Markita Schulman
An Interview with Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen shifts between modes and genres with apparent ease. I first encountered her writing in the pages of The New Yorker, where her work ranges from reporting on the Oklahoma teachers’ strike of 2018 to flash fiction about ghosts—including one who takes the shape of a Bernese mountain dog in “Have You Ever Met One?”—to an account of what she ate as a medical student. (Galchen holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as an MFA from Columbia.)
Galchen’s stylistic versatility is complemented by the breadth of her curiosity and her affection for all of her subjects. Her award-winning first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, tells the story of a man whose wife has disappeared and been replaced by an uncanny imposter. In his search for his wife, the analytical and sometimes paranoid narrator comes across an indecipherable (to me) graph taken from a real-life scientific paper; to this graph he attributes “a mesmerizing, unsolved kind of beauty. [. . .] Something irritatingly beyond category—sublime, the melodramatic might say.” When Galchen tends to graphs and numbers with the same care that she affords characters both real and fictional, she does more than make beauty of the quantitative; she seems to test its limits and pursue what lies beyond.
Searching—whether for a disappeared wife or the melodramatically sublime—unites much of Galchen’s work. Her first book for young readers, Rat Rule 79, tells the surreal story of a girl named Fred who steps through a paper lantern and into a world populated by white elephants, troublesome Insult Fish, and a Rat Queen. Fred must journey through this new world in order to find her mother. In Little Labors, an episodic memoir about life with a new baby, inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, the search is often for words or a new way of telling: she refers to her baby not as “the baby” but as “the puma,” and, later, when the baby is mobile, as “the chicken.” At one point, Galchen muses, “I have often, in the past decade or so, wanted to write something about ‘women writers,’ whatever that means (and whatever ‘about’ means).” That thought morphs into another, about envying men, and another, about what the baby is doing that very moment with a cutting board, and another, about Arnold Schwarzenegger. The writing process, its own kind of search, seems to materialize on the page.
Galchen is also the author of the short story collection American Innovations and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and the William J Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. She was named on the New Yorker’s 2010 list of 20 Writers Under 40.
Galchen is a former NYU creative writing graduate faculty member. When I reached out to her for this interview in November 2020, she emailed back, “I’d be delighted to chat—and imagine myself back into the inside of that slope-floored little creative writing house.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’d like to start with what feels unavoidable (and, by now, unavoidably cliché): these unprecedented times, our new normal. When I came across the global COVID-19 anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, which features your essay “The Longest Shift: A New Doctor Faces the Coronavirus in Queens,” I couldn’t believe that anything cogent could already have been written about COVID-19. (Of course, I have to remind myself that “already” is now a matter of almost eight months.) “The Longest Shift” focuses on just a few individuals. Reading it now, I am so touched by your attention to their peculiarities, the human details that pandemic scale threatens to dwarf. When you wrote the essay in mid-April, thousands of New Yorkers, and many others around the world, had already died of COVID-19. That last line—“This is what everyone is doing now”—lingers; so much and so little has changed. What was your process for writing “The Longest Shift”? What did you hope to document, and for whom?
RIVKA GALCHEN: That piece was one of the more extreme experiences of “writing in the dark”—and by dark I don’t mean the grimness, though there was a lot of that, but I mean dark as in without knowledge. I knew that I didn’t have an understanding, emotionally or otherwise, of the scale of what was happening, and, in a way, I don’t think the doctors did either. I knew I couldn’t write from a perspective of wisdom, for example (though I am never one to write from that perspective). So instead I followed the details. I have so much faith in details, whether it’s in fiction or nonfiction, I think that if a person attends to the details of an event, they will light up something true even if they themselves don’t yet see or know that truth. That’s the magic. I spoke on the phone with dozens of doctors in reporting that piece, but one reason I ended up focused on those three doctors was that they themselves had a natural instinct for detail when they described their experiences. They weren’t offering theories or predictions. The ICU doctor, talking about the errant panic about not knowing how to write backwards on glass in order to communicate in the new ICU setting—I trusted in that kind of detail to capture something of the moment.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What would “writing from a perspective of wisdom” sound like? Why do you avoid it?
