A Patchwork of Obsession: a conversation with Emily Temple on Buddhism, Buffy, and Bodies

Emily Temple is the author of The Lightness and the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, No Tokens, Territory, and elsewhere. Her story “Out, Out,” won the 2022 Calvino Prize.

On Thursday, November 15, 2023, Emily Temple joined The Interlochen Review editors Kaydance Rice, Mari Farrand, and Max Pearson for a conversation about her novel The Lightness and her fabulist short stories.

Kaydance Rice: We wanted to talk about how The Lightness uses a fragmentary or modular story structure, fluctuating between memories of the summer, memories from before, and what Olivia has since learned in the present. I was wondering how you came to this structure, how it informed the project of the piece, and how it informed your perspective on Olivia as a character?

Emily Temple: Pretty early in the drafting I figured out that I wanted to have Olivia be telling the story from a more present adult place. When I started it was very grounded in the summer and I eventually realized I wanted the flexibility of her being able to look back on it and also have some sense of her present existence. I thought a lot about what it would be like if something happened to you when you were sixteen and you didn’t understand it. That’s really what this structure is about—something has happened to her, she’s not sure whether she can believe her own memory, her own eyes, so what would you do? You would obsess over it, you would think about it. You would think about myths that might relate to it, you would research the science behind it, you would approach it in all of these different ways. That’s where the fragmentary structure began, this idea that she’s making a patchwork out of her obsession. She is trying to figure out what happened through whatever means necessary. It is a way of representing the way we think and the way we move around in this world. We don’t have this linear structure where we move from A to B. No, you come back, you think, you revisit. One thing reminds you of another thing—that’s the way consciousness works, and I wanted to represent that as well as possible.

KR: I was wondering if you could speak to the way memory functions in this book? We go from moment to moment in that nonlinear capacity and I was wondering the way memory functions in this project and how memory influences it?

ET: Memory is so fickle. One of the questions of this project is, “is what I remember real?” I’m not sure there’s an answer in the book and there’s not an answer in the world. I think scientifically, the answer is no—that you’re wrong about your memories. But what does that even mean when our memories are what inform us? Does it even matter that we’re wrong about them? They say every time you recall a memory it degrades a little bit, so you’re remembering the memory instead of remembering the actual event. In biochemistry that’s how it works. But so what? This is our experience living in the world, consciousness is an illusion. Part of the question is, where does it leave us to know we are unreliable even to ourselves? What do we do with that both practically and theoretically?

Max Pearson: One thing I was interested in was the escalation of tension throughout the book. Throughout the story, the narrator foreshadows Serena’s supposed death and in high tension moments the narrator pulls back to add in myth or informative anecdotes. I was wondering how you go about establishing and maintaining tension throughout collaged voices?

ET: It’s hard to maintain tension in any kind of structure. In order to make a narrative work, you need to have tension, you need to make the reader interested in what’s going to happen. There’s a difference between overall tension and in-the-moment tension, so you have foreshadowing. Paradoxically, stepping away from a tense moment is both a way to increase tension and to create a sort of valley or patterning. You’re in this really tense scene and to take a step back does two things: it delays the satisfaction, you’re asking the reader to wait longer and that’s anticipation but it’s also a break, like creating a valley. So you’ve got tense, tense, tense, and then a lull. I’m taking a step back to give you a whole page on a Hindu deity and that creates a push and pull of tension. I didn’t want it to be constantly up and up and up. I wanted to create peaks and valleys, I wanted to create an undulating feeling. It’s not a thriller, it’s not high stakes all the way to the end.

KR: One thing that stood out to me was the dialogue between the girls—especially Serena, whose dialogue was really stylized and specific to her character. I was interested in your approach to crafting dialogue in a way that feels specific to a character without feeling inauthentic, particularly in cases like Serena, a character who really doesn’t talk like anyone else.

ET: Dialogue is so hard because it needs to be specific and it needs to feel special in a way—it depends on the project, finding the balance between realism and literary realism. Serena makes a ton of proclamations, but I’m very cognizant [that] she is speaking through the lens of Olivia’s consciousness. This is how Olivia remembers her, as this semi-magical being who is going to say profound things and give treatises on Buddhism. So there’s always this question of, “is that really what she said?” We have this narrator who’s really just remembering and thinking and telling herself this story over and over again, and this is how that story has evolved.

