![]() Popkey: I have a really hard time structuring plot in the way that traditional novels structure plot, with rising action, a climax, etc. Were you always planning to follow this structure, or did it emerge later during the revision process? ![]() Guernica: The novel is structured around a series of conversations that take place in different locales over roughly two decades. If I was writing a new section and the voice wasn’t clicking with the content, it was sort of a sign that perhaps I was not writing in the right direction plot-wise, because if I couldn’t make it sound right in her voice, then maybe it just wasn’t a situation she would be in. I had that voice, and as I continued to write, it was really important to me to keep that consistent. The voice was the first thing I had, before I had a plot or even a sense of who my narrator was. The novel was definitely influenced by her novels more than her nonfiction, although some of the ideas of her nonfiction are in there as well, but you’re absolutely right to spot that as an influence on the voice. It reminds me so much of Renata Adler in Pitch Dark and Speedboat. Guernica: In the revised draft, the voice somehow tightens and leans into a sort of dark ambivalence. Perhaps “water-damaged” is, too, but if one cliché is forgivable, two, to butcher Lady Bracknell, starts to look like carelessness. Guernica: Why did the “walls flak white plaster” disappear? Was it also about tone? Perhaps, because the comment now reflects back on her alone, I also make our narrator slightly crueler, less sympathetic. Trying to do less, I sharpen the tone (I hope). The reader gets the narrator’s contempt for Fran and also, possibly, one reason for it: Fran, sharing the joy and camaraderie she felt, seeing Sandra, is making herself vulnerable our narrator hates vulnerability. The eye roll is clear-a very legible gesture. It just read as mean-and worse, slightly confusing. ![]() Miranda Popkey: What I’d had in place of the eye-rolling (“The stench on her …”) was meant to communicate the narrator’s dislike of Fran and her ambivalence about motherhood but, trying to do two things at once, I found it was doing neither well. Guernica: I’m curious about the detail of the eye-rolling. I asked her about the process of revising her “nontraditional” novel and what other traditions she subverted along the way. In the style of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, Popkey trusts her narrator’s voice to carry the reader along, eschewing many conventions of plot. The excerpt above brings together a group of single mothers reflecting on their circumstances while their babies nap in the other room. Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, traces ten significant encounters over twenty years, each of which shapes the unnamed female narrator’s views on gender and sexual politics.
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