Her story, "But Are They Still Doing It?" appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.
Here, Michelle Seaton talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about allowing your character to think your most embarrassing thoughts, galloping plots, and Rex Ryan.
I love how we get told the story through gossip. It adds such a rich layer of complexity to what could have otherwise been a sad, but somewhat typical story had the gossip not been there. Was this the format from the get-go, or did it come about through the drafting process?
The story was always a story of reported gossip, and it was always a story about a woman finding out about her husband’s affair. In a way that is the most mundane plot in the world, and yet it’s the one that these women can discuss endlessly. I’ve participated in a few of these kinds of conversations and I’ve always found that gossip is incredibly compelling, but also fills me with despair. I can’t stand the glee of the people talking and yet I can’t stop listening.
The pacing of this piece is fantastic. The topics these women discuss gradually get darker and more threatening to their own lives. Did you outline the piece before writing it, or again, was this something that came about through revisions?
Once I started writing the story, I couldn’t stop writing it until I had a complete draft, and I knew where it was going from the start. I went to a party once in which a woman showed up with her estranged husband. I knew her only slightly, and yet I knew she’d had an affair and that she’d left her husband. Everyone knew. And when they showed up together, holding hands, a surge of panic went through the room, and I knew I was going to use that here. The arc was clear and yet early drafts of the story failed because the women telling the story weren’t revealing enough about why they were obsessed with her story and her pain. The narrator didn’t have enough compassion for the characters engaging in the gossip. I think that’s always a danger in a story where the plot is moving at a gallop. It’s easy for the characters to become props.
The title of the piece is: “But Are They Still Doing It?” For many of the women in this story, sex seems to function not as something intimate and pleasurable, but rather a way of protecting their relationship. If the sex is there, so too must be the relationship. Is this a fair assessment of these characters logic?
Absolutely. I think it’s at the core of so much questionable advice women give to each other about marriage. Have more sex, and your marriage will be okay. But what if sex is just sex? And what if marriage is more of a business arrangement, an economic partnership with assets and shared goals? And what if that is essentially boring? In the story I also wanted to dwell on the financial threat to all of them. If your mortgage is under water and your job could end at any time and if you’ve got kids who require a huge, ongoing financial and emotional investment, then the stakes of divorce are unthinkable. They are unthinkable until you have to think about them.
How much fun was it to write a bunch of characters who want reassurance so very badly, but who are so unwilling to directly discuss their own issues and insecurities?
Their insecurities are my insecurities about getting older, about money, and about sex, and dwelling on my insecurities isn’t that much fun. But it is fun to give my worst and most embarrassing thoughts and traits to someone else, or in this case, to a group. In fiction, your characters can have the feelings you would never admit to, and they can say and do all the things that would get you in trouble.
The character of Jennifer seems really important. She’s the one character who both participates in the gossip and eventually finds herself the victim of gossip. Can you talk more about her story and the way you went about creating her character?
It’s great that you noticed her. The challenge of this story was to make sure you can see the women as individuals, and I think you can in several cases. They each have a style of responding to every event in the story. Yet, Jennifer was the only one for whom I imagined a detailed backstory. She has about five pages of interaction with the group that I never used about her husband’s first wife and her step-children. It informed only a few of the lines in revision, but those lines are important. Also, I knew the group would fracture at some point, that there would have to be factions and that someone would get pushed out, because someone is always pushed out of these groups.
You’re an essayist, a creative nonfiction instructor, a co-author of books covering topics from the psychological to the biological, and a fiction writer. All but poetry, it seems. Are you the type of writer who can work on several projects at once, or do prefer focusing in on one?
I’m always working on a lot of projects and helping other writers with their projects. Right now I’m helping someone write a book about cancer so I have to learn about the effects of chemotherapy on the body. I’ve been helping a writer with a project about South Sudan, so I’ve been learning about the war and poverty in that region, and about the shaky politics that plague new nations. Yesterday I was editing part of student’s memoir on fighting with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Today I owe a story about private jets to an editor. Actually, it was due last week. So, if you want to know about the Gulfstream G650, I can tell you what a new one costs ($71 million) and its cruising speed (670 mph) and I know I’m going to spend time today studying the seat configurations and the avionics. I like thinking about so many different subjects. I find that projects pollinate each other, and they inform my short stories, but when I’m really busy, like now, working on darker nonfiction, my short stories tend to contain more humor and more sex.
Lastly, what book recommendations are you making these days?
Oh, dear. This is where I get embarrassed because I’m no book snob. I love a narrative that moves and I want to be obsessed with the story. If you pick up Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates, or The Virgins by Pamela Erens or The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison, you’ll be up late. I promise. I’m also waiting for my husband to finish Collision Low Crossers so I can read about Rex Ryan and the Jets. I’m no fan of the NFL, but I’ve covered football and I know the culture, and Rex Ryan fascinates me. All football coaches do. I bought The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer for my son, but he hasn’t read it, so I’m stealing it from him. (He’s reading The Whisper first). As a YA title, it seems to have the perfect mix of politics and science and outsized characters, which is the sweet spot for me.
Thanks!