Julia Ridley Smith is the author of The Sum of Trifles, a memoir in essays about the process of dispersing her parents’ belongings after their death, with each essay focusing on a different object. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and her nonfiction was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays 2019. After earning her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked for nearly twenty years as a freelance copy editor of academic books. She’s taught creative writing and literature at UNC Greensboro, as well as art-based writing workshops for educators and other adults at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She is the 2021-22 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in her hometown of Greensboro, NC.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Ashley Trebisacci. She currently works as a Study Abroad Advisor at Brandeis University, and her writing has been published by The Journal of College Student Development and Sinister Wisdom. They live outside of Boston with their wife, who just so happens to be Julia’s literary agent.

AT: What brought you to writing, and what made you interested in writing nonfiction?

JRS: I was a reader from an early age, and I always wrote, but mostly fiction. Once I got out of my MFA program, I started doing some book reviewing and reviewing of art exhibitions,but I wasn’t thinking of myself as a nonfiction writer.

It wasn’t until I had this problem of having to go through my parents’ stuff and I knew I wanted to write about these objects… suddenly I just didn’t want anything between me and the material. I didn’t want to write fiction about it. I wanted to do things I’d never tried before. I wanted to do research and more descriptive writing about the actual objects. I would start with the object and go off on these different associative tangents. I went at it with a spirit of not knowing where I was going to go, which felt right at the time because, in my own life, I didn’t know where I was going to go, in that period of grief.

AT: Did you know you wanted to do things around objects first, or was it like: you had these objects, you thought they were interesting and that there was probably something to say about them, and then you decided what to focus on from there?

JRS: I think I was in almost a panic, or a scramble, to find a way to hold on to this stuff, while knowing that I couldn’t hold on to it. I just started taking notes and writing, and gradually I thought, it could be kind of cool if I could pick certain objects that have multiple resonances and things to think about.

AT: Do you have many other essays or chapters that didn’t make the cut?

JRS: I thought about doing one about books because they were so central in my life and my household growing up. I was playing around with that essay, but then I thought, this topic is too big—and plus, books are already in all the essays. Near the end I allude to how my mom’s library got broken up. But in a way, the room and the books are still there in my mind. I can still go there.

AT: When it came time to order, how did you approach that?

JRS: I knew there needed to be an arc for the reader to follow. The big thing I really wanted to make sure to do was to give a sense of what it felt like to go through the process of cleaning out the house. Then, there was another arc of me growing up with my family and the presence of all that stuff in that growing up. And then there was another arc I wanted to follow about becoming a writer. There was the arc of my parents becoming ill and dying, and then grief after that. So I knew that each essay had to do some kind of job or work within those multiple arcs. At first it was a very puzzling problem, but I really like thinking about structure, so it was fun.

This problem also helped me think about the “First,” “Last,” “Next” sections. In the first section, I wanted to show some of the things that formed me and my relationship with objects. And then in the “Last” section (which is actually in the middle): how my parents and I related to objects at the end of their lives. As they were dying I was observing a shift in the way they were relating to things. And then that third section, which I called “Next”, was me thinking about what comes next, and what my life was going to look like without my parents, and without their stuff, and what I wanted my next stage of life to be like. Because part of getting rid of all this stuff was also getting rid of some of the ideas I’d grown up with that don’t work for me.

AT: One line that really stuck out to me was when you write about when your mom first got sick and the way that your body kind of echoed her feelings with its own physical reactions. The quote is: “As far as I was concerned, we were one body, a body in pain, and we were going to pull through this ordeal together.”

That just sparked so many questions and thoughts for me about the idea of a body being an object unto itself—things can happen to it, and it can move in certain ways, and what does that mean in terms of its interaction with other objects and with the world? I was curious what your thoughts were on that.

JRS: I love that you pulled that quote out because I think a lot of times when writers get asked questions about the body in their work, they’re all like “I’m really interested in the body and I love the body.” But I would be happy not to have one most of the time. Or at least that’s how I felt about it for a long, long time. I always wanted to think more about mental things, intellectual things, creative things, imaginative things—a body was sort of an inconvenience. It was never the right shape; it was something people were always commenting on in ways I didn’t necessarily want to hear about…

Suddenly though, when my parents got sick, I was confronted with so many questions about the body. It was different with my mom than with my dad, because my dad had been diabetic from childhood, so his body I think for him had always been an adversary in some ways. But with my mom… we were so close, and at the time she got sick, my kid was three years old. I was just coming off the experience of pregnancy, nursing, being very responsible for keeping this little person alive, this little person who wanted to be attached to me all the time. I couldn’t ignore my body or anybody else’s anymore. And her illness was also getting me thinking about how attached I had once been to her, born from her.

There’s also the contemplation of the body and mortality. When my parents died some part of me couldn’t believe they weren’t in their bodies anymore. Even before they died, it was so hard to wrap my mind around it, that they were going to be separated from their bodies. Their presence in their body—that’s the only way we could access them. Once they’re gone out of there, you don’t have a way to get to them anymore. That was really painful to think about.

It’s a shock when your body starts to get sick or decay or age. My parents would express this sort of recurring shock: “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” The fact that every human being is always shocked when their body starts to break down—it’s kind of fascinating, and terrible. At that point the body does become like an object, because an object feels separate from you, and when your body’s not doing what you want it to, it feels like, in some sense, that it’s not part of you.

AT: This next question is kind of random, but I don’t know if you listen to You’re Wrong About, the podcast? One of the hosts [Sarah Marshall] said something like “Writing a book is like doing a ‘you’re wrong about’ but about yourself.” That made me wonder what you thought you were wrong about, or realized you were wrong about, over the course of writing?

JRS: Well, I love this question, and probably the answer is everything. [Laughter.] There’s plenty I felt I was wrong about about writing, that I didn’t quite understand yet, especially in the later processes of trying to wrangle what I was writing into a book. I needed to keep reducing, keep chipping away at the manuscript. Even though I had worked for years as a freelance copy editor, trying to whittle down my own prose was hard.

On a deeper level, one of the things I discovered I was wrong about was the idea that grieving would only be about being sad and missing people. I really was not prepared for how much anxiety I would feel… It hadn’t occurred to me that, when your parents die, and you’ve been close to them and you’ve been spending a lot of time with them, suddenly there’s a whole role you’re not called on to play anymore. The role of “daughter” was over, and it had been such a big one for me in those years before they died that it was really disorienting—and also freeing—to realize there were things they’d expected of me that I now didn’t necessarily have to do anymore. Not just caregiving, but also my attitudes or the ways I did certain things.

AT: This is a Non-Fiction by Non-Men classic: Who is part of your writerly support team, whether that’s friends, family, other people?

JRS: Definitely my husband. He’s a full domestic partner on all fronts, so I’ve never had to worry about that stuff, which is not the norm. I have writer friends I’ve met through a variety of conferences and residencies. I have friends here in town who cheer me on. And I have one really good writer friend who read the first full draft of the book several years ago and gave me helpful notes.

I think one of the things I most value about that relationship, and my interactions with a couple of other friends, is that they have helped me acknowledge that I actually have some ambition as a writer. I’m trying to get better at saying that my writing needs to be always on the front burner, not the back burner.

Claiming your time and your vocation is a common struggle for women no matter what domestic or career situation you’re in. I think that’s one of the shocking things I’ve learned as an adult—that the bigger ideas in society can drive so much of what you do, even when they’re not part of your own personal values, or your family’s values, and even when you think you’ve been able to hold them at bay. Specifically, I’m talking about patriarchal expectations for women’s behavior and the idea that your time belongs to everybody else first and you last. I have particular friends who help me remember that writing’s not this little bonbon I’m keeping in the back of my pantry that I get to have when I’ve been a good lady.

AT: I’m curious what you’ve found most rewarding about the process of writing nonfiction and what you’ve found most challenging about it?

JRS: One of the things I enjoy about writing fiction is you get to make stuff up, but it’s also one of the things I enjoy about nonfiction—that you don’t have to make stuff up. [Laughter.] It’s already there!

I like the process of gathering that you do as you’re trying to figure out a piece of nonfiction. Because with fiction it’s like: “I have an idea of a story, and now I’ve got to figure out a way to tell that particular story,” so for me the through-line is maybe a bit more clear. Whereas with nonfiction it’s these weird ruminations and gleanings that you’re picking from places, and then you’ve got this pile of stuff and you’re like: “Well, now what am I going to do with it?” And it’s fun to just be arranging and rearranging. That becomes the challenge as well. For me, the challenge is often when to stop fiddling and let the piece be finished.

AT: And the last thing to wrap up with is: do you have a passage of nonfiction by a non-man that you would like to share?

JRS: This summer I was reading In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova [translated by Sasha Dugdale]. In the book she’s pulling together all these different threads of memory, of looking at objects, and it’s all about her Jewish family in Russia and all they went through during the twentieth century. I was struck by how she was doing some similar things to what I was doing in my book, grappling with memory and objects and what gets left behind. She says:

Memory is not sentimental, it is functional, it works as an accelerator… Memory works on behalf of separation, it prepares for the break, without which the self cannot emerge. Shove the past away like ballast so we can be propelled forward. No speed, no future.

That’s exactly what I was trying to wrestle with in my book, how the stuff weighs us down, and if we don’t figure out a way to deal with it and throw off some of it, the self we want to become can’t emerge.

I love this idea. When I was asking myself, “Am I really writing a memoir?” I realized I was resisting the genre a bit because memoirs are about feelings, and I dislike the idea that women’s writing is only about feelings, that it’s sentimental, and all that bullshit people say about women’s writing. I just love that she addresses that assumption so head-on… and then she offers that idea that memory is doing this work that is going to propel you. I just love that line: “Shove the past away like ballast so we can be propelled forward. No speed, no future.”

AT: I love that. And it makes so much sense—that there is a next after the last.

JRS: Yes, exactly. There’s a next after the last, and that’s what I was hoping to find as I was writing my book.