A Conversation with Christina Milletti

Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is available from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her fiction and articles have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Harcourt’s Best New American Voices, the Iowa Review, The Master’s Review: Best Emerging Writers, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Studies in the Novel, and Fiction’s Present: Situating Narrative Innovation (among other places). Her first book, The Religious & Other Fiction (a collection of stories) was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and she has recently completed a new collection, Now You See Her, with the help of a fellowship from UB’s Humanities Institute and a residency at the Marble House Project. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and co-curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series.

An excerpt from Choke Box: a Fem-Noir, “Yes,” is featured in the 2019 Ocean State Review.

Milletti’s narrator in Choke Box: a Fem-Noir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) carries a distinct vision, precision, and power. It’s difficult for writers to be form conscious while simultaneously telling a compelling story that draws in readers and keeps them on their toes. Milletti does both. In Choke Box, Jane Tamlin, a ghost-writer and a mother of two children, relays her truth from the confines of a mental asylum. Tamlin’s voice will haunt readers, inciting those who encounter her story to confront and evaluate the realities of the world they occupy— its social norms and codes, as well as the readers’ own beliefs.

Milletti’s work questions the role and purpose of storytelling—who is telling the story and why? How will the way the story is told impact the reader? While reading Milletti’s work, one becomes conscious of the power of voice and, ultimately, the power of words. This is especially so in Choke Box—Milletti weaves a tight story with no strings hanging unintended. A desire to find bite-sized, comfortable answers stemming from neat and tidy questions will be checked, but in a strangely satisfying way.

Sue Y. Kim: In your work, disappearance seems to be a theme. This is true in the short stories from your collection The Religious & Other Fictions such as “Where Nööne is Now,” “Amelia Earhart’s Last Transmission” and “I Cook Every Chance.” Your novel Choke Box: A Fem-Noir centers around Jane Tamlin and the mysterious disappearance of her husband Edward Tamlin who was in the throes of writing a memoir—Jane believes that the words of Ed’s memoir hold power over her actions and life even after his disappearance. Can you talk more about this theme of disappearance and what draws you to it?

Christina Milletti:Women are always disappearing, aren’t they? Into kitchens. Into motherhood and their children’s lives. Into causes or their partner’s work. Even when the world’s eyes are on them, women can disappear, suddenly, into the fathomless depths of history. We find artifacts of their existence. Amelia Earhart’s shoe on a remote Pacific island. A necklace, worn letters, stored in boxes beneath beds. Dry statistics cataloged by police and politicians. Brief mentions in the Acknowledgement sections of their partner’s books. I’m intrigued by these losses. Devastated by them. The way they differently, but inevitably, happen. Where do women go when they’ve gone? What do they do there? How do we adapt to their absence?

The problem is there’s no way of pinpointing absence. But we can corral it. Identify its presence. Hem it in. Because absence isn’t “nothing”: the absence of a loved one you want to hold or be held by, can be felt on the skin as much as the heart—just like a missing coat on a cold winter day will make you break out in goosebumps at once. Absence, in other words, is marked both on the body and on the mind, and the artistry of fiction is uniquely adept at articulating both landscapes, exploring their limits in language. You might even say, absence is the very stuff of fiction.

We’re often told that stories are just imaginary narratives, that fiction is a form of entertainment offering readers an escape from daily troubles. But stories also provide us a space where real world issues can be worked out. They can guide us. Shape us. Give us strategies for understanding all manner of contrariness. They offer us a language that can grapple with phenomena we barely understand. How we can go on. Even when we think we cannot.

So stories for me? They’re a matter of life. And writing stories about how women disappear is a matter of living.

In The Lover, Marguerite Duras’s narrator reflects, “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Doesn’t exist. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.” I’m intrigued by that “no one.” (As you note above, I even wrote a story about her.) Who is she? Why does she remain invisible to herself, or at least cannot be captured by stories that are conventionally told? What does she tell herself to get through each day? Would I know her if she walked into the room? Is she my sister? My daughter or mother? Is she me?

SYK: In connection to disappearance, there are moments in your stories when the unknowability or invisibility of the father in the life of their daughter is addressed. This is true in “Where Nööne is Now” where the narrator admits that she has “never known” her father, and in Choke Box, where Jane gives birth to and cares for her baby girl in the absence of her husband. What is your thought process behind the depiction of the missing father?

CM: Questions about gender are the prism through which much of my fiction finds direction. So, by occasionally removing patriarchal figures, my characters are given space to reimagine their options, their identities, even if for just a brief time and incompletely—kind of like tearing a bandage off an injury and letting the wound breathe. The wound is still there. But the scar tissue that eventually forms will take on a different shape.

Certainly, my fiction is often geared toward thinking about how women are corralled into roles society has pre-determined for them. Characters who find strategies to resist those roles present opportunities to explore or pressure social constraints, perhaps even discover places where they might, like a loose stone in a wall, push on them a bit, create cracks and fissures for the reader to notice. So they can begin to imagine what’s on the other side.

SYK: Is there a correlation between the death of Jane’s brother Jules and the disappearance of Jane’s husband? Does this connection have anything to do with Jane’s voice being silenced?

CM: There is a crucial subplot in Choke Box: as a young woman, Jane was an unwilling ghost writer of several books published in her teen brother’s name. Years later, Choke Box is Jane’s first “self-authored” book. It represents her effort to break the cycle of oppression and anger of her childhood, to step out from the silencing that has been inflicted on her—first by her mother, then her husband, not to mention the institutions all around her that couldn’t imagine she’d written her brother’s books, while it had no problem believing she was the sole “author” of her husband’s demise.

While I was writing Choke Box, I was thinking a good deal about the long history of women writers who have worked as editors, typists, and ghost writers to help the men in their lives complete their work. Jane’s back story plays with that history, tries to recuperate it. You might say Jane is a “Shakespeare’s sister” styled character, who is trying to reclaim her voice through her “counter memoir.” That her book yields unexpected effects—that it may have even put her in danger—is arguably one of the novel’s more realistic gestures, given that it’s otherwise saturated by a more fabulist aesthetic.

SYK: What do you think is the value of storytelling in a world where “results . . . will not be conclusive” (“Chokebox” 148)?

CM: Fiction has never been more important than at this “anti-factual” moment when spin, propaganda and lies—fiction’s wicked cousins—have become commonplace narratives we all now regularly must navigate. But “alternative fact” is not synonymous with fiction. Instead, I’d propose that fiction offers a kind of “inoculation” against harmful narratives, helps us identify the design and stratagems embedded in duplicitous stories. (Scholar David Castillo calls this process “fictional awareness” in his recent work on “reality literacy.”) At the very least, we can say that fiction makes us more sensitive to stories that carefully parse out many complex threads with great skill, and create a sense of empathy for characters who, often much like their readers, are trying to find a language to articulate thorny problems that can’t be resolved, only lived through.

Choke Boxis saturated with this suspicion for simple conclusions, not because of a resistance to, or disbelief in, “facts” or “results,” but because (at this post-postmodern moment) uncomplicated statements or neatly tied up “resolutions” seem a uselessly, even misguided, state of being. Whereas an acknowledgment of the hard work, the ongoing process required to advance social justice, our need for activism in so many quarters, seems a more appropriate and reasonable stance to take.

SYK: Madeleine, Jane’s therapist, observes that “an element of privacy, of secrecy, is healthy for the healing mind” and lets Jane hide objects such as “chapstick, a wad of soft tissue, and small red leaf tracked in on a doctor’s shoe” behind a vent cover in her room. I am intrigued by this connection between secrecy and healing. Would you be able to elaborate on this more especially in connection to women such as Jane who must struggle to tell dificult truths?

CM: There is a deliberate paradox built into Choke Box’s “fem-noir” form. Jane Tamlin has been told that being able to keep a secret—“to hold one’s tongue”—being able to choose when to speak, and to be careful and deliberate in the speaking, are all signs of a reasoned mind. Yet, Jane relays this information, like everything else, in her tell-all, “hold nothing back no matter the risk” memoir style. Is her signal to the reader, then, one of authenticity and reason? Or of fabulation? And madness?

Women who tell their stories are always asked to walk this dangerous line. By telling their truths, by making themselves vulnerable to criticism and added peril, they often put themselves at further bodily jeopardy, not to mention the risk of disbelief. The #MeToo movement has gone a long way to showcasing these dangers with its mind-numbingly long catalog of accounts of sexual harassment and assault. And yet, there’s still so very far to go. Like many others, I was overwhelmed by the courage of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018. Only a mad woman (right?) would knowingly open herself up to the kind of blowback she knew would follow her account. As of spring 2019, she’s still been unable to return home due to death threats.

The dilemma of how to talk about gendered issues—of what and who to tell, what to keep secret—is a question Jane presents to us and struggles with (as many women do) because her sanity (like theirs) is at stake. It’s no surprise so many women’s fictions end with madness. The genre exists for a reason.

We’re now at a moment at least when stories by and about women are no longer immediately consigned to doubt or to “the second shelf,” as Meg Wolitzer once wrote (in her New York Times piece by the same name). Readers are finally beginning to appreciate the range and breadth of ideas that women writers embrace when given half a chance to write outside expectations. Their stories surprise us—and endanger the comfortable ways we think—when we believe them.

SYK: There are some lovely details in your work such as the aforementioned items that Jane hides in the vent, especially the “small read leaf tracked in” by a doctor. Do you keep a list of items or ideas that pop up during the day that inspire or feed into your work? What are some habitual writing practices or inspiring exercises you participate in to engage in your work?

