Q&A With: Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
by Bex Frankeberger
Sometimes fiction does more than captivate you - it captures you, it observes you, it wants you right back. Isle McElroy’s writing does this and more. Their sophomore novel, People Collide, follows a husband and wife body swap, from which they and those around them (re)learn what it means to love others as a means to love yourself. Isle was generous enough to sit down with me and discuss People Collide, their first book The Atmospherians, and what it's like to write a novel using only dollar store-notebooks.
People Collide switches narration and point of view a number of times throughout the course of the book. I finished my MFA recently and one of my professors gave me an existential crisis about third person, and I am particularly in awe of when you switch not only narrators but first and third POV, and then end the novel with someone we don’t necessarily meet for a long time. I’m curious about the decision to switch between narrators and POV and how that affected structure for you as you were writing.
The change in POV came about pretty organically. I wrote the first chapter, and then I felt this sort of impulse that I needed to pull away from the claustrophobia of Eli’s voice. I wanted to get a bigger picture – a very classic narrative move of starting in the middle of things and then stepping back to give more context. Then I moved into the third person in the second chapter as a way to try and mythify the story of this book. Obviously some magical things are happening, so it’s not going to be a primarily realist book, and I think that gave me an opportunity to try and step back and move to a different register outside of the granular everyday of realism. As for how it shaped the book, once I decided that I would continue to use that structure, that when thinking about the past, I’d move into a third person, it actually really helped move the book forward. When I would get stuck in Eli’s perspective, I would think maybe the reason why I’m stuck is because there’s something else I need to know, something else I need to add more context to. I also think that it does something that I’m really interested in in this book, in that it provides what seems to be an objective perspective in a book that is clearly, and very intentionally, lacking objective perspective. There’s another version of the body swap where both characters get equal weight, and this book is intentionally not trying to do that. Moving into the third person hints towards objectivity but still asks the reader to discern where they can find the reality of the situation, if Eli is a trustable narrator, if Elizabeth might be more trustworthy, if the omniscient narrator is trustworthy, or the final character you hinted at as well.
Right, it is a body swap book but it felt like a very new version of a body swap, one that we haven’t seen before. I mean, when I think of body swap, my mind of course goes to the masterpiece, Freaky Friday.
Yeah, it’s got to.
But this is so it’s own thing. Which thematically leads to my next question, which also has a spoiler for People Collide: There are many books that feature a major world event as a crucial plot point. One of my favorites is how Colum McCann does it in Let the Great World Spin, which revolves around Philipe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, and more recently there was Ottessa Moshfegh who famously and controversially ended My Year of Rest and Relaxation on 9/11. In People Collide we have the 2015 Paris Attacks. I thought it ended up working so well, but major historical events are truly a high risk/high reward scenario. How did the attacks come to be a part of this narrative of a body swap, which is also a narrative about the physical embodiment of empathy?
I really love that you’re connecting the two of them. It wasn’t something that I was initially thinking about consciously. I’m not even sure how to unpack the role that empathy is playing on the ground level body swap, as to how we live as another person, and then of the empathy with which we respond to larger tragedy. I think the biggest version of that is where we place ourselves within stories. There’s a moment right after the attack when Eli is in the hotel and is looking around and seeing how everyone is grieving in this hotel, and he has this strange sensation of both understanding the grief and feeling very put off by it. They are technically in a hotel, so the people there do not actually live there, the people are tourists in this city. The way that he describes it is that he felt sort of an obligation to attach himself to this grief, an obligation to attach himself to this tragic event. And I think that that is something I was really curious about, especially in relationship to story. Thinking about big historical events, writing about them, it’s not that they happen in the background, but it’s how characters read them. I really loved Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and so that was also on my mind as well. I think this book is definitely in conversation with that one, and I wanted to bring in a sort of nod to that book. I also think there is something about it plot-wise that is really important, that in order to maintain the level-headed relationship that Eli and Elizabeth have to this magical transformation, there needs to be a larger event than the event of the body swap. It seems like, oh, their world is coming apart, everything has changed, how can they move forward? And that’s happening on the really day-to-day level, and then they enter the space where something much larger happens. My goal was to put their major transformation in relation to larger historical events, and to not dismiss what is going on to them, but to really unsettle the perspective the reader might have or even these characters might have towards this transformation.
I tend to think of editing as something that sounds so daunting to start, and then when I start, I don’t want to stop. People Collide is your second novel - has your editing process changed and developed between this work and your debut, The Atmospherians?
For The Atmospherians, I wrote a lot of it by hand, often on legal pads. I didn’t write the entire thing by hand. I sort of moved back and forth when I felt like I needed to. I was also in a Ph.D. program where I needed to submit a lot of pages both in workshop and later for thesis, so I was constantly getting 50 pages ready or 100 pages ready, which meant that even though I was handwriting a lot of things, I would try to type it pretty quickly. I wanted to have that living document on my laptop that I could eventually turn in for other people’s responses. For this book, though, I kept a lot of it to myself. I wrote the first chapter at a cabin with a couple friends in a notebook. I was in Maine, I’d forgotten a notebook, and I went to a dollar store and bought one notebook. I wrote the first chapter in one sitting, and then I went back to that dollar store and bought all of their notebooks. I was like, there’s something magical about these notebooks, I don’t know what it is, but I need to write this book in these notebooks, and I did. I wrote the entire book across four marble composition notebooks. Another thing that changed, and I’m not sure if I did this before, I think it was the first time I did it, but I would only write on the right page and leave the other page open to take notes. So if, say, I was in the middle of a scene and I knew a character needed to be developed further, or this job isn’t the right thing for this character, or this dialogue isn’t right, or I felt myself moving too quickly but I didn’t want to stop because I knew that if I really slowed down I would lose the momentum, I would just take those notes on the left page. Then when I eventually went back to transcribe everything, it was so much easier for me to edit because I had those notes and suspicions. Sometimes I would even get to the end of the scene and realize it needed to be cut. I’d be glad I got to the end of the scene, but then I’d realized it shouldn’t be in there, and I could just go back and leave a note, “don’t even type this up.” It gave me a greater sense of confidence and understanding about moving forward with the growth of the book. I just understood a bit quicker when something would need to be cut. And I think that was a gift that I got out of having written a first book and knowing that I could write a book. I had a little bit more trust.
Sarah Thankam Mathews came and talked with my cohort once, and she said when she was writing her debut, All This Could Be Different, she had to remind herself that she was going to write more books. Not everything had to be in this first one. I think about that so much.
Yes, it’s really important that it’s not your one book, forever, right? It’s just the beginning of a series of books.
Exactly. You mentioned Ben Lerner earlier, but what other books were in mind while writing People Collide? Did you keep any on your writing desk?
Katie Kitamura’s A Separation was a huge influence for this book. I kept it really close to me. When I was trying to structure a scene, I would often return to that book. I think it’s wonderful, it’s incredible. Tonally they’re very different books, but I admire Kitamura’s work so much. One of my favorite books is Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser. It’s about a boy who lives at a butler academy where he is taught to be nothing, taught to be small, and I think that that undoubtedly shaped Eli’s voice in some ways. I’m not sure exactly how, but I think it had to have been in there. As for others, I’m not sure. I really was keeping A Separation and [Leaving the] Atocha Station closest to me over the process.
Is there any other art (books, movies, TV, etc) that you’re really enjoying right now?
I’m really enjoying Megan Fernandes’ I Do Everything I’m Told, which I do keep on my desk. I tend to read a poem from that every morning or so. I just started reading Annie Erneaux and that has been incredible.
She’s amazing. Which are you reading?
I’m reading The Years right now, so I’m almost done with that and that’s been really great. I also recently read Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a nonfiction book about CPTSD. I think it’s incredible. I listened to the book too and listening to it is really wonderful. Movies…
There doesn’t have to be movies! I just like knowing what art artists are imbibing.
I just started watching Six Feet Under for the first time, so I am four episodes into that, and that’s been great. To dive into something that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the contemporary moment seems really great. I mean, it’s 20 years old, it’s not forever ago, but TV ages so much faster. It’s nice to watch something that seems a little grainer. No one has an iPhone in it, you know?
Is there a piece of writing advice you’ve received that has stayed with you over the years?
I think the advice that has most stuck with me is less about the actual process of writing than it is about a writing career. And I think that comes back to, “this won’t be my first book, it won’t be my only book.” And that, to me, involves a level of really celebrating small parts and recognizing how things have changed. Like celebrating accolades, even small ones, like finishing a chapter that was really difficult. It’s about finding a way to maintain motivation and momentum over the course of what I hope will be a long career writing books, recognizing that I can celebrate things that might seem small. I can celebrate rejections from major places that seem really nice, I can celebrate finishing a really difficult chapter. I can turn to friends and other writers and talk about these things and acknowledge getting past something difficult so that I don’t feel entirely overwhelmed at all times. I think that has been really important and probably has been one of the most important parts of the process. A former professor of mine from undergrad told me that, and I’ve tried to follow it to a T.
Copies of People Collide and The Atmospherians are available for purchase! Check them out today.
