In the Story Prize winner’s latest collection, Brawler, families reckon with desperate situations and navigate mental health issues.
When you’re putting together a collection, how do you home in on the themes?
The beautiful thing about stories is that they all come out of this dark, shadowy place in the subconscious, which creates linkages and thematic resonance without you ostensibly knowing it. What happens for me is that I finish a handful of stories, and then I need to figure out which stories belong so I can make the most cohesive argument. In Brawler, there’s family violence. There’s also the oppressive nature of American masculinity, while women are asked to become martyrs.
Family ties are an important theme in Brawler and many of your works. How much of this comes from your own
experience?
Every story is autobiographical. Sometimes it takes a long time to dig beneath the superficial aspects of the story and find deep resonances that speak back to your life. There are stories in this book that, on the surface, have no relation whatsoever to my actual life, but I still find them deeply autobiographical. For example, in “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” there’s so much that’s not at all my life, but I’ve seen the effects of alcohol on families and the way it reverberates
through generations, changing how we love one another.
In many of these stories, people must assume non-traditional familial roles. How do you conceptualize these roles?
I didn’t realize that until this moment. It’s probably coming out of some of my anxiety for my own future. My parents are getting older. I’m getting older. They’ve always been the ones who’ve been there to take care of everyone. So there’s some anticipatory grief I’m subconsciously working out through these stories.
Many of them are left open-ended.
I’m really comfortable with ambiguity at the end of a short story. What I’m trying to do with endings is shine a light back into the rest of the story to sort of illuminate things that maybe the story wasn’t pinging. Sometimes that means the reader has to interpret things. But that’s close to life. I don’t feel like a story’s ever fully finished.
Multiple characters in Brawler struggle with their mental health. How do you approach this theme as a writer who has spoken openly about having OCD?
I’ve never met anyone who is “normal.” We’re all idiosyncratic, and that makes us extraordinary. My older son has severe ADHD. He’s brilliant, but there are some real issues. But it also gives him superpowers. He has an intensity of focus like almost nobody I’ve ever met in my entire life. My anxiety is very acute at times, especially when it feels like the world is ending. But it also makes me a hypervigilant observer of the world. Honestly, I treasure my anxiety and OCD. It’s made me redevelop the way I work, and it’s shown me the way forward.