When approaching dialogue I always try to remember that everyone in a scene has their own agenda; everyone is saying something a little bit different and talking past each other, especially when you’re working with a group. [I work] on knowing what everybody in the room wants to get across and what they’re thinking and what they’re thinking but not saying and what they’re trying to say but not saying. So there’s all these different levels, and I try to approach it in this way of imagining everybody’s internal conversation. Serena is presenting herself in this very specific way. If we accept Olivia’s version of events Serena is very controlled, so that’s what her dialogue is. With Laurel, you can see she loses it, she’s losing control of herself, she’s not always perfect. Serena is always in control.

Mari Farrand: The majority of characters are women, which is part of the setting. But a great deal of emotional weight surrounds Olivia’s absent father. Luke as well is given importance in the story because of what he supposedly knows how to do, but in the end he turns out to be a fraud. How did you approach connecting these two male characters and were they similar or different to write?

ET: The simplest answer is that Olivia is looking for her father and finds another man as a father substitute. That’s the sort of baseline metaphorical connection between them—although she’s not interacting with Luke the way she would a father. He’s this older man who’s going to teach her about this secret world and on that level they are connected. They’re also connected in this sense that, for me at least, these people cannot give you what you want. I’m not sure the women in the story give her what she wants either. It’s not about their maleness. But there is this cultural narrative that our fathers are going to give us some ultimate understanding, or that when we fall in love it’s going to change us and change our lives. The implication is that it’s for the better. Ultimately she thinks that because her father was interested in something it’s worthwhile, and by the end she’s questioning that idea. The same is true for Luke, so the question is are they both frauds, and to what degree?

In terms of writing them, it felt different to me because the dad is not even there. So it’s writing presence versus absence. I found Luke pretty hard to modulate because he needed to be appealing and mysterious, but he was also a human with cracks. The dad isn’t really a human, he’s not a fully fleshed out character because he isn’t to her. So I was off the hook with that one. I didn't have to make him a fleshed out character because all he is is a cipher for what she wants and what she thinks she should want and what she thinks she should be. There’s a moment where her mother says “he’s a beautiful vessel but there’s a hole at the bottom,” and that’s kind of how I thought of him—Olivia’s putting things into the vessel and they’re just coming out because it’s empty. That’s not how you conceive of yourself, you have to put things in your own vessel.

MF: The father is of course a Buddhist and the story deals a lot with that. It also tows the line between reality and fantasy. Did you start out thinking you were going to write a realistic story or a fantasy story and what research went into writing the levitation center and the Buddhist ideas described in the book?

ET: This book started out as a short story that I wrote based on a place. When I was a teenager I went with my family for several summers in a row to a meditation center in Vermont called Karmê Chöling. It was not at all connected to levitation, but the concept of the place, the visual sense and the vibes, were meant to evoke this memory. The center itself was the center of the original short story, and it grew from there. I felt like, “Well what can happen here, what can we do here?” When I was a teenager I went to this place [in the mountains] and it felt like there was magic there, I didn't know why. There was this whole language that was different. My parents would disappear for long periods of time and we'd be left to our own devices. So rather than approaching it as, "this is going to be real," or as, "this is going to be speculative,” I approached it as trying to nail down that feeling: Is there magic here, or anywhere? For me that's a question that the book is asking, and I think you can read it however you want. There's a way to read it that there's magic and there's a way to read it that’s sordid and plain. I feel differently about it on different days.

As far as the research goes, Olivia has the same relationship to Buddhism that I did when I was her age, which is that her father is involved in it, and she's getting all of it through osmosis, so she doesn't really understand it, she's heard it filtered down to her. That was also my experience. My parents were involved in Buddhism and I had no formal training in it, no formal understanding, but there were things about it that I knew just from living with them, so I maintained that. I didn't do any research until I was done with the book, then I went through and made sure that everything I was saying was right. I did change some things, like Tummo, the strategy of levitation that actually supposedly works in real life, is a secret tradition, and you're not supposed to describe it, so that part is wrong, because I'm not allowed to know what it is. My father would call it self secret. You have to get the transmission of it; you're really not supposed to talk about it.

MP: I was curious about how you approached balancing Olivia's critiques, or even lampooning of Western Buddhism with making the characters who are participating in it or finding value in it still sympathetic?

