CR 010: Jessica Anthony on Her Brilliant New Novella, ‘The Most’
The critically acclaimed author discusses her influences, the craft of writing, and her love for absurdity in fiction.
Jessica Anthony’s work has been referred to as “achingly funny” (The Guardian), “thrilling” (The Los Angeles Times), and “weirdly compelling and compellingly weird” (Kirkus). One of the most innovative authors working today, her writing is ambitious and clever, with each project different from the last. Her widely praised 2012 novel Chopsticks (written in collaboration with designer Rodrigo Corral) was told entirely through images and featured a companion app, while her third novel, Enter the Aardvark, was one of Time Magazine’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2020” and a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction.
Her latest work, The Most, is a novella that brilliantly tackles marriage, longing, secrets, and shame as it pulls back the curtain on a seemingly idyllic 1950s suburban family. Taking place over the course of a single day, The Most tells the story of Kathleen, a housewife who gets into her apartment complex’s pool one warm November morning and refuses to get out. Over the course of her eight hours in the water, the narrative alternates points of view, allowing Kathleen and her husband Virgil to reflect on the choices they’ve each made that brought them to this critical point in time. Referred to as “exceptional” by Publishers Weekly, The Most is a delicious read, and its format—two points of view shared over the course of a single day—was a fun stretch for Anthony, who doesn’t typically enjoy shifting narrative perspectives.
“Reading novels that jump around like that usually are unsatisfying to me,” Anthony says. “I don’t know why. I just want the writer to commit to a perspective. But it’s fun to imagine the different ways in which these two characters misremember or return to similar moments of their past with different perspectives. That’s something I’d never had the chance to do before in fiction and it was enormously gratifying.”
Anthony recently chatted with me from her home in Maine about the craft of writing, her influences, and the ridiculousness of grocery stores.
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SANDRA EBEJER: I read that you began writing The Most while you were guarding a bridge in Slovakia. How did that come about?
JESSICA ANTHONY: There’s a website called Res Artis and they have a huge compendium of international artists residencies that you can apply for. There’s one called the Bridge Guard Residency. It’s a three-month stint, and you’re living in this little apartment underneath this bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. The story of the residency is that in WWI, the bridge was destroyed, and then the Nazis obliterated it in WWII. Finally, in 2001, they rebuilt the bridge. It was hugely meaningful for the area to have this bridge rebuilt, and now they have an artist there to guard the bridge against further fascism and fascist destruction through the act of creation.
So, that was my task. Every day I got up, I would write, and then I would walk out of my flat and cross this bridge into Hungary and return. Obviously, it’s more of a metaphorical bridging and yet, you feel while you’re doing it that there is some kind of larger importance to it. It really changed the way that I think about the importance of writing. This experience reminds me every day how important it is what we do—the execution of imagination in daily life, and the importance of making, even in climates where you feel overwhelmed by bad news and a sense of hopelessness. It reminds me that we are not powerless. By creating, by using the imagination, we’re fighting those forces in some way. Maybe that’s facile of me to think, but it helps when you sit down every day at your desk and you’re just doing the work.
Where did the idea for The Most come from?
I tend not to work from ideas, if that makes sense. I never sit down at the computer and think, “I have a great idea for a story.” Instead it’s a slow burn of accumulated feeling and this sense that I’m interested in a particular piece of music and language that leads into character. Then, of course, the character wants something and desire breeds conflict, and suddenly, you’re off and running.
I read an article back in 2010 or something about a guy in a condo complex who refused to get out of his swimming pool. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t really think much about it. And then I was at the bridge and thinking about this idea of how a bridge is uniting two different lands, but these lands are also a bit similar. There’s some powerful metaphorical work going on.
I also had been teaching a course on women writers of the 1950s. This is a decade of literature that I love. I am amazed by contemporary conversation around ’50s ideas and ’50s culture. Nowadays, people have a strange, mythologized idea of what it was like back then. If you read the work of writers who were publishing in the ’50s, you know that these are human beings just like anybody else. They are as complicated and nuanced and longing for equality in the same way that we are now. My aim was to try to create a feeling of discovering a secret text that no one had read before that actually was published in the ’50s. Obviously, there is a [John] Cheever influence here, but there’s also quite a bit of Shirley Jackson in this novella and a little Patricia Highsmith, too. It’s got a bit of a mystery to it. So, that was how the book began.
The story alternates between Kathleen’s and Virgil’s points of view. What was it like as the author to tackle both perspectives?
It was fun. Part of the joy of it was the fact that the novel has a weird structure. We start with Kathleen not wanting to go to church and then we follow Virgil going to church, returning home, and Kathleen is in the swimming pool, and she starts to exercise resistance to getting out. In the following chapter, we drop back in time to Kathleen starting her day. I started having fun with this shifting between time periods within these eight hours and how the moment before is rendered after and how eventually those two moments collide. It was more of a structural play for me than anything, but it was also fun to learn about two characters that way.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a wife and a mother, but I really felt for Kathleen. I had deep empathy for her. She stayed with me, even in the moments when I put the book down. Do you find it difficult to let go of characters after you’re done writing?
Oh, gosh, no one’s ever asked me that question. I love that question! Yeah, what is that feeling? I mean, they’re kind of with you, but you have to let them go to make room for the next person. I think Kathleen will always stay with me. I’ll always think about her as a beloved character. But right now I have to fall in love with and get to know somebody completely different, so I can’t think about her. Even if I wanted to, I just can’t. It’s funny—sometimes you forget that you’ve written the story or the novel. It’s like your brain forces you to let it go, for it to become this little ghost that haunted you for a while. So, I would say she’s pretty much gone. I think of her like a beloved lost relative. [Laughs]
A lot of non-fiction writers use writing as a way to figure out a problem. Is that something you do with fiction?
Oh, yeah, for sure. What it is is figuring out why you’re feeling the way that you do in the moment of the writing. In this particular novel, I was thinking about the fact that my husband and I have been married for quite some time and neither of us likes conflict. We don’t fight a lot. When we do fight, it’s these meek, sad arguments where, maybe five minutes later, the other person will peek around the corner, like, “Are we still fighting?” I think on one hand, that’s a wonderful thing that we don’t really argue. But on the other hand, it’s like, what are you missing out by not arguing? What’s being lost? What isn’t being communicated?
That idea expanded or conflated made me think about two people in a marriage who really don’t talk. They have their little routine, they’re polite with each other, they take care of each other, and they love each other in their way, but there’s something that is not being shared that is hugely important to the truth of who they are. And neither of them is able to face it. That idea of taking this little kernel of my own experience and exploding it into: what if we took this notion and made it 10 times worse, where there were these horrible, horrible secrets that two people wouldn’t share? Suddenly, that became this really fun tension to play within the book.
Who are your influences? Who are some of the writers that you go to for inspiration?
It changes depending on the fiction that I’m writing. Some of my favorite writers are Jerzy Kosiński, who wrote these wildly different fictions. Every novel you read almost feels like a different voice, like each project had a very distinct ambition. Jeffrey Eugenides is another who’s doing deeply different work every time he sits down to write.
For this next project I’m working on, I have Nadja by André Breton, the founder of surrealism, and I’ve been returning to it to study the voice and the pace and the structure. It’s the voice that I’m writing in that makes me think, “I need to read that short story by Kafka again. I need to return to that thing that I know will help me nudge forward in the fiction.” I’m also reading Cloud Atlas again for this new book. But would I call Cloud Atlas a novel that has made me the writer I am? No, I don’t think so.
I think the answer to that particular question is much more complicated. It’s a crazy amalgam of music and lived experience and books. That is the stuff that I think makes a writer and gives you a certain perspective on life. I think the reason I tend to shy away from literal realism is because I find the real world to be so amazing that my only answer to it is absurdity. Like, amazing in the most grandiose and shocking and appalled kind of way. I mean, I can’t believe there are things called grocery stores. You go to the grocery store—look what you have in America, look at all the bounty that you have, and then a plane ride away is a completely different planet. It’s like, you go into the grocery store to get some fruit and suddenly you’re overwhelmed.
My response to that as a human being, because it’s so absurd, is to respond to the absurdity. It’s the only way that I can try to make sense of it. So, Kathleen is in the pool, and she stays there. What would it mean to be in a pool for eight hours? Your skin is withering, you become dehydrated, you’ve got to go to the bathroom—all of these physical things are happening. It’s that aggrandized notion—it’s completely irrational what’s happened to Kathleen in the pool, and yet it is credible within the terms of that world.
I’ve never thought of grocery stores that way before!
The grocery store is such a weird place. We’re all in these lines with our sad little carts. Some people are dressed really well and other people are in their pajamas. And they have drugstores in there now. It’s gotten so big and sterile and strange. And, even worse, now they’re playing our music! They’re playing ’80s and ’90s music. So I’m becoming that lady jamming out to whatever Duran Duran song is playing in the aisle of the baked beans. It’s really sad. [Laughs]
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I knew that I wanted to read very early on. It was the thing I loved to do more than anything. I would literally go to my friend’s houses, and I would lie on their beds and read their books. You know, like that’s fun for them. That was my idea of socializing.
