By Christine Rice

Reading Suzanne Scanlon’s second novel, Her 37th Year, An Index, felt at first like standing too close to a painting. Until I stepped back, the lyrical instances–thoughts, conversations, moments, letters, memories, dreams–felt prismatic, disconnected. But as I became familiar with Her 37th Year’s abecedarium form, the novel’s narrative arc and rhythm and tone emerged.

While reading Her 37th Year, I would pull a book off the shelf  to reread an essay or story or poem referenced by Scanlon and so, by the time I finished the book, it had taken me on some pretty profound journeys. That hypertext quality–the fluid movement from one topic to another–made the reading experience dynamic. At times, it felt as if  I’d stumbled upon the narrator’s diary, her honesty and vulnerability fiercely illuminated on each page.

Her 37th Year examines a young woman’s relationships, desires, fears, triumphs, and mistakes. It moves forward and back and sideways to investigate every corner of the narrator’s life.

The book begins here:

ANECDOTE, She tells him that she is writing a book about him. She asks if he’s heard the one about Flannery O’Connor and the young and handsome textbook salesman. He took her for a drive, kissed her. She didn’t know how to kiss. I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, he wrote in a letter to a friend. Some weeks later, upon hearing that he’d married, she sat down to write “Good Country People”; she sent the finished story to him with a note: This is not about you.

I connected with Suzanne Scanlon to discuss form, what takes her attention as a writer, and the process of writing Her 37th Year.

Christine Rice: This is one of my favorite sections in the book:

FREEDOM (see also: Aging, and Death) You drink wine with a friend and speak of the real shit of it. “It’s weird aging, right? It’s like, ‘What the fuck is that?'” you say, misquoting the movie Greenberg, in which Baumbach’s Ben Stiller has been disfigured into a regular person, a mentally ill loser, even. The sentiment lacks eloquence, yet is true. How irrelevant we must seem![figure out how to footnote in WorPress4] “I know this is horrible,” your friend confesses, “but I feel ashamed of getting older.” “I get it,” you say. “It’s like that Nora Ephron book: I read the title now and think, I get it. I never wanted to get it, Nora Ephron!” To the man in boots, you say: “I was so young once!” It’s your favorite line from Hiroshima, Mon Amour–when the French actress says so to her Japanese Lover, to the universe. Privately you wonder if your writing has been just this, a histrionic assertion: I was young once!

This aging thing. That section is so weighted, it just carries so much cultural baggage. It comes about a quarter of the way into the book and, by that time, we know quite a bit about the narrator’s younger self. Moments like that give the book such scope, the narrator such depth.

How is your writing different now than when you were twenty-something? Similarities? What takes your attention now compared to when you were 21?

SS: Wow. When I was 21 I was so trapped in my own world, and it was very small. The world of my imagination. It was absurd, really. I have journals from the time which are so focused on my FEELINGS–every tiny little thing–it was so exhausting, really.That I was unable to look beyond myself, at least enough to connect with other people in a satisfying way. I had moments, but overall I was tortured. I was so focused on the next thing–the story of my life–that I was unable to live my life. (I’m thinking of Madame Bovary now: “She wanted both to die and to live in Paris.” That was me!) It was overwhelming, the thought that I had to choose and prepare and create the life I wanted. Now I guess I don’t feel so future-oriented. I pay much more attention to what is here now. What my life is. I judge it all a lot less. I mean, I’m more relaxed–and that’s a much better energy to bring to art-making. That openness. At 21, I wanted to control everything, which is why I utterly failed to live a normal life for some time. I’ve let that go. I let life be. I love a lot more about life. I think writing of those years, though, I feel more tenderly towards my younger self–I want to speak to her, or protect her, or comfort her. Take care of her. She was so young (once)!

CR: You are an actor too. What does one discipline bring to the other?

SS: I think of writing as performance. I read work aloud, and I think a lot about the interaction between reader and writer, just as I would actor and audience. I don’t act anymore, really, but I go to the theater a lot, and I learn from watching actors, and from being in the audience.

CR: Until I got to chapters C and D, the structure and the interlocking nature of each instance felt random. But as I moved further into the book, patterns started to emerge. Did the material dictate the form? Or did the form shape the material?

SS: Once I created the index, I was then able to write the book. So, the index form came first. But some sections contain material I’d explored earlier, in other contexts.

CR:  Did the narrative arc keep morphing the way thoughts do, the way way thoughts might have hit this narrator? If so, did you allow these to lead you down different paths? Or did you write off a more set outline?

SS: Yes, definitely–one idea led to another. I pushed the text out from these moments.

The book’s frame was set clearly from the start; that opening bit referencing O’Connor was also set early on, as was the last entry. That was the skeleton. Within that framework, there was a lot of variation and digression.

