Emotional Truth and Relationships: A Conversation with Jessica Andrews
“The textures and the smells and the humidity and the salt and the food were the perfect trigger for the story”
photo credit: Seth Hamilton
As this issue is themed around reflection, I wanted to start by asking you about your thoughts on memoir and the relationship between real lived experiences and fiction. I know you have said there are elements of lived experience in both Saltwater and Milk Teeth, and I read something you said about emotional truths bringing these different elements together. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
So, my first book, Saltwater, is semi-autobiographical and I was honest about that from the beginning - I think because I felt I couldn't really talk about it in a sincere way if I was pretending it wasn’t true. When I came to write my next book, I had to think a bit more about what my project was going to be. I thought – am I going to continue to write from life? Or am I going to do something quite different?
Ultimately, Milk Teeth does have some elements of lived experience, but it is more fictional as well. Although it feels true to me, if you sat me down and asked me, “can you verify whether this, this, or this happened?’, I wouldn't be able to. I think it comes down to the idea of emotional truth because, for me, the emotional world of a book needs to feel true and authentic to both the reader and writer. I think fictionalising events sometimes gives the author a bit more freedom to get at the truth of the emotion that you're trying to portray.
Although the two books are very different, there are some themes that crossover, and I did ask myself whether I needed to write something completely new, but then I thought a lot about visual artists, like Louise Bourgeois who returns to her childhood again and again; she makes work about the same events over and over, but each piece feels fresh and presents a different viewpoint. So, I thought that maybe you can do that with writing as well.
So, if there are certain emotional truths that run throughout the novel and then fictional worlds that are built around them, is there a conscious separation in your mind between the fictional elements and the truths?
I always start with a theme or a feeling for a book. With this book, I knew I wanted it to be about wanting – a kind of denial and desire. I knew there were some questions I was trying to tease out, so when I was writing, particularly in the past tense narrative, I was sometimes writing from memory; I thought of episodes when I felt bodily shame and then I wrote them as a fictional occurrence. I didn't always want to write the true version of something, so I would try and place those feelings into the fiction, which I guess is what all writers are doing all the time. So, I guess it is a conscious decision, but the way it evolves comes down to what feels more alive or real on the page.
Both of your novels have been described as transporting in some way, as they both involve characters travelling around different cities. You do a beautiful job of evoking the sensory aspects of the different places, and I have seen a lot of people linking the idea of literal travel with the emotional journeys of your characters. Is that something that was in the back of your mind, or is it too much of a stretch?
No, I think that's true. With both of my books, place feels integral to the characters. I wrestled with place quite a lot in this book, and I think I worried at one point that there were too many places. But the movement and rootlessness of it all, and the contrast between the different cities, felt really key to the story that I was trying to tell, and I found that I wasn't able to tell the story in the right way without them – especially the setting of Barcelona.
I was living in Barcelona for a couple of years, and although I wasn't planning to write about it necessarily, the textures and the smells and the humidity and the salt and the food were the perfect trigger for the story. Because it's partly a book about denial, I wanted it to feel very full and alive and hungry at the same time. So, Barcelona was just the right place.
Although the central relationship in Milk Teeth isn’t necessarily a negative relationship, the couple don’t seem to be able to communicate fully. As a reader, I found myself willing your character to tell her partner exactly how she feels, and when she doesn’t, it creates this sense of disconnect. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about their failure to communicate and where you feel that comes from?
I guess so much of the book is about the protagonist and how she's desperately trying to communicate this thing about herself, but she can't find the language to, or she doesn't understand it. She’s unnamed and partly it's because of this – she wants to name what she is or what has happened to her but over and over again, but she can't quite get there. So, I guess the miscommunication between the couple reflects that. I also really wanted to write a heterosexual relationship that's not completely toxic because, you know, there's a big trend for writing about toxic relationships and sexual assault, and I think that’s really important, but I guess I felt like, where does the conversation go next? Because if we don’t have any positive representations of things like sex or relationships, then what? And so, their miscommunication felt like the most true-to-life thing to me because communication is often a significant problem in relationships because not everybody can always say what they mean. I wanted it to be positive, but I wanted it to be real.
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Read the full interview in our Reflection Issue.
