Issue 86: Ramona Ausubel: The Willow Springs Interview

TO READ RAMONA AUSUBEL’S WORK is to experience a rebuilding of reality. She does this carefully. Empathetically. Like the stranger and the young girl from her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, who guide a small Jewish community into reimagining reality in order to survive the horrors of WWII, Ausbel uses metaphor and magic to cut a path through our perceived sense of normalcy and reveal the universal weight and beauty of grief, fear, and love. In a review of No One Is Here Except All of Us, Rebecca Lee writes, “Ausubel seems to trust metaphor as much as reality . . . [her] imagination wants to offer consolation for how ghastly things can get.”

Ausubel is the author of two story collections: Awayland (2018) and A Guide to Being Born (2013), and two novels: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (2016) and No One Is Here Except All of Us (2012), all published by Riverhead Books. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, and collected in The Best American Fantasy and online in The Paris Review.

Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Ausubel has also been long-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Story Award. Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty was a San Francisco Chronicle and NPR Best Book of the Year. Ausubel is currently a faculty member of the Low-Residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Visiting Professor at Colorado College.

We met with Ramona in Portland, Oregon where we discussed writing about family history, creating empathy, and the power of “What If?”

KIMBERLY SHERIDAN

I read you used to write poetry. Did you always write fiction, too? Or did you transition at some point. And does poetry still influence your fiction?

RAMONA AUSUBEL

I definitely transitioned. I definitely did not start out writing fiction. I took a fiction writing class in college and basically wrote poems. I wasn’t a very strong reader as a kid, so I hadn’t read that many novels even. The House on Mango Street, which I loved, was the first book where I was like, “Oh, wait, a book can be this? This I feel and love.” It was because of the poetry. It was because you can’t not feel the language. So I decided on poetry.

I finished college and went off to work crappy jobs. Then I decided that I wanted to write this novel about both sides of my family. My dad’s mom was Jewish and born in Romania, and they fled for their lives. My mom’s family came from fancy Chicago and was once an “important” family with lots of money and service people and grounds and wings of museums named after them. So I had this idea that I was going write a novel that was going to be the 20^th century through those two women’s eyes, my two grandmothers. I understood that this was narrative and that it was a novel and not a book of poems. That was the extent of my understanding. So I applied to grad school. It was not a good first project for someone who’d never written anything longer than like ten lines. Eventually, it divided up and ended up being my first two novels. But the places where I felt most alive were still in the lines—thinking about the language and thinking about the images. No matter what I’m writing, the thing I care about the most is the line to line stuff.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Did you find other fiction writers who spoke to that poetic side?

AUSUBEL

Definitely. I had one semester where I was reading Pastoralia by George Saunders and Ulysses, and I was like, “These are doing things that are weird and they’re official literature, too.” I read every page of Ulysses, but I don’t know what’s in that book still. That’s magic. I love that about it. That was a useful lesson. There’s a thousand doorways in this place and every one you enter is going to change the whole house, so have fun. Just walk around, enjoy it.

LEONA VANDER MOLEN

The two novels are very connected to your life and your family’s history. But the short stories have this vein of the fantastic. Do you have plans to write a novel in that style?

AUSUBEL

Yes. Now that I’ve gotten the family things done, I’m off in the wild-lands and can do whatever I want. I’m working on a novel now that has absolutely nothing to do with me, and every character is a version of me. It’s about a couple who are scientists, and they’re working on a project to re-introduce the wooly mammoth in a lab, like CRISPR, all the genetic stuff that people are really doing. So this wooly mammoth is born on the shores of Lake Como. But they have two teenage daughters who are not on board with the project. Aside from having been to Lake Como, none of that has anything to do with me.

CLARE WILSON

In Sons and Daughter of Ease and Plenty, which is half of your background, did you have any fear about writing about the super-wealthy, this part of society that most of us don’t really have access to and perhaps are a little prejudiced against?

AUSUBEL

Yes, absolutely. That whole piece felt really intimidating. The money in the family was gone before I was born. But as a kid growing up with the house that my great-great-grandpa—he was an architect—built, I had the story and this “what we do matters” idea passed down. That summer house is now the Ragdale Colony outside Chicago, and my grandmother turned it into a space for artists and writers. My great-grandmother has a sculpture in the White House rose garden and was a working sculptor, which she could do because she didn’t have to earn a living. There are just so many interesting points of tension. But does the world need to hear about these people? Does the story matter? Do the struggles matter? So yes, I thought about it constantly. In the end I felt like the job of the book was to try to find those places where you see with some perspective and can empathize and imagine a life that was not without pain despite being hugely privileged.

