7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess

7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with

Tess McNulty (EH)

Transcript

Emily Hyde

Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and

produced in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. I'm

Emily Hyde, one of the hosts and co-producers of this season. Listeners know that on this podcast

we bring together critics and novelists to talk about how novels work. And so I'm particularly, but

maybe a little perversely, looking forward to this conversation between two people who are not

primarily or originally novelists or novel studies scholars. So I'm excited to have Sarah Manguso and

Tess McNulty on the show because both of you come at the novel and its workings from dierent

angles from other forms of writing and storytelling.

Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including books of poetry, stories, aphorisms, and three

memoirs that include a just brutal narrative of illness, a meditation about keeping a diary, and an

elegy for a lost friend. Her most recent book is her rst novel with the just excellent title, Very Cold

People, which was named a nalist for the Pen/Jean Stein Book Award. And she will be publishing a

second novel very soon with, I think, an equally brilliant title: Liars.

Tess McNulty is an assistant professor of digital humanities in the English department at the

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is working on a book that is a kind of a recent cultural

history of the major genres of the viral era, including gonzo self-help, the hypnotic process video,

and my personal favorite, the uplifting anecdote.

So my role as host is now just to kind of step back into the wings. So Tess, I'm going to hand things

over to you.

Tess McNulty

Thank you so much. And rst, I have to say thank you so much, Sarah, for being here to talk with us.

I'm so excited to talk to you. I've read all of your books since your rst memoir, Two Kinds of Decay.

And one thing I particularly love about your books is that if you name any of your books to me, I have

about three or four just moments from them that immediately pop into my head as so vivid and so

memorable. So there's lots of things I love about your work. But for me, maybe most of all, I feel like

you're just a master of moments. And it's a big part of how I enjoy your work. So I'm really excited to

talk to you. And I hope we have some interesting moments together.

Sarah Manguso

Oh, thank you so much, Tess. I can already tell we're going to get along because I'm an absolute

disaster when I'm asked to recount a narrative arc. You know, like what was that movie about? I

can't do that, but I can pick out three really great details that I remember. So it seems as if we'll

understand each other. That's great.

Great. And yeah, I normally actually think in a kind of macro way, but when I read your works, it

makes me think in that momentary way. And that's part of why I love it.

So the rst question I want to ask you is about your very rst novel, Very Cold People. And this

question comes from the rst page of the novel. So for anyone listening who doesn't know this

novel, it's narrated by a young girl. Her name is Ruthie. And her family has moved to this very cold

town in Massachusetts called Waitseld. And so on the rst page of the novel, Ruthie is talking

about her parents. And she says, “Some people wore their dierence honestly, but my parents were

liars. Illegitimate Waitselders, their o-whiteness discovered only after the paint had dried.” So I

was so struck when I rst read this by that stark word “liars.” And then I was even more struck by it

when I learned that it would be the title of your upcoming novel, which we're not going to talk much

about, but is coming soon. And it also struck me as maybe not a coincidence that at the moment

you had started writing ction instead of nonction, this theme of lying was emerging. So I just

wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about this theme of lying and its importance. And does it have

anything to do with your turn to ction? Or is it unrelated?

It probably does. And I love that academics exist because they can gure this out for me. Because,

you know, whatever intention I might have had, it was much more chaotic than is being described

now. So yes, it is true that the word liars appears on the rst page and that my next book is entitled

Liars. But I wasn't thinking about my second novel, I was writing my rst one.

That said, you know, every writer sort of has their grab bag of favorite words and concepts and lying

is denitely one of mine. And that is partly because when you, well, when you're a woman and you

publish a book of autobiography, you are frequently faced with sometimes well-meaning,

sometimes less well-meaning questions from critics and readers about how much is actually true.

You know, so like, oh, how could you possibly have remembered this accurately? Or, you know,

what is in it for you if you actually lie about such and such event that you're putatively delivering as a

journalist would? And on the ip side, when you publish a novel, I recently learned, if you're a

woman, you are faced with the ip side of the same question, which is, isn't this book just true?

Like, didn't you just write down what happened to you? So it's a way of kind of minimizing it and

framing it as something less than legitimate literature.

