Your story in this week’s magazine, “Once Removed,” is about a young couple’s visit, baby in tow, to a distant relative. Amy, the story’s protagonist, feels alienated from her partner Matt’s many family ties. Is there something special, experientially, about being from a large family?
I think so. In large families, or in any group in which more than two generations are intimately entangled, it gets a little harder to imagine oneself as the first person who has ever come this way, experiencing all the ancient dramas that have always flowed around birth or death or love or aging or money. This can be good or it can be bad. Certainly, if you’re a kid from a large family, and you never had your own bedroom or much control over what you ate for dinner, you might long for the kind of privacy, or the sense of personal autonomy or control, that an only child may take for granted. At the same time, the kid from the crowded house may have grown up with a wider array of characters, and with a more intimate exposure to other imaginations.
This story is interested in the flow of time and the work of perspective. I was trying to think about where and how people locate themselves in time at different stages of their lives. That’s why I wanted Ella, the baby, to have a real role to play. She’s just four months old, barely conscious, and she’s often treated as an object to be handed around. But her actions and reactions are decisive in the plot, and, at a key point, the relationship she forges with her great-great-aunt turns out to be an important mechanism for transporting the whole story to a new—or old—place.
I’m interested in the way the story focusses on Greet, an elderly woman who, frankly, shows few endearing qualities over the course of the narrative. Yet maybe the reader starts to understand her differently by the end. What was the spark for her character?
Just as she’s described in the story, I think of Greet as “a force of nature.” I see her as an individual who has already come through a lot, and, though her personal history may not be known, she certainly knows what happened, and I think her experience has given her a perspective that allows her to act, at least most of the time, with clarity and conviction. In the beginning, Amy and Matt, and perhaps the reader, may see Greet as a bossy person, an individual who is too insistent, too direct, even rude. But, by the end, maybe a shift occurs, and we begin to see her in a different, more complicated light that reveals her true strength, but also her vulnerability and her pain.
Something I think that’s subtle in the story is the role of politeness: even as Amy realizes that she and Matt are being used by Greet, the placating logic feels inescapable. Is there a subterranean connection between this politeness and a kind of empathy?
Absolutely. I think some of the most basic acts of politeness—the standard “please” and “thank you” refrains, or holding the door for the next person—can also be interpreted as fundamental acts of recognition. When you hold that door, at some level you’re saying “I see you here,” in the same space with me. The story is interested in the back-and-forth between resentment and empathy. It’s a question that keeps coming up in lots of our lives: How can we rise above our resentments, above our own sense of being disrespected, mistreated, or misunderstood, and connect with this “other” person? I wanted Amy to feel hard done by in the beginning and then, by the end, maybe recognize something profound in Greet, a connection that she could never have imagined before. Greet is nothing to her in the morning, just a polite in-law responsibility, “her boyfriend’s father’s mother’s oldest sister,” but the dynamic shifts as they move through the day, and perhaps, by the late afternoon, there is a kind of empathy developing in the spare room.
It turns out that Greet is an obsessive collector of unwanted objects. Do these things hold a special power? Is it the story behind them, or maybe the pathos of knowing that the stories are already gone?
I see Greet as a caretaker much more than a collector. Or maybe a caregiver. Collectors usually want the things they collect, and often this desire turns into a controlling obsession. For Greet, it’s the opposite. She doesn’t want any of this stuff, and she even admits that she “can’t totally understand it,” this passionate connection that others feel for their precious things. Like everyone, Greet has limited space, time, and energy, and almost no one to help her, but she is still doing what she can to fend off the ruthless alternatives that come at the end of any life. I picture her holding back the tide of selfish grandkids, Salvation Army drop-offs, and garbage-day pickups.
The array of objects in the spare room was the key to the piece for me. I wanted the place to be so crowded with random things that they couldn’t possibly come from just one person, or even one kind of person. A taxidermy fox and salt-and-pepper-shaker sets and Maurice Richard and lots of commemorative plates: the very particular and peculiar things that we all love for no easily communicable reason. Then, hanging above it all, this ridiculously ugly chandelier, a newly installed, but permanent, fixture.
Greet is an exile from her family, owing to reasons that are never really explained. I’d be interested to hear your thinking on secrets in stories: when we decide to reveal, and when we keep things in the pocket.
In fiction, and in life, a secret is often the purest motivation for action. People will do almost anything to hide the things they don’t want known. Conversely, when everything is revealed and it’s all out in the open, the same person might end up missing the rigid structure that maintaining a secret demands. People don’t always know how to “act normally” when they aren’t fully occupied with the business of concealing their shame.
It works the other way, too, with the secret motivations that we often project onto others. All the explanations we offer, lines like “Well, you know, she’s this way because of this hidden truth,” or “He’s always pushing like that because of what happened with Larry.”
In the end, though, when the truth is revealed, it often turns out that we were completely wrong, and that our judgments were based on misguided diagnostic fixations that we just didn’t want to abandon. In this piece, I wanted the secret to be hidden and out in the open at the same time. Greet thinks everyone knows—she thinks she’s still the subject of scandalous gossip—but Matt and Amy have no clue about anything, and, what’s more, they don’t care at all. Like all of these objects, Greet’s secret is simultaneously the most significant and the least significant thing in the room.
The story comes from your forthcoming collection of stories, “Animal Person.” Are there any short-fiction writers you thought about or who inspired you particularly as you composed your own?
My dad, Alistair MacLeod, will always be the most influential short-fiction writer in my life. He wrote about these themes—family and work and loyalty and communication between loved ones—but in a very different way, and I always go back to his stories to listen to his cadences, and to see how he structured them, with images rising out of scenes, real characters, and beautifully crafted sentences that stand on their own but still work inside the paragraphs. Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant are also very important to me, as are lots of writers from the Atlantic provinces: Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Kris Bertin, Kerry Lee Powell, and David Huebert. In the end, though, it’s the Irish writers who matter most. I won’t list all the names—everyone already knows—but they have worked this genre better than anyone, and I love that their tradition has run so long and is still going strong: Edna O’Brien, Claire Keegan, William Trevor, John McGahern, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Mary Costello, Kevin Barry, Billy O’Callaghan, and Anakana Schofield.
