Life is Just Like This: An Interview with Kate Doyle
An Aquarius and a Cancer emote about the passage of time.
Mila Jaroniec: Tell me about Amsterdam. What made you move there? Do you miss New York? Does New York have symbolic weight for you, as it does for everyone?
Kate Doyle: I think it’s so fun talking about the trajectories of life, the circuitous ways people end up where they do. I moved to Amsterdam a year ago. My partner got a job there is the simple explanation, though that makes it sound like I followed him there. It was more collaborative than that, I wanted to go. There’s something about being in another country and how it makes the smallest things so fascinating—new brands of toothpaste in the grocery store, the smallest little differences from what you’ve otherwise known—that’s amazing for the creative brain. And Amsterdam has such a different pace of life than big cities in the US; there’s so much green space and water, and you bike everywhere so there’s less noise. I love it. I’m using some of the experience for my next book. I’m writing about being far away, at a distance from the life you had. And seeing, from a distance, the ways your own country is stumbling. Wondering if you’ll go back.
I do miss New York, though younger me would be utterly dismayed to learn I do now feel like “oh this is kind of too intense” when I visit now. But I do love to visit. I lived in Brooklyn for many years in my twenties. New York is where I found my community—I met so many other writers. We were all trying to figure out how to do this, and the camaraderie of that meant so much to me. The grief I felt when I realized it wouldn’t go on and on, when people started to move away, leave the city, get married, those feelings were the basis for the story you’re referencing, “Two Pisces Emote About the Passage of Time,” which has the line “New York has symbolic weight for me.” I had somehow thought we would all stay there forever.
MJ: There’s a lovely, brutal line in “Two Pisces Emote About the Passage of Time:” “Home is deserting me.” What is home for you? How do you know when you’re in it, and how do you know when it deserts you? In fiction, what does it mean to do justice to the concept of home?
KD: I think maybe home is feeling. And at its best that feeling seems like it could go on and on, though of course it can’t. But if feels safe and meaningful and good in such a way that you’d be happy for it to continue. One character in my book remembers feeling “home” feelings about an ex-boyfriend things didn’t work out with: I could always do this. Maybe that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the grief I felt about friends dispersing from New York—this good feeling going away, and the desperation of trying to hold on to the scraps. As I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve figured out how to cultivate the feeling more—that it doesn’t have to be such a happy accident as it felt to me in my New York years. At the time I was so afraid I would never feel it again.
I think maybe home is feeling. And at its best that feeling seems like it could go on and on, though of course it can’t. But if feels safe and meaningful and good in such a way that you’d be happy for it to continue.
But I think this book is a lot about characters who really feel their feelings, in a society that isn’t very kind to people who do that. What I wanted to do justice to was these characters’ emotional lives, because I think as young women they haven’t been told their feelings matter very much at all. A lot of people in the book tell them variations of life is just like this or you need to get over it. But when they allow themselves to keep obsessing over what obsesses them, to long for what they long for, they end up finding out something they needed to know. For the ones who do start to find a sense of home, I think it comes of trusting what they feel and allowing that to guide them.
MJ: The beginning is contained in the end, right? The endings of your stories are so sharp. They’re almost violent. It’s as if the stories are films playing on loop and we’re dropped in at specific points, then cut back out when the projectionist feels like it. They don’t really begin anywhere or end anywhere traditionally symbolic—it unifies the collection. How did you know this was the right structure?
KD: I don’t know if I knew exactly, in a thinking sense. I do believe in kind of feeling my way instinctively when I’m writing, I don’t outline or anything like that, so the endings always come from what feels true or potent. In some cases in was easy and in others it meant trying again and again, over the years, to arrive at the right place.
I was trying, in the structures of all these stories, to reflect how remembering feels and how we’re remembering all the time. Not so much how a story occurs, but how it lives in the mind, how it returns to us later.
The cutting-away feeling you’re talking about has to do, I think, with one of the book’s thematic preoccupations, which is just the human weirdness of living with your own memories. We all have to do it, so we accept it, but it’s so weird! You’re in this whole other moment of your life, thinking of something from last week or ten years ago or whatever. I was trying, in the structures of all these stories, to reflect how remembering feels and how we’re remembering all the time. Not so much how a story occurs, but how it lives in the mind, how it returns to us later.
One of the stories that feels like it has the kind of ending you’re describing is “I Figured We Were Doomed,” where the narrator has been dwelling on these lovely, meaningful memories of a relationship, and then the last line is “Anyway, it didn’t work out.” There’s no resolution to be had, she just has to close the door in her mind until the next time it opens.
MJ: Another unifying element I loved is the imagining of other lives, other realities, other outcomes, and the sort of resignation that takes over upon realizing that although our potential is technically limitless, in practice, our choices aren’t so varied. In “At the Time:” “...there is only what I chose and did not choose, so many open doors evaporating all around me.” In “Two Pisces:” “It’s vivid, mesmerizing, to consider other lives.” What is it about the early 20s that makes the possibility of other lives feel so attractive, but also somehow already out of reach?
KD: It's such a wild time of life. When I was 23 I remember reading that part in The Bell Jar with the figs and feeling so thrilled that this was a feeling other people had and wasn’t just something wrong with me. She’s imagining all these figs on different branches, and every fig is a different life, but she can’t bring herself to climb the tree because choosing certain branches to reach certain figs would mean giving up the others. “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing them meant losing all the rest.”
Your twenties are the first time that doing one thing doesn’t obviously lead to the next thing, doesn’t earn you some grade or course credit. The feelings of that period are so desperate—any mistake can feel like you’ve ruined your life.
If you’ve been in college, you’ve lived a very structured and organized life, and you’re probably immersed in certain narrow ways of thinking about the concepts of “merit” and “hard work.” Your twenties are the first time that doing one thing doesn’t obviously lead to the next thing, doesn’t earn you some grade or course credit. The feelings of that period are so desperate—any mistake can feel like you’ve ruined your life. So every crossroads or decision point feels enormous. I had a therapist in those years tell me, “There are no good choices or bad choices, just the thing you do choose.” And I had to repeat that to myself all the time.
When I was in my early twenties, I had to learn a whole new way to think and live and choose, which was quite an emotional process in part because I was very sad for my younger self. So in this book I wanted to speak to all the conflicting feelings in those years, and the intensity of those feelings. And how confusing it is to feel all that, while authority figures are saying to you calm down and life is just like this.
Even still, people sometimes say to me very casually, “Oh, these narrators are so dramatic.” Recently I had a very positive, absolutely lovely review, where the reviewer nevertheless called their problems “inconsequential” like that was a given, like it was an objective fact. I’m interested in why we’re so quick to tell people of that age, especially women, that their feelings are somehow illusory, that they aren’t important.
MJ: I felt so validated by the recurring imperative to cleanse and purge (“I hated to throw things away except that I loved it, the wild unspooling reckless release.”) Exactly me, until I realize I actually need half those things! In “Like a Cloud, Lighter Than Air,” the tarot reader recommends a physical cleanse as a gateway to a spiritual cleanse: “You have to get rid of the clutter…clean house…throw things away. Let go of dead weight. This is an essential practice.” She then pulls The Tower, which is always a shock to see but also a relief, because it’s a natural purgative. The Tower card says, Let go or be dragged. What difficult or “negative” card in the Tarot are you strangely happy to see when it shows up, and why?
KD: Ooh, well I’m excited to talk about that story with someone who knows tarot! That part of the book arose from an experience I really did have myself with a tarot reader. I had always been a person who saved mementos. And my mother loved to cleanse and purge and we would really fight over it—she would give things away and I’d be so upset. But I listened to that tarot reader when she told me I had to go home and literally let go of things. And I couldn’t believe how good it felt, releasing things that way. I did a huge letting-go and I do think it was fairly life-changing, and it remains an important thing I do periodically. And of course I had to do a lot of that when we moved to Amsterdam because we could only pack so much, and I couldn’t believe how much better everything felt at home once we started letting go of all these things we’d had stashed away in our little apartment.
