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Your story “Thursday” involves a kind of (unwanted) mind meld between two strangers, in which one man experiences the memories of the other (who has died). The two men have very different personalities and histories. I’m guessing that the challenge of writing the story was also the pleasure of writing it: finding a credible way to blend the two voices while keeping them distinct. How did you do it?
Yes, you’re right about that; that aspect was both challenging and enjoyable.
“Thursday” started with a fragment that had fallen off another story I wrote years ago. In that story, I was trying to explain why a particular character was prone to violence, and I wrote a scene in which the boy witnesses his father “pummelling” his mother. The bit didn’t serve that story in the end, but I liked it and kept it around, and finally, last year, went back and started, as we in the writing trade say, in our specialized jargon, “farting around with it.”
That produced an early version of this story, in which a guy goes to a clinic every Thursday to get a certain high-tech treatment that lets him relive his childhood in exquisite detail (which, I find as I get older, is a recurring dream of mine—oh, to be back in 1969 for just a few seconds!).
But that version of the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I kept revising and, in time, arrived at a version in which, in those memories, the man keeps getting younger and younger, until he slips clean out of this life and undergoes an inadvertent past-life regression. Oops! But then . . . so what? There weren’t any real consequences. (In that version, he came out of the session saying, “Reincarnation is real!,” and then proved it by, like, detailing something that had happened before he was born, which was then verified, via Google. Hooray! Reincarnation: PROVEN! Ugh.)
So . . . there was more work to be done.
What’s the narrative benefit of letting the reader see one character’s story as it’s experienced through the eyes of another?
Well, to be honest, the “benefit” part, for me, is secondary. This aspect of the story—the combined consciousnesses—wasn’t planned, but grew out of the initial setup and surprised me when it happened. This is how it works best—if I don’t know what I’m looking for and then that thing comes and finds me. Then I just go, “Oh, I see, this is what you want to be about, story. O.K., let’s do that, since you seem to feel strongly about it.”
But, if I’m thinking more as a critic, the benefit of this move might be that, on some level, the juxtaposition of those minds reminds us of a bigger truth; namely, that “a human community” is really just a bunch of highly subjective thought-streams, generated by clumps of flesh inside the heads of a group of bodies, bodies that are blundering around, each convinced that his or her thought-stream is the one and only authoritative, objective thought-stream.
And then one of these beings backs her car into the car of another, or they go on a date, or embark on a business deal—and hilarity ensues.
The two men in the story had very different childhoods: one lived on an isolated farm with loving but puritanical parents; the other had parents who cheated, fought, drank, divorced, and showed little interest in their kids. Both men lived quite lonely adult lives. Is there something to be learned from that?
I’m guessing that Gerard and David are really just two manifestations of my mind; one part (Gerard) values control, regulation, being perpetually “right” (and, in the process, shuts out the flawed and human). The other part (David) is wild and open to experience and all that—he likes being unregulated—but he’s also a big, unthoughtful mess. I see myself in both of these descriptions. (“Controlling stiff vs. freewheeling moron.”) In practice, the way it works is that as soon as I see that Gerard (“tight-assed, religious, judgmental person”) has become a presence in the story—well, David has to be . . . not that.
There’s also a bit of a class thing going on in “Thursday,” which always interests me. More broadly, and again thinking more like a critic, I’d say that there may be a common thread between the two men’s respective childhoods, in that, in both cases, the parents rather thoughtlessly used their kid as a repository for their beliefs, and maybe didn’t make much room for the kid to find his own way.
Did you find yourself identifying with one character more than the other, or are you more like Horace, the I.T. guy, fiddling with the brain you have stored in your crawl space?
There’s a title for a song right there: “Fiddling with the Brain I Have Stored in My Crawl Space.”
The story is anchored in Gerard’s mind and, especially, in his diction; there are a number of places where he’s relaying/retelling David’s experience in his own more sophisticated language. So, I think the story tilts a bit in his direction. But, once I get going, I’m not doing much identifying or preferring, vis-à-vis the characters—I’m just trying to use them in service of the story. So, in that, I’m very much a Horace, I’m afraid.
Then again—to “use” your characters, you have to really know them, which means you have to love them, and love them equally (even if one happens to get more stage time than another).
Distracted by the thought of our new co-written song, “Fiddling with the Brain I Have Stored in My Crawl Space,” I seem to be evading the question.
I feel that fiction writers in the past decade have been quite interested in stories involving technology that enables people to recapture prior experiences or memories. There’s Jennifer Egan’s book “The Candy House” and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s story “The Relive Box,” to name just two. What drew you to the idea?
Yes, this notion seems to be very alive right now. My feeling is that it has something to do with the pervasive effects of social media and partisan media—the way that ideas from afar, focussed by algorithms, are starting to behave like invasive species, shouldering aside our “native” insights rather piggishly. This is happening even as we’re becoming more aware that thought makes the person, and that thought is, at least in part, a chemical process that can be modified via drugs or other kinds of technological interference, including media. So, in a sense, we’re under siege but have enthusiastically thrown open the door for the invaders.
My interest in this memory stuff goes back to my first story in The New Yorker, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” from 1992, in which the narrator accidentally downloads into his brain the memories of a burglar who’s broken into his shop (a virtual-reality parlor).
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