MEGINNIS x GABBERT

One night early in the year, everyone on Earth has the same dream, a dream with a message: The world is going to end in November. What does the human race do with the rest of its time alive? In Drowning Practice, we ponder this question through the eyes of Lyd and Mott, a single mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter, and David, Lyd’s ex and Mott’s father, who doubts the apocalypse is coming, but also doesn’t want to face it without them. This hilarious, heartbreaking novel was the first book I read in 2022. I asked Mike Meginnis these questions over email in January. – Elisa Gabbert

One of my favorite things about Drowning Practice is the novel within the novel—the novel Mott is racing time to write. I love the way you handle it, describing it rather than actually writing and embedding it (ugh), which allows us to imagine something we can take with utmost seriousness, even though it’s written by a child, albeit a genius-y child. Did you always know the two main characters in the novel were going to be novelists? What possibilities did the metafictional elements open up for you outside of the first-order/first-level fiction? (The importance of dreaming, and lucid dreaming in particular, feels parallel to this!) 

Thanks so much. The first thing that I knew about the book was that it would be about a young girl who wanted to write her first novel before the world ended, and that this was important to her because her mother was a novelist, and because she loved and admired her mother so much. I remember saying all of this at once, the first time I thought of it, to my partner Tracy Rae Bowling; I was describing why my last several book ideas had failed, and why I felt so bad about my odds of ever writing anything decent again. Then I had the idea, I said it to Tracy—I said it as I was having it—and immediately felt a little bit better.

The other thing I knew right away was that they would be pursued across the country by their father/ex-husband, a spy. Because the end of the world sounds like a narrative pressure, but I don’t think it really is. It’s more of a mood. You need a person who can actively cause complications and frustrate the protagonists’ plans.

Like I think most writers, I’m kind of annoyed by stories about writers. It feels too obvious. But I felt like it had to be about writing a book because that’s my answer to the question of what I would do if I had a year left to live—I would try to write something beautiful that I could share with the people I love, less because I think that’s a good idea and more because I don’t have a better one. Making the characters writers suggests that the things they care about are important to me, which hopefully makes the stakes more real and immediate in a book with a premise that might otherwise feel too abstract. And I think that books are special objects in books, for the same reason songs are special in songs, movies in movies, etc. A fun example here is Tenacious D’s “Tribute”, where we intuitively understand how special “the best song in the world” was to the people who made it because they are talented musicians and making songs is their life’s work, so of course “the best song in the world” is important to them and they wish they could play it again. You know that Mott’s book is an object of immense value in its own world because it exists in a book, which was in turn written by a person who values books above everything else. I poke some fun at this in the book, and tried to undercut myself by acknowledging within the text that writing a novel is not obviously the most important thing to do, but in this context it actually is.

After the November dream, a lot changes in society, but a lot doesn’t. As you write, “the most common choice of all was to continue living almost exactly as before”—so much of life is merely habitual. This vision of the pre-apocalypse has really borne out in the pandemic. My life feels shorter, more fragile and precarious, but I haven’t changed my life very much, outside of accepting lots of new limitations, and feeling sadder and more anxious. Was this vision in place well before the pandemic? How, if at all, did the material conditions of 2020/2021 affect your revisions?  

I finished the draft that we sold to Ecco sometime in late 2019, and it went out on submission mid-April of 2020. Which was a weird, hard time to be selling a book about an apocalypse. Several editors wrote back with something like, “This is really good but I can’t deal with it right now.” And I felt like, yeah, that makes sense! Everything was too much back then in a way that already feels hard, sometimes, to access now.

So all of the book was written before we had any idea about the pandemic—the first draft also predates Donald Trump’s election, which is another thing that people ask about—but I do feel, well, vindicated (yuck!) by the way this current apocalypse has played out in our day-to-day lives. One of the reasons we like apocalyptic fiction is that it feels like the end of the world would be the one thing that could shake us out of our collective habits and create an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and our relations. Apocalyptic stories are usually ultimately stories about renewal, the return to Eden, subversion and inversion of class structures, etc. But in reality, rethinking our lives is incredibly hard and we are where we are because entrenched powers like us there, and to an extent because we like it too. Even if the Earth were being invaded by literal Martians, we would mobilize an army to defend ourselves but people would otherwise mostly still show up for work, even (especially) the shitty jobs. The folks who were on strike at Kellogg’s wouldn’t be given any concessions; they would be forced to make Corn Flakes at gunpoint if necessary to maintain a sense of normalcy and order. Even the threat of imminent planetary explosion doesn’t give us a way out.

When I wrote the first couple drafts of Drowning Practice, I was thinking a lot about climate change and our listless, drifting non-response. Our cultural, political, and personal exhaustion—our invulnerable belief in our own inability to address the problem. In this respect, COVID is just high-speed climate change (although I do think it will “end” in a way that leaves the planet basically livable, which the climate situation may not do). Roughly the same people have decided COVID is impossible to fix, and the same institutions have acquiesced to/actively backed up those bad actors. And our same collective weakness, our same inability to act in our shared self-interest, is killing people in much the same way. My editor Gabriella Doob sent me her notes on the book in December of 2020, and I did my revisions in early 2021, by which point we knew how the pandemic was and how it would be, and I don’t think we had to make any substantial changes to account for COVID; it was already there.

I love when novels ask interesting moral questions, when they reveal morality as a complex, active process rather than a set of made decisions. I think Drowning Practice interrogates the idea of the “good person”—not just what does it mean to be good, but also, can we be good? Can only children be good, because they don’t have the weight of a life on their backs? Do we “deserve” punishment, even if we can’t help being bad? Can you tell me about your approach to morality in a novel? What is the role of argument in fiction? 

