Q&A with Ruby Todd

 

Photo by Nabeel Khan

 

 

Ruby Todd is the author of the new novel Bright Objects. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Ploughshares. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Bright Objects, and how did you create your character Sylvia?

 

A: The book emerged during a strange period in my life when I was in between projects and also grappling with some personal sadness. In the process, I was distracting myself in a number of ways—through short trips to country towns, researching the connections between astrology, mythology and astronomy, reading gothic fiction, and exploring the ways we ritualize death through funerals.

 

When I read a news article one day about a comet that might soon be visible to the naked eye, these threads came together in my vision of a young widow working in a funeral home, whose life collides with the lives of an astronomer and a meditation teacher in a small country town that’s visited by a bright comet not seen since the age of the pharaohs.

 

Sylvia is a woman whose experience of loss, and tendency to feel intense emotion, colors the world around her and her perception of reality.

 

While I’m fortunate not to have experienced the same kind of untimely loss that she has, I certainly share her tendency to experience the external world through the lens of ever-shifting emotion. I also share her wonder and restless curiosity about the underlying nature of reality, her potential for obsession, and preoccupation with death.

 

So in more ways than I was originally aware, Sylvia was created as an extension of myself, although we obviously are also quite different.

 

In writing her story, I was interested in exploring how the arrival of a celestial object in her life begins to act as a kind of mirror for her projections and questions.

 

At first, Sylvia believes her life to have essentially ended with the death of her husband, and she is entrapped by her own moral scrupulosity regarding ideas about love and justice, but I wanted to plot a revolution in her understanding about life and herself, to the extent that by the end of the novel she makes certain choices that she could never have imagined making at the beginning.

Q: The writer Susanna Moore said of the book, “Bright Objects is the story of a woman consumed by an unquellable obsession, reduced by solitude and incompleteness, caught in an unconscious embattled conspiracy of her own making.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It was an honor to have Susanna Moore read and blurb the book, and it’s true that Sylvia is consumed by obsession for most of the story—an obsession with seeking justice for her husband in the first instance, which then takes on new dimensions.

 

When the novel opens, she is at the point of having become a kind of ghost, so far has she gone into a kind of self-erasure, and denial of the basic needs and drives that nourish a person. She is just surviving, and indeed living within the structure of a logic and reality she’s created, which entraps her.

 

We all create such structures to some extent, but Sylvia has taken this process far beyond normal limits in a rather compulsive way that’s driven by grief, guilt, and her inability for much of the novel to see an alternative. Her journey is in many ways a journey toward deeper self-understanding, and true freedom, the kind that we can only grant ourselves.

 

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

 

A: From very early on, I believed I did have an understanding of how the novel would end, and I carried through with writing this intended ending, which was retained throughout many drafts.

 

However, much later, after discussions with one of my editors, I decided to change it to an ending that neither Sylvia nor I had predicted, which was an interesting surprise—a discovery that in fact, the DNA of the story and Sylvia’s own transformation warranted something different.

 

I enjoyed having my original assumptions upturned; it’s a reminder of how stories ideally can reveal themselves, over time and in the midst of the work, to have a logic and agency of their own.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I really hope Bright Objects is absorbing and entertaining. But I also hope that it might offer a sense of companionship for readers who share Sylvia’s sense of existential bewilderment, and her drive to seek meaning in the face of spiritual uncertainty, to better make sense of the strangeness of life, amid loss.

 

Because every central character in the novel is doing this in some way—clinging to a kind of life raft. For Sylvia, it's the idea of justice; for Theo (the astronomer), it's science; for Joseph (the meditation teacher), the idea of transcendence—all things they project onto the bright object of the title: the Comet St John.

 

Perhaps more than anything, I'd love readers to emerge with a renewed sense of the strangeness of our being here as part of a wider cosmos, and the wonder of being reminded of this, whatever it is we believe.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a novel that explores questions of art and authenticity through the lens of an unlikely female friendship. As with Bright Objects, an element of obsession will be involved, in addition to a blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy—these seem to be preoccupations of mine!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I think it's a fun side-note that the orbit of the fictional Comet St John was actually charted so as to be hypothetically plausible, with the help of one of the astronomers I consulted with during research for the book.

 

I’d consult the chart data to see what constellations the comet was passing through, during the time period relevant to each chapter. It made the idea of Comet St John feel quite real to me as I wrote.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb