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| (photo: Ryan Pfluger) | |
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces; the essay collection So Sad Today; and five poetry collections, including Superdoom and Last Sext. She has written for the New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine's "The Cut." A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, Broder has published poems in Poetry, the Iowa Review, Guernica, and Fence, among others. She lives in Los Angeles. Her third novel, the darkly comic Death Valley, about a woman writer who goes to the desert to escape the tragic developments in her life, will be published by Scribner on October 24.
This book is, in a word, unique! (I loved it!) Where did this project originate for you?
In 2020, my father was in a car accident that put him in the ICU for six months before he died. He was on the East Coast, I was on the West, and no one was allowed in to see him for the first months because of Covid. I was powerless--and I needed to escape a feeling. But you can't escape a feeling because a feeling is inside you. Still, I tried, driving back and forth through the desert between my home in L.A. and my sister's in Las Vegas. I was driving through Baker, Calif., home of the world's largest thermometer, when the first two sentences of the novel came to me.
Does your work start with a kernel and evolve as you write? Or did you outline and plan this book in some way?
Always a kernel first: a magic cactus; a merman; two women in love--one zaftig, one eating-disordered--and a pile of frozen yogurt. Then comes an outline. But my outlines are like the ship of Theseus. Piece by piece, they change as I move through the draft. By the end, it's a different ship. And yet the same ship.
This book's outline changed when I did a "desert recon" trip midway through the first draft. I took a little hike in a touristy area of Death Valley where nobody gets lost. Well, I got lost. My phone had no service. I had no water. Only Coke Zero like a fool. I was crying. "How long have I been out here?" Half an hour. I panicked after half an hour of being lost. And in my panic, I scraped myself up getting back.
But once I made it back, I was very pleased despite my injuries. Now I knew what had to happen. My protagonist was going to get lost in the desert. And she would get lost for longer than half an hour.
Can you talk a bit about the parallels you see between grief and wilderness survival? That connection feels very present in the novel in imaginative and unexpected ways.
Grief is so physical. It's shockingly physical. The heaviness, the ache, the exhaustion. As I write this, it's the two-year anniversary of my dad's passing, and the aftermath of a friend's death by suicide, and I'm wrecked. And I want to not be wrecked. I'm frightened by the wreckedness. But wanting to not be wrecked, or judging ourselves for being wrecked, doesn't make us less wrecked. Similarly, wanting to not be lost in the desert doesn't make us any less lost. Grief is a force. Nature is a force. In both cases--grief and desert lostness--we keep walking. But we can't see, and we're scared, and we wonder: Will this ever end? Will I be okay? Will I survive this?
The main character here is fleeing: her life, her dying father, her ailing husband, her grief and her depression. But in the process of fleeing, she also seems to be seeking something. Do you see fleeing from and seeking something to be related to one another? Two sides of the same coin?
In my experience, fleeing and seeking can be two sides of the same coin, because seeking is often a form of escape: seeking to be other than we are; seeking for reality to be different than it is; seeking refuge. Also, both actions always lead me back to a fundamental, if annoying truth, which is that acceptance is the only answer.
She is also deeply alone, and yet very linked to others, both in person (the hotel reception staff people) and electronically (her sister, mother, father, ICU nurses). What might you say about that tension between solitude and interconnectedness, especially as it relates to depression and sadness?
It can be challenging when a person has depression and anxiety--or is in a state of grief, which resembles many of the symptoms of depression and anxiety--to be with people. There's the fear of judgment, the heightened nervous sensitivity, the constant checking of one's mood against one's performance. But at the same time, depression feeds on isolation, and genuine human connection is healing. So, the question is: What do we do when we need people but are kind of scared to be with people? I'm still figuring this one out.
Did the pandemic in any way shape the role of technological communication in this novel?
Absolutely. The first two months my father was in the ICU, when we weren't allowed in, my sister and I FaceTimed with him every single day. Sometimes he was unconscious, and the nurse put the phone on his pillow, and we just talked to him. Sometimes he was fully lucid and cracking dry jokes. The day before he died, I was there with him, and I made sure to FaceTime in my sister. He really felt like she was in the room, too. When I was leaving, he said, "Melissa, take your sister with you."
I loved the ways that the visions she sees in the cactus are directly connected to old family photographs, and the stories told about them across the years. How do you see photographic moments shaping memory and recollection, in this novel and/or in your own experience?
I'm not a very visual person. My melatonin-dreams are the most imagistic I get. In fact, I often create word banks of nouns--lists and lists of juicy nouns scattered all over my house--and weave them into my texts when I'm editing. With this book, I took a lot of gorgeous nouns from vintage copies of Desert magazine that I bought on eBay, just to make sure the text was steeped in that specificity of imagery. So, I don't personally use photographs when I write. But I grounded a lot of the fantastical elements of the novel in photographs, Reddit posts, and images that the protagonist had seen, because I felt it was important to "earn" the fantastical, archetypal elements of the book. This comes from having a poetry background, I think, in which a teacher once said to me, "You have to teach the reader how to live in the world of the poem and then you can do whatever you want." It's like Chekhov's gun but in reverse. Chekhov's cactus.
While I've not spent time in the desert myself, the concept of a mirage is closely linked in desert stories. Do you consider Death Valley to be a "mirage novel," to make up a new genre of sorts?
I think the line between reality and mirage is so blurry to begin with, which is why I'm always confused by the term "unreliable narrator." Like, aren't we all unreliable narrators? People often ask me if the merman in my novel The Pisces was "real" and I don't know how to respond, other than to say, "He's real to the protagonist." But I do like the term "mirage novel!" Now I'm thinking of a number of mirage novels, which, although not set in the desert, weave the subjectivity of the human psyche into physical wilderness: The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas. Down Below by Leonora Carrington. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain... now that's a mirage novel! --Kerry McHugh