Cheating at Grief: An Interview with Mary South
Mary South’s short story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten was released in March of 2020. Epiphany published South’s story “The Age of Love” in the Spring/Summer 2020 “Borders” Issue. The story has recently been acquired by Anonymous Content with the intention of adapting it into a feature film.
Jamie Kahn: A lot of your stories sort of play with the bounds of reality in terms of their speculative elements, while others tend to stay more within what we'd consider to be a traditional physical world. Are there certain themes or story elements that make you want to bend reality a little more?
Mary South: Well, first of all, I guess I really like the idea of a collection with a lot of range. I love it when collections do that. You can have stories that are pretty close to reality, and there's just one tiny thing that's weird, and then you can have stories that are hugely wildly speculative, strange, like going to space or something. So I wanted to write a collection that had that range. But for me, I guess how speculative or not something is always comes down to a particular emotion that the characters are experiencing. So it's all about the character first and the emotion first, and then I sort of try to let that guide whatever speculative elements are coming into play. So for example, the story Not Setsuko in the collection. The core of the story is about grief, and the idea was like, what if someone sort of refuses to go through the cycles of grief, the stages of denial, bargaining, anger? What if they just got stuck in bargaining or denial? Going further off of that, I was like, what situation would cause someone to do that, to insist on not going through grief. It’d have to be pretty devastating, like the loss of, say, a child. That is just so painful that you wouldn’t want to accept that. And so then, we have the speculative concept of this mother who cloned her daughter, and she's remaking her memories so that she doesn't have to go through the pain of having to accept that her daughter's dead, and that she’s never coming back again. That came after figuring out the emotion and the emotional interest in the story that was appealing to me. I think it always starts off character first, even in a very realistic story, like the Frequently Asked Questions story is about, again, another woman, this time, a neurosurgeon grieving over the loss of her husband. I ask, how can I start off in a sardonic place and get very vulnerable by the end? And there’s nothing speculative there, because that's what that story demanded.
Kahn: You've mentioned before that your book follows the stages of grief. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. Was it a conscious choice? Or was it something that just sort of happened naturally that you noticed and leaned into?
South: That's interesting. I didn't realize that I said that!
Kahn: You mentioned it at the Debuts and Redos reading.
South: I could see like that's the case. I'd like to think that with Not Setsuko being the last story in the book, it sort of ends with the mother asking her daughter to tell her the story. Some people have told me they find that ending rather ambiguous, but for me it was a real point of acceptance for her of releasing control, and her telling her daughter, “You get to help me write the story now, it's not just all based on what happened before. You get to have control of your life, have some narrative power.” So that is sort of like reaching the acceptance stage of that story. I guess I can see the rationale, for the title story being that full rage, that anger stage of grief too. I think about when I was ordering it, too. I did a whole bunch of different orderings, and I was trying to think about what stories would flow into each other well, and be interesting conversationally to each other, but also give a reader a break. If you have a difficult story or a grief stricken story, or depressing story—like the title story, which is about a woman getting over a sexual assault—to give the reader a breath after that, I think what comes after that is a story about about a summer camp or internet trolls. I like to give a sense of levity after they’ve sat with some real heaviness and darkness. A lot of things happened very naturally without having to think about it. And maybe it's just the nature of putting a book together, that you want to end on a story that does feel like there's been a journey by the collection, not that someone has had an epiphany necessarily in the traditional sense, but that you have reached a different emotional place than the start of it, where there has been some progress or development and emotional maturing. Coming to terms with things. I sort of see the first story of the book as a good mirror for the last one. Because it also has the cloning speculative element of like, an Amazon warehouse where a nurse is raising clones so that they can be shipped out. A friend calls it Never Let Me Go meets free two-day shipping. And that really ends on a super despondent note. She's lost her husband to a very devastating illness and now she's losing this patient of hers who she has projected a lot of feelings onto. And there's a sort of a sense that maybe she's coming to acceptance, but you don't get it in the full sense that you do in the final story. So I do like the idea that there's a full circle by the end of the book that feels different from where we started.
Kahn: I know you mentioned the whole thing about bringing in moments of reprieve. I find that one of the really unique qualities of your work is the way that wit and humor are very effortlessly woven into more serious plots and subject matters. And so I was wondering, what do you find that humor does in that setting that it probably couldn't do when it's more isolated?
South: For me, it's sort of just how life is in a lot of ways where you can be really intensely grieving and sad over something, you know, you can be mourning the loss of a loved one for example, and crying, and then somebody will remember something funny that they did. You can be laughing, and you're still missing them, but some levity has entered into the situation. I sort of want to have that fullness reflected in my stories, generally speaking. Like how you can be deeply upset over something but then you still have to go into your job, you know? And you go to your job and you still have to like, make coffee or deal with coworkers who say stupid things. I've spoken about this too, that there's something that happens on the internet, where you'll be reading Twitter, and you'll be reading about something really dark and heavy that people are talking about—take any topic that's come up recently, for example—and then next to that it'll be like a cat GIF. Or like, a joke, an advertisement, or whatever. We're bombarded all the time in our lives with so many different kinds of content. Not only online, but that can bring relief in real life too. Things aren't just always dark and heavy. There are some breaks. I want to give a sense of relief, too, I suppose.
Kahn: Even with a lot of focus on plot and concept, a lot of your stories really contain such vivid characters and personalities. I’m wondering, do you find that character is still really important in stories where concept is more the focal point in your process?
South: Yeah, absolutely. The concepts are great and like I said, sometimes I get the concept first, like the one I mentioned before: what if someone doesn't go through the cycle of grief? Then you have to figure out that particular character and why they would be that way. I think voice is super important. Like if you don't get the right sound of the character and the right voice, to me, the story doesn't work. I've actually been working on a novel, and I restarted it at one point, not only because I sort of started in the wrong chronological place, but because I hadn’t figured out the voice. For me, once I figure out who the character is and the voice, I feel more confident proceeding forward. I not only outline my stories, but I try to really imagine the characters. I think about like, where they grew up, and what job do they have? It kind of annoys me when you read about people and you never know what jobs they do or how they get their money. How do they make money? Where do they live? Do they have friends? Is anyone in their life checking them on some of their impulses? Like Not Setsuko for example. Not a lot of people are checking her on this impulse, this project that she has. You know, what is their situation? I just sort of develop this whole person, for them, this whole backstory for them and it's not necessarily because those things come out in the writing. Sometimes you don't use any of it, but I think it informs how the story feels. And then sometimes it does come out in the writing. I can see different bits and pieces here and there, like the title story. It's a pretty isolated person, again, who has been grieving the loss of a parent, who doesn't have a ton of friends, who used to have these ambitions that have been lost because she's traumatized. I think that knowing a lot of things about her helps in writing the story. Same with all of the stories.
Kahn: Speaking of the title story, notably, it's one of your most popular in the collection. It was in The New Yorker and the Best American Short Stories; it's arguably also one of, if not your most, realistic traditional fiction pieces. I was wondering, what do you make of it, that you really are a writer who plays with the bounds of reality a lot, and you had this thing that really shot off that hugs reality a little closer?
South: I mean, it's funny, you know, my collection came out in March of 2020. And a lot of people said stuff to me at that time like, “You must feel like you almost anticipated this moment!” or “Your collection was primed for this moment because now we’re all online, and you write about the internet and grief and stuff like that!” And I was like “No, there's no way I could have anticipated what reality would look like right now.” A lot of times it's the speculative stories that feel the most real to me. It's because the world has gotten darker and stranger and weirder than I could have anticipated in a lot of ways. Like the first story, Keith Prime, feels very real to me. It’s a sendup of Amazon, and I didn't know this at the time, but now Jeff Bezos wants to, I guess, get into healthcare with something called Amazon Care. And so the fact that I was writing about, well what if Amazon did healthcare and if you're rich, you get organs boxed up and shipped to your house in an Amazon box or something, you know? Obviously that's not what that would look like in real life, but the fact that now they’re going in that direction sort of gave me the creeps! Any kind of tech intrusion into healthcare, whether it's through data collection, or Walmart making its own insulin, like, really gives me chills. So sometimes then, writing about that kind of thing feels less like reality in some ways, but it is more real. I'm writing a novel now with a premise that could never happen in real life. It's about a fictional illness, and I actually sold the idea for this book before COVID. It’s about a nurse who treats patients with this fictional illness. But it feels very real to me, writing about it as time has gone on because of everything that's happened, with COVID, and the world. So sometimes it's nice to take a break with a story, that I guess is realism, but maybe it doesn't feel too close to reality. You’re right in that the title story does feel very close to reality to me, and I did a lot of research for it to make sure that everything I've read about content moderation and Google was accurate. Unfortunately, I have one friend that works for Google who told me it was accurate, so I felt really proud of this. Then the story about internet trolls, I guess that that is a realistic story, too. And that exists, and it's nice to have a little bit of a break from a story that feels so entrenched in reality in a very dark way.
Kahn: So, because of the nature of your work hugging close to reality, and the real but unreal feeling of your stories, do you think that as a writer who does that kind of thing a lot and who imagines a lot of concepts through that lens, that you're almost fated to predict the future, and that maybe just by statistical probability, you’ll probably get a lot of things right?
South: Really, what I’m picking up on in a lot of ways is the present, right? When I sold the idea for the novel I was picking up on things that are already present in the time, like inequality in healthcare, the disturbing trends in healthcare. So you can say I’ve foreseen something, but the kernels of it were already there. I’m not writing about things that are so off base that it would be a surprise that they happen. So yeah, I guess in a certain way, they are destined to become more true, if things keep going in the direction that they seem like they're starting to go in without any change.
Kahn: This novel sounds so fascinating, by the way. You said that you sold the idea for the novel before the pandemic, and you're currently working on it, so have the pandemic and the events around it changed your writing process in any way?
South: It's definitely informed how I see how people respond to illness. And how things can become politically divided that I would never have foreseen would be divided. For example, wearing a mask. Like, pre-pandemic, I would have just assumed if there's a vaccine available—and I know we had anti-vaxers long before COVID—but especially with something so serious, I was under the assumption that most people would want to get it, that most people would be very careful, wearing masks. So, seeing the reality of the response to illness has shifted how I’m approaching things in this book. The book hasn’t changed, but observing the world has sort of changed the world of the book. I also reread Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, and how she talks about the metaphors that we use to talk about illness was very startling to read during COVID. She talks about the use of metaphors of warfare. And she's particularly talking about cancer, but you know, we call them “frontline workers” or we say someone “battled cancer” or that they “lost the fight” to cancer. She says at the end of it that the one thing that she wishes we could change if we could change anything about the metaphors we use in relation to illness, it’s the use of militaristic, battle metaphors towards it. I’ve become increasingly more observant and focused on our use of metaphors as I’ve been observing that in the real world, and then applying it to my fictional world.
Kahn: I'm very excited to read your novel when it comes out. Any info on when we'll be expecting it? That you're allowed to tell us, of course.
South: I’m pretty deep into it at this point. I’m supposed to turn it in soon, like by the end of the year, and who knows how long we'll have to do edits with my editor, but we’re guessing 2024. That’s what we’ve estimated.
Mary South is the author of You Will Never Be Forgotten, which was a finalist for The PEN/Bingham Prize for a Debut Story Collection and longlisted for The Story Prize. She has received fellowships and support from MacDowell, The Black Mountain Institute, Kimmel Harding Nelson, VCCA, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and The Sewanee Writers Conference. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, NOON, Epiphany, and elsewhere.
Jamie Kahn is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and journalist whose work has been featured in HuffPost, The Los Angeles Review, Yes Poetry, Far Out Magazine, Atwood Magazine, The Spotlong Review, Lover's Eye Press, The Hunger, and Epiphany. She serves as the contributing features editor for Epiphany.
