First Draft Episode #230: Miranda Popkey
JANUARY 28, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Miranda Popkey, essayist and debut author of Topics of Conversation.
Sarah Enni: Today's episode of First Draft is brought to you by Adeline's Aria by Laynie Bynum. Falling in love with your celebrity crush is supposed to be a dream come true, but for Addie, it's becoming a nightmare. Adeline's Aria is the first book in Laynie Bynum's new Infernal Echo series and it's out today from Fire and Ice YA.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Miranda Popkey, essayist and debut author of Topics of Conversation. I loved how Miranda was ready to get into her experience as an entry level editor in publishing, and all that taught her about the industry. As well as her choice to get an MFA. Topics is about how women craft their own stories through conversation, to explain themselves to themselves, and to survive. So it felt appropriate to sit down and discuss Miranda's brilliant, smart, and emotionally rich debut novel. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Hi Miranda. How are you?
Miranda Popkey: I'm good. How are you Sarah?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. I'm so excited to chat with you in person and get to talk about Topics of Conversation.
Miranda Popkey: I'm very excited to be here.
Sarah Enni: Yes, you and I have chatted before because you are friends with Zan Romanov (author of A Song to Take the World Apart, Grace and the Fever, and the forthcoming Look. Listen to her First Draft interview here, and her mailbag episode here! You can read them write about their friendship in The Atlantic’s Friendship Files here, and in the Two Bossy Dames newsletter here, and they shout out First Draft, too!)
Miranda Popkey: That's true.
Sarah Enni: An esteemed author friend who is fabulous. And you helped me when I was writing Tell Me Everything because you are from Santa Cruz.
Miranda Popkey: That is true. I think I warned you before that conversation that I was a very particular kind of Santa Cruz resident in that I did not interact with Santa Cruz at all, and mostly just stayed inside and read. And occasionally was like [drops voice and adds disdain], "I guess the ocean exists." But I hope I was helpful to you.
Sarah Enni: Which I loved. You were, you were. And listen, Santa Cruz has all types of people, so that's fantastic. I don't think my main character was, I don't know...
Miranda Popkey: She wasn't much of a surfer, put it that way.
Sarah Enni: She was not much of a surfer. The ocean was peripheral to her life as well. So that was great. Because that is my first question, is where were you born and raised? So Santa Cruz, was that all the way up through college?
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, up through high school until I went to college.
Sarah Enni: I'd to hear how reading and writing was part of growing up for you.
Miranda Popkey: Oh yeah. It is all I did. I was a pretty voracious and a pretty indiscriminate reader. I remember reading David McCullough's Truman biography when I was, I don't know, eight or nine. Just because my dad didn't have a lot of novels in the house, but he did have a lot of massive books of nonfiction.
Sarah Enni: That feels like a very "dad book".
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. I didn't realize later how much of a trope that is. Dads have never run across a book about World War II that they don't want to buy and read.
Sarah Enni: I mean, that's how my dad was for sure. 100%.
Miranda Popkey: Oh. And he had a copy, it must've been Paths to Power, which is the first LBJ book of the Caro biographies, which are still ongoing. And I tried to read that, and that was truly above my reading level.(But she loves the Caro books on Johnson now, which also includes Master of the Senate and Means of Ascent).
Sarah Enni: That was the one that was like, "Mm, this is not..." [laughs].
Miranda Popkey: In a bit of foreshadowing though, because that is now like, "Oh, I fucking...Oh, I love the Caro books. [Loudly whispers] Sorry. Can I swear on this podcast?
Sarah Enni: Absolutely. I wish you would. [Both laugh].
Miranda Popkey: Okay. I'll keep that in mind. But yeah, I was really into Nancy Drew. I was really into Agatha Christie. The Poirot's not the Miss Marple's. I read one Miss Marple and I was like, "She didn't solve that mystery. She was just an old lady who was also in this hotel. What is going...?
Sarah Enni: She's the Angela Lansbury in this.
Miranda Popkey: I didn't get it. Maybe I read the wrong one. I read a lot of Agatha Christie's, I loved mysteries. Although I could never tell, and this is still true, I could never tell who did it. Ever.
Sarah Enni: But was that part of the enduring appeal do you think? That you were always taken by surprise?
Miranda Popkey: Oh yeah, I can imagine getting bored, if you were able to figure out what was happening before the book was ready to reveal it to you. I never was.
