The Tamesis
Simply put, there is no book like T Kira Madden’s WhidbeyA literary thriller that weaves together the perspectives of its three protagonists, two survivors of childhood sexual abuse and the mother of their recently deceased abuser, with skill and surprising empathy. If it doesn’t have simple clichés about what it means to experience something terrible, it might reconfigure your expectations of what life means.
This week, Fashion Madden talks about moving from memoir to novel, shadowing projectionists and gas station attendants to get a feel for her characters’ worlds, creating mood boards for her writing projects, and complicating our cultural understanding of abuse. Read the conversation below.
Fashion: What was it like making the leap from memoir to novel? How do you think the two differ in terms of craftsmanship?
T Kira Madden: It feels really good! All my life I have wanted to be a fiction writer. I studied fiction, my MFA was in fiction, and my first failed books were all novels. The first book I published happened to be a memoir, but that was never the plan, so it was great to finally publish a novel. In terms of technique, I’d say I work in a very similar way in that whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, I try to write from a place of discovery and let the story tell me where it wants to go, rather than imposing a narrative or hypothesis on the story I want to say. I always have a set of questions I want to solve that feel unanswerable, tricky, or complicated, and a set of scenes I really want to write about. I’m always excited by filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s idea that all practical scenes should become scenes of desire. I kind of support that, I have these images and scenes in my head, and then it’s just an act of discovery, getting to know the characters, getting to know the world of the story. Ultimately, this determines the shape and style.
Can you tell me a little bit about the research that went into making your protagonist’s life and career so vivid?
I like roles that have jobs. The book grew out of some real-life trauma that I was writing about and my experience as a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse, but I really wanted the everyday lives of these women to feel completely divorced from my own in order to feel like I could really enter the fictional world and possibilities of the project. Linzie King is a former reality TV star who worked in a mall, so that was experience I did have; I had been on a movie set and had never done a reality TV show, but I knew a little bit about production and movies and how they worked. I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years about the making of shows like this and read every one of them Bachelor National books I can get, including memoirs by reality TV stars. For Mary-Beth Boyer, I spoke with a number of current and former gas station attendants (mainly at Stewart stations in upstate New York) who allowed me to work with them on their daily tasks. For Birdie Chang, who was a projectionist at a time when digital was taking over theaters, I worked with Lillian Hardester, who was a projectionist at Prospect Park, the Nithawk Cinema, and she asked me to shadow her. That really enriched the story more than any other piece of work in terms of opening up the metaphor of the film screening and the damage inspection report and how that affected Bertie’s life and thinking.
