Following Characters’ Leads: An Interview with Jody Hobbs Hesler https://ift.tt/dmD51VQ
Jody Hobbs Hesler’s Without You Here is the story of the close relationship between Noreen and her beloved aunt Nonie, who dies from suicide when Noreen is a child. This loss, complicated by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. Now the same age her aunt was when she died, Noreen is mother to toddler Evie and stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage. When crisis strikes, she must either set a new course or allow history to repeat itself. Hobbs Hesler ably explores this family’s dynamics, generational trauma, and, ultimately, the redemptive power of love.
Jody Hobbs Hesler has written ever since she could hold a pencil and now lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Growing up, she split time between suburban Richmond, Virginia, and the mountains outside Winchester, Virginia. Experiences of all these regions flavor her writing. She is author of the forthcoming novel, Without You Here (Flexible Press, September 2024) and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, October 2023). She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, and reads for The Los Angeles Review.
Suicide remains one of society’s most tragic events, and your novel takes it on courageously and gracefully. You’re even donating a percentage of sales to a suicide prevention organization. What does this important book mean to you?
I didn’t set out to write a novel about suicide or about mental illness. I set out to write the story of these particular characters who were clamoring to get onto the page. I loved their vulnerability, their extremes, their flaws. The better I got to know them, the more effort I put into understanding their needs and problems, and I researched widely and deeply. What struck me most about Noreen and Nonie, from the beginning, was their intense connection, their love and acceptance for each other within a family that often treated them more like problems than gifts. I wanted to accentuate their gifts, while fully acknowledging their challenges. Even the most troubled person has love to give, and that’s what makes this story so important to me.
Flexible Press donates 10% of its proceeds to a nonprofit of the author’s choosing, and I chose a local suicide prevention organization. I’ll make a gift to them in honor of the book as well. I love this publisher’s mission to support books with social relevance and to engage literature with community. This press felt like an ideal home for this novel.
How did you arrive at the intimate structure, with its own internal logic? It feels natural to use the death date of Noreen’s namesake, her beloved young ‘Aunt Nonie’, as a sort of fulcrum around which the book revolves, rather than a linear timeline, using, for example, chapter titles such as “Twenty Years Before” and “Nineteen Years After.” How difficult was it to juggle and arrange these juxtapositions of time and characters’ points of view?
Finding the structure for this book was the biggest challenge in writing it. The first draft was linear, which placed all of Nonie’s experiences up until her death first. Then Noreen’s experiences followed—for 20 years! It was important to me to show how Noreen’s whole life was affected by the loss, but, in real time, her continuing grief read a little like whining. When I butted the past against the present, I didn’t need to explain anything. The tension and the sorrow were obvious. The timestamps added extra context for readers to smooth transitions, and using Nonie’s death as a central point of reference underlined its significance to the story’s structure.
Jane Alison’s craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, which celebrates unique plot shapes, assured me that my idea for an asynchronous structure was plausible, but formulating the proper sequence at first confounded me. My kids jumped in to help. My youngest entered every chapter description I’d scribbled onto index cards into a spreadsheet. My oldest studied the spreadsheet and proposed a sequence that spliced past and present. The final sequence evolved beyond that suggestion. My kids’ faith in the book, and in me, and their willingness to be so generous with their time gave me the confidence I needed to trust the final structure.
Tell us about “the shivers” that sometimes creep up on Noreen, draining her. These shivers scare her into wondering if shemight die the way Nonie did. This notion of suicide running in families is a central thread in the novel. I see from your acknowledgments that you researched deep grief/depression. What did you learn and how did the research affect your writing?
Some of my knowledge came from life experience. Probably every one of us knows someone with acute anxiety or depression, and maybe we’ve all lost at least one person to suicide in our lifetimes. These people we know are far more complex than their diagnoses, and I wanted to make sure my characters were too. So I dug into research from every angle—documentaries on panic disorder to v-logs of young adults struggling with panic attacks; from therapists’ YouTube public-service series to archives of relevant filmed therapy sessions; from academic books to interviews with professionals, friends, and acquaintances experiencing the issues I was working to represent. The shivers emerged from all of that.
I could talk for hours about what I learned. Most importantly, I learned a way inside my characters’ feelings so I could articulate them with as much depth and tenderness as possible.
Certain characters’ “soliloquies” stand out. Readers meet Noreen as a young mother to Evie; Noreen dearly loves her daughter, though worries: “If Evie turns out like both of them [Noreen and Nonie], Noreen wants to celebrate it instead of fear it.” What does Noreen think might have changed, for her, under that scenario?
Whenever a family member perceives a likeness to Nonie in Noreen—in behavior, temperament, physical appearance—they react with concern at best and scorn at worst. Imagine if the likeness to Nonie were met with joy. Then Noreen would likely feel freer to be herself, more comfortable in her own skin. This is what she wants for her daughter Evie.
Your gift for portraying family dynamics really pays off in this sensitive novel. I’ve heard you discuss your process of “seeing through each character’s ‘eye holes.’” That’s a powerful tool. Can you say more?
I do talk a lot about eye-holes. I use that term because it’s visceral. When I’m writing, I’m not looking at my characters’ eyes from the outside. I’m inside my characters, looking out. What they feel and need arises from that immersion. If I focus on how the reader is meant to understand my characters, I have to take a step away from them to do it. But when I put myself inside my characters and render what I see out of their physical eyes, then I’m right there with them—and so is the reader.
I apply the same practice for supporting characters. In a scene that showcases a family’s dynamics, I need to be aware of how every character is processing the moment in order for each of their movements, actions, and reactions to ring true. The layers and nuance won’t be there if I haven’t done the work.
The ending of Without You Here seems perfect, yet I did not see it coming. Without giving anything away, can you say how this ending emerged?
Everyone worries about Noreen, including Noreen. But Nonie was as full of joyous chaos as she was of brokenness and turmoil. The whole story pushes us toward a moment of crisis where all the worry, love, and fear collide, forcing some kind of answer from Noreen. I’m not sure I knew the answer when I set out, but when it arrived in the story, I rushed to follow.
FICTION Without You Here
By Jody Hobbs Hesler
Flexible Press
Published September 10, 2024
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