So that's sort of like the general answer. But the more specic answer is that, you know, in writing

about Waitseld, which is, it's a composite of all of the little towns west of Boston where I grew up.

There is a culture of isolation and abuse, and there's a lot of manipulation of historical truth and a

lot of coerced lying. So when we were taught the history of our town, which began and ended with

colonization, essentially, we were coerced into lying about what had actually happened there. And

that kind of lying was a really useful tool for the people in control of maintaining this environment of

abuse.

And that really brings me to my second question, which is about the theme of abuse in this novel,

which is a central theme. And I wanted to ask you about this in relation to one of those scenes that I

found so striking. So it comes out in the course of this novel that almost every young girl we meet,

including the narrator, Ruthie, has been subject to some sort of abuse in this town of Waitseld, or

sexual predation. And there's one scene where one of these girls or teenagers named Charlie is

describing a situation to her friends in which she's been having a sexual relationship with the tennis

coach. And she says that he's broken her ribs, which is awful. And this is the way that the scene of

her saying this is narrated, so it says: “Charlie said that he had broken her ribs while on a bender.

After that, she said that the story of the broken ribs had been a lie. After that, she said she thought it

was a lie. But once she told it, she realized it was the truth.”

So I found that so striking because it was just so apt to me, this, especially when children have

these very intense experiences, the idea that it can be sort of inchoate. And then when they put it

into words, it almost feels like you're lying. But then you realize after putting it into words that no, in

fact, that's the truth. But there's always this gap between the label put on the thing or the words put

on the thing and the experience. And I've never seen that described in a novel. So I really

appreciated that. But it also just made me wonder, how did you think about the process of unveiling

these facts that have been sort of lied about in the novel and revealing them and thinking about

whether we're certain of them or what we call them and things like that. So I wanted to ask you

about how you thought about that.

I love this question. When I was writing that passage and thinking about the way that Charlie would

be aected by this, you know, sort of global situation of being female and being abused, I was

thinking about legal testimony and the credence that we give to people who seem calm, people

who seem to be able to, you know, provide an arc. And on the other hand, people who are

emotionally overcome or overwhelmed and who are unable to tell or unable to provide a linear

narration of what has happened to them.

I was beginning to read about the way that trauma informs and harms the memory and the ability to

just lay down memory. And I was also thinking about the way that in 12-step groups, a huge part of

one's therapy is telling one's story over and over and over again at meeting, after meeting, after

meeting, because, you know, even years after traumatic experience, it can still be impossible to

remember it all at the moment one wants to provide the narration. And this is just because of the

way that that trauma aects memory.

I said earlier that the town Waitseld is a composite of all of these actual towns and these

characters are composites of all of the dozens and dozens of young women I knew growing up and

women I knew when I was a bit older. And there were so many instances that in the moment, before

I had collected so many of them that I began to understand the pattern, there were these very

strange and back then, very hard for me to understand, sort of holes in stories. And, you know, I did

know somebody who had been physically abused by an adult man who violently attacked her. And

to this day, I assume that it was true. But every time she tried to retell the story when we were

teenagers at the time, every time she tried to retell the story, it was either absolutely true or

absolutely untrue. You know, she would say, you know what, I just made that all up. I don't know

why I did. And then the next time we would talk about it, which wasn't the next day, it was, you know

how trauma works. So it sort of welled out at another inopportune moment. She said, you know, it's

actually, it's true. I didn't think it was. But now I'm thinking, it's just, occasionally, when I'm asked,

why did you make that part of that narrative in that book nonlinear? And the answer is always the

same. It's that like, I made it as linear as I could. I'm just trying to be accurate here. But like, nothing

is linear. Like, nothing in human memory is linear. And so the veracity, of course, like any kind of

self-reportage is, it's impossible to conrm or airm from the outside. And so we just kind of have to

decide to believe each other or not. You know, speaking from Waitseld now, we all have to, we all

have to kind of judge who is trustworthy.