Sarah Enni: I feel that way about movies. I went to go see Knives Out recently, and even in action movies, when there's an element of mystery, no part of my brain is trying to figure it out. I'm just sitting back and along for the ride, which is very relaxing.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, it is. Even movies that do that sort of thing badly, or it's like, "Oh, of course, this turns out." And it's like, "Oh, I was quite surprised." I also read Rebecca Wells has a whole series like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. I don't know why I got really into those books. Anyway, the first book I read that I was like, "Oh, literature,” was the English Patient. That movie came out in '96, so I was nine. Did not see that movie at the time, obviously. But I think my mom had a copy of the book that was a reprint, a movie tie-in edition. And I remember reading it and being like, "Oh my God, 'literature'."
And then also, "Oh my God...sex!" There's a sex scene that I can still see it on the page. And I was like, "Hmm. Very intriguing."
Sarah Enni: You were, how old do you think?
Miranda Popkey: I was probably thirteen, twelve or thirteen.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. There you go. And the reason I think this is so rich right now is that because Topics of Conversation engages so much with the pop culture that we ingest. So it's interesting to think about that. When I was thirteen, I think maybe it was Anne Rice (Interview with a Vampire) that was the first one where I was like, "Oh boy. A lot's going on here." It wasn't 'literature', but it was like, "Oh...sex!"
Miranda Popkey: Actually, the first book that was like, "Oh...sex!" for me, was a book by, I think her name is Susan Brown. I may be getting [it wrong]. She's a writer of thrillers. And it's called Witness (by Sandra Brown) or something. It's not the Harrison Ford. But I actually went back and reread it maybe ten years ago. And the plot is so, so, so complicated. But basically, a U.S. Marshall is transporting a woman across state lines, there's a car accident, and he loses his memory. And she decides to pretend that they're married. Because she doesn't want to be transported across state lines to go testify in whatever trial. Anyway, but eventually things get sort of spicy. I think he sees her shaving her legs and he's like, "Oh, hello."
Sarah Enni: Oh my God, that's hilarious.
Miranda Popkey: And then obviously they have sex, and the next morning he wakes up and is like, "Oh my God. I remember everything." [Laughs]
And there's also a really amazing scene in that book where they eat a sausage biscuit. And I have been searching for "the sausage biscuit of my youth." It's like Proust's Madeleine, like, "My sausage biscuit."
Sarah Enni: Oh my God. I love that. That's amazing. I do want to talk about writing as well. When did you start writing? When [did] creative writing became a thing that you were doing?
Miranda Popkey: I absolutely had an interest in creative writing, but it was not something I found easy to do as soon as I became conscious of wanting to do it. So there was definitely a time when I was in elementary school when it was fun to make up stories. There got to be a point, maybe when I was around eleven or twelve, when I became aware of the possibilities of books. And I became aware of how far from the best [pauses] the best kind of book I was capable of writing as an eleven-year-old.
And because I'm a perfectionist, and because I hate to do things that I'm bad at, it was really tough for me to do a thing that I think, for a time, did come naturally, which was make up stories. Because I was aware of them not being good enough.
Sarah Enni: That's kind of heartbreaking. But obviously, I can relate to being a perfectionist. And that kind of really making it difficult just to start something, or to do the work you need to do to incrementally get better. I don't think that we're super great at telling young people to fail aggressively. So you had this kind of early realization that you weren't gonna be able to write an Agatha Christie at eleven. When did it kind of come back to you? Or, how did you develop a voice and writing in another way?
Miranda Popkey: So you're not given a lot of opportunities to practice creative writing within a standard educational system. So the way that my writing craft developed, it was absolutely moving in the direction of nonfiction. I learned how to structure an essay. I learned how to put together an argument. And then when I went to college, I started writing movie reviews for like the Alt Weekly. And I actually became a managing editor there and that was really fun. But I was not writing creatively. The only creative writing class I took in college was poetry. And I took an intro to poetry class to impress a boy.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. Did it work?
Miranda Popkey: Yes, it sure did. This is my college boyfriend. We're still friends. And actually, so as it happens, my teacher in that class was Louise Gluck (author of Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems). And years later when I was working at her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux for her editor, we reconnected and she remembered me, which was really flattering. And she was the one who encouraged me to start writing fiction.
