Alina Grabowski is the author of the new novel Women and Children First. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Day One. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Q: What inspired you to write Women and Children First, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: I was inspired by the different types of books I love to read; books that have a strong sense of place, books that explore intimate personal relationships, books that are voice-driven.
(Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad are just some of the novels in Women and Children First’s DNA.)
I knew I wanted to write something that focused intensely on complex relationships between women, something where platonic love took precedence over romance.
And I was also very inspired by the landscape of my hometown, which is a small town on Massachussett’s coast. Nashquitten, where the book takes place, is a fictional creation, but I drew on my experiences growing up by the water.
There’s something so beautiful yet tenuous about living beside the ocean—you realize just how powerful nature is. And I think it encourages a kind of saltiness in the people, too; there’s hardiness to folks who live with flooding and hurricanes and the general unpredictability of the sea.
The question of where characters come from is such an interesting one. Voice is always my way into a character, so I was really just following an interesting phrase or thought that began each woman’s story.
And as the novel started to take shape I began to think very deliberately about how the different women’s personalities and speaking patterns could align in certain ways and contrast in others. Shaping their voices was like conducting a chorus—what do we need less of? More of? What don’t we have yet?
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: It’s funny, the book was always called Women and Children First, even when I submitted a version as my MFA thesis nearly six years ago. I actually changed it during one revision and my agent very gently suggested switching it back. I’ve always liked titles that encourage an extra layer of interpretation of the text, like Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
Many of us are familiar with the phrase from the Birkenhead drill, which calls for women and children to be saved first when a boat is sinking.
The novel’s very interested in ideas of vulnerability and safety as they concern the female body, so the title is ironic in that sense: that men can save women and children when so frequently they’re the ones harming them.
And on a very literal level, the book is about women and children. Many of the narrators are young, and the ones who aren’t are often involved with young women as mothers or teachers or coworkers.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the novel says, “Girls and women inflict damage on each other by being too close and not recognizing their own agency and power, and also because disrupting systems of male privilege is difficult. Grabowski’s exploration of all these ideas makes for a brilliant novel.” What do you think of that description?
A: I came of age in the 2010s, when the girl boss was this aspirational figure and women were finally—supposedly—“having it all,” which just meant working all the time while simultaneously upholding domestic duties.
Those ideas feel so dated now, but I do think this conflation of female empowerment with capitalist values has never fully gone away. And I was interested in looking at the ways this mindset could manifest on a personal level.
Capitalism is all about self-interest, and what a lot of the women are struggling with in the novel is how to square what they claim their values are with a desire for self-preservation.
For example, one of the characters is a public school principal, but private school is suddenly on the table for her daughter once issues arise at school.
And the central tragedy of the book is a death that takes place at a house party where kids are trespassing on private property—only one girl is brave enough to stay and risk getting caught.
I wanted to show a darker, more nuanced side of womanhood, and explore these pressurized situations where characters are asked to put someone else’s needs above their own, or to reckon with how they’ll use the power they have.
Q: Another review of the book, in Publishers Weekly, said, “The ennui of small-town life is perfectly captured in the slice-of-life vignettes, which coalesce into a riveting set of Rashomon-style retellings.” How did you decide on the novel’s structure?
A: To me, life—and the way we explain it to ourselves via memory—is this very unstable, shaky, circuitous thing. And what’s endlessly fascinating to me is the fact that we’re all experiencing shared events, places, and relationships through our own highly individual lens.
So a central concern I had when writing this book was how to create a narrative structure that reflected both the instability of a particular character’s viewpoint and also the interconnected, weblike nature of the community she belonged to. Because the book is simultaneously a portrait of these women’s individual lives and the town, Nashquitten, that they live in.
People have used the word “kaleidoscopic” to describe the structure and I like that. The novel moves backward and forward in time, so-called “facts” from one character’s perspective are refracted differently through another character’s retelling.
I tried to create a form that felt multifaceted and dynamic, and the book gathers a lot of its narrative energy from the ways in which the women’s stories contradict or echo each other, rather than from explicit plot points. The novel offers so much formal freedom, and I wanted to take advantage of that.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m currently working on my second novel. It follows two adult female friends as they reunite for the first time in three years and moves backwards in time over the course of a single day. In the opening scene one friend punches the other’s front tooth out. I’m nervous to say any more!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There are so many wonderful debut novels and collections coming out this year that I can’t wait to read. August Thompson’s Anyone’s Ghost, Marissa Higgins’ A Good Happy Girl, Mai Sennaar’s They Dream in Gold, Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall, and ‘Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots are just a few I’m looking forward to.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment