{"id":153299,"date":"2021-06-29T12:35:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-29T16:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153299"},"modified":"2021-06-29T12:35:01","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T16:35:01","slug":"the-momentum-of-living-an-interview-with-clare-sestanovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/06\/29\/the-momentum-of-living-an-interview-with-clare-sestanovich\/","title":{"rendered":"The Momentum of Living: An Interview with Clare Sestanovich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Edward Friedman.<\/p><\/div>\n

Clare Sestanovich\u2019s short story \u201cBy Design<\/a>,\u201d which first appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of this magazine, features the unforgettable Suzanne, a woman facing accusations of sexual harassment, going through a divorce, and struggling to accept her adult son\u2019s independent life. In the opening tableau, she sits across from her future daughter-in-law at a restaurant. Suzanne keeps her criticism of the impending marriage to herself but outwardly betrays a deep, unspoken malaise. She consumes an entire basket of bread by soaking each bite in red wine, as if gorging on the sacrament.<\/em><\/p>\n

In <\/em>Objects of Desire<\/a>, which includes the story, Sestanovich revitalizes James Joyce\u2019s style of \u201cscrupulous meanness\u201d\u2014depicting the setting and inhabitants of her narratives in an ultrarealistic, if sometimes unforgiving, light. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. Suzanne, for example, finds solace not in a major dramatic resolution but in the acquisition of a houseplant. But Sestanovich engages more self-consciously with a matriarchal literary lineage. Her steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She weaves each narrative around universal trials of womanhood. Through hysterectomies, miscarriages, and unstable relationships, her cast of canny protagonists come to terms with their wants and needs.<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the past year, Sestanovich has continued to release new work in\u00a0<\/em>Harper\u2019s, <\/em>The Drift,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker, where she is an editor. Her characters provided me companionship throughout the solitude of quarantine, and the publication of her full-length debut this week coincides with our uneasy communal reemergence. Sestanovich\u2019s stories about social encounters\u2014meeting strangers on flights, striking up conversations with bartenders, sitting through dinners with in-laws\u2014feel eerily appropriate for this moment of easing back into the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sestanovich and I corresponded by email in the weeks leading up to the publication of\u00a0<\/em>Objects of Desire. At the start of our conversation, she reminded me that we had attended the same Quaker prep school. There, students met for worship every week, sitting in silence to await communion with God or one another. This got me thinking about how such veneration of silence might have affected the emergence of Sestanovich\u2019s voice as a writer. Her stories are built around what is waiting to be said\u2014the desires that remain unspoken or held within.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I loved the piece you wrote for The New Yorker<\/em><\/a> earlier this month about chance encounters. The city is \u201ca cartography of a shared world that does not insist on bringing everyone together,\u201d you write, adding that \u201cin parting ways, we are still imparting something of ourselves.\u201d You structure many of your stories around chance and coincidence as well. What purpose, what friction, do passing encounters bring to a narrative?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t insist on bringing everyone together\u201d is actually a pretty good distillation of my views on plot\u2014though when it comes to hosting a dinner party, I promise I\u2019m more conscientious about togetherness! There\u2019s a certain narrative tidiness that coincidence, if used well, can helpfully disrupt. A lot of us have expectations, in both life and fiction, about the hinges on which our stories are going to turn\u2014you know, the moments the Hallmark aisle tells you to commemorate. Births, deaths, all the things you\u2019d throw parties about. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Sounds like Clarissa Dalloway.<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

But, at least in my experience, reckonings have very little regard for milestones. Coincidences are sort of antimilestones, reminders\u2014and not always comfortable ones\u2014that the momentum of living builds and breaks in unforeseen ways.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The title of the first story, \u201cAnnunciation,\u201d brings to mind the iconography of the Virgin Mary and her impregnation. But Ben is the virgin of the story, and Iris, despite her symbolically virginal name, is quite sexually experienced. How did you go about finding new ways to represent and play with gender and female sexuality in literature?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

At some point in my late teens, in college I guess, I experienced what felt like a revelation\u2014women I knew could talk about sex as frankly, as confidently, occasionally as crassly, as I had always imagined men did. And then, soon thereafter, I experienced what felt like a second revelation\u2014all that talking might not have any bearing on how we were actually experiencing <\/em>sex. There was some way in which our lucid, sincere, empowered thinking didn\u2019t translate into lucid, sincere, empowered acting\u2014for structural reasons, for personal reasons, for murky reasons that we were always at a loss to explain. When I write about sex, I think what I\u2019m trying hardest to capture is that murkiness. What keeps us from getting what we want? What keeps us from knowing what we want?<\/p>\n

