Make Me Do Things Interview
Interview with Victoria Redel by Kathleen McNamara
Interviewer Bio: “Kathleen McNamara is an MFA student in fiction at Arizona State University. She was formerly on staff at The New York Review of Books.”
KM: One aspect of this collection that I found particularly compelling was its investigation of the intersection between family, motherhood, and sexual desire. Many of your female protagonists seem caught in a tenuous balance, and the tension between sex and home is a central one in their lives. A few examples that come to mind are Sabina in “You Look Like You Do,” and Sasha in “On Earth.” But you also explore similar ground with male protagonists in “Stuff” and “Red Rooster.” Can you speak a little about that?
VR: The tenuous balance that you mention seems to be true for both men and women and the balance must shift in any of us even as we try to keep our compass. Half of the stories in this collection stay close to a man’s perspective and the other half a woman’s. This wasn’t intentionally planned, but somehow was inevitable. I’m interested in how we as people manage (or not), stay true to (or sabotage) our goals and dreams and obligations. And, of course, I’m interested in how these various things are usually messier, more conflicted and less streamlined than we’d like them to be. As for writing male—which is I think part of what you’re asking—I love it. I’d done it in my second novel in the person of Itzak, a 17 year-old kid in 1940, so it hardly seemed strange to slip into the mind/action/heart of a contemporary man.
KM: That strange tension between sex and family is also present in the title story, except the narrative is confined to details that a child would be capable of perceiving about the world of adults. Our characters are “the boy,” “the mother,” and “the man,” and the boy watches as his mother and the man flirt together in the pool. The effect of this is gripping. It also seems to inform “Red Rooster,” which is the story that immediately follows. I found myself wondering if Tracey from “Red Rooster” was “the boy.” Am I right in conflating these two stories? Do you consider any of the stories in this collection explicitly linked?
VR: You are right about the two stories. I’d written “Make Me Do Things” quite some time before I began “Red Rooster.” But much later I realized I was interested in thinking about those characters again, taking them out of the more iconic “the boy, the mother” and putting them into new circumstances and through a different lens. In this case, through the lens of the character that was least developed in the prior story. These two stories are the most explicitly linked, though there are others that seem linked—probably only in some skewed and not particularly essential way—to me.
KM: I loved “Ahoy,” which opens with this sentence: “This is the story of the year my wife became the sea captain’s wife and carried his child, a child that is by all rights mine.” It’s the final story in the collection and also the only one with a first-person narrator. It’s compelling, funny, surprising, and structurally complex. Can you speak about your sense of the differences between first and third person narration? Why end in someone else’s voice, rather than an authorial one?
VR: I’m so glad you like “Ahoy,” I admit it’s kind of a favorite for me. So thanks for noticing it. For much of the writing of these stories I was interested in writing in a close third-person narration. I wanted to see how staying in third person, but coming really close to the protagonist, changed the sentence making. What words, what syntax would become available to me this way? How would it both enlarge and limit? Could I have, as the writer, the benefits of both first and third person narration? “Ahoy” was, I don’t know if I should say this, the last story I wrote for the collection, although that opening sentence had been lingering, hanging around, poking at me, for a long time. So I wanted to write the story for the book. I wanted to figure out what that sentence was meant to become. He’s a complicated character, his reliability entirely in question. More fun, I think, to have that happen in first person—because it allows the reader to figure out what’s going on kind of slowly and to both know more and less than the narrator.
KM: You mentioned that part of what drew you to writing “Red Rooster” was a desire to take the characters out of the more iconic “the boy, the mother” and put them into new circumstances. The story “He’s Back” also features “the boy”—but in a bathtub rather than a pool. The bathtub element is reminiscent of the croup scene in “You Look Like You Do,” and throughout the collection, careful attention is paid to the sensation of water. “The Horn,” for example, begins with this line: “She was the handsome boy sent out by Highdaddy as a Handsome girl, not so wise as just lucky to remember how good a bowl of dirty water tasted.” It’s another story that takes place at sea, and we know our protagonist only by nickname, “Lucky.”
