CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Jennifer dubois and Emily Collins
April 14, 2021
Jennifer duBois is the author of three works of fiction The Spectators, Cartwheel, and A Partial History of Lost Causes. Her critically-acclaimed novels grapple with loss, the nature of cruelty, and the beauty and limitations of human perception, all told through multiple points of view. Her books deftly explore heavy subject matters with humor and grace and standout as essential reads for our current political and cultural movement.
Emily Collins: Like your previous novels, The Spectators is a multi-POV work that explores cultural origins, historical events, and our fraught relationship with spectacle. What inspired you to pursue this incredibly layered and profound form of storytelling?
Jennifer duBois: My first three novels use multiple points of view, and I think on a personality level that has to do with getting bored easily and finding it easier to write a book if I'm toggling back and forth between characters. On a more thematic level, I'm very interested in the ways that different people can look at the same person/situation and come up with wildly divergent interpretations -- themes that are explored most explicitly in Cartwheel, about a young woman accused of murder on study abroad, and The Spectators, which follows the transformation of a progressive politician turned trash TV host. Cartwheel is narrated from four perspectives -- each characters with different predispositions toward the question of the young woman's guilt -- and The Spectators from two: the politician's former lover, who watches with disillusionment as the man he revered becomes unrecognizable, and the publicist in the 90s who initially despises him but comes to a more complicated understanding as the novel progresses. My ultimate goal with each of these works is for the readers to hold all of these interpretations in their minds at once – alongside their own, of course.
EC: I love how The Spectators accretes perceptive ideas about big subject matters (i.e. school shootings, the AIDS crisis, political scandal, trashy T.V. etc.) without losing connection with its heartfelt portrayal of what it means to love and witness in a chaotic world. The novel’s transitions feel effortless, though I suspect they posed structural challenges in their early stages. Can you speak to the research and/or writing process of your latest work?
JD: The structure was an absolute nightmare, and the research a complete quagmire—I began researching/structuring the novel in a year when I had absolutely no time to actually write, and by the time I began the drafting process I found myself quite burdened by all my notes—writing these contrived little cul-de-sacs in order to include some fun factoid, coming up with elegant structural arabesques that nobody would have ever noticed anyway. In the end, I had to cut a lot of nonsense. For me, at least, an elaborate outline ahead of time has a chilling effect on the actual creative work.
Jennifer duBois is the author of The Spectators, A Partial History of Lost Causes, which won a California Book Award for Fiction, a Northern California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. The National Book Foundation named her one of its 5 Under 35 authors. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was the winner of the Housatonic Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for a New York Public Library Young Lions Award. An alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship, duBois is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, Salon, Cosmopolitan, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. A native of western Massachusetts, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.
Find her at https://www.jennifer-dubois.com/
EC: In your debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes explores the power of connection and the human will when faced against insurmountable odds. The book feels deeply political and personal as well. What were some of the joys and challenges of writing this type of work?
JD: I think the joy and challenge of writing APHOLC were largely one and the same—the freedom and anonymity you feel when you have absolutely no idea how to write a novel, and no real concept that it will ever live in the world beyond your own mind. The two characters in that novel are in superficially very different circumstances—one is a young woman with a diagnosis of Huntington's disease who is grappling with her premature mortality, the other is a chess champion turned political dissident running a quixotic political campaign against Vladimir Putin—but they are united by their preoccupation with the question of how one proceeds in the face of a lost cause. The female narrator's experience was rooted somewhat in my experience of having a father with Alzheimer's disease, while the other character was loosely based on Garry Kasparov—and I think both dimensions of the book, the personal and the wild jump into imagining a character so far beyond my experience, were enabled by feeling that that book really only belonged to me. There are drawbacks to that too, of course—and arguably something arrogant, or at least oblivious, about my feeling so little concern about what I didn't know yet. But that feeling of writing without anyone looking over your shoulder is something you can't get back after you've published, and it's part of why that book will always be special to me.
Emily Collins is a MFA in fiction candidate at the University of Montana and the Interviews Editor for CutBank. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, The Chicago Review of Books, The South Carolina Review, and others. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. When she’s not interviewing incredible writers, she enjoys hiking and volunteering
EC: It’s rare to read fiction that explores human cruelty in a writing style that bristles with humor and intelligence. I find your work a refreshing/necessary evaluation of our current cultural and political moment. The events in your novels are inspired by distinct movements and events, and nothing about the human cruelty component strikes me as very new. What messages (good or bad) do you hope your fiction conveys to readers about our current cultural trajectory?
JD: I don't consciously try to convey messages, necessarily, although I can certainly see when I look back on my writing that there are certain themes and questions I'm drawn to again and again, and also certain maneuvers of plotting that do convey some of my values system. The Spectators grapples with the enduring nature of cruelty—as well as our enduring fascination with it—but all of my books are coming at their themes from a spirit of genuine curiosity, rather than a presentation of anything I think I know. That's probably the uniting message of my work, if there is one: that our perspectives are limited, that individuals are irreducibly complicated, and that we don't have everyone's number.