But anyway, you’re asking about tarot and I’m off on a tangent. For exactly the reasons you’re describing here, I do love the Tower. And the Death card too—my sister always brings up the word “composting” in relation to that card, things breaking down to grow something new. I’m convinced the designer who did the cover of the book, which has nine paper cups with one of them crumpled up, was kind of getting at an eight of cups reversed energy. Leaving behind what’s broken and what doesn’t serve you, moving toward a simpler, more grounded way of living, which is nine of cups.
MJ: I really appreciated the writing workshop component of “Briefly,” mostly because I too share the shortcoming of “...my evident incapacity to state outright what any character actually desired.” It’s difficult to execute, but at the same time I think it’s too easy for the reader. It’s not just throwing them a bone—it’s digging up the graveyard. Clear desire is somewhat of a requirement in fiction, but I actually think it’s more interesting to have a character’s journey start and end beyond desire. The stories in I Meant It Once seem to suggest that too. What do you think about this inescapable demand, to craft meaningful narrative out of an escalating series of wants? What is there to be discovered by resisting it?
KD: I didn’t consciously set out to write against that rule, and it took a couple sharp readers, including my editor at Algonquin, to show me that that story needed to come last in the book. It has to because it works kind of like an ars poetica when it’s placed there, it’s saying: no story in this book has really followed these rules that this man is pronouncing to this young woman about what a narrative is, and how writing must happen, what makes a story valid or important.
I don’t think any more that clear desire is a requirement to tell a story. I’m more interested in being honest and exact about what characters feel, and what they notice. What that tells them about themselves and the world.
Having written this book, I don’t think any more that clear desire is a requirement to tell a story. I’m more interested in being honest and exact about what characters feel, and what they notice. What that tells them about themselves and the world. And yes, like you’re saying yourself here, I think a reader who pays attention to what a character feels and notices can see, perhaps, what that character wants, even if the character themself still doesn’t have words for it.
I’m interested in the way we tell stories to make sense of what happened. Sometimes we tell a story to ourselves again and again, not because we know what we wanted or what changed or what it meant, but because we still don’t, and because we don’t know, we can’t let it go. So we have to keep telling it as a way to keep trying to understand. That’s a story too.
MJ: Do you have a literary predecessor? Is there a writer no longer on the mortal coil whose torch you feel you’ve inherited?
KD: Joan Didion’s work gave me a lot very early on, at the time I was becoming serious about writing. One was the control of syntax, an interest in the pleasure of syntax and in the technical work of syntax. There was also a door that was opened for me in her work just by feeling everything I felt when I read “Goodbye to All That.” I remember reading it and being startled to learn it was written so many decades ago, because it felt so alive and contemporary. That’s a story about a young woman feeling lost in New York, which is what a lot of my stories are about too. And there’s not a plot so much as there’s powerful feeling—rapture, dread, malaise, loss. And those details…the gazpacho! The peach at the subway entrance. I suppose that essay worked for me as a permission to pay close attention to feelings and images, and see where that took me.
Another bit of permission to do that came from her “Why I Write” essay. About writing as a way to understand “what I think and what I feel.” Before that I had this idea that you had to know what you were going to write before you began. That essay was part of a moment in my writing life when I was learning you could write to find out, and I became very interested in process, not just the finished piece.
But anyway, I don’t know if I would dare to name myself an inheritor of her torch—I admire her so much. I always hoped I would get to see her in her lifetime, but I never did. Years ago I went to a screening of the documentary about her at the New York Film Festival, The Center Will Not Hold. There were two screenings and later I heard she was at the other one, the one I didn’t go to. I think I might never get over that!
MJ: Do you have any advice? Not for writing or publishing, necessarily, just in general.
KD: I’ll stick to what I said earlier about letting go of things: it’s a good practice. Try to let go of the old in a very literal way from time to time, to make space for the new to show up.
MJ: Is there anything you can (or want to) share about what you’re working on now?
KD: I’m working on a novel. There’s a character, Helen, who appears in three of the stories in I Meant It Once, as do her siblings, Evan and Grace. I had this feeling I could let these three talk to each other forever. They’re older though—they’re in their thirties, figuring out a different chapter of life now.