Parker Tarun
Interview with Camille Bordas
Early in reading “The Presentation on Egypt,” I came across a moment of such pure narrative electricity, I knew then that I would go on to read everything else Camille Bordas had written. It’s not the moment when the first point-of-view character, Paul, hangs himself (though this surprised me, too). Instead, it’s a decision that Paul’s nine-year-old daughter, Danielle, makes. On the morning after Paul has killed himself but before Danielle knows this fact, she brings his lighter to school. She resolves to “either set something on fire or just show it off.” When the recess monitor catches her flaunting the lighter, Danielle panics. And then, as if to preempt the self-destructive phase that her future grief will cause, the nine-year-old puts the lighter in her mouth and swallows it. The recess monitor asks the obvious question, the question I, myself, was asking Bordas: “What did you just do?”
Bordas was born in France. She grew up between Paris and Mexico City. She published her first novel, Les treize desserts (Losfeld, 2009), at twenty-two. Two years later, she followed up with Partie commune (2011). At a reception for the prix du roman Fnac, for which Partie commune was nominated, she met the American novelist Adam Levin, who was visiting Paris on tour. Levin returned to Chicago, but he and Bordas continued to correspond by email. Eventually, she moved to Chicago to live with him.
Bordas’s English is fluent, refined in adolescence by watching popular American movies, but it wasn’t until immigrating to the United States that she decided to write in her adopted tongue. Her third novel, How to Behave in a Crowd, is her first written in English.
How to Behave in a Crowd is a coming-of-age story set in rural France, a region no safer from death than anyplace else in Bordas’s fiction. The novel follows Isidore Mazal, the youngest of six and the least impressive member of his precocious family. After the Mazals lose their father, Isidore’s PhD-toting siblings struggle to carry on, prisoners to their excessive intellects. Only unremarkable Isidore seems capable of making meaningful connections with other people. In speaking with me, Bordas said the basic DNA of all her narratives is this: “Sad person realizes everybody else is sad, too.” That’s true of How to Behave in a Crowd, but it’s the snappy humor and psychological felicity of Isidore’s particular realization that make this novel so special.
Since 2017, Bordas has been steadily publishing short fiction in The New Yorker. Like Isidore, the characters in these stories are first-rate worriers. They’re self-conscious about not being more self-aware. Their lives are permeated with dread, but their responses to that dread are emotionally mysterious, darkly funny, almost feline. Her stories aren’t like anything else being published in The New Yorker right now.
Our interview took place over the phone and email. Bordas and Levin are now married and live in Gainesville, where Bordas teaches creative writing at the University of Florida. When we spoke, she was teaching a class that focused on long short stories and short novels. We spoke about her experience with those forms, the humor in her work, and, of course, death.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Since we’re not face-to-face, could you tell me about the room you’re in right now?
CAMILLE BORDAS: It’s our bedroom, but there’s a gigantic desk in here for me, so it’s also my office. It has a window that gives onto a yard we never go into, because it’s Florida, and I hear there are snakes. I’m surrounded by books. A whole bunch of Legos, too—more than I care to admit. Star Wars sets and stuff.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Danielle in “The Presentation on Egypt” has swallowed a Lego.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I have never done that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you follow the instructions or invent your own constructs?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Always follow the instructions! Legos are a meditative thing for me. I like to witness a neat progression step by step. It’s the opposite of writing, and the opposite of writing is always welcome.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: On that topic, writers fetishize ritual. You don’t. You told The New York Times in 2017: “[I] still have no idea what makes me work well. I can work in the morning; I can work at night. I can work on coffee; I can work on beer.” Has that changed in Florida?
CAMILLE BORDAS: It’s different because I’m teaching now. In Chicago, I had odd jobs. I did a lot of freelance translating. I nannied on and off for years. I walked dogs. I do have a bit more of a routine these days. I teach in the afternoon and at night. I try to set aside two hours in the morning to look at my stuff every day and forget about everyone else’s.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In a specific place?
