![]() ![]() It reminds me so much of Renata Adler in Pitch Dark and Speedboat. ![]() Guernica: In the revised draft, the voice somehow tightens and leans into a sort of dark ambivalence. Perhaps “water-damaged” is, too, but if one cliché is forgivable, two, to butcher Lady Bracknell, starts to look like carelessness. Guernica: Why did the “walls flak white plaster” disappear? Was it also about tone? Perhaps, because the comment now reflects back on her alone, I also make our narrator slightly crueler, less sympathetic. Trying to do less, I sharpen the tone (I hope). The reader gets the narrator’s contempt for Fran and also, possibly, one reason for it: Fran, sharing the joy and camaraderie she felt, seeing Sandra, is making herself vulnerable our narrator hates vulnerability. The eye roll is clear-a very legible gesture. It just read as mean-and worse, slightly confusing. Miranda Popkey: What I’d had in place of the eye-rolling (“The stench on her …”) was meant to communicate the narrator’s dislike of Fran and her ambivalence about motherhood but, trying to do two things at once, I found it was doing neither well. Guernica: I’m curious about the detail of the eye-rolling. I asked her about the process of revising her “nontraditional” novel and what other traditions she subverted along the way. In the style of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, Popkey trusts her narrator’s voice to carry the reader along, eschewing many conventions of plot. The excerpt above brings together a group of single mothers reflecting on their circumstances while their babies nap in the other room. Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, traces ten significant encounters over twenty years, each of which shapes the unnamed female narrator’s views on gender and sexual politics. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |