I Am the Brother of XX

"My dad gave me this book for Christmas a couple of years ago. I’d never heard of her. There’s a couple of reasons for why she’s a little more obscure. She can be very evasive in interviews, where her biography is concerned. She writes exclusively in Italian, so we don’t have access to all of her books in translation . She has an amazing book of essays, a tiny book called Three Possible Lives , and the fiction is also quite brief—I think sometimes that can be harder to pitch. But it falls into this category of literary horror for me because of this sense of destabilisation and uncertainty that she produces very deftly and quickly. I love how her books operate with no moral code; it’s like a universe stripped of morality. And this effect is achieved just by relaying how people engage with each other, or with themselves. One of my favourite stories from I Am the Brother of XX is ‘The Aviary’. It’s about a husband and wife who are going through the husband’s deceased mother’s house—as you do, when someone has passed away—and you get the sense that the mother was very hard on the daughter-in-law, who in turn had a very problematic, incestuous relationship with her own mother. In terms of meat for a story, this in itself feels like enough. But then—in the already loaded, charged space of his deceased mother’s house—the husband gets her to reenact the incest that her own mother subjected her to. At the start of the story, it seems that the horrific element is this mother-in-law, who was emotionally brutal towards the daughter-in-law. But then you realise: no, it was the mother-in-law who was holding the son in check. The horror is the vacuum her death has left behind: a clearing the son can now fill with his own brand of emotional violence. Then you get the title of the story, ‘The Aviary’. She’s trapped in this structure. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then there’s a story called ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman’. Again, very short, just a couple of pages. In it, the speaker is looking at a portrait of a woman in white gloves clutching a crucifix. All of their psychology becomes condensed into this gesture of the clutched cross. There’s an amazing line: ‘She grips to excess, and maybe the cross itself will drive her to squeeze it till it bleeds like a pomegranate fruit.’ Then the person leaves the museum, but is still carrying this image with them, and you get a sense of how they have been altered by this encounter. Again, there’s this idea of ‘arrive late, leave early’. These are intense bursts, these short stories. There’s no right or wrong. Only ambivalence. You’re left to the discomfort that produces. You have to sit with it and let it linger. Oh, they’re so good. Where images are concerned, the experience of them changes with the experience you accrue around them. In an MFA course, you might be taught this idea of ‘repeat, repeat, evolve’. A hamfisted version might go something like this: at the start of a horror movie, there’s a pair of scissors on the kitchen counter; in the middle of the movie, those scissors are used to cut the stems on a bouquet of roses; at the end of the movie, they are used to stab someone in the neck. That experience for the viewer is very different to if someone just pulled the scissors out of the cupboard at the last minute. They’ve already become subconsciously invested through subtly instilled acts of recognition. So there’s a lot you can load onto an image—especially something like a crucifix, which comes to us already rife with religious connotations, things that people literally clutch and cling to for comfort. It’s easy to underestimate your reader, and to kill something with description. Hilary Mantel always says to trust your reader. Which is something I do way too much of in early drafts, in that I’m far too vague. But I do think there’s a lot to be said for suggesting something, letting it sit, and picking up the threads as you go rather than divulging everything in one pre-digested lump. Some people would say that makes a piece of fiction frustrating. Others would say that makes it challenging. Other people would say it makes it inquisitive. There are all these different expectations of fiction where the unspoken is concerned. It gives you space. While I was doing my MFA at Bennington, I was reading some hugely astute and erudite memoirs . I thought, my god, they are so resolved. What is the point of me reading these, if there’s no point at which you can slip in and wonder at? It’s impressive because it’s so polished, but I like a bit of that porous quality, where you leaving room for other interpretations, even if it’s only fleeting. A few people have said things about Follow Me to Ground , in particular, that I disagreed with because I felt the book was being used to serve pre-existing arguments and feminisms. Of course sometimes a reader will just misremember things, and there’s no harm in that, it’s a form of interpretation in some ways. And then there’s kinds of rewriting where authorial agency is partly handed over to the reader—like with Julio Cortázar ’s work, which is quite conceptual with thought experiments are incorporated into the reading process. That’s something I could never envisage doing myself."