WILSON

There’s a fabulist feeling in the first novel, then basically complete realism in the second, and then magic realism elements, sci-fi elements, fantasy elements, all kinds of elements, in the two books of short stories. Where do you see yourself fitting in the spectrum of literary fiction? Also, do you have other influences and people you’re emulating?

AUSUBEL

“Atria,” the pregnancy story, was the first story I wrote that I hadn’t thought about before I got to school. I wrote it in the five weeks before it was due for workshop, so I hadn’t identified the terrain of being a fabulist writer, or a fantastical writer, or a realist. And also, the fantastical-ness is all in her head, so it turns out that everything in the world is the same as the world we live in. The experiences we’re having, all of us, on the inside, are fantastical. We’re living these outsized emotional lives, feeling things that are a jillion-billion miles long. It might be a tiny thing that you feel this tremendous thing about, that you can never explain to anybody else, because why are you still thinking about that dude you saw on the corner, who exploded your heart for some reason? And then there’s the big things that happen to explode your heart, and the scenarios we’re all playing out—I shouldn’t have said this thing, and what if this happened, what if that bus hits me as I’m walking down the street—that’s actually where we live. Meanwhile, we’re walking around looking like normal people, and none of us are. The fantastical doesn’t seem so distant to me; it feels like it’s right there on the edge of what is actually happening.

I’m always trying to connect to that thing that’s happening on the inside, and I also want to play in as much space as I want. I’m not going to say, “Yes, I am a fantastical writer. Everything I do is that. I will stay in those lines now.” Sons and Daughters was not. I thought, as I set off, “Probably something magical will happen in this.” It just didn’t feel right. That was not what that book was. It’s still super weird. We’ve still got a giant, we’ve still got a badly planned sailing trip, and we’ve still got kids alone. There are plenty of things that are a little bit exaggerated from the world, but the story didn’t want a magical thing. I’m just trying to listen as closely as I can to the work and let the stories do what they need to do and take the best care of them that I can. Sometimes there’s going to be that crazy thing that happens, and sometimes it’s going to be pretty straightforward and just the feelings inside will be the crazy thing.

As far as influences, George Saunders was important. I’ve read all of his work, but “Pastoralia” is still my favorite. That story goes straight to your heart. I drove my now-husband to Las Vegas from LA, where we lived. On the drive, I read him “Pastoralia”—it’s like sixty pages long. I think it was partly a test: “Could I love you for a long time? Because if I can, you have to love this story.” And he did. And now we’ve been together for like twenty years.

I hadn’t really read that much fantastical stuff besides him until I got to grad school because I’d been reading poetry. People were like, “Oh! Have you read Aimee Bender? And Kelly Link? And Márquez?”  And I was like, “No! Tell me all those names so that I can avoid them, because I don’t know what I’m doing yet, I don’t know who I am as a writer, so I just need to not be afraid that I’m borrowing. I need to just be in my own thing.” I read no Aimee Bender, no Kelly Link, no Márquez until I’d finished the first two books. And now I get to enjoy all of them.

WILSON

All of your books are characterized by this sense of the author’s empathy and compassion so that even when really terrible things are happening, there’s still a sense that this is a character we need to view with balanced emotions and compassion. The farmer in No One Is Here Except All of Us jumps into mind as a truly awful character who is portrayed reasonably, empathetically. How do you approach that?

AUSUBEL

If we’re not writing toward that deep understanding of what somebody’s experience is, what a day or a moment or a life is, then there’s nothing. But I also really like when you get that sizzle: “Yes! I see your little heart working and you are trying and also you are completely fucking this up and failing! And you’re terrible right now! What are you doing?!” We are all failing in some way all the time, and we are all trying.

VANDER MOLEN

I wonder about the process of putting them on the page and letting them live because there are moments where I think, I can’t put a character through this, even though I know we’re all supposed to challenge our characters.

AUSUBEL

Totally. I am the most wussiest reader. Like, “No no no! It’s too sad it’s too sad—no no no, just fix it. Make it all okay.” And I think I’m that way writing, too. Obviously I was writing a Holocaust novel, so I knew terrible things were going to happen or they were going to happen in the periphery. That was part of what the book had to do. And my great-grandmother really did escape—we don’t even know where she was, probably somewhere in Russia—with her three children for years. No one knows exactly how long, but a really long time. They really did sleep wherever they could sleep and eat tree bark, and the baby did die in some sort of refuge-camp situation. I knew I had to go to those places. I was writing that story. Those were the points on the map. We’re following this path, and this path leads to all of these different places. But it doesn’t end there. I’m always going to try to rescue everybody a little bit at the end. Maybe I’ll change as I get older, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to end with the misery. I can go to the misery on the way if I know that we’re going to come to something a little bit okay at the end.

