Q&A With: Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
by Bex Frankeberger
In Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee has created pure magic. Her debut novel is a singular and luminous story of dreams, labor, and love. Jonathan Abernathy, saddled with debt, is simply trying to survive. When he gets a cushy job as a government dream archivist, his troubles all but disappear. But this is late stage capitalism! It’s the government! Nothing is quite what it seems.
At its core, this is a book about choices. What possibilities can emerge when we choose to be brave? What infinities are just around the corner? How does it feel to write the sublime? Molly McGhee graciously answered my questions (but not actually that last one) ahead of Jonathan Abernathy’s release.
I'm going to start by gushing and then hope by the end it turns into a question. I was fascinated by the dreamlike, varied timelines of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. Throughout the novel, alternative futures are presented whenever certain characters (namely - if not exclusively? - Jonathan) have to make a deceptively simple choice. No matter how small, the braver choice (the one the characters don't choose) always makes them happier. But I realized at the end of the novel that even these imagined futures are false. The what-if's are just another dream of what could have been instead of what actually is, which is just so unbelievably brilliant. It's not that we have an unreliable narrator so much as we are right there with the narrator, unsure what to rely on. What is true! What is a dream! What is labor and what is love! All of which finally leads to my question: can you speak to how you went about structuring the book?
My process is very strange, and talking about it has been one of the most surreal elements of publishing a book. As a writer I knew I had to write the book, but I didn’t anticipate explaining how I wrote it.
My process is opaque to me. None of my attempts to explain it have felt satisfying. That being said, I guess I have to try: The “feeling” of the novel came to me in a dream. While I was writing it I thought of myself as a translator. I had to find the right language, the right order, the right frame. The poetry of it was important to me.
In some ways every novel is a failure because the moment of inspiration—which for me is always a moment of intense feeling—can never truly be captured. The trick is to hold onto the feeling and then pull it into the world, where it becomes a living, breathing thing. But this takes time. Months. Years. Decades. Often writers can kill the feeling in the process of its birthing. My partner and I joke that novels are shoddy fourth dimensional beings created by three dimensional idiots. A good story is brought about by capturing language and cajoling it into the right sequence. If you can coerce language into the right order, a novel is capable of transcending time. The idea and characters become “alive” and, in a sense, immortal. The book escapes its three dimensional creator. If you choose the wrong sequence of words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, the idea comes into the world stillborn. Getting it right is a delicate process.
Two of the novel's most prominent themes are labor and capitalism, yet I never felt the book was hitting me over the head with ideology or sanctimony. I attribute this, at least in part, to the surreal/dream elements of the novel, which were more grounding than they ever were satirical. I felt the job of dream archivist instead lent itself to Kafka, to expressionism, a literal embodiment of profit over people. How was the process of translating these larger themes into a novel that was intentional without being heavy-handed?
I am an avid reader of the surreal, the absurd, the horrific, and the unexplainable. I often think life is stranger and more unknowable than we are capable of conceiving. I feel kinship with Kafka because he seemed to understand this on a fundamental level. For me, labor and capital have been the driving forces behind most of my life’s tragedies. As those forces play out, it becomes predictable, the predictability becomes absurd, the absurd transforms into the cruel, the cruel becomes horrifying, and then the horrifying becomes commonplace, which in turn makes the entire cycle retrospectively quite funny. It’s inescapable. It’s incomprehensible. And yet it still is.
To me writing novels is part of this process of absurdity. Once a book is completed I can’t always conceive of it in parts as I did when I was creating it. The tragedy blends into the politics blends into the humor blends into the romance blends into the horror. Everything is the way it is because it is part of the whole. Each part (language, tone, voice, theme, character, etc) flows into every other part and informs the book’s shape. By the end all individual components are inextricably entwined, like a body.
Spoiler alert of a question: at the conclusion, the narrator is revealed to be Jonathan Abernathy himself, narrating from his archive box. Once I had a professor say about my own third person POV, "It's 2022, who's using a third person narrator anymore?" Which changed my entire book, until I changed it all back again, and when I told the professor of this existential crisis, she said, "But I love third person!" So now I'm agonizingly curious whenever the narrator starts as something and then turns into something/one else. Was the narrator always meant to be Jonathan? Was the finale/reveal initially a part of that choice?
One of my favorite writers is Brian Evenson, who was highly influenced by Gene Wolfe. What I love about both of their writing styles is that their work is meant to be re-read. On each reading, you can know the text more intimately. Their stories have great depths. Like getting to know a person, characteristics of the text that were at first meaningless reveal themselves upon rereading to be the linchpins to comprehension.