When I went to college, I majored in English. My junior year, I went to the University of Manchester in England and in their catalogue there was this class called Fiction Writing. I remember thinking, “You can do that for credit? That doesn’t make sense.” I wrote this terrible story and sent it to them, and they took me, which was a shock. It was my first writing workshop, and let me tell you that the British don’t care about your feelings. Not at all. I sat in that workshop and those knives just started flying at me. I remember going back to my flat—I had just turned 20—and thinking, “Either I’m going to quit or I’m gonna get better.” So I started to practice. From that point on, I couldn’t stop writing. I loved the experience of walking into a character, figuring out what they wanted, and then trying to answer for myself, are they going to get it or not?
I do believe that this is like learning how to play an instrument. I was listening to the saxophone for 15 years before I started to try to play it. It’s a very different thing to actually pick up the instrument and learn the position of the fingers and how to move them and how to blow and how to create your own sound with that instrument. I use that as an analogy to writing. You’ve got to pick up the instrument and start to do it.
Do you write every day?
When I’m writing I write every day, which is to say, there are times when I’m not writing. I think those times are important, because I also like to feel as though I’m a human being on the planet living her life. Sometimes I’ll take a few weeks off and I will just live and see what I’m thinking about. And that thinking is a huge piece of the work that goes into the moment that I start writing again.
When I’m writing I write every day. When I’m writing a novel, it’s usually 1,000 words a day. It’s helped me to have that kind of limit. Otherwise, I don’t know if it would work for me. I started four novels before I published my first novel and every time, they withered at page 80. Since then, I’ve learned that when you stop caring about what you’re writing, you have to stop the writing. It’s not going to carry forward. You’re not going to force yourself to care again if you don’t care in the moment of the writing. So now I’m careful about how I feel while I’m writing, being attentive to my own interest in the project. Is this the novel that I absolutely have to write right now? And is it the novel that I most desperately want to read right now? Those two charges help me get the work done.
It sounds like you aren’t somebody who plots an entire novel before you begin. You don’t necessarily know where it’s going, you just write.
No, because I’m too much of a bifurcated thinker. If I had a plan, then I would be thinking out the novel. I would say, “Now is the chapter where this happens” and I would write out, logically, what’s going on. But it would not be felt. There would be no dramatic tension. It would just be a report, essentially, of characters doing stuff, rather than what I feel is a living and breathing fiction, a fiction that feels animalistic and multi-dimensional and unwieldy. That’s the kind of fiction I want to get. I want to get that feeling of slipperiness and risk. There’s a danger that if I don’t write the correct sentence in the next moment, the entire project could collapse. It needs to have a sense of itself.
It’s learning how to trust that it’s going to somehow work out okay without the plan. Because if you have the plan, then what’s organic about it? What’s mysterious to you? I will say there is a part in the process where you get a sense of the ending, and you start to write to that. It may not deliver itself in the way that you’re anticipating, but you can just feel like, I think this is where we’re headed.
You’re currently teaching at Bates College. What advice do you often give to your students about writing?
I am always telling my students to slow down. Given this culture we’re in, we feel this pressure to be producing. There’s this sense of needing to get your book out. And the internet has just made it worse for writers because you see all this material out there and you feel like if you’re not participating in it, you’re less of an artist. The natural outgrowth of that kind of toxic environment is you have fiction writers who are zipping through plot in their stories. They rush to get to the end and that means you’re overlooking any number of things. So I would urge folks to just take your time. This is a slow medium. It should be slow and savored. There’s no law that says you have to publish 16 novels in your lifetime to be considered a great writer. In fact, oftentimes it’s a single novel that will make a writer’s reputation and career.
Instead, think about who you are and the work you most want to write and give yourself the breathing room to do that work. If that means you have to disappear, by all means, disappear. Don’t do anything for a while other than this book. Then hopefully, when you emerge from your cave in three years, four years, whatever it is, you’ve written something that has real value—not to anybody else, but to yourself as an artist. That, at least for me, is what it’s all about. You can’t write to an invisible audience. You can’t predict what people are going to like or not like, especially if you’re interested in writing anything that has texture and that is complicated and that hopefully will endure. So that would be my advice: slow down.
To learn more about Jessica Anthony, find her on Instagram.
To purchase The Most, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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