{"id":167045,"date":"2024-03-11T10:02:36","date_gmt":"2024-03-11T14:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167045"},"modified":"2025-06-16T14:43:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T18:43:43","slug":"let-me-tell-you-something-a-conversation-with-jamie-quatro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/11\/let-me-tell-you-something-a-conversation-with-jamie-quatro\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Me Tell You Something: A Conversation with Jamie Quatro"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Jamie Quatro. Photograph by Stephen Alvarez.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last June, <\/em>the Review published Jamie Quatro\u2019s \u201cLittle House<\/a>\u201d\u2014what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it\u2014the real story\u2014almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the\u00a0second part of which, \u201cYogurt Days<\/a>,\u201d was published in<\/em>\u00a0The New Yorker;\u00a0in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, \u201cTwo Men, Mary,<\/a>\u201d published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts.\u00a0Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender.\u00a0We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Men, Mary\u201d\u00a0came first. When I was drafting, I had no idea the story would end up as part of a triptych. \u201cLittle House\u201d was the second story I drafted, but chronologically, it comes first, so it\u2019s great that it was the first piece published of the three.<\/p>\n

In \u201cLittle House,\u201d Anna\u2014who narrates all three stories\u2014is looking back on her early childhood and interrogating her relationship with her father and her younger sister, who has accused the father of sexual abuse. After finishing the first two, I realized that I would need to write a third piece foregrounding Anna\u2019s relationship with her mother. That story,\u00a0\u201dYogurt Days,\u201d\u00a0also wrestles with themes of faith and sexuality.\u00a0You know, I keep thinking I\u2019m going to write something new, something I\u2019ve never written before. And I keep coming\u00a0back to God and sex.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do you decide what is fair game and what isn\u2019t\u2014whether to transform autobiographical details, or keep them as they happened?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

This material is really close to the bone for me. I grew up in Tucson. My first job was at a TCBY. I have a sister I haven\u2019t seen or heard from in twenty years. I avoided writing about her for a long time because I was afraid it would make the schism worse. It was only in the past several years that I\u00a0realized, We\u2019re at the worst, we\u2019ve been\u00a0there a long time. I decided I had nothing to lose.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to the idea of an unreliable narrator, but this narrator seems to have a different syndrome. Do you have a name for her type?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

When I was drafting, I thought of the narrator as simply \u201cretrospective\u201d\u2014the word unreliable<\/em> didn\u2019t occur to me. But you\u2019re right, she has some serious blind spots. I like your word, syndrome<\/em>. Suggesting something systemic (maybe even insidious?) infecting the narrative approach. Like an illness or physical condition that cannot be helped. What about \u201cthe blinkered\u00a0retrospective\u201d? Though I wonder if all retrospective narrators are blinkered, to a degree.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Men, Mary,\u201d is, quite virtuosically, itself a triptych within the larger one. What drew you to the idea of visiting\u00a0this character at these points in her life?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

Well, \u201cTwo Men, Mary\u201d wasn\u2019t a triptych at first. Originally, the story opened with Anna and her poet friend having lunch and talking about praying the rosary. Anna went home, got out her deceased mother-in-law\u2019s rosary, and found herself talking to her mother-in-law, Carol. And what she told her about were the things that happened with Mark and Roberto. Then the story ended with the Mary\/Carol thread, revealing the suicide and closing with adult Anna and her husband returning to the yogurt shop in Tucson. It was a very<\/em> different story. A soupy admixture of disjointed material, the story very clearly announcing its intentions\u2014I\u2019m going to confess something to Mary\/Carol. Now, here\u2019s the confession.<\/p>\n

I sent that early draft to a few trusted writer friends, among them Lauren Groff, who said something like,\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t like to be told explicitly what a story is about, I enjoy\u00a0making the leap myself\u2014what if you open with the men, then do the more surprising thing and pivot away from the male and into the realm of the female?\u201d\u00a0Lauren\u2019s a genius at structure. No one else I know has her\u00a0intuitive eye and architectural grasp of shape. The decision to gather up all the fragmented Mary\/Carol material and cast it as its own section is what allowed me to revise the story as a triptych.<\/p>\n

But why these discrete moments, with Mark and Roberto? I didn\u2019t know why when I was drafting. It was just what came. I felt some intuitive connection and went with it. But now I can see that in both the Mark and Roberto episodes, Anna is navigating the line between desire and repulsion. Mark and his friend Doug are objects of Anna\u2019s desire, and both end up repulsing her and robbing her of her sexual agency\u2014especially Mark, who physically penetrates her. Roberto, too, penetrates Anna without warning and without obtaining consent\u2014and had Anna reacted differently, that too would have been an assault. But now Anna has agency. She makes a conscious decision to allow and enjoy Roberto\u2019s advances, and to invite him to her hotel room. In a way, she\u2019s reclaiming the agency she lost as a fifteen-year-old, though it\u2019s a tainted reclamation. She\u2019s cheating on her husband, after all.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m curious, then, about the narrator\u2019s desire in the third episode to\u00a0\u201csurrender to Mary,\u201d\u00a0to \u201ca\u00a0feminine<\/em>\u00a0divine.\u201d How do you think about that turn in her?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