BUCKINGHAM

In “Atria” you treat the two men with great compassion, and that creates an edginess because we don’t want them to be treated compassionately. But we’re rewarded when they are. Could you address that dynamic in your work because it seems prevalent?

AUSUBEL

I think that’s true. The person who’s doing the bad thing, I want for us to see through it to something else in them always. Part of what I’m looking for is a way to come from a different angle than we’d expect. The guy in the convenience store was a lot like the boys I dated in high school—like, you guys, what was I doing? They were so pathetic, oh my god, but I saw through the pathetic-ness to something else. And also shouldn’t have bothered. I should’ve been like, “I see that you are a human being, but, also, get out of my house! Do not throw up in my bed!” Anyway, that part’s not in the story, but that character kind of comes from that part of my life. That’s why I wanted to get both of those really strong views on him. We’re going to treat him as a real person, and we’re also going to see just how not-great he is.

VANDER MOLEN

Sometimes you put your characters through hell and write about it very softly. I was wondering how you choose when to acknowledge the trauma and when to step back and let it just be that moment.

AUSUBEL

I’m trying to get the feeling, the experience on the page so we feel what’s happening for them, but also don’t follow all the threads too far. Because trauma is very hard to pin down. It doesn’t stop. It goes forever and it tangles up with every other part of your psyche and life and experience, but also in surprising ways there can be pieces of it that wind up supporting you to do something great. I want to feel the thing as itself. It’s the same way with the endings. Leave it, let it stand, and let it hang in the air, so you have that feeling of the trauma or the experience having endless spiraling lives for this person. It’s not going to be done at the end of Wednesday. If you write the thing too fully sometimes, you’ve created a stop for it when there is none.

BUCKINGHAM

Some of the most devastating moments are the moments you talked about where there’s no resolution. It’s just this strange thing that happens. One of them is the aunt treating the narrator like a baby in No One Is Here Except All of Us. It’s just devastating. Another is the little girl who shoots the ghost . . .

AUSUBEL

That story with the ghost had the weirdest inception. I started out writing it when I read this baseball story by an older, male, white writer. It was a good baseball story, and I was like, “Baseball stories, that’s a timeless, American thing. I should write a baseball story.” So I wrote a baseball story, and it was so boring. It had nothing to it, and I put it away. And then I was looking back through files and was like, “Could I wake this thing back up and make it into something that actually is a story, that’s mine, that matters to me?” So I took the little southern boy who is out playing baseball in his backyard and was like, not a backyard, but way out in the middle of nowhere with no social contact at all, and make the boy a girl. The only thing we need is songbirds and a grandmother who is inventing baseball in her own head. Okay, but what’s happening here? There’s a ghost, not like a scary ghost. He’s a Civil War general. What’s that guy doing? He’s a good guy. He’s been helping out in nursing homes. Okay. But what does he need? It still felt like a game and an experiment. I didn’t expect it to actually turn into a story that worked. But when I figured out who he was and what he wanted—he just wanted to be able to finally be dead—I was like, “Oh, okay, now this matters. Now there’s something of consequence here. She’s the person who can save him, something that she will have done and that she won’t be able to explain, and that will be hers alone.” Once it tunneled down deep enough to get to that feeling of release, and the weight of having to carry that release, then it became a story.

WILSON

In other interviews you’ve said that you do fifteen to twenty-five revisions on stories. Are your drafts that tunneling process, or do you do all the tunneling to get the first draft down, and then work on the line-level? Can you talk about how the story ends up in its final form?

AUSUBEL

Yeah, there’s tunneling all along. There’s no fun, polish-y stuff until the very end. I try to keep thinking about every part as a moving part, all the way through. Draft sixteen, yep, everything can still change. If I discover that the character could change in some drastic way and make things more interesting, that has to happen. And I have to follow that all the way through the whole thing, even though it’s going to take me forever, and it’s going to be really annoying. That is operating policy; that really matters because otherwise a thing that seems like the solution, and works for a while, you get too attached to it, you outgrow it, but then it’s there, and that means you put the story in steel bars. That’s the biggest it can possibly get. But if you build everything out of cardboard for a while, you can find out that it’s twenty-five stories, or that it’s miniature size, the entire thing the size of a dime. So I try to not put in anything that’s completely set ever, until I’ve got it all.

