Danielle Lazarin’s debut story collection Back Talk (Penguin Books, 2018) features women grappling with what they—often deliberately—leave unsaid and displays the intricacies of the desires and rages that live inside those silences. Hailed as “beautifully crafted” by the New York Times, Back Talk is a story collection that lingers long after a first read, not only for its beautiful prose and unforgettable characters but for its quiet, powerful tensions. Here, Lazarin discusses her title story, writing child characters, writing New York, what books she’s recently loved, and what she’s working on now.
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Peter Kispert: To start, I love the title story’s placement in this book. It falls almost dead center, runs at a tightly compressed two pages, and contains so much of what seems at the heart of this collection, as shown through this character who is very aware of both these public and private stories, and chooses not to speak up, and on whose behalf we feel such anger.
Do you see the title story as a kind of thematic anchor for the book? And could you talk a little about the back talk in this collection?
Danielle Lazarin: Yes, it’s absolutely an anchor, but it wasn’t always that way, and in fact, I resisted this story from the get go. Writing it felt too on the nose for the themes of my work: teenage girls and the rush and cost of their freedoms, sexual and otherwise; how silence doesn’t equal the absence of a complicated story. Additionally, many readers seem confounded by shorter work—honestly, I think it’s often not thought of as super literary, or maybe too literary, maybe too in line with poetry and therefore out of reach for a prose audience?—but I think this story being so on the nose in such a compressed space is what makes it that anchor after all, and once I claimed it as such, it was a touchstone for the themes of the other stories.
As for back talk, there could be a version of this story where the narrator says something witty or devastating to the boys in question, where she literally talks back, but that gotcha moment is more for a screen than a page that seeks to be honest. In truth, many women have this talk with themselves; for better or worse, it’s an internal dialogue. And when I look at the book as a whole, I wanted the reader to feel the pressure of how much we leave unsaid, to consider why it’s hard to say those things. In this story for instance, the narrator can talk all she wants but it’s useless. By getting inside that moment, and in particular using the very intimate second person to do so, I hope the reader can understand she’s not powerless. Pithy comebacks or acts of revenge are few and far between in most women’s lives, but the internal conversation is constant, and there is power and rebellion in that quiet space, too.
PK: The second-person point of view in “Back Talk” fascinates me for how it creates a kind of distance that positions the piece as back talk to the “you” herself. The use of italics instead of direct quotes, to suggest a running internal dialogue, and present tense helped, I think, to make that reading available.
What was your process for finding this story’s final form—and why second person?
DL: This story came out fairly quickly (in part because it gathered steam in my convincing myself I should under no circumstances write it) and began, as much of my work does, written into a notebook. I didn’t change much on from first draft to final, and most of it was for language in this case. Part of this is length, of course—the shorter pieces tend to appear firmly as such from the start, self-contained more quickly. The privacy of the story, the intimacy of the narrator with the boy (boys, really, as there are two she is in conversation with here) she is addressing, lends itself to second person. She’s having this conversation that is directed at them but we know, as you point out, that it’s also self-directed. I think it’s also kind of a. . . pep talk? Which seems funny to say, but there’s a sense that she is telling herself it’s okay, a way of floating above the experience, which at some point she loses control of, and explaining it back to herself, reasserting that control over the story at least. These other conversations are going on around her, conversations that though they are about her, no one seems to care what she has to say about them. As it often is with women and sex, and even more so with young women, her voice is presumed to be irrelevant to a story about herself. You can make choices with your body and then the you, the human being who has made those choices, disappears. It becomes a discussion about the body of a woman rather than the woman herself, and often, too, an assumption that there is no agency or bad agency. The result of which is an erasure of a woman’s complexity and consciousness. So the second person here restores that consciousness, both for the narrator and for the reader.
PK: I’m amazed by how well you write children and teens, how deeply you’re able to imagine, for example, the sisters in “The Holographic Soul,” who have this tender and complex but seemingly unbreakable bond, and whose lives are rendered in all the marvelous particularity of childhood (measuring in backyards, the detail of bees “collecting on sandwich crusts”), and who are all the more convincing for their maturity and awareness, which seems like something we often short young characters.
What tenets do you write by when writing younger characters, especially women and girls?
DL: I have children now myself, though I wrote many of those younger girls before I had any of my own, and the sisters in “The Holographic Soul” for sure, though I now have a pair of sisters who behave not unlike those two in many ways, ironically. (Perhaps I manifested my children in writing that story? Be careful, friends!) But most of all I feel like I still hold those younger parts of myself within me, and that’s been my guide. I think the biggest mistake that writers make with younger characters is forgetting that they are characters, fully. Children are fully people. You have to think of the expression of that person, and then work around the limits of their age, their experiences and language access, for that expression without denying them full humanity. I do recall that I had very complex thoughts and emotions as a young child and teenager, and when I write these characters I try not to forget that what I felt as a being was not what I didn’t know or understand, but what I did. I felt fully in the world, in myself. The inadequacies we feel as adults we can project onto child characters, seeing them through a lens of lack; that’s a tell that as a writer you aren’t in touch with, ahem, your inner child.
PK: There are so many gorgeous moments that touch on this larger, collection-spanning notion of narrative ownership—who “owns’ a given story, who gets to tell that story, and how that story changes over time into many different stories, which are parts of different truths. This inheritance of that kind of complexity. I’m thinking here of how the collection closes, with this fabulous rumination on precisely this.
What are some of the questions you want these stories, and this book, to ask? How do you hope it challenges readers?
DL: I definitely want the book to ask questions about the veracity and I’d say dominance of stories. Just because we see one version of womanhood: naturally maternal, safety-seeking, meek, aiming towards nuclear family life, etc, doesn’t mean that that’s what all women want, and I want people to think about how those narratives loom over women’s choices. I want the book to make people not see women as stroller pushers or lost when they have children (which we all were, and as I said above, children are fully people). What do we do to women when we make assumptions about their lives? About what they want once they make a single choice that aligns with that dominant story (wifehood, motherhood, etc)? I hope it challenges readers to stop obscuring the person inside the woman. And always, always, for others to write their own stories. These are a very narrow slice of experience. I sometimes get hopeful when people get annoyed by the white, heterosexual, middle-classesness of the book (which is true for both the stories and for my life) that it spurns them to write the stories of their lives they can’t see in my characters. I hope it makes a broader experience of womanhood show up on a shelf one day.
PK: I love your conversation with Lee Thomas at Fiction Writers Review, where you mention that “Most of the characters in families in my stories keep things from one another in order to spare them something they think they can’t handle.” Over the course of these stories, these “secrets” assume their own shape and provide these worlds of tension just below the surface.
As you write, do you find yourself attracted to questions of what characters are keeping from one another? What do you find routinely drives your curiosity in writing/drafting?
DL: I heard Jennifer Egan say that she often begins work by having a vision of two people together in conversation or action and then working backwards from that vivid moment, and I wanted to shout ME TOO! but it seemed like it would be awkward at a large event with hundreds of other people. But that’s how story often begins for me, with seeing a moment between two people and wondering what has driven them together and yes absolutely, what they’re not saying to one another and why. What is the dynamic between them, and what’s the context of the love or discomfort or what they want to say but cannot? Why can’t they say it? I find that that question often pushes me further than what happens when they do say it, which is much more functional human behavior and often doesn’t make for great story.
PK: Years ago I remember Antonya Nelson saying that the best places to set stories are places you know very well or places you’ve only briefly visited, that sort of imprint themselves in an instant.
Are there any challenges for you unique to writing about New York, where you grew up and now live and where many of these stories are set? Do you find yourself returning to anything in particular in setting? (Aside that all subway detail in this book is so spot-on.)
DL: Thank you for the subway detail compliment! I get easily emotional on subway trains, in particular the 1 train, which is considered one of the worst lines but that feels like home to me in a visceral way. It’s the big mess of New York City on that line, and I live so far up on it, and riding it downtown for an hour will teach you so much about what this city is, literally who it is made of, if you watch who comes in and out of the car doors. And maybe that’s it, that’s my challenge, that I am so emotionally, primally rooted to New York I can’t see it from an intellectual place. I don’t want to talk about “New York”—I’m not interested in selling it or trashing it or commenting on how it’s changing, in being that interpreter—and there’s an expectation that you will add that layer in. It’s the literal setting where I imagine most stories happening for the sheer fact of the number of years I’ve spent here, so I just try to pretend I don’t live in “New York” but New York, like it’s just a city called New York.
PK: What have been some of your favorite books recently? (Selfishly taking recs.)
DL: I was on a memoir kick earlier this year. No surprise that the ones I loved were all written by women who hurl themselves at the question of how we tell and hear women’s stories with tender brilliance. Three that come to mind: Allie Rowbottom’s Jell-O Girls, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Recent fiction reads that also address this same question and that I devoured include Ashley Wurzbacher’s forthcoming collection Happy Like This (out in October) and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.
PK: What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?
DL: Recently my agent, Julie Barer, said, “Just because it’s good doesn’t mean it belongs in the book,” which nearly made me drop to the floor. Also when I had written a novel draft in first person and it wasn’t working and I said, “Yeah, I actually really struggle with first person and don’t like it,” and she said, “So then why are you doing it?” That simple question helped me see that I don’t have to give myself extra struggle in my work (or life, honestly). It’s plenty hard, and if I’m going to challenge myself, it should be with something I find pleasure in conquering.
PK: What are you working on now?
DL: I just finished a draft of novel (yes it’s in third person now, and it’s better that way) about an underground women’s healthcare network. The project after that, also a novel, is taking root more firmly in my brain, and I’ve been handwriting that in secretive bursts. Desperately wanting to write a nice little short story instead of all of the above.
Danielle Lazarin’s debut collection of short stories, Back Talk, is out now from Penguin Books. Her fiction can be found in The Southern Review, Buzzfeed, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has been published by The New York Times, The Cut, and Lenny Letter. A graduate of Oberlin College’s creative writing program, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where her stories and essays won Hopwood Awards. She lives in her native New York, where she is raising her daughters and working on a novel.
Peter Kispert is an assistant editor of American Short Fiction and author of the forthcoming debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am. His writing has appeared in GQ, Esquire, Playboy, OUT Magazine, and elsewhere.