By Patricia Ann McNair
I’ve known Kathleen Quigley, the winner of Michigan Writers 2023 Chapbook Competition in Nonfiction, for more than twenty years. I can say with authority that Kathleen’s writing is very much a reflection of herself. She is open and forthcoming; brazen and curious; fearless; witty; and warm. All good traits for a memoirist. In Twinkies, her story of friendship and so many other things, Kathleen lures us into a pair of lives that shift and tilt precariously without warning. But the qualities listed above—especially her wit and warmth—help us safely navigate the emotional storyscape Kathleen has made.
After the launch of Twinkies, Kathleen and I had the chance to talk about her chapbook, the perils and rewards of writing nonfiction, grief, friendship, mothering, and the love behind silly nicknames.
PMc: In your moving and funny long form essay, Twinkies, winner of the Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest in Nonfiction, you consider the essential friendship between two women—yourself and Patty, a young woman you met in college. Your lives entwine in good ways and sad, but it is the overlapping and parallel experiences that give the work its momentum and depth. Were there other essays or memoirs that inspired you to explore this path of story?
KQ: I’m not sure when I read Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell – possibly before I was diagnosed with cancer – I admired the way she began the book, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.” I have a horrible (in other people’s minds) habit of reading the ends of books before I get to the end. By beginning with the end, Caldwell saved me from having to read the end of the book to figure out what happens. When she established the friendship and her friend’s death right away, I felt like I was in honest hands. In Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett writes about her friendship with the poet, Lucy Grealy (who incidentally had the same type of cancer Patty did), and Grealy’s eventual death. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I read “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel—another story of losing a friend. All three gave me insight into how to write about a friendship cut short without being maudlin.
PMc: The title of your chapbook, Twinkies, is decidedly sweet, a little flirtatious, while the content of this work is intense, often painful. That makes for an interesting tension. Tell us about the genesis of the title. Did you ever waver on that choice? How did you decide to use it?
KQ: Originally, when I first began drafting the essay a few years ago, Crowning Glory was the working title. One night during our freshman year in college, one of the guys working in the cafeteria looked up and saw Patty and me dressed in matching outfits and said “What are you two, a couple of Twinkies?” we adopted Twinkies – then shortened to Twink – as our nicknames. I don’t think anyone else used it, just us for each other. As I was drafting my submission for the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest, I changed the working title to Twinkies as an homage to Patty. After I won the contest and the manuscript was going through its final edits I toyed with the idea of changing the title, but decided to stick with my first instinct and not be difficult. Ironically, I despise Twinkies and any crème-filled dessert.
PMc: Had you written about Patty, her illness, and about your friendship at all before you got your own diagnosis? Or did discovering your own illness make you want to further consider your time with Patty and her short life?
KQ: In early writing classes I wrote some bad poetry about Patty’s death. During grad school I tried to figure out how to write about Patty, but at the time I wasn’t allowing myself to dig deep into emotional terrain. I wrote a couple of stories that had a funny middle, but no beginning or end.
PMc: When did you understand that the two storylines—your illness and Patty’s—must be braided? Can you talk about the braiding process?
KQ: The initial title and drafts from a few years ago seemed too grandiose for me and Patty, making me feel like I had to include some social commentary on hair to make the essay more “important.” The essay was spinning out of control, so I decided to keep it fairly tight and focus on hair loss and identity as it related to our different cancers. I don’t think in a linear fashion and enjoy circuitous routes, winding roads over highways. Braided essays and stories have always attracted me. I think most of my essays weave in and out.
For Twinkies, when I felt like I needed a break—a caesura—a deep breath—when Patty’s story became too intense, I would switch to my storyline. I had written much more about my hair loss, but I wanted to keep the focus on Patty, so I gave my story a haircut rather than a trim. During the final editing stage with my fantastic editor, Dawn Newton, she suggested reordering some of the last sections for flow and clarity. She was right; the final version was tighter with her gentle nudges.
PMc: I am really intrigued by this idea that you thought the story of a friendship and illness was not an “important” enough story on its own. I’ve heard you tell the story about how a writer who directed a workshop you took asked you all what you were working on, and when you said yours was a cancer memoir, she dismissed it with something like “Oh those don’t sell.” (Forgive me if my paraphrasing is off, but I think I get the drift here, don’t I?) As a long-time teacher of writing myself, I am appalled by that response to a student’s project. Was it her dismissal that made you think you had to craft some “important” commentary in order to tell your story? And I know that you are a voracious reader, do you find that you only feel engaged by memoirs of “importance”?
KQ: Yes, you did get the drift. Her actual words were, “That won’t sell.” I’m not sure if her response made me feel like it had to be “important” but it certainly made me feel impotent. I wasted—not that any time thinking and revising is actually wasted—valuable time trying to figure out how to make my memoir be more than just a cancer story as well as experimenting with different structures. Even though her comment stung, it forced me to think hard about making my story relatable on many different levels.
I don’t think I’m necessarily drawn to “important” memoirs if important means historical figure or a hot topic. I’m most drawn to narratives or memoirs that show me a life or culture that is different than mine, but that I can identify with. Bonus points if I can laugh from time to time. In an early draft—I wrote about the Crown Act (a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination), but the section made no sense in relation to what I really wanted to explore—my story of loss. Loss of Patty. Ways we both lost parts of ourselves and our identities to cancer.
