Michelle Lerner is the author of the new novel Ring. She also has written the poetry chapbook Protection. She lives in New Jersey.
Q: What inspired you to write Ring, and how did you create
your character Lee?
A: Ring was in part inspired by my experience with
complicated grief when I was younger. I wanted to write a story about a person
struggling so much with grief that they consider ending their own life, because
that feeling/desire is a common facet of complicated grief.
In addition, I've been struggling with chronic illness for
the past decade, triggered by a too-long-undiagnosed case of neurological Lyme
Disease. Earlier in my illness, I experienced a profound sense of physical and
social isolation due to being sick.
I also discovered, in my attempts to recover from my
illness, a range of healing modalities that calm the nervous system and release
trauma stored in the body. I wanted to write about all of these things.
And since I mostly wrote the book during the pandemic, that
deeply influenced my desire to write about isolation, despair, and the process
of re-entering the world.
In some ways, the character of Lee came to me fully formed.
As with many fiction writers, I feel like I "see" characters more
than create them. They tend to appear fully formed in my mind, and writing
about them feels like channeling what they tell me about themselves.
That said, I think the way that Lee appeared to me was
heavily influenced by Tig Notaro's largely autobiographical character in her
series One Mississippi, who responded to the traumas of grief, alienation, and
illness with a combination of resignation, repression, recognition of aburdity,
quiet wry humor, and some willingness to learn and change.
Lee is not that character, but I think that character helped
give birth to Lee in my mind and heavily influenced Lee's responses to their
surroundings.
Lee is also experiencing severe depression, and having
experienced that state myself, I was able to describe it with some clarity. But
depression is an emotional state and not a character trait; it was important to
me that the progression of the story tease this out to some degree.
In developing the actual character of Lee, I tried to
understand a kind of emotional repression that I've witnessed and that I think
is common in certain elements of American culture; it's a bit foreign to me as
an Ashkenazi Jew but I've spent a lot of time contending with it in people I'm
close to.
Lee's somewhat blunt communication style and tendency toward
judgment, on the other hand, is more reflective of my own personality, and that
the way wrote those traits reflects my ambivalence and concerns about how they
play out in my own life.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it
signify for you?
A: Ring is the name of the dog in the story, who is a
character himself but who also triggers conflict and growth for the main
character.
Ring's name symbolizes something central to the story. In
group meditations, the person leading the meditation will often ring a small
bell to start and finish the meditation practice, and sometimes in the middle
of the practice. This happens in a scene in the book.
Part of the point of the bell is to bring us to our senses
and the present moment, to remind us of why we are here, and to help focus on
our breath or whatever other point of focus we’re utilizing to try to stay
present.
The bell is supposed to pull us out of the stories we're
telling ourselves in our minds and back to what we can actually feel in our
bodies, our breath, and the space immediately around us in this moment.
I think Ring as a character does this for Lee, brings them
back to the present moment and the realization of being a living being in the
world, and also to the decisions and commitments that come with that
realization.
Q: The novel is set in a remote part of northern Canada--how
important is setting to you in your writing?
A: The setting in this book was extremely important to the
story, and I do not only mean regarding its plot. The story did need to take
place in a remote northern area in order for the plot to work, and some of the
subplots are directly tied to exact place where the book is situated.
The specificity of the land and environment are in
themselves something that is explored in the story. The location is also a
place where certain things tend to be more noticeable, such as climate
change.
But on a deeper level, the book explores emotional states
through setting and climate. The story is about an extreme emotional state that
is understood, in part, in the context an extreme environment.
The isolation and iciness of the setting is central to the
emotional currents of the story and what the characters, and thereby the
reader, experience; environmental descriptions diffuse the writing about the
characters.
The setting is also important because of the way that Lee's
experience of it changes. What initially seems to Lee like barren and frozen
surroundings where they can more easily shut out the world eventually reveals
itself to be a source of beauty, expansiveness, and meaning, a place where it's
actually harder to shut out the material world.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and
what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I wrote the book, in some ways, as a healing guide for
myself, as well as for the reader. While I was writing it, my best friend died.
I stopped writing for months, but when I returned to the story, it helped me
cope, almost as a blueprint.
I hope that readers find the book comforting in some way,
and that it helps them understand something that either they themselves are
experiencing or have experienced, or that someone they know may be going
through.
I have been told that the book is profoundly healing even
though it's a raw and unflinching look at grieving. When people are grieving or
otherwise experiencing something very difficult, like illness, they can feel
very alone, like everyone else is going on with their lives while they're
personally stuck in a sort of frozen state.
Just seeing someone else acknowledge the frozen state and
reach out a hand can be profoundly comforting. I've experienced finding this
kind of comfort and companionship in books a few times in my life, and I hope
that Ring provides that.
I also hope that the story gets readers thinking and talking
about some the ethical issues explored.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Believe it or not, my next book is funny! It’s a
collection of humorous stories about my life among animals, from my
neurologically impaired squirrel to my physically disabled sheep to the six
cats with feline leukemia I accidentally adopted.
I'm a Harvard-trained lawyer who practiced animal law for
years, and while I was a law student I helped get the animal law program at
Harvard Law School started. This memoir-in-essays about my own experiences with
animals sheds light on what led me down that path. It's already finished and in
the editing stage.
I've also started a historical novel about the Shakers. Most people aren’t
aware how truly radical the Shakers were. They were egalitarian in terms of
both gender and race. They were communist with a small “c.” Their religious
leader was a woman.
They prohibited marriage, sex, and reproduction, and
replenished their ranks by adopting orphans and raising them in the community.
At the point of adulthood, they let the adoptees go out into the world and
decide whether or not to remain a Shaker.
My story is about a young woman at this point in her life,
deciding whether to remain a Shaker and have access to education, occupation,
and leadership positions, or to live in the outside world and have the kind of
family life afforded by marriage and childbearing.
I want to consider the question of what we are willing to
give up in order to fulfill our potential, and what it means to choose between
different kinds of freedom.
And in the wake of the demise of Roe v. Wade, I hope to
explore the concept of women’s reproductive autonomy by considering the Shaker
movement. The Shakers were started by a woman, Mother Anne, who suffered four
still births and didn’t want to do that anymore.
The Shakers became one of the only options for women who did
not want to marry or bear children, and a very large percentage of every Shaker
community at any given time were women of reproductive age. I think this is a
story that needs to be told right now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Ring was released in paperback rather than hardback in
order to be more affordable. It's also available in e-book and audiobook. The
audiobook is read by talented narrator Jenny Barr.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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