The Bodily Memory of a Moment: T Kira Madden on Lists, Loss, and Growing up in Boca Raton

T Kira Mahealani Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in Hudson Valley, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS, was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir. There is no period in her name.

On Thursday, April 29,  T Kira Madden  joined The Interlochen Review editors Neva Ensminger-Holland and Alix Sykes for a virtual conversation with T Kira Madden about her memoir and writing process. Editors Lane Devers and Nazani Cassidy also contributed questions for this interview. 

Neva Ensminger-Holland: What text inspired you the most when it came to writing the memoir? And what inspires you in general, when it comes to both fiction and nonfiction writing?

T Kira Madden: In terms of inspiration, I don't feel that it's different between the genres. I think my fiction and my nonfiction is most inspired by my daily observations, and daily noticings in the world. Every day I write down any glimmer or spark of something that feels rich and alive, something that I notice, because I think there are reasons we notice certain things. If we tune into what's particular, in our noticing, for example, some people might notice other people's hands or their posture, or the way they speak. For me, I notice images and colors. And I'm always creating similes using images that I find in the world every day.

 I'm also really influenced by sound. I love jazz. My whole life I have wanted to be a jazz drummer. So sound is something that comes to me a lot. I'll give you an example. There's a piece in my book called “Can I Pet Your Back?” and there's a refrain, “I found pretty when, I found pretty when, I found pretty when,” and I didn't have the words for it—but the song of it came to me when I was driving in the car. It's often the sound that comes to me first.

 Regardless of what I'm writing, I pull from everything I read. I think it's nice to have some North Stars of maybe three to ten books or whatever that looks like for you, that are guiding a specific project. You can keep reading and rereading them, but I am a firm believer that if you're a reader, a productive reader, you could read a magazine, you could read a screenplay, and there's something to learn from anything you read.  

So for me, something I thought about a lot was The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch and the way that it was fragmented and how it broke chronology in a memoir. I also thought a lot about Jo Ann Beard. She wrote a book called The Boys of My Youth, which has such rich language and use of metaphor. Those are two that I thought about a lot. I always go back to the work of Native Hawaiians and the tradition of oral storytellers because that's where I come from. My book of Hawaiian mythology definitely came in handy with Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, especially the third section that digs into mythology and myths, as well as the work of Kiana Davenport with Shark Dialogues. Those are some of the North Stars for this project, but there’s so many things that influenced the book. I'm always reading and rereading Toni Morrison, the opening of Jazz, for example, just for that kind of musical language. There are certain writers I go to for their rhythm and their music, and others for their form and others for their content. It's just a big, kaleidoscopic view of different ways to learn and pull things from writers.

Alix Sykes: Your memoir gives the reader a very succinct sense of your life so far. How did you decide on the order of the sections? How did it feel for you to see it all together for the first time?

T Kira Madden: The order of sections was really moving things around hundreds of times. I didn't write in an order. I wrote whatever memories came to me and felt the most sharp or memories that held the most charge, or emotional resonance, or emotional potency for me, and I would write them all. Then I would see which ones felt like they needed to be longer, which ones could be short and a little punchy, and then moved them around. I eventually settled on the three act structure, but before that there were eight acts. Before that there was no chronology at all and it was random and then at one point it was all chronological. 

For me, the idea of a three-act structure—past, present, and future version of the self—was a form and shape that felt true to my story, and felt true to me. So in the end, I really liked that arrangement, because something chronological and linear wouldn't make sense for my story or for how I experienced memory.  How I experienced my life doesn't feel tidy and chronological, it feels a little shattered, it feels fragmented, it feels random at times, the way memories can sneak up on us at random moments. So I wanted to mirror that experience of memory and loss in the shape itself. 