I think this is why the pivot to the feminine, as Lauren suggested, was the right move structurally. In the first two episodes, Anna surrenders to men\u2014to Mark by force, to Roberto by choice. To her father, in \u201cLittle House,\u201d and to a male conception of God via her church in \u201cYogurt Days.\u201d Now, entering her fifties, she turns away from the masculine. But the surrender to a feminine divine\u2014the desire<\/em> to do so\u2014seems to be more than a turning away from a patriarchal understanding of God. It seems also to be a turning away from the sexual past, the assault, abuse, temptation, infidelity. And in making the turn, she finds her one true source of regret\u2014the way she failed her mother-in-law, Carol.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Roberto\u2019s refrain of \u201cLet me tell you something\u201d is so memorable, and captures a certain kind of man so well. It\u2019s the writer\u2019s credo, in a way, too.<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

Roberto is doing a little bit of posturing when he uses the phrase\u2014Pay attention, what I\u2019m about to say is of the utmost importance. Of course, the irony is that because he prefaces nearly everything<\/em> with \u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d the phrase loses its potency. It\u2019s just throat-clearing.<\/p>\n

But you\u2019re right\u2014divested of context, \u201cLet me tell you something\u201d reads as the story-writer\u2019s credo. I can\u2019t remember where I heard this\u2014it might have been something that Amy Hempel, my thesis advisor at Bennington, said\u2014\u201cThe invisible first sentence of every great short story is, Oh my God, sit down, you\u2019re never going to believe what I\u2019m about to tell you.\u201d I\u2019ve actually written that sentence at the top of my finished drafts, to see if the energy in my opening is there. I\u2019ve also used it as a writing prompt with my students. Often I\u2019ll read a perfectly competent story draft but still come away thinking, Why are you telling me this? What is so important that I should drop everything and spend the next half hour listening to you?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your relationship to religion and religiosity seems to me one of the most fascinating and consistent through lines in your work, and it also takes many forms. I\u2019m interested in how that connects or doesn\u2019t to your own relationship with religion, past or present.<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

When I was studying with David Gates, he kept saying, \u201cJamie, you need to let your characters do things on the page that you would never do. Let them fail, let them suffer<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I took David\u2019s advice and started letting my characters do messy, \u201csinful\u201d things, like cheat on their husbands in airport hotels and leave their Presbyterian congregations to join nature-worship cults with sexual initiation rites. Many of my characters abandon their Christian faith entirely, or actively preach heresy\u2014especially in my forthcoming novel, in which the Devil puts on a play re-visioning the Gospel narrative with himself as the rightful Christ figure.<\/p>\n

Flaubert said (I\u2019m paraphrasing), Keep a clean and orderly life so you can be violent and messy on the page. I believe in that advice. I\u2019ve wrestled with my faith, of course\u2014in fact, I would say wrestling is the mark of a viable religious practice\u2014but I\u2019ve never abandoned it. I somehow avoided the growing-up-in-church trauma that so many others experienced. Our Bishop recently put it this way: \u201cThere\u2019s no cut so painful as a stained glass cut.\u201d I have certainly left the legalism of right-wing American \u201cevangelicalism\u201d (I\u2019ve spoken elsewhere<\/a> about how that lovely old word has become tainted, mostly by the right-wing MAGA crowd), and, as of last year, am a confirmed Episcopalian. I love the Book of Common Prayer. I come to worship and feel like I\u2019m eating organic whole foods after years of processed meals.<\/p>\n

But when I was growing up in the church, I could see that most of the \u201crules\u201d had nothing to do with Jesus. My parents were loving, and not as conservative as other parents. I was allowed to wear a bikini and have a boyfriend and go to dances. I was also an early and avid reader of the Bible, and of C. S. Lewis. I suppose it was reading that saved me from conflating legalism with the Church en masse.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What does a set of discrete stories do for you that\u2019s different than, say, chapters? Have you thought about putting these characters into a novel?<\/p>\n

QUATRO<\/p>\n

I have not considered putting these characters into a novel. I\u2019ve written two novels and the form terrifies me. Other forms come with ready-made boundaries\u2014stanzas and meter, read-in-one-sitting length, or, for nonfiction, adherence to the (remembered) truth. The novel is anarchy. No blueprints, no parameters. You have to build a house but you know nothing about the square footage or the height or how many bedrooms.\u00a0Maybe you have a vague sense that it will be a ranch-style bungalow. You take up your meager little hammer and hacksaw and figure out how to build the fucking house. Actually, it\u2019s harder than that\u2014you have to let the not-yet-built house\u00a0teach you\u00a0how it wants to be built.\u00a0How does it teach you? Music.\u00a0You listen to the sounds of what you\u2019re doing\u2014your hammering and sawing\u2014for clues as to what this thing is supposed to look like.<\/p>\n

And then, after\u00a0a month or a year of work, you realize the whole thing is toppling. You\u2019ve built one side up too far, or you haven\u2019t laid the foundation properly, or you\u2019ve put in way too many windows. Sometimes you can rework a wing, but probably you\u2019ll have to knock the whole thing down and start over.\u00a0Maddening.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Early Work\u00a0<\/span>and the story collection<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Cool for America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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