ET: I think they're sympathetic in the way that our former selves are sympathetic, depending. To some degree [Olivia’s] learned a lot and she's telling this story from a jaded place, but that doesn't mean that she isn't still captured by the intense feeling of that time. To me that feels realistic, where you think about something that you have grown out of. You might think, cringe, but you also have sympathy for your passion and intensity. I think she still feels that desire for transcendence, she's just decided that this isn't the way. To me that makes it sympathetic because she's sympathetic, even as she is rolling her eyes or critiquing it. The other thing is she's been wounded by it, so that has a specific result in both the way she can romanticize it and in the way she can critique it. She has to hold both things in her mind at once.

KR: The Lightness, in a lot of ways, is about the contradictory nature of desire, especially in adolescence, and its contrast especially with the ideas of Buddhism. I was wondering if you could speak to how you thought about writing that conflict and the ways that informed your perspective on the characters in the project.

ET: Unfortunately for us as people desire is always contradictory and it's always complicated. One of the reasons that I wanted to write about adolescence is because I feel that everything is running hotter in adolescence than in any other time in your life and the desire is so much more reified than it is later. As you age your intensity burns out like a bulb, things don't feel as intense. When I was sixteen everything was the most important thing in the world, and I felt the power in that. It's almost as though when you age you gain power in some ways and you lose power in some ways. That was what I was interested in, this moment where you are on the cusp, you're not a child and you're not out in the world as a full adult with a job. But your desire has power and meaning even if you don't understand it yet.

Before I wrote this book I found a letter to myself that I had written when I was sixteen, and the gist was, "your parents treat you like you don't know what's going on, but you know what's going on. So when you're a grown-up don't forget that sixteen-year-olds are not idiots." It was basically, like, this is serious and real and don't forget about it. Culturally, we have this inclination to devalue the experiences of young women. But those experiences are so powerful and have so much meaning in them, and it doesn't matter that they're contradictory. So I just wanted to reflect that and give credence to this time in life that is really powerful and interesting.

MP: A lot of your work, both in this book and also in your short stories, seems really interested in linking girlhood and the expectations associated with it via the grotesque. Throughout the book there are really visceral descriptions of the body, like with Olivia's connection to (and destruction of) the Fatties, and the opening scene where she regards her own reflection as monstrous in comparison to the car ornament. I was wondering what interests you about that kind of link between grotesqueness and girlhood.

ET: I mean, for me, growing from a child into an adult felt like changing into a werewolf. It felt like there were all these societal expectations for what you're supposed to look like, how you're supposed to move, what you're supposed to say, how you're supposed to act, and then there's this sense that you don't have any control, your body is changing. For someone who, like me, lives through reading and writing and thinking, there is something grotesque about having a body at all. In a perfect world I would be a floating brain, but that's not how that works, and I might not like that as much as I think. There is something interesting in this sense that we all have these complex consciousnesses, and we are forced to be tied to these semi-uncontrollable physical forms, and what does that mean? Then we have a culture that polices those physical forms, especially for girls. Just think of Brittany Spears— she's back to talk about how she was physically controlled on so many levels. I grew up in a culture that was extremely specific in what you were and were not allowed to look like. For me, that's an integral part of girlhood, that external pressure, though I hope it will not be like that for everyone forever going forward.

MP: In addition to that focus on what you were talking about there, there's a lot of focus on outside perceptions of girlhood, particularly through myths and references to pop culture. I was wondering how you chose what perspectives you wanted to borrow from, and how they informed the project.

ET: In a very basic way, I put in all the things I loved. There are references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just because I love it. I let myself follow my own interests to some degree without being too analytical. However, there were lots of things that got cut. So in terms of what things ended up making the cut, for me I think it has to be working on at least two levels in order to make it in. Basically, it's about weeding out, whittling down until we get to the point of, this is really going to be going to show my reader something about what I'm talking about, or about these characters. I have a hundred and fifty more pages of myths and pop culture references that could have gone in that I cut and saved for later use.

MF: Sometimes you interrupt the narrative to provide a definition. I have this example of page 17, where it defines the word monster as a warning. What were your thoughts or intentions when including these definitions?

ET: In addition to everything this book is about, it’s about language and how our experiences are processed through language. That's at the core of my interest as a writer. I spent a weird amount of time googling the words I was using for this book, almost without direction. I already knew that my essential viewpoint was going to be this character trying to figure out what happened to her and using any means necessary, so I thought maybe she’d be looking up what these words mean. So I just did it, and whenever I found something that I thought had resonance I would put it in and leave it there for a while to see if I wanted to keep it. Ultimately, they are just artifacts of my own writing process and I tell myself that they make sense because of this frame structure of her own investigation. This is a book about language—what can the language that we’re using to talk about our experience tell us about our experience? Sometimes the answer to that is nothing, but in that particular instance, I think it deepens the concept of the self as monster. It’s a warning or portent that changes it a little. I thought it continued to have resonance, especially at the beginning when I'm giving you little hints.

