Stringing Together Consciousness: An Interview with Katie M. Flynn
I first met Katie M. Flynn at the 2018 AWP conference in Tampa, when she was the Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine (she has since left the magazine to focus on her writing) and I was the newly enlisted Reviews/Interviews Editor. Katie was wearing admirably ostentatious glasses that night, and she had a jubilant, kinetic energy I later found in her fiction. Her debut novel, The Companions (published last month by Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), imagines a world decimated by a virus, where the minds of the dead are uploaded to companions who, in a range of manufactured bodies, serve the living. The novel explores the experiences and societal consequences of these companions. It initially focuses on Lilac, a companion who manages, mysteriously, to disobey a command, and eventually branches into the lives of seven other characters (some companion, some not) whose stories intersect with Lilac’s. The writing is propulsive, imaginative and multi-voiced, occasionally calling to mind, for this reader, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. And while the book has a sprawling canvas, the sentence-level writing is compressed and memorable, as in this description: “She’s like a Renoir, always capturing the light.” The result is a novel exhilarating both in scope and nuance, breadth and depth.
Katie talked to me via email about genre, voice, and writing from the perspective of an uploaded consciousness.
Clancy McGilligan: The companions in your novel have a mixture of non-human and human qualities. For example, they must obey commands. Yet the central companion (Lilac) initiates the story by disobeying a command. They also cannot eat or dream. Yet their human-ness continually invites the reader’s empathy. One companion says: “In all ways, I feel alive. Then I remember I’m inside a machine. My emotions—they’re all fabrications. Everything that’s happening to me is actually happening to this machine I’m in, yet I feel it.” This same companion goes on to describe how leaving behind her old body was traumatic. But it was also liberating: “My old self is dead, all my mistakes, my fears. What I do now, it makes me me.” I was wondering: What, for you, is the difference between a companion and a person? Was writing from the perspective of a companion character different than writing from the perspective of a non-companion character?
Katie M. Flynn: While companions have given up or lost their natural bodies and now exist in machine form, they experience desire and pain and love like any person. When the novel opens, the technology of companionship is new to the world, and the legal system hasn’t caught up to it, as often happens with new products (see: those scooters that used to litter the San Francisco sidewalks). Despite their obvious humanity, companions are considered intellectual property; they are treated as products, as legal objects instead of legal actors. If they defy commands, they can be recalled and destroyed like any malfunctioning product. I have no doubt that if the tech were around long enough, it would challenge the concept of personhood, just as corporations have.
Because of their machine form, companions experience memories differently than natural persons. As Lilac, one of the original companions, notes in the first chapter, “They play for me, memory after memory, every word, every smell, every last itch.” For humans, the act of remembering can alter the very memories being recalled, but that’s not the case for companions. Companion memories are frozen in time and can be relived as if the companion is there, in flesh or machine form. Some companions can remember their own deaths in vivid detail, can relive them over and over. Others have no memories of their deaths, which is its own kind of trauma. Lilac, the main character, falls into this latter category, so much of her time as a companion is spent tracing and retracing her last day alive, looking for answers.
Companions can change bodies, which in turn changes their relationship to the body. The body shifts from a prison to a window—companions can experience the world in different forms; they can see how the world perceives them differently in these forms, too. Companions can even exist form-less. At one point in the book, Lilac loses her body (one of many bodies) and is forced to exist on a screen for a time. There, she gets lost in her memories. She drifts, outside time, in a space that she can fill up with whatever she wants, but where she’s always alone, the ultimate prison of technological isolation. Writing this section meant thinking about time differently, as well as the self and its locatability.
CM: Your novel is set in the near future and includes speculative elements, ranging from a quarantine to the companions themselves. Carmen Maria Machado has written of the “unending, utterly exhausting fight between two particular writing communities: literary fiction and genre fiction.” How do you see your novel in relation to the categories of literary or genre fiction (such as science/speculative fiction)? Do you think these categories are productive?
KMF: I like to think that my novel is situated in that wonderful border region between genres. For me as a writer, this is the most exciting terrain to work in, and I love it as a reader, too.
I see genre labels as marketing buckets; the categories themselves don’t feel particularly important to the writing, but they can be helpful for getting a book into the right readers’ hands. Genre categories also come loaded with expectations. In the case of books that walk the line between genres, categorization can be problematic or misleading. One of the labels that gets put onto my book is dystopian, but I don’t think of The Companions as truly dystopian. In the book, quarantine is lifted; people return to their lives. Society carries on much as it had before the quarantine, which is perhaps more disturbing to me than if it were to change. Soothed by devices, by companions, people reemerge without questions, ready to get back at it, the grind, to be productive, to produce and consume, even as their world shifts and shrinks due to climate change and increasing economic disparity.
But I also understand why the label is used. My book has a lot of qualities of dystopian fiction: outbreak, quarantine, a technology that existentially challenges what it means to be human, which is to say: “This book may appeal to fans of dystopian fiction.”
CM: The Companions takes place over a period of years and is told by eight narrators in sections of varying length. While some of the narrators have multiple sections, others only get one. The result is a relatively complex, mosaic-like structure. How did you go about arranging the different sections? Did the structure reveal itself as you wrote? And did you have any models, literary or otherwise?
KMF: When first-drafting, Lilac’s journey presented itself as the central thread of the novel from the very beginning, but as I wrote, I realized that I was equally interested in Gabe. She became the human counterweight to Lilac’s experience as a companion. While Lilac is navigating her first real romantic relationship, with a human, in her companion form, Gabe is figuring out how to manage her first period without a woman in her life to guide her. Both characters are orphaned and alone; both are driven by anger and love and abandonment. Balancing these two threads—human and companion—against one another felt like the right approach to this project.
The book takes place across eighteen years. I knew I wanted to watch Gabe—who is nine years old when the book opens—grow up, to see how she’d turn out. I also wanted to trace Lilac’s trajectory as a product in its early stages all the way to its recall, and after, when her very existence is illegal.
Initially, I set out to write each chapter from a different point of view. Upon submission to agents, this was the form of the book, and there were three additional voices, eleven total. But my amazing agent and most trusted editor Stephanie Delman encouraged me to let go of this rule—one chapter per character—and once I did, I felt so freed up to build and close certain threads. I do love and mourn those lost voices, but I don’t regret the choice. I got to spend more time with some of my favorite characters.
CM: Many of the companions function as storytellers, both within the novel itself and as narrators. For example, Lilac narrates the first section. Then, in that section, a character repeatedly asks that Lilac tell the story of her murder (which led to Lilac becoming a companion). Can you talk a bit about the link between companion-ship and storytelling?
KMF: Storytelling is indeed an important part of being a companion. In one section, companions visit an eldercare facility where their job, in effect, is to recount to the elderly stories of the past. The world is changing so swiftly—technology constantly updating, the environment in a scary state of unpredictable flux—and the companions’ stories of times past are a salve.
Companions are often asked to tell the stories of their deaths; it is a curiosity that all humans have, yet most of us would not ask another human in idle chitchat to recount something so deeply personal. But because companions are products, people think they are owed this story, and because companions are command-driven, they don’t have any choice but to deliver it.
Some companions become somewhat addicted to telling their stories. We could say that our stories strung together make up consciousness. In that sense, storytelling becomes a way for companions to prove their humanity, both to the outside world and to themselves.
CM: Your novel is fittingly and enjoyably multi-voiced, with narrators ranging from the manic, wealthy Ms. Espera to the slangy street urchin Gabe. How do you approach writing in different voices? Are you inspired by voices you hear in your day-to-day life? Or by those you’ve encountered in fiction?
KMF: When drafting, a piece of writing doesn’t really feel alive, animated, until I’ve found the voice. I guess I lead with my ear. Sometimes I have what I think is a good idea for a piece, but I just can’t find the voice, and so it’s boring, and eventually I abandon it. When I’m lucky, the idea is delivered to me pre-packaged in the voice, and in those cases I just type furiously until I hit a roadblock, and that’s when I know I need to stop and plot. But that frenzied first stage is the funnest part of writing.
Sometimes my characters’ voices are influenced by the people around me. Gabe is based loosely on my oldest daughter, who has always had sensory sensitivities, who uses language in really creative and playful ways, and who has never felt comfortable with the gender binary.
Other voices are born of chosen parameters—in Jakob’s case, he is an actor, eccentric, hiding in the Hollywood hills long before quarantine. Knowing this about him, his voice came to me pretty easily (and with tremendous pleasure)—dramatic, self-indulgent, and delusional, lonely and lovesick. I am drawn to voices that engage and entertain me as I write, and which I hope will have the same impact on readers.
CM: Do you have any intention of coming back to one of the novel’s narrators in another piece of writing? Also: Do you have a favorite narrator?
KMF: Presently, I would say no. I devoted seven years on and off to The Companions, and I’m ready to work on other things. I’m writing a new novel, and I have a collection of stories coming out next year. But I also don’t want to say no definitively because I do love these characters and this world, and I can see where this story might go should it continue.
My favorite narrator to write has to be Ms. Espera. She is in many ways the most unlikable—wealthy and privileged, stuck up and judgmental, detached from the suffering of others. It was, in truth, quite fun—dare I say cathartic?—to write her voice. But I really empathize with her too, as she’s just learned that she has terminal cancer and is presented with this terrible choice: to die and leave her daughter or to live on as her daughter’s companion. I do enjoy writing from the perspective of an unsympathetic narrator. However, my most beloved narrator is definitely Gabe, so tough and vulnerable; no doubt this is because she’s based on my daughter.
CM: Final question: When writing this novel, what authors/books served as inspiration or models?
KMF: One book in particular that I had in mind as I wrote was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’m not sure whether this book is a short story collection or a novel (it doesn’t really matter), but I love its expansiveness—the way it crosses space and time—and its gaps, which readers can fill with their own imaginings.
In writing The Companions, it was important to me to show the technology’s influence from a variety of points of view—using first person to present the oblique angles of individual perspectives in an overwhelming sea of information (and misinformation)—and across years, to consider both what it means to be a companion and what it means to be a human living with companions and then without them, to have for a time the possibility of eternal life and then to see it taken away.
Katie M. Flynn (@other_katie) is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The Masters Review, Ninth Letter, Tin House, Witness Magazine, and many other publications. Her debut novel, The Companions, about love, revenge, and uploaded consciousness, is out now from Scout Press/Gallery Books. Katie has been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Geography from UCLA and is a member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco.
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.