That also makes it fun because every draft I’m discovering things. I’m not just fussing around. When I write the first draft, I usually don’t know what I’m doing at all. I usually don’t have a plot. I can’t outline. If I outline, I’m instantly bored, like it’s already done. I have to have a lot of emptiness in front of me, and that means that the first draft is just wandering. It doesn’t make any sense, the characters are appearing and disappearing, or the setting is changing all the time. The first draft is incredibly mushy. It’s like a slime mold I’m playing with; it’s alive, but it’s not taking a form at all, and I don’t want it to. It gets a little more formed with every draft until it finally feels like I can see it all, and it’s doing what it wants to do.

SHERIDAN

You don’t feel stressed by its lack of form?

AUSUBEL

Oh, I feel stressed out all the time. It’s so stressful! It’s especially stressful with a novel. With a story, it’s only fifteen pages. Whatever, I can live with it if it fails. But with a novel, it’s such a long investment of time. Writing time is hard to come by; it’s not like I have twelve hours a day to work. If I spent a year on something that doesn’t come together, that’s terrifying. It just is terrible. But also, maybe part of why this process feels so important at the same time is because I can still rescue it. I don’t have a novel in the drawer. I have never given up on something long because it’s too heartbreaking to imagine doing that. So I revise eighteen times. On draft three, a wiser person might be like, “This thing is not working. We should put it in the drawer and start over.” But I’m like, “No! We will work this thing until it comes together. We’ll never give up!” Because I’ve already invested two years. I will not let it die. It requires a kind of bringing it back from the dead, every single draft, until it finally does actually take a form. It comes to life. There’s a moment in there somewhere where I trust it, where I know it’s not going to go away, where I know it’s a book. I still see a ton of things I want to do. It won’t be finished for months or a year, but it will get there.

SHERIDAN

Do you get any outside feedback? Do you have friends or readers read it?

AUSUBEL

I don’t like to have people read too early because I can get off-track if somebody’s like, “I don’t get it. I don’t get this whole thing.” Then I’d be like, “You’re right, that’s weird. We’re not doing that.” The wrong reader at the wrong time can really derail an idea. Part of why I feel the confidence in this new book is because I did show it to a little writing group in LA (where I don’t live, so we don’t see each other often enough). You put up the bat signal—“Guys, I’ve got a draft! I’m sending it to you. I’m flying out. We’re going to talk about it.” It’s so, so, so important. And they were like, “Yes, it’s a book. And here’s a bunch of things we notice.” Even just admitting to them that I had it helped me start to bring it together in a way that it hadn’t come together before. So they’re my first readers—there’s three of them—then, usually I’ll show it to my husband, and then it’s almost always ready to go off to my agent. I have other friends who I could ask to read, if I needed another round. But I do like to have it stay close for a long time.

SIERRA SITZES

When a novel hits that point you mentioned where some people would put it in the drawer, what are some questions you ask yourself to push it past that?

AUSUBEL

This is my very favorite exercise, I do it all the time when I’m stuck: write a long list, at least twenty-five, of “what-ifs.” It’s magic, I’m telling you. It’s the most important thing I know how to do. I have this novel. The novel itself is two-hundred pages or so right now. The document of what-ifs is fifty pages. I’ve come to a room with no walls, and I don’t know where to go. What are a bunch of things that could happen? It can be in the plot-world—this mammoth novel—what if there’s something wrong with the mammoth? Here are a bunch of what-ifs about what could be wrong with the mammoth and what those consequences would be. What if one of the daughters gets pregnant? She does, and it’s Neanderthal sperm . . . it’s complicated. But then that also needs to have a trapdoor, too. So what if it’s a possible Neanderthal baby, possible not-Neanderthal baby? By writing all these what-ifs, I decided that the place is going to be a castle. It’s a crumbling castle, once beautiful but now kind of terrible and falling apart, but in this beautiful place. What if for a while maybe it’s India, maybe it’s Siberia? And what if the older daughter is super angry about this thing that happened a long time ago, but the younger daughter feels completely differently? And what if the dad has a crush on the lady who owns the property? What if we rearranged stuff a little bit? You get a new sort of electricity. A lot of times that’s all it is, especially in the first draft—what if everybody had a new arm when they fell in love, and what’s the principle, and what are all the iterations of that, and what if we washed our hands in the cabbage soup?

This mode is a way of opening things up for me. If I’m in the document and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next, I cannot continue. Whereas if I’m on the list, it’s safe. You can write anything on the list, and the list does not have to go in straight lines. What if there’s a rabid lion? I don’t think there is. So don’t worry about it. Leave it on the list, but keep typing other ideas, too. It can be anything. Whatever feels true, what feels interesting, what feels alive. You get to run all that through all your little instruments and see where things start to ping. It might not work. But all you’re doing is trying. You’ve identified this as an experimenting- and trying-land.

VANDER MOLEN

Many of your endings lean towards the unknown and the unsolvable. I’m thinking of the arm one [“Tributaries”] in A Guide to Being Born in particular. It ends in this lovely picture, but at the same time, I was like, “What?” How do you decide when to end the story, what to reveal for the reader, and what to leave for them to decide on their own?

AUSUBEL

I started that story because I gave my undergraduates, when I was in grad-school, a writing assignment, which I still give, which is to change one and only one rule about the world. Everything else stays exactly the same. So I was listing, “Maybe you have to walk on your hands the whole year you’re thirteen, or the girl’s hair catches on fire when she’s angry at her mother, or you grow a new arm when you fall in love.” And I’m like, “That one’s mine. Don’t do that, I’m doing that.” I assigned them the story over the course of a weekend, and I wrote that story with them. Instead of a story that had one larger arc, I wanted it to be a portrait of the world with this condition. So I knew it wouldn’t have a clear ending, because it doesn’t. You get to scan the whole land—this version of it, that version of it—but then it needed to weave together and connect. Even with an ending that doesn’t have an ending-ending, I still want you as a reader to see where you’re going next.

I don’t like short stories that end in complete ambiguity—“You just dropped me off and I don’t even know where or what path I’m walking”—but I do like it when you get there and you’re like, “Whoa, I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I see where we’re going, the direction the energy is moving,” and then the reader gets to imagine what’s next, gets to participate. It works especially well for short stories—it’s this little delivery of what-if you get to hold onto, and you get to do this piece at the end that activates a new part of the story.

BUCKINGHAM

It seems like a lot of the stories in A Guide to Being Born end on a tiny gift, a moment of generosity. “Tributaries” does that and “Chest of Drawers” and certainly “Safe Passage.” It’s small. It obfuscates some of the darker tones of any of the endings. Could you speak to that?

AUSUBEL

That’s nice, I like that, doing something nice for somebody else. Maybe that’s because that’s what I feel is the only thing that saves me in the world. All the sad and terrible things are still true, they’ll always be true, but that tiny moment of generosity saves your life over and over again. Coming back to that must matter to me because I keep doing it. It does feel like sometimes that’s all there is, and that’s the only bridge that’s going to get you over whatever the other thing is underneath.

WILSON

You had four books come out within a six-year period, which is pretty fast. What’s your daily approach to your writing when you’re doing this many drafts and this much experimentation?

AUSUBEL

They came out in that time, but the first two I started like eight years before that, so there is actually more time in the frame. I write the first draft as quickly as possible because it’s less scary to just do it and get something done. The first draft of No One Is Here I wrote the last quarter of my second year in grad school in five weeks, and I wrote ten pages a day. I took weekends off. If you write ten pages a day, you’ll have 250 pages after five weeks. That’s enough of a draft to see what you’re doing. Ten pages is a lot, but it’s not absolutely insane; anybody could do that. The second time, I had a one-year-old, so I didn’t have the six-hour stretch. I wrote like five pages a day for a little bit longer.

Then with this new novel, I had a little more faith in the process, a little more faith in myself. I knew that I had done it and maybe could do it again, and that I could live with the not-knowing in a different way than I’d been able to before. So I wrote what I thought of as a half-draft. It was the bottom half, not the front or the back, but like the foundation, like starting to put some seeds in the ground and see what it was. It was about 150 pages, which, now revising it, feels like a good method. I think I’ll do that again because it meant that I discovered a lot about what was happening. I have scenes from the beginning, middle, and end. I have a lot of understanding of who the characters are. A bunch of things are happening, but I’ll have a scene I know is going to get a lot bigger. I know it’s going to stick its arms out to connect up to a bunch of other things. I don’t know what those other things are yet, or I don’t know quite how they connect. So instead of trying and writing the connections when I don’t know them, I’m just writing the foundational posts.

In all that first drafting, actually sitting down every day requires focus and a commitment: “I am in this; I am getting this book to come to life. And so I’m going to have to do that every day for whatever the time is. I have to keep coming back to it. I cannot be interrupted.” And after that, once it’s being revised, there can be more coming in and out. I have never been a person like Aimee Bender who writes for two hours every morning before she does anything else. She has always done that. She writes all the books that way. Which is great. But my kids get up early. Before five? No. We cannot do that. That can’t work for me. I’m okay with like, “For these five weeks I’m writing this first—teaching will fit around it, or whatever else I’m doing will fit around it.” And then I know there’s going to be a bunch of stuff that I have put off, so for a couple of weeks I’m okay with focusing on other things and not writing that much as long as I see that it’s coming back around. It comes in cycles, but I do try to look ahead so I’m looking at a scope of time, so I know. For example, I’m teaching a class next week, and it’s five full manuscripts we’re talking about. So I’ve been reading these books for the last couple weeks. I have not written anything, and that’s fine. I know that the second the teaching thing is done, April is a writing month.

My ideal writing day is four hours long. I write for two hours then go for a walk, and I come back and write for one more hour once I’ve figured out all the smart things that I thought of while I was walking. When in doubt, move across land. That always, always makes something happen. That four hours is actually a lot of time if you’re using the whole thing and not getting distracted.

VANDER MOLEN

You mentioned not needing to define something and put into a box, especially with your own work. I was wondering how that works for publishing because as much as we all don’t like boxes, the publishing world very much likes boxes.

AUSUBEL

They do, it’s true. They like to sort and label. I’ve partly been lucky. So far, the fact that they don’t all fall in line has been okay. I think because they still have a certain similar flavor. It could be that I keep going and somebody’s like, “No, you can’t write that literary thriller, that’s not what you do, we can’t sell that from you.” And that might happen. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to write a literary thriller.

I think there’s a really true thing—brand is a terrible word, let’s not think of it like that—but your own thing. You keep doing the thing that’s yours to do. And if you keep doing the thing that’s yours to do, and you do it as absolutely well as you can, and you keep going over that thing until it is a hundred-percent itself, and then you let it out into the world, the world will figure out where it lands. That’s not your job. The “where it lands” and “who it belongs to” is a completely separate project. If you start to think, “Well, there’s this thing now everybody’s writing, like The Girl on the Train, I should try to do that, get in on that thing,” it won’t be yours. Unless that’s really authentic to you, you’ll probably do a less-than-great job at it. Or you’ll do a good job and then the publishing world, because you’re trying to do this thing that falls into the label, will be like, “Oh, we got another one in the pipeline already, sorry, can’t work for us.” And then you’ll waste all that time on something that didn’t really belong to you in the first place.

As writers, we have to do the work, we have to do the art, we have to do the living in it: “I don’t know what this is going to be, and I don’t know if there’s going to be five people who want to read it or a hundred people, or nobody at all, or fifty thousand—that’s not what it is yet. Right now, it’s just this really true thing that’s important to me that I need to make to explain something to myself about how the world works. And I’m going to do it the best way I know how and the way that is most true to me, and then I’m going to trust in the next phase.” And then no matter what happens, even if nobody ever publishes it or nobody reads it, you still have done the thing that mattered to you. So it won’t have been a waste.

VANDER MOLEN

You hear a lot of novelists say, “I wrote this great novel and then they wouldn’t take it, so now I have five in a drawer,” and things like that, which is really disheartening because you want to put it out there.

AUSUBEL

That’s true for all of us, and it’s true no matter how far along you get. That’s no less true for me than it is for somebody who hasn’t published anything yet. I mean, no one has seen this book besides my little crew. They might be like, “No. This is just. What? No.” That could happen. And I’ll have to be able to live with that and also continue on and write something else. That could happen with the next one, too. There’s no knowing. But there is knowing what it feels like to make the thing in the first place.

There are a lot of conversations, especially at places like AWP and writing conferences and workshops, about the reader as the most important person in the room. What is the reader going to feel? What does the reader need? How can we serve the reader? How can we hook the reader? The reader is going to turn that page, is going to close that, is going to be bored. We’ve got to entertain them. It feels a little bit like this tiny little overlord. You, as the writer, are the first reader, and the most important reader forever. And it does need to actually be yours and to do something for you. You need to be answering the question that feels unanswerable, and you need to be writing toward something that is deep or profound or complicated or incredibly sad or incredibly beautiful. It has to be just because you feel that. No matter what else happens. The experience of having done that is what will stay with you for the rest of your life. I still feel so lucky that I have books in the world. I still feel like I got the golden ticket and I got to write, and that’s amazing. The books go off and live their lives, and actually it doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore. I’m done with them. I spent years in those worlds, but the time I spend there is when I’m writing them, not when they’re being between covers. They have a whole completely separate existence.

WILSON

One thing that makes your work unique, beyond the fantastical elements which might catch people’s attention, is the fact that you use many different points of views and very unusual ones. No One Is Here Except All of Us is basically an omniscient first-person, which is really cool and not something I’ve seen before. How do you come to those?

AUSUBEL

I’ve switched lots of points of view as I’ve written and in the revising process. No One Is Here, for many drafts, was all that “we” voice. I knew it was a problem, that it was hard to hold, and the people, those overlord readers, were going to be like “oh gosh.” For many drafts I was like, “I see you there, problem, but I need this. This is what gives the book teeth for me—this fact that they were all together as a group, they were feeling it as a group, and experiencing it as individuals and as one.” So I couldn’t leave it behind. I was like, “Nope, anybody who tells me something differently is wrong. This is how it has to be. This is what makes it a story. Fuck you if you don’t like it.” When I finished at Irvine, I had a second-ish draft.

Then I had a story published in One Story, which was my first publication ever. I got notes from agents after that story came out, and they asked, “Do you have a novel?” And I was like, “Yes, I do have a novel. I just have to do a few things, but it’s totally close.” Because I thought that they were going to slam the door and forget about me in five seconds if I didn’t send them something right away. Which is not true. I was wrong about that. So I sent No One Is Here to a couple of people when it was not done, and it was in that first-person plural, the whole book. I don’t know if I still have some of those rejections, but some of them were nice, “Oh, this is an interesting choice that you’ve made. I can see this. I don’t want it.” And other ones were like, “What are you doing?!” There was some guy who was a little bit mad at me. It was terrible. It was a tough point-of-view. But I was still annoyed: “No! This is the book! Shut up!”

Then my husband and I took this round-the-world trip, and there was an editor who was still reading it. I was like, “She’s going to be the answer.” We were in Morocco and I got this really long, really thoughtful rejection letter from her. She said, “I really want you to think about this point of view. I see why it’s here, I see what it’s doing, but I also think there’s like a distance that this necessitates. That might not be what you want in this book.” At first I was like, “Pssh. Stupid. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’m right about this.”

Then I rode a lot of long busses, and I realized, “No, that’s true. And I can still have it, and I can also have a person we’re close to. I can have a character who we feel attached to and are seeing the world in a way that makes sense to us through one person, through an experience that is individual, and I can still get that kind of Greek chorus in there.” So I changed the whole point of view over the course of like a week. There are lots of other things that also then had to be changed because of it, but I could see right away the way the story was starting to open up. I could have made a much simpler choice early on: “You choose first or third, that is just what you do, don’t mess around with something complicated. You’re just learning this, don’t be so big, just do a small thing.” But I do feel that’s what made the book matter to me and what gave me access. That’s critical. Think about being your first reader. If you don’t have access, if you’re doing it for some cynical kind of solution for a reader, you’re going to miss all these cool passageways that you would’ve gotten if you’d written for yourself first. Then you can come back and be like, “All right, what does this feel like to receive, and how can I make the process—that reception—both functional and a way of getting all that complicated weird stuff across the bridge?” I’m glad I figured out how to solve it, and that it eventually worked, but it needed to not be so close at first. Those entry points, which point of view often is, are critically important and they change the way the story feels completely.

VANDER MOLEN

Some of your books have very distinct sections. You’ve spoken about the organization in A Guide to Being Born in other interviews, but also No One Is Here Except All of Us, even the chapters have very distinct titles. I wondered if you could speak about the sectioning.

AUSUBEL

Yeah, I really like that part. Partly because it comes later, usually, so I have a sense of what the story is or what the book is and how it’s going to work. In No One Is Here, we’re in this really unknowable place. I’m asking readers to take a leap and be like, “We’re going to believe this with you. We know that it’s not possible to start all over again, but we are going to do that.” What does the title “Chapter Two” mean? You finished that part and now we’re moving ahead, somewhere different. I wanted it to feel like this is a specific place and moment that is nothing else. Nothing else is here. This is what this is. Partly, it’s for me to hang onto. It feels like this is the “Book of the River.” This is a real thing that is firm and important. Not just like, I’m sort of trying to continue moving this story forward.

I just gave one of my students an exercise. She’s working on an historical novel that has all these different characters and they’re all affecting each others’ lives. She’s trying to decide what the larger thing is. I asked her to do an exercise starting with, “It was the era of . . . .” It’s the era of cooking three breakfasts every day because my seven-year-old eats like a man. It’s the era of poached eggs immediately after cereal immediately after whatever. Not just like, “Today I made poached eggs and then I made cereal and then I made an omelet and then I made waffles.” That’s just about today. And maybe that detail sticks around and you’re like, “Okay that’s a lot of food.” But if I’m telling you, “This is the era of poached eggs after cereal after waffles,” it has bigger significance.

WILSON

The first section in A Guide to Being Born is Birth. And the first story is “Death.” I loved that. It was a little window into the author’s intent. Sometimes when you’re reading short stories, you’re like, “This is a great short story, but I don’t know exactly what the author was thinking.” So it’s a little bit of a guide.