GALCHEN: Even fairy tales, when they end in those little summary morals—Don’t talk to strangers when you’re on the way to your grandmother! A clever cat might be a great inheritance!—still, they have this wonderful way of exceeding and confusing their endings. And the stories are so much more complicated than the “advice” or “wisdom” that they share. When I write something, I figure that whatever ideas a writer has are at best okay, but that the special intelligence of language, or story-form—that those elements should be the real speakers, and the writer is just the firefly briefly lighting up one little path through those woods. I like to read work that I feel couldn’t have existed whole in the writer’s head until their imagination crashed up against words and form, against their medium.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your writing on COVID-19 was almost journalistic, but you are also an accomplished novelist, personal essayist, literary critic . . .the list goes on. Sometimes your writing seems to feature a blurring of “truth” and fiction: the character who bears your father’s name in Atmospheric Disturbances, for example. How do your approaches to fiction and nonfiction differ?To what extent do you keep genre and “truth-telling” (forgive the scare quotes) in mind while you write?
GALCHEN: I put my father’s name in my first novel because it gave me so much joy to write his name down. He died when I was seventeen. He has an unusual name—Tzvi Gal-chen—and we used to get letters addressed to all sorts of humorous variations, my favorite being Chewy Chen. So it was really a matter of personal fuel to include his name, and to have my characters have delusions about his meaning, his power. But my actual father wasn’t a character in that novel, and there was no character in the novel who was anything like me. In retrospect I saw how my loss, as the writer, connected to the loss that my main character was experiencing—but I wasn’t conscious of that parallel.
But more broadly, generally, my nonfiction writing mind is wired pretty differently from my fiction mind. If fiction is like gardening for truffles—you can’t really garden for them, you can only hunt them—then nonfiction feels closer to normal gardening.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I wonder how this question of fiction versus nonfiction relates to your explorations in Little Labors of what it is to be a “woman writer” and a “mother writer.” David Bezmozgis wrote in the Times that your collection of stories American Innovations featured “bits of [your] biography” and “variations of a particular sort of woman.” True, but I find I bristle at the idea that writing about women by women necessarily reveals some kind of autobiographical impulse. Male fiction writers seem to retain a plausible deniability that women aren’t allowed. Have you noticed this (or been bothered by it)? Has your identity as a woman writer or a mother writer changed since you wrote Little Labors?
GALCHEN: I don’t find my stories very autobiographical at all. That said, I do think there’s some universal truth to that old Fellini quote, something about how he could do a film about a goldfish and it would still be autobiography. The shape of an instrument affects the sounds it can make, and I suppose each writer is her own eccentrically shaped instrument.
Little Labors was so animated by love. And I think that’s why it works, to the extent that it does. In that specific case, the love was the love—sometimes overwhelming—of motherhood. And so that was the love that changed me, at that time. But I don’t know if it changed my writerly identity all that much. I still see myself as again and again drawn to an interface between logical language and overwhelming emotion. The mathematician Alan Turing wrote a famous essay thinking through the possibilities of artificial intelligence, making various points, but then ending with a bit about how a possible hole in his argument would be shown if the compelling evidence for ESP proved the power to be true. That last thought in the essay—I think of it as my spirit animal.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your forthcoming novel Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch draws on historical documents and has been described as “a tale for our time.” What can you tell me about the book: your writing process, what drew you to this particular moment in history, anything else?
GALCHEN: With some embarrassment, I’m realizing that nearly everything I do involves following some initially unconscious impulse. I had never intended to write a novel set four hundred or so years ago. I was working on a different novel entirely. But I found myself making it through these past stressful years by reading, for reasons I didn’t totally understand, a lot of scientific biography. There are very few good biographies out there about Johannes Kepler, and so I found myself reading—in an effort to learn more about Kepler—a book by the Cambridge historian Ulinka Rublack about Kepler’s mother, Katharina, being put on trial as a witch. This was near the end of her life, and it went on for years. Johannes coordinated his mother’s defense, but also tried to keep the trial a secret, since he himself was in enough trouble already. But what really caught my attention was a small detail in the Rublack book—about a neighbor of Katharina asking the court to be released from his position as her legal guardian, citing his old age. That figure of the neighbor, of the witness to someone else’s persecution—that was what opened up the story to me as a novel.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Finally, what have you been reading recently (fiction or nonfiction; for young or grown readers; for inspiration, escape, or otherwise)?
GALCHEN: Early in the pandemic, I went back to my main comfort reading: P.G. Wodehouse novels. “The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa was a terrifying novel I read recently, admired a lot. And I’m still reading scientific biographies, most recently one on Paul Dirac—The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom—and a biography of the physicist Lise Meitner, who is a relatively unknown hero of that terrifying era of physics when people who love abstract thought suddenly found themselves with this enormous practical power: the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb.