"Mara Faye Lethem on Catharsis and Sustained Creativity" by Gracie Bialecki
The first time I remember meeting Mara Faye Lethem was at the memorial for Michael Seidenberg at his Upper East Side bookstore apartment. We weren’t sure if we’d met there before and didn’t try to figure it out—it was a place where those specificities were less important than the present moment. The fact that we were standing there sweating in the July heat said enough about each of us.
Nine months later, I started Mara’s novel, A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small. Its main character Barbara is pregnant, hungry, and full of hilarious rage, and her story enveloped me until I had to slow down to stall its inevitable end.
When I emailed Mara to say I’d enjoyed her book, I didn’t expect a friendship to grow from our correspondence. We were both confined in European cities and faced restrictions unlike anything in the States. We knew virtually nothing about each other, but with hilarity and empathy her emails brightened my otherwise bleak inbox.
I was reminded of Barbara’s friendship with her neighbor, Ana Snapple—Snaps and Babs they call each other—whose unlocked screen door she often bursts through. “My door is always open, literally,” Snaps reminds Babs.
It’s refreshing to read a friendship unburdened by niceties or norms. In this year of isolation, I stopped trying to valorize form or medium, and I’m grateful for all the books, emails, and people who helped me through.
Gracie Bialecki: You’re most known for your work translating literature from Spanish and Catalan, though this April your first novel, A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small, was published. How did that manuscript come about? Were you always writing alongside your translation work?
Mara Faye Lethem: I’ve always been some sort of an incredibly thwarted writer. I never thought I would live this long so now I’m having to reassess my goals. This book started as a short story, with just one murder, and was longlisted for a novella prize that meant I had to expand it. Translation is writing without having to face the blank page, or your own demons.
GB: The novel is laugh-out-loud funny, raucous, and free. Was fiction a way of escaping the confines of translation? Did you always intend to tell the story with such humor?
MFL: With this story I was hoping for catharsis, for myself and for readers. At a certain point, I started to see the world through a lens of hormones, and this book grew out of that, as a rebellion against the quite pervasive idea that women need to be “treated” with hormones, from birth control to menopause, really most of our lives. It seemed like maybe our natural hormones, with their sometimes volcanic flashing nature, were an incredibly powerful force bubbling beneath the surface of our lives.
GB: Some of the most hilariously memorable descriptions are of eating, such as Barbara licking a Thin Mint and saying, “the lunar surf of my ass looks just like these.” Other than her almost sexual lust for food, how do you see its role in the narrative?
MFL: You know the expression “eating for two”? I had a joke that when I was pregnant and nursing I was eating for three. Hunger as a metaphor is useful in both the physical and spiritual sense. For me becoming a mother was a simultaneous encounter with my embodiment and corporeality and an alienation from my body as a colonized territory.
GB: Though you’ve lived in Barcelona for many years, your novel takes place in a suburb outside of New York City. You grew up in Brooklyn and your author bio describes you as “just a Brooklyn girl.” Did you always imagine the narrative existing near New York? Has living abroad changed the way you write the US?
MFL: That bio was a riff on a Henry Miller quote, referencing what Brooklyn once represented, now completely lost to history. I have some sort of Brooklyn survivor’s guilt/pride. For A Person’s A Person, I wanted a generic suburban setting. I will write something set in Barcelona someday, maybe in this neo-retro-Barcelona without tourists.
Note: In Tropic of Capricorn, Miller refers to himself as “just a Brooklyn Boy,” in a wry dismissal of the city where he spent his formative years. Miller lived in Williamsburg, Bushwick and Brooklyn Heights from 1892 to 1927 before moving to Paris.
GB: Your novel was published as one of ANTIBOOKCLUB's first e-books. When its founder Gabriel Levinson was announcing the release, he wrote: “Now more than ever we need new books to read. After all, literature is community. Literature is humanity. Literature is an essential service.” What are your thoughts on this statement? Has your relationship with literature deepened or changed during the pandemic?
MFL: The last event I went to before the confinement was a Yiddish poetry reading in a part of the Old City that was a Jewish neighborhood more than five centuries ago. The most recent poetry event I was planning to attend was just postponed as we head into our latest iteration of confinement. I miss the ways that literature took me out into communion with the world, since the writer’s life is an isolating one, but I’m lucky to have a lot of unread books at home to get me through. I once translated a book about Joan Miró and it said that he read poems every morning in the studio before he started painting, so I try to start more days with poetry.
GB: From a translator’s perspective, what’s it like working as the globe cleaves and isolates? In the beginning of the pandemic, Spain had some of the strictest confinement rules. Other than the daily madness of managing children, are these times influencing your work on an intellectual or artistic level?
MFL: Teddy Pendergrass sings: “You can’t hide from yourself; everywhere you go, there you are.” I’ve been thinking about the intersections and interstices of work, meaning, and creativity. Spain has been flirting with a guaranteed minimum income scheme, and I personally have been taking a long hard look at the precariousness of many cultural workers, especially now, and there seems to be a possibility for reassessing how we spend our days, what gives meaning to our various types of paid and unpaid labor. The only thing I know for sure is that sustained creativity, regardless of recognition, is the crux of human existence. To borrow and distort Mr. McGuire’s advice to Ben in The Graduate, there’s a great future in art. Yet we’re bogged down in various forms of complicity with “plastics”: planned obsolescence, student loans, to name just some of the more quotidian manifestations. There continue to be moments throughout this pandemic—which often feels like a Zen exercise I am failing—for a turning point; I am trying to remain hopeful.
GB: The e-book format allows readers across the globe easy access to your book. How do you see the development of this technology impacting your work?
MFL: I love the physical book, always will. The smell of it. I can still recall my roommate in college telling me that you could now call anyone anywhere in the world through the computer, for free. I was like, “Yeah, right…”
The Internet is an amazing tool for translators, and many kinds of research, obviously. I am very interested in the outcome of this Google antitrust suit. And very interested in rejecting the lack of nuance that technology seems to have promoted in contemporary discourse. And the neoliberal insistence, abetted by technology, on reducing us to productive units. That said, it has made my life on two continents possible. Even in my island fantasies, I have internet access.
Mara Faye Lethem’s writing has recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review, LitHub, and BOMB magazine, and has been published in anthologies including Berkeley Noir, A Velocity of Being, Matar en Barcelona, and Brooklyn: A State of Mind. She has translated quite a few books by other people, including Patricio Pron, Toni Sala, Marta Orriols, Alicia Kopf, Jordi Nopca, Javier Calvo, Max Besora, and Irene Solà. Her novel A Person’s A Person, No Matter How Small is published by ANTIBOOKCLUB.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
