Poured Over: Idra Novey on Take What You Need

By Jenna Seery / March 2, 2024 at 6:00 am

“I do think it was freeing for me to write about a female character who has been relegated to a corner, but she takes over the whole house.”

Take What You Need by Idra Novey is a story of home and family, coming of age and making art. Novey joins us to talk about her connection to the setting of the novel, art and identity, her influences and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                 

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.       

Featured Books (Episode):
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey
Those Who Knew by Idra Novey
Foster by Claire Keegan

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Idra Novey first hit my radar with Ways to Disappear, which technically is her debut novel. I don’t think it was your first book. I think there was some poetry and a lot of translation before that, but I love this novel, Brazilian writer goes up a tree with a suitcase and a cigar in her mouth and disappears. And that’s pretty much all I’m gonna say at the moment, we’re gonna come back to this novel, but I love this book. And the Brazilian novelist may or may not be a little Clarice Lispector ish. And yeah, we’re gonna come back to that too. But Idra’s new novel, Take What You Need is out in paperback. And that’s where we’re going to start because you’re in the United States. We’ve got, well, I don’t want to call it a story of mothers and daughters. Because it’s much more than that. Let’s call it a story about who gets to tell stories and who gets to make art. Does that work for you? Okay, Idra, I’m so happy to see you. It’s been a minute.

Idra Novey

it’s fantastic to see you as well.

So Take What You Need. We’re in the Allegheny Mountains of Western Pennsylvania, which you did grow up in that neck of the woods, you have not lived there in quite some time.

Yeah. Well, my family has been there for over 100 years. So I go back all the time. And in the pandemic, I was actually there a lot because I was in a one bedroom rental with two children and a dog. I went back often and we stay with my parents, because we’re all on zoom, I resumed teaching, the kids resumed schooling, and they rigged up a zipline in the backyard. And we were so I actually went I was working on so I was actually spending a lot of time in Pennsylvania. Okay.

Okay, I love everything about this book. No, we really get the story through two women, one called Jean and one called Leah. And Jean is not like anyone I’ve met in literature in a really long time. And I’m gonna let you explain these women, because we’re also going to stay spoiler free in this conversation. So I’m gonna let you set the tone. But as you know, I really liked Jean quite a lot.

Well, you know, I think at this time when I was traveling back and forth, and you know, my family has just, you know, it’s like a century of life in western Pennsylvania. So we’re like, that is like, inhabits a big place in my mind and Ways to Disappear begins in Pennsylvania. But it starts with a character leaving. And I think in some way, this is like a bookend to that first, almost, it’s about a character coming back. You know, in my mind, that’s, that’s kind of how I think about them. And I was started interviewing people in my hometown, because I wanted to write a nonfiction book, because I felt this deep draw and wanted to talk about some, like major shifts that are happening in a lot of, you know, the rust belt and sort of like post steel towns, like how the radical changes that have happened between when I was there, and now there’s only, I think, a fifth of the population of what there was when I was growing up. So I’ve seen like, such a drastic change in a place and it’s really marked me and marked everyone I know, whether they stay or not. But I realized that the people that I interviewed who were the most fascinating, and who resisted easy answers were artists. And then I started thinking about why we didn’t know their art and how much of the art was happening, sort of under the known surface of American art, you know. And so that was what got me thinking. And then it was funny, my brother said, if you’re looking for artists, there’s someone I want you to meet. It’s my barber, he told me, so he took me into barber shop that was full of flea market art was like exactly my kind of thing. You know, I was just like lots of records and jukeboxes and art in the walls and everything. But it was actually not the barber who put the art up. It was his wife. And I met her. And then she told me her name. I actually wrote a poem about her recently that came out in poetry. Her name is Helen and she made cigar boxes and she made collages on them and filled her basement with all these cigar boxes. I was like, Well, what do you do with these gorgeous collages and she’s like, I just make them for the joy of making them. There was something so freeing about that and then another artist who you had said you that you are a fan of was Norm Ed who his family is originally from Syria and from Russia but he you know, they’ve been in Pennsylvania for several generations now. Well, and he is also more or less off the grid making his art out of discards and he was my art teacher. So I we reconnected and Norm Ed greatly influenced his metalwork, I got to torch with him we did a lot of welding together. And so I had like the bodily experience of welding with Norm Ed and I think that his use of you know, discarded metal from you know, all that post industrial metal that you want confined in abundance became the material literally of this novel.

