Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends: Novelist Katya Apekina on Russia, Motherhood, and Mother Doll
To read an excerpt from Mother Doll, go here.
The bright-yellow cover of Katya Apekina’s acclaimed sophomore novel Mother Doll is an extreme close-up of a Russian nesting doll. The dolls play no concrete role in the book, but they are a perfect metaphor for the overlapping identities and relationships between Zhenia, a 20-something Russian-American who is newly pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want; and Irina, the dead great-grandmother who appears one day to tell Zhenia about her years as a revolutionary and her reasons for abandoning her daughter, Zhenia’s beloved babushka.
Mother Doll is fierce in its emotional candor, as well as funny and enjoyably weird. Better than any other novel I can recall, it captures the ways that motherhood can be a mirror for our relationships with our own mothers—not just a mirror, but something less logical, more cannibalistic, a thing folding in on itself. The women in Mother Doll’s maternal line sacrifice plenty, as parents do, but not always by choice, and never without a price.
I met Katya many years ago through a book club led by a mutual friend. She lives in my neighborhood and we’re Facebook friends. But if you want to see someone’s soul, read their novel, learn their family history. Here, Katya discusses the complicated characters who comprise her novel, and how she created them while working and parenting.

Cheryl Klein: Zhenia’s relationship with her grandmother is very sweet, while her relationship with her mother is fraught, as is Marina’s relationship with her own mother. Tell me a little bit about why and how you decided to tell an inter-generational story.
Katya Apekina: I wanted to tell an inter-generational story, but for it to be internal rather than sprawling. I wanted to create a character who one initially might judge, but then one understands once they see why she is the way she is, because of how she grew up and because of how her mother and grandmother grew up. I think it’s so interesting the way people can be so different for different people. Vera, Zhenia’s grandmother, is a very warm and nurturing grandmother, but she was pretty cold as a mother. Part of Zhenia’s issue as a person trying to individuate and grow up is she feels this closeness and alliance with her grandmother, and that it would be disloyal to see things from any other perspective. To see things from her mother’s perspective feels like a betrayal of her grandmother, and she’s really only able to see her mother more clearly after her grandmother dies.
I love this sentence, from Zhenia, on the topic of maternal sacrifice: “Not that her own mother hadn’t sacrificed for her, she had—demonstrably and resentfully—but not in the grand sense that Zhenia imagined she would for her own child. Not with love.”
We tend to think of both mothers and revolutionaries as being motivated by forces that are pure, but in this novel, motivations are not just complicated, but kind of muddled and haphazard. What interests you about selflessness, selfishness, and self-mythologizing?
Oh my god, I think this might be my beat. I think it’s interesting the way one’s impulses are often in contradiction. Being a parent does require a lot of self sacrifice, but ideally it doesn’t feel like that most of the time because you want to be doing it. But sometimes you don’t. Mothers are obviously expected to be saints, voids, to exist purely in that identity and not to have other interests or desires. I reject that most of the time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty when things feel out of balance. There are a lot of different kinds of mothers in this book, and not all of them have the bandwidth or want to be mothers. And different kinds of Revolutionaries too. Irina is a teenager at the time of the Revolution, and she is much more guided by a desire to burn everything down than by a coherent ideology.

Zhenia’s brother is described as someone who wants to make other people comfortable and therefore is “not a Russian immigrant.” In America, we expect women and especially mothers to be people-pleasers. What are expectations of mothers like in Russian culture?
I don’t think of Soviet immigrants as people pleasers. They are all the person on the reality show who “didn’t come here to make friends.” I think culturally Russian people are more honest and blunt and not overly concerned with pretending and pantomiming happiness to make other people at ease. I don’t think there is the expectation of constant happiness. Russian immigrants find the American friendliness to be off-putting and insane. Why do people smile so much? What do they have to smile about? Why are they asking you how you are all the time if they don’t actually want to hear about it?
Can you talk a little bit about developing the thread with Paul, the medium, and Zhenia’s ability to talk to her dead great grandmother? I.e. Why this modality instead of just having Irina’s ghost visit Zhenia?
I always wanted there to be an outside perspective. A person outside of the family with their own set of interests, concerns and backstory that provides some sort of grounding contrast. Like a therapist. But, Paul is of course very affected by his work as a medium—having this story come through him affects him deeply. He becomes obsessed, he becomes involved, he is changed irrevocably by it. I think it’s a metaphor too for writing and reading. Writing feels like channeling—characters who have nothing to do with me, whose stories I feel a certain responsibility to do justice to. And also, as a reader, I have been so profoundly affected by characters in books. I have felt seen and understood—across time and space.

The nesting-doll image is a perfect metaphor not just for pregnancy, but for how we carry future and previous generations inside us. You’ve said this story is inspired by (though not based on) your family’s experiences. How do you carry them in you? How did writing this book impact how you thought about your family?
I just turned 40, and I feel like the rest of my life will be spent unpacking that question. I was with my grandfather on his deathbed, recording his memoirs that he was dictating to me, and it was just him remembering and grappling with his early childhood. I had a friend who was like, what is wrong with me, why am I as an adult still so fixated on my parents and how I grew up—but I just think you only get more fixated as you get older. The first half of your life you are in the soup, and taking it for granted, and the second half is maybe about reflection and awareness of the soup.
In this book the characters are very scared and detached from their emotions, they don’t want to acknowledge their pain, and so the pain just sits there inside of them, affecting their behavior and decisions, warping their lives. And it’s passed on from one generation to the next, so by the time Zhenia, an American, is living with this pain, she has no context or source for it, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. I think that aspect of it is something I have experienced also.
How has motherhood shaped or changed you as a writer? And how has being a writer shaped or changed your approach to motherhood?
I was very worried when I was pregnant, that once my daughter was born I would not be able to write anymore. This has luckily not been the case. To say that they easily co-exist would be dishonest. Writing often is an obsessive process and it’s hard when I am in the middle of a project to be present. I think it’s important as a parent to be present, to be responsive and engaged, but also the idea of the “good enough” mother is one I come back to. I became a mother halfway through my first book. Like any constraint, it probably sharpened me and made me more serious. Time was not on infinite supply, and I couldn’t just bend my life around my process to accommodate it as much as before. I waste less time, or try to. I don’t know how being a writer affects me as a mother—but I will say that writing is all about trying to imagine the world through someone else’s perspective, and I think that is a deeply empathic process, and one that is probably helpful in mothering.
What is your writing process like? How do you balance it (or not balance it, haha) with the demands of parenting?
I try to start big projects at residences—I started and revised both my novels this way. This is not always easy or convenient, and required me to have a supportive partner. He goes on reporting trips too, though, so it feels pretty balanced. We try not to be away for longer than two weeks at a time. My work is freelance—writing, teaching and editing, and happening in between my writing. I have had many many different kinds of jobs, but almost always freelance. The flexibility is a tradeoff for stability. A full time job seems pretty nice right now, actually.