By Desiree Cooper
Kelly Fordon’s second collection of short stories, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press), is a straight arrow into the heart of suburban angst, where characters stand to lose much more than social and economic privilege. Sudden death, drug addiction, mental illness, and sexual violence cross the borders into lives where perfection and appearances up the ante on shame. As I savored her compelling prose, I marveled that Fordon would lob this brave bomb into today’s class war, where the lives of well-off are easily written off. Fordon makes us dispense with the politics and take a hard look at the souls of the wealthy—especially women—with an eye toward both critique and compassion. I’m amazed at how fraught these characters are, yet how much I keep rooting for their survival. Long after I turned the last page, I’d find myself wondering if they ever made it.
Desiree Cooper: Your first short story collection, Garden for the Blind, explored the dark underbelly of life in suburban Detroit—especially the confluence of race and money. Now comes this collection that extends your examination of white privilege and the particular way it impacts women. What influenced you to take up these themes?
Kelly Fordon: I live in the suburbs of Detroit and have witnessed the various ways women in my suburb are impacted by the choices they’ve made. In Garden for the Blind I was interested in exploring how one could literally be “blind” to privilege all the while wreaking havoc on the lives of everyone around. In this collection, the tableau is similar. From a socioeconomic perspective, the women are privileged. They are either working remotely from home (white-collar) or they aren’t working at all. In many ways, they are free, and in many other ways they are trapped. They are dependent on a patriarchal system and that is very limiting whether they realize it or not. In one story, “Getting a Grip” the woman literally has no idea she has any agency in her own life until a retinue of imaginary people show up in her dining room to rescue her.
DC: Do you see yourself as a contemporary writer of suburban Gothic?
KF: I’ve never thought about it before. But, if by “gothic” you mean that I am writing in allegorical form about the political plight of people who on the surface seem fine, but who have dark underbellies, then yes.
DC: So many of the stories are about girls seeing their mothers on the edge of sanity—or women just barely able to fake it. And yet, the daughters view their mother’s weaknesses as an opportunity for judgment rather than compassion. Can you talk about your portrayal of the relationships women have with each other?
KF: In my experience women are very hard on each other. The Boomers had few choices until the early ‘70s. My mother-in-law wanted to be a lawyer, but she wasn’t allowed to go to law school because her father felt that no man would marry her if she did. My mother, on the other hand, battled her way up through local television to network television and became an ABC correspondent in an era when there were no female correspondents. Then she gave it all up to have me. I think she would admit that she was very angry about that when I was growing up, and as a result we had a very difficult relationship. Now that I’m older I understand why she was so frustrated, but when I was a kid, I didn’t see how her choice benefitted me, and it didn’t benefit her. It benefitted my father, who could have a family without the sacrifice of his time.
The narrator in “Tell Them I’m Happy Now” is angry with her mother for pursuing her own goals and neglecting her when she was a child. She vows to be more hands on with her own kids, but she soon discovers it’s hard to live solely to meet the needs of other people. Ultimately, she realizes that whether flouting convention or acquiescing to it, both she and her mother were defined by it.
DC: One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Superman at Hogback Ridge.” A teenager is socially distant from his family, unmotivated and lost in his own world. But when the chips are down, both father and son discover their own true natures. Your characters often are surprised by who they really are.
KF: I’ve noticed that people often don’t know who they are until they are in a moment of crisis. I have a friend who saw a boy choking on the street one day. His father was yelling for help, but no one was rising to the occasion. This friend was surprised to find herself running across the street and giving the boy the Heimlich maneuver. It worked, but afterwards she had a moment of complete collapse thinking, “Why in the world did I think I could give him the Heimlich maneuver, and what if it hadn’t worked?”
The second guessing doesn’t really interest me. I’m interested in the split second reaction. The boy in “Hogback Ridge” has been distant from his parents (as many teenagers are) but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t absorbed their lessons or thought about what type of person he wants to be. Maybe he was influenced by his father’s Superman stories. Who knows? Or maybe he’s simply a hero in his own right. Either way, he isn’t simply an oblivious kid with his earbuds embedded. He turns out to be way more than that. Better, in some ways, even than his father.
DC: What is your process for writing such faulty but relatable characters?
KF: One thing I’ve discovered about my own writing is that, generally speaking, my first drafts are terrible. And not just on a craft level. Sometimes I’m mean-spirited in a first draft. I write a character who does everything wrong. I have no sympathy for the person. I foist all the dismal attributes of everyone I’ve ever disliked on that character and then I propel them through the story basically shouting: “Look at how terrible this person is!”
