 Today Jonathon Thornton interviews Maryse Meijer, author of the excellent The Seventh Mansion (click here for Jonathan;s review) Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature’s 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and Rag, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, as well as the novella Northwood. The Seventh Mansion is out now from FSG Books She lives in Chicago. Your debut novel The Seventh Mansion is out this month from FSG. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about it? It’s about a 15 year old boy named Xie, who moves to North Carolina with his dad to get away from LA. There he hooks up with two girls, Jo and Leni, vegans and animal rights activists like him. They get together and try to free some mink from a farm, and Xie is the only one who gets caught; he gets kicked out of school and he becomes more isolated, spending a lot of time in the woods by his house. One night he finds the relic of a Catholic saint named Pancratius, and he steals the relic and keeps it in his house. Stuff happens after that. The animal rights activists stuff is a big part of the book, in particular Xie’s quest to live a life where he causes no harm… I’m a vegan of sorts, maybe not as pure as some people, and was and am involved in animal rights and environmental activism. I wanted to write about a character who is always looking for the perfect way to live. What is the most ethical way of life that you can have, under capitalism? And what happens when you believe that everything is alive? So it goes beyond even veganism for Xie, it’s not just about him and animals, but it’s about trees, it’s about plants. Even things that we don’t see as living, bones, streams, rocks, whatever. If you start to see life everywhere, then you also see death everywhere, and that can be really overwhelming. I know in my own life sometimes it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by these questions of how to live well and how to justify my own existence when it seems to cause more suffering than good. And what do you do about that? And how does love and kinship with humans and other forms of nature create a community that makes it possible for us to survive on an emotional level but also on a literal level? There’s an interesting link between the novel and your short story Francis in the collection Rag, which is about a guy who euthanises dogs, and there’s also that connection with the saints cause his boss calls him Saint Francis. Was that a conscious connection? No it wasn’t but it’s interesting that you thought that up. I’m always interested in reversals, and the Francis story is about this guy who kills dogs, but he really loves them and he cares about them at the same time. And he figures out that maybe euthanising them is actually the best thing that he can do for them. I’m interested in animals and in nonhuman creatures and the way that we interact with these other beings and have to deal with the bioethics that comes out of these relationships. Why is our Western conception of human/animal, human/nature so antagonistic? I think most people feel a great desire to be connected to animals and to nature in various ways. So there’s this conscious tension between our way of life ,which is so destructive and which requires us to think of ourselves as superior to everything else. But then I think inside all of us there is the knowledge that that’s just not true ,and it doesn’t make us feel good. The farther away we get from the sense of kinship, I think the lonelier and the sadder and the deader we get. And it’s causing our destruction right now. Because most of us don’t feel or honour our relationship with nature, we’re probably all gonna die in a hundred years. And that hard line of extinction made me want to write about this character and these “extreme” ideals and actions. iS there some hope within this limit, within this reality? Is connection still possible? I think so. I hope so! The novel has this balance between optimism and pessimism. Xie, Jo and Leni are all trying to find a way of living that’s less destructive and that works for them. Right, yeah. And I think one thing that being involved with any type of activism does is that it can force you to separate yourself from your actual human community. So I wanted to work hard to make sure that Xie didn’t come from a terrible family. His dad is so ridiculously supportive of him, he’s not alone, he has two really great friends, then he becomes friends with his tutor. So he’s surrounded by people who care about him and who love him and who are willing to at least go some ways to meet him in his world. But he gets so focused on purity, nothing is good enough, and he ends up not being the best friend sometimes and he doesn’t always reach out to the people who are there to help him, because he’s just trapped in his head and his own anxieties. And I think when you try to live a certain way that’s outside of the way that everyone around you is living, it can be really isolating and it can feel really lonely. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are alone. But you read about all these saints and these martyrs throughout history, and there’s a similar isolation that happens. This idea that to get to this pure state you have to close yourself off from the world. There’s a tension in the book between Xie’s quest for purity but also that he gets frustrated with the saints for isolating themselves from the real world… There’s a quote that I love “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it.” And supposedly Jesus said this to somebody, and to me that is what Christianity should be about. Jesus is saying it’s not about the world to come. Heaven is here, it’s invisible, and it’s up to us as a community to work together to make heaven appear on earth. And as we know from history, Christianity did not adopt that ideal at all. It has really seen the world as again a resource, it’s just put here for humans to use up. And it’s going to be destroyed – with the second coming and the rapture, everything gets destroyed and the good people go to heaven and fuck everyone and everything else. And that encourages us to see the world as if what we do to it doesn’t matter. And so Xie gets frustrated with that side of Christianity. And the sensual side of it, the erotic side of it, of all of these martyrs who were writing these mystic texts about their relationship with Christ. It’s very passionate, it’s very sensual, it’s very physical, and you get sort of lost in that. And he worries that he’s getting lost in his relationship with P. He feels like there’s these two things, there’s the world of the flesh and there’s the spiritual path. And for him it’s inverted for the way that it is for religious martyrs but he doesn’t see that maybe you can have both, and maybe again Christians, if they had listened to that quote from Jesus, maybe human history would have gone differently in the Western world. If we destroy what we have here then we destroy the possibility of that perfect future world. I’m an atheist now but I did grow up with a fascination with the Catholic church. And for a while I was Catholic and I was going to mass every day and all of this stuff. And there’s something about the rituals and the beauty of the Catholic mass, the adoration of the saints, it’s so extreme and so like aesthetic and it’s very involving. And even now, that I’m not a believer, I still miss that that magic. I think in some ways it replaced the sense of spirituality or whatever connection that people experience when they live close to the earth. The church tries to replicate that in this mystical way but if you think about the woods as a church or nature as a church, it provides that sense of mystery and magic and the ineffable. Cause those feelings that you have when you’re really put yourself in a place that’s not so human-centric is to me very similar to what you feel when you’re in a church and you’re contemplating god. Has a lot of the stuff around Catholicism and the saints in the book come from your own experiences with Catholicism and your ambiguities to it? I didn’t set to write out a book that had these religious overtones, but writing about this particular body that’s connected to Catholicism definitely reminded me of those feelings. And I went back to church a bit when I started writing the book, just to see if those feelings, that feeling of magic and mystery, were still there, and they were. I don’t think you have to believe in a god or in the bible to still feel moved by people coming together to contemplate something that’s bigger than themselves and trying to make community. It’s fraught with all kinds of crap that’s not useful, but at the core of it is just that desire for connection to something. And Xie definitely has that in him, really intensely, and he’s looking for it in all of these places, and I think he’s on the right track. I think a life without any of that is not a great life, so you gotta find it somewhere. One of the interesting things you do with the actual writing, it’s told largely in the third person but in these moments of great intensity it switches to second person. How did you go about writing that on a structural level? Oh I’m so glad you asked that. I think that when it slips into the second person, it’s almost like speaking in tongues, or when you get like a sort of rapturous rhythm with thinking and with feeling. And it’s really direct and it’s like a voice speaking to you, it’s like the voice of god or whatever. I think it was like breaking down this barrier between the reader and the character and me. I wanted it to be really anarchic in a way, cause I am an anarchist. So there’s not line breaks when people speak, there’s no quotations, there’s a lot of speech with no dialogue tags so you often have to figure out who’s speaking and is something spoken being spoken aloud at all? And who’s saying it, and is P. really talking, and who’s head are you in? And the way the text looks on the page, I had some great designers from FSG who made the text look narrow. It looks like a coffin. So even in the moments when the diction is really choppy and there are all these periods everywhere, the text as a whole still has a stream of consciousness feeling and this sort of rapturous sound. It’s difficult cause not everyone’s going to read it that way. Some people have said they just can’t read the book cause they can’t hear it, it’s just gibberish to them. Which is the danger when