So do you consider water to be a motif in this collection? It’s a key element in a number of pivotal scenes and I wondered if it was a deliberate structuring device or if it emerged from the text more organically?
VR: Water imagery. Interesting. I could try to make something up that sounds cool about water as a conscious thread I wove through the book, but I’d be bullshitting. That said, I think imagery does recur in a writer’s work and there’s no doubt something important to learn from this. People have noticed before that “boats” show up in a good deal of my work, which by logical extension means there’s been water. I do believe writers have essential objects—ones that have some private urgency/depth for them. I’ve said before that the legacy of the first generation, of being a child of whose parents were refugees, a family where boats mattered. So does that make water so kind of essential object for me? Maybe yes but how it appears in these stories doesn’t bear that history. If anything, maybe it conveys some of the urgency.
KM: I’m also wondering about how your characters are named (or not named). What do you think is the effect of calling a character “the boy” or “Lucky” rather than using a formal name? In “The Third Cycle,” for example, we only know the characters by the “fake” names they call each other. As a result, “Polly” and “Susie” feel almost dangerous—as though because we don’t know their “real” names they are liable to do almost anything. Do you think this technique of not-quite-naming allows a more intimate view of the characters?
VR: As you can see that is a thread through these stories. Characters do or don’t want to call people by their names. In “The North House,” Madame S. is annoyed that the students can’t pronounce her name. In “Red Rooster,” he thinks of his girlfriend as “the girlfriend” rather than as Juliana. I hope the effect is not always the same in each story. In some stories I wanted to unhinge the characters from a certain kind of specificity either for the reader or for other characters. Not that the father becomes all fathers—but that in depersonalizing I actually heighten the situation. In other situations, a character might rather see someone less distinctly—a way of avoiding or really taking responsibility for an actual person. In other cases a character might be hiding from himself/herself. So yes, your question does it give us a more intimate view? I hope so. Though I think the intimacy differs between stories.
Interviewer Bio: “Kathleen McNamara is an MFA student in fiction at Arizona State University. She was formerly on staff at The New York Review of Books.”
KM: One aspect of this collection that I found particularly compelling was its investigation of the intersection between family, motherhood, and sexual desire. Many of your female protagonists seem caught in a tenuous balance, and the tension between sex and home is a central one in their lives. A few examples that come to mind are Sabina in “You Look Like You Do,” and Sasha in “On Earth.” But you also explore similar ground with male protagonists in “Stuff” and “Red Rooster.” Can you speak a little about that?
VR: The tenuous balance that you mention seems to be true for both men and women and the balance must shift in any of us even as we try to keep our compass. Half of the stories in this collection stay close to a man’s perspective and the other half a woman’s. This wasn’t intentionally planned, but somehow was inevitable. I’m interested in how we as people manage (or not), stay true to (or sabotage) our goals and dreams and obligations. And, of course, I’m interested in how these various things are usually messier, more conflicted and less streamlined than we’d like them to be. As for writing male—which is I think part of what you’re asking—I love it. I’d done it in my second novel in the person of Itzak, a 17 year-old kid in 1940, so it hardly seemed strange to slip into the mind/action/heart of a contemporary man.
KM: That strange tension between sex and family is also present in the title story, except the narrative is confined to details that a child would be capable of perceiving about the world of adults. Our characters are “the boy,” “the mother,” and “the man,” and the boy watches as his mother and the man flirt together in the pool. The effect of this is gripping. It also seems to inform “Red Rooster,” which is the story that immediately follows. I found myself wondering if Tracey from “Red Rooster” was “the boy.” Am I right in conflating these two stories? Do you consider any of the stories in this collection explicitly linked?
VR: You are right about the two stories. I’d written “Make Me Do Things” quite some time before I began “Red Rooster.” But much later I realized I was interested in thinking about those characters again, taking them out of the more iconic “the boy, the mother” and putting them into new circumstances and through a different lens. In this case, through the lens of the character that was least developed in the prior story. These two stories are the most explicitly linked, though there are others that seem linked—probably only in some skewed and not particularly essential way—to me.
KM: I loved “Ahoy,” which opens with this sentence: “This is the story of the year my wife became the sea captain’s wife and carried his child, a child that is by all rights mine.” It’s the final story in the collection and also the only one with a first-person narrator. It’s compelling, funny, surprising, and structurally complex. Can you speak about your sense of the differences between first and third person narration? Why end in someone else’s voice, rather than an authorial one?
VR: I’m so glad you like “Ahoy,” I admit it’s kind of a favorite for me. So thanks for noticing it. For much of the writing of these stories I was interested in writing in a close third-person narration. I wanted to see how staying in third person, but coming really close to the protagonist, changed the sentence making. What words, what syntax would become available to me this way? How would it both enlarge and limit? Could I have, as the writer, the benefits of both first and third person narration? “Ahoy” was, I don’t know if I should say this, the last story I wrote for the collection, although that opening sentence had been lingering, hanging around, poking at me, for a long time. So I wanted to write the story for the book. I wanted to figure out what that sentence was meant to become. He’s a complicated character, his reliability entirely in question. More fun, I think, to have that happen in first person—because it allows the reader to figure out what’s going on kind of slowly and to both know more and less than the narrator.
KM: You mentioned that part of what drew you to writing “Red Rooster” was a desire to take the characters out of the more iconic “the boy, the mother” and put them into new circumstances. The story “He’s Back” also features “the boy”—but in a bathtub rather than a pool. The bathtub element is reminiscent of the croup scene in “You Look Like You Do,” and throughout the collection, careful attention is paid to the sensation of water. “The Horn,” for example, begins with this line: “She was the handsome boy sent out by Highdaddy as a Handsome girl, not so wise as just lucky to remember how good a bowl of dirty water tasted.” It’s another story that takes place at sea, and we know our protagonist only by nickname, “Lucky.”
So do you consider water to be a motif in this collection? It’s a key element in a number of pivotal scenes and I wondered if it was a deliberate structuring device or if it emerged from the text more organically?
VR: Water imagery. Interesting. I could try to make something up that sounds cool about water as a conscious thread I wove through the book, but I’d be bullshitting. That said, I think imagery does recur in a writer’s work and there’s no doubt something important to learn from this. People have noticed before that “boats” show up in a good deal of my work, which by logical extension means there’s been water. I do believe writers have essential objects—ones that have some private urgency/depth for them. I’ve said before that the legacy of the first generation, of being a child of whose parents were refugees, a family where boats mattered. So does that make water so kind of essential object for me? Maybe yes but how it appears in these stories doesn’t bear that history. If anything, maybe it conveys some of the urgency.
KM: I’m also wondering about how your characters are named (or not named). What do you think is the effect of calling a character “the boy” or “Lucky” rather than using a formal name? In “The Third Cycle,” for example, we only know the characters by the “fake” names they call each other. As a result, “Polly” and “Susie” feel almost dangerous—as though because we don’t know their “real” names they are liable to do almost anything. Do you think this technique of not-quite-naming allows a more intimate view of the characters?
VR: As you can see that is a thread through these stories. Characters do or don’t want to call people by their names. In “The North House,” Madame S. is annoyed that the students can’t pronounce her name. In “Red Rooster,” he thinks of his girlfriend as “the girlfriend” rather than as Juliana. I hope the effect is not always the same in each story. In some stories I wanted to unhinge the characters from a certain kind of specificity either for the reader or for other characters. Not that the father becomes all fathers—but that in depersonalizing I actually heighten the situation. In other situations, a character might rather see someone less distinctly—a way of avoiding or really taking responsibility for an actual person. In other cases a character might be hiding from himself/herself. So yes, your question does it give us a more intimate view? I hope so. Though I think the intimacy differs between stories.