Chelsea novelist Laura Kasischke's latest work explores "happily never after"
It turns out I didn’t read the back of the book very carefully.
Jiselle McKnight does indeed embark on married life, to a dashing and widowed pilot who woos her in every exotic city on Earth. And motherhood arrives abruptly in the form of his three children, whom she quits her flight attendant job to care for. But as far as problems go, neither a husband whose absences keep increasing nor adolescents with seemingly limitless fury compare at all to the deadly Phoenix flu, whose ravages circumscribe their lives in ever-narrowing circles. Set in the not-at-all-distant future, Kasischke strings together her evocative turns of phrase to paint a doomsday scenario that emerges in pieces, jarring us thoroughly as those pieces scrape the utterly familiar to deliver us to a place that, I suspect, we’re all at least a little afraid is coming.
Q: Tell me what you wanted to write about when you sat down to write this book. A: Actually, I had been reading a book about the plague, “The Great Mortality” — a history of the Black Death. And I just had the “what if” question — what if something were to happen here? I wanted to write about family and a kind of domestic drama, a fairy tale gone bad, so mainly I wanted focus on the domestic details, but I wanted it to be against this backdrop of an expanding calamity in the outside world. So I just thought, what if people started getting sick, if global warming started to alter things — not in a huge way, not like a bomb being dropped, but more in the way cultures do sort of disintegrate sometimes.
Q: One thing that struck me as familiar was all the uncertainty, even in the face of tons of information. Everybody has a theory about how the flu’s spread, everybody has a theory about why it’s such a lavish Christmas, the headlines in the store have “President threatens war” next to “Lose 10 pounds in a week!” I feel that experience of not being able to find the truth for all the facts very acutely, and I wondered if you do, too. A: I definitely do. And once I started really thinking about how these things happen, (I realized that) disasters sort of trickle in, and there’s lots of theories about them everywhere. (That) was important while I was writing, because I’m not an epidemiologist, and Jiselle and the kids wouldn’t know anything either — they’d have to hear it from the news. It’s not like there’s any historical context as things are happening. As I was reading (“The Great Mortality”), there were all these things that now we think are totally ridiculous, like killing all the cats because they thought the cats spread the disease, but then there were more rats (which turned out to be the actual carriers), and now that makes perfect sense — but they wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that. And it seems like even though people are so confused, in the meantime they still have to put food on the table, and pay for things, and have love troubles. As I started thinking about it, it became clearer and clearer that people just wouldn’t know exactly what was going on — you would accept different theories at different times.
Q: Did the experience of researching the Black Death and pandemics make you a little grim and macabre while you were immersed in it? Or give you a case of hypochondria? A: (Laughs) I’ve been interested in that anyway — I mean it is a grim and macabre subject matter, which maybe I’m kind of interested in anyway. That book — I really recommend it if you’re interested — it inspired me because, although there was a lot of science and history, there are a lot of anecdotes, too. It made it possible to think about how some people would take care of themselves and other people and invite someone into their home even though they might sneeze on you, and that there would be other people who would take off and be long gone. The stories of ordinary people made it seem so possible to think about who any individual might be or become. … I was thinking about Jiselle, and how what she would want out of her life was this high romantic ideal, but really she was very challenged by running a family and other concerns outside herself. Sometimes it takes a while in life to figure all that stuff out.
Q: Who do you think you might be if the whole world crumbled? A: I don’t know. I guess that was part of what I was figuring out, too. I do think that a lot of moms, without really knowing why, we do know at heart that the most important thing would be taking care of the kids. Jiselle was in the unusual situation of trying to take care of these three kids by herself, two of whom didn’t particularly care for her, and she did. I would hope that I would be like that, but I don’t know.
Q: After reading pages and pages of this book about total global disruption and seeing all the parallels to the present global disruption, we get to the part where everyone’s watching the movie “The Birds,” and you say, “You would think no one would want to see a movie that so closely paralleled the fears of the time. But they did.” Do you? Why? A: I think that the answer to that would be yes, but I also think that a lot of times, there is something psychological and subconscious about what’s popular at a certain period. We don’t think or notice that certain stories, movies, nightmarish fantasies and rumors become popular become they appeal to us on some level, because they either see our fears, or allay our fears, or parallel our fears. I remember — do you remember that movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”? (In it,) New York City was flooded, and I remember so clearly going to see that movie and thinking, “Oh, this is about September 11,” with people trying to survive and being in New York City. I’m no psychologist or sociologist, but they probably notice these trends and see it pretty clearly. People might not necessarily say, “Oh that’s just like just now,” but they’re drawn to it.
Q: If this is a time of transition happening now, do you have any thoughts on where we might get to? A: I do have thoughts on that, but I don’t think they’re that illuminating. (Laughs.) They’re just guesses; I have a dark imagination. I do think that the way of life that we’ve had for a long time, I could be wrong, but I see it changing. I think there’s going to be less travel, less money… there’s just going to be less.
Q: Are you sleeping OK at night? A: I finished writing the book a year ago. So I’m sleeping fine now.
Laura Kasischke reads from “In a Perfect World” at the Waters Place Borders, 3140 Lohr Rd., on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 7 p.m..
Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.