Jamie Quatro

Anyhow, imagine if everyone had such labels attached to their professions. Imagine a doctor billed as a ‘Christian neurosurgeon’. I don’t care what religion my brain surgeon is. I just want him to be the best fucking surgeon out there.

Speaking of women and God and sex: the protagonists of both your novels – the Girl in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Eily in The Lesser Bohemians – engage in complex and risky sexual activity. In Toronto we spoke about how certain readers seem put-off, or even offended, by a female character who uses her sexual agency in ways that they, the readers, think are ‘bad’ for her. Can we dig into this a bit more? What do you think is beneath that kind of response?

Jamie Quatro

And you’re right, the ‘marital bed growing cold’ is one of those euphemisms that borders on irresponsibility on the part of the critic, because, as you point out, it obscures and tacitly dismisses a desperately important topic I’d hoped Fire Sermon would bring to public light: marital rape. It happens. Are we talking about it? The #MeToo movement has been essential in calling out male gatekeepers and sexual coercion and abuse in the workplace. But what about sexual coercion and abuse within marriage? Especially in religious marriages, where traditional gender roles and prohibitions related to extramarital sex – even just sexual attraction to someone other than one’s spouse – might inhibit a woman’s courage to speak up. I’m thinking not just of conservative Christianity, but also cultures in which arranged marriages are still practised. There seems to be a silencing in these spaces in the same way there has been, until very recently, a silencing in the Catholic church related to sex abuse.

Abuses in the Catholic church aside, having been raised in a stripped-down Protestant church, I’ve always been attracted to the physicality of the Mass. The bells and smells. It seems to me that Catholicism honours the body and its inherent sensuality in ways Protestantism doesn’t Yet your Catholic characters experience the same existential splits – body vs. soul, physical vs. spiritual, the vast gulf between what they’re ‘supposed’ to do and what the flesh naturally longs for. The Girl in your first book intuits the utter wrongness of this split. From the moment she’s born, she’s seeking more body, more tangible physicality, at first in her religious imagination, as when she scribbles wounds and blood all over the picture of Christ, and later in sex. She’s a victim of horrific sexual abuse, which complicates her relationship with her own body and its sexual desires. Am I off base regarding Catholicism’s integration of body and spirit? I’ve only ever been an outside observer. Also, do you think there might be an inherent aversion to the religion in which one is raised, versus an attraction to whatever version of religion (or non-religion) one comes to as an adult?

Jamie Quatro

Your question about controlling the female body – we could talk about that for thirty pages. You’re right, so much of the abuse of women has to do with the religious patriarchy’s need to maintain power, but I think it’s more systemic. In fact, today in the New York Times, I read a piece about gender bias among doctors related to the treatment of male and female pain. A Yale study found that adult participants who observed children receiving a finger prick attributed more pain to the child they thought was a male over the child they thought was a female. The study associates these findings with ‘explicit gender stereotypes’ that assume men are more stoic about their pain, women more emotional. When an obvious source of female pain can’t be immediately located, we are told it must be ‘stress-related,’ or that the pain is ‘psychosomatic.’ Now we’re learning at just how young an age this bias begins. A large percentage us grew up thinking a) I can’t trust what my own body is telling me; b) I can’t disagree with doctor, because doctor knows best; and c) if I’m suffering, I shouldn’t keep talking about it, because it’s shameful, and people will think I’m making it up, or that I’m a whiner.

Girls describing their own suffering, and the way adults respond: it’s a short, sickening leap to women narrating the stories of their sexual abuse into our still-rampant culture of disbelief. ‘An estimated one in five women are sexually assaulted in college, with only 20 per cent of those assaults being reported – fear of not being believed one of the biggest barriers,’ the Times piece says. This shaming, or scepticism, related to the female body seeps into even what I do as an artist. One of the most frustrating things about publishing female narrators who have illicit sex (or any sex) is the assumption, from readers, that I must be writing autobiographically. ‘Did you actually cheat on your husband?’ is a question I’ve been asked in a myriad of ways: ‘How much of your work is drawn from real life?’ ‘Why do you write about infidelity?’ ‘How does your husband feel about your novel?’ etc. Do you get similar questions about your novels? Like, ‘Did you run away and join an acting company in London and have sex with a famous actor?’ Why do you think some readers find it difficult to believe that the sex scenes might, in fact, be purely fiction?

Jamie Quatro

You’re absolutely spot-on re: how certain readers feel they’ve been ‘duped’ into experiencing powerful emotions if they find out the scenes and images that ignited such emotions did not, in fact, take place. I also agree with you that fiction gets at truths deeper than our own conscious, or chosen, beliefs and disbeliefs. Great fiction seems to bypass the conscious mind altogether. It stirs up the primal, what is most childlike and raw inside us – and in that sense it can be thrilling and electric on the one hand, or (if a reader is unprepared, or hasn’t ventured far afield of, say, Reader’s Digest) terrifying and threatening on the other. I don’t understand how the discovery that ‘these things actually happened in real life’ assuages such terror. Perhaps because if it actually happened, the reader can displace his or her own emotion onto the author. Still, the power to touch an individual soul via words – whatever ‘the soul’ is — it’s the reason I sit down each day to do this lonely, mentally-tortuous, ego-feeding, ego-defeating, financially-challenging, posture-ruining job.

When I was drafting the stories that eventually became I Want To Show You More, I had no idea what I was doing. I was working with a pit in my gut, in a sort of feverish sweat of aspiration and longing, nursing the hope that someday, someday I might publish a story in a journal somewhere. I’d tried off and on through the years and always got rejected. When I began my MFA program, I encountered many contemporary American story writers for the first time: Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Joy Williams, David Means, Steven Millhauser, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Lydia Davis. But Joyce and Woolf were the writers whose fiction made me want to write fiction. I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for the first time when I was working on my MA in English at the College of William and Mary. The book was a revelation – the fusion of sacred and sexual, and Joyce’s experimentation with language and form. Looking back, I realise the ‘Hell Sermon’ in chapter three is probably a kind of Ur-text for Maggie’s ‘Fire Sermon’ at the end of my novel.

You write short stories as well as novels. Do you have a preference – shall we say a ‘native’ form?

Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro

Last week I finally read Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, which I found smart and charming and devastating and formally daring, especially the ending. I’m currently reading sixteenth-century source material for an essay about a female writer almost no one has heard of. She was a translator and poet and nonconformist activist with close ties to Calvin and Knox. I’ll keep her name mum for now so as to protect my energy and excitement about the project, but I found out about her because my son had to do an ancestry research project and told me she was one of my distant grandmothers. My ‘invariable literary turn-off,’ at least as a writer, is historical fiction, which is ironic because the more I read about this sixteenth-century woman the more I think, Damn, her life would make a great novel. I do adore period film. Perhaps I’ll write a screenplay next.