Right. And this makes me realize there is this manner in which the truth can kind of stretch our

ideas about veracity. I think if someone were critiquing this novel, who I would very much disagree

with, they might say, oh, there's too many incidents or too many of these incidents accumulate. But

the whole point is that the normalcy of the thing is what strikes one as unbelievable. But it’s in fact a

reality—

And you're talking about abuse, right?

Yes. Yes.

You're talking about abuse of children? Yeah. You know, it wasn't until I was quite far into the project

of constructing this book that I realized, oh, the abuse isn't the story. The abuse isn't, the abuse is

the background. And I can provide a story against that background. But like, yeah, initially I thought,

oh it'll be one lurid story of abuse. And I just found that as soon as any other, you know, a second

girl is brought into the book, her abuse is just as substantial as every other girl’s in the book. And so,

and then I realized I was getting somewhere. That progress had been made in the way that I was

thinking about how the book was constructed, how to write about Massachusetts in the rst place,

which was the original nut that I was trying to crack for decades. And it turned out that the story

wasn't the story. The, yeah, it was the accumulation of stories that made my experience of

Massachusetts so dierent from just sort of any other book I had written up to that point.

So this might be a place I could jump in, because Sarah, you just used the word that came to my

mind when I was reading Very Cold People, which is “accumulation.” My experience of reading that

book is kind of what you just described, which is at rst I thought, okay, I'm reading a novel, it has a

female protagonist, I am relating to that female protagonist, I happened to be living in rural New

Hampshire when that book came out. So I was cold, there was a lot going on on that level! And then

I think it's more than halfway through, I just realized, oh, actually this novel is operating on a

completely dierent level, which is the level of accumulation and the accumulation of these stories

of abuse, and what was being kind of amassed in the story was sexual violence against girls. And I

just, and actually in my experience Ruthie, the central character kind of dropped out for me

because I was so interested in how you, how a novel, which is usually about characters and

coherent social settings, how a novel includes multiplicity, accumulation, the massing of stories

that aren't necessarily the central story.

So I mean, I just, I think that there's a connection too, with that idea of accumulation across a lot of

your work. So you have a book, 300 Arguments, and it's aphorisms, one of which can land in a

certain way, but 300 is a dierent matter. And you have another book about, about the diary that

you've kept for 25 years. So there's this kind of tension between the mass or the accumulation of

experience and then the distillation in your work that came across as very, came across in a really

sharp and almost kind of shocking way in Very Cold People. And I just, I just wondered towards the

end of that novel, like how did you, when those stories started to amass, did that change the

structure of the novel for you? Or how you were thinking about the shape of the novel or what it is

that the novel itself can do with that kind of experience?

Oh, I'm so glad you had that experience in New Hampshire. That's absolutely perfect. I think to

respond to your question, I have to talk about the character of Winifred. So Winifred is a character

who isn't alive at the same time as Ruthie and all of her friends are. Winifred is the woman who built

the house that Ruthie and her parents move into. The house is almost 100 years old. It's a historic

building. And this woman, Winifred died in it as a very old woman.

Initially, when I started writing this book, I thought it's going to be a period piece about Winifred. And

it's going to be exactly, like it'll have characters, she'll be a protagonist, we’ll follow her through the

events of her life. And something will be discovered at the end of that. That's a novel. And so I wrote

that part, I got about 20 odd pages in and then I became so bored because I just, I need to not really

know what I'm doing in order to maintain interest in pursuing a book. And having made all of these

decisions before I started writing, it solved the problem without my needing to actually write it.

So I was left with these pages. I really liked the pages. The house is in fact based on the house that

my family and I moved to when I was 13. And that house is just so, it was such a haunted place,

even more so than other places in New England. I mean, they're, everything is haunted in New

England. Somebody died in every square inch of New England. But this house was special. And so I

clung to these pages, even though I knew at the time that I was much more interested in exactly

what you just said, Emily, about what it would mean to accumulate so many stories that there

wasn't really a story anymore, that the stories sort of become this accumulated mass that provides

a background or provides a setting, rather than a narrative.

