Breastfeeding is Dark Magic: Shannon Robinson on Motherhood, Beastliness and THE ILL-FITTING SKIN
Motherhood is beastly in Shannon Robinson’s new story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, which came out in May and is the winner of the Short Fiction Prize from Press 53. In her stories wombs house birds and rabbits, and a mother loves her wild, unruly son so much, it turns her wild herself.
I first read Shannon’s stories years ago, but they followed me and have a way of popping up in my mind, now that I have children and am confronted with the chaos and intensity of loving them. In “Origin Story,” the first of the book, the narrator writes, “I began this as a story about my little boy, but the maternal ego casts a long shadow.” Indeed. In the early years of my own son’s life, it felt almost impossible to differentiate between me and me-with-him. The struggle of this—how we act upon our family, especially our children, and how they unconsciously, unexpectedly act upon us—is a central question of this collection, which looks at relationships of many kinds, always with an eye for the ambiguous and strange, and always from the point of view of women.
I recently spoke with Shannon about motherhood, fairytales and sex in her writing. – Emily Robbins
Emily Robbins: The title of your book comes from a line in the story “Dirt.” A woman is paid to wear a risqué maid’s uniform. Looking back, she describes the outfit this way: “Someone else’s idea of sexy that had covered me like an ill-fitting skin.” This idea—the distance between a what a woman is made to be (or paid to be) and what she is, runs through many of your stories. Ill-fitting skin is a perfect image for it. Can you say a little about it?
Shannon Robinson: Never mind feeling uncomfortable in their own skins—again and again, the women in my stories feel confined by external notions of what they should be (such as accommodating and self-sacrificing; perfectly nurturing of others but never demanding …). I wanted the image of an ill-fitting skin to suggest how insidious these imposed roles and expectations can be, how they can be made to seem organic, essential and therefore inevitable. While there’s an aspect of horror to the title with the vulnerability of “skin” and the queasiness of “ill-fitting,” I hope it also evokes the possibility of transformation and escape. The ill-fitting skin can be a chrysalis, not a body bag.
One of the stories I most love in this collection is about a mother who loves her troubled son so much, she turns into a wolf. Can you speak about writing this story? How did you get the idea to turn a desperately loving mother into a wolf?
Monsters are creatures of metaphor: they’re embodiments of what we fear—and specifically, of what we fear about ourselves, our own darkness. For “Origin Story,” I began with the idea of a boy who turns into a wolf, a boy placed on the “lycanthropy spectrum” … but I knew that emotional territory would also include the mother’s “monstrousness.” I think it’s inescapable, the way we feel responsible for our children—responsible for taking care of them, of course, but also responsible for who they are and who they become, to the point where the parent’s and the child’s identity overlap. And if your child is difficult or challenging or atypical … it can become very fraught. Every mother is potentially her own child’s villain origin story: we can feel this way, and we can be made to feel this way.
An inspirational image for “Origin Story.” I came across this art while Googling “wolf boy.” It now hangs on my office wall.
What was the transition to motherhood like for you, personally? Has your writing changed since having a child?
I came to motherhood relatively late in life, just a few weeks shy of my fortieth birthday. The term “geriatric mother” is applied to any pregnant woman over the age of thirty-five, which I find sort of hilarious. I’m also a “geriatric writer” in that I started writing fiction at the age of thirty-five. I went into labor right at the end of my MFA—and I do mean right at the end: Kathryn Davis drove me to the hospital instead of the year-end awards ceremony! I’ve become more resilient as I’ve aged, so I’m not sorry to have postponed motherhood for so long … but those early days were still really tough, exhausting both physically and mentally. I remember reading that Alice Munro would write flat-out while her child napped … that so wasn’t me! Now that my son is older and more independent, the main competition for time I would otherwise spend writing is my teaching work. Motherhood has been a heavy lift, but not a burden; it’s required constant self-examination and re-visioning of the world—and the same is true for teaching, to a different degree. All this has been good for my writing.
Motherhood in your stories is often linked to the beastly and fantastical. A boy’s troubling behavior is so troubling, he temporarily becomes a beast. Another mother gives birth to rabbits, and yet another invites a bird into her womb. What makes motherhood ripe for these fantastical elements? What do you want to get at with them?
Motherhood is a tender enterprise, but it’s also rife with strangeness. Pregnancy is uncanny. Breastfeeding is dark magic. Children are odd creatures until they gradually learn to be otherwise; they are fiercely themselves and not of this world—aliens with our faces. So often, motherhood is spoken about in exalting clichés—“the miracle of birth” and “every mother tries her best” and “the hardest job in the world”—bleh, they just don’t capture its wildness and weirdness, all that ambivalence and ambiguity. I find myself turning to the fantastical to talk about experiences that defy easy articulation, experiences that can benefit from the fantastical’s roomy capacity for metaphor and subtext. For me, motherhood definitely falls into this category.
I also wondered how you see your work fitting into the tradition fairytales? Have classical fairytales influenced your thinking?
I grew up reading fairy tales—the original Grimms’ versions—and I still find them fascinating. The stories are interested in goodness, but they don’t necessarily have morals; terrible and bizarre things happen, unfolding with matter-of-fact efficiency. It’s always thrilling to read a story and feel like it’s getting away with something and that you’re part of the conspiracy. The influence of fairy tales has radiated out far and wide, through decades of fantastical writing—I feel like I’m part of that continuum. My stories have talking animals, shapeshifters, magical shenanigans, yes, but also (I hope) they possess that spooky truthfulness that I associate with fairy tales.
Let’s return to sex: most of the women in these stories are not afraid of it! They grew up after the “free love” revolution. But, though they might be having a lot of sex, very few of them are having good sex. Can you talk a little about this?
It’s not that none of my characters are having good sex, but that if they are, it’s taking place offstage, as it were. I suppose I just find bad sex more compelling on a narrative level: funnier, weirder, more poignant, more conflicted. And maybe “bad sex” is too categorical, because in many of my stories, women are experiencing genuine pleasure and desire, but that’s entwined with anxiety, resentment, or shame, or some combination thereof. For instance, in both “Zombies” and “Doom of Her Own,” the sex is hot, but it’s also “hot”: for the respective female protagonists, sex has an element of performance, of calibrated pandering; it’s part of an ongoing audition for male approval. In “The Rabbits” and “Origin Story,” sex features (implicitly) as part of conception, which is a complicated—that is, troubled and troubling—feature of each story.
Years ago, when I heard about the “Bad Sex in Fiction Award,” I thought it was for the best description of bad sex … but eventually I learned it was for “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” Notably, the prize winners all provide descriptions of good sex.
Along with the child-in-flesh, the child-in-absentia also runs through this collection: lost, whether purposefully or accidentally, before being born. The shadow of the pregnancy decided-against colors the ones that come after. I wondered how you conceived of abortion and miscarriage in your writing?
It’s sorrowful to lose a child that you’ve been gestating, and I think no woman opts for an abortion lightly. I remember ads for pregnancy tests that showed happy couples clutching that pee-stick, but they could just as easily have shown a different image, depicting expressions of distress. I was an unplanned pregnancy, the last of three children, and I understand that my birth was touch and go, that at one point during labor, the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. I also know that between my sister and my brother, my mother lost a child. This isn’t strictly rational, but I’ve always had some inkling that I snuck in past the boundary. In my writing, wanted to step into that liminal space, where there is both abstraction and flesh, potential and nothingness, hope and loss.
In “All Things Bright and Beautiful,”,an aging mother loses her memory at the same time that her son struggles with addiction, and her family gets together for a failed intervention. It is a beautiful meditation on family and inheritance; reading it moved me, greatly. The story blurs the line between two kinds of mind-alteration. Was there something you were trying to get at about inheritance and family of origin in writing this?
In that story, the narrator says of her mother, “she forgot things, or claimed to”: it’s a function of age and her strokes, but at the same time, there’s a willfulness to it—so it seems. There are things the mother doesn’t wish to remember, and there are things she doesn’t wish to know—things she doesn’t wish to face about her son’s pain, past and present, and the role she may have played in it. This is not about callousness, but about coping with her own guilt and her sense of helplessness. Her son, in turn, has manufactured his own kind of forgetting: he’s been in self-imposed exile on another continent, trying to obliterate his feelings with alcohol. His legacy is one of denial. The sister arranges an intervention, which doesn’t go well (both the mother and the father decline to take part) … she probably should have seen this coming, but you might say she “forgets” how dysfunctional they are, as a family. Still, on that flipside of “forgetting,” there is optimism and indeed forgiveness. How else can we move on from suffering?
Stories about mothers and brothers have a different tone—perhaps a slightly softer, though no less incisive—tone in this book than the ones about romance and motherhood. Could you say a little about this? Does subject decide tone for you—are they tonally different in your head?
I hadn’t consciously crafted a tonal difference between these two categories of stories, but I can see what you mean. I suppose that “softness” that comes through in the stories involving brothers may have something to do with nostalgia—with a wistful, retroactive feeling of protectiveness for my brother, as a child, which perhaps extends to younger myself, through close identification. My brother and I are close in age and could have passed for fraternal twins, for the first ten years of our lives: we were inseparable playmates and were even dressed alike. Granted, most siblings mirror each other in some ways—or they form identities in reaction to each other, which is its own kind of mirroring. Tonally, I think all my stories have some ironical inflection, but my intention is never to seem like I’m standing at a distance, quipping and eye-rolling: I love my characters, with all their flaws, mistakes, and broken hearts.
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