Q&A with Sarah Bruni

  

 

 

Sarah Bruni is the author of the new novel Mass Mothering. She also has written the novel The Night Gwen Stacy Died. She lives in Chicago. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Mass Mothering, and how did you create your character A.?

 

A: When I started this novel, I was thinking a lot about storytelling permeated by different kinds of loss or absence, as well as my own discomfort with my country’s legacy of intervention abroad.

 

I wanted to write a novel that juxtaposed a single character’s private pain with a kind of collective pain in a faraway place, and then move between those two fictional worlds. When I realized that the novel would include the voices of a community of women reeling from political violence, I knew the narrator would need to occupy a space much closer to my own experience.

 

While A.’s story is not biographical, I did work many odd jobs in big cities during a health scare, and I could identify with her sense of transience while living in a kind of perpetual present. 

 

Q: The Library Journal review of the book calls it a “timely yet timeless tale about the power of community and the importance of mothers in the face of grief and systematic oppression...” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I particularly appreciate that the reviewer landed on the idea of the story being “timeless.” It was important to me that the narrative take place without a clearly defined historical moment or setting. I wanted the reader to resist assuming the types of places where certain kinds of tragedies occur, so that the story could potentially unfold anywhere.

 

Of course, we know that forced displacement, disappearance, and separation of families happen in many places, including within our own borders right now. In Chicago this year, we have been witnessing acts of courage by community members—mothers among them—in the face of brutal policies designed to terrorize our immigrant neighbors.

 

I didn’t realize when I started the book about a decade ago that some of these details would hit quite so close to home. 

 

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

 

A: I didn’t know how the novel would end, or really what shape it would take at all. I never know much about the narrative arc at all when I get started writing something new.

 

For me, the process of writing a novel is about creating the conditions for moments of tension, but I largely feel like I’m following the characters' lead, rather than imposing an idea that came to me ahead of the process.

 

I do remember that I had imagined that the character A. would eventually find her way to the place where Field Notes was written, but each of the discoveries she makes while there were surprises to me.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: For a long time, I thought that the title of the novel would need to reference the process of ambiguous grief, which I saw as one of the central threads connecting the experiences of A. and the mothers.

 

Thankfully, early readers directed me away from that notion, and I realized that shifting the focus so that the title lands on the act of caretaking, independent of the receipt of the care, was more appropriate. Because the idea of mothering is not predicated on motherhood, a person without children or a person who is separated from a child can participate in the act.

 

I also love the idea of mothering occurring at large, as if it were some kind of natural phenomenon, while at the same time, in this particular case, reflecting the conscious choice to care for one another. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Nothing that I could coherently describe at this point. A lot of fragments above all.

 

I spent the five years around the pandemic teaching in a high school, and the emergencies implied by that environment during that period feel like they have stayed with my body and brain years later, in a way that still makes me curious to write through them.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The journey of writing this book began for me when I started reading more widely outside of the canon of literature I had grown up with in the US. It truly changed what I could imagine was possible from a narrative, and it was such a gift to learn to read in a different way.

 

I also spent time in Uruguay and Colombia during graduate school as I got started writing this book, and while neither of those countries is the setting of the novel, the histories and narratives I encountered in both places deeply informed the story at its heart.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb