Q&A with Michelle Lerner

 

 

 

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