say, about her status at school as an object of sexual attention. Her trick is that she uses these gendered assumptions to her advantage. In a different way, Leo also relies on roles that are gendered — father, patriarch, professor, scientist — to assert a reality he very much wants to be true. Linda takes all this in, coveting and disdaining, in turn, their very different claims to authority.
This novel started as a short story, which won the 2013 McGinnis Ritchie Award and now functions as the first chapter. The structure of that first chapter also seems to frame the novel, while the penultimate chapter shares a similar, mirrored force and composition. First person narration can often read like reverie, but here I found it to be an excruciatingly effective instantiation of it: the way our recollection of a period of stress, or trauma, or transformation doesn’t work so much in a linear, temporal fashion but stitches itself together emotionally. The way that logic plays out in the prose is so incredibly precise, powerful, immutable. In following that internal logic of a first-person narrative, were there sacrifices made during the composition you might not have otherwise made? Was the writing more a process of discovery, of guiding questions, or working toward a culminating idea?
Yes! In my experience, the mind does not advance in a linear, chronological march. Because this is Linda’s first-person story, it traces memory and imagination — which are recursive and roving — as much as it relates a chronological unfolding of things. Linda’s mind works on associative as well as causal logic, which I found to be the opposite of limiting as a writer: it’s very exciting and freeing. Associative logic allows narrative events to be stitched together through ideas and images and emotions, perhaps even emphasizes ideas and images and emotions, over the straight-shot linearity of a leads to b leads to c. That said, yes, this can be a harder way to write than relating chronological events that have been mapped out in advance in an outline. Though I knew some of the general movements in the plot before I started to write, I often didn’t know as I wrote what a paragraph would contain until I wrote it, or at what point in the book events would be revealed until they were revealed. I had to grope my way at the end of every almost sentence, listen for the emotional tenor of the story as it was coming into being, and try to catch the prose’s rhythm. The initial process of plotting this book was very intuitive, actually, and then the later revisions were a little like doing math. When I went back and looked at my drafts, there were many small adjustments to be made while I was trying to keep the whole story, or the whole equation, in my head at once. It was difficult work, but it was so engrossing, too. I love thinking about plot.
What are you reading right now, and what do you wish was being written?
I recently finished Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood. I am almost to the end of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and have just begun Rachel’s Cusk’s Transit. All are marvelous in their very different ways — I’m on a good reading streak. I love anything that is weird and beautiful, that reorients for a while how I see the world. I’m always hoping for more fiction that is a little irreverent about our assumptions about what’s normal, real, and human. I think we could use a few new ways of understanding ourselves in the world right now.