I was trying to figure out what the next thing would be. I had gotten into publishing thinking, "Okay, well I have this real passion for writing, but I don't feel I have the skill to write at the level that I know I want to write at." I'm a good enough reader to read my own writing, and be disappointed in it. So I had been working in publishing for three or four years, and it had become a little frustrating to not have a creative outlet, and to be trying to squeeze my freelance writing in around the edges, while editing books that were going out into the world. So she encouraged me to start writing fiction.
And she would look at my look at my work. Looking back on it, it's such an example of it's not luck, it's so clearly privileged. I went to an Ivy League school and I met a professor there who was a Pulitzer Prize winner and she liked me enough to later read my work and help me put together an MFA packet. And that is just the kind of opportunity that not everyone gets, and I'm extremely aware of that. Which makes it strange sometimes to talk about, but I think also important to talk about the ways in which 'the game' is a little bit rigged.
When I was in my MFA program, having worked in publishing, had an understanding of the process by which you take a manuscript and turn it into a book. And also the process by which you get an agent, the process by which that agent then shops that manuscript around to various editors. And at a certain point, I think this was during my second year, near the end of my second year, I just sat down with a bunch of the other students and we had a conversation about what the publishing process was like. And I just answered questions.
And it was really surprising to me, maybe it shouldn't have been, but it was really surprising to me how opaque the process was to them. And I think that that is on purpose. I think the publishing process is meant to exist behind a barrier that writers are not supposed to see through. But there are all of these unwritten rules that if you do not follow them, you...
Sarah Enni: Are disqualifying.
Miranda Popkey: Exactly. I do think that there are now places where there's rules are written, but there's a way to approach an agent, for example, that makes sense. And that is going to make sense to them. And there's a way to approach them that is going to signal that you are not serious, even if you really are. Or even picking an agent. I remember talking to my colleagues about, there may come a time when you are choosing between agents, and you want someone who's interested in publishing the books that you want to write. Or even when you're querying, how to figure out who to query.
It's so, so, so tricky. And I think it is absolutely in the publishing industry's interest, from a certain perspective, to keep those barriers up. But on the other hand, I think the publishing industry has been thinking about ways to change and ways to diversify, and keeping those barriers up is a really good way to ensure that that process is gonna be slower and less successful.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Yeah, it's true.
Miranda Popkey: And a huge part of the problem in publishing is, the people who work in publishing, which is... I want to say the last statistic was, "Oh no, it's 80% white women." And it is the rare industry where women do have a lot of power, but they're almost always straight white CIS women. And that's a really narrow slice of experience. And one of the barriers, through having worked in publishing, I also know exactly how difficult it is to break in.
You typically, and this is changing a little bit, but typically you have to have an unpaid internship, and live in New York at the same time. So you can't do that unless you have parents who are willing, and able, to pay for your living expenses while that's happening. Again, that's changing a little bit. While I was at FSG, I was managing the internship program and we had started paying. I had interned there between my junior and senior years of college, and I had not gotten paid. And I had had a mom who was like, "Okay, this is difficult, but we'll make this work."
But if you don't have that, and the internship that you're interested in, or the internship that you get isn't paid, you're just sort of screwed. Then once you have that internship and you're able to move from that into a job, you're maybe going to move into a job where you're being paid $28,000 a year. Which is what the level at which I was hired, which even in the year 2011, was not enough to live on.
I mean, I made it work. And I was very proud of myself at the time that I wasn't taking any of my parents' money, because I was also in very expensive therapy at the time, because I was very depressed. My mom and I also had to work this scheme where I would borrow $500 from her at the end of the month to cover my bills. And then as soon as I got paid, I would pay her back.
But yeah, without my mom being like, "Yes, I'll help you." She knew she was gonna get the money back, but she had to have those $500 at the end of every month to give me. Without that, I would not have been able to survive. And I remember having a really hard day at work and coming home and being like, "What I really want to do is go to this cute little bar that's a few blocks away, and I want to get a burger, and I want to have one glass of wine." And crying and trying to think like, "Can I afford that extravagance?" It makes me so sad that that is, and again, I was in a really privileged position already, and also that was the calculation I was making.
It's just so difficult if you're not from money. And also if you're not from the right kind of money. Cause you come at these internships from places like Yale, and Harvard, and Columbia, and it's just so, so, so much harder if you don't have that kind of, I hate to use the word but I think it's the right word, pedigree.
Sarah Enni: I mean, it's an old industry in so many ways, and it just feels like it keeps getting older, which is wild cause everything else is moving so fast.
