The Fear that You’re Broken in Some Way: Susan Henderson

Susan Henderson is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Creative Writing program and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her debut novel, UP FROM THE BLUE (HarperCollins, 2010), has been selected as a Great Group Reads pick (by the Women’s National Book Association), an outstanding softcover release (by NPR), a Best Bets Pick (by BookReporter), Editor’s Pick (by BookMovement), Editor’s Choice (by BookBrowse), a Prime Reads pick (by HarperCollins New Zealand), and a Top 10 of 2010 (by Robert Gray of Shelf Awareness). It’s currently being translated into Dutch and Norwegian. Susan is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award, and her work has — twice — been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She blogs at LitPark.com and The Nervous Breakdown. Her husband is a costume designer, filmmaker, and tenured drama professor. They live in NY with their two boys.

Michael Kimball: UP FROM THE BLUE starts with a frame, the narrator Tillie about to give birth to her first child. That frame accounts for just over 10% of the pages in the novel. That is, most of the novel is narrated by the wonderful 8-year-old Tillie, who tells the difficult story of one year in their troubled family. I’m wondering if that frame was part of the initial conception of the novel or if the idea for it came later.

Susan Henderson: When I submitted the book, 100% of it was narrated by 8-year-old Tillie. My editor at HarperCollins, Brittany Hamblin, was the one who suggested a frame story. She thought, and I think rightly so, that there were questions the reader might have that Tillie was either too young to understand or too young to communicate. She told me the specific questions she had wanted more insight into, but after that she left it to me to decide who would narrate the frame story and what the plot of that frame story would be.

Even though I said yes right away, I had no idea what I was going to write. In fact, the first thing I did was Google the term “frame story” because I didn’t actually know what one was. In essence, it means to pan out from the story and look at it from another angle, usually from some time in the future. I watched movies like Titanic, Wuthering Heights, and Crazy in Alabama to understand the rhythm of them. And all the while, I kept my editor’s questions in the front of my mind, and just let my subconscious work with it. A few days later, I realized what a relief it would be to move some of the heavier content into the frame story so my narrator could speak about it with more insight and a grownup voice. I was surprised how much I’d wanted to say, and how emotionally freeing it was to be able to do that.

Though the hospital scene and the pregnancy had never been a part of the original story, it allowed me to go to the heart of where childhood trauma continues into adulthood—the fear that you’re broken in some way, that you’ll be a bad mother, that you’ll always feel like a child when you return to those old relationships. I was also able to tackle some of the issues that happen to trauma survivors—a tendency to develop mysterious sicknesses that no one can find physical evidence of, or to have your concerns written off because you aren’t quite put together. I really enjoyed this extra writing step, but the heart of the story, and the one I absolutely had to tell, was from the child’s perspective.

Kimball: The ending is absolutely crushing, but there is a kind of comfort in knowing that the adult narrator has come through. The frame makes 8-year-old Tillie’s narrative more moving and somehow leaves her with a kind of innocence as well. I feel as if the voice for the adult Tillie must sound something like you (I hear it in your emails), but I’m wondering how you found the voice for 8-year-old Tillie, which is infused with a tremendous tenderness.

Henderson: Tillie’s voice just kind of piped into my head. Sometimes I felt like I was just moving the pen and trying to capture what she was saying without missing anything. Tillie is a very observant kid but kind of in a bubble. She might notice something stuck to her shoelace but fail to notice the conversation going on while she’s focused on that shoelace, and so writing her character was about stepping into a very vibrant but limited world.

That’s an interesting observation you make about the tenderness. There’s something about Tillie where her playful side or her incessant hope and belief in people rubs up against reality, and I think that’s where she struck a real nerve with me. In some ways, that’s what was nice about writing the final chapter in a grownup voice, because it allowed grown Tillie to stand beside the child Tillie and bear witness to her story.

As far as the adult voice goes, the writer Mark Childress gave me some advice based on his experience of writing frame stories for three of his novels (always at the request of the publisher). He said to make sure the narration of the frame story was similar enough to the rest of the story that it didn’t jar the reader. So I took the same basic voice, imagined it as being more guarded, showing life’s wear and tear, but also having more insight.

Kimball: UP FROM THE BLUE is one of the best treatments of depression that I have ever read in a novel and I think it’s the voice of 8-year-old Tillie that makes this possible, her innocent and hopeful descriptions of what is happening. I’m trying to frame a question here, but not exactly sure what it is. Could you maybe just talk about the novel’s portrayal of depression? It’s handled with such care.

Henderson: Thank you. I really appreciate that, especially coming from a writer I admire so much.

I had a lot of input early on from people who tried to talk me out of writing from a child’s point of view. But there’s something fundamentally different, in my mind, about how trauma affects children. I think it actually changes a kid’s wiring. And the trauma is processed without the words needed to describe it or the life experience needed to give it perspective.

So you’re seeing the mother’s debilitating depression through the eyes of a daughter who has very few expectations about how things ought to be, who likes to crawl under the sour-smelling sheets with her and relishes having someone in her life who shows emotion. I don’t think you can reduce this time in her life to anything so simple as a bad year because the trauma is so intertwined with laughter, tenderness, important friendships and crushes.

But this eight-year-old girl is also getting a taste of depression herself, the way it sneaks into a person. She’s starting to lose chunks of time and sometimes can’t make her body move because it simply feels too heavy. She’s also learning the careful social dance of keeping secrets and hiding her emotions.

What I wanted to do with this book was to walk Tillie through the grieving process and see if I might find something hopeful on the other side of it. Her story is like a lot of people’s, in the sense that the trauma has no clear end—there’s no way to change the outcome, there’s no one to confront. And yet, she isn’t chained to that sorrow or to repeating any family patterns. That doesn’t mean she’s come through this without some rough edges, but I feel like the ending reaches for love and forgiveness and new beginnings.

Kimball: I’m really glad that you stuck with your instincts and wrote from a child’s point of view. The story of the novel couldn’t have been conveyed with the same wonder, charm, tenderness, innocence, etc.—and you still capture the things that an adult narrator can capture with the frame. I’m wondering, though, why people tried to talk you out of writing from a child’s point of view.

Henderson: There were lots of reasons, the first being that I’d have two choices—baby-talk or some super-precocious child we’d all grow to hate. But Tillie’s voice continued to pipe into my head with a real urgency to it, and I knew she was the one who wanted the reigns. The second warning people gave me was that I’d be limited in the breadth of the story I could tell. But I have a stubborn streak, and nothing inspires me like someone telling me what I can’t do. I loved the puzzle of figuring out how to tell a story from a child’s perspective without sacrificing the poetry that’s so important to me. And how to stay inside Tillie’s limited perspective and still give the readers more of the information they needed.

The final problem I was warned about, and the one that was not in my control, was that publishers might look at the age of the narrator and decide that this had to be a YA book, despite the rather adult story I wanted to tell. And I simply plowed ahead, knowing I might not sell the book at all. By this time, I felt truly haunted by this child who would wake me up in the middle of the night. It was like she was pleading with me to tell her story and to move her away from where she’d gotten stuck to someplace more hopeful.

Kimball: I’m always surprised when people don’t understand what can be gained from using a constraint like a child’s voice—so much voice and feeling if the material is handled well and follows its own internal logic. And we’re mostly well read enough at this point that the normal way of telling the story underwrites that originality of using a different voice. In a sense, both perspectives get conveyed.

For instance, there is a thing that you do in UP FROM THE BLUE that wouldn’t have been possible without 8-year-old Tillie’s voice (or something similar). After the family moves, young Tillie arrives in the house and her mother isn’t there. Tillie is given a flimsy explanation that is supposed to convince a child, but doesn’t quite. After some youthful detective work, Tillie finds her mother living in a room in the basement of the house and it isn’t entirely clear whether Tillie has actually found her mother in that room in the basement or whether Tillie imagines it as a kind of coping mechanism. Could you talk about how you handled that material and the effect that you were trying to create without, you know, giving it away?

Henderson: One of the unique things that happens to children, besides their young minds trying to process information without the benefit of life experience, is that people try to hide things from them or give them “comforting” answers. Sometimes this is done with the best of intentions and sometimes it isn’t, but the result is that what’s happening around them doesn’t match with their gut instincts. Someone may tell the child everything is fine and not to worry, but she senses the stress. So, as this happens to Tillie, she really enters a foggy state of reality, and she doesn’t know if the things she’s seeing and feeling are true. Add to that the things she knows about herself—that she’s a kid who regularly gets into trouble, and she’s a kid who’s comfortable with lying—and even if something is right in front of her eyes, she’s not at all sure if it’s real.

Kimball: I feel as if writing this novel must have brought you to a kind of personal catharsis and I wondering if parts of UP FROM THE BLUE are pulled from your own life? If they are, could you talk about that—the process of turning life into fiction and have you overcame any difficulties along the way in doing so?

Henderson: I didn’t set out to write my own story. I didn’t even set out to write a novel, not initially. I just felt flooded with images and with this child’s voice; and each time, I’d write the ideas down and then get back to my life. Some of the things I wrote down were true and others weren’t. The best stories pull from everything you know—your own life story, the things you’ve witnessed, the things you’ve learned in the news and in the books you’ve read—all of that becomes paint in the fiction writer’s pallet.

Once I realized these stray images were starting to tell a bigger story, my goal was to always seek out the emotional hot spot. That’s the truest place I know, whether you reach it through fiction or non-fiction—the place of insecurities, fears, grudges, and unexpressed love. For me, that’s the place I guard closely in real life but aim to struggle with on paper. So exposing that kind of emotional truth was a pretty vulnerable process but unbelievably freeing.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages and, in May 2011, Tyrant Books will release his novel Us (which El País calls “haunting and awesome … beautiful and intense”). He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, and the 510 Readings.