I've been continually haunted by Marisa Silver's novels. And I'm not the only one. Mary Coin was a New York Times Bestseller and a South Carolina Independent Booksellers Association Award for Fiction; The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize; No Direction Home; Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Little Nothing is about how we survive, how we transform, and truly, how we live.
Thank you so much, Marisa for being here and for writing this great response.
Despite the fact that I spend much of my life wandering
around and trying to think of what to write next, the idea for almost
everything I’ve ever written has come to me not after long contemplation but in
the flash of a single moment. The same was true for Little Nothing. I
was perusing the obituary page of The New
York Times one morning (yes, this is something I routinely do,) and I read
the obit of a man whose claim to fame was that he was one of the last surviving
munchkins from “The Wizard of Oz”. The focus of the obit was, naturally, his
association with that iconic film, but what caught my attention, was a brief
sentence that revealed that, as a child in Eastern Europe, his parents had
tried to have him stretched.
And there was that flash, that thing that happens each time
I stumble on an idea. I back up, I take another look, and my mind begins to see
that this small nugget of information has implications for me that are broad
and deep and somehow emotionally resonant. I didn’t understand why that particular
detail meant something to me, or what kind of story I would fashion, and I
didn’t really know until two-and-a-half years later, when the novel was
finished, until I could look at what I’d made and think about why I might have
made it.
At precisely the moment that my previous
novel, Mary Coin, was published, my father passed away. His death was
sudden, surprising, a rupture. Trying to understand what it means for a person
to be absent is difficult, I think, and it certainly was for me. I spent a lot
of time trying to figure out what nothingness was. How could a person be here
and then not here? And what exists in place of their absence? It is something different
from actual presence, but something just as palpable, just as weighty. In its
own, often fanciful, sometimes deadly serious way, Little Nothing is an
exploration of transformation, transcendence, enduring love and the materiality
of nothingness.
Little Nothing is also about the body, the female
body in particular. It is about all the transformations the body goes through
not only as a result of normal maturation, but also because the female body is an
historic subject of violation. During the time I was writing the book, two
hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. In the U.S., the
abortion wars continued to rage. In some parts of the world, a woman could be
stoned to death for committing adultery. The female body continues to strike
fear and outrage in people who need to quash its possibilities for pleasure, for
learning, for existence. I kept thinking about what happens to a woman during
the course of her life as she is told that who she is, what she looks like, the
very form she takes — her body— is
unacceptable.
And, despite that, or maybe because I was thinking about
these somewhat dark themes, I wanted to write a tale that would be filled with life!
With the earth, the body, with humor, and scandal, and improbability, and a
touch of magic.
Transformations:
Something I was thinking about when I began the book was
Sophocles’ riddle of the Sphinx: What goes on four feet in the morning, two
feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? The answer, of course, is Man, who
crawls as an infant, walks on two legs as an adult, and uses a cane, a third
“leg” as an old man.
We all change throughout a lifetime. Some of those changes happen
as a result of time, some are self-imposed. Still others are imposed upon us.
We are always in the act of becoming something else. Little Nothing
takes an allegorical approach to exploring this central fact of life. Because I
situated my story in a real world where strange and impossible things happen, I
had the latitude to physicalize the emotional transformations we go through in fantastical
ways. Once Pavla made her first, incredible alteration, I just kept going, and
tried to imagine what form she would take as she developed both as a woman and
as she suffered the slings and arrows of her particular fortune.
Fairytale:s
I have now read more fairytales than I ever read as a kid! I
was not a reader as a child. I was a daydreamer. A champion one, at that! But
when I wrote Little Nothing, I took a deep dive into the world of folk
and fairytales, especially those out of Eastern Europe. I also read Bruno
Bettelheim, Maria Tatar, and Philip Pullman, all of whom write about the form
in fascinating ways. One of the things I love most about fables and fairytales
is that, although the most weird, unlikely, and violent things happen, the
telling is invariably simple and straightforward. The brutality of what occurs
is somehow made all the more frightening by this lack of artifice. Once upon a time a woman had a child who she
hated, so she sent her out to the woods to die. No imagery. No lyricism.
And certainly no psychological realism. The narrative frankness freed me up to
make certain leaps of the imagination.
The challenge for me was to make sure that
the story always felt emotionally truthful and that what happened to the
characters, no matter how surreal, felt, in some metaphorical way, accurate to
our experience of being alive. I want a reader to believe in the changes Pavla
goes through even as those changes are impossible to believe. That’s what
fiction is all about, isn’t it? Drawing the reader into that liminal space where the real and the imagined mingle
and what is mere fabrication feels utterly true.
What surprised me was how much of life really
hews to the contours of fairytale. Read the newspaper. We have an ogre running
for president.
The Last Line:
Well, I think that if all time exists, as it does, and if
nothing truly disappears, which it does not, than all stories are there. It is
my job, through observation and imagination, and the application of language,
to give them shape.
Obsessing me now:
Besides the election, you mean? Oh, I’m wandering around
trying to figure out what I’ll write next.
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