Miranda Popkey: I feel we should get off this really depressing topic. But I do want to say, I wrote this piece for the Hairpin RIP about the term "pin money." And while researching it, I discovered what I sort of already knew to be true, which was that originally these assistant positions at these publishing houses, were for women who it was assumed did not need the money, and were working as a lark until they married.
Sarah Enni: And had kids, or whatever.
Miranda Popkey: Exactly. And so it was assumed that they were being supported, which is how the incredibly low salaries were justified. You weren't supporting yourself, you certainly weren't supporting a family. You were just getting a little spending money.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Oof. And if $28,000 was just a little spending money, that'd be great.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. I mean, if that's your...
Sarah Enni: Walking around money [both laugh].
Miranda Popkey: You're headband allowance. I mean, great! You're gonna get some really sweet headbands.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] Oh my gosh. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that actually. I think it's really interesting. And I do want to ask a little bit about the MFA program, and your experience in that, because that was also the genesis of Topics of Conversation. I'd love to hear about the inspiration to start going to a program, and what you were hoping to get out of it.
Miranda Popkey: I think, like for a lot of people, going to the program was a way to see, given the time, given the support, given the deadlines, given these particular conditions where I'm gonna be expected to do not very much other than writing. And I'm gonna be surrounded by peers, brilliant peers and brilliant professors, who are wanting to help me grow. Can I do this? Because if I can't do it under these conditions, I cannot do it at all.
And I think for me and for many other people, one of the most important things the MFA program gives is permission to focus on your writing and to take your writing seriously. And also time to do that. So I sometimes get questions about like, "Was the MFA worth it?" For me? Absolutely. Something I also always say, is that I don't think it's worth it to go into debt for an MFA. An MFA is not like an MD, or a JD, where it's this kind of professional degree that you then take into the marketplace.
It's a professional degree that you take into a marketplace that basically doesn't exist. And while having an MFA may get your manuscript a second look, there are so many MFA programs, and they produce so many candidates, so many brilliant, brilliant writers, that that alone is not going to guarantee anything, honestly. I also think that for people who do not have the connections that I did coming from publishing, the MFA is a great opportunity to talk to a writer, a professor who has an agent and ask that writer, how did you get that agent?
And in some cases professors are putting their students in touch with their agents. So that's an important aspect of it too. But yeah, my advice for people contemplating the MFA is go somewhere fully funded. And so St. Louis, Washington St. Louis, which is where I did my MFA, they not only covered tuition, but they also gave me a stipend.
So I was being paid to write. And I was assuming that that was going to be the only time I was ever going to be paid to write, at such length for such a long period of time. And you could really live on $22,000 a year in St Louis. And that meant that I didn't really have to work a second job. I could spend all of my time watching Frasier and avoiding writing [laughs].
I think it can be a real gift to writers. But you have to be careful because some of the really good programs are also not the really well-funded programs. I think Columbia and NYU most notoriously, not only do they require that you live in New York, but they offer very few full scholarships with tuition forgiveness, or whatever it's called. And a stipend.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Right. And it sounds like you were such a great resource to your fellow students, having this kind of extracurricular class of "Ask Miranda How Publishing Works." How do you feel about how your program did or did not integrate like, 'rubber meets the road' reality about...?
Miranda Popkey: So my program does not do a lot of that kind of instruction. It's a program that is really focused on craft and really focused on helping you write the work that you want to write. And I think one of the really great things is that you do get to create work absent those sort of 'rubber meets the road' concerns. And it is also I think a program that tends to attract a more experimental writer. In part because of the professors, especially Kathryn Davis (author of Duplex: A Novel and The Silk Road: A Novel), and Danielle Dutton (author of Margaret the First: A Novel and Sprawl). Danielle and her husband who's also a professor at Wash U, Martin Riker, they run a small press called Dorothy, A Publishing Project.
Miranda Popkey: And the books that they publish are frequently more experimental, and Danielle's work is also more experimental. And Kathryn maybe writes what could look like more traditional novels, but she reinvents the novel every time she writes one. She's amazing, as is Danielle. So because of the those professors, you tend to get students who are interested in doing less commercial work. And so I think that as a result, there's less of a feeling that people need to also learn about the publishing process.
Sarah Enni: Their publishing journey may also be untraditional.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. I will say Kathryn invites her agent to come to WashU every two years and meet with all of the students who wish to meet with her. And that is an interesting and illuminating process, I think, for many of the students. Although something that I told people who had not met with an agent before, and I had not met with an agent before either, but I had met professionally with agents as an editor.
I very much wanted to tell all of them, this particular agent is just one person. And if she does your like work, that's great. If she doesn't your work, that doesn't mean that you're never gonna publish.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, as you know also as an editor. Because agents and editors are so specific in what they're interested in, what projects they're gonna move forward with. It is hard to not take that personally, but it's not.
Miranda Popkey: There are programs that you can go to that I think are more publishing directed. I think a place like Iowa, in part because of its reputation, attracts so, so, so many agents who come and look at people's work. And I'm sure that there are others, that's the first one that came to mind. But yeah, my program was much more focused on helping you write what it is that you wanted to write. However, weird is was. Which is also cool.
Sarah Enni: Well, I love that and actually that leads me back to Topics. Before we speak more specifically about Topics of Conversation, do you mind pitching the book for us?
Miranda Popkey: Oh...[chuckles].
Sarah Enni: Surely the easiest thing!
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, let me see if I can still do this. So Topics of Conversation follows an unnamed female narrator from the age of about 21 to the age of about 38. And her story is told in vignettes, mostly conversations, mostly conversations with other women. And the things that they talk about are the things that I think women do talk to each other at the end of a long night over a bottle of wine. Sex, relationships, power, those kinds of encounters that fall in a gray area. The desires that you have but are foreign to you, even though they feel natural, whatever natural means.
So there is a plot trajectory that we can follow in terms of her development as a character. You know, obviously a lot happens to her over the 17 years because this is not a plot based novel. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that she gets married, she gets divorced, she has a child and that those are the plot points of her life.
But I think if you're someone who is gonna like the book, what you're also going to be attracted to are these digressions, these conversations, that the narrator has with women of various ages at various stages in their lives.
Sarah Enni: They're sort of snapshot moments as you glean how she's moved through her life, which I think is such an interesting way of world-building as well. You're following her and the little bits that she shares about her life and her reflections, you're like, "Oh, this is how she's progressed." And these are not only things that have happened to her, but how she is dealing with them, or processing them. Which was so interesting.
So there's a lot that I want to break down about the structure of it. Last night at Book Soup, your LA event, you were talking a little bit about the constraints of sticking to a conversation, and how that actually unlocked the book for you. Do you mind talking a little bit about that?
Miranda Popkey: I was, when I began writing this, having a really hard time figuring out how to plot not even a novel, but even just a short story. The way that I think writers are taught to set up events that will pay off later, truly that's a skill I wish I had, but I don't. And I wonder in part if that's because I allowed myself to start writing fiction late. And if that's a skill I would have developed if I had been writing more consistently, and taking creative writing classes, over the course of my life.
But it's a skill I currently don't have, still. And I was, as a result, having a lot of trouble writing pieces for workshop. I would try and figure out a way to introduce themes that I was interested in writing about, but I couldn't graph them onto a plot. And on the other hand, I think I find it pretty easy to illustrate a point in conversation by telling a story. And I don't know at what point those two things clicked for me. I'm sure at the back of my mind was Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, Outline, Transit and Kudos.
Those novels are all written as conversations. I think they're fundamentally more experimental than my novel because you learn so so, so little about Cusk's narrator. But reading Outline, and I think the fall of 2014, opened up a space of just gigantic possibility. It was very exciting. And I think once I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to write a traditional short story, or a traditional novel. And I had this voice, and I had these things I wanted that voice to talk about, at some point I was just like, "Oh, you can also do this. You saw someone else do this."
I think also, this was my fall semester of my second year, but in the spring semester of my first year, I had been in a class in which we read some Sebald. I had not read any Sebald before I got to my MFA, and I feel like Sebald is an extremely MFA writer. No one else has read him. And then you get turned to an MFA program and everyone's like, "Oh my god, Sebald's amazing."
But he writes discursive almost travel log novels that are really interested in history and place and also in this slippage of the narrative 'I'. We read Rings of Saturn. There are moments in that novel where you are reading and you realize that the 'I' who is speaking is not the narrator, and you have to flip back a few pages to see where the handoff happened. And I found that really exciting too. And that kind of essayistic writing, seeing that, I was like, "Oh okay. This is a kind of permission to write in a style that I feel more comfortable. Because I have developed my nonfiction writing skills over a number of years, but I can make it up also.' Which is really, which is really helpful.
