This year Julia Slavin released her first collection of stories, oddly titled The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club. Many of Julia’s inventive stories mix realism with the impossible. A housewife swallows the yard boy in a fit of hormonal passion. A woman breaks out in teeth all over her body, and eventually caps them in gold for her lover. Scandal drives Maisie Haselkorn to cut off her leg and rid herself of mosquito bites. An actress’ lover falls apart – literally thumb from limb from torso – when she can’t choose between her home life and him.

Julia’s stories reveal emotional truths with a strategy similar to that of Tim O’Brien’s stories or Degas’ paintings. None of them tell, or even show, us the literal truth. Jack Gilbert described this kind of lying best when he wrote, "Degas said he didn’t paint / what he saw, but what / would enable them to see / the thing he had." Julia’s use of metaphor does exactly this.

This interview was conducted via email.

Camille Renshaw: You once said, "I take a metaphor a step too far." How true. What do you think a metaphor is, or can be?

Juilia Slavin: I wanted to write about passion, all-consuming passion, and addiction. The best way to suggest their enormity is through these wild, excessive metaphors. I don’t really think my stories are metaphor driven, however. I am just trying to tell good stories. A metaphor is a challenge to the reader, a challenge to look at something ordinary in an extraordinary way.

CR: When did you first experiment with these over the edge metaphors?

JS: I had a crush on the boy who mowed my lawn. It was horrible. He’d come by, and I’d put on a miniskirt and Jane’s Addiction, and this was all in front of my husband who thought it was pathetic. But if you had seen this boy... I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to describe this kind of passion. I thought of the album cover for Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by The Cure. It was an extreme close up of a mouth, if you got any closer this mouth would swallow you. In fact, that’s what Robert Smith had in mind. Anyway, I wanted to describe overwhelming, unquenchable desire, all-consuming passion, which is how I got "Swallowed Whole."

CR: Your stories deal with all sorts of unmentionable passions. Can you tell more about the origins of the individual stories?

JS: Most of these stories come from daily life, believe it or not. I’ve talked about my feelings for my lawn boy. The evil company in "Babyproofing" is based on a real experience. After my first child was born I hired a company called Baby Guard to make my house safe. They made over a thousand dollars on my hysteria. Was it a rip-off? No, they made it possible for me to lead a normal life without daily panic attacks. It’s an illusion, but I’m willing to pay for the illusion of comfort. I wrote the story from the man’s point of view because of the distance children put between husbands and wives. The man is biologically left out. Couples imagine that having a child will be a continuation of their love. It’s not. It’s a third person. In "Babyproofing" the husband is sent away.

I was visiting friends in the Hamptons and was devoured by mosquitoes. The itching was so horrible I wanted to cut off my feet. I had tremendous welts all over my legs from the scratching. I looked like a leper. I went to a snooty art opening. I looked around. Everyone else was unscathed. I thought, these people are somehow immune. That experience kicked off the title story.

"Dentaphilia" comes from pain. There was a horribly unfair death in my family, my brother’s child. A friend called as he was dying and asked how I was feeling. I said, "Awful. I feel like I have teeth growing all over my body." I’d had a long difficult illness a couple of years before and was aware of how much more painful it was for people around me, which is why I told the story from the point of view of the husband. It also came from reading Freud.

"Rare is a Cold Red Center" came out of all the restaurant work I used to do as a teenager. There was a clear hierarchy: white women were waitresses. Hispanics in the kitchen. Blacks working the ovens. The characters in the story are all based on people I knew. Someone asked me which character in the collection I most related to. I said it was Corky, the drug addict grill chef. Peter Ustinov really did come into a restaurant where I was working in Washington. Everybody knew who he was but couldn’t think of any of his movies.

The idea for "Painting House" came to me as I walked into a new building and smelled fresh paint. Nothing evokes memory like smell. I remembered the summer after eighth grade when my brother painted my parents’ house to pay for a lawyer after he’d been arrested for drugs. When he finished painting, he went to jail. It was a painful time. I was lonely and felt no one would understand how I was feeling. I felt responsible for myself. Everybody else had checked out.

With "He Came Apart" I was interested in writing about fanatic careerism, how it can destroy families, and what happens when an affair becomes the domestic situation and, the primary relationship becomes the affair.

CR: Passion is key to this collection. Jeanette Winterson wrote in The Passion, "In between fear and sex, passion is." To what extent does fear fuel your work and your characters?

JS: I don’t agree with the Winterson quote. I think fear keeps us out of trouble, and passion causes us to do things we wouldn’t normally do, dangerous, self-destructive things. I think my characters are trying to break the bonds of safety because in their safety there’s loneliness, the death of feeling.

CR: I’m drawn to the artful, cryptic way you let the reader learn about your characters. You assume the reader is smart enough for the ride. I like that. You’ve said, "In the suburbs we think we’re happy; there are huge amounts of people living together in denial, and nothing is more fascinating than denial." Why do you think you’re drawn to writing about denial in this way?

JS: Denial is the way we throw a blanket over our true selves. Uncovering the self makes for great drama, I think. Isn’t that what fiction is – finding the road to the self however painful? For instance, the neglected wife in "Swallowed Whole," whose passion is so great she incorporates the love object, swallows the beautiful boy. By denying her Self as a sexual person in exchange for comfort and seclusion, she practically explodes with passion trying to sweat it out of herself, running through the streets looking for the lawn boy.

CR: I’m going to throw some words at you. Just give me your first reaction. Yes, or no, or something more.

Whiskey.

JS: Never liked the taste but wanted to… I love the word; it’s so sexy. It goes with slutty. I think of a broad in a tight red sweater.

CR: Suburbs.

JS: Leave them alone. They are fine.

CR: World Wide Web.

JS: Big spiders named Mussolini and Pinochet and Marcos.

CR: Sex Outdoors.

JS: Mosquitoes. Encephalitis.

CR: Franz Kafka.

JS: Oh, him. That guy. Whadda ‘bout him.

CR: Lobster.

JS: Butter.

CR: Your stories are all so personal. Do you ever have to suppress the urge to run from this emotionally intense material? How do you continue to stay in it until the story’s finished? At the heart of this I would think is the inexplicable reason why you write.

JS: Yes. Constantly. It’s like ditch digging. It’s a job. If I could do something else, I would.

CR: Then what keeps you at your desk?

JS: The fear of failure keeps me at my desk. Also, I’m trying to get that rush you can get from writing well. It happened to me once about six years ago when I was writing "Rare is a Cold Red Center" and not once since. Most of the time the work is drudgery. I don’t know if you can ask a writer that question and get an adequate answer. It’s like asking why you pick scabs. There are better things to do.

The real reason I write is to be heard. I grew up in a family of men and always felt invisible. I still feel that no one wants to listen to what a broad has to say. I write hoping that someone will listen.

CR: What is the sound of your own voice like to you? I would think this is a particularly strange time in your writing because of all the recent attention you’ve received. So many people are interpreting your voice back to you.

JS: I find I’m never at a loss for ideas but finding a voice to go with them is impossible. So I end up hating my voice most of the time. It’s been really difficult writing through the attention for the very reason you stated, that others are telling me what I’m trying to say when I wasn’t really sure in the first place. But the attention is dying down, and I’m going back into the wilderness and loneliness where it’s possible to work.

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