And then at some point, I realized that Ruthie can just have imagined whatever she wants. And

again, this is also like me discovering what ction is capable of. This is my rst sustained book of

ction. So I decided that Ruthie would be the one who invents Winifred. And it's exactly what

Winifred needed to do, needed to be in this book. Because Ruthie, ultimately, it's an escape

narrative, Ruthie gets out of Waitseld. And in order to do so, she needed to sort of have this

practice round, this internal imagined practice round. And she imagines Winifred as a woman of

agency, which is not a kind of role model that she had in her actual life. And the way that she

constructs this character, this woman of agency, is that she imagines Winifred sexually predating

upon the young boy that lives next door. So, you know, using examples that Ruthie has around her,

she sees that you're either predator or prey. And so if you're a person with agency, you're the

predator.

And so, you know, none of this disturbs her, she's just sort of like, yes, I'm using the kind of

vocabulary that is accessible to me. And so, in a way, this kind of, this project of imagination

elevates Ruthie out of the accumulation for a little bit, or it allows her to become singular, even

though her story is part of the accumulation of terrible stories of men doing things to girls. Not just

men, not just girls, but generally. She, yeah, it's almost like she sends this periscope up, this little

narrative periscope of the idea of Winifred to see what it would be like to be a woman of agency.

And I really do think that it's that sort of like rst metaphysical escape that allows her to escape in

the end.

And I do want to say that I had absolutely no idea that any of this was going to happen. And that's

the only way that I can write a book ever. You know, with all absolute respect to people who write

600-page novels, you know, Hilary Mantel style, or, you know, in the style of many of my friends who

write really long books, I just don't know. It's still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing

anything at all what they're about to write.

I want to ask a question about this novel as an escape narrative and how Ruthie kind of escapes

from Waitseld, that has to do with the question of the theme motherhood in the novel. So another

thing I found so striking about this novel was its depiction of how daughters see their mothers, and

how Ruthie sees her mother, and this kind of unbelievably exacting scrutiny to which Ruthie holds

her mother, which in the novel feels very dark, though when I think about it outside of the novel it

kind of makes me laugh a little bit, because I recognize that.

But in the nal sentences of the novel, Ruthie mentions becoming a mother herself for the rst

time. And it feels like part of this escape that she's able to create for herself from the town of

Waitseld. So I wondered how that emerged for you as a kind of nal moment in how you were

thinking about Ruthie becoming a mother.

Oh wow. Yeah, I'm actually having a hard time remembering my frame of mind when I wrote the

ending, what I was attracted to. So the other thing about the ending, which you did mention, but I

want to just shine a little extra light on, is that the pacing of that last page accelerates violently. So

we've made it through less than a decade in a couple of hundred pages. And then as Ruthie

narrates, what it was like after she nally became, you know, entered her 20s, moved out of

Waitseld, went back to visit a bunch, then became a mother and had the kind of organic love that

mothers have for children, ideally, all of that happens on, like, I don't know, maybe like the last 600

words, probably less than that, last 300 words of the book.

So I knew that I was interested in sort of like achieving escape velocity. And I wanted to, whoop, I

just wanted it to happen very quickly, because I thought it would be boring otherwise to sort of like

see her stepping out, like reaching these neat plateaus and then nally reaching her achievement.

So yeah, I wanted there to be a kind of feeling of wildness about that. And even though Ruthie has

been collecting data and preparing the whole book long to get out, like she doesn't do so gradually.

It just sort of happens. There's this little explosion at the end of the book. And I also wanted to, well,

I didn't want to, and this is probably, this is a result of my laziness, but I didn't want to have to tell

the story or even point out any of the ways in which her experience of motherhood was similar to or

dierent from her experience of girlhood and having had the mother that she had had. And it just

seemed, it just seemed like one of those wonderful shortcuts. And I just thought, you know what,

I'm just gonna, I don't have to say anything. I don't have to characterize her motherhood. I don't

have to characterize her child. We can just assume or hope that it's dierent, or fear or worry that

it's not dierent. But it just seemed like that was the end of the book.

I wonder, because we're talking to you at this sort of interesting time when this novel, Very Cold

People came out about two years ago or so and you're about to release a new novel. I wonder if

anything about your perception of Very Cold People has changed since you wrote and sort of

released the novel does, in the rear view mirror, does anything appear very dierent about this novel

to you? Or do you think about it dierently?