CM: The artist Melissa Kaseman has an ongoing project photographing items she finds in her pre-schooler’s pockets. Most children are collectors, found artists in training, assigning totemic value to objects they happen upon throughout the day. Mine (I have two middle-school aged daughters) are no different, and I can’t help but wonder what they were thinking when they hold onto specific items, try to follow their thoughts in recoil. It’s a useful practice for fiction—to consider what your characters might keep in their pockets in order to better understand their motives and drives when they’re at their most relaxed. Currently, my daughters’ favorite items are an enormous rusty screw discovered in a scrubby, crabgrass field. Gears from an old timepiece given by a friend. And a tiny plastic moose with mournful eyes. Jane might hold onto the gears. But the screw and the moose would go.

SYK: You’ve included in Choke Box, lines from literary works by past female writers as part of Jane’s “counter-memoir.” The line from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman stands out as it speaks directly of Jane’s own situation: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is nothing really the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” In light of these words, have you found moments of hope in your own life and work that answer Gilman’s question that are also questions that arise in Jane Tamlin’s story?

CM: “The Yellow Wallpaper” was incredibly influential in writing Choke Box. In fact, at one time I thought Choke Box might be read as an adaptation of Gilman’s story, if in a less gothic and more fabulist vein. But the more I dug into Jane’s narrative, the more I wanted her “counter memoir” to be a critique of patriarchal institutions, that challenges how the discourse of gender relations is played out at the levels of both form and content. Jane after all challenges her husband’s account of their marriage—how he portrays her, “controls her,” as she puts it. She resists what other people (her mother, the Board, her husband, his mistress) think of her. Above all, she tries to hold onto her sanity. Whether she succeeds, I leave up for debate. But her struggles, like the acts of resistance I see around me every day, are promising. For my daughters’ sakes, not just my own, I hope they’re evidence of social change. Perhaps that’s why I dedicated Choke Box to all the mad women I know. There are many of us. And we’re all fighting. Each in our own way.

SYK: This may be a question that is asked far too often—but I am curious because it is important for women who are working against entrenched patriarchal cultures and norms in their daily lives: how do you continue your work in the various roles you occupy as a writer, instructor, mother, etc., without—quite frankly—losing your mind?

CM: I’ve lost my mind many times. As it turns out, there is always more mind to lose. Depths you discover you didn’t know you could lose. Writing Choke Box was one way of hanging onto a small corner of serenity while I juggled all my obligations (it was originally a longer book), especially when my children were small. But I have no short cuts to share. You learn quickly what you want, what you can live with, what you can’t do without— and that differs enormously among the parent-writers you meet. A sense of humor is desperately important. What did Djuna Barnes write in Nightwood? “I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.” I’ve found myself under that rock many times for many different reasons. Sometimes you come out and you discover your book won a prize. Sometimes you realize you need to head back under for a while and keep to the work. Frequently your kids pull you out and into their own stories. You can’t rush writing or parenting. That’s the one thing they have in common: creative process. And joy in seeing the work unfold.

SYK: In an interview with the Kenyon Review, you quote Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senselessas a starting point in understanding Choke Box. Acker writes, “Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn’t per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks down the codes.” You note that this is the mandate that Choke Box models. Likewise, my last question has to do with your role as a teacher and a writer who aims to disturb the status quo: In our current political climate, how do you approach or work with those (students, readers, et al.) who scorn, dismiss or simply cannot see the dilemma that Jane and countless women face?

CM: Form and content always go hand in hand in my work. It’s one of the many reasons I admire Kathy Acker’s fiction: her ability to mobilize a story’s narrative arc, along with its form on the page, into a body of critique. Fictions like hers—which ask readers to puzzle together its pieces themselves in the “writerly” as opposed to “readerly” fashion that Barthes once wrote about—evolve “through” the reader. There’s a give and take. A rapport. We arrive on the other side of the book somewhat changed. The power of the literary act to work on the reader simply awes me. I hope it always does.

But there is a learning curve with this sort of fiction. A patient stance readers must take, a trust that they’re in good hands, and that they’ll eventually be able to weave together all the threads they’ve been offered.

So I’ve always connected my work as a writer to my work as an educator. In my literature seminars, for instance, I often ask my students to come to class with questions about the books we’re reading rather than answers or interpretations, so they feel empowered by the process of wonder and discovery. In my writing workshops, meanwhile, I often assign exercises that ask them to try writing sympathetically from the point of view of a character very unlike themselves. We’re often advised to reserve judgment before we’ve walked a few miles in another person’s shoes. Literature—fiction in particular—gives us the opportunity to do just that. To ask questions. And to try on “shoes” of all kinds.

Engaging the Other is always a first step toward understanding and tolerance. Perhaps toward change. All to say: good fiction is dangerous for just this reason. Exciting. Maddening. And my work in the classroom, like my work on the fiction page, tries to fully capture this mood.

Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I get it right.

More of Christina Milletti’s work can be found at www.christinamilletti.com.

Sue Y. Kim is a writer from South Korea. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Southern California and is currently a PhD student of Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Rhode Island. She is working on a bildungsroman with characters living in spaces of errantry and exile. Her work has received a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers.