I Had to Chase Her Singularity: A Guest Post by Jessica Anthony
It’s an unnaturally warm November day and all Kathleen Beckett wants to do is float. Jessica Anthony’s latest, The Most, is a sharp, taut novel about a restless 1950s housewife. Read on to discover Anthony’s inspiration behind this unique story and its characters.
Paperback
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The Most
The Most
In Stock Online
Paperback
$16.99
$18.99
We love immersive books you can read in one sitting, and Jessica Anthony’s novel of a housewife at her wits end packs a punch. The clever premise and unflinching narrative voice might remind you of The Swimmer by John Cheever.
We love immersive books you can read in one sitting, and Jessica Anthony’s novel of a housewife at her wits end packs a punch. The clever premise and unflinching narrative voice might remind you of The Swimmer by John Cheever.
I had been reading the work of American women writing in the 1950s: Carson McCullers, Shirley Jackson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Childress, Grace Paley, Patricia Highsmith. I don’t know why I was drawn to these particular voices; I felt only a strange, undefinable kinship in with their protagonists. Though wildly different in style and genre, these writers all seemed to be telling a similar story: one of women trying to live as human beings in an era that had little use for their humanity. Then, about seven years ago, I was given an unusual opportunity: to travel to the southernmost town in Slovakia, a little village called Štúrovo, and guard a bridge for three months.
The word “most” in Slovak means “bridge.” The bridge I was guarding was the Mária Valéria Bridge, a five-hundred-meter steel girder truss bridge over the Danube River, into Esztergom, Hungary. The bridge was destroyed in the first world war, and then rebuilt. After it was bombed again in WWII, the bridge was left in ruins for sixty years. When it was finally rebuilt in the fall of 2001, the people of Štúrovo installed an artist residency to guard the bridge against fascism, against further destruction, through the act of creation. I was the forty-first bridge guard.
I crossed the bridge once each morning, on foot or bicycle, then returned to my flat on the Slovak side to enter notes into the Bridge Log (a cartoonishly large leather-bound tome) and write. But the summer of 2017 was hot in Europe—the temperature regularly soared over a hundred, and I had no air conditioning. By the end of the first week, I hadn’t written a word.
There is a little resort of sorts in Štúrovo, a water park with a number of swimming pools. Early one morning I gave up writing, biked over to the pools to cool off, and was delighted to discover that I had an entire lap pool to myself. It was a Sunday. Everyone was at church. I hung my arms on the pool’s coping and floated there quite happily for at least an hour, thinking about a 50s American housewife who had been on my mind. To write her, I had to chase her singularity: there was something unusual about Kathleen Beckett that I had not read before, and suddenly, I wanted to know what that was. I had the title. (I always begin with the title.) I climbed out of the pool, feeling better than I had all week. I biked home, sat down at my desk and wrote a very simple opening line: “Kathleen Beckett awoke feeling poorly.”