you do things like that, when you take out the markers for people. But if you do give it a few pages to get into it, hopefully that part comes through and then it becomes like a preacher speaking to you, or listening to an inner voice, and it starts to make sense. There’s this question in the book, whether Xie is crazy or not. A skeleton is following him around and talking to him, and there’s hints that there’s some mental illness in his family. And so the text reflects that as well, this space where you’re just not sure what’s real and what’s not. Does that question even matter, does it matter what’s real? It’s real because you’re experiencing it. Just like, is it real to believe that climate change is a thing if governments don’t acknowledge it and they make you feel crazy? So there’s his tension f you believe in something, whatever that is, if you have faith, but that faith doesn’t reflect the larger cultural beliefs, then you’re crazy no matter what. Whether or not what you feel or hear or think or see is true, if you’re isolated in your beliefs and your faith then there’s a part of you that is by definition insane. And so the text is struggling with that as well. To me everything is literal in the book. He’s not crazy, and everything’s really happening, but in the end that question doesn’t really matter, because Xie’s experience is so outside the realm of “everyday” experience that regardless of his perspective, to be in a headspace that he’s in is insane, it’s a form of madness. So maybe hopefully when the reader is reading it they feel a little bit crazy too. Your short stories in Rag also don’t use quotation marks. Is that a very conscious choice that you want to avoid them in your writing? Yeah, I don’t know how old I was, I read some shitty book by Louis Begley, in the back of it there was an interview with him, and he said quotation marks look like bugs on the page, and that’s why he didn’t use them. And I had always felt the same, just aesthetically they’re really ugly. But for me the quotation mark is telling the reader, “this is true, I’m quoting a person and this is like what really was said and this is what really happened,” and I never want to like commit to that thing. Because I just disagree with that, I think that notion is just awful on a philosophical level. Like who am I quoting? What am I quoting when I’m writing a book? I’m not here to say this is the truth, this happened like this, this really happened. Obviously I just made it up! But I also like the confusion of not always knowing when you read something for the first time, is it the narrative speaking, is it a character speaking, is it a thought, and where does it end? And I like sometimes the little musicality or the rhythms or the sounds of the sentence when you’re unsure of who is speaking. Where it’s like, who knows where it ends? The line gets sort of fuzzy and the boundaries aren’t as clear, and I’m always interested in messing with the boundaries in the work. So the quotations are part of that. The lack of quotations do a lot of work for me. I think it’s more interesting as well as just aesthetically cleaner. The novel and the short stories put you right in the characters’ heads, and these are frequently uncomfortable points of view… Yeah I always say that for me if I’m not scared of what I’m writing then I know I’m not doing my job and I’m not properly enjoying myself! And it’s an interesting trick to try and get the reader in the character’s head. But when I’m writing the work I feel a lot of distance between me and the character. Because I don’t write from my life, I don’t write about my life, I don’t write about people I know. I’m not one of those writers who keeps a notebook, and after I hear someone say something on the train I’m writing it down. I don’t do that. I like to be an observer and I like to write about people that I don’t understand and write about situations that are totally mysterious to me and just watch them unfold. These characters aren’t me and I’m not in their head, I don’t know that much about them. The work is kind of thin in details, not a lot of backstory in my work. I just know what is on the page and that’s it, I just know what the reader knows. So I don’t have this intimate connection with the characters, it’s more me watching them, and the intimacy comes from me just caring about them. I care about what happens to them. I worry about them, and I want them to make the right decisions, which they hardly ever do! So I want the work to feel intimate in that way, that you’re uncomfortably close to people who are in these very fragile, vulnerable, maybe violent places, but there should also be a sense of authorial distance, I’m not right there, telling the reader what to think about what’s going on, or explaining things. I think that the mystery should be preserved as much as possible so that the work itself and the stories have a little bit more room to interact with the reader in a certain way or interact with these blank spaces. But I hope that the immediacy comes through all that distance, all that lack of knowing. Because it’s just about the pure sensation, the pure atmosphere of being in these situations that are really tense and unknowable. I’m always trying to get both a