Talking with the author about her new story collection, addiction, and being honest about human nature.
Juliet Escoria isn’t afraid of writing monstrous characters. One story in her new collection, You Are the Snake, is about a bipolar woman and abuse survivor who goes on to abuse her own child. In another, a restaurant cashier wishes for her co-worker to die — and then she does. These stories are daring and intricately crafted. But what’s really powerful about them is that, somehow, the reader still comes away sympathizing with the characters.
As readers of her 2019 semi-autobiographical first novel, Juliet the Maniac, know, Escoria survived an adolescence filled with danger, addiction, and neglect. She was sent to a wilderness school for delinquent youth, where the traumatized teenage inmates mostly made each other’s problems worse. In the decades since, Escoria has mined her colorful past to populate stories with mostly troubled, addicted characters, as in her first collection, Black Cloud (2014). Though the writing in You Are the Snake keeps its trademark rawness, it’s more deliberate and subtle. The attention she pays to her characters’ darkest inner desires and the unflattering truths she dares to uncover feel more honest than most contemporary fiction. I spoke with Escoria about channeling the dead, how she weaves biographical material into fiction, and how her recovery from drug and alcohol addiction continues to shape her as a writer.
This book is so good!
Well, thank you. Some of the stuff that I’ve gotten back is, “This book is so violent and so dark.” I know some of the stories are fucked up and disturbing, but I thought it was a lot softer of a book than my last one. Maybe the more fucked-up stories stand out more than the softer ones to some people.
But it was also a fun-to-write collection, and I think that’s short stories in general for me. They’re just fun and a lot less stressful than novel-world.
Do you think of your previous book, Juliet the Maniac, as more of a novel or a memoir?
It definitely straddles the line, but it’s made up too much to call it a memoir. And I also just feel like in a memoir, you’re supposed to explain what it means.
I feel like a lot of memoir is very over-explained or includes outside material that can be self-exculpatory. It always feels extraneous to me. It’s like, Just get out of your own way and let it be a story.
We expect essays and memoir to put events in context and explain the lesson you learned from them, and that’s dumb to me.
I could not agree more. And when you don’t do that, people react really strongly to it because they expect it. They want the “In retrospect, I realized that I was an asshole” paragraph.
I think some people had a problem with the fact that Juliet the Maniac was just not doing that. They want a mental-health narrative where you’re like, “I’m all better now, and I misbehaved, and here’s why, and this is how I healed myself,” and I didn’t want to do that.
Yeah, I don’t believe in that. I think in this new collection, there’s a similar thread where a lot of these characters have moments where they’re really violent or they think about something really violent and they’re not punished for it.
That’s something I’m definitely interested in when I watch movies or read books. So much stuff is pretending that the world is one way when really it’s so mixed — we do good things, we do bad things, we do bad things for reasonable reasons, we do good things for shitty reasons. And I feel like a lot of art these days doesn’t want to acknowledge that and instead wants to be edifying. And I don’t think it’s edifying when it’s denying the true nature of humanity.
There are just a ton of books, even very acclaimed literary books, where characters are just purely bad or good. That doesn’t reflect my lived experience. I’ve never met a purely good person.
It just seems strange to try and pretend that the world is that way. I was at the doctor’s office the other day. I was seeing an ear, nose, and throat doctor. And this woman came in and she was wheezing really loudly the whole time, which makes sense for an ENT. And I was thinking, God, shut the fuck up. Quit breathing so loud. It’s so annoying. I want to go wait in a different room. And then I started having really horrible thoughts about how if I lived with her, I would just hold a pillow up to her face and she’d probably die. And I was like, This is not how I actually feel. How I actually feel is sorry for this woman whose health problem is so bad. Yet I’m having these horrible thoughts run unrequested through my brain. I would imagine that most people have moments like that and just don’t cop to it. I don’t think I’m strange to briefly imagine killing a stranger.
No, you’re not. But I think the unusual thing about you is that you admit it.
What’s the process behind your stories? To me, it seems like you draw on biographical material but then make it into fiction. How does that work for you when you set out to shape a story?
A lot of it just has to do with whim. I’ll be like, What story do I feel like telling next? And just thinking about the various stories I tell my husband, or my friends, or the stories I tell about myself, and what seems fun at the moment, and then just let it go organically. Sometimes I’ll get obsessed with something that has nothing to do with me, like the story about the nun, ‘Santa Muerte,’ where it was just this case that I found fascinating.
I don’t think too deliberately about what biographical stuff is true to life and what’s not, it’s just what works in the story. And I might write it one way and then realize that’s not working, and then change this detail, or remove that person, or create a character that didn’t actually exist, seeing what works as I go along. Sometimes a random lie will pop out and I’m not really sure why, and then later I’m like, Ooh, that made-up thing works really well, or maybe it doesn’t.
’Santa Muerte,’ the story you wrote about the real-life rape and murder of a young postulant in the 1970s, does feel really different from other stories you’ve written. Do you feel like that’s a direction that you’re going in, towards the more fully made-up?
I think I might be going more outside of myself, because what I’m trying to do now is this book that’s about my hometown. How I see it now, it’ll be framed around myself, but mostly not about myself. I’m really scared of this book.
And this is a novel?
I don’t know. And that’s one reason why I’m so scared of it is I have no idea what shape it’s going to take. I really want to do it, but it feels like I have no idea how to get it done.
Part of writing for me at least is that it has to be an escape, even if what you’re writing about is super-dark, it has to be a world that you want to live in, at least temporarily.
If I’m writing a story, it means that I want to wallow in it in whatever feeling or actions that are in it.
It helps you if you’re broken in some way to write. And by broken, I mean maybe you’re just a little bit obsessive, or anxious, because you’re looking for something. If you’re trying to get to something, or fix something, or satisfy something, then I think that you’re going to make more compelling work. I don’t really understand why you’d write for any other reason.
One of the stories that I wanted to talk about specifically was “Hazel: A Diptych,” the story about the bipolar abuse survivor. Can you walk me through how that one came about?
My grandmother … nobody ever talks about her in my family. You can’t really get any information from my dad. And I’ve always been curious about her because she was bipolar. And so I decided, I’m going to channel her. And I equally believe that it was just my imagination and also that maybe something real was coming through there. “Today I’m going to meditate. Today I’m going to try automatic writing to see what sort of images I get.”
There’s a fair amount of that stuff that’s made up in that story, but it’s based on my actual grandmother, who my aunt said was abused by her father, and abused others. I wanted to understand that. I feel sorry for her because it’s like, “You were bipolar and highly intelligent in an era where they didn’t value that too much in women, and you couldn’t get the treatment that you needed. What if that could have been me, if I was born in the year that you were born in, as opposed to the year I was born in?”
You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to, but I’m curious what role your sobriety and recovery play in your writing? Have you written all of your books sober?
I feel as though it’s a hundred percent integral. I feel also lucky in that I wasn’t one of those writers who was able to be successful or functional while I was using substances — I’d nod out in front of my computer and never get anything done.
My addict brain and my writing brain have the exact same brain patterns and instincts: being both overwhelmed by life, but also completely underwhelmed by life, and obsessive, and wanting things to be perfect, and berating myself while also thinking I’m amazing. All of this stuff that I feel like I need in order to be a writer is the same stuff that I grapple with in sobriety. A lot of the reason why I used substances was the existential problem of “What’s the point? Life is meaningless and empty.” And writing gives an answer to those questions.
You write so well about characters who are in the throes of using various substances. And you write so well about what it’s like to be really drunk and high, the day-to-day life of someone who spends a lot of time in an altered state. How does it feel to go back there?
Once you get sober, there’s still a part of you that romanticizes drug use, like It would be awesome if I could just get completely out of my mind on crystal meth, which is not a normal thought to have. So being able to do that in a story is helpful.
I don’t fully understand how I could be both that person and the person I am today. So trying to reconcile the two aspects of identity is one reason why I think I’m interested in writing about that, because I didn’t want to write any more drug stories for this book. I was like, No more drug stories, done with that! But then they just happened anyway. Maybe it’s me trying to be like, How am I this person when I used to be this person?
There’s a feeling that I miss, which is just this completely numb feeling of, “Nothing matters. I can do whatever I want.” And it’s an awful feeling. But of course, it’s really a powerful feeling, and fun and thrilling too. “I don’t care. I could die. It’s fine.” And now I feel very much the opposite. I really don’t want to die a stupid death. I don’t want to do things that are unsafe, for the most part. I want to live forever.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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