The Pleasure & Pain of Long-term Relationships: A Conversation with Chloe Lane

5 Sept

“Sex can mean nothing or it can mean everything. It’s only arms and legs. But we are only arms and legs.”

First of all, could you tell us a little bit about how this book came into being? What was your initial catalyst or inspiration for the novel?

The earliest drafts of the book started as reviews of swimming pools – ones I’d visited in my Florida neighbourhood, and ones from my New Zealand childhood that I recalled fondly or otherwise. I was a new mother at the time, spending all my days home alone, while my husband was in grad school. I worked on these ‘reviews’ while my son napped, tied to me in a cotton wrap, not because I thought this project had any great artistic merit, but because writing these little things was the only means available to me at the time to help me feel a little less insane and a little more myself. Although I don’t consider motherhood to be the central story of the novel, I suspect that this is why it provides the foundation for the story, the tide on which everything else is carried forth .

The title of your novel, Arms & Legs, comes from a Barry Hannah short story about an old affair. Could you tell us why you chose this reference as your title and how this idea reverberates throughout the narrative?

I have an appalling memory for quotes, but that line, which I first read in 2007 – I remember the exact year – has never left me. It’s actually three lines: “When you get down to it, there isn’t much to do. It’s just arms and legs. It’s not worth a damn.” Since that first read, my understanding of what romantic love is and what sex has to do with it has shifted a lot, and with those shifts my interpretation of these lines has become murkier and less sure. Some of this uncertainty is evident in the novel through Georgie’s reflecting on the line, and in what she is grappling with in her life – her personal relationship to sex, sex in her marriage, sex in her affair, and the unsteady hierarchy of these loves. Though from where I’m sitting, Hannah gave us one perfect, moving way to describe how sex can mean nothing or it can mean everything. It’s only arms and legs. But we are only arms and legs. Interestingly, whenever that Hannah story comes up in the company of my male friends, overwhelmingly the line they recall most vividly is one from earlier in the story that reads, ‘I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.’

Following on from this idea, I’d love you to talk more about how you use the physical body throughout Arms & Legs, perhaps to explore the ways we are perceived/experienced by others?

I think part of this comes from my own revelations, of the things my body can and can’t do, with thanks to pregnancy and childbirth and the aftermath of both. As an ex-athlete, I always thought myself very in-tune with my body. I knew nothing. What a fool. I suddenly found myself thinking about my body and the bodies of others in a new way. I guess the human body became more interesting for me. It’s also a lot easier to talk about physical injuries than it is to talk about emotional ones.

Kirsten McDougall, your fellow Gallic Books author of She’s a Killer, has described Arms & Legs as being a ‘perceptive, nuanced novel that charts the murky, contingent boundaries we draw around our homes and hearts’. I love this quote and would love to find out more about your interest in boundaries and the many ways Georgie – and I think most readers(!) – are inclined to push and redraw them.

My natural character – some of this is to do with how I was raised, some of this is just me – has always been predisposed to the black and white. This is good and right; this is bad and wrong. I’ve been lucky to find a partner who has accepted this about me, while simultaneously showing me all the ways life isn’t like that—it can’t be viewed or lived like that. On some level, I think this is why I write fiction—to break away from my own rigid impulses, the boundaries I’ve created for myself. Georgie knows it’s wrong to have an affair with Jason, but in another way she also believes it’s right, that it’s her right. Towards the end of the novel, she thinks about how after all this time Dan didn’t seem to think she’d changed in any fundamental way, and how this felt like a betrayal, as she believed she had changed, and she wanted him to see it, acknowledge it. She says, ‘I’d become too many things to Dan, that was our problem, and we piled those things one on top of the other, so it all became growth and life. I was too many layers of person to him and he’d got used to it’. This is the pleasure and the pain of the long-term relationship, isn’t it? The line you draw around yourselves that thickens and hardens like the bark on a tree, with each year and each shared tragedy and shared joy. And how much comfort can be found within that space. And how suffocating it can become sometimes too. And why it might feel like the only way you can keep living is to cut it all down.

Arms & Legs frankly addresses desire and discontentment in a long-term love, and it could be seen as a book that answers the questions of whether happiness in a long marriage is possible if one person experiences a compulsion to escape in some way. Could you talk more about why you chose to explore this idea?

I don’t know that is does answer that question, at least in a way that I’m the least bit happy with. I also dislike the word “compulsion”, as I think it suggests that Georgie isn’t completely in control of her actions (or desires?), which simply isn’t true. She knows what she wants, and she knows what she’s getting into—even if she has only loosely considered the extent of the fallout. I hope that the book asks more questions about long-term love, marriage, and faithfulness than it answers, as I also think the answer/solution is contained within that – if Georgie and Dan can ask each other the questions they really need to ask, the hard ones, then maybe there is a path forward for them. Is it truly possible to live your life in tandem with another person? Can one person give us everything we need and is that even a fair thing to expect? And where do you, the individual, fit into all this? These questions are ones I’m still trying to nut out. Which is why they also take up some room in the new novel I’m working on, which is also partly set in Florida.

The sense that potential threat is always around the corner runs throughout your book, and this idea is reinforced through mentions and experiences of different threats - some which materialise and some that don’t. Were you looking to build this unnerving feeling of threat, both natural and unnatural, and real and false in your writing? And if so, why?

I’m scared all the time. Aren’t you?

Georgie’s character seems to show an apathy towards New Zealand and a love of Florida, despite its perceived threats. Could you tell our readers more about the importance of place in Arms & Legs and whether your own relationship with these places has impacted the novel?

I’ve always thought of Arms & Legs as a kind of love letter to Florida. I wrote most of the book during the two and a half years my family and I returned from Florida to New Zealand to live, due to the pandemic, and due to US visa restrictions. I’d started working on the book while still in Florida, but I missed my Florida life painfully when I was in New Zealand, and I found myself thinking about it, and then writing about it, as if it were a lost love. New Zealand is also a difficult country to return to after spending many years away. It’s a bit like a closed community in that regard – those who have stayed are suspicious of those who have left and then decided to return. On the one hand, I felt welcomed back – so many old friends and new friends greeted us with open arms. But on the other hand, I also felt very lonely and isolated, as if I was walking around inside the life of someone else. And that my life - the one I’d spent six years building, and had had to leave so abruptly, and that I missed so much - no one wanted to hear about it. New Zealanders can be extraordinary snobs. So, if I was asked to speak about Florida, the questions would be along the lines of, What is it about Florida? Why? And what’s wrong with you? And there’s no way to answer those questions because in my experience, feeling at home in a place, it’s similar to how we find ourselves feeling at home with a person – it just is.

And lastly, a question that we ask all the authors we speak to – do you judge a book by its cover?

I enjoy good cover design as much as the next person, but I don’t tend to hold that against a book. I recently replaced my copy of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. This is maybe the fourth copy I’ve owned of this book, the others gifted or left behind due to overseas moves. This version is by far the least aesthetically appealing. Overly large orchid photo. Small, scratchy fonts. I was looking at this cover, and thinking about this question, and it made me wonder if maybe I was even drawn to ugly covers. That maybe an unattractive cover suggested something more enticing in the content, like this book, which has seen so many editions now that the cover design has become the least concern. This stance could also be connected to how many new books with dazzling high-design covers I’ve read that were utterly disappointing. And maybe why I’m also drawn to the uniform designs of Fitzcarraldo Editions and NYRB books. So I suppose that in fact, yes, I do judge a book by its cover.

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