The Terror of Fucking Up: A Conversation with Marisa Crane (Part 2)

BAT: Are there any flavors to your own feelings about parenting that are particular to being a non-binary parent? 

MC: It’s something I’m…I don’t know, dealing with in a new way. My gender feels less my own and more about me in relation to others, including a small person I love very much. Now, it’s like, “oh wow more relational words I have to think about.”  I don’t like being called mom or mother, so we came up with Mozzy as my parent name. I like gender-neutral terms like “Wilder’s parent”, but often it feels tiring, just more corrections I have to make. I’m having this new sort of experience in which we go to birthday parties or something and my wife chats with all the moms, and I circle up with all the dads. That feels very natural and gender-affirming because I think the guys see me as one of them and are like, “yes, you belong with us.” 

BAT: IKMETM is written as a series of letters from Kris to her deceased wife, Beau. How did that form serve the story? Why not write the same story in more traditional first person, or in close third person, or as letters from Kris to the kid?

MC: The direct address is a manifestation of Kris’ grief and loneliness and isolation. She needed someone to talk to, to narrate her troubled, sad, confusing days. Plus, she wanted to feel like she was updating Beau on all the minutiae, everything the kid was doing as she grew and developed her own personality. It’s akin to how I text my wife literally everything my kid ate that evening because we find everything he’s doing to be so disturbingly interesting even if he’s not really doing anything at all. I also think the form of first person, direct address gives a certain intimacy to the narrative. It’s like peeking in on someone’s lives, peeling the curtain back. There’s something I find so enticing about that.

BAT: One thing I loved about IKMETM was how you peppered multiple choice questions throughout. I appreciated how you used that multiple choice question form in a story about characters living within an oppressive surveillance state. Were you drawing on (or commenting on?) connections between these questions and evaluation, control, or attempts to justify injustice with claims of unbiased assessments?   

MC: I wanted to use the multiple choice questions, along with reality testing and other experimental forms, to interrogate Kris’ beliefs, to dig into her problematic ways of viewing the world, and to challenge her to consider what she really thinks and feels. And it was a little callback to Beau being an educator, another way that Beau can sort of hang around in Kris’ consciousness. I was thinking about how limiting multiple choice questions can be, how there’s always a bigger story than what is given to you, how no single answer is really going to capture the heart of the issue.

BAT: That seems so true to me, and nowhere more than in parenting! Kris’s kid grows up over the course of the book. We see her go from a nonverbal infant to an independent pre-teen who fights back against injustice. As a reader, I fell completely in love with the kid for her strength and passion. As a writer, I marveled at your ability to write such a dynamic character. How did you write her voice? 

MC: Ah man, thank you so much, truly. It was a big challenge, but something I really centered in my drafting of this book since her literal growing up is what’s marking the passage of time. On just a technical level, I was marking how old the kid was in basically every scene so I could make sure to match the voice. Although it’s also like…kids develop so differently and at such different rates that I don’t always subscribe to the notion of a “believable” child for a certain age. I gave myself wiggle room to play with how this particular kid, in this particular setting, under this particular set of circumstances might flourish and evolve.

 It was important to me to center the kid’s character in this novel even though it is from Kris’ perspective because so many books seem to use children as a vehicle for an adult’s change as opposed to valuing them as their own person with their own hopes and desires and problems. And I’ve spent a lot of time around children, worked in a school with young children (not unlike Kris), and simply love them for their creativity, big swinging hearts, and curiosity. I wanted that to shine through the kid and allow her to stand as her own person, separate from Kris, separate from Beau. Yes, she exists in a community with adult influences, but she’s firmly her own person.