I Do Not Know Clare Sestanovich

 But she was interviewed by Poets & Writers after publishing her short story collection Objects of Desire and had a few things to say about the actual writing of her stories(there were 10 questions) , including this:

3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?

That hardest part was that every day I had to decide—again—to keep writing it.

4. Where, when, and how often do you write?

I write early every morning. This isn’t really a preference, or a principle, it just happens to be the only schedule that I can follow while also doing my day job. I regret that early risers seem virtuous and night owls seem cool. I would much rather be cool!

And she appeared in The Paris Review which interviews her and says in part:

 In Objects of Desire, which includes the story, Sestanovich revitalizes James Joyce’s style of “scrupulous meanness”—depicting the setting and inhabitants of her narratives in an ultrarealistic, if sometimes unforgiving, light. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. Suzanne, for example, finds solace not in a major dramatic resolution but in the acquisition of a houseplant. But Sestanovich engages more self-consciously with a matriarchal literary lineage. Her steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She weaves each narrative around universal trials of womanhood. Through hysterectomies, miscarriages, and unstable relationships, her cast of canny protagonists come to terms with their wants and needs.

I have read Didion's essays and the fiction of Smith and Lahiri, and I have to say that is pretty much heady company. The interview leaves me wanting to know more about this woman:

INTERVIEWER

The title of the first story, “Annunciation,” brings to mind the iconography of the Virgin Mary and her impregnation. But Ben is the virgin of the story, and Iris, despite her symbolically virginal name, is quite sexually experienced. How did you go about finding new ways to represent and play with gender and female sexuality in literature?

SESTANOVICH

At some point in my late teens, in college I guess, I experienced what felt like a revelation—women I knew could talk about sex as frankly, as confidently, occasionally as crassly, as I had always imagined men did. And then, soon thereafter, I experienced what felt like a second revelation—all that talking might not have any bearing on how we were actually experiencing sex. There was some way in which our lucid, sincere, empowered thinking didn’t translate into lucid, sincere, empowered acting—for structural reasons, for personal reasons, for murky reasons that we were always at a loss to explain. When I write about sex, I think what I’m trying hardest to capture is that murkiness. What keeps us from getting what we want? What keeps us from knowing what we want?

Iris has what you call experience. She’s intentional about acquiring it. She’s had a lot of sex, and I imagine she thinks of herself as someone who’s comfortable talking about it—good at talking about it. She isn’t, however, very comfortable with vulnerability. She looks away when she sees something real and raw in Ben’s face, she hides her most important truths from her mother, and she falls asleep when there’s something she wants to avoid looking at head-on. I’ve tried to be clear-eyed about sexuality in these stories, and that includes being clear-eyed about all the things we can’t see, or don’t let ourselves see.

***

 INTERVIEWER

Each story is about transitional phases, perhaps illustrated most beautifully in “Brenda,” in which the title character lives alone in a trailer on the lot where she once planned to build a house with her partner. Has your own reading of these stories changed after this past year of transition and tenuous human connection?

SESTANOVICH

When I was sending the first draft of this manuscript out to agents, I said that the stories were about loneliness. In general, I can’t bear to be asked what the book is “about,” but this was my best attempt. I imagine we’ve all learned something about the texture of loneliness this year, and some of those lessons may become legible only with time. What I already knew, but have certainly come to know more immediately and intensely, is that my own loneliness has more to do with the gyre of time spent with myself than with the hole of time not spent with others. There are characters in this book who share that, I think—who are driven back upon themselves and, as Didion says, find no one at home, or find many people, many selves, they no longer care to share quarters with. We were home alone in many ways this year. My own writing and reading filled much of that space—it brought me relief, gave me purpose, kept me company.

There is also a link to one of her stories published by The Paris Review here. Now to find time to read it!