I always knew the perspective of the narrator, but the question of how explicitly that perspective would be revealed was one that I grappled with. Intimacy between the text and the reader is important to me. The more time someone spends with a book, the more intimate the book should become. The question became: how intimate would the reader need to be to understand the greater tragedy of the text?
Also, Bex, this is a slight side note, but as a rule of thumb, you should always ignore your writing teachers. If you enjoy third person, and third person does something for you, you will be able to execute it in a way that your teacher—who perhaps fears the form—would never be able to anticipate. Trust your gut. Reading takes two: both the author and the reader. Writing only takes one. If you are writing in the third person because you love it, that love will act as a beacon and readers with the same proclivities will find you.
The editing process can look so different for every writer. Do you have a specific approach you've developed over the years?
I’m so sorry for how esoteric my answers have been, but I feel the only way I can make sense of my process is to attempt complete honesty, even if complete honesty is often more confusing than polite abridgement.
Writing is like being. It does not have to make sense. It has no logic. It just is. Editing is the process of ‘being’ in the context of others. What is accepted, what is not accepted, what is communicable, what is not communicable. When we are around other people how much of ourselves do we give? How much of ourselves do we explain? What is a “normal”? What is “expected”? How can we move through the world with intention? What do we owe the reader? How can we empathize with them without compromising ourselves? To what degree is compromise fundamental? To what degree is our ideal possible? How can we communicate the fundamentals, and to what extent is misinterpretation part of the experience? Ultimately, I edit to facilitate connection without compromising the true nature of the project. I write to write. I edit to be read. Some writers, I think, do not care to be read. But I love reading. I love communicating with readers. I want to write books that are readable. To me editing is the final act of translation. The goal of translation isn’t exactitude. The goal is communication. A very good translator knows when to set down the tools of language and instead employ charm.
It's an important distinction that the dreams in this book are archived. It's not a dream library, or a dream mall, but a dream archive. Do you keep your own archive of your writing process? Are there other books you've read that would fit into the archive of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind?
The thing about archives is that they are collections of obsessions, an attempted consolidation of knowledge. They are lonely places. At least libraries are patronized, whereas Archives are mostly plundered, burned, abandoned, or forgotten. I’m not sure the archive of books that led to Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind would make sense to others, or even seem tangentially related to an outsider.
Instead of inviting you into my personal archive—which I can be rather private about—I guess I’ll compromise and reveal that I spent a lot of my early-twenties involved in/actively obsessed with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer, especially the earlier issues. David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Marlon James, Karen Russell, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Samantha Hunt, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus, Helen Oyeyemi, Brian Evenson, Alexandra Kleeman, Colin Winnette, Hilary Leichter, Colson Whitehead . . .
From the age of like 19-21 all I did was archive interviews from The Believer into an online database. It was pointless work. I wasn’t paid, really. This was before The Believer was sold to the Black Mountain Institute. Because I wasn’t important, no one told me The Believer was up for sale. The archiving I did never went live. No one—including, I think, my boss—cared that I was doing it. But I took it very seriously. The project consumed my life. I transcribed all the interviews from old issues because there were no digital copies, especially this one interview between Ben Marcus and George Saunders. My computer kept crashing before I could save the file. Marcus opens the interview in a way that made such an impression on me (maybe because I had to type up the damn thing so many times) I often wonder if it’s the reason I ended up studying with him at Columbia. Anyways, before I could finish the project, The Believer was under new ownership. When I declined to meet the new director for a drink in his hotel room my position was eliminated and I was so hopeless about the state of things I did what only the truly desperate do: I applied for an MFA . . .
This anecdote strikes me as funny, now, given everything that happened with the director and UNLV and the re-sale of The Believer back to McSweeney’s, but at the time this little series of events felt deeply personal and incredibly tragic. I guess that’s how comedies always seem before the end. Now I recognize all that ‘pointless’ work for what it was: a truly fantastic, genre-agnostic education in Contemporary American Fiction.
Is there any art (books, movies, exhibitions, etc) you're really enjoying right now?
I’m teaching a class on Apocalypses and right now we’re reading Kay Dick’s They. I love it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
What's a piece of writing advice you've received that has stuck with you over the years?
I like what Bradbury has to say. When you write you should not be rational. Rationality is the death of creativity. When we explain ourselves, we draw limits around what’s possible. “At the typewriter you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.”
He also said writers must live in libraries.
Both maxims seem right to me.
Copies of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind are now available for purchase! Get your copy today!