CAMILLE BORDAS: At home. Because the café thing . . . Well, I could do it in Paris, but I’m not a big fan of American cafés. I feel bad.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Why?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I never know what to order. It feels like a test. The drinks are too complicated. People wait in line behind you. It’s stressful.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You published your first novel, Les treize desserts, at the very young age of twenty-two with no MFA. How did you teach yourself to write?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I wanted to write a novel. It was perhaps naïve of me, but I thought the only way to learn was to do it. We didn’t have MFAs in France at the time. We have a handful of them now. So I guess I didn’t think there could be another way to learn. I just went sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your stories don’t always neatly snap into place like Legos. The loose-end quality is part of what makes them so distinctive. I’m thinking of the Professor Allan thread in “Most Die Young,” or maybe even the narrator’s final words in “The State of Nature.”
CAMILLE BORDAS: I don’t do it intentionally, but it must have to do with the fact that I write without knowing where I’m going. Only two-thirds into a story can I begin to make the preexisting elements speak to each other. As for loose ends, it’s okay to leave some of them in if they give the story texture.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Texture is an interesting word. That’s definitely how it feels to me.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I don’t know why I used that word. I will say that one thing all of my stories have in common is they don’t try to speak to our times. They don’t seem to carry a message, political or otherwise. I feel very free to only tell the story of these people I invent and put in front of me without requiring them to make total sense.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The political zeitgeist is ambient in your stories, though. Terrorism is a feature of “Most Die Young.” The apocalypticism of “State of Nature” sounds like something we’re hearing a lot about in the news.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I do have those deep anxieties. I grew up in France, where there was a lot of terrorism going on in the nineties. It’s still going on. But if I write about them, I want them to be in the background. I don’t want to tie my stories too much to an era. Every generation has had its own fear of the apocalypse.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Those issues are not at the center as they might be in another writer’s hands.
CAMILLE BORDAS: They might be at the center for a minute. But then the character is focused on the dog in front of them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Maybe another way of thinking about that loose- end quality is expansiveness. This isn’t a knock on the short story form, but your stories seem to hold more than most. “The Presentation on Egypt” cycles through viewpoints and moves through time with an almost novelistic scope.
CAMILLE BORDAS: All the stories I’m working on right now are like that. They’re driving me crazy. I always set out to write a short short story, hoping it will be three thousand, five thousand words long—tops—but they always hit eight thousand. New characters show up. Things get complicated. I wish I could write a two thousand-word story about one person on one day—one of my favorites is Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”—but I can’t seem to.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is that quality you’re trying to jam into eight thousand words?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I think it’s a range of emotions that’s hard to get across in one thousand unless you’re Wolff. The reader needs to have a clear idea how a character’s mind works in order for certain changes in their ways of thinking to hit more powerfully.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What’re you working on right now?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Over the summer, I was working on a novel, but it’s difficult during the school year, when I teach. Now, I’m working on a few stories at once. I have five that are started. When I hit a wall with one, I go and see what’s happening in the other documents. It’s a little messy, but there’s this hope that I will finish them all on the same day.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How long does it take to write a story usually?
CAMILLE BORDAS: From start to finish, it takes roughly a year. I let months go by between sittings, though, at times. I think probably ten to fifteen sittings over a year.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: And the novels?
CAMILLE BORDAS: A novel has taken me anywhere from six months to four years.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How to Behave in a Crowd focuses on six children, five of whom are precocious to a fault. The baby of the family, Isidore, is the most emotionally intelligent. Which Mazal are you most like?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I would say I’m a mix. Maybe Berenice and Aurore are the closest? I’m very much like Isidore and Leonard. I’m not as judgmental as Simone, or, if I am, it’s all inside my head. I don’t voice my opinions. What’s most autobiographical about that novel is I come from a big family, as well. My mother did, too. I’ve always been interested in these sibling rivalries.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I tend to avoid coming-of-age stories, especially when they have “big issues” like death in the family, etcetera. It’s a bad bias, but it’s one I have. And yet, I read through How to Behave in a Crowd spellbound. I suspect it has something to do with Isidore’s voice, which is plausibly childlike but also not cloying.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I started writing this book soon after moving to America. I didn’t exactly think, “I’ll write from a child’s perspective because I feel that this is what my level of English allows for,” but I’m sure that was in the back of my mind. I definitely couldn’t see myself writing in the voice of a Harvard Divinity School professor. I still feel like there are many registers of English I will never be able to fully grasp, but I’m interested in seeing whether I can do anything interesting within my limits. I probably wrote in a child’s voice because I thought it was all I could do at that time. I don’t happen to share your bias, so I didn’t spend too much time wondering, “Is this too heavy for a child narrator to bear? Is it going to be misconstrued as cheaply sentimental?” I had a fairly complicated experience of childhood and adolescence myself. Lots of hard, “adult” stuff was going on—deaths among friends and family alike, illnesses, hospital stays—yet, I never felt like life was “unfair,” that I, as a child, should’ve been spared tragedy.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Why?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Life gives you whatever it gives you. What I like about Isidore’s character, and what I end up sharing with him, perhaps, is that he knows this is all very bad, but he doesn’t feel sorry for himself. Children are completely capable of acquiring distance where distance is needed, of looking at themselves at least as honestly (if not more) than adults. So I will never discard them as narrators, even though I happen to be writing a novel from an adult’s perspective right now and enjoying the things that doing so allows me—things which How to Behave in a Crowd perhaps inhibited.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Catherine Lacey’s blurb mentioned Salinger. I’ll admit the Mazals reminded me of the Glass family.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I was a bit ashamed when people started to make parallels with the Glasses because I had only read The Catcher in the Rye at the time I finished writing my novel. I had read it as a teenager, and the translation wasn’t great. I hadn’t thought much of it, to be honest. Salinger doesn’t have the power in French that he has in English. I hadn’t read Franny and Zooey, but after hear- ing enough people talk about it, I ended up reading it, and it’s become one of my favorite books of all time. It is gorgeous.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How to Behave in a Crowd takes place in France, but you wrote it in English, and it has an American idiom.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I never know where to place fiction. I try to liberate myself from those concerns because, in the end, it’s fiction. Nothing has to match exactly. How to Behave in a Crowd could’ve been set in America. I only set it in France because I’m fascinated by the French educational system. It seemed unlikely that the children would be very successful in university while staying at home in America. Americans leave their families behind to study. I also wanted to believe that Isidore could take a train and end up on the other side of the country without anyone knowing. It’s these small reasons that the novel was set in France. Actually, when I started How to Behave in a Crowd, I wrote twenty pages of it in French, which I put aside. Later, when Adam lived in Chicago and I was still living in Paris, and we were emailing, he said, “Your English is really good. You should write fiction in English.” I translated those twenty pages into English, and that gave me the impulse to pursue that one novel in English. A lot of the language came to me in English, especially writing dialogue. I did wonder, every time I wrote something, how it would translate into French. Sometimes, I didn’t have the answer. But it doesn’t matter. Again, it’s fiction.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Almost best to just give the reader the most fluent version of the thought.
CAMILLE BORDAS: It is a problem I’ve thought about even more recently be- cause now I’m writing a story where half of the characters are French, half are Spanish, and they’re all talking to each other.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How’re you reconciling that?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Well, the story’s in English, so I’ve just decided it’s not a problem. In writing, you get to decide what “the problem” is. And, for this story, I’ve decided it’s not that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Could you imagine alternating between French and English based on the voice of the piece? Or do you think you’ll continue to work in English from now on?
CAMILLE BORDAS: If I ever move back to France, maybe I’ll go back to French. It’s hard to tell. Right now, I’m surrounded by English all day. My students and my husband don’t speak French. And English is a very infectious language.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your first two novels were written in French. Did you ever write short stories in French?
CAMILLE BORDAS: No. No, no, no. I’d only read a couple stories in my life before moving to the United States, and they were by Guy de Maupassant, one of France’s only short story writers. I wish France had magazines like you do here as a way to educate people on that form. They don’t read short stories there, though. Even my mom will say that she likes my stories, but she doesn’t like stories.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What was it like for you to discover short stories?