Sarah Enni: That's the fun part. I mean, it also strikes me that a lot of what you're exploring, with Topics of Conversation, is the trick of narrative. It's talking about, and toying with, the idea of narrative itself and how we utilize that in our everyday life. You know, it strikes me that it's often her, the unnamed narrator. in conversation with other women, not exclusively. And so it's a lot about how you tell the story of yourself, not actually what your "quote unquote" story is. Which is so interesting too.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. Well, I'm a person who is constantly narrativizing her own life. And I think that that's fine. That's useful to me. It's useful to me to look back at my life and try and see the story, or see the patterns, as a kind of interpretive exercise.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's called therapy.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, exactly. I was about to say like, "I didn't invent this. We call this therapy." Exactly. I think what can be dangerous, tricky, is when you try and use narrative to plot a course forward in your life. And it's possible to become wedded to certain narratives that are not helpful. And I think specifically of a time early in college, when I was like, "You know what? I just am not in a position to deal with what happens if I reject someone. I, one, should feel lucky that anyone is trying to sleep with this old bag of bones to begin with." I mean I did think of it that way. I was eighteen and I was like, "This gross flesh-sack." And now I look back and I'm like, "Oh God would that I could inhabit that gross flesh-sack again."
But it was really like, "I should be so lucky. And I'm just not prepared to try and fight against someone else's desires, when I feel I know so little about my own. So I'm just gonna go with it." This was a bad idea. And also one that my body was physically fighting me on. I would get into situations, none super serious. I was thankfully, I think also unfortunately sort of unusually, not ever in a situation that I can say was clearly sexual assault. I was having bad sex. Or I was having not even bad sex. I was having weird sexually charged encounters that I just didn't want to have. But that I also didn't believe that my not wanting it was important enough to make that known or stated.
And so I just remember being in these situations where my entire body would be cringing, my entire body would be telling me like, "Get. Out. Of. This. Room. You. Don't. Want. This." And in my head I'm just like, "Shut up. It's happening."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, we're kind of talking about a collapsed bridge between intuition and an action. Or, I dunno, conscious decision making.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, I mean it's funny, I have always been someone who's like... you know, when you say "trust your gut"? I never know what my gut is telling me. Is it telling me no, or is it telling me I'm hungry? And now I look back on that period of my life, a pretty brief period thankfully, where I was like, "I'm not gonna listen to my body. I'm just going to listen to what these men tell me I want."
And I'm like, "Oh no, you did have a gut. And it was the fact that every cell in your body was screaming". And I was just refusing to listen.
Sarah Enni: Do you have something that you can point to, to say this was a growth period that I emerged from? Was there something that made you like, "Oh, this!" Did you have an epiphany about your gut?
Miranda Popkey: I think part of what happened is that I started dating my college boyfriend, he was a year ahead of me. So we were on and off for the whole of the three years that we overlapped. And so while I was dating him, I was like, "Well, I do know what I want. And it's this relationship." So that was a lot easier.
But when we were off, it was a lot of situations that I was in, where I was like, "Well, if I can't get what I want, I might as well just let this rando get what he wants." But then again, I would get into these situations. I specifically remember having someone over for dinner, and I think he really thought - I'd moved off campus - I think he really thought that the interaction was going one way and I just, I couldn't. I just couldn't.
But it was a nightmare getting him out of my apartment. Again, I've never been in a situation where it's sexual assault, but this is truly what I think the British term "sex pest" is.
Sarah Enni: I've never heard of that.
Miranda Popkey: Oh my God.
Sarah Enni: What a great term!
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, well sort of. It makes it sound so silly. And it's a term that I've seen used as a catchall for people, for example, Harvey Weinstein who are not sex pests. They are rapists. In parentheses "alleged". But yeah, this was a true sex pest. He was just like, "But what if? But you should just loosen up." And I was just like, "This is not happening. This is really not happening." And I think that that was maybe a moment where I just couldn't do it. And it didn't seem possible to me to get my body to shut up long enough for the thing to happen. So I was just like, "I'm sorry, you have to get out of my apartment."
Sarah Enni: "Please leave." But that excruciating discomfort of opening the window and letting the sex-pest out, and ushering them out. That is really what we're talking about when we're talking about why women put, you know what I mean? I don't think it's fully appreciated how awful that feeling is. And how awful those experiences are of trying to be kind, or whatever. And someone just, of course, in the soup that we're all grown up in, then men have learned that they can just keep prodding and probably it'll happen.