CR: The book had a very intimate feel. Many of the instances felt like journal entries. Like any traditionally structured novel, you used other forms within the larger form – to get to the material in Her 37th Year. What outside writing influenced this book?

SS: Yes, journals or notebooks. Blogging. A lot of it came from blog conversations I had with Kate Zambreno and Pamela Lu and Angela Simione and Rebecca Loudon, among others.

CR: How did you keep up the emotional intensity of the book? Did you write in fits and starts? How did writing in this form differ from writing Promising Young Women?

SS: I think I’m just rather emotionally intense, for better or worse. I wrote it quickly, actually, over a few months. It was so much easier than Promising Young Women, which took years. But I write in fits, really, so that timeline is not totally accurate.

CR: You develop the narrator through her interaction with other writers’ work.

SS: Yes, for sure. Writing of Anais Nin led to memories of the perfume I had long before I knew who she was; writing of Woolf led to other memories…she was also a spectra of sorts, before I developed a personal relationship. Many of the New York City references build on themselves, one leads to another, and refracts towards some other idea or moment.

CR: I read somewhere that you are writing another novel based on scenes in Her 37th Year. Is the new work surprising you in ways you didn’t expect?

SS: Really? Did I say that? Maybe I am.

CR: I often make things up…so you might not have said that at all.

SS: Each book I write seems part of one larger project, a reiteration/reaction to what came before. The novel I’m writing now does momentarily reference 37th Year. I’m rather unoriginal and my writing all seems to be a circling, a retelling, a quest for (another) understanding of the same story.

This new novel is both easier and more difficult. Easier because the index form was limiting–and harder, well, for the same reason. I find structure always challenging, and so that was a really contained wonderful gift for that book, how much work the structure itself actually did.

CR: In G you go from Gaze, The to Ghosts to Good People to Goodbye. In that chapter (as in other chapters), you use letters, footnotes, and speculate on the way other writers might have felt at certain pivotal points in their lives. And every segment works as a full movement or scene, and in such a nuanced and unique way.

As a reader, that’s what I responded to most: the narrator’s sadness or shared sense of sadness. It’s very much centered on specific moments in the narrator’s life but then it periscopes out. I certainly got tangled in the memories and the overall tone of the book. It’s not specific to gender but at the same time very specific to gender.

SS: That’s nice. I think it’s very much about gender, yes. Though that wasn’t my intention, necessarily.

CR:  The narrator’s world view is very much influenced by her time living in New York. You lived in New York and now live in Chicago. New York very much influences the narrator’s development.

You write:

Now you have a certain openness, a vulnerability–a man will ask: “Why so sad?” Or, lost in thought you will hear a voice behind you: “Smile!”

SS: Yes, I believe that entry arose from a reflection on New York, the way a place is so bound up with people–the person we were, the people we knew when we lived in a place…all of that was linked to “my” New York, of the nineties. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, and return to every time I visit the city.

CR: In K you write about a therapist who quotes from Cindy Crawford’s book and follow it up with a quote by Chris Kraus:

KING STREET (see also: Advice, and Therapy), where you pass the office of a therapist you saw exactly once. A skills-trained therapist, back before DBT was hip:  a women who could only see you for a 6 a.m. appointment, in the middle of a life where you saw no one at 6 a.m. A woman who, as you moaned or complained or expressed a bit of post-adolescent despair, asked, “Have you read Cindy Crawford’s new book” Despite the horror & shock on your face, she quoted Cindy Crawford to you –a patient sitting in her carefully lit ground floor office –”Never let a pimple ruin your day!”

KRAUS, CHRIS (see also: Feminaissance, I Love Dick):  “I think that ‘privacy’ is to contemporary female art what ‘obscenity’ was to male art and literature of the 1960s. The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove. There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative. But to examine things cooly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.”

The juxtaposition of those two entries made me laugh. And then I started thinking about how women’s writing has been marginalized for so many years by so many writers (men and women). And then I thought about the breadth and power of writing by women who work so hard at it and I just got kind of angry.

But the implication or the way you set each entry up side by side makes a huge difference.

SS: I think it’s funny, and I wanted the humor there, too. I’m frustrated by these very things you mention, but I also find life very amusing. That Cindy Crawford thing really happened to me. At the time I was much more serious. But I’m also not above getting advice from Cindy Crawford.

CR: Who isn’t.

You reference so many writers and poets in 37th Year. Who are you reading now?

SS: I just finished and adored Ben Lerner’s 10:04. I read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was exciting and painful. I’m re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being and Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. I have maybe ten books on my nightstand at all times. I also just read Nora Ephron, Pema Chodron and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

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Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi). Her fiction has appeared in publications including The Iowa Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, MAKE, BOMB Magazine, and was recently anthologized in A Kind of Compass, Stories on Distance, edited by Belinda McKeon for Tramp Press.