By Karen Halvorsen Schreck
Writing was getting me down.
Well, not writing, exactly, but publishing, the business industry of things. The sales numbers, the swag, and the shelf life, the platforms built on solid ground, the platforms built on sand. I shared my discouragement with other writer friends. I listened as they did the same. Afterwards, I felt far less alone with my blue mood, but no less daunted by my prospects.
Then a panel discussion, Paths to Publication, popped up on my events horizon. The panelists participating had chosen various options when it came to getting their books to readers, including major publishers, small/indie presses, hybrid presses, and self-publishing. This discussion would give them the opportunity to talk about their experiences and the advantages and disadvantages each option presented. I marked the date on my calendar, and when the time came, I went.
And this was where I first met Deborah Shapiro, who happened to be among the panelists. Deborah is the author of a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, The Sun in Your Eyes (HarperCollins), and The Summer Demands (Catapult), yet she chose to create her own imprint, B-Side Editions, and self-published her most recent novel, Consolation.
Over the course of the panel, I became increasingly impressed by Deborah’s savvy perspective on the state of publishing, and her commitment to her work and her confidence in its worth inspired me. Deborah didn’t hide her manuscript in drawer and let it gather dust as some (I) might have done. She did what she had to do to put her novel out into the world, and, damn, it’s a beautiful book, impeccably designed, from the front cover to the back.
And then there’s the language, the story. Why didn’t an editor snap this up? I kept wondering as I read my way through Consolation. I didn’t dwell on this at the time, however, because I wanted to keep turning the pages, losing myself in Deborah’s lyrical prose, her wise and transportive story, the concerns of loss and love, remembering and misremembering, paths not taken. Consolation remains one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and, given my own recent bout of discouragement, I am deeply grateful to Deborah, for opening up my sense of what is possible when it comes to publishing, for giving me hope by getting her book into my hands.
Could you share a bit about your journey as a writer? When did the desire to write strike you? How have you gone about pursuing and developing your craft?
Do you remember that N+1 piece, MFA vs. NYC? I moved to New York City after college and started working in magazines (RIP), knowing that I wanted to write fiction, and at the time, that world seemed fiction-writing adjacent. It was really in high school that I developed some notion, however vague it may have been, of wanting to write. I have a BA in Comparative Literature and I figured I would apply to grad school at some point, but I never did. I did start looking into MFA programs when I wasn’t loving my job… but then I got a better job. Anyway, being in New York gave me the chance to meet and connect with writers and editors (and my agent) who became my friends, whose work I loved and whose editorial judgment I really valued – and still do. Who were generous with their time and engagement. That sense of community has been and remains key for me. I don’t know if New York still functions that way for young writers? Maybe it does, but post-pandemic, and as publishing has grown a little more decentralized, there are other options. Chicago, for one, has a good literary scene.
In terms of developing craft, it’s been mostly about reading. Reading widely and closely. And working in magazines, mostly as a fact-checker and research editor, sometimes as a writer, did affect my writing on a craft level. It was an education to see how pieces got edited. It taught me the importance of concision and clarity, voice and tone, and it also taught me not to be too precious. To be kind of worker-like about it.
You’re the author of three published novels. Has your process of seeing a manuscript through to completion evolved over time? If so, how?
I think it has evolved. My first novel, The Sun in Your Eyes, had a lot of moving parts and a bit of a broader canvas and because of that, I felt I could have revised it forever (after having already spent years revising it). My second, The Summer Demands, was narrower in focus and when it was done, I sort of knew it was done – not that it didn’t need more work or revision, but the general shape of it seemed complete to me. The process for Consolation was similar. I don’t know any writers who aren’t prone to doubt themselves and their work, but I do think that over time I’ve acquired a certain confidence, at least in knowing when something is working and when it isn’t.
When you consider your work, are you able to suss out thematic preoccupations, questions, concerns, or conflicts that you keep trying to untangle through your writing, intentionally or instinctually?