Oh, that's an interesting question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that. I think that the novel

seems more coherent to me now, because I have read with great appreciation enough pieces of

criticism about the novel that went to it assuming a kind of central coherence. And my not very well

kept secret of my writing process is that I never have a central coherence. I work, I'm a very bottom-

up thinker. Tess, you mentioned in the beginning about the dierence between remembering an arc

or remembering a few, you know, a few bits of the mosaic. And I only ever start with a few bits of the

mosaic and build up from there. And it's always so lovely to read a critical approach to something

that I've written, not only assuming that I had a kind of central coherence that I was writing about,

but when a critic says anything that, you know, just like, let me draw your attention to this idea that

has been discussed in this book. I just think, god, yeah, that's right, this book is about something.

It's not just a collection of bits and bobs that I found of general import. So yeah, I think that's the

main way in which I see the book somewhat dierently now.

I want to ask a question inspired by your book 300 Arguments. So it, for anyone who's listening who

doesn't know this book, it is exactly what its title suggests, which is it is a series of 300, more or less

short arguments, some people might call them aphorisms, though arguments is the chosen term.

And they're really fun to read because it's sort of like a Rorschach test for me, like which of the

arguments I immediately I'm like, yes, I'm totally on board with that one. And which of them I'm like,

I have to think about that one. But one of them raised a question for me for you. And this argument

is “Bad art is from no one to no one.”

So this is familiar to me as a writer of nonction style essays, you know, you have to be a speaker

and you have to have an audience. But I wondered for you in writing something like ction, because

I think you're making good art, not bad art. Who are you writing to, do you have a “to” or an audience

in mind?

You're very kind. The rst thing that came into my mind, when you began this very smart question,

“bad art is from no one to no one.” That argument is about the, well, it's about pandering. It's about

the kind of bad art that irritates me most is just hopelessly generic, and written to a generic,

appreciative audience. You know, it's the kind of art made by somebody who doesn't quite

understand what art is for, thinking. Oh, I'm writing for “the reader,” of which I have an incredibly

generic sense. And “the reader” likes things that are generally like this. So I'll, you know.

So yeah, many of these arguments came out of little frustrations or complaints or lessons that

come up in the classroom when I teach creative writing. So a lot of them are sort of like a writer

complaining about teaching writing to other writers or a writer complaining about other writers.

Yeah, there's a lot of writing about writing in this little book.

But the second part of your question is about, the audience that I imagine when I write, and I don't

imagine an audience when I write. I just write, uh oh, and so here come all of the accusations that

like women only write therapeutically. And yeah, I do, you know, if it's therapeutic to have an almost

physical impulse to articulate a feeling in language, then yes, that's my therapy. It wasn't Shelley, it

was one of the Romantic poets, I think it was Byron, who said, if I don't write to empty my mind at

the end of each day, I would go mad. And that's how I feel. I'm not writing in order to create

something beautiful. I'm not writing in order to communicate with some real or imagined person

unless I'm writing a letter. I am writing in order to articulate something that I feel in my body that is

uncomfortable until it is so articulated.

And I'm lucky, you know, like, I think it's really convenient to have that constant urge, impulse, it's

almost like a physical urge, because there's a job that you can do, right. So it's like, I'm scratching

my itch, and it makes books, and that's a job. How lucky, other people, you know, whatever bizarre,

like sex thing you can be into, that's not really a job generally. And so I feel bashful when people ask

like, oh, how did you, you know, it took you not very long to write this or that book, or, oh, you know,

you wrote in a bunch of genres, how did you decide to do that? No decisions were made, it is all

completely impulsive, it is all, I'm never thinking about what kind of book it would be good to write

next. It really is just this very almost base level need to translate feelings into language. It's like

inheriting a bunch of money, like it's embarrassing, like it's, I don't have writer's block, I have the

opposite of writer's block, like I always have some terrible mess, or, occasionally, like amazing joy

that if I don't articulate in language, I don't feel well. That's what I have.

So I'm currently actually teaching a course called “Fiction and Therapy,” and I had to restrict the

items on the syllabus to only ctional works in which therapy appears because—

I would love to see that list.