CAMILLE BORDAS: It was refreshing. I was twenty-five when I moved to the United States, and that was when I really discovered short stories. All of a sudden, here came George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, Lydia Davis, Rebecca Curtis, Lorrie Moore. In an hour, in one sitting, I get to see the inside of someone’s mind.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What were the novels that were important to you growing up?
CAMILLE BORDAS: When I was ten to twelve, I read a lot of classics that France deemed readable for adolescents: Victor Hugo, Raymond Radiguet, Françoise Sagan, certain Balzac novels. I think my first “Holy shit! Novels can do that?” moment was with L’Écume des Jour by Boris Vian (translated as Froth on the Daydream). The freedom of the author there seemed total to me without ever coming at the expense of the reader. I was able to follow Vian’s craziness very easily. I haven’t reread that book since. Something tells me I wouldn’t like it much as an adult, though at the time it opened something up.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: And as a teenager?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Henry Miller’s Sexus. Again, something about freedom, the liberties he took with the form of the novel—though, same as with Vian, I haven’t reread it since. I was also surprised at how much I loved Crime and Punishment, because I’d assumed these big Russian novels had to be somewhat of a chore to read, that satisfaction would only come at the end or something. I read it in two days in Spain. I remember I kept telling myself I would go down for a snack at the end of the page, and the next, and the next . . . I couldn’t stop. The same thing happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I might’ve read it that same summer, actually, now that I think of it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: And adulthood?
CAMILLE BORDAS: In my early twenties, I began my everlasting love affair with Philip Roth. I think American Pastoral started it, but since then, I’ve read almost everything he published. That was also around when I first read two of my favorite books of all time: Romain Gary’s Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, and Nabokov’s Ada. A little later, I added DeLillo’s White Noise and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to that list. Now, I go back and reread a lot of books I love. Har- ry Mulisch’s The Assault. Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. The big discovery of my thirties so far has been Svetlana Alexievich. I’ve laughed and cried at Secondhand Time. I had only cried at books twice before that, and I’m not sure those books hadn’t been manipulating me. With Alexievich, it was a pure, clean cry.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Manipulation is an interesting word. Your stories, and How to Behave in a Crowd, have a lot of momentum, though I never feel as if I’m being gamed. There’s an associative logic that carries the reader through.
CAMILLE BORDAS: When I write, I try not to be boring. I just try to move and be funny. Those are the two most important aspects of my writing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you attain momentum?
CAMILLE BORDAS: For example, I had a really good time writing “The Presentation on Egypt.” I thought the story would only be about the mother finding her husband’s body and hiding it from the daughter, and that it would take place over a week. It was surprising when I realized I could put a blank space in the middle and then jump twenty years. Fiction writers can do anything. We need to never forget this and take advantage of it. That was also the first time I ever wrote in third person, which was fun because I felt for a minute I had escaped my old habits and was free of my own thought processes, finally writing something different. Of course, it ended up, as always, being one of my stories. I get frustrated when I feel I’m writing the same story over and over. The dream would be to write something and not recognize myself in it. It keeps not happening.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: If you had to characterize it, what is that same story you write over and over?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Sad person realizes everyone else is sad, too. That’s apparently my default plot. But it always takes me too long to see it. As for constructing it, my standard is: deep insights, insert joke, go on a tangent, dialogue. It makes me want to shoot myself in the face when I can’t find a way to break from the routine. I bore myself a lot, and when I do, I just try to spot where the boredom starts and ask myself, “Why is this not interesting? What direction or angle am I not seeing yet?”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you find that angle?