Miranda Popkey: Right. [Pauses] I think one of the hardest things is that. As someone who has socialized as a woman, I wasn't scared of him. And I think this is also true, men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. And I do think that that is true. This person was not going to kill me. I knew that. But, I didn't want to hurt his feelings. And I say that now, and it seems ridiculous. Someone is trying to get you to have sex with them and you're like, "No, no, no." And they're like, "Mm? Do I hear a yes?"
And you're worried about hurting their feelings when they're literally not listening to the feeling that you are expressing out loud. But yeah, if you're socialized as a woman, and if you take to that socialization like a little duck takes to water like I did, then you're like, "I could never. I couldn't possibly hurt this man's feelings, because I don't want him to leave this room feeling ashamed of his behavior." Even though, "You know, dude, you probably should."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I relate to that. I super, super relate to that. And the reason I'm letting us talk about this for so long is that this is a lot of what Topics of Conversation is about. Though, I want to be careful not to conflate you with the unnamed narrator of the book. When you write a book this personal, I think that's kind of a risky endeavor.
Miranda Popkey: I think I said this at the reading last night, but all of the actual facts, and incidents, of the novel are fictional. There's nothing in this novel that is drawn from an actual experience that I had. But all of the emotions the narrator and the other people in this novel voice, express, are trying to work through, they are all emotions I've had. And that was something I was very interested in making as truthful as possible.
Sarah Enni: It occurs to me that it can be nerve wracking to be so honest about emotional states. But you also workshopped a lot of this novel beforehand, so you'd kind of had small groups of people to expose it to before the wide world. I mean, was that a helpful part of the process for it?
Miranda Popkey: It was. Specifically I workshopped the sex scene, a couple of times, I think. The scary thing for me, and I think for many people writing about sex, is people are going to assume that the sex you write, is the sex you have. And to a certain extent, that's understandable. Because most people who write sex have had sex. And having read some Harry Potter fanfic, if someone who has not had sex, writes sex, you can definitely tell.
Sarah Enni: You can definitely tell, oh my gosh, yes.
Miranda Popkey: But in the way that you draw from life to write a realistic scene of someone cooking dinner. Sure, yeah, it's not crazy to assume that you're drawing from life when you write a scene of two people boning. But yeah, there's a fear of revealing yourself.
Sarah Enni: Absolutely.
Miranda Popkey: So I had a very particular vision for how the sex scene was going to make the narrator feel, and was going to make the reader feel. And I wanted some questions to come up. And it was really important to me that I write the scene in such a way that a variety of readers would be getting that from the scene. And it wasn't just what I thought would produce a certain effect.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean that's the point of workshop, right? Is to be able to [draws a breath], I've only taken a couple, and I think this is probably usually how it works, but you have to sit there quietly.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. that is the classic workshop model is, the author doesn't speak.
Sarah Enni: And everyone around the table takes turns being like, "Well, this is what it's about." And you're like, "Uhhh." You can't explain yourself or defend it, which is the point. But how illuminating to hear how people reflected it, and then you can change as needed, which is great.
Miranda Popkey: I think also you run a real risk, if you're trying to write a sex scene, that it's accidentally funny. Which is like the bad sex awards, bad sex writing awards. And that was really like, this scene in particular, if you start finding it comical, it's ruined. So I was very lucky to be in a program where I had many intelligent readers. And also I will give WashU credit, a diversity of readers. Yeah, there were a bunch of white ladies, me very much included, but there were also people of color in that room, and people who were not straight in that room. And I was really grateful to be given the opportunity to share this with people who I knew for a fact, we're going to come at this particular sexual experience with a different set of their own experiences.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. It's huge and so helpful. I'm glad that you had that.
Miranda Popkey: Yeah, me too.
Sarah Enni: Let's talk about the fact that it is a novel. And whether or not it was always your hope and intent to write a novel. Or were you, I mean, it sort of took the form of small, short stories that are interconnected. But had you always hoped to go to that?
Miranda Popkey: I had always hoped to write a novel. This is not the novel I entered my MFA program thinking I would write. I came in with an idea for a novel, and I worked on that novel for the first year of my program and into the first summer. And at a certain point during the summer, I think I had about 30,000 words, I opened the document and I was like, "I am so bored by the prospect of reading what I just recently wrote. And even more bored by the prospect of continuing to write." Like, "I just don't care." And if you don't care enough to write it, there's absolutely no way that a reader's gonna care enough to read it.
