This week’s story, “The Chartreuse,” is about a woman who has become obsessed with a dress. She first saw the design in a boutique in New York and has since scoured the web for it, buying many versions in different colors and lengths. When did you first start thinking about using this conceit as the basis for a story?
I love dresses. Though they’re just pieces of cut cloth, they feel charged with a kind of fairy-tale magic. They represent the possibility of transformation in everyday life. They can make you feel amazing and powerful, the best drag. But as anyone who’s contended with an unbecoming dress in a fitting room knows, they’re also potential spaces for profound disappointment, even existential crisis and dread. The wrong shape, the wrong color can make you feel wretched. It can reveal things about yourself you’d rather not see. For me, putting on a dress can absolutely transform how I feel about myself (and the world) in any given direction—horrific or wondrous. It’s that inherent potential of a dress, the question mark of it, that drew me as a narrative engine. This is a story about someone who’s addicted not only to dresses, but to the wild-card nature of their possibility. There’s a British horror movie I love called “In Fabric” about a red dress that kills whoever wears it. It looks very beautiful on.
The story describes the moment after she’s found a new hue—chartreuse—and has decided to buy the piece: “One finger, a few clicks, that was all she had to do. Add to cart. Checkout. Then Google would know her, the machine would let her. . . . Always a hesitation with the credit-card click, that was part of it. The held breath, the raised finger, the uncertainty, a sense of underlying stakes.” How important was it to describe that hesitation and then the point at which she acts?
Oh, it’s essential. This is a story that explores addiction and I wanted to capture that headspace as viscerally as possible. Her hesitation gives the reader a sense of what’s at stake and a sense, too, that she is somewhat aware of those stakes. She knows she shouldn’t do this. But knowing something and doing it are of course two different countries. One can know and know and know. One can be very reasonable. But reason alone can’t save you in the end. Not when you’re in the grip of addiction, as she is. There’s a horror in that that I wanted to activate early on, so that the story quickly begins operating in a place outside of reason. And, surely, we’ve all been there.
We gradually learn that she’s left New York and is now living in a shabby apartment complex in the ritzy coastal community of La Jolla, in San Diego. Why did you want to set the story here? Does the apartment building represent a different world within La Jolla?
I love La Jolla. It’s jaw droppingly beautiful but, like all beautiful things, it also has a shadowy side. I love the idea of the sketchy apartment building in an otherwise ritzy setting. That something dark, disturbed, or rotted lurks in a place of light. It’s very California gothic in that way. Certainly, there’s also an aspirational element to the setting that’s crucial to the engine of the story and to her desire for the dress. The narrator doesn’t feel she belongs here, she’s out of place, yet she stays. The dress becomes a passport to the possibility of assimilating and perhaps that accounts for the urgency of her desire. We learn that the online model for the dress is blonde and pale and that our narrator is neither. So there’s some magical thinking in her purchase. She longs not only to fit in but to become the kind of person she imagines belongs here. This longing manifests as dress obsession. It’s part of the pantomime of the glamorous life she’s telling herself she’s living.
She’s been tracking her FedEx delivery online, waiting for its arrival, but the parcel never seems to reach her. When did the idea of making FedEx so central to the story’s plot come to you?
The story is really being dispatched from deep within her consciousness which makes it feel quite surreal. To balance this storytelling style, I wanted the plot to hinge on something very familiar. A woman waiting for a dress to be delivered from FedEx feels like a very everyday, even banal setup. But because of what it means for this woman, and because of the singularity of her obsession, waiting for it becomes a hallucinatory experience, even a spiritual reckoning. There is also a slightly uncanny aspect to FedEx that felt fitting. I never knew that there was a FedEx and a FedEx Express until I wrote the story.
The woman seems to be experiencing a particularly solitary period. Her mother and uncle have died, she has no friends in La Jolla, and the only people she interacts with, excepting any FedEx workers, are her neighbors, most notably “Number Twelve,” whom she suspects is both a dealer and a user. Why is she so fearful of Number Twelve?
Neighbors can be frightening, especially when you live alone in a building with thin walls. They come to know you in ways you may not want to be known. I think Number Twelve represents the horror of a certain kind of neighbor, at least for an introvert like my narrator (and myself): the neighbor who wants to engage, the one who watches you, who feels compelled to comment on how you look. For someone like my narrator, who has a lot to hide, but who also just wants to be left alone, this is a nightmare. But I do think her fear of Number Twelve comes from her own desires as well. Number Twelve is a drug dealer, and my narrator is deeply vulnerable to addiction, to what she has to offer.
In place of conversations with others, she’s mainly talking to herself, or, sometimes, with the imagined presences of her mother and uncle or a friend she’s conjured up. Could you hear all those different voices in her head as you were writing? How important are italics to the story’s construction?
Italics are crucial to the story’s style and to my narratives more broadly. I really love dispatching from deep within a narrator’s head, playing with the sort of self-talk we all engage in. And there are usually layers to that self-talk, different imagined audiences, etc. In this story, my narrator is quite alone, so her self-talk is particularly rich and varied. Sometimes it’s directed inward, and sometimes outward—at some imagined loved one, or at the flowers or the water, even a sidewalk or a door. Sometimes it’s self-aware, sometimes it isn’t. The italics help me create those different layers of consciousness. They also heighten our sense of her isolation and this strange mental place to which her obsession has brought her.
We eventually discover that she was a university professor who came to California for a conference on the movement of dread in literature and then, drawn by a light she glimpsed on the ocean, never leaves. Is the light a real phenomenon in San Diego? How seductive or dangerous do you want it to seem in the story?
Light on the water in San Diego is indeed a wonder. Certainly, it’s a wonder to me. And the green flash, which is mentioned in the story, is a real phenomenon—San Diego is known for sightings. The light is meant to be deeply seductive in the story, but, like all forms of enchantment, it’s also dangerous. Enchantment, though it sounds so lovely, ultimately holds you captive. In that way, it can become a sinister force, as it is in this story. The beautiful light is captivating her in a place where her mind is unravelling.
At one point, when she’s talking to one of the FedEx deliverymen, she slips and asks about the “dread” rather than her dress. The story is, in many ways, one of dread—a contemporary gothic tale. What should we fear more for her? The light on the water, or the hungry mirror in her closet, or what Number Twelve has to offer behind her door?
That’s an amazing question. The hungry mirror in her closet, the light on the water, and Number Twelve’s door all inspire dread in the narrator because they are all portals to the same place of spiritual reckoning (or oblivion). Mirrors are, after all, doors. And water, as the narrator observes, was the first mirror of the world.
You have a new novel coming out in September, “We Love You, Bunny.” It’s a sequel to your 2019 work, “Bunny,” which was set in an all-female writer’s workshop where the participants call one another “Bunny.” As Hermione Hoby wrote in a review, it’s a novel in which you “winkingly deployed the great ruse of the supernatural.” Why did you want to return to the world of the Bunnies?
Writing “Bunny” was one of the most joyous experiences of my creative life, and when it was over, I missed the world of it profoundly. This happens to me with all of my fiction, but “Bunny” never left me. Perhaps because it was the first time I used the supernatural to depict a very real psychological state (the state of the outsider), and to explore the relationship between loneliness and the imagination—a relationship that runs through all of my work, including this story. But I think I ultimately returned to “Bunny” because of my readers. Their response to the book was so incredibly rich and generative that it kept the story alive in my head. I felt myself getting drawn back to the Bunnies. So when they called to me from the attic, I answered. ♦
