Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, the 2018 Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des lectrices ELLE for Nonfiction, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. Named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, The Guardian, and The Sydney Press Herald, it was an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection, long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger, and a finalist for a New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award, and, and has been translated into eight languages. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has published essays and criticism in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Oxford American, the Boston Globe, and Harpers. They now live in Portland, Maine and are an Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College.
EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?
AML: Writing is something I’ve always done. My dad likes to tell a story of me in my crib when I was two. He asked what I was doing, and I said: I’m writing a song. He said: what’s it called? And I said: Crib Life.
EB: [laughter]
AML: Even back then, I was already thinking about how to narrate my experience, though I wrote fiction for many years. I went to grad school initially for fiction, and there I discovered this odd genre called creative nonfiction, which was everything I loved about fiction—creating an immersive world, where everything else falls away—but with nonfiction. We’re all in our own silos, stuck in our bodies and minds, stuck in our own experiences, and writing gets us out of it. With creative nonfiction, I could grapple with issues I wanted to think about—things I had previously been thinking about in law school—but through the fictive techniques I loved.
EB: I actually wanted to ask about law school. Anyone who has read The Fact of a Body knows you studied law, and I know that being a lawyer involves a lot of writing, but a very different kind of writing. What was it like pivoting from legalese to narrative nonfiction?
AML: I had to unlearn a lot of things. You can’t say anything in legal writing unless you can say it three different ways, so I had to learn to take a different kind of risk. I had to learn how to go out on the limb to bring the reader with me. I think [creative nonfiction] has some similarities [to legal writing]––the logical step-by-step construction of an argument is helpful in terms of world-building. Every book has an argument—it’s the point of view of the book. Also law is just a contest between stories. It was at once a huge shift and also not that big a shift at all.
EB: So true. I feel like I hadn’t realized that, how a trial really is just choosing the better story, until after I read your book.
AML: A lot of the public thinks of a trial as a truth-finding mechanism, but it’s not. A trial is a story-making mechanism.
EB: That reminds me of the keynote speech at the GrubStreet Muse conference this year, with Luis Alberto Urrea. He talked about his experience working with poor communities in Mexico, and how he realized you could use narrative to get help for people. Whoever could tell the most compelling story on behalf of someone or a group of people, could get them access to better medical care, food, water.
AML: [nodding] Jonathan Harr, who wrote A Civil Action, told me years ago that he was working on a book about the narration techniques necessary to get someone asylum. Every asylum-seeker is actually being judged on whether or not their story suits the genre.
I had an essay in the December 2019 issue of Harper’s about the lack of a genderqueer narrative, and how without a narrative, it can be more difficult for people to understand [a situation, perspective, identity]. I think narrative has an enormous amount of power over us.
EB: I felt the exploration of that idea in The Fact of a Body—the power of narratives we tell about other people, but also the power of narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives. So how did the narrative for The Fact of a Body come about? Were the subjects in that book the first things you explored when you started writing creative nonfiction?
AML: The Fact of a Body came out of this moment wherein I could not remember how I answered a question my grandfather asked me. I was writing fiction at the time, but stories from my past—and stories from a murder I had encountered as a law student—kept bubbling up for me. It’s such a cliché to say this story has to be written, but this story kept showing up, even when I was trying to work on other things.
EB: I get that.
AML: That applies to the stuff I am working on now, too. I was researching something else, but these stories about trying to find a genderqueer narrative kept surfacing instead.
EB: I wanted to ask something else about The Fact of a Body—I love how the book is a braided narrative, going back and forth between your personal story and the story of the murder and trial. I found myself equally engaged in both stories, which is something I don’t often find with a braided narrative.
AML: Thank you.
EB: How did you pull that off? Did you write all of one part and the all of the other and braid them together or did you write both parts simultaneously?
AML: I wrote a lot of failed structures. I tried to do a bunch of outlines, but outlines are boring. They were missing the images, the stuff that gave the story life. I realized it wasn’t about the content, but what you do with the content. And an outline isn’t going to capture that.
So, next, I wrote a number of 100-page versions [of the story]. Can you picture a movie on fast-forward, but then you stop when you get to a pivotal scene?
EB: Yes.
AML: That’s what they were like. And I could start to see which scenes were pivotal, but none of [those versions] really worked. I decided to try this exercise by Gay Talese, which is in the Sherry Ellis collection Now Write! Nonfiction. I put away all my notes, and I did an associative drawing connecting one thought with an arrow to another thought, to another thought. I did this for days in the Writers Room of Boston, and I made my way through the entire story that way, and without any of my notes. This let things fall away that were less important, because I simply forgot about them, and it started tapping me into associative connections rather than chronological connections. That distinction comes from a really fantastic craft book called The Art of Time in Memoirby Sven Birkerts, which is part of The Art of series from Graywolf.
EB: I love that series! I interviewed Edwidge Danticat who wrote The Art of Death.
AML: Yes! The series is wonderful. Through sketching the story out like that, I was able to find the associative connections that helped shape the braid. I ended up using that [drawing] as a blueprint for the structure… but then I had to figure out the reason the narrator would be moving from this idea to that idea. I am a big believer that a book teaches you how to read it. You can get away with anything as long as the reader is convinced near the start that you have a structure in mind. For me, that meant things like making sure there was this prologue that had the two stories together. I tried to model the prologue after the opening to Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.”
EB: Oh my god, I love that essay. I teach it in all of my classes.
AML: I actually used to teach a class at GrubStreet that was a six-hour one-day class that was only on that essay. I was inspired by Jane Brox who taught a Bread Loaf seminar that changed my life—she spent the whole class breaking down Natalia Ginzburg’s “Winter in the Abruzzi.” With “The Fourth State of Matter,” if you look at the first two paragraphs, it’s all there—she outlines everything that is to come. I knew I had to do that in my book.
EB: Speaking of writers you admire, I also interviewed Grace Talusan for this series, and I know that you two are in a writing group together. Can you speak a bit about your writing community, and how that affects and helps your writing process?
AML: The group I’m in is called the Chunky Monkeys. I love them madly—Chunks forever! The group had a number of books come out recently: Grace’s The Body Papers; Cape May by Chip Cheek; Once More to the Rodeo by Calvin Hennick; The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer; Leading Men by Christopher Castellani; and Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. Coming next year is Jennifer de Leon’s Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From.
In many ways, I wrote The Fact of a Body for them. In many ways, I am writing the next book for them. I brought early pages to the group, and they urged me to make it more itself. Weirder, braver, structurally more daring. Every time I had an odd little impulse I was afraid to show anyone, they would say that! Go towards that! Having this group of really smart people cheering me on was transformative, and to learn from the discussion of their work, and to learn from reading their work—we all learn from each other and we all spur each other on. There are so many ups and downs in writer’s life, and it’s crucial to have a group of people to celebrate with, complain with, cry with.
EB: I know. I didn’t realize until I did my MFA program what a void I had in my life, how badly I had been needing a group of writers. Before that, I just didn’t have anyone to talk to about writing. They filled a hole in my heart I didn’t know was there.
AML: I feel that way about the Chunky Monkeys. We totally love each other.
EB: [laughter]
AML: Everyone [in the group] is such a total badass, and I want to live up to that badassery.
EB: I love that. I feel like sometimes I meet writers who get really competitive and upset—like oh if she got a book deal, now I can’t get one, or that someone else took your spot to publish a piece online and… I just don’t really get that? Because I feel like when I see someone doing something awesome I think ooh, I want to try to do that. It inspires me to try harder, to be better.
AML: Yes! Also, writers writing books that people want to read, makes people want to read more books, which means more writers can write more books.
EB: Such a good point.
AML: Thanks.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?
AML: This is from Melissa Faliveno’s TOMBOYLAND: Essays, which will be published August 4, 2020 by Topple Books, Jill Soloway’s new imprint devoted to promoting the work of queer writers and women of color:
We want to look at a thing and know what it is. We want a race and a class and an age and a gender. We can’t know or imagine what we can’t define, so we’ve developed language to do this work for us—to give something a name, and in naming it, so give it an order, a meaning, a place in the world. But language—like gender, like sexuality—is fluid, not a static thing. And language provides only a limited number of options. Beyond that, there is a vast expanse, a tunnel, a cave—a dim gray space without much light, if there’s any light at all. Maybe it’s the job of those of us who live in that liminal space, who live beyond what is already defined, to determine what might exist in the dark and unnamed in-between. To be the explorers. To set out into the darkness, strike a match, and get a good look around. To seek not answers, necessarily, but to stand still for a while and listen. And to know, at the very least, we tried: We faced the darkness of the unknown. We looked. We kept our eyes open, even when the match went out.