The protagonist of this week’s story, “Earthly Delights,” realizes, at the age of fifteen, that there’s a difference between wanting to be someone’s girlfriend and actually being that person’s girlfriend. Did you set out to explore that gulf in the story?
No, the story was actually written for a magazine that commissioned me to write a piece for them about lust. They were doing a series on the seven deadly sins. I figured, since they wanted me to write a story about lust, they probably wanted a lot of sex in it, so I put in as much as I thought would fit the story. The editor replied with a very prim and terse e-mail, saying they were a “family publication” and were not interested in running the story as I had submitted it. I looked up the magazine—it turns out they were a Catholic publication, their board full of vicars and priests! You’d think they might have mentioned this in the e-mail they initially sent me. Or at least said they didn’t want me to depict sex in a story about lust.
Eventually, the protagonist meets a man named Roy, with whom everything just feels right, and she spends the rest of her life with him. The story doesn’t delve into that happy relationship. Why did you want to make the description of it so fleeting?
Well, I was trying to write a story about the onset of lust. The mystery of love and even lust in a long-term relationship is a completely different mystery than the mystery of a new and sudden lust, and deserves its own story. I didn’t want her lust to come out of any dissatisfaction in her long-term relationship, or even for any reason at all. It was a singular thing that had dropped into her life, seemingly from out of nowhere. The relationship also prevents her from acting on it, so I needed it in the story. I didn’t want the story to be a story of pursuit. I wanted to write about sublimation of lust. I think sublimation is one of the most interesting and most important things in life, at least if you’re trying to make art. To force an energy, that wants to go in one direction, into a completely other direction—I don’t know what life would be without this power.
As we’re reading the story, we—and the protagonist—suddenly find that the setting has switched from Earth to Heaven and she’s now dead. It’s a surprise to the reader, but was it a decision you made before you started writing the story?
It wasn’t. I think I just got bored of writing about her life on Earth, or didn’t have anything left to say about it. I was surprised when I wrote that line about God and the marble. I didn’t expect it, either.
Soon afterward, Pier arrives in Heaven, too. Finally, the relationship is consummated. Did you have different scenarios in mind for how things might go? Or did you want any possible complications to arise because of the “pretty incredible” nature of this first encounter?
I mean, I wrote the story pretty quickly (I always write quickly—I taught myself to write to the beat of a fast metronome), so I guess it was just intuitive: the sex would be good, because they were in Heaven. Complications are for Earth, not Heaven. And Heaven is Heaven, but it’s also a fantasy, and I think the point of fantasy is that it doesn’t have the complications of life.
On Earth, the possibility of romance seems to go hand in hand with talk of it with friends. In Heaven, the only third parties appear to be a silent tidier-upper and God. What’s lost when there’s no one to gossip with? And is God any help?
I think half the fun of anything in life is talking about it with one’s friends, so what’s lost is maybe half of the fun. God isn’t really a friend, or at least not a friend like a friend is a friend, because God has different experiences than a person, if God has experiences at all. The person who it’s fun to gossip with is the one who’s lived similar things as you, and, like you, is also trying to understand everything. It’s not fun to gossip with someone who’s not trying to understand anything, who doesn’t want to figure out everyone’s personality. I guess what’s lost is the fun game of trying to figure things out.
Last year, we ran your story “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” about a girls’ school that had taken to the high seas at a time of war. You’ve now expanded this into a novel, which will be published by F.S.G. next April. Were you expecting to do this when you first started work on the story? Does “Earthly Delights,” with its tracing of a teen-age girl’s mind, feel like a companion piece in any way to the novel?
I didn’t think it was going to be a novel when I sent you the story. Maybe it was in my mind a little bit. I can’t remember. Anyway, it turned out there was more to the story, or I decided to make more of it. I’m not sure if “Earthly Delights” connects to that story in the way you suggest—because both contain teen-age experiences. However, I do think they’re connected, in that they seem to be coming from a new impulse in me, which is to use my imagination more and step away from the facts of my real life. I feel very free these days, in my writing. I don’t know how long it will last, but since abandoning (for now, anyway) my A.I. book (you published my story “According to Alice,” which was part of that project), and since publishing my book “Alphabetical Diaries” something has changed. Both of those books, which were very precise editing projects, didn’t allow me to write anything new—or, in the case of the A.I. book, anything at all. It feels like I was bottled up for years and years. So it’s been a nice time, lately, writing-wise. I hope it lasts forever. ♦
