I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Today we are joined by Molly Gaudry. Molly is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the BFA and MFA programs. Summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.
Describe your
book in three words.
And so on.[1]
Describe your book poorly.
My first two
books were verse novels, my new one is a memoir-in-essays with a
novel-in-progress inside it, and hundreds of literary quotations collaged
throughout.[2]
Would you and your main character get along?
Yes, because I used to think I sewed us
together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could
unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and
farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.[3]
What would you do if you could live forever?
Read, most likely, because, well, this is what I am already
imagining for an immortal character
in my
current work-in-progress: By now, Beauty
has spent nearly two centuries, total hours tallied, curled on a velvet divan
beneath a tall stained-glass window, reading her way through the endless
shelves of books in the castle’s great library. This library, it should be
noted, is home to every book that has ever been written and every book that has
yet to be written, so when the Queen declares their story should be recorded
for posterity, Beauty, who has already read it—has read dozens of
Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 425C stories and novels, not to mention hundreds of
ATU type 402 and 425A animal bride and bridegroom variants—sends at once for
me, the author. Well, not exactly the author, because there are too many
to count, really, but suffice to say that I am the author of Beauty’s favorite
version, which, as you will see in the pages that follow, is a retelling of my
favorite version: Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s The
Story of Beauty and the Beast, first published in 1740.[4]
Do you DNF books?
Absolutely, because grown-ups shouldn’t finish
books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer
live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of
leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.[5]
What’s the one book someone else wrote that
you wish you had written?
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts,
because I’ve never stayed still, I’ve always been moving, that’s all I’ve
ever been doing. Always waiting either to get somewhere or to come back. Or to
escape.[6]
What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?
This one, from Raven Leilani’s Luster:
Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a
moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God
as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous
genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany
and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face,
this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes
me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover
his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I
would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you
need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel
panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I’m looking around the
room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be
extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a
concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings
into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes
get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault
that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault
that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are
collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car
home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling
away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly
his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an
arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the
white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city
rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash,
insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and
still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless
days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.[7]
If you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s
the one book you wish you had with you?
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude, because they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him
as hard as they could, shouted into his ear, put a mirror in front of his
nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter
was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light
rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town through the night in
a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered
the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the
morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear
them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.[8]
What are you currently reading?
Mariana Leky’s What You Can See from Here, because
while I was considering what to do next, I noticed I was holding a butter knife
as I stood in front of the bookshelf that had not been unpacked for eight
years. I cut open the packaging. The assembly instructions included twenty-six
steps, but I still gave it a try. And while I was assembling the bookshelf, I
thought of Frederik’s letter in which he’d asked what real life was in my
opinion. I thought of Martin and the fogged-up window he had leaned against with
his eyes closed in intense concentration, also of the strand of hair on his
head that never stayed combed down. I thought of Elspeth’s hydrangea-like swim
cap, of Mr. Rödder’s breath that smelled of violets, of Selma’s old skin that
looked like bark. I thought of the table in Alberto’s ice-cream parlor at which
I’d been rewarded with a small Secret Love the first time I read the sugar
packet horoscope aloud by myself. I thought of Alaska and how he lifted his
head when we left a room, how he weighed whether it was worth getting up and
coming with us, and how he usually decided it was. I thought of the optician,
who, all his life, was always ready to help others. I thought of Palm, of
Palm’s wild eyes when I was young, and of Palm now, how he nodded and said
nothing, nodded and said nothing. I thought of the station clock, under which
the optician taught us to tell time and about time zones. I thought about all
the time in the world, all the time zones I’d had anything to do with, and of
the two watches on my father’s wrist. That’s real life, I thought, the whole
expanse of life, and after the seventh point in the instruction manual, I
crumpled it up and kept assembling without it.[9]
If you could time travel, would you go back to
the past or forward into the future?
Neither. I would get stuck in a time loop and happily
stay in it until I finished my next book, which is a scenario I have already
considered and written in The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel, which
is currently on submission.
NOTES
[1] Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five:
A Novel (New York: The Dial Press, [1969] 2009), 1.
[2] Molly Gaudry, interview by Robert Lopez, “Beyond the Trilogy: Robert Lopez and Molly Gaudry on Writing Interconnected Books that Defy Expectations of Traditional Series,” Vol. 1 Brooklyn, November 14, 2025.
[3] Tana French, The Likeness (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 3.
[4] From the chapter, “Concerning the Story of Beauty & the Beast, and the Queen, and Me,” which opens my current work-in-progress, Finding Beauty: On Love, Death, and Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s ‘The Story of Beauty & the Beast.’
[5] John Irving, interview by Ron Hansen, “John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93,” The Paris Review 100 (Summer–Fall 1986).
[6] Jhumpa Lahiri, “Nowhere,” Whereabouts, trans.
Jhumpa Lahiri (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 153.
[7] Raven Leilani, Luster (New York: Picador, 2020), 40–41.
[8] Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1998), 153.
[9] Mariana Leky, “Meadow, Meadow,” What You Can See from Here, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: Picador, 2022), 263–64.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In her most
innovative book yet, Molly Gaudry embarks on a search for belonging amid loss,
framing her memoir around a fictional narrative featuring the tea house woman—a
character who appeared first as bride-to-be and then as widow in her earlier
books. As Gaudry grapples with traumatic brain injury, family secrets,
repressed memories, and the job market in her essays, the tea house woman goes
on a parallel quest of identity and desire. Gaudry also delves into literature
as guide and comfort, using the words of authors as wide-ranging as Sappho,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marguerite Duras, and Jose Saramago to form yet another
text within a text. Artfully braided into a hybrid-genre tour de force, the
many strands of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir ask: to what extent can a
fiction reveal more about an author than nonfiction?
As the tea
house woman manages a mercurial lover, a family business, and caring for her
dying father during the winter holidays, Gaudry, too, reflects on some of her
own challenges: relearning, post-skating injury, to read and write while in the
midst of earning a PhD; questioning her loneliness, desires, and ability to
connect; wondering what it would be like if her biological brother flew in from
Korea to inform her that their father has died; and navigating her identity as
a transnational adoptee. Each essay in Fit Into Me, the
memoir, is a testament to resilience, and as those true stories
merge with Fit Into Me, the novel, they reveal how literature
can become a lifeline that guides us back to ourselves.
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