{"id":109795,"date":"2017-04-20T10:30:23","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T14:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109795"},"modified":"2021-04-30T17:39:43","modified_gmt":"2021-04-30T21:39:43","slug":"real-space-an-interview-with-patrick-cottrell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/20\/real-space-an-interview-with-patrick-cottrell\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Space: An Interview with Patrick Cottrell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I think writers attend M.F.A. programs to meet people like Patrick Cottrell\u2014or at least, I did. When we met in our first semester, he was a quietly focused and deeply intelligent student who sat back from the pack as we clamored for attention and support. Cottrell and I began sending each other work, and the constructions of the classroom soon felt secondary. Reading the forceful clarity of his sentences, how they openly wrestle with their influences while still feeling original\u2014somehow both arch and sincere\u2014I knew I was in on a secret that wouldn\u2019t stay hidden for long.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace<\/a> announces Cottrell\u2019s arrival. A manic detective story about a young woman seeking to understand the suicide of her adoptive brother, Cottrell\u2019s debut novel is prickly, hilarious, and extremely sad. I interviewed Cottrell over the phone, and what was meant to be an hour-long conversation gave way easily to four (and more than 120 pages of transcription). Cottrell talks like he writes\u2014with great authority and considerable anxiety\u2014and I left our conversation as I left his book: feeling electrified and knowing I would have stuck with it for as long as it would have me. <\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading your work for something like six years now, and this book marks a departure for you. It\u2019s more straightforward than your earlier work, which often reads more like a fable\u2014familiar at its core but on the surface very strange. How did the change come about?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

I wanted to see if I could keep myself interested in something more traditional. I had a professor in grad school who read my work and asked, Where is this set? What year is this set in? I wanted to write something that could answer those questions\u2014it\u2019s Milwaukee and it\u2019s 2013. I was curious to see if I could sustain that. I was also reading Jane Bowles more closely. Her work employs a kind of curdled realism. It\u2019s off-kilter and has a weird tone, but it\u2019s set in a real place. That was inspiring\u2014that even if you can answer the setting question, it doesn\u2019t have to be strict domestic realism. You can still make it strange. Some of the power of this story comes from the fact that it could be real.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did the subject of suicide influence your decision to move away from a fantastic setting?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

If it were set in a fabulist world, it wouldn\u2019t have the same charge. Books that feel close to \u201creal life\u201d have a unique tension to them, because some readers can\u2019t help wondering what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not. Although this book is fiction, because of the autobiographical details, I\u2019m sure some readers will read it as if it\u2019s close to some kind of lived experience. That tension is compelling.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So you were interested in playing with autobiographical overlap?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I said I was writing an antimemoir. I was thinking of it as a response to people who suggested that I write a memoir, which I was never interested in doing. The further along I went, the less it became a preoccupation, though. The autobiographical details that overlap with the book\u2014they\u2019re very emotional, I was writing from a place of emotion. But I wasn\u2019t hoping to create confusion between me and Helen. If people want to read the details of my life into the events in Helen\u2019s, that choice has nothing to do with me. That\u2019s the reader\u2019s response, which is private and subjective. I\u2019m aware I need to hold space for all different types of responses, and I\u2019m hopeful I can do that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What do you think people get out of reading in that way?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something powerful about the idea that the story in a book actually happened. That\u2019s why people read memoirs. But I think it can be a very problematic way of reading novels. There has to be space for fiction to be a work of imagination. It came from my brain, and in that way it\u2019s personal\u2014every book is personal\u2014but this is largely invented. That\u2019s why I inserted that note, which is meant to be playful, on the hardcover, underneath the book jacket.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the book\u2019s cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Was there a process of editing yourself out?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been tempted to write more directly about my life\u2014the person I am and how I experience the world\u2014but the way I apprehended this book was as a work of imagination. I had fictional tools at my disposal, so characters, events, et cetera\u00a0are shaped and constructed with deliberation. There might be elements of my personality, exaggerated to an extreme, in Helen, but I put myself at a remove, as the writer of the book, so I\u2019d argue that there is an ironic distance between us. This experience of editing myself and my own thoughts out wasn\u2019t weird at all. It was like having a tree-shaded picnic near a riverbank\u2014very pleasant.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I read in another interview that you started this novel, hung out with it for a little bit, and then wrote the first draft in a blast. Do you think that energy helped produce the book\u2019s propulsive energy or did you have to tease that out?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

When I started, I had a handful of chapters, and then I moved from New York to LA and had a long time away from it. When I went back to it, I was able to write it quickly, partly because the voice was relatively immediate for me\u2014it never really left. It \u00a0was just there, like a cactus in a pot on a desk. Plus, if I wrote every day, I think I would start to dislike writing, but if I\u2019m doing other things, I can muster up the motivation to do it.<\/p>\n

I also took a break from contemporary fiction, and I think that helped\u2014not having any idea what the trends were and what other people were doing. I only read older books, and that helped create the space and the freedom to do whatever felt natural.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve folded the words of other artists\u2019 and writers\u2019 into your text. In most cases, they\u2019re quietly quoted alongside your words or in the middle of your words. How did you come to that approach?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

Helen is a sponge and also maybe a bit of a parasite. She absorbs things from art and from reading and from other people, and she uses these other words and ideas to help make sense of her world. We had to get permission for a few of the quotes, and at one point, it looked like we might not be able to secure the Nabokov one. I decided to try to rewrite it and thought, This is so easy\u2014\u201cflattish and faded.\u201d Three words, one of them is \u201cand,\u201d but it was impossible to write anything to replace them! I couldn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did the selection process happen?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

To be honest, they were lines and texts that I remembered reading in high school. Or sometimes, in the case of Clarice Lispector, from books I read more recently and that stayed with me. My influences are very obvious. When I\u2019m writing, I gravitate toward the writers and the books that I love. Helen\u2019s mind is like a collage of all of her influences, and it\u2019s interesting the way she absorbs them, takes them in, and utilizes them for her own purposes. She doesn\u2019t give them credit or cite them. Unlike Helen, I gave the writers credit in the back.<\/p>\n

You described the book as propulsive earlier, and that\u2019s funny because I felt like I was writing the slowest book ever, like unwinding an endless spool of thread. Not much happens. It takes several chapters for Helen just to move from one room to another.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking, and funny, how you handle that. We get so deep into Helen\u2019s thoughts that the physical world drifts away, until she offhandedly describes having entered another room or someone interrupts her train of thought. That\u2019s something you see in Bernhard, too, that juxtaposition of intense interiority looping back to a quick reminder of how little progress is being made on the physical plane.<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

Right. She walks through the house, but progression in the book occurs more through voice than physical movement. My family moved around a lot when I was young, so I got used to moving and inhabiting new houses. Maybe that\u2019s why, even as Helen goes from room to room and eats a cake or kills the flowers, she\u2019s not giving much description in the narrative about the details of place.There\u2019s a loneliness to a person who\u2019s moving without any kind of big event happening and who\u2019s going through an intense, individual experience. Certain places can be psychologically loaded, but it has less to do with individual objects\u2014a cup or a picture frame\u2014than with the fact that they\u2019re settings for emotion. Childhood homes are like that. So when Helen goes back to her parents\u2019 house, where she grew up, she feels a mixture of fondness for and ambivalence about those objects. There\u2019s an element of recognition and reunion, but sometimes the objects are not as she remembers them\u2014they\u2019re distorted. It\u2019s an eerie feeling, and it sets up the house as a kind of haunted house, or a gothic one, where strange events can happen, like when she imagines her parents\u2019 grief entering the house as a balding European man. In this way, the house functions as a place of emotion, sadness, loneliness, isolation, daydreaming, and passivity.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You use repetition\u2014which we also see in Bernhard\u2014to create a sense of urgency, almost mania at times, but it\u2019s also a grounding element. Every time a word or phrase is repeated, it becomes more familiar. Helen will use a particular phrase every time she describes something or someone, and every time we hear it, it carves out a space for whatever or whomever she\u2019s talking about. Helen also becomes known to the reader in this way\u2014her speech patterns sometimes reveal more about her than what\u2019s she\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

That\u2019s definitely influenced by reading Bernhard. For me, it gives the story energy\u2014it\u2019s about rhythm, the way Helen\u2019s voice sounded to me. It\u2019s also meant to mimic the way people repeat themselves when they deliver stories verbally. The repetition pushed the book forward and also seemed to draw attention to her feeling of estrangement from her family and other people in her life.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The repetition of \u201cadoptive parents\u201d and \u201cadoptive brother\u201d not only highlights that dynamic, it also reveals the desire to communicate that distance.<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

It asserts a distance, while pointing at it. The repetition of adopted<\/em> and adoptive <\/em>makes visible the feeling of being adopted, which is sometimes a feeling of invisibility. Using it repeatedly helps ground it. It also draws attention to the fact that the arrangement of the family is artificial. Not that adoption itself is artificial, but in this story, Helen feels that the fact of her adoption is outside of her, separate from her. She feels a clinical detachment from her experience of adoption, and the adoptive<\/em> qualifier is a constant reminder of that detachment. There\u2019s an estrangement from her circumstances as an adoptee in relation to the parents who \u201cchose\u201d her. It stems from something I remembered reading as a child when my parents introduced me to books about adoption, from the experience of being an adoptee. Sometimes adoption was presented as \u201cmagical,\u201d and the adoptee is \u201cspecial\u201d and \u201cchosen\u201d and \u201cunique.\u201d In my novel, this relationship is deflated with every utterance of \u201cadoptive.\u201d It\u2019s dry, it\u2019s grounding, it\u2019s not magical at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I like that you approached the story as an \u201cinvestigation.\u201d A detective is someone whose job it is to remain on the outside of something, while working hard to come to an intimate and comprehensive understanding of it.<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

I suppose aloofness might be a good characteristic for a detective. For example, I think Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote<\/em> sometimes runs into trouble because she\u2019s a kindhearted person. She trusts people who seem decent, and that trust always seems to be undermined or eroded by the end of the episode. But Helen\u2019s view of reality is askew, and she\u2019s not a good detective by any means. She is estranged from the people in her life but thinks she can see them clearly, in her own way. Really, she has no idea what she\u2019s doing. The investigation is a distraction from the horrors of what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Was it hard to leave this novel?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

As far as mentally leaving the novel and getting distance from it was concerned, that wasn\u2019t hard. There\u2019s pleasure in seeing a project through to completion. But it was a great joy to work on the novel with my editor, Andi Winnette. She\u2019s a special person, very well-read and intelligent. In that sense, it was hard to leave the book.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

At what point has an investigation come to its end?<\/p>\n

COTTRELL<\/p>\n

I suppose an investigation has come to an end when a person has exhausted all possibilities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Colin Winnette\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0most recent novel, <\/em>The Job of the Wasp<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press this year. He lives in San Francisco.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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