So I was like, "Goodbye!" There's a morning I opened that document, and I closed it, and I haven't touched it since.
Sarah Enni: Well, yeah, "Go with God." Right?
Miranda Popkey: I mean I think that there's stuff in there that I'm gonna want to cannibalize. I think the idea that I had for the arc of the novel is still an interesting one. I think one of the problems is that I was very recently married and trying to write about marriage and like, "No, no. You don't know what's up with that yet." I mean, not to say that... I've now been married four-and-a-half years. I still don't know what's up with marriage, but I do now know that a year in, you can't write a reflective novel about the first year of a couple's marriage. You're just in it.
So I knew that I wanted to write a novel, but I didn't come in with this novel in mind. And then I wrote the art museum piece, and the Los Angeles bit that I read from last night, I wrote those as a two part short story. And I workshopped that and it got a really nice response, and I was like, "Okay, so maybe I'm onto something." But it was like, "Maybe I'll send this short story places, try to get it published."
And then our visiting professor the fall of 2017, was Ben Marcus (author of Notes from the Fog). And having already worked up those two pieces, I was like, "I don't want to show him just those two pieces. So very quickly, I wrote the Anarbor section. And I sandwiched it between those two. And I was like, "Maybe this is just one big short story. Let me show it to this writer I respect, and see what he thinks of it."
And he was really excited by it, which I was not expecting. I, in fact, was a little bit like, "Oh, I don't know how a man in his forties is going to read this. I don't know what he's going to say about this." And like I said, he responded really positively, which was a surprise and just an amazing thing. And he asked me if it was a novel. And I was like, "No, this is sort of all I have." And he said, "Well this voice is really interesting. I think you might want to see where else it can go."
And I was like, "Oh, okay."
Sarah Enni: "Interesting you say."
Miranda Popkey: Yeah. And it is, for a novel, it is funny that this novel is so much about women and their relationships with men. And wanting to negotiate power with men in particular ways, wanting to release power to men in particular ways. I'm not unaware of the irony of the fact that a male writer gave me permission to write the novel. But that is how it happened.
And I think that speaks to the underlying emotional truth, for me, of a lot of the stuff in this novel. Which is if you're socialized as a woman, you grow up ingesting a lot of pop cultural narratives that are about releasing control to men.
Sarah Enni: Miranda has been so fun to talk to you today. Thank you for giving me all your time.
Miranda Popkey: Thank you so much. This was really fun. I am definitely gonna have to come back because Hammer has not given me the time of day, and I am pissed about it.
Sarah Enni. I know! Tragic.
Miranda Popkey: I'm gonna have to come back with a little salmon fingers or something.
Sarah Enni: Oh, he would... A dream. Yes, absolutely. Thank you Miranda.
Miranda Popkey: Thank you Sarah.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Miranda. Follow her on Twitter @MMPopkey and follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni, and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything that we talked about in this episode, check out the show notes which are available @firstdraftpod.com. A really easy way to support the podcast, if you're interested in that kind of a thing, is go check out the show notes. If you're interested in a book, or maybe a TV show, or a movie that we've mentioned in an episode, there's a link to it on the website. If you click that link when you buy something, a portion of the proceeds will go back to First Draft, and it'll help keep the podcast free. It's kind of a quick and easy way you can support the show.
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I'm gonna read a recent five-star review. This review was left by StarryYJ H. Starry says, "Wonderful for YA writers. This podcast is wonderful for those aspiring writers who need a little bit of everything. Sarah Enni is phenomenal at asking the right questions with the right authors. There are little nuggets of wisdom in each episode. There's hope, encouragement, and suggestions for what you should do to bring your work to the next level. I always hear something that I need to hear to keep me motivated and going forward. It's amazing."
Thank you so much Starry, that's so sweet. I am so glad that you are finding little nuggets of wisdom in the episodes. To be honest, so do I. That's why I keep doing this. I love what everybody has to say, and it's so heartening to hear from a listener that you're getting a lot of great stuff from it. So thank you so much. Your review could be, you know, the one that pushes us over the edge and some random dude at Apple will put us on the front page of iTunes. Who knows?
I want to hear from you as well. If you have any questions about writing or creativity, or anything like that, you can call and leave that question at the voicemail box 818-533-1998, and I'll get to it in a future episode.I really have loved the questions I've gotten so far, so please keep sending those.
Our producer is Hayley Hershman and this episode was edited and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey, and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And as ever, thanks to you, big headband spenders for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
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