I can definitely see themes, concerns, and questions that I keep returning to. I’ve been drawn to writing about women at various crossroads in their lives. I’ve often ended up exploring friendship, or even more broadly, connections between people that offer understanding, that break through loneliness. (Which is what writing does itself, no?) Creative ambition and how that gets defined and talked about and how it changes over time for an individual has also been something that consistently interests me.
What success means – not necessarily success in capitalist terms, that can be quantified by audience or sales, but what does success look like outside of that (to the extent that you might ever get outside of it)? Is it simply doing the work? Is it finding a community that can receive and recognize that work? What drives that kind of ambition and where does that drive – that wanting – go if or when it’s not met? What do longing and yearning have to do with it? What role does satisfaction and striving play in all of this?
I think there’s something consistent in the tone of my writing, at least so far. It tends toward a certain melancholy met with humor. Which is maybe Jewish? I don’t know.
It’s mostly instinctual. I don’t think I’ve set out to write about these topics and concerns but my preoccupations come through – I kind of wish I made outlines beforehand, but I don’t. The topic of preoccupations is making me think of Patrick Modiano’s work, which has the reputation for being the same book over and over. And that’s not wrong. But that’s part of what fascinates me about his work and I’ll read any iterations of it. His books pretty much all have something to do with France during the Occupation and with conjuring the murky legacy of that for a younger generation, marked by disappearances and absences, by strange repetition and recurrence, and by the workings of memory and forgetting.
Discussing your style, author and editor Matthew Specktor compared your prose to that of Elizabeth Bowen’s. When I was reading your latest novel, Consequence, I found myself thinking of the work of James Salter, whose style I deeply admire. Like yours, Bowen’s and Salter’s sentences can feel as transparent as glass, deceptively accessible, given the nuances and subtleties expressed. What do you personally value, when it comes to form and style? Are there authors you study and try to emulate in your work?
That’s incredibly flattering. Bowen and Salter are two favorites, whose work I often return to. Increasingly, I think I’m drawn to prose that doesn’t necessarily call attention to itself but is quietly insightful. “Deceptively accessible” is a great way to describe the stylists who write this way. There are too many to list, though Anita Brookner and Tessa Hadley come to mind – their keen powers of perception and observation, their ability to conjure an atmosphere and outer world while plumbing a depth of feeling and interiority, excavating emotional subtleties. The recognition I experience as a reader. Helen Garner, too.
I don’t know that I consciously try to emulate particular writers when I’m writing, but I’ll often purposefully turn to them when I’m revising, like guides, and I’ll think, oh this sentence needs more zip or fluidity or a different rhythm. Or there’s a kind of shading that this scene could use. Or depending on what I’m going for, I’ll recall a certain scene and movement in a book that evokes something I’m trying to get on the page, and I’ll go back to see if I can glean how they did it. It could be Mrs. Ramsey walking down the stairs and seeing the moon out the window in To the Lighthouse. Or it could be Chantal Akerman describing the warmth and quiet and intimacy of a car ride home in winter after her father’s death in A Family in Brussels. Or how Salter depicts the family’s house – including the bathroom – in Light Years. Elizabeth Bowen can write about the weather or even a nightstand and it’s great and evocative.
When someone who has yet to read Consolation asks what it’s about, what do you say? What inspired you to write this novel?
I usually stammer a bit and come out with something like “It’s about three women of different generations whose paths cross after the death of a man they all knew in various ways” and then if their eyes don’t glaze over, I get into more of what it really is. The book initially came out of my own experience. I had what I’ll call a brief encounter with somebody when we were in our twenties in New York, we didn’t keep in touch – nothing dramatic, just what happens – and then years later, when I was living in Chicago, married and with a small child, I found out on social media, in that abrupt way, that he’d died. I experienced a kind of initial shock and then a cascade of other feelings – and questions about those feelings. Is this even grief? What is this? What am I mourning? Am I entitled to express these feelings? How? And why is the issue of entitlement even coming up?