One-dimensional characters are never satisfying. Writing a story to make a point about how bad “those” people are is no way to write a good story. It’s not even a good way to go through life. So, I rewrite the story. I think, “Ok, well, maybe Mel lost his brother when he was ten, and that’s why he screams at his kids when they come home five minutes late. Maybe he’s worried that one of his own boys is going to crash the car. And maybe he’s so worried he doesn’t even let them get their licenses. Maybe he makes them come home at 6pm every night and never go out on the weekends. He’s terrified to let them out of his sight. That’s kind of sad.”
Once I realize my character is just like me, a frightened soul trying to navigate through a hostile world, I know the story is coming to life. I’m always writing towards that moment.
DC: Another favorite is the heart wrenching “Afterwards,” where a mother retells the journey of her son’s opioid addiction. Of course, there are her recriminations:
Maybe if I hadn’t yelled at him to come out of his room, to pick up the dirty laundry, to turn off the computer, to make it home on time, to stop using, to stop stealing, to stop wandering off, to stop running away, to stop selling.
It rankles me how mothers bear the brunt of judgment when it comes to the successes and failures of their families. Are the characters in your story the women that feminism left behind?
KF: In my experience women are often the caretakers whether they are working or staying home. I am a feminist, but I don’t think we’ve won that battle yet. I know that even women who are working end up caring for family members more than their spouses. And I know people still blame parents—and especially mothers—for the mistakes of their children. Why, I don’t know, because no parent has control over whether a kid makes a bad choice. And in the case of heroin, my understanding is that one bad choice and you can be hooked for life. I personally know of six or seven overdoses.
My neighborhood with its leafy trees and well-manicured lawns doesn’t look like a place where bad things happen, but we have had every type of problem—overdoses, suicide, mental health disorders. Not talking about these problems perpetuates them. People don’t want to be judged, so they refuse to discuss it. And then of course it happens again, because we never get to the bottom of it. Shame is insidious. This is where I Have the Answer attempts to go—deep into the shame so that healing can begin.
DC: When you were writing this collection, we all were living in a different world. Now your book is arriving on our doorsteps in a moment of existential crisis. What do the stories have to say to us now?
KF: A lot of the people in these stories are trapped in their houses for various reasons. They don’t realize they have agency—that they can change the story. To a certain extent, that freedom has been taken from us by Covid-19—at least for now. We literally can’t leave our houses. Maybe in that way, the collection will resonate with people in ways it wouldn’t have before the pandemic.
Maybe now that we’re all trapped in the house, we will have a better understanding of what women have gone through all these years. As a feminist, that is the backdrop for many of the stories in the collection. Now, both parents (or whatever adults are on location) are going to hear the kids making a racket, and all the adults are going to have to deal with the mess, and the meals, and the laundry. There is no escaping it—no more setting off for work in the morning and leaving the caretaking to someone else. Maybe we will all emerge from this with more empathy for people who work in the home or who perform caretaking 24/7. We will have no choice but to see how much effort it takes to keep other people alive and well.
DC: You end your collection with “Why Did I Ever Think This was a Good Idea?”, a story in which letting go ends up being the best idea of all! That’s a pretty Zen notion for a writer who was raised on Catholicism. Tell me more about the role that faith plays in your work.
KF: The only thing I’ve retained from Catholicism at this point is the hope that there’s a benevolent entity out there somewhere. I can’t quite let that hope go. I’ve been deeply disappointed by the Catholic Church on many fronts. The misogyny of not allowing female priests. The ongoing denial and brushing under the rug of the pedophilia scandal. The random rules and edicts set down by men which limit women’s access to contraception and reject their right to choose. I think about all of my Irish ancestors who had 10, 12, 14 babies and raised them in mud huts under the thumb of the church, and all the while the priests were doing egregious things to children—among other nefarious infractions. I can’t wrap my mind around why women—in particular—put up with it, but there are a billion Catholics in the world so obviously I am in the minority. Still, I reserve the right to hope there is some entity up there—raceless, genderless, classless—who is everything good. It makes me happy to set my hopes on that.
DC: After reading this collection, we can see exactly how humans, with all their faults, get into fixes that may or may not be of their own making. The stories make us look inside ourselves instead of pointing a finger at others. I think I have the answer, and it’s empathy. Am I close?
KF: The only reason I chose the title “I Have the Answer” was to find out what other people think it might be. So, I guess the answer is: I like your answer!
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT KELLY FORDON.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, is a 2017 Michigan Notable Book that has won numerous awards, including the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s flash fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, Electric Literature, COG Magazine, and in the forthcoming Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. Her essay, “We Have Lost Too Many Wigs,” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019. In 2018, she wrote, produced and co-directed “The Choice,” a short film about reproductive rights based upon her flash fiction story, “First Response.” The film has won several awards, including a 2019 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Berlin Flash Film Festival, and Award of Merit, 2019 Best Shorts Competition, California.