"The book stretches into the realms of dream & surreality, hinging on histories I don’t have full access to." (An Interview With Marie Conlan)
As part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Marie Conlan’s Say Mother Say Hand, journalists, bloggers, and editors have been sharing reviews of the book for the past week on their platforms in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss a review by Rachel Elizabeth Small for R. (“Grief is an inheritance that Conlan unwinds, seeking out her own independence and connections.”), Grace Lee for Grace L. Writes (“I think this is the beauty of Conlan’s debut work, that she transformed all the hurt and bruises, crafting it like a skilled potter, putting power and voice back into herself.”), River Adams for Oh Shadows (“This is a story told in ‘whole palmfuls,’ like scooping coins up from a fountain and knowing you hold wishes, but wanting to know who they belonged to more than if they came true.”), and Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng for Counterclock Lit (“In writing this book, Conlan asks the reader to carry burden of our ancestors’ trauma as an honor, and to dream on for the eternal narrator of this anti-memoir.”). Also, an exclusive essay by Marie here on the Half Mystic blog! Today, Marie joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of SMSH...
HM: You’ve called Say Mother Say Hand an anti-memoir. Can you share a bit about the genre and your experience writing one?
MC: I struggled with the genre of this book for a long time. But the more I sat with the manuscript, the tighter the constraints around the “memoir” label began to feel. At its center, this is less a story about the events of my life and more an exploration of how the landscape of intergenerational trauma threads through them. The book stretches into the realms of dream & surreality, hinging on histories I don’t have full access to. I needed the freedom that the genre of “anti-memoir” allowed in order to limn this history open, to dip into dreamscape and into the surreal as a way to offer my lineage the gift of being witnessed to the capacity it could be, to hold a new space for its trauma to be validated and moved through.
If anyone is interested in the anti-memoir genre, I highly recommend reading Akilah Oliver’s poetic statement for her piece in the Memoir/Anti-Memoir issue of Chain Magazine.
The book gorgeously braids grief and healing, moving forward and backwards in time and returning to specific moments to further probe tender subjects. How did you go about writing such a complex story?
I have found my process of grieving & healing from trauma to be deeply non-linear. “Grieving” & “healing” exist for me more as states in perpetual motion than as destinations I can reach. I liked the idea of this book mimicking the passes of a labyrinth, the grieving & healing spiraling back in on themselves, recognizing themselves in new depths with each pass. I just read Ocean Voung’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where he writes, “Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been? … Where have we been, Ma?” It was this reencountering I was after while writing this book, having each wound tell the story of where it had been to the part of itself it encounters again.
One of the most striking motifs in the book is that of caterpillars and butterflies. What interests you about these creatures?
The concept of metamorphosis became intriguing to me as I reflected on inheritance and what it means to be part of a lineage. I wanted to know what was inherited through the body, not only the shared body of a womb, but also the interconnected bodies of generations. I find plenty of beauty here too, the dissolving into caterpillar soup and coming out a new, bright thing. Butterflies and caterpillars seemed to naturally embed themselves within this story. My mother has always loved butterflies, and as I write about in the book, her detox in the hospital manifested as these giant hallucinated caterpillars, seemingly stagnant in their refusal to engage in metamorphosis. They just got bigger and bigger. Later, after she left the hospital, she got a butterfly tattoo in remembrance.
What initially sparked your drive to explore your own and your family’s genealogy?
There is a part in the book where I write about talking with a psychic who tells me that my grandmother committed suicide, and it was truly that conversation that made me interested in understanding my grandmother’s history. I also began writing this book in my early twenties, and I just had so many questions about my own identity swirling in my head. After my mother’s attempted suicide and battling my own mental health demons, I was really struggling to understand the generational patterns of trauma and mental health. I wanted to know what was inherited and what I had the power to change.
The book confronts many heavy topics, including addiction, suicide, and the Holocaust. How did you go about such a difficult exploration?
I was lucky enough to have incredible writer friends by my side and really inspiring writing workshops that were guiding lights during this process. Also, therapy!
Say Mother Say Hand is your first book. What was most challenging about the writing process? Most surprising? Most rewarding?
The most surprising part was realizing I was writing a book. At the start, I was just writing what needed to come out of me. When I realized there was a cohesive story I wanted to tell, I found myself in completely new territory. Once I leaned into that, the most challenging part was desperately wanting to live up to what the book was calling out to be. The most rewarding part was seeing it finally come together.
Although not about music in a traditional sense, Say Mother Say Hand is written symphonically. How did you go about balancing the crescendos of the story with the more wandering, contemplative melodies?
When I was writing, I just wrote. I didn’t edit much and I didn’t really focus on the arc of the story. Once I felt like I had written most of what needed to be there, that is when I went about rearranging and truly listening to its sound. The story took many different arcs and moved in many different waves before I landed on the final version. I printed out every page, laid them out on my living room floor, and did a lot of staring & rearranging & replacing, trying to sense where the build-up was too strong, where there wasn’t enough to hold onto, where it was too much or too loud for too long. The process was a balancing act of understanding when to take charge of the narrative voice versus when it was okay to let the intensity of the work marinate, even if it looked different from what I had been expecting. Reading things out loud & having new eyes on the manuscript were also indispensable tools.
You write about both psychics and therapists. What connections do you see between these two different methods of understanding the world?
I think we as humans experience a collective aching to know ourselves, and psychics & therapists each illuminate different access points to that knowing. They can both hold mirrors up to who we are, how we exist in the world, our realties, our pasts & possible futures—and force us to do the terrifying work of looking straight ahead as they interchange the lenses.
What songs are on the soundtrack for Say Mother Say Hand? What songs have defined your life? Your writing?
I took a class with Danielle Vogel during Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and when I gave her a sample of this story, she prescribed me to listen to the Library Tapes, Chelsea Wolfe, & Colleen. I listened to those artists on repeat as I continued to write, and I feel like they had a lot to do with allowing the story to unravel and reveal itself. In particular I think this book could be read with Colleen’s Colleen Et Les Boites Á Musique.
As far as songs that have defined my work as a whole, I started writing when I was eight or nine years old after stealing my older sister’s hip hop albums. Atmosphere’s Lucy Ford, Jay-Z’s Blueprint, and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate were pivotal encounters with writing for me. They were my first introduction to poetry.
Say Mother Say Hand focuses on the past. What of the past do you hope to bring forward into your future?
Growing up, my family’s past seemed very distant from me. There was, and still is, so much unknown and so much that just didn’t want to be talked about. There were bits and pieces of information that I knew, but even my maternal great-grandparents’ names were new to me until I started researching for this book. So I suppose what I want to bring in most from the past is simply a validation of existence. To look at my past—my past as mine, but also the past of my lineage—and say yes, you were, & yes, you existed. In writing this book I didn’t want my history to remain erased. I wanted to integrate it, to see the threads of generations more clearly, to hold them more sacredly. A lot was shut out because it was so painful, but I also feel as though there is power in being witnessed in some capacity, if only in the gift of being able to move forward with a sense of wholeness.
Marie Conlan’s Say Mother Say Hand begins in the wake of an attempted suicide. Nestled somewhere on the spectrum between memoir and dreamscape, the narrator rummages through her maternal lineage and unravels the threads of intergenerational trauma—of the Holocaust, of mental illness, addiction, suicide, what it means to bear witness to what she cannot heal. As these threads spiral into a reckoning with inheritance, the narrator dreams open the unfindable parts. In this stunning debut, Conlan interrogates what is inherited through the body, what connects a lineage, and what is destined to come next in the brutal and uncertain now.
The blog tour for SMSH features reviews and giveaways of the book, interviews with and essays by Marie Conlan, never-before-seen content on the creation of the book, and a virtual launch on Instagram Live on the 18th of April at 9 P.M. EST. SMSH is available for preorder now.