Heralding the arrival of a stunning new voice in American fiction, Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You Thistakes readers into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all.
Written with maturity and insight, and in beautiful, clear-eyed prose, these stories plumb the depths of love, loss, and hope. A father struggles to forge an independent identity as his blind daughter prepares for college. A mother comes to terms with her adult daughter’s infidelity, even as she keeps a disturbing secret of her own. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting a dying man’s portrait. An accident on a trip to Italy and an unexpected connection with a stranger cause a woman to question her lifelong assumptions about herself.
Brilliant, hopeful, and fearlessly honest, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This illuminates the truths of human relationships, truths we come to recognize in these characters and in ourselves.
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A Conversation Between Karen Russell and Robin Black
Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, both published by Knopf. Recently she was selected by the National Book Foundation as one of their "5 under 35" and by The New Yorker as one of their “20 under 40.” She is the Writer in Residence at Bard College.
KR: Robin, these stories are so rich, and fed by so many different streams of life experience—they may be "short," relative to, say, "The Brothers Karamazov," but they have all the insight, heartbreak, and complexity of the best novels. In your acknowledgments, you mention that it took you eight years to write the ten stories in the collection. Do you feel like the gestation period for the stories has something to do with their emotional depth?
RB: In part, I think the whole process took a long time because I never set out to write a story collection.I wrote each story as its own thing without focusing on how it would fit into a manuscript, so I didn’t feel hurried to finish a book.And I am remarkably inefficient.I honestly think I throw out a good 80% of what I write.On a less logistical level, I think that some of what you call complexity and depth – thank you, Karen! – comes from a childhood spent trying to figure out the familial complexities into which I was born.So many of my stories deal with aftermath, years of history echoing down, and I can see now that I grew up with a sense of a household still trying to deal with its own history.Maybe this is true of all families, but in mine anyway, the stories from the past seemed to loom incredibly large and I was always aware that my parents and my grandmother, who lived with us, were carryingthe legacies of these complex narratives within them.There had been deaths before my birth that were still being grieved, injuries and illnesses from which people had never recovered.I know that isn’t unique and my preoccupation with those things is probably the strange part, but for better and worse, I have always been obsessed with the question of how personal history determines the present moment.
KR: Your characters felt very real to me, some more real than many people I know, as though they had a secret life beyond the page. I got the sense that every one of them casts a shadow, has a past and will have a future. How much do you know about your characters when you sit down to begin a draft? Do you draft out biographies for them? Or do their histories, quirks and preoccupations become clearer to you as you write?
RB: My characters definitely reveal themselves to me in process. Going into a story, I know almost nothing about the people, the events, the reason it feels urgent to me.And I like that.Characters develop in a kind of conversation that takes place between actions or plot elements that occur to me as I go along and the responses the characters have to those which then in turn spark on more plot developments.In the sort of stories I write, the story grows out of character, meaning the people do things because it makes some kind of psychological sense to me that they would, but the characters also evolve to serve the story.Like so much of fiction writing it’s a messy and inexact process.
KR: So many of the stories in this collection focus on an emotional or spiritual blind spot—their characters' inability to accurately see themselves, or their failure to fully apprehend a lover, a parent, a child, or, in the case of the title story, the neighbor who lives behind your cunningly-erected fence. I'm thinking of the sort of intimate one-upmanship of the conversation between Clara and her ex-husband, Harold, in "Immortalizing John Parker" or Jeremy's startling discovery in "A Country Where You Once Lived." How can we be so wrong in our judgments of those to whom we are closest—our parents, our children? What blinds these characters; in your opinion, what prevents them from truly seeing one another?
RB: I honestly think it’s just how we all bungle through life.We make mistakesWe assume we know what’s going on and we don’t.Every person carries a vast number of secrets, even people who don’t think of themselves as secretive.We withhold from one another as a kindness or to be in control of some situation or because we don’t want to violate someone else’s confidence.Or because it’s not even theoretically possible to tell someone everything you know.So much of life is conducted in this kind of strange murky darkness.I think I may be more attuned to that than some people or I may be naturally drawn to it as an area of narrative potential, but I think it’s a condition that exists for us all.What’s amazing to me, and continually beautiful, is that we manage ever to connect to one another at all.
KR:Memory, in your stories, felt suddenly so precious and so terrifyingly fragile to me. These characters suffer losses in the present, but often it's their version of the past that is most at risk. In "Immortalizing John Parker," there is a wonderful dinner scene between Clara and her ex-husband where reminiscing becomes a heart-stoppingly dangerous activity: "Harold has just taken from her a part of George she thought she held…as effortlessly as she has just rewritten decades of Harold's life for him." Is this a loss or a betrayal that you wanted to explore in the collection--how even the past can be taken from us?
RB: Definitely.And also how it can be preserved and how we conspire to create the past.In “Immortalizing John Parker,” Clara robs her former husband of his version of events, but she also offers to preserve John Parker for his wife, agrees to try and keep the past alive that way.In “Tableau Vivant,” Jean and her daughter tell and retell the story of a shared evening to one another because doing so preserves a moment of happiness.It’s a kindness they give each other.I think there’s something inherently hurtful to someone saying “Really?That’s not how I remember it at all.”It strikes a very deep chord.I imagine that we all want to believe we are reliable witnesses to our own lives.Maybe because it makes time itself seem more like something we are able to hold.
IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS , a collection of ten stories, is my first book and I wrote it over the past eight years. I studied writing long ago at Sarah Lawrence College and then more recently at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and while I learned remarkable amounts at both schools and received extraordinarily wise teaching from both faculty and my fellow students, I've come to think that it's really what I learned informally, about life, that makes these stories what they are.
As I wrote this book I was - though I didn't quite know it - storing up millions upon millions of observations about people. About myself, about my own family yes, but also about people I met once or twice or maybe people I just noticed at a store. Or walking down a street. I never thought of myself as someone who is perpetually noticing such things as how people's posture changes when they're trying to hide their sadness or how they find secret ways to satisfy a private desire to be kind. But as I write my fiction, it's as though all those people I've been watching for all these years materialize in my thoughts; and in act of generosity of their own they share themselves with me. Maybe they haven't taught me how to write - but they have absolutely taught what to write. All the ways we help one another, the ways we hinder each other too. The tangles in which we find ourselves. The aspects of ourselves that come along to help cut through those knots. They remind me of what matters, what I believe matters about life.
I've heard from some readers over the years that my subject matter tends to be sad. And in a way, it's true. I write a lot about loss. But really what I know and what I think every reader will also soon know, is that I write about hope, about the extraordinarily creative ways in we humans manage to create and recreate reasons for hope, sometimes against extraordinary odds. The subject matter may sometimes be sad - yet the world view behind my work is anything but.
Now that this book is going out into the world, into your hands, I am at work on a novel. Writing that is really exciting - and a little scary - for me. But mostly exciting. I love the depths at which I can explore "my" people. And always as I work I am enjoying my three children - now pretty grown up - and my husband, and the household member with whom I spend the most time as we both "work" at home, my wonderful dog Watson.
I'm so excited to share this work with you. I very much look forward to hearing what you think. And you can find out more at Robinblack.net The site is still under construction but I've started blogging there.
Enjoy the book! I can honestly say I have loved it writing it. And I'll miss it in a way - but not if it finds readers who take it to their hearts.
It's interesting...finishing a book of stories about love on Valentine's Day. "If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This" is an interesting title as well.
Having finished it, I wouldn't say it's about love...but the loss of love. Or in some of the stories, the changing of love...usually into ways that are sad or disappointing.
While these stories of husbands, wives, fathers, daughters, sisters and brothers do touch on the very aspects of love that make it such an important part of most peoples lives, most of those moments are seen in retrospect. The reader does not experience any of the joy or excitement firsthand.
"He was, he is, the love of my life. He was, he is, the only possible reason a woman of my cynical nature would ever think to use a phrase like that."
Reflection on a lover that recently died.
"So what choice did she have but to unbraid the different strands of love and learn devotion without desire again? Desire without devotion?"
On a much older husband who is starting to fade from life.
Once I reached the last few stories, I began to understand that they appeared to actually be about the affect that time has upon love. And in these stories, time is very rarely kind. It robs us of our loved ones, either by death or infirmity or with gradual lack of feeling.
"Time, she thinks. Both foe and friend. It will destroy John Parker, but it will also soon relieve him of the knowledge that he is being destroyed."
And, "It doesn't matter, though, she knows. It doesn't matter what warnings there were or were not, or whether she could somehow have averted his departure had she been more aware. That is the problem with the past, she thinks, as she flicks off the light. This illusion that revisiting might change what occurred..."
These stories are full of so much feeling...but they are feelings that pull you down. That makes your heart sink lower and lower as you grieve with each new character. There is none of the lightness and joy that is such a part of loving and being loved. There isn't a balance in this book as the reader only seems to be given the end scraps that remain after a relationship has changed or ended.
Or maybe it's me...finishing this book on Valentine's Day. And yet? The overall theme is that no matter who we are or who we love or how strong that love may be...
"Soon there will be only hints that we were here at all; a couple of forgotten water bottles lying on the ground, someone's jacket crumpled beneath a tree. No traces of the cheers or the names called out loud. No lingering tension over who will win or lose."
Not being familiar with the author, I had no expectations for this collection. No overwhelming positive or negative thoughts, just the eagerness to read and discover a writer I had never been exposed to before.
"If I Loved you, I would Tell You This" is a strange (not so much strange, but just kind of lengthy and a bit awkward) title, but the stories contained within are pretty good. Other reviewers have commented on the amount of detail and the overall gloomy nature of the book, but as another reviewer pointed out, the amount of detail is why I loved the stories so much.
My favorite had to be "Immortalizing John Parker." A friend of mine is dealing with a loved one's inevitable demise, and I found myself really able to identify and empathize with her. I'd recommend this book to any fan of short story collections.
I'm sure my fellow subway riders were curious as to what could make a grown man well up while he's reading, but some of these topics can be a little heavy, (cancer, loss of a spouse, alcoholism, etc.), however, the writing serves the reader in building a desire to "press on" and finish.
Her words in these essays are so carefully, purposefully, and perfectly chosen that it's a joy and a credit to English language.
The stories reveal a tenderness, caring that anyone who has "loved and lost" will identify with.