lot of distance and through that distance the feeling of really kind of scary and uncomfortable intimacy with what’s going on. So if I’m making you uncomfortable then I know that I’m happy and I’m doing my job. Cause I’m uncomfortable when I write. When you’re coming up with ideas for stories, do the characters come first? No, not necessarily. I just sit down, and I usually start writing after I’ve seen a movie that I really like, or listened to music, or seen an amazing painting. And I will get really jealous of how good this other piece of art is. I basically want to copy the atmosphere, not necessarily the content, not necessarily the narrative, but whatever the thing is in that piece of art that I liked. So I just start typing and out of that atmosphere that somebody else created the characters appear. I don’t usually have an idea that I develop before I start writing, it usually comes out in that first draft and then you just follow it and figure out where it’s going and what it is. Or I’ll see something that I like, and then the artists will make a choice I really disagree with, and I’ll get really mad, like why didn’t you do this other thing, you know. And then I almost work to correct it, this is what I would have done, if I had had this narrative and I was in charge of it. That’s why I started writing as a young person, I wanted to write books that I wanted to read. And my twin was the same, we’d read a book and we’d get half way through and we’d be like, oh they fucked it up, why? So it was borne out of this frustration and also jealousy and admiration for what other people are doing. There’s quite often a transgressive element in the stories. Is there ever a moment when you’re writing something and you feel, this is too much, you have to reel it back a bit? Yeah all the time. Especially when I was writing Rag. When I published Heartbreaker, which took me ten years to write, when it came out I felt like I had held back in a certain way. I’d get uncomfortable in a story, not necessarily just about the subject matter but just the conventions of narrative, I would just feel like nobody’s going to understand it if I don’t do this, or it’s too weird if I don’t give this type of context or whatever. And I went to an MFA programme which made me very paranoid about my work. Cause it wasn’t very well received there. But when I wrote the second collection I was like, I’m just going to go as far as I want and I don’t care how uncomfortable or weird it is. So I did that, and I remember sometimes I would just feel awful. I was a little afraid of what’s going to come out. But I guess I just like being scared and uncomfortable! But there are times when I feel like some things are just too much. And that line for me is always, when I’m depicting a violent situation, am I doing too much violence to the reader, to put them in that space? So I think there’s always this ethical charge to take care of your reader, and to take care of your characters too and just take care of yourself when you’re writing. And to never exploit a situation, cause I always think even though I’m making all these people up, they represent real people in the world in some way. There’s someone out there who’s like Xie. And so you can’t use them for shock value, you can’t exploit them. I hate that. I never sit down and think, I’m just going to write something that’s really shocking, I’m gonna shock people. I think that’s the worst that you can do. So many artists say, well, art’s immoral, you can just do whatever you want because, you’re the artist and you’re so great and blah blah blah. I don’t think that’s true. I think there are boundaries and I think there are limits. And the limit is the intention of like, do I care about the worlds that I’m creating, do I care about the people that I’m creating, or am I using them as tools to speak for me or to impress someone? And I think once you go into the latter route the work isn’t as good, and you’re actually doing something bad. You’re actually doing harm to your reader and you’re doing harm in the world because we have to care for each other, and you have to care about each other in the work, even when it’s getting uncomfortable and it’s vulnerable and you’re exposing people in a certain way. If you think about your characters as always being mirrors for other people and potentially someone coming to your work and reading it and saying, that’s me, you don’t want them to feel like, oh that’s me and I’m a terrible person or I’m shameful. I never want to shame anybody or anything in the work. When I was writing this novel, the piece about Xie being attracted to bones and dead bodies, that all came from my interaction with a group on a website who identified as necrophiles,. None of these people were out having sex with dead bodies, they didn’t want to kill someone so they could like rape the body. It wasn’t anything violent. It was all very romantic and was a lot about loneliness and that longing for connection and wanting to care for a being that they didn’t see as dead. I just really wanted to understand what that was like. I remember somebody on there saying, there’s never been a book that describes how I feel about this girl who is buried in some church somewhere. And I thought well it would be just great if someday I could write a book for this person that described their emotions in some way. I don’t use the word necrophilia in the book, I don’t think it really applies to Xie, but yeah that was in the back of my mind for many years. Like how could I write about this thing that people see as so extreme and so disgusting and make it seem natural? I spent a lot of time looking at skeletons and imagining like, ok, what would it be like to be with this body that’s so fragile that you can’t be violent with it or else you’ll destroy it? There’s something about the idea that these bones are so fragile. A skeleton would just be destroyed if you were mean to it in any way. So there’s something beautiful about that idea. And I really wanted to take something that just seemed so out there and so gross and so weird and stupid and crazy and relate it to the way that we all feel about romance and about love and about intimacy. We all really want to be cared for, and what better way to frame that desire than to think of a body that requires you to think about its physical integrity at every moment, so even your passion and your desire, you have to control it, you have to shape it in this way that it honours the Other. An Other that most people don’t even think exists. And that to me was almost the extreme form of romance, to think about really serving this Other body. How can we look at Xie and his relationship and sort of be inspired by it? I How can I make it relatable in this weird way? I think that runs through the short stories as well, this idea of finding empathy in these unusual viewpoints… Yeah. And I think, we just mess it up. Our culture is just totally fucked up about sex and romance and love. I think in some ways all romance under patriarchy is necrophiliac. It’s all about objectifying the other and reducing the Other to parts. I mean I hate when you go around and you hear people saying I’m a leg man, or I only want to date someone who’s tall. People are projecting desire through this filter of pieces of other people. Do these pieces add up to the thing that I want? How is that really different than saying someone just give me a body that has no will, that’s dead, that I can just use and that will satisfy me and there’s no sense of what do I have to give to this other person? How do we come together in terms of acknowledging the actual being of another human? So I think it’s all deeply deeply messed up for us. I don’t know many adults who have healthy truly satisfying relationships, and pornography is so gross and so prevalent, etc. We don’t exist in a community that really encourages us to think of the Other at all. But even within an imperfect system those moments of connection might still exist and they’re still important. I wanted to write about someone that was successful in some ways in having a good relationship, a romantic relationship that might sound fucked up but that ends up being positive in some ways. Which is how I think the novel is really different from my other work. It’s much more optimistic on some levels I guess, in the conclusions it comes to about the possibility of connection. What’s next for Maryse Meijer? I’m finishing off another collection of short stories, I’m working on several novels. I’m working on my non-fiction project about bullfighting. I’m always looking for the next thing that will surprise me and make me really uncomfortable . Thank you Maryse Meijer for speaking with us  One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of the Second-Half of 2020, one of Library Journal's 35 Standout Summer/Fall 2020 Debut Novels, and one of Shondaland's 11 New Books That Will Change How You Think About the Climate Crisis From the author of the story collections Heartbreaker and Rag comes a powerful and propulsive debut novel that examines activism, love, and purpose When fifteen-year-old Xie moves from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father he makes just two friends, Jo and Leni, both budding environmental and animal activists. One night, the three friends decide to free captive mink from a local farm. But when Xie is the only one caught his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard. Exploring the woods alone one night, Xie discovers the relic of a Catholic saint--the martyred Pancratius--in a nearby church. Regal and dressed in ornate armor, the skeleton captivates him. After weeks of visits, Xie steals the skeleton, hides it in his attic bedroom, and develops a complex and passionate relationship with the bones and spirit of the saint, whom he calls P. As Xie's relationship deepens with P., so too does his relationship with the woods--private property that will soon be overrun with loggers. As Xie enacts a plan to save his beloved woods, he must also find a way to balance his conflicting--and increasingly extreme--ideals of purity, sacrifice, and responsibility in order to live in this world. Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion is a deeply moving and profoundly original debut novel--both an urgent literary call to arms and an unforgettable coming-of-age story about finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction.   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