CAMILLE BORDAS: This comes back to writing sentence by sentence, constantly revising as I go. I don’t understand the concept of multiple drafts. I only ever have the one, which I add to and subtract from very slowly. I need to write long, fleshy, sometimes redundant paragraphs just to know what I’m thinking. Then, rereading, I realize all I need from those is the one sentence. There’s nothing more freeing than deleting whole paragraphs. How I free myself from boredom, I guess, is I cut the boring parts.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Anxiety is a common thread in your fiction.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I like to put characters in situations I fear and see how people other than me would react. Maybe one day, I can do a little anthology of reactions to catastrophes. Then, I can know how I would behave when the time comes.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is it about reactive characters that interests you?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Familiarity. I understand them. I’m the last of four children. My siblings are smarter and funnier than me, so I always waited for them to be done saying whatever they had to say before I spoke. More often than not, I skipped my turn. I’m an observer. I rehash conversations after the fact, making up corrective ones when I’ve said something stupid to make myself feel better. This is why I tend to write about people who are in their heads a lot. The small actions they do take end up being all the more significant, also.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The small actions have an electricity to them. In “The Presentation on Egypt,” the first POV character hangs himself fairly quickly, but the moment where my stomach dropped was when his nine-year-old daughter swallows a split-pea lighter.
CAMILLE BORDAS: I can remember writing that moment. I was stuck; some- thing odd needed to happen. I looked at the elements already in the story and asked myself, “What’s the craziest thing that could happen right now?” Of course, that would be aliens coming down and smashing everyone, but short of aliens, I wondered what nobody would expect or understand, not even me. It’s going to sound new-agey, but it felt very instinctual. She already had the lighter. It seemed like the right move.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: There is a tension in How to Behave in a Crowd between the Mazals’ hyper-intellectual pursuits and the popcorn movies they like to watch and predict. Isidore is in awe of his siblings’ prediction abilities. Simone talks about how a character’s coherence is all a plot needs to be predictable (“the big ropes”). How important is coherence to fictional characters?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Predictability is bad, but to be good, things have to stay in the realm of the plausible; otherwise we, as spectators, feel cheated. We need rules. If a character can do anything, if there are no rules that we can integrate as we read, then we feel disrespected. That’s why the “and then I woke up” ending doesn’t ever satisfy anybody. The hard part is to surprise within that space of plausibility, to stay exciting there and not fall into predictability-land. A good character is one whose actions surprise us but still make sense according to what we’ve seen from him so far. Tony Soprano is a perfectly coherent character, for example, yet he has a few surprising moments each season. He keeps moving us, we keep discovering him. There’s a perfect balance the writers of the show found between the warm, comfortable moments when we see him eating ice cream and weeping over migratory birds or World War II documentaries, and those where he suddenly beats up his bodyguard or cries again, but this time because he realizes his son is unhappy. It all makes sense. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be beautiful.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you know when you’ve reached the end of a story?
CAMILLE BORDAS: My dream is that I’ve gone too long and the ending is already there. Sometimes the stories have a couple extra paragraphs, where things are too nicely wrapped up or are sort of useless. With “The Presentation on Egypt,” I went maybe two paragraphs further, unspooling some of Anna’s anxieties. It killed any subtlety. Endings are so hard. I try not to put too much pressure on them. George Saunders says, “Ending is stopping without sucking.” Mavis Gallant says, “You’re finished when anything you do makes it worse instead of better.” I guess we can only define a story ending this way: negatively. I reassure myself by thinking that, above all else, an ending has to not ruin the story.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Being funny is definitely an important part of your work.
CAMILLE BORDAS: A novel that doesn’t have humor doesn’t interest me very much. There doesn’t have to be a joke on every page—it can be a single light moment in five hundred—but it has to be there somewhere. There are exceptions to that rule, of course, but in general, the books I love have made me laugh.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How would you characterize your humor?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I have a dark sense of humor, so I try not to joke a lot in public. There’s high offensiveness potential. I’ve always loved humor based in exaggeration or relentlessness; characters who insist, who won’t let go. In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Murray tells Gladney that Gladney’s wife, Babette, would be “great to have around in a family tragedy. She’d be the type to take control.”
Gladney replies, “Actually, she falls apart.” Murray keeps trying to insist that there must be a situation in which Babette doesn’t collapse, and Gladney denies it every possible way. The list makes me laugh every single time.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How did humor become important to your work?