I enjoy it. So maybe I'm subject to the criticism, you know, female academics only teach

therapeutic.

Oh right they only talk about their periods.

Something like that. But I was wondering when I was reading your work if I could put it on this

syllabus and because there are scenes in some of your books that take place in it in a psych ward, I

think I could next time around that that I teach the course.

Yeah, there's a lot of abuse in psych wards. So if you're doing an abuse class that works too.

It was going to be a question actually about your depiction of this psych ward across multiple of

your books, because I think it comes up in Two Kinds of Decay rst in a memoir form. And then it

comes up again in Very Cold People, though there there's a much more kind of cuckoo's nest feel to

the space that's sort of horric. So I wonder about just your experience of writing that space

throughout multiple of your books.

Yeah, you've really noticed something. And so the rst book in which I write about a psych ward is

my rst memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, which is about an autoimmune disease that I developed

when I was 21. And I was in and out of hospitals for four years. And toward the end of those four

years, one of those hospitals was a psychiatric ward. And I, in writing that memoir, so my rst

memoir, don't know how to write a memoir. So again, I'm just writing. I'm writing what seems

interesting to me. And there were several little scenes, several little things that had happened to me

during the duration that I was writing about in that memoir, that were really lurid. And I knew that if I

put them in the book, the pacing or the emotional amplitude of the book, I'm making a gesture in

the air, but it's sort of like, you know, generally at, and then there would be a spike. And then there

would be another spike. And I didn't want the book to consist of just like two really intense, lurid

moments surrounded by generally, more, more kind of less lurid moments. And, you know, I mean,

when you're like, I still had to write about them, though, I didn't know this, but I did.

And so it wasn't until I realized I had to write a novel in order to suiciently expunge my childhood

and all of things that I had long been needing to write about Massachusetts. I realized that it was

time to write about them. Finally, as ction, you know, as ctionalized, the thing that I learned in

writing my rst memoir is that not everything goes in. And the thing that I learned about writing

ction from my rst novel was that it might surprise you what needs to go in. So maybe that, maybe

that's a coherent way of answering that question.

In that rst memoir, Two Kinds of Decay, I don't know if it's that the rst time that you were using a

form in which you often write, which is the sort of short units of text that are separated by white

space. But I was struck in that book by the connection between that form and the theme. There's

sort of a discussion in the book about illness and a kind of relationship to time, not knowing what's

necessarily going to come next. And one thing I nd interesting is that many of your books use this

form, but it strikes me as dierent in every single one, the way it's used, like in 300 Arguments, it's

very funny. In Very Cold People, it's kind of spare and ascetic and cold, like the environment. And it

seems like there's almost a relationship between the form and the theme of the book in a dierent

way each time it's used. So it did make me wonder how you originally came to that form or found it.

Was it part of writing Two Kinds of Decay, or did you come to it earlier?

That's a really generous reading. I am for better or worse, a short form writer. And I began my writing

life as a poet. I, after college, I got an MFA in poetry. And I think within a semester of arriving on

campus as a rst-year grad student, I realized that I didn't want to write poems anymore. I only

wanted to write prose blocks, but they were very short. They were, you know, maybe seven

sentences long. And so I went to my advisor and said, you know, something terrible has happened.

I'm no longer a poet. I realize I don't have the authority to break a line. I don't want to break a line. I

don't know how, it doesn't make sense to me. I'm afraid of it. And I'm only going to write prose. And

she said so? Which I've talked about before in dierent contexts. But like that, that one, that one

word question was just this, it oered such, not just consolation, but permission to do what I

needed to do and, you know, gure out what I needed to learn.

My rst book is a poetry collection, but more than half of it is in prose, prose poems. My second

book is a poetry collection. I think I break maybe half a dozen lines in the entire book. And then my

third book, that's the one that I think really started, starts to show evidence of my learning how to be

a prose writer. And that book is a story collection called Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, and it

was published in a three-book set with works by Deb Olin Unferth and Dave Eggers. And that book

is 81 stories, each one about 200 words long, some of them are shorter. And it was an absolute

delight to write. I really felt that like it was exactly the form that I always wanted to write in, forever

and ever. And I basically have ever since, and that was 20 years ago.