PMc: You mention you wrote what you called bad poems about Patty, loss, and friendship. When I first met you, you were in a fiction writing MFA program, but even then you were often writing what now would be called “auto fiction.” When and how and why did you decide to move fully into nonfiction writing?
KQ: After I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I started blogging about my experience in order to let friends and family near and far know what was going on. I didn’t want to talk about cancer ad nauseum, so writing the blog allowed me to take an unruly medical situation and make sense of it as I went along—and insulate my son from hearing about my cancer. I tried to make the blog informative and entertaining—as entertaining as cancer can be.
In the summer of 2015, I signed up for an online coaching program with Katey Schultz for assistance and feedback writing my memoir. It didn’t make sense to me to make things up. I wanted my memoir (as I initially envisioned it) to be a frank look at my experience with cancer and all of the issues that stemmed from it: femininity, mortality, family dynamics, identity, and more. I like to joke that I have to write nonfiction because my mom was a compulsive liar. I believed her tall tales for most of my life—a bona fide Big Fish situation.
PMc: What do you think nonfiction can allow or encourage that other genres can’t…not just for your work, but writing in general?
KQ: I think creative nonfiction, when done well and truthfully, creates a pact between the reader and the writer, one based on honesty and a willingness to confront issues head on. The reader will sense if you hold back or lie. Other writers have had their lies or half-truths discovered (James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces comes to mind. Initially a memoir, then rebranded as semi-fictional novel.) Creative nonfiction does allow for attempts at figuring things out on the page, by using words like maybe or perhaps to indicate places where the narrator isn’t sure exactly what happened or how someone might have reacted. This can let the author play with some elements of fiction, while staying true to the actual story.
PMc: Is there a tradeoff when you choose to tell a nonfiction story as opposed to, say, fiction?
KQ: I don’t want to borrow trouble, but in the publishing world it seems like nonfiction such as cookbooks and self-help books require a platform, whereas fiction does not. Does memoir require a platform? Does fiction require a platform? I try not to let that worry me too much and just focus on writing. For me, the tradeoff is negligible. I like the truth. Even when I was writing autofiction (very little fiction other than changing names), I think my voice was strong. I’ve always been most comfortable writing first person, so the switch to memoir was easy for me.
PMc: Do you see potential limits of the nonfiction genre?
KQ: I’m not really sure. There are so many different ways of writing a memoir. One self-limiting factor can be fear of hurting people we care about by what we have to say. When my grandmother and mom died, I could write about events—familial or personal—that neither one of them would have been comfortable reading. For example, after my mom died, I finally had the freedom to write about childhood moments that didn’t shine a sunny light on my mom. She preferred to gloss over difficult times, which probably in turn affected how I approached tough times: humor first, reckoning later. This has impacted how and what I write.
My memoir seems to be morphing into a memoir-in-essays and includes much more mother/daughter material. I hope to portray a complicated, yet loving, relationship with honesty and humor. A few of the essays I’m currently working on evolved out of grappling with grief. I think some illustrate how enmeshed my mom and I were, which helps clarify how invested she was in my cancer. Without me, who would she be? And, the same holds true for me. Without her, who will I become?
I was thinking about The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. That level of familial dysfunction is hard to fathom. It happens. Worse happens. A limit of this genre could be the reader’s capacity for reading about tough situations. If one is writing about domestic violence, does every blow need to be on the page or a few incidents to illustrate the horror? The writer can pick which incidents to include, but shouldn’t cherry pick situations that show him/her in stark terms, like 100% hero or 100% victim. But if the memoir deals with extremely unusual situations that ask the reader to suspend their disbelief, it better be true.
My childhood wasn’t easy or “normal” by any stretch of a limited imagination, but everything that I write about happened—or I was told it happened—which brings me back to my mom being a compulsive liar. I’ll have to interrogate the ghost of my mom and the memories she left in my safekeeping. But life is nuanced. Truth can be as well.
Kathleen Quigley is a writer and massage therapist living in Wisconsin. Her chapbook Twinkies won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press2023 Nonfiction Chapbook Contest.She has been published in Hypertext Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Seventh Wave, HerStry.blg, among others. After pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, Kathleen took a hiatus to raise her son and run marathons. She has been awarded residencies at Ragdale Foundation and is completing a memoir which explores mortality, mother/daughter relationships, sexuality, and reclaiming identity after illness. Humor—sometimes screwball, often dark—infuses her writing. She loves her family, all things purple and her crazy rescue dog.
Patricia Ann McNair’s short story collection, The Temple of Air (stories) was named Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year; Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award from Southern Illinois University; and Finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction. A second edition of The Temple of Air is forthcoming in 2024. McNair’s collection of essays, And These Are the Good Times, was a Montaigne Medal Finalist for Most Thought-Provoking Book of the Year. Responsible Adults, short stories, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards. Her work has been published in Rumpus, LitHub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, RiverTeeth, Hypertext, and many other journals and magazines.