PW: And Now You Can Go begins with an act of implied violence, but because nothing actually happens, it's hard to determine if Ellis [the narrator] is a victim or not. Was this deliberate?
Vendela Vida: What happens in [that scene] is ambiguous. It's a big deal, a little deal. Nobody knows how to talk about it. I wanted to describe how a community of people react to something that doesn't obviously have a name or is easily identifiable.
PW: But we also know very little about the narrator at that point.
VV: When writing, I look at [the story] as if it were a film or a play. I like how plays always start at the last possible scene and with the last possible moment where the reader can understand. Originally, this started off as a much longer novel—450 pages—with the first chapter in the book buried around page 300. It took two years to draft it and three days to realize I didn't like it, but there was that one scene I kept coming back to. I decided to start again using that as the starting off point.
PW: The prose is rather spare. Does the structure somehow reflect the narrator's emotional state?
VV: I wanted to be subtle. The space breaks were scenes that were taken out [because] they were explaining too much. Ellis has little time to think. She's just recording what happened to her. It would have been dishonest to have 10 pages of reflection.
PW: How did you come to decide that Ellis's voice should be strong, but with an undercurrent of anger?
VV: [Ellis's voice] was natural because I wanted to portray what she was going through. She was on this incredibly tempestuous spiral. I wrote a lot of this book while listening to music. Liz Phair's Whip-Smart and a Hole CD. It was somehow important to me to listen to female singers, especially with this book when I was writing from a woman's perspective. Something I learned from Philip Roth is that you can have anger and confusion mixed in a way that's mixed with humor.
PW: How much of the novel is autobiographical?
VV: [With] any piece of fiction, you take details you see around you—a T-shirt or a picture—and you have all these things in your head. They kind of get spun around and come out in strange ways. I wanted to make sure everything felt real. Honesty on the page is much more important than anything else. I believe so much in doing research. I teach, and with my students, I tell them to go out and actually do something if they're going to write about it.
PW: Did you actually help operate on eyes, as Ellis does? Or crawl into a cabinet under the sink as she does?
VV: I did observe eye surgery, and I did try to climb into my own cabinet, but it wasn't big enough, so I went over to a friend's apartment and did it over there.
