It was a full house on Sunday, November 22nd at Powell’s City of Books,
where Margaret Malone read from her lauded debut People Like You before being joined in conversation by Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of
Children, Dora: A Headcase, and The Chronology of Water, among other brilliant
books. Their 20-minute dialogue was, like Malone’s work itself, all at once funny
and moving and frank and compelling, as Yuknavitch shared a number of marvelous
insights about Malone’s stories and drew Malone out on some primary aspects of
her work.
From his place at the back of the room, the publisher soon
realized he ought to be jotting down some of what he was hearing—it was all too
wonderful and well-observed to let it go by without some record.
“I don’t believe in God anymore,” said Yuknavitch at one
point, “so I’ve become suspicious of the gesture of looking up. And what I love
about your stories is that it’s all ground-level. Hope [in the stories] is
ground-level.”
Asked about what draws her to short fiction, Malone said: “The
world makes sense to me in short stories,” but acknowledged that she will
probably undertake a novel before long. The comment prompted Yuknavitch (a
masterful novelist herself) to state her dislike of the traditional novel form,
which functions on the fallacy that human experience is substantially linear
rather than fragmentary. She works to explode the novel, she said, and jokingly
urged Malone to call her before committing to a novel herself.
Later, Yuknavitch brought up the subtle but important
element of class-consciousness at work in People
Like You: “I like it when someone writes stories that remind you that class
matters. Ray Carver did that, but I like you better.”
The publisher was particularly delighted, toward the close
of the conversation, to hear Yuknavitch touch on a central feature of People Like You that first drew him to
Malone’s work—a distinct quality that he’s come to think of as anti-epiphany. “There are no great
transcendent moments in these stories,” said Yuknavitch. “Some of the stories
act like Polaroids.” Asked to comment, Malone replied: “A lot of times the big
dramatic moments [in life] are small, and it’s OK for them to be small.”
Our thanks to Lidia
Yuknavitch, and to Forest Avenue Press publisher Laura Stanfill, who provided
all the excellent event photos above! See Laura’s complete album of the evening
on Facebook HERE.
