A Q&A With Author Katherine Heiny
Greetings from Smog Land.
Hello, virtual friends! I’m writing this to you on Thursday evening, at the end of what has been a very strange day: We’re currently under, like, whatever the DEFCON-1 level is on the air quality index here in DC due to the Canadian wildfires, and the sky is the opaque, milky shade of the water you’d use to rinse all your brushes in art class. It’s cliché to say it looks like an apocalyptic movie scene, but I think I’ve inhaled so much smog I’m beginning to slowly asphyxiate myself and my brain is no longer working, so I’m just gonna go with that. And to make things extra strange and dimension-warping, today I also saw a large, grizzled man with a chihuahua strapped to his chest in a bright pink BabyBjörn. A true study in contrasts. What a place, this Earth!
But let’s get to the fun stuff, something that might distract us from the fact that we’re all sizzling ourselves into oblivion here on this tired rock of a planet, egg-on-asphalt style: I’m very excited to launch another aspect of Fully Booked—interviews with authors! I’ll run these once a month, in addition to reader Q&As and monthly reading round-ups.
That means today we have a Q&A with the author Katherine Heiny, whose excellent book of short stories Games and Rituals I mentioned in last month’s reading round-up. Whenever Heiny has a new book out, I’m guaranteed to read it—her stories are funny, weird (in a good way) peeks at everyday life. Reading them is kind of like looking at yourself in a really great mirror: You recognize the person in there, but it’s the most heightened, interesting version.
Heiny, who lives in Maryland, has also written the equally excellent novels Early Morning Riser (one of my fave books of 2021), Standard Deviation, and the book of short stories Single, Carefree, Mellow.
Here, we chat about writing during Covid, the real-life inspiration behind her stories, and Ted Bundy going to the DMV (wait for it):
As someone who's written both full length-novels and short stories, do you prefer one or the other? Or are they just two different beasts?
Yeah, they're two different beasts. A novel is a really involving, enveloping, dominating experience. It’s like this very long marathon because you just keep going and it seems like you're never going to finish and then suddenly, you get all fired up, and you write the last third in, like, a month or whatever. Whereas, a book of short stories—each time you're starting fresh. At the end of writing one, there's more of a sense of accomplishment, because you're like, “Oh, I have a story instead of a chapter.”
I actually started my writing life as a poet. I have an MFA in poetry, as well as in creative writing. It really taught me about making every word count, and how they're supposed to sound.
How are writing short stories and novels similar?
Well, I always think the scariest part is starting. Just being like, I'm gonna do 500 words. And it's just getting past that initial hump. I think that I forget how to write in between everything that I write. If I'm in the middle of a project, and I sit at my desk in the morning, it's easy to pick it back up. But when I set something aside, and then move on to a new thing, I'm like, “How did I do this? How did I start it?”
I’m curious–when you’re writing a book of short stories, do you get each story in a really good place before moving onto the next? Or do you write the entire collection of stories as a first draft and then go back and edit them all?
It’s very much one at a time. I get them as close as I can get to being ready to send out. A long time ago, a writing teacher told me that you're ready to send something out when you're sick of working on it. But during the pandemic, I was having a lot of trouble writing. I could outline things, but when I sat down, I just couldn't write. There were a couple of stories that I started and then was like, “This is not going to work.” And then I went back about six months later and finished them. And that was really surprising to me, because it's not usually the way I work.
Did you write the majority of Games and Rituals during the pandemic?
I almost wrote nothing during the pandemic. I outlined things. A few of the stories were written between Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser, and then the title story is actually from when I was a graduate student at Columbia. We found it when we moved, and I gave it to my husband to read and he really liked it. He said, “I want it to be the title of the collection.” And I was like, “Great! Fewer decisions I have to make.” But the rest of the stories I outlined during the pandemic and then wrote very quickly in 2021.
Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser were born out of two of your short stories. Are there any stories from Games and Rituals that you could see becoming full-length novels?
“Damascus,” the one about the mother who's worried her son is on drugs. The relationship with her ex-husband and her son and her mother were really fun to write. In high school, I used to go to parties and come home after drinking. My parents’ bedroom was at the top of the stairs, so I’d go into their room and they'd be in bed reading, and I would basically do stand-up comedy at the foot of their bed for 30 minutes. And my parents never thought this was anything other than spontaneous socialization. One of my sons worked at a supermarket during the pandemic, and sometimes he would come in and talk to us afterward. And one night, he looked really flushed, and his eyes were really bright. And I was like, “He loves his job. He is high on life.” And then I was like, “Oh, my God, I'm becoming my mother.”
“Damascus” was one of the stories that I outlined half of. When I'm jacked up emotionally, I see more connections and I have more ideas, and when we were driving to drop my younger son off at college, it suddenly occurred to me—the son doesn't do drugs, but the mother does. And then I saw how the story was going to end, and I was able to finish it.
To that point, it feels like you’re so close to so many of your stories, and there’s just such a keen observation of what's happening in those moments. I'm curious how much of your work is pulled from your own life?
Almost everything is based on a thought I’ve had or something that’s happened to me. It used to be that if something funny happened to me, I went home and wrote it down and was like, “Well, this is a paragraph, what do I do with it?” And I think as I've gotten older, I've learned I don't have to write it as a story. I can just use it as inspiration for what I'm currently writing.
Shortly before the pandemic, I was on book tour, and when I got on the flight, there was an elderly man in the aisle seat and mine was the window seat, and he was like, “Can you climb over me?” And I did it because I thought he had limited mobility. And then he got up twice and moved around. I was tricked into giving this man a lap dance! And it was so funny. But now that stuff just makes me want to write, instead of being like, “Okay, I have to make that into a story.” Although sometimes that happens, too.
What are some of the moments from your latest collection that are plucked from real life?
Well, I took my son to take his road test at the DMV. And again, that was a situation where I was sort of jacked up and everything seemed like an idea. And I saw that one of the driving examiners was a woman and, because I think about true crime all the time, I was like, “Wow, so somebody actually did give Ted Bundy a driving test.” Like, somebody got in the car with him, and maybe he wanted to murder them, but he couldn't because they were expected back at the DMV. So I started outlining what became “Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented.” And as I was planning the story more, I started thinking about when you're in this enclosed car with this person and can have all sorts of weird and inappropriate conversations.
“Sky Bar,” the final story where they get really drunk at the airport, happened at my hometown airport. I was there waiting for my flight and a man came into the bar and ordered a drink. He was talking to his friends and somebody asked where he was going. And he was like, “Oh, I don't have a flight. I just came out for some drinks.” Like, how did he get past security? So I texted my brother who's a really smart, funny person and asked why would anyone come out to drink at the airport? And he said, “Oh, well, he's probably banned at every bar in town.” And I wondered why he would be banned, and my brother had a very suspiciously thorough list. He was like, “For this or this or this.” But the last thing he said was for doing donuts in a parking lot. And I was going to have the story end with them getting on the plane, but because my brother said that I have the story ending with them doing donuts in the parking lot.
You’re so funny. I laugh out loud reading your stuff. Is that hard work for you? Like, do you labor over a sentence for it to be funny?
It comes easily to me. The jokes are always what I write first. I think I'm also insecure, and I'm afraid nobody's going to read if there aren’t jokes. When I read Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding or High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, I was like, “This is the kind of book I want to write.” Those just really, really spoke to me. When something happens to me I immediately fashion it into a story and embellish it. My mother had dementia that was very severe and went on a long time. And I was always thinking of stories that I wanted to tell her, things that she would think were funny. It’s kind of a way of honoring people if you say this funny thing happened and I wanted to tell you about it. It’s a way to say to someone, “I hold you always in my mind, and nothing is real until I tell it to you.”
Who are some other authors you love who you think do humor really well?
Anne Tyler can be really, really funny, and she’s one of my favorite writers. I keep a copy of her books by my desk. Sometimes when I'm feeling like I don't know how to do it anymore, I'll just read two pages, and then it’ll be clear again. I read a memoir recently called This Story Will Change by Elizabeth Crane. That was her messy divorce memoir, but it was really, really, really funny. And Heartburn by Nora Ephron is just like its own thing. I really liked Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan and The Idiot by Elif Batuman. Those were the first books that made me laugh out loud after the pandemic, so they will always have a really special place in my heart.
When I'm writing something and I read something and it's really good, I get upset and I'm worried that what I'm writing is not as good. And when I read something bad, then I'm worried that what I'm writing is bad. It’s like the narrow space between hungover and drunk again. So usually when I'm full-on writing something I tend to read mostly nonfiction, because it's not as upsetting to me.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a new novel. There are teenagers, and it's about people making really bad decisions. I wasn't able to work this story into the book, but I knew this girl in high school who had a party at her parents’ house, and it got so out of control that it was like, thousands of dollars of damage. And then I wasn't really friends with her, but a couple of years ago, she friended me on Facebook. I was like, “Are you still grounded?”
I've done a lot of the planning, and the interviewing people. So now it's just up to me to write it. The hardest part about writing is not what you're gonna write about. It's sitting at your desk and pouring blood and sweat and tears on your keyboard.