That’s such a big question, and I appreciate your asking it, but I feel really inadequate to the task of answering. Here’s my best attempt:

My first goal with any book or story is not to make an argument—there are better forms for that—but successful fictions do usually need to at least hint at one, and moral stakes, I think mainly because they elide and restructure so much about the real world that they need to present a somewhat clear and defensible perspective (with implications for real life) in order to feel at all plausible and worthwhile. I’m trying to think of a concrete example of what I mean. So, China Miéville’s The City & the City is a book about a detective pursuing a mystery in the overlapping city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma. These two places share one physical space, but the citizens of each have to train themselves to constantly “unsee” the other city, so that when the protagonist needs to go to Ul Qoma to follow a case, this is understood as travel, though actually all he’s doing is allowing himself to see the other city-state (and forbidding himself to see Besźel, where he started). All of this would feel like total nonsense if it didn’t suggest an argument about the structure of the real world that we live in. I suspect Miéville is more invested in his argument than I am, but even if you (like me) are mainly excited about the weird premise and setting of the two overlapping cities, it needs the grounding of the argument to feel real, coherent, and consequential.

For my part, if I could, I would like to write largely meaningless, beautiful texts full of strange images, barely logical sentences, and only wrong ideas. (In Drowning Practice, Lyd fantasizes about writing a book with “no implications, absolutely none of any kind at all—a book that was only itself and would contain itself completely,” and this is my fantasy too.) But it doesn’t work. Readers need a text to be constrained in order to make sense of it and enjoy it (I wish we didn’t need to make sense of things!), and I need constraints to make the choices that let me write. A story’s argument is one of its most important constraints—one of the things that helps the writer make a lot of otherwise very difficult choices. I see character, genre conventions, and structure in similar ways. They’re necessary because they help me decide which word will come next. And of course, constraints enhance beauty in practice.

I do make a point of undermining my own arguments. A lot of my beliefs are in the book, but I tried as much as possible to give them only to the least trustworthy characters, or to reveal them under circumstances that demonstrate their weaknesses and worst implications. But I think constantly about those ideas and questions you mentioned, about what it means to be a good person and how to be kind, whether goodness is possible, whether we could be better. So it finds its way in, even if sometimes I wish I were just mashing phonemes together.

I find the tone of the novel really cute and fun. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams. In both there’s a definite sense of magic possibility, a certain sparkliness, but the planet these people are on still looks a lot like Earth. It makes me realize how closely tone is related to world-building or even genre, how the sensibility of the voice helps you understand the novel’s reality, what is and isn’t real within it. This is more of a statement than a question. Do you care about genre, or only style? What books or authors do you see this book as being in conversation with? 

I’m really gratified to hear you call the book cute and fun, which is a description that feels true to me but which I don’t know that I expected other people to feel.

I care much more about style than I do about genre. For me, genre conventions aren’t much fun in themselves, but they provide a useful way to quickly establish key facts about a world and its range of possibilities, to help readers begin making productive assumptions. They let you leave tedious things off the page, which is one way they enable style. (Of course, in straight genre fiction, sometimes the conventions actually obligate you to put tons of tedious things on the page—descriptions of how the spaceships or giant robots work, facts about fictional topography, etc., which is sometimes a texture I like but usually not.) The style’s where most of the fun lives for me.

Regarding other books and authors that I want to be in conversation with, I feel really fortunate that Drowning Practice’s blurbs are a great starting point here. I read J. Robert Lennon’s novel Familiar toward the end of writing my first draft of Drowning Practice—actually on your recommendation—and I felt like I was looking at a perfect example of so many things that I wanted to do aesthetically, structurally, etc. (His books Broken River and Subdivision have felt similarly close to what I want.) I hadn’t yet read Sandra Newman’s fiction, but when I did read The Heavens last year, I had an even stronger feeling that she was achieving exactly so many things that I wanted to do in terms of subject, style, genre, politics. Matt Bell is an interesting case in that I feel we came from such similar places, have such overlapping tastes, and write about such closely related ideas that we aren’t even actually in conversation—we just kind of both exist in parallel, doing similar things at roughly the same time. (No idea if he’d agree with that assessment, which feels a bit presumptuous and self-congratulatory on my part, but he’s a nice guy so I think he’ll let me get away with it.) And Lindsay Hunter is a writer whose work I think about constantly when I’m trying to make good sentences, and whose characters taught me a lot about how to write mine. I feel bad comparing my work to theirs, which is so beautiful, but that’s what I’m reaching for.

In writing Drowning Practice I was also thinking a lot about Ishiguro, whose The Buried Giant came to me at a perfect time, and whose When We Were Orphans is horror of exactly the kind that I want to write. Both make great use of genre conventions to enable and heighten their style. I was thinking about Saramago’s Blindness and its bleak, beautiful, gross, mundane, hilarious approach to its own apocalypse, and Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, probably my favorite book, and its depiction of a mother/child relationship, where the child is (as you say) genius-y. The book-within-a-book is partially modeled on the stories told by the potential father characters in The Last Samurai, which I love for their wild compression and comfort with telling, not showing.

Honestly, I was thinking a lot about your own work too, your sensibility and interests, the things that make you glad and break your heart. You’re one of the people that I thought about when I was writing Lyd—I wanted her to be a person that you would want to know.

I’m so honored by that. I do want to know her; I’m glad I can know her.