I love this so much. Poet, translator, novelist, welder. I love it. I just I love it so much. Because one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading, Take What You Need, and I’ve read it a couple of times now because obviously it’s out in paperback and I read it before it came out in hardcover and reread it obviously before we sat down here is how it connects thematically to Ways to Disappear. And also your second novel, Those Who Knew which is set on an unnamed Island cuts across time and is sort of about the price of silence, shall we say? But you’re also talking about how women in a lot of ways It’s become invisible. No matter where we are in the world, there does come a point where women become invisible. And both Jean and Leah, both of the women in tech, what you need have become invisible in their own way. And yet, Jean dies. I’m that’s not a spoiler. We learned this very early on. But it’s also what brings Leah back to a place that she had pretty much tucked behind her and said, I’m good. Thanks. Can we talk about these two women? Now? Obviously, you’ve got this amazing backstory for Jean, who is the artist in question. But she can’t live on her own just doing cool stuff in the living room of the house. She grew up, right. So Leah?

Yes. Well, it was a funny thing that happened about invisibility after this novel came out nor met the artists who sort of into Helen sort of a hybrid, you know, because I think that Jean’s existence in this book is very much it as an Invisible Woman. And her father didn’t teach her to weld. And I think that there’s still a lot of resistance to women taking themselves seriously as welders. And as metal artists, it’s getting better, thank goodness, and Norm’s daughter came up to me who’s you know, in her I think, early 40s. And she said, You wrote my life I relate to Leah did inheriting this art, decades of art. And she says, when it comes time to find a home for my father’s art, I’m calling you. Like, oh, Nellie, I’ll help you. But this isn’t invented artists, you know, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it was funny, I did an event with the head at the time of the Visionary Art Museum that plays a role. And it was like, was asking where her art was stored. And it just to me felt that I had taken this woman whose art was invisible, and whose life was invisible. And she became real, her art became real to the daughter of an artist, it became real to a woman who was running a museum. And I think that to me was so validating, and exciting, what the imagination can do.

It also had me thinking about the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. And if for anyone who hasn’t seen them, they are mosaic and mirror, and there are these, they are wild when you see them, too. And it was one man, just working over time, chipping away. I love seeing someone’s vision like that, right? And yes, Jean felt very real to me, as well, as she’s welding in her living room. And making all of this art and I wouldn’t say Jean always makes the best decisions. I think that’s fair. You also made her a stepmom which I thought as a as a literary device. I mean, it’s true to her as a character because I don’t really see her necessarily needing to be a different kind of parent, right? Yeah. But it’s a big piece of her. And it’s like a warm, squishy piece that I wouldn’t have expected. I genuinely wouldn’t have expected. I mean, and this is part of her. Do I make art? Do I have a family? What’s happening? Who do I take care of? And I’m wondering when you knew that’s what the relationship was going to be?

Well, I’m very close to my stepmother. And I talked to her often and I couldn’t find any novels that portrayed the stepmother, adult’s daughter relationship in a way that drew for me emotionally. And I think as I’ve gotten older, became a parent and my stepmother, we would talk about how, you know, she stepped, I mean, I think I don’t know if the step parents steps forward into the role of a parent. And I think that, you know, I’m close to my mother as well, you know, I’m Leah’s not autobiographical in that way at all. But I think I wanted to explore, you know, the way that a stepparent is, you know, may not have any legal rights if the do if the marriage dissolves, but you know, can step in with their whole heart and their whole being, and, you know, make a child into the person that they are and give them maybe the things that they cherish the most. And so I wanted to write about that, because I just hadn’t read that, you know, and I think sort of the cheap bill in positions of stepmothers has become tiresome. And so I wanted to chart another story.

That’s kind of like what you did with Ways to Disappear. You were like, well, I wanted to read a novel about a translator that made sense to me. I kept seeing all of these novels about translators where they were kind of mealy-mouthed weird people. And I’m paraphrasing you poorly, but yeah, we’re kind of like well, actually translators are brave and they live in liminal space, and they do all sorts of other different things. And, and I do, I think, you know, it’s I know it’s been ascribed to Toni Morrison and I’m sure she did say it, but lots of folks have said, you know, write the novel that you want to read and there’s so much life in take what you need. And I really there’s some other care characters there’s a kid called Elliot, Jean’s neighbor. There’s also Leah’s dad, and I have many feelings about Leah’s dad and his bad decisions. But okay. But I really want to focus on these women because they’re both making art in a different way because Leah is a translator.

Yes. Well, yes. She edits, edits websites. But not necessarily books. I was trying, you know? I mean, I think of Ways to Disappear. I actually read, there was an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa and he was like said that, you know, translators are the good girls and like, the writers are the bad boys. And I was like, oh, Mario, no, no, no, no. Like translators. We are also the bad girls, that don’t always you know, and in this way, this novel, I came across something, was an author actually online who said, I don’t care if Janet in Cleveland reads my novel. Like, but what if Janet and Cleveland is the most open minded, passionate reader? What if Janet and Cleveland is doing the best art that you don’t know? You know, why underestimate given somebody’s name and where they live? Who’s a great reader in this country? I think that that stayed with me, you know, really, you know, it was like driving a sort of, like, you know, making the watchtowers you know, like, I’m gonna build this, because I want you to in Cleveland to be in the Whitney Biennial, I want Janet from Cleveland to, you know, be part of who we think of as someone who might change this country in a beautiful way and be part of the best art and the best new ideas, why not.

But also Leah and Jean are both kind of living in this. They’re living in their own versions of liminal space, right, like, Jean has grown up in this town. She’s in the same house that she grew up in, you know, her job has ended because the Regional Hospital has closed, which we keep seeing again and again and again. Leah has lived around the world and is now living in Queens and is not coming back to this place. Neither of them is quite settled. Even though they’ve chosen a place, right. They’ve each chosen a place but they’re not settled. Yeah. And that’s a nuance that we don’t always get, right. Like, it’s like, everyone’s straight up an outsider, or everyone’s straight up, you know, a townie and it’s like, well, actually, you’re doing this thing, where everyone’s walking on a knife’s edge.

Yes, yes. And I do feel like I am, like, inhabiting two knives at all times, on the edge of two knives all the time. I’m like, one foot on one knife. And when I’m, you know, like, Here I am, you know, living in New York, and there are many conversations, you know, where I was like, Well, you know, I think that might flatten exactly, you know, who’s living in what’s going on? Because I think some of the best, you know, people like just talking when I was in the vent, in my hometown, the books, the bookstore owners in my hometown, you know, and what they’re trying to do to bring poetry and novels and keep conversations about literature. They opened an independent bookstore in a town that’s getting smaller all the time. That’s so brave. And I love those two women at that store, you know, and it was a beauty. It was like one of the most beautiful things I did. Also the two guys who run the welding center gave a fellowship in my hometown to center for metal arts and Johnstown. And they have brought in a lot of women who are willing the most incredible art, and they’re coming from places, you know, they’re coming coming from Norway. They’re coming from Ohio. They’re coming from California. Like I just think that there’s more varied and more dynamic, passionate people that we can’t assign them to any one geography, and I think it diminishes all of us to do so.

Did writing Take What You Need change you?

Yes, I think it did. I think it did. Yes, yes, it enlivened me. I, these conversations that I had, when I was first making them, I had one hunch about what happened in the conversation. And the thing that ended up happening and the people in my town, and these were people I’ve known since birth, or people I hadn’t seen since high school, you know, I went to bars with my stepbrother and things like that. And then there would just be amazing conversations with people who just did not adhere to any sort of boxes that they might be put in, which I think I’ve written about in every box, who would we writing off? And why write people off? You know, you know, it’s, it seems to make life less exciting when when one does so you know, and so, you know, I was talking there was like, there’s one bar in my town that has a drag show. And I was there. And the bartender, who is one of the performers in the drag show is also well known for doing taxidermy, and he moved back to town because he loves to hunt. And some days he’ll go hunt, he’ll make some extra money doing taxidermy and then he then he performs in the drag show. And he’s very happy. You know, and that’s the story of Western Pennsylvania too. And I just think that i just i It really did change me and make me want to write this book and grant everybody more life than our media depictions often grant them.

What you just said to was making me think about something you said in an earlier interview, and I think it actually was for the second novel Those Who Knew Me Just gonna quote you for a second because this is really great line in a way translation is also about thinking of issues of silence and whose voice is heard, and how it’s heard in translation, you learn a lot about what you call the major languages and the minor languages, and how that plays into whose work is then translated and seen as worth working. And I just, I feel like you were translating for me. I mean, I’m a coastal person. I’ve always lived on a coast, except for a little foray into Chicago. And then I came back to coast, but I feel like you were able to translate communities for me that I did not necessarily have a deep experience of, I mean, I’ve been around, but I, you’re so grounded in this place, your family’s been there for 100 years, you still have family there, you’re going back. And it’s not just the pandemic. I mean, you were going back regularly. Yeah. And I just I love the idea. Right, because we do get bifurcated sometimes, as Americans, we get very bifurcated, that you have created this world in your novels that are, it’s deeply American, and it’s all of the books, but really Take What You Need. That you’ve created this world, where everyone has space. I think that’s really important. I don’t think we talk about that. And like everyone’s sort of retreated to their corners, right. And you don’t let your characters do that,

though, Jean is not going to stay in the corner. She turns on the argon gas, and she takes a welder and fills the hole. And yes, it is true that even we maybe impose that on ourselves to retreat. I do think it was freeing for me to write about a female character who has been relegated to a corner, but she takes over the whole house. And, you know, she builds her sculptures up to the ceiling, you know, out of whatever the barber chair is on the corner, the bicycle wheels, you know, she takes everything that’s been discarded. And you know, she resurrects it. In her space. I was doing a something about visual artists and an event on visual artists United States, and the person who was running the event was like, Well, what haunt you know, what artists haunts you that people were naming artists. And I said, I think the artists who haunt me are the ones whose work we’ll never see. You know, because they started making art at a late age, because they started making art edit in a place that were quick to dismiss as regional arts as folk art, you know, because of their background, because they, you know, whatever, like, Jean, they’re just having a great time at home. And, you know, don’t even bother to care what the world think, you know, I think that and so I think, you know, when I drive by the streets in my hometown, where almost all the houses have an X on them, you know, and I had thought that the X on those houses was so that, you know, people would know that those exit those houses has been marked for, you know, demolition, and I thought it was you know more about that. And, you know, there might be you know, something that was you know, about the house itself, but actually, I was thinking what’s in those homes that have been marked for demolition? Is there art in there? Does somebody write some great poems in there? Did somebody, you know, do some music in there does somebody you know, play an amazing violin, and they’re like, what happened in these homes that are just gonna vanish. And I think that’s the art that haunts me. And I think that’s probably a Part A translators submission because you know, you want to go and for me, when I translate and wrote about, you know, with bad cheeses, character and ways to disappear, was this exciting thing that one can do as a translator is to bring to readers in another language, a writer who they wouldn’t get to experience, you know, if they don’t speak that language. And I think in some ways, you know, some people don’t want to try and speak, you know, a little bit of the visual language of the rust belts, because I think there’s a lexicon that art is made with, and maybe they’re more comfortable with the visual lexicon of coastal art, and some of the visual language. But that’s the story of our country, too. It’s a big part of our country.

I mean, if you think of the genre that we call outsider art, right, like there was the whole trashcan School, which was a whole different moment. But, you know, there was a moment sort of late 90s, early aughts, were suddenly outsider art. So it’s like, you know, paint on styrofoam or painting on doors, which also John Michel Basquiat did as well. Like these labels that we put on things because we don’t see it in the context of, say, the Met or the MFA, or, you know, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the idea that art can just be on the side of the street or on the side of a house or it would be really interesting to me if we stopped trying to put labels on everything.

And now you know, so I’m the labels I think often to our own detriment, you know, and I think that we’re in a time where everyone can sort of delete anyone who doesn’t you know, you can just so easy to mute somebody or delete somebody and narrow and I think that can sort of, you know, we might what you might be missing out on, on the other hand, it’s overwhelming. To be open to everything, I mean, just think when you walk into Barnes and Noble, how many books are in there, if you didn’t have some label on the on the shelf, you would never leave. I mean, you know, unless you have many hours, but you know, and I think that was like when I was bringing up the x’s on the houses, you know, in my hometown, and in on the street, where my brother lives where there’s only two inhabitants left on his street there, all the other houses are either vacant or marked for demolition, but the extras were actually so that the fire department would not go inside, because they wouldn’t risk their lives so that they would know that no one lived there, and there was no one safe. And, you know, I think many people don’t know that we all have this other impression of what those x’s on the door for. And I was like, well, but what if it’s not true? What if there’s something else in there to save? Right? So I think this book was about answering that question.

I think that landscapes really important too. I mean, if you’re driving sort of in the byways, right, and the smaller roads, there’s so much to see. And I’m always sort of taken aback when I see something. And it’s everywhere. This is not this is not just Western Pennsylvania, this is and yes, it happens on the coast, too. It’s just places where people have left because they cannot stay. And they can’t stay because there isn’t work or there isn’t whatever. And just watching these houses sort of crumble to dust.

Or climate displacement.

Yeah, all of it. I always want to know why someone left.

I think my question that I always want to know is why someone stays. That’s kind of the inverse of that. Yeah, no, I get it. Because I’m, I’m quick to, you know, you know, take off on you for probably by nature, whether it’s language or novel setting, or something’s like first book completely set in the United States have a little there’s some flashbacks set in Lima, Peru. So, but I think for the most part, it said here, but I think that, you know, I’m honest, what kind of bravery does it take to stay? So I think some librarians maybe want to go and look for some easier places to, you know, be a librarian, but I was recently visiting high schools in western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, and outside of it, and those school librarians are not leaving, you know, they said, There’s books that have been on the shelves for 40 years. And they are going to keep those books on those shelves, literatures, their life’s work, as it is yours as it is mine, and they’re not leaving.

And part of it too is defining home, right? Like home isn’t necessarily a physical location. I mean, yes, that’s part of it. But if you look at how Lia defines home, and if you look at how gene defines home, and then there’s some other folks who define him even in a different way, I just, I love rolling around in the back of their brains and watching them figure out what everything means to them. I mean, that’s part of why I read write, I’m, I’m nosy, I want to eavesdrop. And I get to eavesdrop on some very smart folks. And some very complicated, folks, when I read your novels. And your earlier you were saying, well, walking into the front of it. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot going on, but part of me just wants to build their table really tall, really high with lots of books that are just good books and not explain anything beyond. It’s a great story, I’m not going to tell you if it’s fiction or nonfiction, I’m not going to tell you if the author’s dead or alive are American or not, and just pile it high with stuff that you know, something’s something there’s going to knock your socks off.

just like well, you know, books, I’m like anything else character unlike anyone else, you know, somebody you know, books that are just taking a risk. And I was hoping to do that, you know, with with jeans character. It was interesting what you said about it’s a great insight about, you know, what, what is home and I think for Jean Leah home, I think the reason that they you know, don’t feel at ease where they are is because the sort of fulcrum of their sense of home as each other and their strain. And that was what was that was sort of, I didn’t plan to write a novel about, you know, a step mother, daughter who was strange, but it was talking to people who had sort of, had a lot of anguish about who they weren’t talking to, whether it was the neighbor, whether it was a sibling, whether it was a child or a parent, and I think it’s like one in four parents in this country is estranged from one of their adult children. It’s, that’s a crisis. That’s a national crisis. And I think that that is your home, you know, is that person who raised you and who knows you since birth and if you’re not talking to that person for many reasons, that’s part of your home that’s been eclipsed you know, like you’re adrift.

But watching Leah and Jean kind of dance around each other. It’s tricky. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but it’s really fun. And I you know, there are complicated women and their lives are complicated. Not everything runs exactly to plan but watching you set them up to figure out what matters most It’s like, chipping away at this little puzzle. Right? And I really am trying to stay away from there’s a thing that happens and I’m Yeah.

I appreciate your artful leaving it to the reader approach to this. Yes and no, it’s a great way to Yes. And I do think there is, I mean, all novels, I think have a Rubik’s Cube aspect to them. You know, and sometimes the novel can feel too simplistic of all the, you know, blues are on one side and the reds on the other like that, you know, that wouldn’t be on my tower at the front of the store, you know, I like tells me there’s some sort of private logic, that the more you read, the more that private logic is legible to you about the sensibility of these characters, and what they mean to each other. And then ultimately, what they mean to us a reader. I think that I mourned Jean when this book was over. I mean, I made her up, but she became so real to me. I missed her company, whenever the book was done. You know, she just, I missed her voice. I missed her pizzazz.

She really is an original. She No, she’s absolutely. And, you know, there are other books that have been written about artists figuring it out, and how to balance all of the things and I just, she felt so original and organic to me. And I miss her to know, twice, and I still miss her. I’m like, Ah, and again, she’s not perfect. By any stretch, she makes a couple of decisions where you’re like, Okay, I understand why she did it. She couldn’t have done anything else. But there are a couple of moments.

Yeah, as we all have. And I think especially being willing to make art, you can overthink it, you know, just gotta plug in the plug in your welder and start torturing, you know, you just gotta, you gotta make it happen.

So can we talk about some of the input? I mean, obviously, Norm Ed, your former art teacher and this sculpture and teaching you to what I just I really loved the idea that your high school art teacher was teaching you how to weld. But I want to talk about literary influences for a second, because, you know, there are some folks who have said to you, oh, well, you write, there’s no magical realism in this book. But I want to parse that phrase for a second because you have done some stuff. That’s a little more George Saunders, ask a little Dennis Johnson, a little Karen Russell. But I think because you translate from the Spanish and the Portuguese people ascribe words to your work that may not necessarily fit but you pull from so many different places you pull from poetry, and you pull from translation, and you pull from fiction, and I just kind of want to roll through the bookcases behind you a little bit. I get to do this every now and again, where I’m like, oh, yeah, I recognize those sponsors to

work so hard are both by artists who are known that I found in in like flea markets.

Oh, that’s very cool.

I just, you know, I’m like, I just, there was one time, my husband from Chile, and we were like, walking. So it’s like that port city there where he was born. And there was this gorgeous painting behind me. And we asked him about the artists and in the store and property. So they said that he couldn’t make enough money making art. This was his last piece, and he opened a pizzeria. Oh, okay. So I just had that was like, another influence on me is this, you know, this artist who ended up you know, couldn’t, you know, couldn’t devote the hours in the day to art making, and so he made pizza instead. And I just, I think that that’s just, you know, there’s many things are gonna happen. I guess I misled you know, I mean, I probably do the equivalent of moving between making pizza and making novels and poetry in translation. So I understand that, that you can if you have passion and an expressive nature, I think that you can find joy in many different forms. And I think it can sometimes like, you know, get a little stale if you don’t mix it up. So I like to mix it up. And as far as literary influences, I read a lot of Claire Keegan. Oh, I love Ah, yes. And I think that, you know, the history of Ireland is polarized history is very different from the polarization we’re experiencing right now in the United States. But because I lived a long time in Chile, and that country is very polarized as well, between, you know, people who are Pinochet supporters, people who see it as a dictatorship. And now we have two very different histories happening in our country. And I think Ireland has, you know, schools that have children are reading completely different histories from each other. But I think what I love about Claire Keegan’s books is how clean it is, and how little moralizing or sort of telling the reader what to think. And she stays in the scene. And she lets the character speak for themselves. And I knew that that was what I wanted this novel to do. And to let those complexities and just let the reader hear the current, you know, like, let the reader hear that water that’s washing underneath those conversations. I didn’t need to say what was in the water. We know what’s in the water. You know, Claire Keegan was like how clean and how vivid the scenes are. But you know, you there’s so embodied and you know, what country they’re in The way the characters speak the humor the way they make each other laugh that, you know, other shorthand. I mean, I think like I grew up speaking that way, you know, I mean, I didn’t really speak in a northern Appalachian dialect. But there are things that are said, just in the region where I grew up, and I probably use them more when I’m home. So I definitely wanted to capture that a little in this book, too. So I think that was definitely clear Keegan influence.

I love that too, the idea that you can pull from literature that isn’t necessarily the thing. That’s right next door. Yeah. Right. And just say, Oh, but actually, this does connect us. I mean, again, this goes back to one of the reasons I read, I like my world to get bigger. Yes. And so the idea that you turn to Claire Keegan, Foster? Yes, I mean, all of her work is great. But Foster.

Yes, which I’ve read like eight times. But I think that way, in that book, that it’s, you know, the things that happen over meals and over food, rituals of food, how much goes on said, you know, with what people eat and where they eat it. And I thought of those scenes in foster lot when I was writing the scenes with Elliot, and the kitchen is very different, you know, because Foster has like a young girl, but she’s being taken care of she’s hungry, right? And she’s in the house of someone who’s a stranger. And there’s Elliot who’s like, you know, doesn’t have food in his house doesn’t have water, and they’re using the kitchen of a stranger and she knows he’s hungry. And so I just like, Well, what happens to those rituals about food, when somebody has all the food and somebody has none of it? And there they are alone in a kitchen together. There’s such a fraught intimacy, I think, when you know, there’s somebody who wouldn’t eat unless they were at your table. You know, it’s a very vulnerable position to be in.

Fraught intimacy, though, does really describe all of your novels, all three of them. Oh, no. And I mean that in a good way. I know. It sounds really weird coming up. Fraught intimacy, it’s, it’s that that whole you can’t separate, right? You can’t separate the character, the characters can’t separate from each other. And yet, it isn’t as simple as I love you. Let’s sit down, let’s have, it’s just not and what you do with silence. And I think this brings me to loop back again to translation and the idea that you have to be able to write into the silence or know when simply to pull back. And not because we’ve all I mean, I think there are times when you’re reading and you understand that you’re reading a clunky thing.

Yes, I can’t bear it. Right.

And maybe I don’t speak the original language. But we all know when we know it when we see it, right? Like, we know, when we’re encountering a thing that isn’t capturing the spirit, like, you just mix the itch a little bit, right? You just know that it’s not the thing. And part of that is giving your reader space to breathe.

Yes. And I love to reading the writing of Agnes Martin, which only as much as she needs and Louise Bourgeois and I read Celia Paul’s amazing self portrait. I read Charlotte Solomon, I read so many work works, where visual art and true it, I read a ton of women artists describing their process and all of the talk about silence. And so I think because, you know, it’s like what I’m saying about visual language, like, I think what something I learned from Norm Ed was this language, which is visual, which is silent, but you know, you’re perceiving the language with your eyes, you know, whether he’s using mind cribbing, which is the word that was used, you know, to hold up the minds or whether, you know, it’s going to be the plumbob, which is like, such a beautiful symbol for a tool that reveals gravity, you know, and it’s just naturally finds the True, true line, you know, I need the human eye can’t find the true line, the way that a plumbob can. I think there are beautiful things that can happen with visuals, some symbols, and so reading women artists who are saying with words, what can be said in an image that has this aura of silence, and I was I tried to write it into that as a tradition, this book.

I think it worked. I think your plan worked. But you I mean, you’ve always written very tightly. I mean, you some people just write longer, as in, that’s their practice, and we get a different kind of novel, but you tend to come in really, really tight, like under 300 pages. It feels like but I might be looking at paperbacks on my desk, but you’ve always written really tightly. And I’m wondering how much of that is just coming out of being a poet coming out of being a translator, but also rewriting and rewriting and I suspect there’s a little bit of rewriting that happens with you?

Quite a bit, I think. I guess I would look back. Somebody asked me this earlier on, I think I’d probably put 1000 pages for the, you know, 250 there and As book, I definitely ruwais Yes, so much so much. And I’m a little obsessive about it. But I think because I come from poetry and from you know, translating, where you’re just trying to just get the sensibility just right. And I also think, you know, I would I love starting a book on a plane and finishing it, what when I land and I just, I guess in my mind’s like, the perfect length for a novel is something you can finish on a domestic flight in this country. You don’t need an international I will never write a novel that requires an international flight, it will always be something that you you know, in English could finish, you know, within the bounds of our sort of origination, you could fly anywhere and finish the book to get there. I think that’s something to me, is in my mind, that’s what I want from a novel. You know, I like I there’s something to me that just feels right. And I will read and often will be cutting words, like in my I’m sure you do that, you know, after a certain point.

I think cadence matters. And cadence matters for your characters. I mean, Jean’s neighbor, Elliot, doesn’t have always a lot to say. And sometimes there are a couple of moments where we meet him. He’s saying a lot. But again, he’s one of these characters who with body language, and physicality, and action, shows us more of who he is, then he thinks he is right. Like he thinks he’s, he’s keeping it all to himself. And it’s like, oh, we know you’re our kid. And not in about just we know, but I mean, here’s a kid who doesn’t trust anyone. Right? And again, it goes back to the sort of fraught intimacy right and Leah’s got some ideas and Jean’s got some ideas and Elliot’s just kind of being Eliot because he doesn’t, that kids got it roped off, right? And when I say kid, like, he’s, he’s not little. I mean, he’s, he’s more of a man than a kid. But we’re just watching the three of them sort of maneuver around each other and knowing what they each bring to their world is kind of a trip.

Well, I, you know, I have a lot of friends who are writers and who aren’t the same age as I am. And I, whether they’re, you know, like, younger writers or older writers, and they’re just sort of their different curiosities. And I think it really like feeds the questions, whether it’s, you know, students or students who become friends and go on to publish books or, you know, like artists who are doing visual art and you know, the one of the people who taught me how to weld worked in the welders Union for the city of New York, and she was the only woman in the welders union, Julia Murray, and she’s now at RISD doing metal arts there, but she did weld in her living room. And I think like figuring out the traps that gene sets up in order to like, not intoxicate and, you know, in her house came from seeing how Julia managed to weld in her house, you know, so Julia very, was it was an influence. And I also thought about Elliot a lot, you know, with Julia, because Elliott’s absolved thing giving too much away, you know, he has one parent who he lost to cancer, as Julia did. And so even in my mind, I just see them that there’s something that if you lose a parent, that and this is also true of Leah, too, you know, is that how can art be a place where you can sort of work out these irresolvable feelings you know about this person who you can never speak to again and then you don’t Leah has that normally you know, with the her biological mother but also with her stepmother and Jean can becomes this place where she could there’s something to touch there’s something to hold, you know that art can do that.

Grief is a complete trip and you’ve got characters who are all in different ways grieving.

But it’s fun to like, I think I was important to me that Leah and her husband have laugh in the car as like, you know, even in like, you know, whatever, deep moments when, you know, we was crazy times in this country, but like, you know, I lost with my husband and my family in the car went on those seven, eight hour drives across Pennsylvania, but some gas station experiences were memorable, and not exactly the way they happened in the book. I won’t I won’t do any spoilers. But and then you know, and I think rarely a to you know, he he’s very reserved, I never had the luxury of being able to state his mind. I don’t think he ever felt, as you said he had the space to really say his take on things because he never was the one with the car. He’s not the moment the water. He’s not the one who even has a house and some points, so he can’t really afford to speak his mind. He never gets to take over the room. But there he is suddenly in a room. And with Jean, they fill it with art.

Grief, to me, drives a lot of different kinds of art. So I don’t actually I know there are folks out in the world who are like, Well, I just don’t want to read a sad book. And take what you need is not what I would consider a sad book. There will not be copious amounts of weeping What it is, though, is a very smart prodding of us, right? Our assumptions, and our place and our idea of class and home and all of these things. But there are moments where it’s very witty, there are moments where you’re just like, Oh, you did a thing, for at least I was. I judged character I, you know, I’m talking about fictional characters like they’re real again. But it happened in books. You know, it’s part of being a bookseller, you just this happens. But I never felt like I was being lectured. I felt like I was in I felt like I was dropped into a world with people that I was really, really, as we say, in Boston, wicked curious about. And I just, I wanted to know where you were going to take me and where they were going to take.

And it paid off. It all literally paid off.

And I know you said, Yeah, this book, changed your writing, this book changed me. But, you know, why do you write fiction? I mean, you’ve got all these different outlets, right? Okay, welding aside for a second, because that takes up a lot of space. But the poetry and the translation, and you know, the teaching and all of that, but why do you write fiction?

That was a great question. And I love that you said smart prodding of us. I was like, that is the bar. That is the bar, you’re going to be in my head, I think forever, you know, what is the smart prodding of this novel? I think I’ll be asking myself that for many books to come. I think that yeah, I was in priding myself to you know, like, I wanted to interrogate my own sort of quick judgments, subvert them, because I heard Jennifer Egan say this, who’s also I would say, an influential writer, and she said that, you know, the role of literature is to subvert caricature and subvert stereotype. And I agree with that, not in like an activist. I don’t want to be lectured in any way. But like, why write about a character, if they’re not new, if they aren’t going to be on that stack at the front of the store is like you’ve never seen this character before. And I think what’s so fascinating to me, and I think really makes me excited about reading fiction is seeing that in every book, Jennifer Egan does something new. Right? She ever derivative of herself, she doesn’t play it safe. And I heard her say, you know, well, with this book, I might lose some readers, but I’ll also get some other ones. You know, and I think it was sort of goes back to that sort of sorting machine that we were talking about earlier that Ruth Ozeki said that she sees the novel as a sorting machine. And I think that she didn’t mean it in the way that literature should be machine devised by AI by any sense, but write the machine in the sense that the sensibility of the book, the risks that take the what the kind of what it subverts, speaks to people who are craving to subvert those stereotypes to who want to read a character who subverts these easy tropes that we are in this country are very quick to sort of throw on each other. And so I think I it was, for me, it felt like very humanizing to have that be what I hoped that my days would add up to, you know, because it takes so many days me to write a book.

That part I’m clear on. I’m also clear on the rewriting part. You know, it’s, I spend a lot of time talking to writers and the rewriting piece, I think, sometimes could be a surprise for folks who may not do this regularly. It’s kind of like everyone needs an editor to like, you really just need to sit down and keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away until the thing breathes.

And I also think you need a moment where you consider throwing the book away, where I was like, Okay, I don’t know if this is gonna work. I had a friend who had never said this before, but any of my books was like, I don’t really know if this is gonna sort of cohere and somebody had said to me, I don’t know if whether this woman gets to make her art or if anyone ever sees it is enough of you know, stakes for readers. And I was like following your passion is the highest one of the highest stakes there are when sometimes you get feedback like when you disagree with it, then I felt this like compulsion to say for Jean, you know, to be off in western Pennsylvania, laughing with her neighbor making a tower that nobody ever sees, or maybe does is the highest stakes there is like I want to live in a country where that’s possible.

Idra, we’re dangerously close to spoilers, I can feel it. So you know, I’m gonna say thank you so much. This was so great hanging out with you and talking about Jean and Leah, and Elliot and art, and translating and all of that good stuff. Also, listeners if you haven’t read Ways to Disappear if you haven’t read those who know they are absolutely worth going back and finding there’s also of course the Clarice Lispector that you’ve Translated there’s poetry there’s a new collection of poetry coming this fall yes soon and so much stuff but really it was a delight as always to talk to you so thank you for making the time and Take What You Need is out in paperback now

Thank you, Miwa.