An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke

You had a busy 2011, it seems, with your memoir, The Long Goodbye, and your second collection of poems, Once, coming out in quick succession. Were you working on both at once? Can you talk about that process?

Actually, for the most part I worked on them at different times. About three-fourths of Once was done before I began The Long Goodbye, and before my mother died at the end of 2008. I had wanted to write about two or three more poems—and I had a sense, given the book’s preoccupation with illness and preparing for a death, that the book in needed to tackle the aftermath of loss, not just its antechamber, as it were. But after my mother died, I found I couldn’t write poems—they were simply too open, demanded too much art; art I didn’t yet have at my fingertips. However, I could form sentences, which had the advantage of connecting one to the next, like a rope along a tricky mountain path. So I started writing the pieces that became the early sections of The Long Goodbye. When The Long Goodbye was done, I went back to Once, to write some poems that the book seemed to me to want—the poem “Still,” and “After Her Death” (which I had actually drafted in fragmentary form right after my mother died), and “My Mother,” and a few others.

Is there any common ground between your processes for writing poetry and non-fiction? Can you characterize the difference?

Hmm. The common ground is making myself sit at the desk, even when I don’t want to. Agony? Agony is common to both. But the mental/creative processes are very different—there’s a thread of continuity to prose that is extremely satisfying and less terrifying than the chaos of writing poems. With poems, there is so much indeterminacy, so many choices to engage with. And many more blank pages to face. Writing The Long Goodbye almost felt like an enjoyable vacation from that chaos: I liked that I could wake up and know what I had to work on next. When you’re writing a hefty piece of narrative nonfiction, there’s a lot of ground you know you have to cover—you have a list of things you need to get to. (In my case they were all written out elaborately on index cards.) That was intellectually enjoyable, despite the book’s dark subject matter.

In The Long Goodbye, you talk about engaging with the literature of grief as a means of working through and exploring your own grief. Do you see The Long Goodbye as a contribution to this literature? Or are its goals of a different order?

Yes, I do very much see it as part of the literature of grief—if we’re talking about the literature of grief, and not self-help books. I mean books like C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, and so forth—books that both illuminate the lived experience of loss and are literary in their methods, at least on some basic level. Which is to say: I thought a lot about clarity and communication in The Long Goodbye—and I chose to write it in a style that is deceptively simple, given that the book also circles around and repeats itself in various ways, in order to dramatize the instability of one’s experience of grief. But I also wanted the book to have sentences that sung for the pleasure of it. I thought about how the sentences should feel as they were read.

Was your decision to write The Long Goodbye at all influenced by contemporary contributions to this literature of grief ? Joan Didion’s, for example, or Anne Carson’s more elegiac Nox, which you reviewed for The New Yorker?

The desire to write The Long Goodbye arose long before I knew of Nox’s existence. In fact, I hadn’t read Nox when I wrote most of The Long Goodbye; I’d nearly finished a draft by the time I it came out. I had read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, years earlier, but that book felt very different from the book I wanted to write, which was specifically about the loss of a parent. And more specifically, about losing a parent when you aren’t firmly settled in your own life yet—on the threshold of your own full adulthood.

You’ve written and edited for a number of the finest magazines we’ve got: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate, and others. How has your development as a poet and a non-fiction writer been influenced by these experiences?

I can’t fully address all the complexities of this, but certainly working as an editor has made me more aware of the importance of revision. It also made me realize that often I need time to see what’s not working in a piece or a poem. I think one of the best things you can do as a writer is put what you’re working on in the drawer and not look at it for six months, then take it out and rework it. The needs of the piece become very clear at that point, and you often can take a poem or a story to a new level.

Having worked as an editor, I’m very aware of how much editors can help a writer—I love it when I find a good editor. A good editor is one of the greatest gifts a writer can get; they’re a kind of ideal reader, a companion in those moments when you think that no one really cares about whether or not you sit at your desk and write.

And, finally, a question that is both always expected and always worthwhile in a student journal: what advice can you give to young writers?

Read as widely as you can. Make sure to read outside of contemporary literature—go way back. Be a serious student of your genre, and don’t just look for the easy pleasures. Try to be somewhat systematic in your reading, to see what a writer’s strengths and weaknesses are, to get to know the habits and convictions of a given time period. Don’t just read for what you “like”—think about what it is that any given writer does well.

Meghan O’Rourke was born and raised in Brooklyn. She has taught at Princeton, The New School, and here at NYU; she has also served as poetry and advisory editor for The Paris Review as well as culture editor for Slate. Her individual publications and awards are too many to recite here. Her first collection of poetry, Halflife, was received with accolades; her new collection, Once, has as well. She has also recently released a memoir, The Long Goodbye, a moving exploration of grief and the death of her mother.