I love the title, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. Do you choose your titles yourself? Do you work

with the others?

I love writing titles. I love it. I love writing titles. I love writing frontmatter. I love writing the

acknowledgments page. I love epigraphs, but I almost never use them because I'm extremely, I'm

very stern about epigraphs. I think that they have to provide something that no other part of the

book possibly can. And again, this is like the Yankee thrift and like almost secret oath of poverty that

everybody takes growing up in New England. And it's, you know, so characteristic of everything in

Very Cold People. But yeah, no I love writing titles. I love writing subtitles. I remember writing the

subtitle for Ongoingness. I think I had to come up with a list of 50. And then I had the best time

narrowing it down with my editor at Graywolf, Ethan Nosowsky. The subtitle of Ongoingness is The

End of a Diary. And the runner-up subtitle was The End of Beginnings and Endings, which I still like,

but I think diary is better. Concrete noun. I need a concrete noun.

Yes, makes sense.

Many as possible.

Well, outside of this conversation, I'm very tempted to ask you to create a title for my book because

I have trouble coming up with a good title for my own academic—

I would love to. Oh, no, I think I'm very good at it. I might not write an appropriate one for an

academic work, but yeah, no, send me your, what's it called, your abstract and send me your

chapter headings. And yeah, I'll get to work.

Great, perfect.

So this seems like a good place to close, although I'm about to ask you a question, Sarah, that does

ask you to select one out of a mass of things, which is, so at Novel Dialogue, we always end with a

signature question, something that we're asking all of our guests, all of the novelists over the course

of this particular season. And so for season seven, here it is. What is the rst book that you

remember just loving?

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It used design, 70s-era typography and wordplay and puzzles.

And there were, there's just such a panoply of these really individuated characters. And it was

written in a way that wasn't pandering to the idea of what a child should like. Like it seemed like a

very grown-up book for middle grade readers. And it was a huge gateway drug to all of Ellen Raskin's

work. And eventually, as an adult, I found out that she lived in a haunted house in the West Village,

which when I lived in New York, I frequently visited, the outside of it. She wasn't there anymore.

Perhaps she haunts it now.

I just realized I have a very intense visual memory of the cover of that book that I didn't know was in

my brain after all these years, but there it is.

Yeah. Is it the one with Turtle in her witch's hat?

Yes, that's the one.

As always, we are grateful to the Society for Novel Studies for its sponsorship, to Public Books for its

partnership, and to Duke University for its continued support. Hannah Jorgensen is our production

intern, Rebecca Otto is our social media manager, and Connor Hibbard is our sound engineer.

For this, the last episode in season seven of Novel Dialogue, Chris Holmes and I want to say a

special thank you to both Hannah and Rebecca, who are going to be leaving us at the end of this

season. Rebecca is a recent graduate of Rowan University, where she was an English major and an

Honors student. And ever since graduating, she has been living and teaching and working in South

Korea. She has managed the time dierence between those of us working on Novel Dialogue and

her life in South Korea really well. We appreciate all of her work on social media and keeping us up

to date online, and we wish you the best of luck, Rebecca.

Chris Homes

Thanks so much, Rebecca.

And Hannah has been with Novel Dialogue since before Chris and I even joined, so she has been a

stalwart manager of the website and doing amazing work on the making the transcripts incredibly

accessible. And we also will miss her and wish her absolutely the best in the future. She is a scholar

of the digital humanities and fan culture, and we can't wait to see what you're going to come up with

next.

Yeah, Hannah, just so you know, behind the scenes, Emily and I talk constantly about what we are

going to do without you, because we're not really sure. But I can tell you one thing, you will be

missed, and you have made a giant impact. And your smarts, your organizational skills, your design

skills, your thoughtfulness, has shaped Novel Dialogue in ways that are uncountable. But we will try

our best to constantly remember the ways in which you made us better. And I hope that you will not

be a stranger to the show or to us.

Absolutely. So from all of us at Novel Dialogue, thank you, Hannah. Thank you, Rebecca. And

please keep in touch.