Dysfunctional Families and Comic Edge: A Conversation with Elizabeth McKenzie

1 Mar

“I do enjoy the comic edge. I feel for me personally, it's a way of fighting through misery and sadness and the best way to cope with things; even when I'm writing about a serious topic, I tend to steer into that lane. I appreciate satire as well, when it comes to things I want to expose as bad or evil [...] ‘To be malicious with dignity’, as Freud said.”

First, a big question, but I wanted to ask you about the process of writing Dog of the North. How did the idea come about? And how was the experience of writing the novel after having written three other books before that?

Well after Veblen, I had started sketching out a few scenes here and there, a few sequences; the story was brewing in my mind, but I didn't quite have the voice. When I switched from writing in third person to first person, it just clicked, and then, relative to my other books, it came very fast – I wrote it in a little over a year. As soon as I got Penny's voice and put her on the train, it just unfolded.

The scenes I had been brewing on prior to that were inspired by events in my life from some time ago, when I was taking care of my divorced grandparents from a distance because my parents were in Australia. They'd emigrated to Australia and my mother was their only child, so it was kind of left to me. My sister had also gone to Australia, and it was at a time when my marriage was crumbling, so I had a lot of feeling behind that time of my life.

Do you think that's why it came out so quickly? Because it was easier for you to get into that mindset?

Yes, yes. I have a backlog of these periods in my life that I continue to go back to and pick apart.

Yes, that makes sense. And just another more general question before I ask about the book specifically, I wanted to ask you about prizes because we regularly write about prizes in the magazine and The Portable Veblen was up for quite a few shortlists and longlists in the UK. I just wondered whether they gave you confidence or whether there was an element of being more nervous to have to live up to this prestige?

That’s such a good question. You know, there are these rare instances of glory and they're tremendously uplifting and meaningful. But you're right, they remind you that you're no longer writing in obscurity and a high standard has been set for your work, so there's a little bit of pressure to write up to the prize or to the recognition. You know, you think, ‘What can I write next that's important enough or good enough?’. But I think after the celebration is over, it's best to just put it out of your mind completely and go back to being the hermit in your pyjamas at your desk that you've always been.

Sounds like a very good plan to me. Onto your voice, which you mentioned. The Dog of The North and The Portable Veblen are completely different books, but I felt that they both had a very distinctive voice and, having thought about it and looked at what a few other reviewers have said, the description I liked the most was the idea of deadpan wit alongside elements of the absurd. I was wondering whether you agree with that definition? And there's also a comic edge to your writing – is that a style you've always wanted to write, and do you feel like it’s natural to you?

I feel like I can go back to where that comes from. I do think ‘deadpan’ is a good word and I think I inherited it from my grandfather; he was my chief correspondent when I was in my childhood, and I strove to impress him in my letters.

I do enjoy the comic edge. I feel that for me personally, it's a way of fighting through misery and sadness and the best way to cope with things; even when I'm writing about a serious topic, I tend to steer into that lane. I appreciate satire as well when it comes to things I want to expose as bad or evil. In The Portable Veblen, for instance, the treatment of veterans or the mismanagement of clinical trials. ‘To be malicious with dignity’, as Freud said.

Fascinating. It definitely comes across and I'm glad you agree! As a writer, are you driven by the plot first? Or are you driven by style or character or a theme? What drives the narrative for you?

It was really different with these two books. The Veblen book was really driven by all these different plot lines that I was trying to pull together. I was very angry with a certain clinical trial that my own father had participated in, and I felt like he had been misled and used. I was grieving that and so I went into that and did a lot of research. I didn't know how these different plot lines were going to relate – I mean, what does that have to do with squirrels and so on? So, it was a matter of weaving them and seeing where they were going to connect. And this novel was really voice driven and it was just a matter of, you know, as she went, moment by moment, what was happening to her and who she was bringing into the mix and along for the ride.

The next question I want to talk to you about is mental illness. You have written a little bit about mental illness before and how you wanted to write about it from an impartial and empathetic vantage point and with a shield of humour. Sorry to quote you, but you said, ‘I think with depth of characterization you might find just about anybody insane’, which I love. There are certainly quite a lot of characters in The Dog of the North that you could say are suffering from some kind of illness or trauma or disorder, and I just wanted you to talk a little bit more about that.

It's psychiatric issues and emotional issues that are of great interest to me. I think I'm always sorting through that because there was a lot of it in my family, but it was mostly undiagnosed or sanctioned by a label. So, I spent a lot of time as a child comparing what I was seeing from these various family members with the outside world and trying to reckon with that, and a lot of those early experiences are just really deeply embedded in me. So, I continue to reckon with them, all the while loving these people and yet often being very troubled by their behaviour. So, I guess I'm interested in trying to capture that balance.

In a similar vein, the idea of a dysfunctional family comes up in your work, but I wanted to ask whether you thought there was some similarity in your quote about insanity, in the sense that, if you look at any family, there is always an element of dysfunction. Or are you particularly interested in those uniquely dysfunctional families?

Well, you know, I shouldn't say this, but sometimes you meet people, you know you're with your spouse or your partner, and then as soon as they're gone, you start talking about some tick they had or something. I think everybody has something, and I think it has gotten me in trouble sometimes because I used to idealise other families, and I’d think, ‘Oh, aren't they wonderful’ and then you can be disproportionately disappointed because you know, in the end, you find out they're just as weird as everybody else. So, families just come in all shapes and colours.

Back to the plot. As you said, there's a lot of motion; it's almost like a continual journey, there are constant challenges and constant obstacles that Penny has to overcome, which can feel exasperating in a way because you're constantly wanting Penny to be okay. And yet, it's still quite an uplifting book and it really does have a spirit of lightness and hope. I wanted to ask about how you went about balancing that despair with lightness?

Well, I'm thinking about the structure of the novel; I confined the whole thing to just a few weeks and so I'm compressing into that time frame all the problems that resonated with that particular time in my life. I was just going to let them all come at her like she's a knight fighting off an attack, even if the attack is often self-inflicted.

Many of her problems are caused by her own defence mechanisms and that was a delicate thing to balance and challenging to follow, but I really enjoyed that. I like the deluded narrator as a concept in general. And then I'm reminded of my letters to my grandfather in which I would enumerate any mishap that had occurred or disappointment or ruckus, and make it sound utterly horrible so that it became funny and so that he would laugh. So, I think that impulse has been with me a long time.

Do you relate to Penny more generally? Are there elements of you in her?

I'm afraid so.

That's a good thing – everybody roots for Penny! My last couple of questions are a little bit more general. First of all, I wondered if you could share a few writers that have inspired either you personally, or your work, or your voice, or all of them?

Yeah, there's so many. I mean, the Brontës and Virginia Woolf were really important to me a while back and then, more recently, Ishiguro and Murakami are both really important to me, but there's just so many.

And last of all, a question we ask everybody, do you judge a book by its cover? And also, do you have any thoughts on the differences between American and British covers? I just wondered if you'd picked up on the differences and what you thought about them?

Well, a good cover is hard to resist! There's a novel out now in the states called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and I wanted to read that book solely based on its cover, before I'd heard anything. Then there’s this site Electric Lit that does this battle of the book covers feature, and they put side-by-side the American and UK versions and then have people vote on which one is better, and the results come out mixed. So, I don't really know how to generalise about the differences, but when you see them side by side, it is fascinating to see the different interpretations. And for my book, for Dog of the North, I love both covers. I think they both hint really nicely at some of the mishaps that will come Penny's way, and they're both slightly skewed.

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