Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For October that debut is The Modern by Anna Kate Blair (Simon & Schuster), a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place. We spoke to Anna about her publishing journey and writing practice.
Stay tuned later this month for a review of the book from Debut Spotlight critic Rosie Ofori Ward, and a video reading from the author on our Instagram.
Can you give a brief summary of The Modern for those who haven’t read it yet?
The Modern follows Sophia, a Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, through the summer of 2016. At the beginning of the novel, Sophia gets engaged to her boyfriend, Robert, almost accidentally, just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail. Sophia, left alone in in New York, develops an intense infatuation with a young artist, Cara, who works in a bridal shop. She spends most of the novel overthinking these two relationships, her identity and her role at MoMA.
Can you tell us about what drove you to write this book, and the book’s journey to publication more broadly?
I can’t pinpoint this book’s origin very precisely, as I was thinking about the ideas for quite a long time before they took this form. I think it became the book that it is now when I decided to set it between the Museum of Modern Art and the Appalachian Trail, which was driven by my interest in the way the forest is seen by people in the city, an interest in escape and the ways that we project desires onto places. I’ve also always been interested in love and romantic desire, perhaps because I’ve never felt very good at it; I fall in love too easily and it takes up all my time, regardless of whether it’s going well or going badly. I decided if I was spending so much energy thinking about crushes and relationships I needed to use it in my writing rather than letting it distract me.
I decided if I was spending so much energy thinking about crushes and relationships I needed to use it in my writing rather than letting it distract me.
I put off submitting the manuscript for quite a while, but in the end the journey to publication was surprising swift and painless. I was very lucky; I filled in the online submission form on my agent’s website and it all went very smoothly from there.
Like your protagonist, you too worked at the Museum of Modern Art! As a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, what made you decide to write this story as fiction rather than memoir or creative non-fiction?
I was, when I started writing The Modern, much more confident in non-fiction than fiction, and I’m often drawn to things that feel like challenges; I think I wanted to see if I could write a novel. (I have explored some of the ideas in non-fiction elsewhere, too; I published an essay about the Appalachian Trail a few years ago, for example.)
I think, also, that fiction facilitated the narrative structure and characterisation that was necessary for this to be a long-form work. I write lyric essays, usually, when I’m writing non-fiction, and it’s hard to sustain a reader’s interest in ideas and sentences, in something longer, without complex characters and a narrative to serve as a through-line. Sophia is similar to me in her profession and her bisexuality, but she’s also definitely not me. I read Sophie Collins’s Who is Mary Sue? when I was first thinking about The Modern and noted this tendency that some writers have, in creating characters with similar lives to their own, to idealise themselves. I tried to do the opposite: if I noticed that Sophia and I shared a flaw, I tried to counter that commonality by pushing it to its limits. I like thinking about ways that people write and read, and writing a novel was a playful way to think through problems, and possible solutions, that I might otherwise have explored through criticism. I did want, though, to maintain the analysis of thoughts and feelings often associated with non-fiction.
What does your writing process look like? Any particular strategies or philosophies that help you find inspiration or put words on the page?
I write a lot of notes on my phone, usually lines about emotional states, small observational details or jokes I’m afraid I’ll forget, and then compile and organise them in word documents later. I read and research a lot, though only small slivers of this end up in the text. I think of creating drafts, sometimes, as akin to collage; it’s a lot of gathering, cutting and shifting.
I think of creating drafts, sometimes, as akin to collage; it’s a lot of gathering, cutting and shifting.
I find, when I’m struggling with a particular scene, that focusing on the specifics of a location really helps me. For The Modern, this often meant looking at photographs—my own photographs from 2016, slideshows in newspapers, gallery installation images and other people’s pictures gathered around Instagram location tags, scrolling back in time. I’m also very attached to Google Streetview. I need a concrete sense of where something’s happening before I can start to imagine characters and their discussions.
When thinking about larger structural issues, I find reading criticism and literary theory is very useful, and often because I’m sort of rebellious about it. If I read that a protagonist should take action in order to drive a plot forward, I’ll think, well, how can I challenge that and drive the plot forward without having the protagonist take action? I like thinking about narrative expectations and conventions and trying to play with those.
Can you talk to the relationship between art, architecture and place in this novel and how this setting shaped the writing?
There was much more architecture in the novel, initially, than there was in the end. Sophia does have one friend, Anthea, who works in the Architecture and Design Department, so I snuck some thoughts on architecture through her, but part of maintaining a boundary between myself and Sophia was minimising her concern with the built environment. Instead, Sophia is more solely preoccupied with visual art, particularly painting and photography.
Sophia’s orientation to the world is very much that of an observer, though, and place is very central to the novel. I often walk around with a particular Charles Baudelaire quotation stuck in my mind—the shape a city takes changes faster than the human heart—and this is part of the attraction of writing, I think. In The Modern, I tried to capture the New York of 2016, to preserve it, through precise details. I think, also, that Sophia’s awareness of her future’s uncertainty heightens her attention; she pays attention to everything, never takes the particulars of the city for granted, because she knows she might lose it. In truth, though, everybody loses versions of every city through the passage of time, and I hope the attention to the specifics of a place and time give the novel an elegiac quality.
Sophia’s orientation to the world is very much that of an observer…place is very central to the novel.
What’s one thing you know now about the writing and publishing journey that you wish you’d known when you were starting out?
I wish I’d known, starting out, that there was cause for optimism. I was afraid to really try writing the things that I wanted to write, for much too long, because I’d read that the chances of success were very slim. (Instead, I went with art and architectural history, failing to realise that the chances of success are just as slim in that field.) I’d noticed that writers often knew editors and other writers, and assumed that that was a prerequisite rather than something that could come later, building gradually through publishing small pieces, reading at and attending events. I think that writing and publishing can seem like a closed world, particularly when you haven’t studied it formally, but it isn’t as closed as I’d feared, and I was much more disheartened by this when I was starting out than was necessary or helpful.
What other writers or books influenced your writing (either this book specifically or your writing more broadly)? Are there any great books you’ve read lately that you’d like to recommend to KYD readers?
I feel like every book I’ve ever read has influenced me, and sadly it’s impossible to list them all. For The Modern, I was influenced by Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and other mid-century novels by critics, many of which explore female subjectivity in relation to the city and to social change, and by The Great Gatsby, which taught me as a teenager that novels should have parties in them. I was, also, influenced by more recent popular novels such as Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, Raven Leilani’s Luster and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot; I wanted my novel to share their lightness and addictive quality.
I’ve always been very influenced by poets and essayists, including Nina Mingya Powles, Larissa Pham, Anne Boyer and Anne Carson. More recently, I really loved and would recommend Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson, But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and Hyacinth by Will Cox. I read Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin two years ago, when it came out in NZ, but it’s coming out in Australia soon, so I’ll use that as an excuse to recommend it, too.
The Modern is available now from your local independent bookseller.
