The Present as Dystopia: An Interview with Mary South
Mary South’s writing has an attention to language, a dark, off-kilter humor, and an emotional urgency that makes her stories a great pleasure to read. Her debut collection of short fiction, You Will Never Be Forgotten, published this month by FSG Originals, centers on characters for whom technology is both an encumbrance and a means of potential fulfillment or escape. Some of the stories feature dystopian scenarios or speculative elements, while others portray a world more or less like the present one. The title story, one of my favorites, exemplifies the collection’s range. Its protagonist moderates content at a search engine; she also stalks her rapist online, then in real life. She is referred to only as “the woman”; the rapist is called simply “the rapist.” The story combines a satirical portrait of Silicon Valley culture with a moving depiction of a woman recovering from sexual trauma.
Mary answered questions via email about her collection and her writing process.
Clancy McGilligan: The stories in this collection are wonderfully inventive. “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls” portrays a retreat for cyberbullies, for example. And “To Save the Universe, We Must Save Ourselves” details multiple episodes from a fictional show titled Starship Uprising, including one where rebels embed information in tumors. Can you talk a bit about what inspires the imaginative worlds of your stories? Also: how do you conceive of the relationship between these imaginative worlds and the world(s) we inhabit?
Mary South: My appreciation to you for describing my stories as wonderfully inventive! I think the inspiration often comes from our world, but it’s our world pushed just a little further or tweaked in a quirky way. The funny thing about the story featuring a summer camp specifically intended for internet trolls is that there are “troll farms” or camps in real life. (They’re an entirely different kind of camp, though, with an entirely different objective…) The “our world, but quirky” origin is the same for the story about a sci-fi show with a rabid internet fandom; it was inspired partially by watching various nerd fandoms tear apart online the very thing they claim to love and, tragically, the people who create it. I wanted to capture the life cycle of a social media meltdown, which is a lot like the seventy-two-hour life cycle of some super nasty insect. After three days or so, the controversy is effectively dead and everyone will have moved on to something else. But there seem to be standard behaviors while it is ongoing: blunder or outrage followed by apology, followed by mockery of apology, followed by think piece, followed by supporters of the person who is the subject of the controversy stepping in to defend that person, followed by those supporters potentially apologizing or stating that they didn’t really have the full scoop on what was happening before they stepped in. And ultimately, we’re all the worse for it.
I’ve heard my stories described before as “near-future dystopias,” but I see the present as a dystopia. “Keith Prime” was inspired by the dystopia in the United States right now where a family can lose their house if they experience one dire, unexpected medical crisis. Same with the title story “You Will Never Be Forgotten.” Content moderation jobs are very much in our present, and it’s been proven that those who perform moderation jobs suffer from severe PTSD. That we turn people into constant depravity and gore filters so we can enjoy our social media feeds in peace is dystopic. But I hope by bringing the familiar dystopic present into light or making it newly strange that it’s easier to look at somehow. Even if it doesn’t solve the core problem, there is something cathartic in fictional honesty.
CM: Your short story collection explores the messy ways technology impacts human relationships. The types of technology range from the speculative (such as in “Not Setsuko,” where a mother clones her murdered daughter) to the mundane/antiquated (such as in “The Age of Love,” where male nursing home patients dial phone sex hotlines). What, in your opinion, are the challenges of dealing with technology in fiction? What drew you to this subject?
MS: The biggest challenge in writing about technology, I think, is not making the use of it clunky on the page. I’m not the first writer, for example, to struggle with how to display text messages so that they’re not obnoxiously intrusive or gimmicky. I went with summarizing what was texted or simply formatting those messages like dialogue. It’s also important to ensure that the story doesn’t become “all premise.” That is, if you’re writing a story in which there’s cloning, getting into the nitty-gritty details of how that works in the world of the story would be distracting. It’s usually never about the technology, even in the most technologically-focused or dystopic stories, but what the technology reveals about human behavior and relationships. My stories have been compared to Black Mirror, and I’ve also seen that show used to describe the work of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and George Saunders, but what I hope I accomplish and what I know those writers accomplish is keeping the story attuned to the underlying character dilemma. The best episodes of Black Mirror work that way. I’m pleased you noted the more outdated technology from “The Age of Love” because no matter how much technology changes, our traumas and our emotions—our fears, insecurities, lusts, and hopes—are the same, and that’s ultimately what the story is about or else it is totally flat. In “Not Setsuko,” the story is about the depth of the mother’s denial and grief. Who cares about the cloning other than that it makes her grief more palpable? Perhaps I’m drawn to writing about technology because no matter how out of control our world feels, that governments can try and hack elections through social media, for example, the psyche and how characters react to conflict remain constant.
