Amy Bonnaffons on the Business of Death
Amy Bonnaffons is the author of the story collection THE WRONG HEAVEN and the novel THE REGRETS, a love story about Rachel, a Brooklyn librarian, and Thomas, who is dead—and, slowly, disappearing. Over the course of the novel, as Rachel and Thomas’s love grows and then fades, this disappearing man becomes the perfect (dis)embodiment of the growth and dissolution of romantic love: what happens when two embodied conscious beings connect and disconnect through, above, and beyond the body.
In addition to writing her own work, Bonnaffons is a founding editor of 7x7.la, a literary journal devoted to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Rachel Lyon, Epiphany’s Editor-in-Chief, spoke with her at Books Are Magic, in Brooklyn, on the occasion of her novel’s publication. Their conversation has been edited lightly for our interview series Epiphany 10.
Portrait by Kendra Allenby
Rachel Lyon: Part of what I think is so exciting about THE REGRETS is the way that it deals with these heady, philosophical issues—there are elements of religion, elements of philosophy, there’s a lot of metaphor—but you make it all so concrete. How important is it to you to concretize these metaphysical ideas?
Amy Bonnaffons: Very important. I think that’s the wonderful thing about fiction, is that you can explore these big ideas in such a concrete way. Like, I don’t actually believe that there’s this afterlife, this Kafkaesque, bureaucratic office, but there’s something I’m investigating about death, and about liminality through that. Not only can you be concrete, but you can be theoretical—and with a raised eyebrow at the same time.
RL: There’s a lot of sex in the book—it’s a fun book—and throughout the book there’s this tension between the physical and the metaphysical. How do you approach that, in your process?
AB: I think I’ve just always been drawn to those in-between spaces: the space between life and death, the space between people, and the space between being with someone and not being with someone. We’re always in those spaces, but we don’t always think about it in that way. So the metaphysics are, on the one hand, high-concept, but on the other hand I’m just trying to be, like, wait, what is happening right now, in this moment?
RL: It struck me, reading this, that it feels almost like a parable, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on a parable for what. Which I think speaks to the work’s strength: that it’s not quite just one thing. Did you think about that, at all, while you were working on it? Would you read it that way, at all?
AB: I don’t think there’s a lesson, but I did think a lot about what this conceit was a metaphor for. There are many answers to that, and probably—I hope!—many answers that I haven’t thought of, myself. But the main thing I was keeping in mind while writing was trying to convey a sort of feeling: what it feels like to relate to a person in all these ways, as a relationship evolves and devolves; of being a body and also being not fully in your body, at the same time. The high-concept metaphysics are always about heightening that.
RL: I found, in writing the protagonist of my book, that I was sort of working through something: there was something about writing her that allowed me to shed certain ideas, and grow in other ways. How was it to write Rachel? What did it do for you?
AB: I’ve thought about this a lot since finishing the book. It did a lot for me. Of course I am the same person, but I’m also not. She—without giving anything away—is forced to shed a lot of the illusions that she had operated under, and I had to shed those same illusions: illusions about intimacy and about daydreaming, and all sorts of ideas about how to relate to others. As I’ve looked through the book for what I was going to read at different events I’ve been like, Oh right, I remember what that felt like. I’m really grateful that I had that experience, and I’m really grateful that I’m on the other side of it, too.
RL: A lot of these things that you’re touching on are very writerly concerns. Illusions and fantasy: these are things that we need, in order to work on our work. How has your work changed since writing Rachel?
AB: I’ve become more interested in different kinds of illusions. The next thing I’m working on is a creative nonfiction piece that investigates family history and American history and my own life—it’s at the stage where it’s about literally everything, and it’s kind of a mess!—but I’ve had to look at: What are the myths that we operate by, in terms of our identity, at a deeper level? Politically: our national identity? Or our personal identity, as a daughter or a mother or a child? Those ideas, in some ways, are just as unreal, and yet they have real consequences.
RL: If you had to trace the path of your creative work back, then, through to your collection THE WRONG HEAVEN, how does it start from there and move through THE REGRETS toward where you are now?
