Photo by Marco Giugliarelli
Brittany Perham is the author of the new memoir Executrix. Her other books include the poetry collection Double Portrait. She lives in San Francisco.
Q: What inspired you to write Executrix?
A: There are two true answers to this question. The first is that I started writing the book at the moment of my father’s death. I wrote notes in the hospital, where my brother and I watched him die after he was removed from life support, and afterwards in the funeral home, in the car, in the lawyer’s office. I wrote the first draft of the first essay for the book, which I didn’t know would be a book, only a few days later.
Writing that essay was a way for me to clarify what I’d lived through—in other words, the first day I’d ever lived through that my father hadn’t—and to understand what I was thinking. About him, about our relationship (which, though we’d been estranged for more than a decade, was ongoing and primary), and about childhood and the nature of memory. It wasn’t a feeling of being inspired so much as a recognition of this is what I do.
The second answer is that, for years before I started writing, I’d been reading and teaching nonfiction, and memoir and personal essay in particular, at Stanford University. I don’t think I could’ve written Executrix had I not spent years practicing the genre.
And by “practicing” I mean a lot of things: Reading widely and anxiously, with a real sense of necessity and responsibility toward my students; having discussions with them; commenting on their work; making up writing exercises and doing them alongside my students; and thinking all the time about memoir as a process, an act, a stance, a way of doing. Memoir should really be a verb—painting, writing, memoiring. That -ing means everything.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The long answer: Executrix is a gendered term for the more familiar executor. It’s a legal word; I first heard it from the lawyer I’d hired to help me sort out the business of my father’s estate.
As it turned out, I had to act as my father’s executrix for something like six years—a very long time in a probate process—because the estate was in debt and had many financial complications.
The fact that executrix is a feminine term is revealed by the -trix suffix, as with so many words we seldom hear: aviatrix, proprietrix. The one word like this that we use in common parlance is dominatrix, a word associated not only with sex but with power dynamics and, also, with roleplay.
I was certainly interested in the gender dynamics at work in a father-daughter relationship. I was also interested in power dynamics, and in the roles we choose for ourselves and then must inhabit, consciously and unconsciously: What power/role does a father have? a daughter? an executor? a memory?
One interesting thing is that people often mistake the meaning of the word executrix for a female executioner (actually executioneress)—and that’s an apt slippage. My brother and I were the people who gave the doctors the final OK to remove my father from life support.
The short answer: It’s a beautiful word.
Q: The writer Cheryl Strayed said of the book, “In lean and vivid prose that's at turns comic and devastating, poignant and provocative, the author reckons not only with her late father, but also with memory and the form of memoir itself.” What do you think of that description?
A: It was clear to me as soon as I read the blurb that Cheryl truly got the book. I mean, she nailed it. I’m so grateful to her for pulling it out of the pile. It is a book that asks philosophical questions about memoir—that’s one of the things that most interests me.
And I’m thrilled that she got the book’s humor. This is a book about death, divorce, estrangement, and griefs of all kinds—all the big miseries. So it had better be funny. I hope people will laugh as they read it.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: To answer the first part of your question, I want to go back to something I said earlier. I started writing about my father’s death as it was happening. I mean literally. My father was dying, and my brother and I were standing at his bedside in the ICU. I was touching my father’s shoulder. I was talking to him. I was looking at his pulse.
And at the same time, I was thinking about the sentences I would need to use to describe what I was seeing. I was putting things in order. So while part of me was in the room, part of me was in my mind, already projecting a second room onto the page.
As writers, I think we learn to bisect ourselves this way. And we’re lucky insofar as this is a protective mechanism. But we’re also unlucky because splitting yourself from your lived experience has a lot of consequences, some of them not so great.
This is one way that writing the book changed me—the process changed my sense not only of my past and my memories, but my immediate experience in real time.
Now to answer the second part of your question. More than anything, I hope people feel pleasure when they read the book. I hope they laugh. I hope they like being in my company, and I hope they feel accompanied.
By that I mean, I hope the book offers them a space to think about their own Big Questions, and serves as a kind of companion to that process. Afterwards, I hope each reader tells one of their own stories to a friend or a family member, and that person tells them a story in return.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing more prose—which is surprising since I still think of myself as a poet. That’s all I can say right now.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m a poet by trade and training and impulse. And I’m a formalist—I think structurally. Executrix, even though it’s prose and nonfiction, is absolutely continuous with my earlier work, especially Double Portrait. In both books, I’m interested in the way formal structures produce distinct brainstates in the reader.
When we read memoir, the greatest pleasure is getting to feel as though we are thinking through something with the writer. We feel we know the writer because we’ve gotten not only to witness, but to inhabit, the way their mind works. And this feeling is made possible through the formal patterning of language.
All this is to say, we’re frequently taught to demarcate a divide between poetry and prose, but actually I think there’s a great deal that writers and readers of prose can take from poetry, and vice versa.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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