Sophie Madeline Dess on siblings, obsessions, and her debut novel
A Q&A about "What You Make of Me"
The protagonist of “Unfathomably Deep,” Sophie Madeline Dess’s short story from Issue Twelve, is something called a Gynecological Teaching Assistant, or, as she defines it, “a body lender for medical students.” That phrase, “body lender,” is a classic Dess coinage, at once refreshingly direct and utterly bizarre — a kind of anti-euphemism. This knack for defamiliarizing some of the most familiar themes of literature (love and grief, obsession and revelation) makes her fiction feel truly new, and nowhere is her originality more alive than in her debut novel, What You Make of Me, out today. Our managing editor, Clare Sestanovich, sat down with Dess to talk about her new book, the creative impulse, and why her characters are so much lonelier than she is.
Your short story in The Drift, “Unfathomably Deep,” was published just under a year ago. Back when we were editing it, I didn’t realize you also had a novel in the works. Now that I know, I find myself curious about how you move between these two forms, short and long. Are they two different moods? Two different instruments? Two different arts altogether?
Both What You Make of Me and the novel I am working on now started as short stories, which I think is common among writers. Sometimes, within a short story, there is that promise of something larger that demands pursuit.
Other times, a story closes itself off to you in a decisive way. “Unfathomably Deep,” for example, is a short story through and through. Nothing about that narrator demands expansion to me. Her voice — her energy — could not lend itself to a novel. It’s difficult to explain exactly why. She somehow runs the course of the story.
But you never know: I try not to cordon something off into “story” until I am finished with it — and even then, sometimes after months a story can start to fatten with novel possibility.
What was the seed of What You Make Of Me? What different forms has it taken as it’s grown?
What You Make of Me started as a short story about two trouble-making young siblings whose father takes them to vacation on an island. While on the island — for reasons that might spoil part of the novel, so I won’t mention them! — the two of them decide to wade into the sea, out of sheer curiosity. Their fates were uncertain when I finished the story, and for weeks I was distracted by the question: who would those strange kids turn into? What would they be like as adults? How would their relationship evolve? Eventually I had to find out.
“Unfathomably Deep” is, among other things, a story of sisterhood. And your novel revolves around Ava and her brother, Demetri. What draws you to writing about the sibling bond?
Siblings have always been fascinating to me. Sometimes — especially if siblings are close in age and endure a somewhat dramatic upbringing — you can sense a certain competitive urge to “own” the past, to claim superior knowledge over what has happened to them, and in turn to know better what is happening to them now. No one else in your life has such a deep internal (even if incidentally gathered) ledger of essentially everything that has happened to you from the moment you were born. What kinds of dynamics can unfold from that knowledge?
The narrator of your short story is an aspiring actress. The narrator of your novel is an emerging painter, her brother an ambitious documentarian. “Creative” has become a hackneyed word, but it strikes me as significant that your characters have such a drive to create things in the world. It seems at times almost like an anti-death drive — creation as a response to loss. Is their art a kind of compulsion? And what compels you to write about artists?
You’re right! All of those “creative” characters have suffered a loss in the form of death. I’m not sure why I am drawn to them, but I do love the idea you propose of an anti-death drive. It’s conventional wisdom that making art about someone is the easiest way to eternalize them (and to eternalize oneself).
As far as art being a compulsion: I think all art-making is compulsive in the sense that we all have a natural urge to do it, in one form or another. I don’t mean this in the hippy-dippy “we’re all natural born artists” sense… although… actually, yes, that’s probably exactly what I mean. The impulse to create comes before the ability to speak. You can witness preverbal children start to scribble, be amused by colors and beautiful sparkles. You can witness their need to reshape materials (like fistfuls of banana, cake) into new forms. These are things we take as givens. But they’re really pure, cool impulses, and they tell us something about our fundamental drive to figure things out and see them anew — to make them into something.
“Unfathomably Deep” begins with an epigraph from Medea. Your writing, to me, has a Classical fascination with the mysteries of fate and fortune. Do you think of your work as tragedy?
Oh, yes, I love those Classical elements of storytelling. However, I did not intend my novel or my work in general to read as tragedy, and will confess I am sometimes surprised when, opening my novel to a random page, I come across some paragraph of Ava or Demetri’s and encounter the aggressive nature of their obsessions, the way their lives charge forward with a kind of tragic force. I think, “Wow, dark!” Maybe I’m surprised because I myself am in love with laughter and life. And I feel very lucky to have friends who are buoyant and irreverent and funny. But for whatever reason my characters don’t tend to have these things. They tend to be isolated, stuck inside their minds, attached to some centripetal force, circling around some void. Anyway, I can only hope that there is always something redeeming about life itself that finds its way into my novels, or into anything I write. The novel I’m working on now has a much warmer aspect to it — it’s bouncy, effervescent. And it’s making me laugh, which means nothing at all, but what does!