There wasn't really a first time of seeing it all together, it was just this years-long process of moving it around. And then finally putting the last puzzle piece in, I guess, right before the book was printed. The printing of the book is the only reason it's done. If it weren't printed, I would still be messing around with the order. So there wasn't a hallelujah moment where everything fell into place. It just was a matter of returning to that ordering system and seeing where I wanted to build out scenes and seeing where I wanted to cut scenes. But certainly holding a copy of your book in your hand, or even the printed out pages of a book, feels really good to have that weight in your hand. There's no real words for that, but it's pretty special.

AS: I noticed that you included an excerpt from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay.” Why did you choose this epigraph? In what ways do you feel that this quote is in conversation with your impulse to write a memoir?

T Kira Madden: I’m a big Anne Carson fan for myriad reasons. Her language or sense of scope and history—I just love everything she writes. “‘You remember too much,’ my mother said to me recently, ‘Why hold on to all that?’ And I said, ‘Where can I put it down?’” is just one of those lines that—do you ever have lines that just stick with you in your body, something that just returns to you every other day—one of those? That’s one of those lines for me. Where can I put it down? That question. If you remember too much, if you're someone plagued with memory and returning to moments all the time, kind of stuck in a constant mode of time travel, as I am, where do you put it down is a really beautiful question.

And for me, I thought Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was answering that question, here's where I'm putting it down. At some point, I even talked about the title, Put it Down because of that line. But then everyone was like, no, because you don't want people to put the book down. So that didn't work out. But I liked the idea that it was speaking to the impulse of like, where do you put all the memory? Where do you put feelings of the past? And sometimes we can do that through writing or through artmaking.

NEH: In your article “Against Catharsis,” you talk about how writing an experience with full accurate detail is not only unnecessary, but impossible. and allowing space for inaccuracy also allows room for the reader. I'm wondering about how you went about creating that space in your memoir, and if that was something you had to consciously work towards?

T Kira Madden: No, I don't think it's possible for us to write an event with full accuracy, including every person and every detail, every action and everything each person in the room brings to the table. You would spend the rest of your life writing the book of a single dinner or a single moment if you were focused on that. We can only gather so much information at a time, the emotional truth or the emotional memory or the bodily memory of a moment or an experience.

To answer your question, for example, in “Against Catharsis,” I said that I conflated two characters, that's a conscious move to kind of clear up confusion. If you have four people in your life, who are basically serving the same function in the story if they're serving the same function of a bully, or a crush, or whatever, conflating them, so that you don't have a reader balancing for different names for people doing a similar thing. I think that is something for the reader so that you can just focus on this one person, and I'm going to compile the characteristics into one name, one person, right?

I'm conscious in terms of what I cut, to make a reading experience feel accessible, and to not lose a reader with unnecessary questions that would be distracting and keep them from reading. I'm more interested in productive questions of what's going to happen next. And what does this mean? And what is love to this character? Those are productive questions, rather than ‘Who are all these people?’ ‘Where are we?’ Those are questions that I think can stall a piece and work against it.

 I'm always conscious of the reader's experience and how they can move through a piece, how I'm teaching them to read my work; I think we're always teaching a reader how to read a piece. But in terms of full accuracy, it's just a given that it's not fully accurate. For me, it's just a given that it's one person's limited experience of something. We don't, as humans typically carry around a camera and a tape recorder every moment of our lives, to gather exact dialogue and the exact picture. And even if we did, it would miss things. So it's a given that we're recreating conversation, we're recreating dialogue, we're recreating a scene to the best of our ability based on that emotional memory.

AS: There's this lovely balance of grief but also joy within Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. I was wondering if you could speak to the process of writing something that reads equal parts love letter and elegy.

 T Kira Madden: Personally, I find that multiple truths and currents of feeling are always running simultaneously and I tried to mirror that in my writing. I think contradictions, complications and gray areas of feeling are what's most interesting to me as a writer, and as a reader. It’s never just, I love this person, and here's why, aren't they great? That’s okay.  But I'm more interested in these prickly questions of I love this person who's bad in all these ways? Or who's messy? Who makes all these mistakes? What does that mean? Why do we still love the people who harm us sometimes? Why do “good” people make the wrong choices, or “bad” people, make righteous choices? I don't believe in good-bad binaries in that way. But I am interested in those questions of the readers’ assumptions of what makes someone good or bad. 

In my case, one could look at my parents and say, wow, they’re using all these drugs, and they’re high all the time, and they’re not really parenting, and therefore are bad parents or bad people, but I don't believe that. I don't think that's true to life. I believe that it's more complicated than that. You can make poor decisions and still be someone worthy of love and respect. And I'm really interested in digging into that space, so to speak, to love letter and elegy. It's the same thing. It's like, how can multiple truths and conflicting truths exist simultaneously? Our understanding of dramatic irony is holding two truths, at least, at the same time. And I like to think of holding that wire taut as we write something so that something can be really funny and really painful with writing about love and hate, and desire, like all these things happening at the same time is my job as a writer.

NEH: Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is written in the present tense. I'm curious why you made that formal decision, and if it impacted at all the way you wrote some sections of the book?

T Kira Madden: I think sometimes we have to go with what we are drawn to. I think every piece can speak to us if we listen to what it wants to do. I write everything in a couple different tenses and a couple different points of view and then I ask an outside reader, or sometimes I know myself, which one just clicks, which one feels right. In this case, I think the present tense lends itself to an immediacy in each scene that felt right for the book. I did not want an older, wiser, retrospective point of view, stepping in telling the story. That is very typically used for memoirs where we have this retrospective hindsight point of view, in the past tense. I didn't want that, because I wanted all the emotional currents running at once. I wanted a past-present-future narrator running at the same time, happening at once, rather than just past. 

Now, for me, all of those versions of myself are alive every day and active every day. And in fact, I think about this a lot, as someone who's been writing a screenplay for Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, typically, in a movie with a voiceover, we get the older person looking back on their life. But for me, if I have a voiceover over my life, it's the younger girl, it's the younger self, who has more knowledge than the older person. So the present tense was a way for me to kind of honor that feeling that all of these selves could be active and alive on the page with the same gravity.

NEH: Sort of in a similar vein to that, did you allow more for the malleability of memory when writing scenes when you were younger in age compared to the ones that take place later?

T Kira Madden: It all feels even to me, I would say. I remember certain things from when I was young, much more sharply than I remember something from last week, in some cases. It's all gathering as much as I could, maybe the first section when I'm relying a little bit more on images and interviews. But in terms of everything up to the present day, if I was writing something about yesterday, I would still ask people questions about what happened yesterday. So it was the same interview process, the same gathering of photographs and information and journals and diaries and all sorts of things. 

But no, I think I love that malleability everywhere and anywhere. There's a suspension of disbelief when we read a memoir. I think when we read this memoir, my memoir, you can see this exact detail from when I was two, but it is embellished in some way to build the scene. I'm there on the page saying, ‘yes, that's true.’ And that's okay. That's how I felt about this book. And I think that's why I pointed directly to the concept of revision and revisiting memory at the end of the book, by rewriting the opening in a new way, saying like, of course, as we gather new information in our lives, the memory changes, the memory transforms. And I'm less interested in rejecting that and choosing an ultimate truth, and more interested in pointing to it and exploring what that truth looks like as it transforms, depending on who's telling the story and who's holding it.

AS: Your note from the author really intrigued me. In it you describe memory as, “discrete, impressionable and shaped by the body inside of which it lives.” Can you tell me a little about your relationship with memory?

T Kira Madden: Yeah, I think this is kind of jumping off of the last question. I think individual memory versus communal, or familial group memory can be very different, depending on who decides to offer their perspective and how that changes your memory. That's what I meant by impressionable memories. If you remember something, and someone says, no, it was bright and sunny that day that you said it stormed, maybe you start to think, oh, maybe, maybe it was both, I don't know, maybe it was bright and sunny, and then the memory can completely transform and change. So you know, memory is deeply imperfect. That's not an opinion. That's a fact. 