MF: I also wanted to loop back around to Serena just because she’s so interesting as she starts out as this mysterious mentor figure/object of desire but she switches roles in the story a lot, replicating the contradictory way Olivia remembers her. What was your inspiration for her as a character and how did you originally write her versus how she is now?

ET: My inspiration for her was the many girls with whom I was obsessed as a young person. This culture of female obsession—I don’t know how universal it is, but for me there has always been this sense of relationships with other women being more powerful than relationships with anyone else, walking this line of object of desire, mentor, best friend, this hope and expectation that someone could be everything to us, this special closeness. I went to summer camp as well, and Serena is modeled on the experiences I would have with other girls at summer camp where you’re with this person for a short amount of time and they’re everything. It’s like the most important bond that there has ever been and that person is just a magical shiny creature to you and then they disappear. You go home. I remember at summer camp we would write these heartfelt love letters to each other at the end, more passionate than any romantic relationship or family relationship—because of the short, separate nature of the relationship and the intensity—and then we’d all read them on the plane home and cry. That’s what I was trying to evoke with her. As far as how she changed, she was always like a manic pixie dream girl in a way. At one point she was more obviously the villain, and I think in the writing I wanted her to be more complicated than that.

MP: Pivoting to your flash fiction works, in stories like “A Clean Egg” or “A Heart of Hearts,” there’s sort of a larger narrative implied so I was wondering how you choose what parts of that narrative were most important to feature in the piece versus what’s better left in implication?

ET: I think that with short stories in general, you are seeking a single sensation. They say it should be one mood. But with flash in particular you want it to feel like striking a match—if you strike a match in the void it won't light, but if you strike a match in a dark room that exists around you, you might not see the room, but the match will light. There has to be context at least implied, but you only want to light up a little. So in terms of what you choose, it’s more that I get one image and one idea and then I imply the world around it rather than choosing one image from a fully formed world. So it’s the match that creates the dark room, not the match that illuminates it.

KR: I wanted to ask about your approach to literary criticism as a genre and what you find yourself learning from literary criticism.

ET: You can learn so much from reading it, but from writing it you learn even more, because you learn about what you like and what you think works and why. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about my own work just from writing about other people’s work. It’s so hard to look at your own stuff critically and pretend that you didn’t write it, but the more you practice doing that with other people’s work, the easier it can be to apply that to your own work. I have been writing various kinds of literary criticism for many many years and I think that what’s most interesting to me is not just evaluating something but putting it into context and conversation with the world. What use is a book review in the void, right? It’s interesting on its own in terms of evaluating the book but you want what you’re writing about a book to be interesting to someone who hasn’t read it, and you want to tell them why you should or shouldn’t read it, and you want to be convincing. That’s a different thing from just evaluating a work. That space I find really interesting—I can look at the craft of a book, but how does this book exist in relation to other people and the world?

KR: I was wondering if you could speak to your position at Lit Hub and how you came to it and how it’s changed your perspective?

ET: I’ll give you the short version, which is that when I graduated from college I got an internship writing blog posts for a now defunct website called Flavorwire and I figured out how to write for the internet as writing for the internet was evolving, and then I just kept doing that until I wound up at Lit Hub. But the thing that writing and editing for Lit Hub, and writing for the internet in general for all these years, has really taught me is to let go. When I started working in this field I had to write four pieces a day about anything—art, books, I had to just find something to say. It was just about creating content, so what I had to do was to find something to talk about, say it, press publish and move it along, and that was very hard for me. Now I have a lot more time to spend on things at Lit Hub because I’m no longer the workhorse, but what it really taught me to do was to trust myself and to not let perfect be the enemy of good. It gave me the ability to not agonize over every sentence until it was time to agonize over every sentence. You can also obviously make a line between all the list making that I have done in my career to the way that I write fiction, because there’s a million lists in there in various ways. I still think that lists are the answer to death, they’re amazing forms of literature.

MF: After The Lightness and other projects, what are you doing now?

ET: I’m going to try to write a new novel. Once you’ve learned how to write a novel you think that it’s going to be easy to do again, but every new novel is its own new project and puzzle to figure out, so I am knee deep in novel two. Hopefully—in however many years—I will get out.