Interview with Chloe Benjamin
Q: One thing I really admire about The Anatomy of Dreams is Sylvie’s seeming detachment from her decisions and the events of her own life. So often, I feel like I encounter young female protagonists in novels who are incredibly passionate, or incredibly lost, making Sylvie’s aloofness a surprising (and effective) approach. The closest analogue that comes to mind is Reno from Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. What are your thoughts on young female characters in contemporary fiction?
What brings me to writing and reading is a desire to understand why people do what they do, especially when their actions are counterintuitive.
What a fascinating question! I don’t know that I conceived of Sylvie as being detached or aloof, specifically—though I think that any detachment she does have is largely a function (and perhaps a gift) of time: she’s narrating from the year 2010, and many of the events in the book take place a decade before. But I really connect to what you say about protagonists often being propelled through a narrative by one primary emotion—whether it be passion or aimlessness—and I think real people more often contain multitudes. The characters I like to write about (as well as the ones I like to read about) are contradictory, complicated, and surprising. What brings me to writing and reading is a desire to understand why people do what they do, especially when their actions are counterintuitive.
Q: The Anatomy of Dreams is novel that’s both rooted in your own experience—it’s set in Madison, where you live now, and in California, where you’ve lived before—and yet it draws on all kinds of academic and scientific disciplines that seem incredibly difficult to master. And yet, in your novel, your characters speak as fluently about their work as if you yourself were a scientist. When you’re dreaming up a project, what’s the ideal balance for you of the known and unknown?
That is the question, I think. I’m fascinated by the benefits and perils of knowledge—that tension certainly drives Anatomy, but you’re right that it also plays a big role in the writing process. I’m someone who loves writing and does not love researching, and somehow I keep getting myself into projects that require tons of research! For me, the relationship between research and writing is an anxious one. I tend not to have any logical plan (such as to research first, write second) and instead flit back and forth as the novel necessitates. Usually, I go as far as I can in the writing before I have to do more research; then, the new research often reveals something that forces me to go back and make changes to the writing that I’ve already done, and so it’s a circuitous process, a continual refining of the world so that it feels as true as possible. With Anatomy, I was making conceptual changes as late in the game as my final proofreading pass. I write to learn, and so I tend not to write exclusively about what I know. But writing about what you don’t know entails a lot of work and revision—as well, of course, as a lot of mind-expanding fun.
Q: The Anatomy of Dreams straddles a line between literary fiction and science fiction thriller, using beautifully wrought prose to tell a story about unlooked-for danger. Did you have genre demarcations in mind when you were writing this novel? Did you have any particular influences?
Literary fiction has much to learn from genre writers: plot and pacing are just as important, and genre writers tend to do this really well.
It was only in the last few weeks, when I was answering another interview question about genre, that I realized almost all of my favorite books straddle literary and genre fiction. Some examples are Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which was a big influence for me when writing Anatomy. I find it difficult to fall in love with a book if it doesn’t have the attention to language and character that’s generally found in literary fiction. That said, I think literary fiction has much to learn from genre writers: plot and pacing are just as important, and genre writers tend to do this really well.
Q: What are your thoughts on writing the ending of a novel, especially if it’s one that flirts with breaking down some of the boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction?
Some readers expect and prefer tied-up conclusions. Others, like me, don’t mind when novel endings mimic life, in which story arcs are rarely neatly resolved.
Endings are always tricky for me. I tend to subscribe to the method of novel writing that compares it to driving through a tunnel at night: you can only see as far as the headlights show you, but you can make the whole trip that way. What I mean by this is that I have a vague idea of the ending when I start, but it only becomes clear as I inch closer to it. With Anatomy, I tried to balance my desire to give the book an ending that felt authentic to the narrative trajectory while also thinking about what readers might want to see. In early drafts, the ending was much darker. Before we sent to the book to editors, my agent passed it around her office, and her colleagues felt that it needed more closure. Some readers expect and prefer tied-up conclusions. Others, like me, don’t mind when novel endings mimic life, in which story arcs are rarely neatly resolved. In the end (no pun intended!), I tried to do a little bit of both.
Q: What are you working on now? I’ve heard you’ve begun on a new novel. What’s the difference in experience the second time around?
Oh, god, it’s so much harder! I hear it’s supposed to be the other way around, so maybe I’m doing something wrong—at the very least, what I’m doing differently this time is a full-time job, as opposed to an MFA, and it’s tough to have so much less time and mental energy; the writing goes much more slowly. It also doesn’t help that the new novel is pretty ambitious, spanning five decades and subjects from vaudeville to immortality.
CHLOE BENJAMIN is the author of The Anatomy of Dreams, which was
long listed for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are
published or forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Millions, The Washington
Independent Review of Books, PANK, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin,
and on the internet at
chloebenjamin.com.