CAMILLE BORDAS: My first novel is pretty dark. The main character is sad and angry. When the reviews came out, the darkness was mentioned, sure, but there was also a lot of talk about humor. Many readers came to me and said that they’d laughed a lot, which I almost took badly. I wanted to write serious stuff, you know? The fact that I’d been funny without realizing troubled me, too. I thought they’d been laughing at my handling of characters, and that I’d done something wrong. Thinking back on it, I struggle to remember the intentions behind my first novel. I know I didn’t want to write a sob story. It’s very troubling to look back on one’s first novel. We don’t know what we’re doing at all. At least I didn’t. I was nineteen/twenty when I wrote it. What was out of my control in my first novel, apparently, was the humor. I didn’t see it was there. And I don’t know why it is that I didn’t see it as a strength right away, when I was told it was there. If all the books I love have made me laugh at one point or another, why had I not deliberately wanted that for my own?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the ways your stories make me laugh is by having your narrators address an ostensible audience. (“Also, yes, I talk to my cat;” “Glauber is a name, in case you’re wondering, and it was Glauber’s name.”) Do you imagine the person your first-person narrators are speaking to?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I don’t imagine my narrators talking to anyone in particular, no.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Is it a metafictional move?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I’m not really into metafiction (as a writer; I enjoy it tremendously as a reader). If anything, I think my narrators are talking to themselves when they say these things. They’re so lonely—those two in particular.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What attracts you to lonely characters?
CAMILLE BORDAS: They’re the most likely to read books! Actually, I often end up writing about lonely people who don’t read books, who haven’t found that solace. I guess I write about lonely characters who don’t realize how lonely they are.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Danielle in “The Presentation on Egypt” and Isidore in How to Behave in a Crowd both have anxieties about what to do or be professionally. Did you share those anxieties growing up? Do you still have them?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I do still have these anxieties. I guess I still see myself as a teen with options, though I’m thirty-two now. I’ve been writing for fifteen years, publishing for ten. Now, I teach writing in a great MFA program. I’ve made my bed and should stop whining that I don’t know what to do with my life. Do I even still have a choice? I tell myself sometimes that, if I wanted, I could be a doctor or a ceramicist or a wise mountain hermit in the south of France. I don’t know where those delusions come from.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Death in your stories is friends with the mundane. It’s never melodramatic. In How to Behave in a Crowd, the big first death is revealed over dinner and is incredibly understated. In “Most Die Young,” the par- ents’ narrators have died during a terrorist attack but not in the terrorist attack.
CAMILLE BORDAS: In the November 2015 Paris attacks, one hundred thirty people died. Suddenly, all the flower shops were out of flowers. I thought, how terrible—for everybody, yes—but I was thinking mainly about the people who’d lost someone on that day but not in the attacks. Now, they couldn’t bury their loved ones with flowers. Strangers, Parisians, were buying them to honor other strangers. I’m obsessed with death but always one step to the side. In “Most Die Young,” it brings home the fact that the narrator’s parents were never exceptional people. That they could’ve died on the right day but not in the right way.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you think a lot about death?
CAMILLE BORDAS: Yes and no. I think about other people’s deaths all the time. I worry for everyone all the time. Maybe not as much about my own. I’m not really interested in books about romantic relationships, where no one is afraid of death at any point. So it always finds its way back in even when I try to avoid it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: There are a lot of orphans, Camille.
CAMILLE BORDAS: That might be because I don’t want my stories to feel unrealistic or like sob stories. Becoming orphaned is, presumably, something that happens to most of us. It’s our most common experience with death.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Where does the obsession with death come from?
CAMILLE BORDAS: It’s going to sound horrible, but my family often joked about death. What’s the most ridiculous death that someone could go through? The stupidest? I fear ridicule more than a lot of things, so when I think about my death, I fear mine will be something very stupid. That’s what worries me more than the fact that I’ll never be again.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Isn’t writing somehow an invitation to being ridiculed?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I am someone who will fear ridicule no matter what, and yet I’m also someone who intentionally exposes herself to it. Sometimes I drink a little too much, or say something stupid while not even inebriated, and regret it for years and years. I still think of shameful moments from middle school: that day I mistook Finland for Norway, for example. I am, and will always be, full of shame no matter what I do, though. I might as well write fiction and take the risk of feeling stupid in that particular way.