Poured Over: Tess Gunty on The Rabbit Hutch
“To write a young woman who refuses to define herself by anything other than her activism, her mind, her curiosity, that was just a delight, and she wasn’t the most predictable character, but she was the one who told me what to do on every page.” How to describe Tess Gunty’s dynamic debut, The Rabbit Hutch? Think Jennifer Egan + Denis Johnson. Think polyphonic novel about climate change and gentrification and coming-of-age in a dying American Dream with an unforgettable 18-year-old as its heart. Tess joins us on the show to talk about loneliness and connection, South Bend and Studebaker automobiles, needing to leave home in order to write about it, how an anxious kid became a writer, mysticism, revision, the poets and writers who inspire her and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.
Featured Books (episode)
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
NW by Zadie Smith
Great House by Nicole Krauss
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode:
B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and we have someone that I’m so happy is here and I’m so happy she’s writing fiction. She also writes poetry and has written a play but predominantly fiction. The novel is The Rabbit Hutch. Tess Gunty, is how do I describe Tess’s prose? Okay, thank Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me. And Dennis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, let’s start there. But if you remember, also a couple of earlier Discover picks, there was Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore and there was also Shiner by Amy Jo burns and the way those two novels capture their place. One is Midland, Texas and one is sort of rural Appalachia. Yeah, you really need The Rabbit Hutch. So Tess, thank you so much for joining us, but I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and introduce The Rabbit Hutch to listeners.
Tess Gunty: Hello, I’m really happy to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Tess Gunty. I am the author of The Rabbit Hutch and it’s a novel that takes place over the course of three hot days in summer and it follows a group of characters in a fictional postindustrial city called Vacca Vale, Indiana, as their lives violently collide.
B&N: Okay, so I want to start with Blandine, who is sort of the heart. She’s not sort of, she’s the heart of this novel. Blandine is ferocious, she is either in love with things or man she absolutely she hates, there’s no middle ground for Blandine. And she’s 18, she’s aged out of the foster care system. She is living with three other kids who have also aged out of the foster care system. And when I say kids 18-19, your brain isn’t fully cooked yet. You are not, you’re still closer to being a kid than not. Can we talk about how Blandine started for you? Because she had to have been the first character who showed up.
TG: She was certainly the character that was the most natural for me to write. But actually Joan was the very first character that came to her. Yeah, Joan introduced me in some ways to blend in because I think in many ways, they’re almost the opposite in terms of their internal experiences, but they’re after the same things. And Blandine was, I think she wasn’t just in many ways, the hero that I wanted to see. She’s extreme. She’s strange, she’s flawed, but she’s also someone who is, she has always taken refuge in her intellect. She’s someone who has always found refuge and learning. And in many aspects of her life, she’s had almost no power. She’s been at the mercy of these really powerful, really heartless structures. But learning is the one realm this kind of cerebral realm where no one can touch her. And so I think, to write a young woman who refuses to define herself by anything other than her activism, her mind, her curiosity, that was just delight, and she wasn’t the most predictable character, but she was the one who told me what to do on every page.
B&N: It seems to me that she wants more for Vacca Vale, and the community almost than she wants for herself. And I’m not saying this as if she’s martyred herself. But she gets much more worked up much more quickly about what’s happening to her community. And I thought that was a really nice touch because it’s not something you always see, we could argue that The Rabbit Hutch is a coming of age novel. I mean, there’s a lot happening here. But for her, that’s a big part of the story, because later, and we’re gonna dance around this because it is a spoiler. Later, she has a moment with someone from her past that wouldn’t necessarily have been set up without all of the other energy that she put into her community and what was happening and fighting gentrification, among other things. Can we get back to Joan for a second because it didn’t occur to me that Joan would have been the first character that showed up. She is Blandine’s neighbor, she lives downstairs in the building called The Rabbit Hutch, the apartment building in Vacca Vale. Joan, showed up first, can you tell people who Joan is and what she does? Because she’s a great character. But I’m a little surprised.
TG: Yeah, I mean, she’s a woman in her 40s. She screens obituary comments for a living so it’s an online obituary website and she is essentially a moderator and making sure people aren’t posting mean or copyrighted remarks about the deceased and she came to me I think after I’d heard an interview with someone who did that job for a living and I think it was on This American Life. I’m not sure, it was a pretty short interview. But I just wondered what such a job would do to your psychology with this kind of immersion in a world that is so full of contrast. Because on the one hand, it’s the internet, it’s the mundane, and then on the other hand, it’s the stage at which someone is entering as leaving the world and everyone in their life is coping with that. And so I thought this kind of contrast must produce something really interesting in such a screeners mind over time, she’s kind of an invisible person in her town, I think people rarely pay attention to her. There are very few things set up for her. She’s single, she’s not making much money. And it was kind of interesting at the time to write a woman like that, in contrast to Blandine who’s kind of more visible than she can even handle, but both of them are kind of brutally visible and invisible. I think, like both states bring both women into the same place, which is that they both feel essentially dehumanized about their surroundings.
B&N: And Joan has a really hard time standing up for herself. When we first meet her, she’s got a supervisor saying, well, you should have deleted this comment, why did you not delete this comment a child, a former child actor has died. And someone has jumped on to the obituary to leave a rather pointed comment in all caps. And the supervisor is not being good about this. And Jen said, well, the person who left the comment, I deleted it, and then they emailed me. And it’s almost like she has forgotten how to connect with people because she’s so isolated.
TG: Yeah. I think, all the characters in this novel are fairly lonely. But I think for for Joan, her loneliness is unmediated. She only has a few interactions throughout the novel, and they’re all with people she rarely knows at all. I mean, she barely knows. And so I think it was interesting for me to write a character. I mean, I just kind of fell in love with her on the first page when she was struggling so hard to even have this very basic interaction with her boss, when she kind of collapses into stuttering, she almost has an anxiety attack during this consultation. And I just wanted to protect her. And in many ways, you don’t want to develop overly sentimental feelings by your character. But as soon as she came to me, I just wanted to care for her. And I wanted to see what happens to her over the course of this week. I think maybe she represents a lot of the sort of both interpersonal and structural failings of her city.
B&N: You do a lot with very small details for all of your characters. I mean, Blandine and her apartment mates, and there gonna be other people we’ll get to in the story. But one of the things that stuck with me about Joan too, is that she has an aunt who’s sending her presents. And Joan clearly wants to connect with us on and they’re not things she wants. It’s not the point. Everyone has an elderly aunt, we all have people in our lives who send us stuff and you send a thank you note. And Joan, really kind of sikes herself out of sending a thank you note, she’s like, well, I don’t know what to say. And then it’s been too long and everything. Like her aunt doesn’t care, she just send a note, you can send a note three years later, she won’t care, just send the note. It doesn’t have to say anything beyond thank you so much have an end just that moment where she can’t even connect with someone she’s known for quite a long time. And she’s having a hard time. It’s just, it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking that she can’t figure out how to fit someplace.
TG: This is the positive feedback loop of solitude, I think, the longer you go without connecting to anyone, the harder it becomes. And you see that pretty amplified in Joan, who was we kind of learned later in the book, an only child, she had to take care of both of her parents as they died. And you know, without any kind of intergenerational wealth, without any money of her own. And in many ways, she’s been trapped in her current life by the financial debt that she’s been saddled with, from caring for her parents. And so I’ve definitely, I mean, even just in little weeks of my life where I’ve gone without, without interacting with people, I always know that when I do go out into the world and even have an interaction with like a cashier at a cafe, I I find it so difficult to interact with people. Normally I feel like I’m blinking at the wrong times. I feel like I don’t know when to speak when not to speak. And so even though that trade is really amplified in Joan, it was something that I think I’ve definitely experienced and I know others have as well.
B&N: You grew up in South Bend, Indiana. And Vacca Vale is based, you know, let’s call it inspired by South Bend, Indiana. Would you describe South Bend as you knew it from childhood for people who have not been there?
TG: Yeah. So South Bend is sort of famously home to the University of Notre Dame. I mean, I don’t know how famous that is, but it is what it’s known for now. It used to be home to Studebaker automobiles, which was a one point, the largest car manufacturing facility in America, and then it closed in the 1960s. And so the town used to have these two economies that were both bringing, you know, great prosperity to it, but the car manufacturing company was was far and by far is way more prosperous than the university was. And so at the time, and I think it was open for about 100 years, it was an enormous source of talent identity, not to mention revenue. And then when it closed in the 60s, of course, some people could transition to other jobs. But there were whole swaths of the population that got left behind and worse and more orphan for generations. And so now, and one of the reasons I didn’t set back a bell just in South Bend was because, in part, this was an experiment to imagine what would happen if the university hadn’t been there to absorb the economic shock, because even with the university there, I mean, I grew up in a town where, I grew up in a neighborhood where about half the people were associated with the university. And then half the people had been there for generations. And, and we lived so close together. And yet everyone in this neighborhood, I had a completely different hands dealt at birth, and very different access to resources, educational resources, financial resources, and then other forms of social protection. And so I think from birth onward, it was just having close relationships within my neighborhood, to me that there was no such thing as a meritocracy, and that there were these structures that were failing a huge number of people in, in this region and their cities that are so incredibly similar, like Flint, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, Youngstown, Ohio, where there weren’t other economies that arrived.
B&N: Did you have to leave South Bend in order to be able to write about it the way you do?
TG: That was absolutely my experience, I think I had tried a little bit to write about my hometown, by the time I was in college, but I did not have enough distance, I was losing the forest for the trees. And I also think I needed to develop enough distance to experience the tenderness for once, my hometown, I think when you’re immersed in a place that you want to leave, it’s really hard to feel the to notice the beauty and the kindness, and all that makes the place, a place that you’re attached to as well. And so when I left, I could suddenly see it. Clearly not just, you know, my awareness of the kind of economic pain, I think heightened when I left, but also my awareness of the things that are worth saving and protecting there, those also heightened.
B&N: What’s been the biggest change that you’ve seen in the community and something that you used, I suspect, I know the answer to this, but something that you used in The Rabbit Hutch, because it does feel like Vacca Vale is very much alive, on the page for you that you know, where you turn right to get to x thing and where you turn left, and where you have to take and do a u-turn. And it feels like you know this landscape really, really well. And I’m not saying itself and certainly not. But that emotional terrain, that emotional landscape. What have you taken away?
TG: I think growing up the landscape seemed quite brutal to me, I think the sort of pain that I witnessed in other people, and then even in my own household, the kind of economic strain that was just everywhere you looked was also visible in the landscape. It was visible in vacant factories, and, you know, these completely unnatural mono crops of corn and soybeans that surrounded our, the outskirts of the town. And that downtown was actually I mean, my house was pretty close to downtown. And it was this kind of crumbling, like relic of the past because so many of the buildings had been constructed in the time of prosperity. And they were the only buildings I ever saw that had some kind of real beauty invested in their architecture. And yet they were mostly abandoned for me that yeah, the kind of emotional textures, the psychological textures. And the economic textures in my town were inseparable from the landscape itself. So when I was thinking back on images that had struck me and you know, there’s a there’s a river in my town, which I put in the in Vacca Vale as well, that’s flooding more every year, thanks to climate change, and, and also the river is completely polluted. I think this is a town that has had in American towns, at least beauty is kind of the first thing to go. And because it’s not utilitarian, of course, there’s no economic incentive to put it in. But I think that that makes an enormous difference in terms of what you think is possible in your landscape and how trapped you feel in a place.
B&N: You know, as you were speaking, I was suddenly thinking of William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, which includes a novel Iron Wade, which I mean obviously set in the in the 20s and 30s. But that kind of ferocious understanding of a place that has seen better days. But still has a community that like blending and like some of the other characters. They don’t want to leave its home, how do you leave, you can’t leave home, you got to figure out how to save it. And she has a very punk rock response. Early in the book, we meet her when she does something to upset the balance of power a little bit at a very fancy dinner. And I just I, as you can tell, I was laughing when I read that too, because I was like, okay, Who is this kid? What is she up to? But she’s trying to fight gentrification almost on her own? Yeah, it’s a lot for an 18 year old.
TG: Right? I mean, I think that her kind of renegade wonkiness of her activism is really a testament to the ways that the structures have failed her, I think she knows that there’s no way to go through the systems to incite change at this point. And everything’s kind of rigged against her, her community. And there used to be a very long chapter that I took out of her kind of at a community meeting, one of these development meetings, before the last meeting before the developers go forward with the management of the valley. And you get a sort of speech that she’s written out. But when the developer calls on her and says, We haven’t heard from you, but I’ve noticed you at a lot of our meetings, do you have anything to contribute? She doesn’t say anything because she looks and she sees a roomful of white men from other cities that and she just knows there’s no way that whatever I say is going to make a difference right now. And so she takes this really a peculiar route, I think, because she feels that she has no other choice.
B&N: She is an incredibly unique voice. And part of that voice comes from something that I had. Okay, my experience of sort of religious anything comes from literature. So you know, there’s Ron Hansen’s Marriott, next to see there is The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott and Matrix by Lauren Groff, which really, really, every time I talk about this book, I’m like, Lauren, made me care about nuns in the 12th century, like, I didn’t really know about Hildegard. There’s a lot of Hildegard in this book. And you have in previous interviews also said, Well, I wanted to be a mystic when I was a child, and I want to bring all of this in. And I’m not certainly you know, we know Blandine is relatable, but not you. This is not auto fiction, but it is clearly something you have been thinking about for a really long time. And it’s a really interesting tact to take this sort of technically martyred apice, who was a mystic.
TG: Her namesake was martyred.
B&N: I sorry. She died of essentially old age. How did we get here? Like, how can we can just please talk about this?
TG: Well, probably when one thing that’s very relevant here is that my mother was in a convent in her 20s. And my father had really seriously considered the priesthood at one point. So Catholicism was not just something that was in my community in my schools. I mean, I didn’t go to a non Catholic school until graduate school, but it was in my household, it was the root of every single action. And so, I think my parents really did a good job of raising us to believe I mean, none of my brothers are practicing Catholics anymore, but my parents still are. And I think that they always raised us to think that we happen to be Catholics, because that’s kind of what our ancestors happened to be. It’s the one that we happen to be offered. But also that all religions, sort of, I mean, all major religions were kind of all oriented toward the good and the world, and that that was ultimate and toward human justice. And so I think my parents had this kind of a much more, even now, like a much more relatable approach to Catholicism than a lot of people in my town and certainly, like a lot of my religion teachers did. My parents were really interested in the social justice aspect of Catholicism. My mother’s Catholicism is also really driven by signs and wonders and visions and miracles and mystics. And so I think growing up with, she has a lot of kind of glimmering, inexplicable stories on her side of the family, especially among the women of her family, that have to do with visitations from saints and prophecies and things like that. And so I don’t know what to do with those narratives now, but growing up among them, made that world the world of the kind of the transcendent seem not just real to me, but accessible. It seemed like Like anyone could access it at any time, and that if you could access this kind of otherworldly union with the divine, why not go for it. And as a child I was a really, like many writers, a very sensitive and anxious kid. And I think the idea of sort of retreating into my mind, which had caused me so much anxiety in order to find peace, transcendence, bliss that was extremely appealing to me.
B&N: There’s a young mother, that we meet in The Rabbit Hutch. And I really hope you get enough credit for being as funny as you are, because she thinks her baby’s eyes are freaky. She’s afraid of her newborn baby’s eyes, which is one of those details where you’re like, Okay, where’s this going? Sorry. I promise I will stop laughing at some point, because I do have a question here. But there’s another mom in the book, this former child actress, oh, Elsie. Elsie, and I love the idea that she’s on this television show. But mom who’s afraid hope, who’s afraid of her baby is watching on live because it’s very, it’s soothing to her. She’s watched every episode 1000 times she knows every line of every piece of dialogue. Elsie is not much of a mom, she still represents the American Dream for so many people, including hope, who’s really having a rough go of it, even though I’m making fun of that lovely detail of being afraid of her baby’s eyes. But Elsie’s son, Moses, is a great character. He is really a piece of work, but in a good way. But their relationship is a different way of talking about class. It’s a different way of talking about American history, it’s a different way of talking about motherhood. Moses actually has a moment with a priest in a church. So where did Elsie come from? Where did Moses come from? How did you know they were going to be part of this?
TG: This novel was making me think about America in pretty explicit terms, and the kinds of promises that are sold to people even though most of my almost all of my characters live in the same housing complex in the same town. I thought, there is some other world that they are connected to, which is this world of narratives Hollywood, and that is kind of manufacturing American dreams, and in selling it to these people to, you know, to often people who have no access to, to those kinds of resources or lifestyles. And so I think in Elsie gave me a chance to think more expansively about the extraction economy, not just as it destroys landscapes and towns and economies, but how could it destroy an individual who’s actually benefited from it enormously. She’s acquired fame and wealth at a very young age. But she also was a woman who was, you know, famous in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And so she was vulnerable to pretty atrocious sexism as well. All of these forces together kind of have created a narcissistic monster, who’s also I think, really likable, and in some ways, I mean, I was kind of rooting for her. And every time she she did something terribly as a mother, I kind of I understood it, I couldn’t have written her to be that bad of a parent, unless I understood why, the forces that were acting upon her, I think she’s someone who felt somewhat forced into motherhood, even though she knew she wasn’t physically forced into it. It simply didn’t come to her. That’s what she says at one point to her son, like motherhood just has never come to me. I was interested too in what kinds of intergenerational consequences of this essentially abuse by fame, abuse by wealth, what does that look like? And then Moses is somewhere where we can see that.
B&N: The Rabbit Hutch started as your thesis at grad school, right? That’s right. Okay. You were at NYU, studying creative writing. You’re living in Brooklyn, you’re spending a lot of time in Prospect Park. None of this is quite South Bend, Indiana. Can we talk about how you sat down? And yes, you had to leave South Bend to sort of start writing about the Midwest and everything else. But how did The Rabbit Hutch start as your thesis? How did it turn into what we’re reading now?
TG: Well, I actually wrote hundreds of pages that I ended up throwing away first of different projects as you do when you’re young. And so I think by the time I started The Rabbit Hutch, I really felt free to write what I wanted to write because I knew that I could just, I could shelve it like I did with all the other projects that didn’t end up going anywhere. And so I think that that freedom gave me an opportunity to be kind of uncompromising in my tastes, especially the more peculiar senses of humor. or like just character directions that I wanted to go in. And, my advisor was Rick Moody. And he was the person who also was my worship leader at the time when I first started writing this, and he had not been, you know, particularly supportive of the other things I had been writing, which were really overwritten. It was all about the language, and they’re all very somber. And then this one, he encouraged me to keep with it, to stay with it, and stick with it for my thesis. And I think he also discouraged me from finishing a full draft of it before I graduated, because he knew that I would be tempted to rush it. And you know, there’s a lot of momentum. And if you’re meeting with agents, you think I gotta have a novel right now, and, and he said, No, just take any job. And keep working on this. And I’m really grateful for that advice, because otherwise, I would have rushed it. And I don’t think it would have turned into thing it turned into. But I think one of the really important things about all the pages that I threw away was that they taught me that I was really interested in the Rust Belt, that I was really interested in polyphonic narratives, I just kept being drawn to those things. And I was really interested in, in young female protagonists, who sort of define themselves by their, rather than anything else. It took me five years after the program to finish this, working on it and working on it. And I thought, when I finished the draft, I just thought, Okay, I don’t think I can do anything more with this. I think I revised it 600 times at that point. But I also had been really discouraged, I think, by this submission process of short stories, etc. And I just thought, no one’s gonna want to read this. It’s too strange. I’m having trouble finding a place in the market in my mind for this. So maybe this isn’t. So I printed it out really nicely. And I found it at FedEx, and he put it on my shelf. And I started writing next novel. And really only when my friend encouraged me to submit it, did I, I just did it in one weekend and kind of closed my eyes the whole time and sent out some emails. But I really grateful that I had that experience of writing it without any assumption of publication. I think it was the only way to have written this particular novel.
B&N: I have to say to that hearing you say that previous projects had been overwritten, the language of The Rabbit Hutch is so spectacularly clear. And I’ve read very quickly, but I cannot believe how quickly the story moved. For me, not only did I not want to put down The Rabbit Hutch and leave these characters, even when I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. There are a couple of moments where I was like, we’re the narrative tension. And the quality of the prose and the characters and everything else, you are doing this kind of high wire act that not everyone can do. And I’m wondering, are you a linear writer? Like, how many drafts did you take to get here because this is beautiful. But this is not first draft territory?
TG: Well, thank you. The selves that, you know, revise this 1000 times really appreciate that I really grateful for you, to you for saying that. Yeah, I’m not a linear writer. And the structure of this novel changed a lot and hundreds of pages got cut. And of course, all the sentences are, you know, I don’t think there’s a single sentence that was there from beginning to end. I was just reading A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, I don’t know. One of the lines I really loved. It was a kind of argument for incremental revision. And he says, The benefit of that is that you you bring every single self to the text over time you bring, you know, the self that just had that great conversation, who just learned this thing? Who has a terrible day who’s really hungry, you know? And I think that incremental revision for me was, that was absolutely my experience of it, it was it was the sum of all those selves was much better at revising, then, like maybe two or three major revisions would have been. So one thing with the structure was that I had, what I had about 150 pages of it. I had this professor John Freeman, who later became my editor, who asked us for our final projects to create a map of our work. And so we had, I decided to put it on, put the kind of major events and major ideas on note cards and then put them around my room in Brooklyn. And so I lived within this kind of the four walls of my book for about a year and I kept moving them around and everything like that. And so it was this kind of mad detective display, but that really helped me think through what was necessary, what wasn’t necessary. How are these threads going to collide? Because of course, a lot of the collisions are not utilitarian. They don’t have like an obvious plot function always but they do It always it forced me to make sure nothing was there by accident to make sure that you know everything kind of ran like a Swiss watch as much as I could.
B&N: So that helps a lot. The Rabbit Hutch is also very much a hopeful book, there is an act of violence that happens that I think some readers will find surprising. It does feel very organic and very inevitable. I think what you just described is the structure of real life. I mean, if you’re telling a story to someone that you’re sitting next to at dinner, you’re not telling them everything, you’re telling them the points that matter, you’re telling them the story. And I think the fact that all of your characters and how they interact, and they’re telling the pieces of the story, even the ones who are just leaving comments on Joan’s website, on obituaries. Everyone is telling a story, whether they know it or not, so we know who you are as a writer, and an editor. But who are you as a reader? Who are some of your literary influences and who have you been reading lately and recommended?
TG: Hmm. Well, I think I’m a pretty omnivorous reader. And I always have been since childhood, but three of my favorite writers of all time, and I can’t believe I get to share an era with them are Anne Carson, Claudia Rankin and Maggie Nelson. I just think that they’re doing some of the most exciting work today in the English language, at least, I encountered all of those writers in my early 20s. And they just completely bulldozed my preconceptions about what a book needed to do. All of them are playing with forum in a way that’s also extremely intentional. And there’s just a lot of intellectual firepower behind each of their books. And I think all of them are engaged with Well, you see this more explicitly in Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankin’s work, really engaged with issues with matters of social justice, marrying those with their art. So I love those writers I really love a lot of contemporary poetry. I think that I that’s where I usually go for inspiration. Ocean Vuong, of course, Morgan Parker, Yousef Coleman yaka, Robin Coste Lewis and Tracy K. Smith. The books that I was reading when I was writing this book were a lot of polyphonic contemporary fiction like NW by Zadie Smith and obviously Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan. Great House by Nicole Krauss. And then I read Middlemarch as I was revising it, and I had never read it before. And that was really, really helpful to me as well. But then, you know, in college, I think I have been reading mostly contemporary work since I graduated college because I think before then I was mostly, I was an English major, and I was reading very little contemporary work. But people who meant a lot to me, then were , you know, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, etc. And so now I’m reading, I just started Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector. I love her work so much. And I’m always surprised by it. And then I just finished a poetry collection by Tibco called Pocahontas. And, that’s beautiful. I can highly recommend both.
B&N:What do you miss most about The Rabbit Hutch? What do you miss most about the world and the characters and the time you spent creating all of it.
TG: I think Blandine was someone that I felt so deeply connected to. And , I’m so inspired by I mean, I really rarely write a character, who I feel that I can kind of look up to. I don’t know if that’s like a very helpful dynamic between a writer and a character. But she was in many ways, everything that I felt I couldn’t be she had this kind of courage, both a physical and I think psychological resilience and courage that I don’t think I’ve ever had. She also she never succumbs to self pity, and she was just such a fun mind to write because I always thought of her as more intelligent than I am. So she was she really challenged me to, to think in, in really different thought patterns. But at the same time, she also shared a lot of my obsessions and sort of tics and and so I just felt like she was this. This person who maybe had, you know, maybe like a relative, that’s that’s shares your native language and you can really, you can really know each other on a level you can’t know anyone else, but also someone that’s sufficiently different from you to challenge you and refresh your worldview. So I miss her.
B&N: I wasn’t thrilled when the book ended. It’s like, Wait a minute. How are we done? Your brother illustrated a chapter of the novel and I think it’s so great, but can we talk about how that came about? Because that is not something you find in a lot of debut novels and it it absolutely works. It is exactly where it needs to be in the book. But how do we bring your brother and his work into this.
TG: Yeah. So fortunately, Knopf was extremely amenable to that request right away. They’re just kind of like, okay, sure. Here’s the timeline. That was part of the vision for the novel from the very beginning. And actually, I remember when I finished it as my thesis, I went out to dinner with my parents and my brother, Nick, who did the illustrations. And he was getting really excited about all the kinds of multi like the he thought maybe we should make like a YouTube video and put it on YouTube of violence that like is in the book and make a link and whatever. He is a visual artist and musician. And so he’s someone who’s kind of very creatively expansive in his thinking. But when I finally asked him to do the illustrations, I’d always had in mind a kind of literal interpretation of the events at hand that that are being described in this. And I always knew either from the perspective of a character named Todd, and I thought of this as his form of expression, you learn early on that Todd really likes to draw, he’s always making comics. And this is kind of his one. He’s a pretty closed off character, but this is his one form of self expression. And so when I started describing what I had envisioned to Nick, he said, Okay, and then he listened to me that will, he suggested making a more figurative interpretation of the events at hand. And when he started describing what he had in mind, it was just it was one of those ideas that was just so immediately better than the other one. And I was so much more interested as we went through several drafts of it, you know, he gave me mock ups of all the drawings, and we went in, we tweaked things together, he’s very easy to collaborate with. And, and yeah, and then he gave me the final draft, and I was just, I still, when I open the book, I just get so it gives me such a joy to see them there. Because I think they add this kind of, yeah, multi textual, dimensional, you know, multi dimensional aspect to the novel.
B&N: You have written poetry in the past, you’ve written a play. I know I mentioned both of those before the next novel comes out in 2023. Is it related to The Rabbit Hutch, or is it its own new, fabulous story?
TG: Well, it’s very much in progress. It’s due in February. I have the first section of it written and it the first section does take place in a town that is like mine. And it does follow a working class man and especially his relationship with his father, after he survived a pretty terrible attack. And so there are overlaps. They’re definitely not in the same. They’re not it’s not a sequel, but I think their their orbit, this novel is orbiting kind of similar obsessions and ideas. I’m thinking a lot about kind of toxic post industrial nostalgia, and especially how that relates to Yeah, the ways that we think about our own pasts. And so the next part of the book, though, is not going to be set in Indiana, it’s going to be set somewhere else.
B&N: Okay, I still really, really, really, really want to read the next book. Do we have a title yet? Did I see that it was called Honey Dew?
TG: It is called Honey Dew. These publishing dates are not always set in stone. It might be published in 2024. But, it’s due in February.
B&N: Okay, we can be patient. That’s okay. We can read The Rabbit Hutch more than once. It’s okay. But I am excited to see where you go. Next one. I love this idea of you having sort of themes that you want to sort of stay with I think that’s and I think we need to spend more time in the Rust Belt and I think we need to spend more time in the Midwest and yeah, I’ll follow you anywhere. So just whatever the next book is, whatever the next book is. Tess Gunty, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The Rabbit Hutch is our August 2022 Discover pick. Thanks again.
TG: Thank you