CM: There are so many lovely and striking uses of language in this collection. Here’s one example: “...where Helen’s hair was loosely elegant, Hannah’s was tightly cropped and turfing every which way, like a lawn in severe need of mowing.” In addition, your narrators frequently have a pungent (and very funny) way of putting things, as here: “Faith was not happy that Jake Knight was more into the assistant than her, even though the assistant didn’t want anything to do with his decrepit sci-fi herpes dick.” Can you talk about how you approach writing a sentence? And what is the importance, for you, of voice?
MS: Language is perhaps the most important aspect of craft to me, so I’m grateful to hear the sentences are well-constructed. I was fortunate to study with some writers who are hyperattentive to the acoustics of the sentence—Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, and Gordon Lish—and have also assisted Diane Williams while she edited stories for NOON. I had long admired all of their fiction, but after I observed in person the care devoted to every syllable in the line by each of them, it became my goal to try and apply that kind of hyperattention to my work. Diane would often have us read pieces aloud to her and she’d listen with her eyes closed, her mouth moving along to the words. She is absolutely exacting—no space is wasted. This attitude feels right to me. A story shouldn’t just convey information in its sentences; a story should convey information in an enthralling way, usually filtered through an idiosyncratic voice. I recently read an interview with Amy Hempel in The Paris Review, and in it she discusses defining character through the action of another. For example, in the work of Mary Robison, she notices, “Where a lesser writer would describe a character by saying, He had brown hair and was six foot five, Mary’s character says, My father had been dead for fourteen years, but I resented my mother’s buying a car in which he would not have fitted.” The first sentence is merely information; it’s boring. The second sentence is excellent because it offers the same information while also offering that information through a specific voice.
It can be difficult to part ways with a voice you’ve grown used to inhabiting once you’re done drafting a story; I think that’s the reason some writers come back to or stick with a certain voice over and over. I was particularly sorry to leave the intellectually rigorous but also extremely melancholy voice of the architecture story. But I love that each new story can be an opportunity to explore a new voice—that’s one of the perks of working on a story collection. Voice is encoded in the DNA of the sentence. A bitter person thinks in bitter sentences, and so forth. In the title story, for example, that character is understandably very bitter, and that comes across in sentences such as, “Shouldn’t the dog of a rapist always be marking its territory on said rapist’s bed or something?” There’s a lot of resentment in just the “or something?” at the end. And I’m intrigued how we all carry a range of voices in our heads in addition to our standard voice. A character who is normally rather sanguine can become absolutely grief-stricken in dire circumstances. And what happens when an upbeat or comically-minded person is rendered inconsolable by loss? How does their baseline humor emerge even amid their devastation? If you’re really writing voice correctly, you’re not merely playing with particular turns of phrase over the course of a story. You’re playing with a particular turn of consciousness that then emerges in every phrase and clause of your sentences.
CM: In this collection, there are quite a variety of narrative forms/devices. One story is an FAQ written by a grieving neurosurgeon. Another is narrated collectively by the fans of Starship Uprising. Another includes footnotes. As a writer, how do you choose the form of a story? And what, for you, is the relationship between form and narrative?
MS: The narration should certainly match the form. In the FAQ story, the narrative necessarily begins in the clinical, detached tone of a medical professional until something more desperate can take over. When I’m pre-drafting a story in my mind, sometimes the form comes first and sometimes the voice. Form is one of my primary inspirations—since we’re surrounded by more text and data than ever before in history, that also means we’re surrounded by wonderful new possible story forms. I want to explore how a story can emerge from someone worriedly browsing medical forums or composing a magazine profile piece about someone they both admire but have also come to regard as ethically problematic. Form and narrative voice are inextricably linked and constantly influence each other, the same way that voice necessarily shapes the sentence. Can you imagine Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy told any other way? Or Woolf’s The Waves? Or Pale Fire? I’m not able to do so!
CM: As someone who used to work at an architecture firm. I especially enjoyed the story “Architecture for Monsters,” which portrays a star architect (“starchitect”) named Helen Dannenforth, an imposing personality whose wardrobe is “part nun, part drag queen.” Can you talk about what inspired this story? How do you see this story as relating to, or complementing, the rest of the collection?
MS: One of things I loved doing in this collection was putting female characters in powerful jobs, as neurosurgeons and starchitects. Though, admittedly, other times women do find themselves in the emotionally fraught and exploitative low-wage positions unique to late-stage or dystopic capitalism, as content moderators or caretakers for human beings considered to be harvestable products.
The architecture story in particular was inspired by a class I took in my MFA with Tom McCarthy, entitled “Space in Fiction.” He had us sketching out illustrations and maps of the physical spaces in novels, so I started to think about how I could even more intensely explore characters reckoning with space in a story. The most obvious way was to deal with their bodies inhabiting architectural space and make one of them an architect; that also serendipitously related to my interest in writing about women reckoning with motherhood. Weirdly, I had a nightmare right around that time wherein I was pregnant and everything seemed fine, but somehow I knew that the pregnancy was going wrong, there was something horribly amiss with the baby. I felt tremendous guilt and shame about my capacity to create life within the confines of the nightmare, which is perhaps what inspired the ending of the story where a woman’s body twists and distorts painfully into the size of a building. But in my research, I also almost immediately came to admire women architects who have thrived in a notoriously male-dominated field. I was most impressed by Zaha Hadid, Liz Diller, and Neri Oxman. They made me want to write about a woman who created buildings that were distinctly, savagely her own, despite her personal shortcomings. I could very happily continue to come up with imaginary buildings. In fact, I may have to return to architecture as a subject again due to just how much that delighted me in a Calvino-esque way. Of course, using your daughter’s body as inspiration for mangled anatomic architectural art also fits with the theme of misusing technology. And there is more than one bad mother in the collection. The story also is similar in its formal playfulness to several of the other stories.
CM: I’m a big admirer of your titles, from “To Save the Universe, We Must Save Ourselves” (the catchphrase of the star in Starship Uprising) to “You Will Never Be Forgotten” (which gestures both toward the trauma of rape and the sense that the “internet is forever”). What, to you, makes an effective or compelling title?
MS: A title should feel like it encapsulates the story. It should provide a glimmer of its many figurative meanings and themes at work. But sometimes a literal title is great too. I quite like “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls” for being a sort of delightful, matter-of-fact statement of the story’s subject.
CM: When writing this collection, what authors/books served as inspiration or models?
MS: In addition to writers I’ve already mentioned, I love the work of J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Katherine Dunn, Mary Gaitskill, Barry Hannah, Anna Kavan, Kelly Link, Ottessa Moshfegh, Alissa Nutting, Flannery O’Connor, Christine Schutt, Virginia Woolf, Hanya Yanagihara, and many more. It’s worth noting again that I would never have been able to write this book without the influence and work of Tom McCarthy.
But perhaps the writer who has inspired this collection the most (and the novel I’m set to work on next) is Kazuo Ishiguro, in particular Never Let Me Go. I’m fascinated by how his characters don’t question the intrinsic validity of their reality in that novel. No one ever says, “We shouldn’t be forced to donate our organs—we should fight to end this unfair system!” They only seek to try and get a leave of absence, more time before their donations. That matches with how we often relate to our reality. What are we too tired to change? Or what feels too systematically entrenched to change, so we’ll settle for a compromise on a personal scale instead? I’ve been so influenced by Ishiguro’s novel that I sought to explore another side of it in the first story that appears in the collection. “Keith Prime” is Never Let Me Go meets the free, two-day shipping of late-capitalistic enterprises that track their workers’ every footstep in warehouses like they are an expendable resource. The novel I’m under contract to write next is about women transforming into household objects at a hospice for the 1%, where only privileged women can endure such a painful and unusual change in comfort, and it’s like Kazuo Ishiguro meets Chantal Ackerman meets David Cronenberg.
CM: Do you have a favorite story in the collection?
MS: I love “Keith Prime” because it can still make me cry. I love “Camp Jabberwocky” because many of its lines still make me laugh. And I love “Not Setsuko” because the ending still feels hopeful to me despite the story’s anguish.
Mary South (@marysouth) is the author of the short story collection, You Will Never Be Forgotten, published by FSG Originals. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University. For many years, she has worked as an editor at the literary journal NOON. Mary is also the recipient of a Bread Loaf work-study fellowship and residencies at VCCA and Jentel. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Believer, BOMB, The Collagist, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Guernica, LARB Quarterly, The New Yorker, NOON, The Offing, The White Review, and Words Without Borders. The writer Maile Meloy awarded her story "Not Setsuko" an honorable mention in the Zoetrope: All Story fiction contest.
Clancy McGilligan (@clancymcg) is the author of the novella History of an Executioner, winner of the 2019 Novella Prize from Miami University Press. His short fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Columbia Journal, Santa Monica Review, Slice Magazine, Sycamore Review, Wigleaf and elsewhere. Currently he’s a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at Florida State University, and he serves as the Reviews/Interviews Editor at Split Lip Magazine. He’s online at www.clancymcgilligan.com.