Q&A: Chelsea Bieker on Her Portland-Set Novel ‘Madwoman’
“I peed on the stick already knowing,” Portland novelist Chelsea Bieker writes, inhabiting a fictionalized version of her own mother’s psyche. “Here was that blonde little girl come to ruin my life. ‘I’m late for work,’ I said, and I scrambled out of the house, drove like a madwoman to my daddy’s. For what reason I didn’t know.”
That fateful moment, blanketed in a thick California drawl, comes from Bieker’s 2022 collection of short fiction, Godshot. But the quick-witted, doomed, and largely autobiographical story serves as a kind of prologue for her new novel, Madwoman, published September 3. Clove, the narrator of Madwoman, is that blond little girl. Though when we meet her, she’s a long way from her mother and father. She left home abruptly at 16, the moment her mother, after years of his incessant physical and psychological abuse, pushed Clove’s father off their high-rise apartment’s balcony. But that’s all buried in the past. That was when Clove was still Calla Lily, before she disappeared and constructed a new identity. The Clove we meet is in her 30s, living in Portland with her safe, stable husband and their two young kids. As far as they know, her parents died in a car wreck when she was young. Then her mother writes from prison; she’s found her and wants Clove to come out of hiding and testify at her appeal hearing.
Clove is playing a character of modern domestic bliss, concerned mostly with young motherhood and the utopia-in-a-vacuum that is her local upscale health food store. Listening in on her thoughts, we find the hardened inner life of someone compulsively disciplined to hold down secrets. But Clove isn’t a moonlight assassin; she’s desperate to fully and irrevocably transform into the person she’s created, and wondering how long she has to keep up the act before she believes it: “I was a mother, a wife, I was Clove.” This, of course, was “a lie that had transformed into a truth,” Clove muses, “as real as my two children that looked at me with assuredness: Mom.” She tries to heal her way into authenticity with a parade of magnesium, vitamin D3, Suntheanine, reishi powder, and liposomal vitamin C, wondering if a balanced gut microbiome, or enough cod liver oil, could have saved her parents. A refrain runs through the book: the human race continues because we all believe we could do better. Motherhood dragged her own mother into a relentless cycle of abuse, but Clove hoped it would bring her salvation, a clean and indelible split separating her past life from present. Instead, her kids are an indelible link to her past. And the trauma of her own childhood haunts her.
Bieker’s characters are never one-for-one replicas of people in her life. Neither are the events in her stories. But they do, quite explicitly, stem from it. Today, not unlike Clove, she lives in Portland with her two young kids and husband. (She knows her way around a New Seasons.) Like Calla Lily, she moved with her abusive father and alcoholic mother from Fresno to Hawai’i as a young girl, where they lived in a high-rise apartment. Nobody was pushed off its balcony, however. Instead, the family split up, and Bieker’s grandparents took her in when she was 10. She kept in touch with her parents—both of whom died in the past few years—primarily through phone calls. In several essays, for the Paris Review, LitHub, and even People Magazine, she’s written about these complex relationships, love tangled with abuse and trauma, and of how she often explores them in her fiction. This transparency is rare. Instead of denying parallels between her fiction and her own biography, toying with the reader, or consciously addressing the overlap in the text, she’s plainly open about it in public.
“No, my mom didn’t murder my dad,” Bieker told me at a café recently. “I didn’t, like, escape and create a new identity. Though, often, I’m writing into this idea of, What would’ve happened if?”
Matthew Trueherz: It doesn’t seem like you’ve ever worried about telling true stories from your past in your fiction, and saying that’s what they are. Which is fascinating, because the central, animating worry of this entire book is its narrator’s fear of people finding out where she comes from. When you drop your kids off at school, or run into acquaintances at the store, do you ever worry they’re like, Oh, that’s the lady who wrote that book?
Chelsea Bieker: Maybe my situation is unique in the sense that my mom was very much like, “Go get it, kid.” Like, “Fucking write whatever you want. I want you to tell the truth in the way that you see it.” I think she sensed there was a little redemption in that. My dad, also. For him, I think it was like, “That’s all I can really offer you. There’s nothing I can do at this point, except give you this sort of spiritual permission to go to town.”
It’s not like these are memoirs. So, picking up my kids from school, or whatever…. The material can feel dark and confronting; that’s the thing that I most often get. Like, “Wow, that was really hard to read.” Well, it was really hard to live, too—times a million. And people live like this every day. I think it’s good that we confront some of that. And I don’t mind being a conduit.
MT: Where did the book start for you?
CB: I wanted to write this zany book about motherhood and wellness powders and Moon Juice and crystals and all this shit. And then it turned into this much deeper thing, because I couldn’t think about motherhood without acknowledging this other piece. It was so entwined for me.
MT: As harrowing as some of the material is, I don’t think it’s hard to read. In fact, a lot of the book is really funny, particularly the way Clove approaches wellness. She seems acutely aware that no amount of ginger immunity shots will solve her problems, but she also lets herself believe they might. And sometimes these things do help. Everybody knows if you drink a $20 smoothie, you’re like, I’m alive!
CB: [laughs] Look at me! But yeah, the wellness stuff was fun to write about. I think in the book [Clove] says, “I felt like I was always catching up to common knowledge.” Her childhood was so preoccupied with survival, and when you’re survival-brained all the time, there’s not a lot of time to think, How do I feel? Like, Could I use a vitamin? Could I use a supplement? Am I drinking enough water? Clove really sees [wellness] as the antithesis to her childhood: just stay focused on these things, these safe, approved items. There’s a sense of productivity in attaining them and using them.
MT: Do you see echoes of her parents’ substance abuse in her wellness fixation?
CB: Yeah, I mean, she is, on her own level, kind of addicted to these things—and to buying things, reaching outside of the self to satiate something with these material items that maybe soothe the beast for a few hours, but it’s really a short fix. It’s like what they call in recovery “switching seats on the Titanic.” You’re still going down.
MT: We talked in the beginning about these distinctions between yourself and the character. Do you ever worry that the life you’ve built for yourself is a construction, that it isn’t real, or is precarious?
CB: I’ve thought so much about this idea of, like, Who are you, really? There was so much put on me at a young age, which really clouded my own vision of [myself]. What is my personality really like if I’m not in that survival mode? I wanted to write this book with this element of total reconstruction, a true identity shift, because, so often in my life, I’ve been like, What would it be like to just…
MT: —start over?
CB: Yeah, to not have to carry that story anymore. That story is really heavy. It’s exhausting. I’m kind of tired of it. What if I was just like, “It never happened”?
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Chelsea Bieker will read from Madwoman at Powell’s, Thursday, September 19.
Source link
