“You Could Jump off from There to Anywhere”: A Conversation with Kate Doyle
When Kate Doyle’s story, “The Goldfish in the Pond at the Community Garden,” arrived to Split Lip Magazine’s submissions queue last year, it was like a revelation: I instantly wanted to publish it. The story is deeply grounded in what Cara Blue Adams, at her recent talk with Kate at the Center for Fiction, called “photo-realist” detail. But it also offers readers these magical fish that can talk. Kate firmly places us in the moment of a first date with her characters, and then, boom! She sends us flying forward to years after the couple are married. The exhilarating leap in time changes the meaning of the story and has us reevaluating everything we thought we knew about it.
I’m grateful for the privilege, exactly one year after the story’s publication in Split Lip, to interview Kate about her new collection, I Meant It Once—a book filled with these satisfying leaps of time and memory and distance. The book explores the lives of women characters in their twenties, an intense age when, to quote Kate’s mother, they sometimes feel like they are “falling off the world.” Kate is a keen student of human relationships, a master of delivering the single, striking image, and a thought-provoking social commentator. Her collection examines what it is to be human, and, in particular, what it is to be a young woman in a world that is quick to brush off women. Her stories, which are punctuated with wonderful moments of humor, are the kind you instantly want to reread—to unpack all the layers and admire the craft.
Kate and I spoke over email about the “privilege” of being sad, how studying creative nonfiction influences her fiction, and the marketability of short story collections.
Maureen Langloss: In his essay collection, Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra writes, “They say that there are only three or four or five topics for literature, but maybe there’s only one: belonging. Perhaps all books can be read as a function of the desire to belong, or the negation of that desire.” I thought about Zambra’s statement a lot while reading your book. Do you agree with it? Do you consider belonging a central theme of your book and were you thinking about it when drafting? Sometimes I wondered, Do Kate’s characters want to belong? Some seem to have a strong desire to be alone.
Kate Doyle: I do agree—and I do think these characters want to belong. Even when they want to be alone, I think that’s a version of an impulse to belong: They feel alienated in their environment, alienated as young women in the world, so to be alone with their thoughts and feelings offers the relief that’s something like belonging to themselves. I’m thinking about the narrator of “There’s No Telling,” who goes to sit alone at the end of the story, rather than repeatedly experiencing new waves of the difficult feelings that her dynamics with her partner provoke.
The narrator of “What Else Happened” is alone at the end of that story too, though I think that’s because she’s fleeing feelings and memories she can’t quite face. So in that case, solitude is less about belonging and more about escape. But I think that story, which is about a young woman who feels increasingly troubled by her friendship with a young man, but who doesn’t believe her own instincts about it and tells herself she’s overreacting, gets at something that complicates the wish to belong for these young women. They’re all characters who are starting to wonder what belonging looks like, and if they can actually have it in a world that is so prepared to treat women’s experiences or feelings as invalid. Do they want to belong in their families if their families’ values are different than their own? Do they want to belong on a college campus where they feel taken for granted? Do they want to be in a heterosexual relationship, and become mothers, and belong to that tradition? They’re coming of age and starting to question these things.
ML: They are so wise to be questioning. And yet, they don’t always recognize their own wisdom and maturity. I love the moment in “Two Pisces Emote About the Passage of Time” when Christine muses, “I feel too messy to be twenty-seven,” because I feel too messy to be fifty-two! Most of your characters are in college or in their twenties. Do you see their difficulties connecting with others, their feelings of malaise or sadness or messiness, to be part and parcel of that stage of life? Or is the failure to connect specific to these particular characters? Are they unique or just experiencing what it is to be human?
KD: A little of all of this, I think! Some of it is absolutely what it is to be human. When I was first starting to write this book, more than anything I was interested in just rendering memory, getting at the human weirdness of living in time, living with our memories. We all have this experience of being in our present moment but remembering another moment. The past coloring the present in some way or the present making us reevaluate the past. I was interested less in how a story unfolds and more in how a story lives on in the mind or comes back to us later.
At the point when I started sharing the manuscript with people, it was the first time I heard something like, This is a book about being in your twenties. I think that’s because I do write fiction sort of close to my own experiences, so when I was in my twenties trying to write about time and memory, my stories inadvertently ended up being a lot about memories of that age. Now that I’m in my thirties and I have a little distance, I do think there’s something specifically interesting about your twenties: Your feelings are so intense, and kind of desperate. There are a lot of possibilities before you, but that also means you always feel like you’re making huge choices and messing up and making missteps.
But there is also a thread that runs through all these characters’ experiences that’s specific to being women. Something about trying to figure out how to exist in a world that is so prepared to write you off. Figuring out how to take yourself and your experiences seriously. The confusion of feeling so alienated in the world even as people are saying to you, Oh, life is like this, it’s just how it is, toughen up, get over it.
ML: This toughen-up attitude makes me think of “Like a Cloud, Lighter than Air”—the last of three captivating stories about the same family—when Helen’s mother tells her, “Not everyone has the privilege of sitting on the couch and being sad.” The specter of privilege seems to inhabit many stories in the collection. Can you talk about this quote in the context of the book as a whole?
KD: I’m going to try my best to respond succinctly without minimizing the complexity of this! I think we’ve been having this absolutely essential, way overdue conversation about privilege and structural inequality in this country. I also think there’s this weird effect of it that’s almost at cross-purposes to the point of that conversation, where we seem somehow less open to the possibility that people are often up against things we might not be able to see immediately or might not yet know to be sensitive to. So, relatedly, in the book people often diminish these narrators by saying something to the effect of it could be worse. And I have readers who sometimes say casually, like this is an objective fact, These characters are overdramatic, or what have you. And why? I mean, I feel for Helen very much. She isn’t okay. She’s a young woman in a world that doesn’t take young women’s experiences or feelings seriously. And she has experienced a beloved friend effectively breaking up with her, so she’s having an experience of grief over something our society does not consider worth grieving. If it was romantic breakup, we would tell her she deserves to be sad. But it’s a friend so people want to say to her: Oh, move on, you’ll get another friend.
I would also say that because Helen has a successful father whose success has led to opportunities for her, there is this voice in her head—to say nothing of many other actual voices around her—saying: You should be doing better than you are. I guess I’m surprised how often I feel like I need to state this outright, but Helen having a successful father does not make her, herself, empowered and safe and okay in the world. A man looking out for her is not the same thing. And what does it do to tell her, You shouldn’t be sad, when she can’t change that?
Also, though Helen’s mother is pointing out something completely true—not everyone does have that privilege—I think the fact that it’s her mother saying it does complicate it. A few of the mothers in the book feel a resentment that gets directed toward their daughters. And Helen’s mother is sort of implying that her family’s financial security should somehow be the answer to Helen’s alienation. Look, so many of us agree now that capitalism is profoundly, dangerously flawed—to say the very least. And yet we still want to tell these young women that money should heal them or something? I don’t know, this is a big question and I’m glad you asked it. “Specter” is a good word for it. It does make me angry that sometimes people’s response to these characters is to be like: Can’t they get over it? We aren’t living in a world that is at all okay. I don’t know why these young women should have to be. I don’t know why they need to be cheerfully going around saying “It could be worse!”
ML: Yes, why? I completely relate to your frustration here, because, as a reader, I felt so angry at Helen’s mom for telling her to stop being sad. It’s so dismissive and unhelpful, and yet I think the world sends this exact message to people who are experiencing depression all the time.
In “What Else Happened,” the narrator notes that “[l]iving in another language made me feel far from everything.” It often feels as if your characters are far from each other even when they are in the same room, as if there is unbridgeable distance between them, as if they are speaking different languages, or can’t talk to each other fully. Your characters think things like “it seems easier to say nothing”; “he could not find the words to answer her”; “I just didn’t want to have to tell the story”; “I don’t really know what we’re talking about.” In “There’s No Telling,” the main character even goes to the bathroom to eat her takeout alone to avoid dinner conversation. Was it hard to write these characters who are so restrained? Did you ever have the urge to shake them and say, Just tell her what you want?
KD: Many of these characters are people whose emotional experiences are really strong, so I don’t know that I always think of them as restrained as much as I think silences are their way of managing their feelings, or managing the sense that their feelings will be treated as irrelevant. There are exceptions to that—in “What Else Happened,” I think what you’ve quoted here is about finding safety in silence, escaping the demands of a person who has wanted more and more from the narrator. And in “Moments Earlier,” Owen has a complicated relationship to his own quiet emotions, and he is at once drawn to and alarmed by Kelly’s openness with hers. But for so many of the other characters, saying what they mean would open the floodgates emotionally, and I don’t think I ever did want to shake them for that honestly, because they all have a good reason for thinking they would not be understood or taken seriously. I understand why they feel they have to contain themselves. People throughout the book tell them to calm down or take it easy in the face of their emotions. I don’t know that I think they have a reason to expect that saying what they need is going to get them closer to having it.
ML: I’m so glad we talked about why your characters hold back, because you have really deepened my understanding of these silences. Changing the subject entirely, let’s talk about time—a central obsession of the book. Five stories and the collection itself even include time references in their titles. I particularly loved how you used time in “Moments Earlier,” where we start in the present tense, move to the past, fast-forward to the future, circle back to the past, to the present, the deeper past, the conditional future (what would have happened), and round again. The same scenes are told and returned to later. There is a character losing track of time by rereading old emails from a dead woman and characters frozen in time in comas and on planes while the action of the story continues without them. You create a delicious dizzying effect where readers must constantly place which time we are in. I began to wonder if your collection is, in fact, about point of telling. In “What Else Happened,” your narrator even thinks, “Anyway, I want to tell this in the right order.” Can you talk about how you approached time, the ordering of events, and point of telling in your book?
KD: You’ve given me words for something I still hadn’t quite figured out how to say—yes, I think it is very much a collection about point of telling. One story is titled “At the Time,” and I’m fascinated by this kind of phrase that both implies a past context and also implies a remove from that context. “Things are different now than they were then, but I still have something to say about back then.” Many of the first sentences are like that. “This happened to me when I was still in college,” for example, which is the first sentence in the book. I think that in being about point of telling, it’s also about how memories return to us, how story is a way to make sense of our memories. For a lot of these narrators, the reason to tell the story is to make sense of some memory they still can’t shake. It’s a way of exploring the question, Why am I still thinking about this? What’s in this memory that I need to understand?
ML: I love how memory relates to this question of time in your book. I also adore all your white space—which seems very related to time in the collection as well. The leaps between paragraphs are exciting to me as a reader; they give the book an intense feeling of movement, of flying. But they also impose a restraint that perfectly mimics the meaning of the book, where so many characters are restraining themselves, being told to rein in their emotions. Did you always envision the book with this white space? Is this structure how you write in general or was it something that developed for this particular project?
KD: I think that came out of the fact that I studied in a nonfiction writing program as an undergraduate, and I had a wonderful advisor who was actually a poet and who was teaching the lyric essay form. That’s my earliest memory of the concept of the fragment, on the syllabus for that class. There was a moment a few years later when I found I wanted to stop writing nonfiction, that I wanted the freedom to depart from the “facts.” And around that time, I read Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill and realized it was possible to write fiction using some of the same formal elements of the lyric essay, the juxtaposition and the white space as the way to create energy and momentum. In that nonfiction program in college, there had been this big emphasis on asking, What is an essay? What different kinds of things can be an essay? How broadly can we define the essay? In a way, this book is me saying the short story collection can be an essay. It can be a way of thinking, and questioning, and trying to understand.
ML: It’s very freeing, I think, to write with leaps of space and time, but did you ever feel constricted by this form? Is your writing process one of writing long and then stripping away to the essential, or do you tend to write in essentials from the start?
KD: I’ve actually never felt constricted by it; if anything it can feel wildly open-ended in certain moments, when one fragment is written and you could kind of jump off from there to anywhere. So I think I didn’t feel constricted so much as there were moments when I felt the pressure to like, make the best possible next step forward out of so many possibilities. I guess that makes it very mysterious to explain the process—I just went on feeling and instinct. But yes, I do tend to write the essentials from the start. Probably again because of studying with a poet early on, and working on lyric essays, and getting that formative fiction lesson from the fragmentary style of Jenny Offill. I’m grateful my publisher never tried to get me to format the paragraphs like “normal” paragraphs, with indentation and without white space. There was actually an early moment in the production process when they were briefly laid out that way, before I clarified that the white space was what I wanted. It was wild how different it felt as a book, to see it without the white space.
ML: I completely agree. It would be a wildly different experience for the reader to lose that wonderful white space. And, speaking of losing things, I noticed that objects in your book are often getting lost, dropping, falling, breaking, “being leached out”—phones, gloves, mittens, sinks, tiles, opportunities, wrists (two!), even whole people down stairs or headfirst out of castles. I love the dream in “Two Pisces Emote” in which Christine’s room is “removed, physically, from the apartment, sliced away as if it were an enormous square of cake.” What a fantastic image! Did you plan this repetition of falling and lost objects or was it something that just happened as you wrote? I’m always curious how repetitive images arrive to us—from the conscious or subconscious.
KD: That one must be subconscious, because I hadn’t really thought about it until now! I mean, the idea of the things that slip through our fingers or slip away from us was very potent overall for me in thinking about memory and time and choice and fate. I’m certainly a writer who believes in the subconscious doing a lot of the work, so I love moments like this, where a sharp reader shows me something I didn’t even quite realize had been happening!
What you’re saying is also making me think about something my mother always told me she used to say to her friends, in her twenties, about the intensity of those years and the anxiety of them: “I feel like I’m falling off the world.” There’s something precarious about all these narrators and the moment of life they find themselves in. Maybe that’s what my subconscious was getting at there.
ML: Fascinating to learn about your subconscious at work! Thinking about it also makes me wonder about the elements of the surreal in your book. Your stories are so grounded in realism, but the supernatural appears in a few places, for example the talking fish in “The Goldfish in the Pond at the Community Garden” and the ghost that appears in “Aren’t We Lucky.” As a reader, I found these moments surprising and captivating. Can you tell us about your decision to leave the real world for brief moments?
KD: I can definitely pinpoint the moment the surreal entered my writing generally, which was in an extraordinary generative writing class at A Public Space in Brooklyn with Mary-Beth Hughes. Mary-Beth is a short story writer and a former dancer, and as a dancer she has a great interest in exercises and training and technique for writers, so we would gather for class and do prompts. I took that class several times. In the first class I wrote the story “Two Pisces,” which has a lot of dreams in it. In the second class we were working with fairy tales, and that’s when I wrote “You Are With Me,” which is a kind of riff on Snow White. I remember thinking with great certainty, This is just an exercise, this will never really fit in my book of realist fiction.
And I believed that for years afterward, but when my editor at Algonquin acquired my book, she was curious if I had any other material, I think for practical reasons at first—it was a shorter book at that point. And I brought her “You Are With Me” and the goldfish story. I’m glad to have had that invitation to expand my own sense of what might belong within the same book. The surreal does, I think now, absolutely have its place in a book about how things live vividly in the mind. I also wrote more into “Aren’t We Lucky,” which at that point was a flash piece that ended with the moment where the family is in the kitchen and the sink falls. I knew that story had such an eerie feeling to it, but speaking of the subconscious surprising you—it turns out that ghost had been lurking in there for years. The flash version was years old at that point, and then when I experimented with making it longer: A ghost emerged!
ML: How wonderfully spooky! Before we go, I’d love to move from craft to marketplace for a moment. Collections are so hard to get published, to find “belonging” in the market, so I applaud you on finding the secret sauce. Did you get any feedback on marketability from agents/editors in your journey that you’d be willing to share with our readers who are trying to place collections?
KD: Yeah, you really can’t avoid the subject of marketability when you’re a short story writer. It’s definitely a piece of this process that has required being able to let a lot of comments roll off me, because everyone is often alluding to the possibility that no one will want to read your book as much as they will want to read a novel! I think that’s kind of a myth, or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy—but I also feel like I’m still so new to the book industry, and I don’t have a good answer yet for why I think this myth persists. I will say this book came very close to not being published at all; it was on submission for a long time.
And I did feel a pressure to prove I was very serious about writing a novel next—that felt like a requirement. I am excited about writing a novel, but truthfully it took a while to figure out artistically why I actually needed to do that, versus just because I knew it was the expectation. Anyway, having had a book that came really close to not selling, I think a lot about the important work of presses, often small indie presses, that have continued taking chances on stories. And I think about what story collections we haven’t gotten to read because of this persistent myth, because they haven’t been published or haven’t gotten significant distribution or they didn’t get the same media coverage as novels. “Stories are hard,” is what people in the book industry often say. I hope, somehow, we can shake that up.
Kate Doyle (@sometimes_k8) is the author of I Meant It Once, published by Algonquin Books in the US and Corsair in the UK. A former bookseller and a 2021 A Public Space Fellow, she has lived in New York City, Amsterdam, and Ithaca, NY.
Maureen Langloss (@maureenlangloss) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City and has been published in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her work has been listed as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2022, received the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Maureen serves as Editor-in-Chief of Split Lip Magazine and can be found online at maureenlangloss.com.