Under Story: A Guest Post from Chloe Benjamin

How far would you go for more time with the people you love? In Under Story, Chloe Benjamin pairs scientific wonder with a sweeping exploration of life and loss after one woman's incredible discovery offers her a chance to turn back the clock. Read on for an exclusive essay from Chloe Benjamin on writing Under Story.

There were two sparks of inspiration for Under Story. The first was a real experiment at Antarctica’s McMurdo base: a group called ANITA, which was researching elementary particles called neutrinos, found that those particles were moving in an unexpected, inverted direction. One fringe hypothesis was that perhaps these results gave credence to an unproven cosmological model called a CPT-symmetric universe. In this model, the Big Bang created two universes: the one we know, and a second universe where properties like time—and neutrinos!—are inverted. This was eventually disproven as an explanation for the ANITA results, but it was catnip for me as a novelist.

I’m drawn to high-concept premises like this one, but I always hope to ground them through character. The second spark of the novel was my desire to explore marriage. I’ve been married now for many years, and it’s struck me that marriage can feel like a world of its own, with distinct codes, history, and ways of communicating. I’m also fascinated by the way that mundanity and profundity intersect in long-term partnerships: there is plenty of daily tedium and dirty laundry (literally and figuratively), and yet there is also this sacred, overarching project—you’ve chosen to go through life together.

On the scientific side, I began by interviewing Latham Boyle, one of the physicists who invented the CPT-symmetric model (though my Duoverse is heavily fictionalized). Under Story’s protagonist, Laurel, grows up on an apple orchard, and this was another early research subject: her family’s property was inspired by Door Creek Orchard in Cottage Grove, WI, where I picked apples for ten years before I ever thought of incorporating it into a novel. I also did early research on fungi, which comes to play a large role in the novel.

After six months or so, I felt I had amassed enough of a sense of the novel to begin writing, but my research continued throughout the five-year-long drafting process. I interviewed clockmakers and scuba instructors. I traveled out of state to shadow microbiologists studying fungi in caves; we road tripped out to a place called Mystery Cave together while I picked their brains about how fungi might operate in a backward-moving universe. I attended a psychedelic conference and a smaller “women’s mushroom conference,” the latter of which was especially impactful. (It also inspired The Center, a fictional commune that features in the book.) My previous novels had also required a substantial amount of research, but most of that had been reading. This time, I noticed how immersive, textured, and lived-in the writing process felt—unique from anything I’d done before. I hope that this has given the novel a similar sense of life and texture. I want to welcome a reader, to create a place where they can touch things, take a seat, or walk around.