Iris has what you call experience. She\u2019s intentional about acquiring it. She\u2019s had a lot of sex, and I imagine she thinks of herself as someone who\u2019s comfortable talking about it\u2014good<\/em> at talking about it. She isn\u2019t, however, very comfortable with vulnerability. She looks away when she sees something real and raw in Ben\u2019s face, she hides her most important truths from her mother, and she falls asleep when there\u2019s something she wants to avoid looking at head-on. I\u2019ve tried to be clear-eyed about sexuality in these stories, and that includes being clear-eyed about all the things we can\u2019t see, or don\u2019t let ourselves see.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your dedication\u2014\u201cFor my mother and her mother\u201d\u2014sets the tone for the collection so immediately, and motherhood is indeed a major theme. But so is the decision not to have children\u2014abortion, IUDs, the mental and physical recovery from a miscarriage, hysterectomies. I\u2019m curious how birth control can function as something of a narrative device. Does its inclusion change how we write female characters and stories?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

Yeah, I think so! At a purely linguistic level, I\u2019m interested\u2014sometimes charmed, sometimes repelled\u2014by how the language of procreation has shaped the way we think and talk about creativity. We \u201cgestate\u201d ideas. Some people, I have learned, observe their books\u2019 \u201cbirthdays.\u201d So birth control, I think, invites us to think more broadly about the peculiar relationship between creativity and choice. We live in a world where you can choose not <\/em>to create or procreate. Thank god! But then what? What does it look and feel like when you do <\/em>choose? These are operative questions for mothers, for artists, for anyone who has felt liberated, or paralyzed, by the revelation of their own agency. I\u2019m drawn to characters who think of themselves as creators\u2014in particular, to characters who yearn to create but struggle to choose. Indecision is so tricky to write about, because stuckness and inertness are the enemies of narrative development. And yet it feels so important to me to try. We know that what looks <\/em>like paralysis can be a frozen surface over very turbulent waters. How do you put that on the page? The last paragraphs of Miranda July\u2019s near-perfect story \u201cRoy Spivey<\/a>\u201d contain one of the best examples of this.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is that the one that ends with the protagonist just standing still while listening to the sounds of her husband move around the house?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

\u201cThe longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there.\u201d It\u2019s so good! I\u2019m always looking for examples of paralysis in fiction\u2014and trying to find out if I can write some of my own.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Throughout the collection, you depict women at different stages of adulthood\u2014from late adolescence to menopause. What was it like to assume the voices of women of varying ages and lived experience?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s really fun! I guess now I\u2019ll do something that probably no fiction writer should do unless under duress, which is bring up autofiction. Some of the characters in these stories seem a lot like me\u2014twentysomethings who live in New York and are pretty confused about the shape and direction of their lives. Guilty as charged! And yet I don\u2019t feel that there is any more of me in those stories than in others. There\u2019s a story in the book about a middle-aged woman who is unhappily married, frustrated at work, deeply and uncomfortably jealous of her son\u2019s youthful potential, and driven to do extremely destructive things\u2014to herself and others. I found that story almost unbearably personal to write, even though superficially I share relatively little with its protagonist, because it meant accessing my own destructiveness. John Berryman once said, about the central character of The<\/em> Dream Songs<\/em>, \u201cHenry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points.\u201d I think that\u2019s true of every character I\u2019ve ever written. The points aren\u2019t always obvious. Often you have to reach before you touch, and the reaching\u2014imagining your way both farther beyond your life and deeper into yourself\u2014is where meaningful things happen.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The pairing of Debbie and Georgia as dual protagonists in \u201cSecurity Questions\u201d is quite shocking. They are drawn together across generations by the arbitrary circumstance of Dana\u2019s affair\u2014Debbie as wife and Georgia as girlfriend. They also reminded me, in a way, of Iris and her mother in \u201cAnnunciation.\u201d What interests you about intergenerational relationships between women?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

I dedicated this book to my mother and grandmother, as you\u2019ve mentioned, because writing is passed down matrilineally in my family\u2014my mom taught me to write, and her mom taught her to write. This is an unusual, and very fortunate, arrangement, but it\u2019s not so different from what I think is constantly being transmitted across generations. Our received narratives are a kind of inheritance\u2014for good and, quite often, for ill. Debbie isn\u2019t Georgia\u2019s mother, but she\u2019s authored her life in a way that fascinates Georgia. Does Georgia admire it? Does she want to replicate it? My guess is probably not\u2014after all, Debbie\u2019s husband is pretty shitty\u2014but she isn\u2019t quite sure. And isn\u2019t that the way of all \u201crole models\u201d? They seem monumental at least in part because we <\/em>are still under construction.<\/p>\n

Debbie\u2019s own mother died a long time ago, and Debbie is now older than her mother ever lived to be. She grieves this fact, and I think it\u2019s a very real kind of loss. Before, even though her mother was dead, she was still alive as a model. When Debbie turned sixty, she could imagine what her mother had been like at sixty\u2014she could turn to her for lessons about sixtyness. Now, for the first time, she has to figure out the lessons on her own. The story she writes will be, in some real sense, hers alone. Now she is the writer, and someone else will be the reader.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

As the title suggests, Objects of Desire<\/em> centers on individual \u201cwants and needs.\u201d In the story by that name, Zeke is forthright about voicing and acting on his desires whereas Val has been brought up to keep it all in. Why did you choose an all-female cast of protagonists to embody this tension between spoken and unspoken desires?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

In this story, the phrase \u201cwants and needs\u201d comes up in a therapeutic exercise. The premise of the exercise is simple\u2014writing down your desires is the first step toward fulfilling them. At least some of the characters in the story think this is really stupid, and they\u2019re not totally wrong. Squint one way and it sounds more or less like The Secret. <\/em>But look at it another way and it\u2019s just the project of literature. The task of writing, for me, is in part a response to the experience of longing. I put the feeling on the page because I often have no idea where else to put it. I don\u2019t expect fiction to become <\/em>reality in the strictest sense, but by turning fantasy into a very literal object\u2014you\u2019ve held my book in your hands\u2014hasn\u2019t it, in another sense, done exactly that?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have some grand theory that all fiction is just wish fulfillment by another name, but I am <\/em>really interested in what happens when we take oblique approaches to desire. As you note, a lot of the women in these stories have a hard time saying what they want. There\u2019s a structural explanation for that. Many women are expected be repositories for other people\u2019s desires, which doesn\u2019t leave much room for them to be the actual source <\/em>of desire. I buy all that, but I\u2019m also aware that having distance from one\u2019s desires isn\u2019t always a burden\u2014in fact, it can feel, for better or worse, like a kind of comfort. To identify an \u201cobject of desire,\u201d you have to first step back and get a good look at the thing\u2014to observe it, to imagine having it before you actually do, to measure what it would take for you to reach out and get what you want. The space between you and that object is the space of subjectivity\u2014the space in which you become yourself.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Yes, you handle the problem of both identifying one\u2019s desires and <\/em>voicing them. Can you speak to the theme of performance in your stories\u2014especially women performing for men?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one truly professional performer in this book\u2014a musician who is actually among the least performative people in the book. He\u2019s quiet, unassuming, private, more of a soothing presence than a galvanizing one. Another character observes that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t seem <\/em>like a rock star.\u201d In that same story, there\u2019s a woman who, by all appearances, is a demure office worker. When her vitriolic tweets suddenly go viral, everyone else is shocked by the new side of her that\u2019s been \u201crevealed,\u201d but the woman herself says, Nope, this is just me. I\u2019m interested in what just me <\/em>means\u2014about all the blurry places where our ideas of performativity and authenticity overlap, defying any straightforward sense of what a real <\/em>self would be. The people I\u2019ve described here are, very literally, pretend. But are they more or less pretend than the person I present to the world when I am trying to make a very specific, perhaps not entirely \u201ctrue,\u201d impression? Many of the characters I write about are, as the expression goes, trying to find themselves. But which self? The real one? The fake one they like best? The sort of real, sort of fake one the audience likes best? And when and why did we get so obsessed with realness, anyway?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Each story is about transitional phases, perhaps illustrated most beautifully in \u201cBrenda,\u201d in which the title character lives alone in a trailer on the lot where she once planned to build a house with her partner. Has your own reading of these stories changed after this past year of transition and tenuous human connection?<\/p>\n

SESTANOVICH<\/p>\n

When I was sending the first draft of this manuscript out to agents, I said that the stories were about loneliness. In general, I can\u2019t bear to be asked what the book is \u201cabout,\u201d but this was my best attempt. I imagine we\u2019ve all learned something about the texture of loneliness this year, and some of those lessons may become legible only with time. What I already knew, but have certainly come to know more immediately and intensely, is that my own loneliness has more to do with the gyre of time spent with myself than with the hole of time not spent with others. There are characters in this book who share that, I think\u2014who are driven back upon themselves and, as Didion says, find no one at home, or find many people, many selves, they no longer care to share quarters with. We were home alone in many ways this year. My own writing and reading filled much of that space\u2014it brought me relief, gave me purpose, kept me company.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elinor Hitt is a Ph.D. student in English literature at Harvard.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read Clare Sestanovich\u2019s short story \u201cBy Design<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in the Spring 2020 issue.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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