Alice Cary

When one of the two central characters in your debut novel is dead, there are unintended consequences, as Anna Montague reveals at the start of our conversation about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? In the book, Magda, a psychiatrist who is turning 70, takes a lengthy, life-changing road trip with the cremated remains of her best friend, Sara, buckled into the passenger seat beside her.

“My apartment is just covered in urns,” Montague says, speaking from the Brooklyn apartment into which she has just moved. “I’m actually really looking forward to exploring other decor options once the book is out. I have maybe 15 in my entryway.”

In fact, Montague’s late grandfather, who was the manuscript’s first reader, suggested she call her book The Urn. People have already been sending them to her, and no doubt she’ll be getting more with the publication of her highly anticipated novel. What’s more, one of these gifted vessels may actually contain remains. “It sounds distinctly like there are some ashes in it,” Montague says, laughing, “but it seems to be locked. I don’t know who sent it, so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern with that one.”

“I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

While she was working on the book, Montague lost not only her 100-year-old grandfather, but two other dear people: her 94-year-old grandmother and a woman named Dorothy (Dot), one of her father’s elderly neighbors whom she had befriended. One day, as Montague dog-sat for Dot’s husband, who was traveling, she suddenly realized that Dot’s ashes were in an urn in the room where she was writing. She notes that “many of the impulses that Magda has” towards her friend’s urn in the book—like talking to it—“are very true to real life. At least for me. I found that the desire to connect and pay homage to that person still very much existed in ways that I didn’t expect.”

Montague’s initial inspiration for the story came when her therapist dropped her. “It’s not as sad as it sounds,” she interjects, explaining that during the pandemic, her therapist—whom she guesses was in her 70s—decided to downsize her practice to only patients she was seeing regularly. “When I asked her what she was planning to do with all of that newfound free time,” she continues, “there was a pause. And she said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll travel.’ I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

Thinking about her therapist led Montague to the character of Magda, and Sara’s character appeared soon after. “I thought I was drafting a short story,” Montague recalls. “And within a couple of pages, Sara was already there. I thought, ‘Okay, this is perhaps not a short story, and this is definitely about the relationship, the friendship between these two women.’”

Readers who plunge into this heartfelt, well-told saga may be surprised to discover that Montague is only 31. “It is very easy for me to write from the vantage point of a senior citizen,” she admits with a laugh. “Perhaps too easy.” She describes her friendship with an 80-year-old named Lena, noting, “if you just had a profile of the two of us, you would never know that I was the younger one. [Lena] likes dancing to house music and afternoon boat cruises, and I am often in bed with a cup of tea at an hour that I won’t disclose. But I’ve spent a lot of my life around significantly older people, many of whom were mining the difficult space of recognizing that their lives were more than likely half over, sometimes more than three-quarters over.” The conversations Magda has with herself about what it means to enter her 70s are drawn from ones Montague has had “with many of the older folks in my life.”

“Most women I know become happier and more fulfilled as they get older,” she adds, “and I wanted Magda to very slowly come to terms with that.”

 “That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.”

Montague got to know Lena through SAGE, a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ elders and fosters intergenerational connections among LGBTQ+ people. Hearing about Lena’s experiences living in New York informed Montague’s writing, including her decision to set How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? in 2011, just before New York state’s Marriage Equality Act.

“One of the things I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the inherent queerness of female friendship,” she explains. “The intimacies that are allowed both privately and publicly to female friends that aren’t allowed to men. As an adult, for example, I’ll often have a friend stay over, and my male friends would never have a sleepover. . . . Women are encouraged to support each other in ways both emotional and physical [that] are so different from the ways that men are socialized.” She suggests that the intimacy of female friendships can be confusing for male partners, even a source of envy, “because it’s a degree of closeness that they have not been allowed. And maybe it’s even a degree of closeness . . . they have not been able to achieve with their partners, you know, because those needs are being met elsewhere.”

Montague dedicates her book to her friend Isabel, whom she calls “the platonic great love of my life.” They met at summer camp and have been “a constant” in each other’s lives since they were 13. The two talk every day, and as Isabel is a poet, they often confer about writing projects.

Once Montague decided that Magda would take a road trip, she says, “I had a pretty good sense of where she would go, but I didn’t have as much of a sense of what would happen to her emotional or intellectual self along the way. That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.” She adds, “The first draft had many more flat tires and a number of more absurd characters who didn’t make it through to the final manuscript.”

Montague also turned to psychology textbooks for reference. They were useful for chronicling Magda’s psychiatric practice as well as Magda’s own inner struggles, which are much harder for Magda to face than her patients’ quandaries. Montague confesses, “There were many moments when I just wished I could grab Magda by the shoulders and shake her. And then I had to remember that I was the one creating this person and all of her problems—which meant I was also responsible for solving them.” Never fear, readers. The solutions—and the long and winding roads that Magda takes to reach them—are one of the many delights of this book.

The author still feels connected to Magda and Sara, and anticipates that these characters may reappear in her writing. However, she is now “very much in the weeds with the next one”—something completely different. Montague is an extremely busy literary professional: She also works as an editor for Dey Street Books, focusing on narrative nonfiction, science and wellness books. (She recently worked on NPR music critic Ann Powers’ “kaleidoscopic” biography of Joni Mitchell, Traveling.) Montague says that it helps that she suffers from insomnia, which gives her time at night for her own writing. Writing fiction while editing nonfiction dovetails nicely for her. “It feels like there’s just enough distance between the two, but there’s enough overlap that I can learn and apply those learnings to the other,” she explains.

Montague has always filled her life with books, and juggling between different ones is nothing new. As a preschooler in Irvington, New York, she kept books in multiple rooms so that one was always at the ready. She kept one in her bedroom, another in the kitchen and yet another in the front hallway so she’d have something to look at while putting on her shoes. She began writing short stories at a young age as well. “I was always particularly captivated by people and their motivations for—everything really,” she says with a laugh. “I think at the heart of it, that’s always a principal focus and fascination of mine.”

What about that therapist who dropped her and inspired How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? Does she plan to send her a copy?

“Yes,” Montague says. “She was very excited to hear about the book, and we’ve exchanged letters here and there. My current therapist is also excited to read it, but I’m a little scared of what they’ll make of it.”

Read our review of How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Anna Montague author photo by Hannah Solomon.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.

The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?

Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.

I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.

At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.

There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.

“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”

I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?

I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.

Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.

And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.

Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write? 

Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.

“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.

Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.

Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.

Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.

Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”

This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.

The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?

I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.

Read our starred review of The Mighty Red.

Author photo of Louise Erdrich by Jenn Ackerman.