Keija Parssinen’s fiction often explores issues of control within families, and “Godly Bodies,” featured in our Spring 2015 issue, is no exception. In the story, Brin Lambert’s conflation of weight-loss aspirations with religion ultimately develops into a lucrative obsession that alienates her from her husband and her adolescent daughter. Similarly, Parssinen’s dynamic new novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, addresses themes of family and fundamentalism to rousing effect. We thought a brief discussion with the author might elicit some insights into her methodology and, though she’s juggling a book tour and a new teaching gig at the University of Tulsa, she kindly took some time to talk about “Godly Bodies,” her new novel, and her writing process.

DH: Hunger is a powerful presence in “Godly Bodies.” Laney does little to rebel against her mother’s strictures, which amplifies the power of the final scene when she acts on her desire, pressing “her teeth hard against the cords of (Marshall’s) neck.” This isn’t something she would have done just a few pages earlier. How do you see Corson’s departure effecting Laney, especially as regards her relationship to her mother?

KP: Corson’s departure catalyzes a kind of awakening in Laney. She is suddenly aware that it is possible to defy Brin, and to break away, as Corson does. While Laney’s future remains uncertain, I wanted the final scene to suggest that she is aware of Brin’s fallibility, and in her own potential for defiance.

 

DH: At its start, the story feels like a satire of certain strains of religious fundamentalism, but it develops into something more as we get to know the Lambert family. At times, you seem to use your characters’ relationships to religion and food to critique an inhuman perfectionism in our culture. What was your impetus to begin writing this story?

 

KP: I gained the inspiration for this story after reading a magazine article about a church where the central focus was on weight loss. I thought, how utterly American: skinniness as a kind of godliness! What a bang-up business idea! I found myself wondering about the people who would run such an establishment, and voila, the story was born. And while I found myself giggling at the sheer outrageousness of it all during the writing process–hence the satirical thread that runs throughout the story–I also found myself becoming deeply sympathetic toward the kind of desperately obese people who would join the church, which promises salvation on several levels, both physical and spiritual. And as someone who once grappled with an eating disorder, I found it natural to channel Laney’s unhealthy thinking about food, which is amplified by her mother’s bizarre livelihood.

 

DH: You’ve recently published your second novel, the Unraveling of Mercy Louis. Was there anything different about the way you approached the project of writing a novel this time around?

 

KP: Despite hearing rumblings to the contrary, I thought that writing my second novel would be a little easier. In fact, it was more difficult! Mercy Louis is plotted tightly, like a thriller, and that was a literary technique with which I had little familiarity. So I read Laura Lippman and Stephen King and Patricia Highsmith’s great little book, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, and then I set about the very hard work of getting everything to fall into place at just the right moment. Because of the intensity of the plotting, this book required several complete overhauls in order to get it just right.

 

DH: That’s interesting. The liveliness of your characters camouflages the careful plotting, but in retrospect I see how taut it is, with the abandoned infant in the prologue serving as a clear catalyst for all that is to follow. Are you sold on this level of plotting now, or are you ready to run the other way for your next project?

 

KP: Although I best enjoy writing character interiority–I usually have to scale way back on it between my first and second drafts–I’m also drawn to write narratives of strong action involving big clashes, both political and personal, which necessitates plot. So I don’t think I’ll run the other way and write a “quiet” book next. But I do find plot incredibly difficult to write smoothly and well–it can feel so clunky and clumsy, which is why I think a lot of novice writers avoid it and opt for stories about guys sitting on bar stools. The trick is to have faith in yourself through the clumsy iterations, and trust in revision. Deft plotting comes with intensive revision. That said, I hope my third novel contains moments of quiet introspection, interspersed with the racier bits. Those are my favorite books to read, so I suppose it makes sense that that is what I like to write, too.

DH: Is there a favorite piece of advice that you give to your writing students?

KP: My best advice to students is that they must take joy from the process of writing and not become too caught up in the product. It’s a variation on advice that Frank Conroy gave his students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As writers, our identity often feels bound up in our work, which means it’s especially difficult, once a manuscript is finished, to watch it flail on the open seas of the marketplace. But if we enjoy the process of creating the manuscript, then we have gained something incredibly valuable by it, something that can’t be quantified or commodified or corrupted, no matter what happens after the story or book is finished.

DH: “Godly Bodies” and Mercy Louis tackle similar themes. Each story dramatizes the psychological effects of a fundamentalist distrust of the body and its desires, for example. In “Godly Bodies,” Brin tries to instill in her daughter, Laney, a disdain for hunger and food; in Mercy Louis, Evelia teaches her granddaughter, Mercy, to fear sex more that death. Are these stories linked at all in your mind, beyond their surface similarities?

