5 Questions with Phoebe Kranefuss
Today, we published the final installment of Phoebe Kranefuss’s story, “Don’t Touch Me I’m Prickly.” Michael Colbert spoke with her about the story, her sense of humor, and what’s interesting to her in fiction these days.
The Rejoinder: What was the kernel of this story for you?
Phoebe Kranefuss: I had the idea to write a hero’s journey story featuring an unheroic hero—I usually write with absolutely no outline or plan, but for this piece, I plotted out every single plot point while consulting a hero’s journey diagram (and fighting off ninth grade English class flashbacks). I will probably never use this approach again, because it’s way more boring than just writing and seeing what happens.
Celine and her peers are loosely based on some of the women I met while working at an eating disorder treatment center about five years ago. I remember going in and thinking I’d change people’s lives (I was very naive at twenty-three), and quickly learning that many of the women didn’t want their lives to be changed, and in fact, were very angry to be getting better, and very angry with me. But underneath that anger was a certain fragility. I think about those women sometimes: their stubbornness, their anger, their conflicting desires, and the way mental health treatment can be really infantilizing and inhumane. With this story, I wanted to give those women a heroic revolt without losing sight of the absurd realities of treatment.
TR: Celine’s a writer who's deeply in her head, imagining the lives of others. How were you thinking about her desire for intimacy in this story?
PK: I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness, especially in young people, and my very close knit group of friends from college, and how I never ever would have survived my early twenties without them. Eating disorders thrive in solitude, so on the one hand, Celine wants to be alone, but on the other, she wishes she had a solid group to navigate life with. That was kind of me in high school: I envied the popular crew, because they had so many people to call on, mostly for the boring tasks of everyday life: complaining, going to the bathroom at parties, that kind of thing. Celine wants to believe she’s better than everyone around her—too intellectual, maybe, to crave human contact—but she comes to realize that this isn’t entirely true: that she’s smart, but not as smart as she thinks she is and way lonelier than she likes to admit.
TR: I’m really interested by your humor–across your work; how do you understand the relationship between humor and vulnerability?
PK: Oh, thank you!! I think at my core, I’m worried people will forget about me if I don’t make them laugh. I think I crack jokes (in my writing and in my life) to be like: Hey, I add value! Keep me around!! I think we’re all basically scared that people will reject or forget about us, and I’m interested in characters who cope with this fear with humor.
Narratively, I feel cringey being too vulnerable, and I really despise saccharine or precious writing. So if I’m writing about vulnerable or emotional topics, I have to pepper in some jokes. It’s the same premise as mixing bottom shelf liquor with juice, I guess: I’ll write/feel the feelings (bad tequila) as long as I can dilute them with humor (pineapple juice), which is easier and more enjoyable to digest. I could write stuff that was like “On the fifth day of her mourning, Gloria shrouded her face in a veil and sobbed hysterically, crying up toward the sky and missing her dearly beloved with every ounce of her fragile being,” but then I would hate myself.
TR: What’s exciting to you in fiction right now? What are you reading?
PK: I’m really into the type of literary fiction that would have been “women’s literature” some years ago. I love books that explore motherhood, relationships, marriage, female friendship, and women behaving badly. I have recently loved Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, J Courtney Sullivan’s Friends and Strangers, and Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street. I’m currently reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and impatiently awaiting Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s forthcoming Long Island Compromise.
TR: What else are you working on these days?
PK: Mainly my novel! I sent my second draft to my agent last week, and am now awaiting her feedback and hoping she doesn’t tell me to just give up and never write again. In the meantime, I’m writing short fiction (sometimes), but also working on lots of other stuff, because I have to keep a thousand projects going at once or else I fall into deep existential dread: I’ve been volunteering at an addiction treatment center, working on some freelance graphic design and marketing projects, writing nonfiction, getting about an article a month rejected by McSweeney’s, going to a billion weddings, babysitting, writing more short fiction, and sewing my summer wardrobe.