AB: I would say about half the stories in my collection, which came out almost two years ago, were written as breaks from the novel, which I’d been working on since 2011, so the themes are really interwoven and intermeshed. A lot of the characters in THE WRONG HEAVEN also struggle with intimacy and struggle with—both for their own idiosyncratic reasons and also as they come up against ideas of gender and sexuality—who they think they’re supposed to be versus what they actually think they are, and what they want. The idea of being in the middle of a transformation, and not being sure whether you’re one thing or another, is something that really obsesses me—you know, like: Am I living or am I dead? Am I a woman or am I a horse? There are all sorts of ways that turns up.
RL: There’s a speculative element to all of your work, and one of the things I like best about this book is there are these periodic instructions from “The Office,” where Thomas is transported somehow after his event, about how not to “incur regrets,” which could inhibit the next step of the process—which is not really revealed to us. Curiously, those instructions have the effect of creative limits around the project. With any speculative fiction, I imagine, you have to sort of define the rules of this world and how they function. Process-wise, which came first: these instructions or the world they refer to?
AB: That was the thing I wrestled with the most, actually. Once you throw out there, Hey, it’s like our world, except there are these sexy angels, and there’s this afterlife office! I felt pressure to close the loop and explain it all. So then I had to figure out how it all worked. There were many drafts of the book where the whole history of the world was explained. There was one version where there was a middle manager of the afterlife who was a first-person character; angels were first-person characters at different points; at different times Thomas would return to the Office and you’d see him navigate that world some more. The problem, though, is, once you determine that you’re going to literally explain Heaven and Earth, it becomes a never-ending project. Eventually I was like, that’s not even what this book is about. This book is about a relationship. This book is about people on Earth trying to navigate intimacy. So I built this elaborate scaffolding and then I disappeared it—and if that’s what you’re reading for, you’re going to be disappointed, sorry! But actually you’re probably really glad that I didn’t give you that version of the book, because it was not good.
RL: Was it a challenge to keep the book tonally consistent, going through all those iterations?
AB: Definitely—especially because, for some reason, I can only write in the first person. There are three narrators in this version; at one point there were five or six. They felt internally consistent, but at one point I was like, Are they too different from one another? Am I going to lose people?
RL: What can you tell us about the rules by which this world plays?
AB: There’s no boss. There’s this “Office,” but there’s no boss. Or, it’s like the Wizard of Oz, you know: there both is and there isn’t a boss. But there are all of these workers in this office, just doing what they’re told, processing deaths, and the angels are the workers. I really liked the idea that even the people who literally carry out the business of death and of transition from this world to the next have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just following orders. It’s just kind of like here: we’re just doing the best we can. I’m not even sure that I ever fully settled on whether there was a man behind the curtain, and, if so, who that was. But that mystery was actually an important part of it.
Have you seen the movie Afterlife? It’s a Japanese movie from the 90s. The conceit of that movie is that when you die you go to this processing center and you’re there for a week, and by the end of the week you have to pick one memory from your life. That’s the only memory that you can take with you into the afterlife. So all of these people are agonizing and trying to decide what to choose, and at one point it’s revealed that the people who are working at the center are people who either couldn’t choose or refused to choose. That’s how they became workers there. I was really fascinated by the idea that the people operating the system were people who’d actually failed at functioning within the system.
So there’s this built-in ambiguity. In the instructions Thomas gets, it’s a lot of “don’t do this, don’t do that,” but the threat is very vague. It’s just, “Otherwise you’ll incur regrets,” and they never quite say what that means. It might just mean, “You’ll regret it!” Or it might mean, “You’ll be punished in Hell for eternity.” But it’s never explained, and that ambiguity is part of what he has to struggle with as well: is it worth it to break the rules?
RL: I’m always curious about the novel that’s left on the cutting room floor: the version of this book that is not this book, which I’m sure there are thousands of words of. How far did you follow those possibilities during the writing process?
AB: Yes. I followed a couple of them pretty far. There’s one version in which he becomes an angel of death at the end. That doesn’t happen in this version. It happens only in the ghost of the book.
Rachel Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief of Epiphany magazine and co-founder of the reading series Ditmas Lit. Her novel Self Portrait with a Boy was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Her short work has appeared in publications such as One Story, Longreads, Joyland, Catapult, and Electric Literature.
