In “Natural History,” your story in this week’s issue, Jesse joins an environmental protest, a kind of die-in, at the Museum of Natural History, for which he and the other protesters are arrested and taken to jail. The protest comes at something of a pivotal time in his life. How would you describe Jesse’s circumstances?
A few months before the protest, Jesse was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. There’s a lot of drama implied in that sentence, so readers should be warned that this story picks up at what may seem—to them, but also (crucially) to Jesse—like the least dramatic part of the narrative. Not the crisis or the breakdown or the intervention, those classic spikes on a plot diagram, but what comes after, when they give back your shoelaces and refer you to an expensive psychiatrist and tell you to get on with life. That after is the most interesting part of the story to me, precisely because there’s no script for it. I’m drawn to characters, like Jesse, who feel abandoned by narrative, who long to both define and transcend the plot of their lives.
Jesse is an artist, though it’s been a while since he’s been able to make anything. His wife, Christina, is an emergency-room doctor. In his ruminations, Jesse comes back to the futility of his work when compared with her concrete helpfulness. Do you, as a writer, often entertain such thoughts? Does this story contain a kind of working out of that anxiety?
Yeah, I desperately want to be a doctor. Or I desperately want to want to be a doctor. That’s the problem.
I think writers, almost by necessity, have a skewed sense of proportion. You have to believe that telling the story of one day in one person’s life is worth not only your while but your reader’s. (“Natural History” is one such story.) There may be a way to justify this sort of storytelling, but it certainly doesn’t make sense. One appeal of working in a hospital instead of in a Word doc is that it seems to right these proportions. The emergencies are really emergencies. Writers can make a case that they’re good at preserving lives—the details, the dramas—but only the doctors are actually saving them.
I don’t have much to say to assuage Jesse’s anxieties, or my own. And, all in all, I don’t think artists deserve much comforting. Discomfort with the craft seems good for all of us, and for the art itself.
What made this kind of protest—symbolic, gestural, maybe kind of futile—feel like the right scene to thread through the story and to contain the psychological portrait of Jesse?
Extinction Rebellion, an environmental movement that started in the United Kingdom and has spread around the world, stages die-ins similar to the (entirely fictional) one that Jesse participates in. I had its name in mind as I wrote this story, because of how starkly it captures the dual forces that animate—and complicate—his life: the thrall of oblivion on the one hand; the hunger for transformation on the other. I think this emotional tension is always present in protest. You get out there because there’s something you believe is really bad—in this story, the extractive industries that are hastening climate change—and you can come away feeling strangely good. Empowered! That’s as it should be; political movements depend on it. But you can’t sit back and enjoy the good feeling. I wanted this story to capture the way these experiences of hope and despair, futility and purpose, so often coexist—uneasily, but also necessarily.
I really admired your ability to write a story about depression and stasis that isn’t completely depressing and static. Are there other stories or works of art that you appreciate in this regard?
The poets do it best! I think of Emily Dickinson:
Pain, in these lines, is the enemy of story—of chronology, and maybe even of creativity itself. For a writer, after all, there’s little worse than a “blank” page. ♦
