by Megan Clement

You can read this newsletter online here – http://lesglorieuses.fr/freedom-is-costly

If, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,“ how do fictional worlds shape the women who inhabit them? Last month, as part of the Festival America, I sat down with three authors – Ayana Mathis, Alice McDermott and Jordan Tannahill – to ask them precisely this.

In The Unsettled, Mathis follows three generations of a family in Pennsylvania and Alabama as they confront racism, poverty and exploitation, and try to build a utopia that will protect them in the future. McDermott’s Absolution examines the hidden lives of American wives in Vietnam during the war. In The Listeners, Tannahill explores sectarian thinking and conspiracy theories through the story of a woman who is troubled by a strange sound that the rest of her family cannot hear.

The following is an excerpt from our discussion, and has been edited for length and clarity.

Megan Clement: The women in all of your novels are incredibly vivid, complex, captivating characters. We have Ava and Duchess in The Unsettled. We have Tricia and Charlene in Absolution, and we have Claire in The Listeners. Where did these characters come from for you, and was it essential to you that they were women?

Ayana Mathis: The second part is easier to answer. Yes, it was essential, but I think less because I started out to write a book about women than because I started out to write a book about the people who were the most vivid, essential, and beautiful to me. And
those often, in my imagination, are Black women. These are poor women, and there’s something very particular to me about the improvisation of poverty, how it makes people have to be creative in almost every way you can imagine – economically, obviously, but also in terms of their esteem for themselves and for one another. These are women who are living at the margins because they’re poor, because they’re Black, which means that part of what they do is create a mode of loving one another and of loving themselves over and against a society that is telling them that they are less than.

Alice McDermott: I have lived the past 30 years or so in the Washington, DC area, ‘inside the beltway’. Over that time, I would run
into women socially in a carpool line or at a cocktail party – women a little bit older than I, who would almost inadvertently mention places they had lived as military spouses [who had] husbands who were doing fascinating even historical things who they followed. The fascinating thing about these women was they would not tell you their stories unless you asked. They would just drop [into conversation] ‘Oh, we were in Burma then’. And I would say ‘Oh, you lived in Burma?’ And all they would say is: ‘I wasn’t doing anything important. I was taking care of the children and running the household, and I had my little charities. But my husband was doing interesting things.’ Of course, that’s when the novelist in me and the contrarian would pop up and say: ‘Maybe you women were doing the most essential thing while your husbands were screwing up
the world.’

Jordan Tannahill: Claire, in The Listeners, begins to hear a sound that no one else can hear, and her experience of this is initially dismissed as a psychosomatic symptom. I was very close with my mother. She was a single mother, I was a gay son. This is a historically famous combination. And for many years, she would have these physical symptoms that were constantly being dismissed by the medical system and other people in her life, which again is also a historical phenomenon – the dismissing of women’s experiences of their bodies. What emerged was the fact that there was something wrong with her body. She had terminal cancer which, by the time it was discovered, was now metastatic stage four breast cancer. I became her primary caregiver for more than half a year, and it was in that time that I was writing The Listeners. A lot of those questions around who we believe, the experience of the body and the different truths of the body really came to the fore as I was caring for her.

Megan Clement: We live in a world in which women are constantly being judged for our choices and also for things that are beyond our control. Jordan and Ayana, in both of your novels there were moments when I was guilty of judging the characters, when I wanted to shout “No! Stop it!” at Claire and Ava as they plunged further into more dangerous situations. When you were writing these characters, did you ever find yourself judging them?

Ayana Mathis: I have a habit of writing difficult women who make questionable choices. With Ava in particular I myself was often
like: ‘Stop that.’ She was very recalcitrant. She’s a character who’s difficult on the page. She makes difficult choices. She was also a character who was difficult to write. One of the things that I had to do was to stop judging her. I had a great many judgments about her. I thought she made bad choices. As a mother, she often failed to recognize what her child needed and to provide that to him, though she loved him. My job is to present complete human beings, and I feel that especially as a Black writer and as a writer who writes Black women, there are stereotypes and expectations of Black women in general, but in fiction in particular. You see the trope of absolute and utter strength, or the other one, which is someone who is a complete failure, completely irresponsible. I wanted to write against those things. It’s my job to make a full human being, which means that she makes mistakes. She does things that are wrong. She’s a flawed being. The biggest thing to do was to embrace the flawed being that she was.

Jordan Tannahill: An interesting point of commonality between Claire and Ava is that both fall under the thrall of a charismatic individual. Bringing it back to my own experience with my mother, one of our big tensions throughout our life was the fact that she was part of a religious sect that fed her in a really beautiful way, which I could see by the end of her life. But I think growing up as an atheist myself, there was a lot of judgement and concern that I had for her involvement in this particular religious sect, and similarly to Claire’s journey in the book, I think we’re constantly on that knife edge of being both unnerved by her seduction with this new thinking that she’s introduced to, but also seeing the revelatory relationship that it has for her. There is a kind of rebirth as much as there is an obliteration of self in the book.

Megan Clement: The women in Absolution are described as having done “inconsequential good” as the wives of these important men. But their actions absolutely do have consequences in 1960s Vietnam. How did you approach this dynamic with all of the hindsight that we now have?

Alice McDermott: There are two refrains for these women looking back at this time in their lives that Tricia, the narrator recalls. One is the Jewish midrash ‘repair the world’, but her friend, Charlene, contradicts that and says, ‘But the buddhists say “repair yourself”’. That dynamic is what’s operating not only in these women’s lives in doing their little charities and trying to do what good they can in this time and place, but also in looking back and in the attempt not to ask for forgiveness, but to understand who and what they were in that time and place. So that dynamic between: do you go out and repair the world at risk of all kinds of unintended consequences? Or do you shut down and say, ‘My household, my children, myself, that’s all I need to take care of?’ That’s precisely the question that women are confronted with, far more than men. There’s a scene in the novel when Charlene and Tricia have gone to a leper colony in the Vietnam jungle. An American doctor shows up, and one of the first questions he asks these women is ‘Where are your own children?’ I don’t think anyone asked General Westmoreland while he was bombing everyone in Vietnam, ‘Who’s home taking care of the kids?’

Megan Clement: All of the characters experience varying levels of hardship in these books. But none of them come across ever as victims and indeed some of them tell us very clearly that they are not victims. How did you make sure that was clear?

Jordan Tannahill: I relate very personally to certain seductions or desires that feel dangerous, or could be linked to a certain kind of undoing of my life – death drives, if you will. Maybe it’s part of the queer experience, or maybe it’s the human experience. And so I feel very close to Claire in these choices that are based on a desire to know what is unknowable, to experience something that is beyond her every day and that threatens to totally destroy her life. But she’s willing to do that, to know and to experience something that is bigger than herself. I don’t think she sees herself as a victim, and when I have blown up relationships or sought out certain kinds of experiences that I feel could dynamite things in that way, I also don’t see myself as a victim. I see myself as someone who’s questing, searching.

Alice McDermott: The two women in the book who are of the fifties and sixties, what they do is rather than rejoice in their victimhood and how helpless they were because of what society told them they should be at that time and place, they [instead] took advantage of what they saw as the strengths and benefits of being a corporate wife in Saigon in 1963. They weaponised what they were allowed to do in the effort to do good. One of the first things Charlene says about herself is, ‘I want to do good, but it takes money.’ She is able to achieve those two things because of her status as a blonde, charming, corporate wife.

Ayana Mathis: There are two major settings in this book. One of them is a made-up little town in Alabama – an independent, Black town – and the other is Philadelphia in a super-politicised cult. Both of the female characters in this book are interested in something very particular. They’re interested in belonging and in loving one another, but they’re also interested in being free. And being free is not really a choice that most of us make. I don’t know that I can make it, actually. Freedom is costly: you have to make a whole lot of choices, there’s no security, there’s no safety net if you decide to do things in a completely different manner from the society around you. And so these women are flawed, fearful sometimes. But they make a choice about freedom, which is an incredibly uncommon and an incredibly brave choice. Their success is middling, but they do make the choice, and that level of agency acts against any kind of victimhood.

Thank you to the Festival America for hosting us. You can watch the full conversation, in French and English, here.

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis is published by Penguin Random House.
Absolution by Alice McDermott is published by Bloomsbury.
The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill is published by Harper Collins.

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