An Interview with Richard Mirabella
Richard Mirabella’s debut novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, is the tale of Willa and Justin’s attempt to mend their sibling relationship as they revisit their childhood trauma and grief. Partly inspired by a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, the story sees the brother-sister duo trapped in a cycle of estrangement and reconciliation across childhood and adult timelines. The novel features difficult themes—mental health, addiction, abuse—but Mirabella handles his subject matter with a balanced touch and infuses in his characters a sense of mercy and grace. At its core, the novel probes the notion of familial obligation, ultimately asking: How far should we go to save a troubled loved one?
Ahead of its paperback release, Mirabella graciously agreed to discuss these themes in greater detail and to share his journey in writing Brother & Sister Enter the Forest. Our interview over email has been edited for length and clarity.
Jamey Baumgardt: Willa and Justin’s complex sibling relationship—their complicated history that unfolds beautifully across past and current timelines—is at the core of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest. What was your inspiration for writing a novel based on brother-sister dynamics?
Richard Mirabella: I often ask myself this question. I don’t know why I started writing a novel about a brother and sister. I have a brother. I don’t have a sister! I love sibling stories because there is so much history, closeness, and conflict to explore. So, like characters often do, they just became who they were supposed to be on the page, and soon I was interested in knowing more about them.
Having said that, I was interested in exploring memory and how family members often remember things differently. That’s an exciting phenomenon to explore, especially between siblings. I think I wrote about a brother and sister, rather than two brothers, because I didn’t want this to feel like my life. I wanted to invent this relationship, but my experiences as a sibling helped.
JB: It shows. I’ve got siblings myself, and your characters’ complex relationship rang true. I often found myself asking, Whose story is this? Arguably, the story belongs to both characters equally, but upon my second read, I began to feel that it was more Willa’s tale than Justin’s.
RM: It’s difficult for me, as the writer, to decide, which might seem like a cop out, but I feel it’s both of their stories. I often think of Willa and her predicament, her desire to be there for Justin, and her struggle to be enough for him. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a caretaker who hasn’t felt this ambivalence: to be there completely or to pull away. I do think this is a big part of what the novel is “about.”
JB: Yes! Willa’s struggle felt very real to me in that respect. Another aspect of the story that immediately struck me was the presence of the body, in particular that of Justin. We know he’s unwell when Willa compares him to a “dug-up tree root,” as if he had “fallen through the roof and landed here, covered in plaster dust.” Can you speak more to this capturing of the corporeal?
RM: Being in the body of a character is very important to me, especially in this novel. Justin is sort of trapped and controlled by a body that sometimes fails him. I was actually really inspired by the way James Purdy handled bodies in his writing. What his characters are feeling often is expressed by the behavior or misbehavior of their bodies. I also wanted us to feel close to Justin’s body, since something happens to him in the book, and I wanted us to care about and feel protective of him physically.
JB: How memory changes is also central to the story—or perhaps more precisely, how we alter our own memories, whether consciously or unconsciously. There are several instances of this, the most obvious being how Justin pulled Willa’s arm from its socket when they were children. Their mother, Grace, remembers the episode much differently than Willa does. This idea of exaggerating or downplaying past events to serve our current narrative is fascinating. Was this something you were consciously exploring as you wrote?
RM: I always wanted this book to be partially about memory, so I found myself writing scenes in which the characters were arguing about the past. I’m fascinated by how two people can grow up in the same house and have entirely different childhoods and different feelings about the common events they shared. I also think people sometimes lie to themselves about how things were; they tell themselves stories so that they can come out as the victim or be right.
JB: Grace often does exactly that—paints herself as the victim in the story, or in her version of the story, anyway. She was a difficult character to read because of her meanness toward her children. In scenes involving the three of them, I was struck by how effortlessly you show their alliances shifting from moment to moment. Are these “triad” character scenes a foundational instrument in your toolbox as a storyteller?
RM: Grace is a tough one for sure. A grieving person unprepared to be a parent. I’m interested in the struggles between family members, but also between, well, everyone. I think long-term relationships, friendships, sometimes have these subtle conflicts. I don’t consciously think about using these things as tools, but when I put characters together, they talk, and old resentments (or new ones) come up, and those surprises make for interesting scenes.
JB: And there are countless interesting, dynamic scenes in this book. The novel’s structure is complex and rewarding for how you threaded the two storylines, alternating between past and present timelines. We get so much rich backstory in scene, plus there’s the mystery that keeps us reading to see what ultimately connects Justin’s traumatic past with his and Willa’s current struggle to reconcile. I believe I read that your decision to weave together timelines came late in the process.
RM: I originally thought the novel would be linear. I’d start in Justin and Willa’s childhood, and the novel would progress into adulthood. After I finished a few drafts of the novel this way, it felt wrong to me. And dull. So much of my process is about feeling my way through things rather than intellectualizing, or planning, or outlining.
But once I had a couple of drafts, I started to think about what I wanted the novel to look like, how the structure could be a part of making the story work the way I wanted it to work. I imagined throwing my book onto the ground and shattering it into pieces. I originally thought I’d arrange the pieces like a collage, and readers would organize the narrative in their minds, but it’s not really like that. I wanted the book to be minimal and sharp and dark. I cut a lot of it and placed sections that made emotional sense next to each other. We go back and forth in time, though not consistently. We remain in the same timeline for a few chapters and then go back in time. It was more interesting to me.
JB: Okay, I want to shift gears: Justin’s sexuality. He’s a gay man, and his sexuality is a key element of the story, as much of the internal locomotion is driven thematically by homophobia and toxic masculinity, but we don’t learn of his queerness until almost page forty. I wondered if this was a conscious decision, to slowly reveal his sexuality, or to de-emphasize it to favor other themes central to the story, like trauma and addiction.
RM: I wanted it to come up naturally because, to me, this isn’t about Justin struggling with his sexuality. Other people are struggling with his sexuality. Maybe I did want to de-emphasize it. I wanted Justin to be queer, because my novel is partially about the violence created by homophobia, but I wanted there to be a balance. This is also a novel about relationships, about sibling relationships, mother-child relationships.
JB: I love that. I think you’ve achieved that balance beautifully.
I listened to your interview with Jaylen Lopez on his podcast, The Bar and the Bookcase, which I enjoyed very much. In that episode, you spoke about how classic fairy tales were an inspiration for your novel. I was hoping you could expand on that and tell us about the influence of fairy tales on your writing in general.
RM: Jaylen is wonderful. Fairy tales have become so important to me. I’m not necessarily retelling them, but I love using them to find story shapes or symbols, to read an unfamiliar tale and see if it sparks something new. The great thing about fairy tales is that they’re meant to be retold, so you can use them however you like, you can steal from them. It’s sort of expected! They’re endlessly inspiring.
My novel was partially inspired by a fairy tale (Grimm’s “Little Brother and Little Sister”), but the language of fairy tales also inspired the syntactical style of the book, though that happened more in revision. The language in the book is simple and direct and sometimes dispassionate. That was intentional.
JB: There are many unique secondary characters in the novel who flesh out Justin’s and Willa’s world and add dimension to their characters. I noticed a handful of times you even dedicated passages of the narrative to their point of view, slipping us into the heads of René’s daughter Brianna, Grace, and Justin’s boyfriend Shivam. What drove you to this decision, and what do you believe it adds to the narrative?
RM: That came later in the process. For once, it was a conscious decision. I wanted to hear from these people, and I liked the idea of giving them one or two of their own chapters. It was my way of learning about them too. It made them more real, and it also was an opportunity to see how they were thinking about Justin. I think hearing from Grace was especially important. She can seem monstrous, but she has an inner life. Shivam needed his moment to be his own person. I wanted to show how this very reasonable person could be in love with such a troubled man.
JB: Okay, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Nick. Growing up closeted in a small, rural town, I knew guys who shared some of Nick’s less desirable qualities. Nick’s own closetedness and self-hatred, the driving force behind his brutal and unfortunate actions, felt honest and real. How difficult was it to manifest a character like Nick onto the page?
RM: It was very difficult, but I had also been trying for years to write about someone like Nick, because I’m fascinated by the prison of masculinity. I encountered boys and young men who were unable to be sensitive or loving, who could not allow themselves to be who they really are.
JB: The ending felt so satisfying in that, in many ways, there is no ending—no catharsis to speak of, no magic bullet. The novel seems to propose that childhood trauma is carried for the entirety of one’s life, but the open-endedness of the final pages also leaves the reader with a sense of hope for Justin and Willa. How were you thinking about the ending as you were writing?
RM: I found that ending, the actual last moment, in the middle of the book. It ends with the promise, and promises are tricky things. This book is a series of cycles. Over and over again. Reconciliation, estrangement, reconciliation, estrangement. A cycle needed to be broken at the end. There’s a change, but nothing is really solved. I’m interested in leaving characters in interesting places without solving their problems. They still have lives to live after the novel is over.
Richard Mirabella (@rpmirabella) is a writer living in upstate NY. He is the author of the novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in swamp pink, Story Magazine, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.
Jamey Baumgardt (he/him) (@theplastickind) is a writer and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Fiction Editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. His work has appeared in OLIT Magazine and the 2023 Saints and Sinners LGBTQ+ short story anthology, and his short story “The Appeasers” was a finalist in this year’s New Millennium Writings Awards.