So, it started with wanting to explore those feelings and questions and it grew from there. I had read Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness as Such, which is written around an absent character. The primary characters in the novel are revealed through their relation to an absence, which I thought was an intriguing structure. In Consolation, James is not the main character, but his absence is what draws the three women together, and I was most interested in those women.
What was the path like from the spark of your initial idea for Consolation to the novel’s publication? Given the current state of publishing, what has been the hardest part of the process of sharing the novel with readers?
The path has been a twisty one! I published my first two books traditionally. The first with a large corporate publisher and the second with a large indie publisher. I was writing this book before and during the pandemic. I revised it with my faithful agent, she went out on submission with it in 2021, and the response was pretty disappointing. We heard a lot of “it’s too quiet” or “it’s not your breakout book ” – if we heard anything at all. After a while, honestly, I got tired of waiting. I was proud of this novel and I just wanted it out in the world in the form of a book that people could hold and read. With my agent, I discussed the idea of putting it out myself and I decided to go for it.
Having published two previous novels, I knew how certain aspects of the industry worked, and my editorial background helped for sure. The production process was new to me, but I was really into it. I worked with Bookmobile in Minneapolis to typeset, design, and print it. It was important to me that this book be a beautiful, high-quality object and I wanted to do it right. So, I started B-Side Editions in order to put it out, with the intention of selling it online, and some wonderful indie bookstores stock it, too, which is incredibly gratifying. And I love the immediacy of sending copies out myself directly to readers who order it from my site. Navigating distribution systems beyond that was a bit of a headache and making the finances work out is a challenge, but eventually I hope B-Side Editions can publish work by other writers.
I would describe the subject matter of Consolation as “ever-green,” a cliché, I know, but there you have it. That said, the story also feels eerily timely, given the profound level of suffering, loss, and death caused by the pandemic. Did writing this book change your perspective on grief in any way?
The pandemic brought on so many specific, destabilizing losses for so many people, of course. Loss of lives, of livelihoods, of ways of existing. But it also amplified a grieving around the loss of possibilities, a grief for both the present and the future. Which is something I think Consolation gets into. This kind of grief, while triggered by the pandemic, is also always a matter of time and aging, of moving through life and mourning our losses and even our past selves while imagining what might lie ahead, which is maybe what feels evergreen about it? Assessing which doors have closed and which ones remain open. And not to belabor the metaphor, but maybe there are doors you can re-open and go through again. Doors that don’t look like doors or doors you didn’t even know were there. Sorry, that’s a lot of doors!
I’ve had people ask if this book will be “too sad” for them to read right now, because they’ve lost someone recently and they’re grieving. And I can’t answer that. But people have also told me they’ve found it life-affirming, which is really the highest compliment – I love when I experience that from a work of art – and it means a lot to me to hear.
“I’m nobody who are you?” “Out of my purview.” “I shouldn’t be here.”
These statements, and others like them, crop up during Consolation. The three central characters have had very different relationships with the man whose death brings them together. At the same time, the relationships share something in common: they are ambiguous, difficult to explain and define. Why did you decide to focus on relationships that defy traditional categories? Was the decision intentional or did you realize that you were doing so along the way?
I’ve always been intrigued by those more ambiguous relationships and also how relationships that are easier to define or label – relationships that we already have a language for – can still defy traditional categories. Maybe because I’ve had more than a few of those kind of connections, I’m still trying to figure out just what their contours are. I’m intrigued by the way that people can fulfill different, unexpected roles for one another, that confound some of the limits that can arise when we define our identities in strict terms.