Our memory shifts depending on how we choose to story it. So by writing a book, I've lost the purity that I once felt about all the memories included in the book. And sometimes it's hard to get that back. That is a real loss. For me, it's a gift in that I can offer grace to those memories and find shape and form and communication and communion through writing them. But it's also a great loss that sometimes when I think about, my dad and giving me that tiger, sometimes it’s set in the memory of how I wrote it and the memory of how I wrote it, again, in the screenplay is or the memory of how I edited it, and the memory of how it happened. I think we are sacrificing parts of ourselves in our memory when we do choose to commit it to a page or for an audience or to transform it into a work of art. It muddles the  memory a little bit. And that's just something I have to think about and live with every day.

AS: There seems to be this obsession with listing within the book, I'm thinking specifically about the listing of tradition and ritual, but also within the dialogue itself. You mentioned keeping diaries within the book, I was wondering how listing affected the process of writing the book itself.

T Kira Madden: I just love the sounds of lists. I think we, as writers, should always turn to what we like, the sounds we like, the rhythms we like, the content we like, the style we like. What are we drawn to? What are our obsessions? What are our “tics” that other people in a workshop space might point out and say, hey, you're always doing this thing? Why? Rather than eradicating that or saying, you know, let me let me squash that tick. Why not ask ourselves, why am I drawn to that sound, or style? So for me, list-making is probably a tic, but it's one that I like. 

I like the specificity of a list, I like the song of a list, I like how a list can be really general and then you can throw in something really specific or really surprising within that list, to add extra tension or drama or an element of surprise. So I just love a list. It's the way my ear works. It's the way I like to write. So I wouldn't say it was a super conscious decision that the book would be list heavy. It's just the way that I write and that looks different for everyone. But I think a list is a really economical way of offering a lot of information at once in a really rhythmic and beautiful way.

NEH: In Long live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, there's almost an exploration of maturity, as seen through the eyes of a younger girl, which is somewhat unusual to see. I'm curious if this was a conscious choice made by you, or if it just came naturally when you were writing?

T Kira Madden: I think that choice came with embodying the younger gaze of the narrator version of myself. Maturity is an interesting word. I was very obsessed at a young age and still am with what it means to be a grown up.  We hear the term “parentified,” someone who parented their parents, that was definitely the case for me. I carried so many kinds of maturities, responsibilities, as a young person, parenting my parents, driving myself to school long before I had a license, because my parents were high, feeding myself, whatever that meant. 

And in other ways, I held this gaze of like, what does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to look a certain way or to be an object of desire?  That was kind of thrust upon me through the media, and through growing up in Boca Raton. I opened the book with that commercial about the plastic surgery girls. I was modeling myself after these women and what that kind of “maturity” looks like. So I think that just came with the gaze of embodying that imbalance or that question, like, what does it really mean to be an adult or a grown up or a woman? As I said, in the pen pal piece, when I would write to those pen pals, and they would say, do you know what it means to be a woman? And how desperate this younger narrator was to understand that when really she already had so many of those responsibilities? But through what gaze is a more interesting question, I think.

NEH: Your most recent piece, published in Virginia Quarterly Review, “Judy in Her Good Robe,”  navigates form in a different way than your memoir does. Have you found yourself becoming more forgiving with space on the page? How would you tell a young writer to navigate section breaks?

T Kira Madden: I think every piece demands its own style and shape. I certainly don't commit myself to one. So certain pieces ask for more white space because a gap has to feel meaningful. If you see a writer have, you know, one sentence on a space that's all white, like Claudia Rankin’s Citizen, a great example of this writing about race, then we have these tiny little sections on these stark white pages. And that feels so meaningful to the content of what it means to be telling this story in this country, of racial inequity. And like, what does that white space mean? And at the end of Citizen, Claudia also has a list of all the people, black people who have been murdered by the police, and then there are all these white pages of space afterwards. And we're left with the negative space and the gravity of what does it mean that these pages will be filled, even though they're empty right now. So I think, white space and thinking about form, it's not just, I want to cut off the scene, so much is white space. It can be very intentional, in its style, to say something and to have a reader sit with a feeling of what the work looks like on the page. And of course, poets do this all the time. But in prose, it's less often we see people really playing with form. So I'm always interested in form, regardless of genre. “Judy in Her Good Robe,” I think it's a more chronological, traditional story, though I wouldn't say it's a traditional story in terms of its content, to have a self haunting person calling you. So abstractions can look different ways in different pieces. And, you know, if I have this kind of abstract idea of another version of yourself, calling you on the phone every day and haunting you, then it might be a place to hook into an easier form, or a more traditional form that’s easier to follow. So I'm always saying, choose your abstractions. 

If you're writing a really complicated story, you might choose an order chronology that's more straightforward. If you're choosing high lyricism language, where it's hard to find yourself in space and time, you also might choose something more traditional or chronological. If you're choosing to write a story backwards with no chronology or fragmented chronology, then you might have the story itself be something pretty concrete to follow. I don't know if all of this makes sense. Balancing what feels a little more abstract versus balancing what feels more concrete. That often feels like my job, how to strike that balance. So I think “Judy” is an abstract story. So it's told in a very straightforward, colloquial way.

NEH: In Love Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, some parts of the chapter “Kuliana” take place before you were born, specifically, as your mother was growing up in Hawaii. How does writing from other people's memories differ from the way you write about your own?

T Kira Madden: I think just tuning into the interviews I held with those people and listening, trying to ask the best questions I could. I interviewed people for most pieces, but it felt more important to stay on the phone for hours and hours and hours, to write those sections, and to then show those sections to the people I was writing about. And ask them if that was what they meant. And if the scenes were holding the emotional energy (or mood or tone) of what they felt and what they described to me. So I think the collaboration, and the back and forth process with the subject, or the person I'm writing about, it felt more collaborative. And there was far more dialogue versus if I'm writing my own piece, I might show other people after I'm through, before they can influence the piece with how they remember it. Because I want to center and honor my experience with something like a memoir, right? I'm not speaking in general terms of journalism, I wouldn't want to center myself. But in terms of a memoir, myself, my experience has to be centered for a reader to feel that they can trust their narrator and go along with the story. When I shift into my mother's point of view, that's when it becomes more collaborative, or more like journalism to me.

AS: So, I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a photo towards the end of the book of you and your family that just juts back towards the title to me. Did you write the title after this photograph? Or did you intentionally write towards this image?

T Kira Madden: I didn't choose the title of my book. So no, my title of the book was The Rat’s Mouth, which is the translation of Boca Raton because it was so much about place for me. And then my title was Tell the Women I'm Lonely, which is a line that comes towards the end. And it's the end. It's the title of the final section of the book. 

In the end, the book was about women to me, and wishing you could call back to all the women that came before you. Say what you mean, and allow people to make space for the women in my life, the girls and women in my life to speak their truth, and to live their truth, which is a theme that I think runs throughout. So no, the photographs all came much later, the whole third section of the book through the discovery of family members came much later in the writing process, it was happening in real time. I'd written the first two sections when I sold the book, and then was writing all those discoveries in real time as I moved forward. Nothing was building to those images, because they surprised me as much as they surprise a reader, as I was unearthing these truths. 

The title was chosen by my agent and my editor and publishers, because they liked the title of that essay. And they thought it might invite readers into this communal space of a tribe of fatherless girls. Although I don't think my book is about being fatherless, fatherlessness. I think that's just one thing that it questions. One thing it is about is, what does it mean to lose a parent? And how many ways can we lose a person without losing them to death? Like, what is estrangement like? And what does it mean to be absent because of substance abuse disorders? And what does it mean to feel like you’re motherless, fatherless, friendless, like, what does “less,” mean? What does absence really mean? When is absence productive? So it's a theme, but I don't think it's a unifying line of the book either.

AS: The writing in your memoir is almost somewhat cathartic to the experience of the reader. I'm wondering how form played a role in manipulating the reader's emotions? Do you believe that it had any impact?

T Kira Madden: I think that's a question for my readers. I can't say what's going to be cathartic for my reader. I think it depends. I consider formal decisions to make a reading experience. I'm not thinking about how to toy with a reader emotionally, I'm more interested in making a reading experience. Moving a reader from point A to point B is my concern. What happens in between there, I want them to be able to experience what's happening in between there, which usually means they have to have a foothold on moving from one place to the next. So, that's my concern when it comes to thinking of my reader. But I don't think in terms of a general audience or general reader, and what they might be feeling. I always narrow my work down into one person, usually that I'm writing to, or a person I'm writing for. And in the case of this book, it was almost always this younger kid version of myself. She was who the book was for, I was writing the book that I felt she needed to offer grace to her experiences. And the book, like Drew Barrymore's book, that could have helped someone like her, or someone like younger me. So that was my focus. And I try not to break focus of who that person is, real or imagined, when writing, because if I start thinking in terms of a general vague audience, I lose the specificity of what I'm doing. I don't know how the form would inform a reader's emotional, cathartic experience. I can just say that it felt true to me as a writer, and to the one person I was writing for.

AS: In your essay “Against Catharsis,” you compare writing to photography, specifically as a way to convey that writing also focuses a lens on what the reader/viewer aims to contain. Though it makes me wonder, do you believe that there are different ways to tell the truth? Could you write two different essays and still show the same part of you?

T Kira Madden: These are complicated questions. Really interesting questions. I think we can write about the same thing over and over and over and over again, in different ways. And I think that we should. I think that it is a real tragedy that so many writers and creators feel like they can't repeat themselves and write about the same thing again, just because they think a market or an audience might say, you know, you're a one-trick pony, or you've already written that story, or we've already written about that person, instead of allowing ourselves to return to our central obsessions, and our central memories that come up all the time, and really investigating, like what they mean, different days and moments and years of our lives. So yes, I could write the story of spreading my dad's ashes, for example, at a tree. And I could write one version of that, that said that it was a really, you know, cathartic or beautiful or sad experience. And then I could write another version that said, oh, by the way, when I did that, it was Halloween. And there was a girl in a catsuit, who jumped on the tree as soon as I spread the ashes and started doing a photoshoot on the tree, and was just rolling around my dad's ashes. And that's also true. 

Every experience carries with it again, those multiple truths, moods, different perspectives, and angles. To go back to the photography metaphor, you can shoot a scene from so many different angles, and it will look different from below, from above wide, close, zoomed. So yeah, we can keep circling the same thing in different ways and carry a completely different mood, and with it completely new truths. But I'm more interested, for me personally, in writing, in one piece, how I can get at all of those truths, this kaleidoscopic view of the same moment in time by thinking through all of those multiple truths and not committing myself to one.

AS: What's next for you? I see that you just published a short story. Have you been working on a lot of fiction recently?

T Kira Madden: I've been working on two novels, two very different novels. One is satire about television and the other’s a horror novel about sex abuse. I’m always writing short stories on the side, and I hope one day I could compile them into a short story collection. But even if I don't, it's just something I love to do. A story typically comes to me at least once a month. But I'm really spending my time in fiction right now, because it just feels good. And, you know, I think we can just write what feels right at any moment. That's not to say I'm not going to write another memoir, another work of nonfiction. It's just not what I'm doing today. 

I also think it's nice to take a breather after publishing, not only writing a memoir, but publishing one and fielding questions about my life and my family for many years now. It feels really good to just spend time in fictional worlds, with different stakes in terms of those conversations and dialogues and what they look like. I love fiction. I will always love it, and be drawn to it. And I'm also writing the screenplay. I'm finishing the screenplay for Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, which is a totally different form and a new way of approaching the same story. So that's been really exciting as well, quite a learning experience.