KP: I think they reveal that I have an unhealthy obsession with fundamentalist religions (see also my first novel, which deals with Islamic radicalism)! “Godly Bodies” was written many years before Mercy, and I’d kind of forgotten about the story when I started writing the novel. But after I took “Godly Bodies” out to revise it, I realized how thematically linked they were. As a writer, it’s fun to figure out what your “themes” are, because you usually have no idea when you’re actually writing.

 

DH: One of the most striking authorial choices you make in The Unraveling of Mercy Louis is the decision to alternate between 1^st person chapters from Mercy’s perspective and 3^rd person chapters from Illa’s perspective. My sense is you may have done that because it’s (mostly) Mercy’s story, and Illa experiences much of it as a spectator. The implication is: if we get too close to Illa, the story loses its center of gravity and its balance. Do you agree with that assessment? How did you develop the narrative voices in this novel?

 

KP: I like that assessment! Thank you for the close read. I chose first person for Mercy because I wanted the scope of her narration to be extremely narrow, a kind of literary manifestation of the narrow-mindedness with which she’s being raised. Illa offers us a broader view, not only of Mercy, but of the community, and so third person seemed like the best choice for her. Also, I find third person narration always reads slightly more sophisticated, so it seemed suited to Illa’s voice, as she’s slightly more worldly and definitely more self-aware than Mercy.

DH: “Godly Bodies” provokes the reader’s indignation, yet your narrative voice remains buoyant and enjoyable. You’ve written about the anger that drove you to compose the first draft of Mercy Louis, though in the published novel the narration and characterization are always humane and empathetic. Can you talk about the process of turning a strong, reactive emotion into a polished piece of literature?

KP: What a great question! I’m glad that you found the story and novel to be enjoyable reading experiences. Many writers don’t make that a priority–some writers reject the audience experience entirely, as Raymond Carver did when he said he wasn’t interested in his readers, just his characters–and that’s fine, it’s a deeply personal aesthetic choice. But for me, the reader’s experience is paramount. I want the reader to get lost in what John Gardner calls the “fictional dream,” and that’s very difficult to do if the writer is constantly insisting on his own cleverness, or his political agenda, or what have you. In the end, the characters must read like real people, not mouth pieces, and that involves a mustering of great empathy on the part of the writer. By its nature, writing is both an aggressive and empathetic act–the writer is foisting her thoughts and opinions on the world under the guise of characters in a story, but she must do so with great compassion, or the whole experiment will fail to come to life, or worse, seem like an exercise in contempt or judgment.

DH: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that reviewers have likened aspects of Mercy Louis to The Scarlet Letter, and that it was “peripherally” present in your mind as you wrote the novel. One distinction between the two is that, while Hester Prynne is singled out for her transgression, in Mercy nearly all of the adolescent girls in Port Sabine assume guilt in the eyes of the community. You and Hawthorne are both concerned with perceived guilt, but you take it further into a kind of mass hallucination, or psychosis. Was the “witch-hunt” aspect of Mercy Louis interesting to you on a cultural level, or did it begin more as a pragmatic, plot-building mechanism?

KP: It was definitely interesting to me on a cultural level. As Arthur Miller was driven by political motivations with The Crucible, so too did I hope to make a statement on this country’s bipolar relationship with young female sexuality–we both valorize and demonize female sexiness, and we seem to find it especially dangerous in teen girls,which is why we still have various state governments trying to place greater and greater controls over the bodies of women of reproductive age. There’s a great line in this spoof birth control advertisement that Amy Schumer wrote, which admonishes the fictional woman to go home and “Think about why you insist on having sex for fun,” before getting on the pill, laying on the guilt nice and heavy. And that’s always been the punitive attitude of American society towards women and sex–have it if you must, but don’t do it until you’re married, and for heaven’s sake, don’t you dare enjoy it! The girls of Port Sabine, many of whom have been raised in the “purity culture,” where premarital sex is strictly forbidden, have a particularly fraught relationship to sex. But I don’t think it’s a far cry from the shame-based indoctrination that American girls receive the country over, even outside the South. So yes, this book is definitely a cultural critique.

DH: Can you share some of the writers that have inspired you, past and present?

KP: I adore Virginia Woolf’s lyricism and deeply psychological and sensitive prose. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had a profound effect on me when I first read it, which probably had a lot to do with the enchanting Louisiana setting. I love the emotional sincerity and complexity in the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. Marilynne Robinson’s contemplative, dreamy novels always stun. Aminatta Forna’s brutally honest books amaze. The scope of Tolstoy’s fictional worlds are inspiring. Ishiguro writes my favorite unreliable narrators. And Alice Munro is the queen of melancholy retrospection, a tone I have a particular fondness for, as I’m a bit of a nostalgic personality.