I think this goes back to the question about grief and wondering if your reaction or your feelings are valid because they don’t neatly fit into a recognizable framework. What are those feelings and what do you do with them? There are so many necessary books – memoirs, novels, non-fiction – about grieving a loved one, someone whose absence upends your entire life. I didn’t think I had all that much to contribute to that, as a writer, and I was interested in exploring instances that weren’t as extreme but were nevertheless affecting, haunting. Losing someone who isn’t actively in your life (or wasn’t ever really a big part of your life) but who was still elemental in shaping your life in some way – and the idea that moments and interactions that seem minor or fleeting actually can be elemental in shaping your life.
Throughout Consolation, you deftly create slippages in time, moving seamlessly back and forth between the present and the past. Could you talk a bit about working with time and memory in this book?
Thank you for that. I think maybe that’s what interests me most as a writer and as a reader. To return to an earlier question, it’s a preoccupation of mine. How lives unfold and how that unfolding resonates with echoes and recurrences. How memory shapes us. How misremembering shapes us. It just seems like life to me: you’re in a current moment and then your mind, in the form of memory, drops you into the past and that in turn affects your present. And that memory may have something to do with narrative, with a story you tell yourself about your life, but it may not be narrative at all. It may be more like a sensation or a half-thought or an image. Novels, as a form, lend themselves to exploring that state of consciousness.
You reminded me of this old essay I wrote about soap operas and how time works in them. As a soap fan, I’m always pleased to find serious writers who become obsessed with soaps and Renata Adler is one of those writers, as is Darryl Pinckney (see this great essay about his brief passion for As The World Turns). In her introduction to After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction, Adler writes: “I had thought of my soap hours as a waste of time, not a joke, not camp, not for a piece, not critically. A serious waste of time. But… I found that those two-and-a-half-year, open-ended narrative experiences define a lot of what I am and what I think.” Soap opera plots and conventions tend to function the way plot and conventions do in a lot of genre fiction – which is to say the melodrama and the heightened, exaggerated, ridiculous plots often allow for the expression of human truths. But I think what most appeals to me about soaps (I still watch General Hospital) is a certain ongoing-ness that is aware of itself.
What intrigues you about writing in multiple points of view? It entails a kind of balancing act, which you beautifully achieve and sustain. Do you find writing in this manner at all challenging? How do you go about tackling it?
Stay with me: I love singing, just for myself around the house or in the car, and I’m pretty good at harmonizing if I’m singing along with something. I have an ear for it, even if it’s never been developed. For me, there’s something harmonic about having multiple points of view. It adds dimension. It’s fuller. But if you’re off-key, it sounds terrible. So, it’s a challenge. With Consolation, the multiplicity of perspectives came out of a desire for each character to express what the other characters simply can’t know, and then for those characters to connect over what they share as well as what they don’t. And as a writer I enjoyed rotating in and out of each perspective. The Summer Demands has a first-person POV and I think that was partly a reaction to having multiple points of view in The Sun in Your Eyes. I may try going back to first person for whatever’s next.
Deborah Shapiro was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She spent a number of years in New York working at magazines, including New York and ELLE, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Sight Unseen, Chicago Magazine, Literary Hub, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the novels The Sun in Your Eyes (2016) and The Summer Demands (2019). Consolation, her third novel, was published in October 2022. She lives with her family in Chicago.
Karen Halvorsen Schreck is the author of the historical novel Broken Ground (Simon & Schuster 2016), called a “masterfully written . . . must-read” by USA Today. Her previously published historical novel, Sing for Me, was described as “impressive…a well-wrought and edifying page-turner” (Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review). Karen’s young adult novel, While He Was Away, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. She’s also the author of Dream Journal, which was a 2006 Young Adult BookSense Pick, and the award-winning children’s book Lucy’s Family Tree. Her short stories and articles have appeared in Consequence, Hypertext, The Rumpus, Belt, American Fiction, and Image, as well as other literary journals and magazines, and have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois State Arts Council Grant. Karen received her doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works as a freelance writer and editor, as well as at her local public library, teaches writing, and lives in Oak Park, Illinois.