Q&A with Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

 

 

Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the new novel Without You Here. She also has written the story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better. She lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Without You Here, and how did you create your character Noreen?

 

A: The simplest answer is that I wrote a short story called “Little Angel” about 25 years ago, and when I shared that with a writer friend, he said he wanted to know more.

 

That needled the back of my mind for ages before the larger story bubbled up, and it bubbled up a little at a time for a long time before I finally committed to engaging it fully as a novel.

 

The original story was a slice of the culminating crisis of the book, a troubled scene between a husband and wife and the wife’s dissociative response mixed with a question of haunting, the possibility that an old loss could linger tangibly enough to destabilize the character years later.

 

But inspiration is a many-splendored thing, and huge swaths of life and personal relationship experience informed this plot and these characters.

 

A distant family member died from suicide when I was a child. His sweetness and tenderness toward me inspired Nonie’s fondness for Noreen.

 

An unexplained breathing sound that my parents and all their friends heard in the house where we lived before my parents’ divorce prompted the echo of sound that subtly haunts Noreen, especially in her most vulnerable moments.

 

The struggle of a friend who stayed in a dangerous marriage for fear that her mental health history would translate into losing custody of her children found some expression in Noreen’s ultimate marriage and also underlies my determination throughout the book to draw both main characters as whole people, not just as functions of their potential diagnoses and circumstances.

 

The question of Noreen’s character is an interesting one, especially since the original story didn’t include Noreen at all and the earliest versions of Without You Here featured Nonie much more heavily than her namesake niece.

 

Noreen’s character began for me mainly as the favored child, the family member Nonie felt most attached to.

 

As the scope of the novel broadened, it began demanding more about the coming-of-age Noreen and the young-adult and adult Noreen. I got to know Nonie a lot more quickly and deeply. Excavating who Noreen would be, growing up in the shadow of Nonie’s loss, required harder work.

 

I had to figure out how alike the two needed to be to make their connection as authentic and enduring as possible, and I had to distinguish them from each other meaningfully too.

 

Noreen’s character emerged from a lot of sculpting over time. Plenty of her chapters didn’t make it to the final draft—episodes from her childhood, her college life. Curating scenes that were the most telling and most essential was a huge task.

 

Q: How would you describe the bond between Noreen and Nonie?

 

A: Nonie and Noreen share a deep, abiding love. They’re both family outliers, people other people don’t quite know what to do with. But together, they’re at peace. They don’t have to make excuses for their oddities, and they can be their authentic selves, free from fear of judgment or other people’s worry.

 

Family worry shadows these two everywhere they go, and it’s exhausting to be the object of other people’s fears, to have people who love you let their worries blinder their ability to see you in totality. Nonie and Noreen find rest and appreciation in each other.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: The major scene that the original short story explored was in the novel from the beginning, but it didn’t always land at the end. I rewrote this book several times, following a different structure each time, with different approaches to the timeline.

 

Plus, the original story ended without a clear resolution, which isn’t the case in the novel. A large portion of the novel’s ending came late in the writing process. The final version spirals through time, returning to the past frequently. That structure came later too and was hard won. Splicing past and present in a way that pushed the reader forward took a lot of experimentation and a lot of faith in the reader.

 

Much thanks to Jane Alison for her craft book Spiral, Meander, Explode, which explores and celebrates alternative plot structures. Her book, along with lots of support and productive suggestions from my adult children, gave me the confidence to build this story the way it seemed so desperately to want to be built.

 

Q: The writer Sharon Harrigan called the novel “[h]eartfelt, redemptive, and compassionate.” What do you think of that description, and what do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I loved that description. My characters suffer in Without You Here, and there’s a lot of sadness, but the story leans toward possibility and hope.

 

In the end, it’s really a love story, though not a romantic one. I want readers to feel like nothing prevents us from giving and receiving love. No matter how many obstacles we have to hurdle in our lifetime, we have the potential to share our best selves and to feel genuine connection.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently finalizing my next novel, which I hope will be ready to shop around before Without You Here debuts. It involves a family whose parents argue about how worried they should be about their troubled older daughter.

 

Their different ideas about what defines danger and how to handle it tear the family apart when its support is most needed to respond to the unlikeliest scenario unfolding with the neighbor the daughter pet sits for—the real danger.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My publisher, Flexible Press, chooses books with social relevance, and they donate 10 percent of their profits to a nonprofit of the author’s choosing.

 

I’m choosing the Suicide Prevention Awareness and Resource Council (SPARC), a Charlottesville mental health agency. I’ll be making a donation of my own in honor of the book to SPARC and to a local domestic violence shelter, Shelter for Help in Emergency (SHE) because a dangerous intimate partner relationship also features in the story.

 

For me, trauma and injustice are never just props in my work. Representing fictional characters struggling with very real issues requires diligent research along with determination to flesh out characters well beyond diagnoses and circumstances.

 

Without You Here debuts during National Suicide Prevention Month, so I’ll incorporate messages about that into how I present the book to audiences as well.

 

I don’t take it lightly that I can’t talk about this book without talking about suicide. Everyone who comes to a reading, including myself, will have had some experience of losing someone they know this way.

 

Literary fiction is all about empathy, about exploring human experience with new eyes to find new truths, about meeting a stranger in a story and walking in their shoes throughout it. This is fiction’s superpower. Fictional characters can unlock emotions and ideas we might otherwise have difficulty articulating.

 

In talking about a character or event we discover in fiction, we often find that we’re speaking to a larger experience than what’s on the page, to an experience larger than ourselves.

 

My hope is that my characters and their stories will help other people better understand their own experience, and I hope that the empathy readers find for my characters will translate into greater compassion for people who may be suffering silently around them, struggling with mental illness, with grief, with everyday dislocation and loneliness. The world is desperate for more compassion.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jody Hobbs Hesler.