AUSUBEL

Exactly. I wanted to reverse the order so you open the table of contents and you’re like, “Oh! We go backwards from birth to love. What does that mean?” Birth and death immediately at the opening feels like a little tension, a little confusion—it puts you on a different alert to pay attention. You know for sure as a reader that it was purposeful. I’m always happy when I have somebody being like, “Trust that this was on purpose.” Because then you get to spend time thinking into that, and wondering why that was, and creating your own map between those two places because absolutely they belong together.

BUCKINGHAM

One of the things that sets the tone for the point of view in No One Is Here are those Yiddish tales at the beginning. They’re one of my favorite things in that book. I wonder from your point of view how that’s operating.

AUSUBEL

I love all those stories. I love when you get to have a piece of storytelling that belongs to everybody in some way and you get to swoosh it into your little world. Those Yiddish folktales, versions of them, were told to me by my grandmother. So they belong to me and belong to other people in different ways. Some of those stories are universal. There’s a version in the Arabic world and a version in the Latino world. We all have ways of understanding the world. We work it into stories. That’s how we process things as humans. It’s a joy to grab one of those and twist it around a bit and make a new version of it.

WILSON

No One Is Here Except All of Us is pretty overtly dealing with religion and doubt about God and prayer and ritual. How did you navigate writing about religious experience?

AUSUBEL

I don’t know that I even thought about it as religious for a while. I was thinking first about cultural significance, the fact of all these Jews being sent away and moving and leaving and running and dying. But you can’t not think about God, partly because it’s a major religion, but also because of people being slaughtered. Where, then, is God exactly? I can’t not have that question. It did not occur to me until about draft sixteen that it was this event at the beginning of the world. Oh. The book of Genesis. The other beginning of the world. You would think that was the first thing I thought of. It probably should’ve been. I could use that language partly as a way for the reader to feel like there’s precedence for this—there’s a reason this makes sense to do and we’re going to go with it and we’re going to believe it. Because that’s a trick. When you’re writing something that has some sort of magic or some sort of huge leap of faith, you do have to get people to go with you. The actual scripture was the way to lift this thing up at the beginning so you were like, “This is how this story goes. This is the only way that they can do it.”

WILSON

Your family is Jewish, and the first novel is obviously very much about Jewish experience. I was curious how that kind of identity shapes your writing.

AUSUBEL

I didn’t grow up with any Judaism but my grandmother was born in Romania and then grew up in New York, and she’s the most proto-typical Jewish grandmother in the whole wide world. You walk in the door and she’s like, “Sit! Eat! Let me see what I have in the freezer.” She’s a perfect Jewish grandmother, and she’s my passport to all of it. Her parents were extremely observant. Very, completely versed. Kept the Sabbath. Did everything. And my grandmother—there were a couple of Polish boys across the hall when she was growing up and they had kielbasa and she was like, “I don’t know. That stuff is good. Did God smite me when I had the kielbasa? He did not. I think this is all nonsense.” She identified God as a hoax when she was eleven and that was that. She still identified culturally as a Jew, but is zero practicing. My Dad grew up in that world, so he had none of it at all. He lives in Santa Fe and does all the other things—like they had a teepee on their land for a while, there’s all the astrology—so he’s taken on all the other ways of seeing the world.

I didn’t even really realize that we were Jewish. It was an insider-outsider kind of relationship, which is part of why I wanted to write about it: this both belongs to me and is completely not mine. I didn’t go to Hebrew school, I didn’t have a bat mitzvah. I didn’t go to Israel on my birthright trip. I have none of the official anything, but it’s in the lineage and the stories. I identified with this history, and I also don’t really believe in god. What does that mean? It was a conversation with myself I really wanted to have.

It was so interesting, especially because that was my first book. Everybody was like, “She’s a Jewish author.” I got flown out to a bunch of synagogues, and I felt like such an imposter. I felt like I am not actually part of this at all. But they totally accepted me, and it was sort of nice. And then A Guide to Being Born came out, and there was none of that, no “Jewish author.” Well, okay. It was fine. I got flown out to do other things. It was a completely different version of myself, which was fascinating and so weird. And then Sons and Daughters came out next, and the Hamptons bookstore wanted me to come. This is so weird. I felt like I needed to put on my tennis whites and pretend to be the waspy part of myself that is also not really there. But it was a good lesson: It all comes from you, and there’s a million versions of yourself in there. And people of the world are going to decide that this is the story and this is the label and this the thing, and then you play that part for a little while. But it will only be one of the parts you play. Then you move on to a different thing, and the different tracks in the road will carry you along. Because I’ve moved around so much and the subject matter has changed in each book, maybe people are going to give up: “You just do you. You do your own thing. We’re not going to figure this out anymore.” We’ll see. Next I’ll be going to natural history museums or something. That’d be great. I’m looking forward to writing all the selves and obsessions I don’t yet have.