Megan Fishmann

In her debut novel—voted by BookPage readers as their most anticipated book of 2012—Nichole Bernier has written the story of a friendship full of twists, turns and heartache. We asked Bernier a few questions about the book's origin, her life as a mother of five, and her book's place in the literary canon—and got the scoop on where she's going next.

This is your first novel. Can you tell us a little about your publication story?
I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and though I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it. But after I lost a friend in the September 11th terrorist attacks, there were things I couldn’t work through in my regular ways of writing. One day in early 2005, shortly after the birth of my third child, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. That sequence became the beginning of chapter three, and it’s never changed.

My big rookie error was in querying immediately after I finished my first draft. My mental timeline was still that of a magazine freelancer: finish, publish, paycheck. I wasn’t used improving something slowly and tortuously with no one in the world even waiting for it. We’d just moved to Boston and I was expecting my fourth child, and eager to cross “Get Agent” off my to-do list. There were some requests for partials and fulls, all leading to rejection.

I put the manuscript aside and fell into the rhythm of life with a newborn, not quite knowing what to do next. A few months passed. Then I received a three-page, thoughtful rejection letter from a well-known agent. Even as a rookie, I recognized this as more of a blessing than a rejection, and threw myself into revisions. When I felt ready to query again, I received three offers of representation, and chose agent Julie Barer.

Julie worked with me for a year, urging me to streamline my story and weave more closely the timelines of my two main characters. After she sold it to Crown, the trajectory of the process suddenly made sense, all the steps and hard work, as if I were viewing it as a whole from a space satellite. 

It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close.         

Kate is responsible for deciding what to do with her recently deceased friend Elizabeth’s trunk of journals. How did this idea of bestowing journals (via a will) come to you?
I’ve always kept a journal, and been fascinated with why, exactly, people do this crazy thing, put private thoughts to paper. What happens if you’re hit by a truck tomorrow? Were you really writing for your own reflection and catharsis, or were you having your say? Years ago for peace of mind I wrote an informal note in my will designating a trustee for my journals, even if it simply meant identifying someone to destroy them.

The what-ifs that generated the novel spooled out from there: what if you inherited the journals of a friend without clear direction what to do with them, and learned you didn’t know your friend nearly as well as you thought, including where she was really going when she died? How might you feel about why she didn’t confide in you, and how might that make you realize ways you were not candid with loved ones, yourself? It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close, our private ambitions and fears, and what it costs us in the end.

Reading through Elizabeth’s journals, Kate suddenly sees their entire friendship in a different light. Would you read your best friend’s journal, if you had the chance?
No. People have their reasons for what they reveal and what they do not, and I would never want to force that exposure. But many people hold things closer than they in fact need to, assuming they’ll be misunderstood or that people don’t care to get involved. The most useful thing we can do as friends is listen for hints and dare to ask questions, help someone crack open the door. Signal receptiveness, and that we care.

Kate is terribly preoccupied with 9/11 and has a lot of fears/neuroses in its aftermath. Her husband doesn’t really understand this. Do you find yourself sympathizing with Kate, or are you more of the mindset of her husband Chris, who feels we should live each day as if it were our last?
In 2002, it felt as if anything could happen—reservoirs poisoned, Ebola unleashed, that you could wake up and the sky would be magenta. I think most people, myself included, felt for a while these things were not only possible, but probable. Most of us moved on from that paralyzing fear, but it was fascinating to me to create the profile of a person who was a confident and rational person, but became obsessed with protecting her family, and could not move on.

A big part of your novel concerns Elizabeth and Kate’s struggle as working mothers. As a mother of five, how do you manage both raising your kids and finding time to write?
Before I started my novel, my third child was six months old, and I was a fairly multifaceted person. When I became truly serious about my novel, most of my hobbies went down the tubes. It’s amazing how being a busy parent has the laser-like ability to triage what’s really important to you. I have an unscientific theory that if you are an involved parent, regardless of how many children you have, you get about three things to call your own. And the only other things that have remained for me are being involved in my kids’ schools and a base level of exercise, which went from running (reluctant, frenetic) to yoga (strengthening and calming). More than anything else, though, it was critical to have a supportive spouse who’d give me the hours and sometimes days away to really immerse myself in tough sections of writing and revision.

You write on your website, “before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear.” Do you find yourself tailoring your thoughts/emotions when you write somewhere like Twitter, since it’s so much more exposed?
Yes and no. Social media is wonderful in the same triage way that parenting is: it forces you to pick what you want to be known for. In the same way I wouldn’t want to say anything in front of my family that wasn’t sincere or kind, I don’t want that part of my permanent online record. But for social media to be fun and effective for me, I need to be authentic, and sometimes that means being exhausted and irreverent about raising five children. But everyone deals with unruly kids, so even in “authentic” I aim for a value-added, something to lift it above a mundane rant: humor, insight, a different way of seeing things.

One of my favorite parts of the book reads, “it was a gift, solitude. But solitude with another person—that was an art.” Do you think it’s fully possible to share solitude with another person? How do you manage the time to find—and create—that?
That’s the million-dollar question for relationships, I think. If you can be quiet in another person’s company and engaged in your own engrossing activity, with no discomfort or distraction or envy, it’s priceless. But it’s hard. There’s a lot of bustle that has to get done in the downtimes, and even when you go quiet, there are some things that are just difficult to do in the presence of someone else. I can’t write in a room where the TV is on, which is how my husband likes to work at night, but sometimes I join him to do other reading and computer work. I think it’s a matter of finding the common ground, the common setting, choosing where and when you can find that togetherness.

You have already been compared to other successful authors in the “educated women’s lit” group, such as J. Courtney Sullivan and Meg Wolitzer. How would you define educated women’s literature?
I think that phrase first came out of Carolyn See’s review of Nancy Munro’s New World Monkeys. I took it to mean readers who want to be challenged by what they read, be willing to go along with characters who might rub you the wrong way, but you still find them, their voice and their issues and circumstances, fascinating. Unlikeable characters are a hot button in the book world because for some they are riveting, drawn in a train-wreck way that grabs your investment, while others are turned off if they cannot identify with a character. It’s a bit of an excursion and an education, reading beyond your own experience and beyond your comfort zone.

You are one of the creators of the popular literary blog Beyond the Margins. Can you tell us a little about how that came about?

This has been such fun. We were a dozen writers who’d met in the literary circles around Boston, and two years ago decided to create a vehicle for daily essays on the craft and business of publishing. It started as a platform for our writing, as many of us were in the chute toward getting agents and novels sold. But it developed into an online literary magazine run amok—a place to showcase the writing of great guest authors, celebrate and promote other authors’ releases, and yes, interact with agents and editors.

We run fun monthly features such as The Page Turner—booksellers writing about their favorite lesser-known books—and Out Of My Comfort Zone, authors describing a recent bit of research or writing that made them distinctly uneasy. Save the Bookstore Day is a monthly feature that grew out of our passion and fear for independent bookstores, which seem to be dropping like flies. We also maintain an active Twitter feed, @BTMargins, to share news, essays and jobs in the writing world.

What are you working on next?
I’ve become somewhat obsessed with an eerie island, a fascinating and disturbing place that spans three distinct phases of history. The ruins are vivid, and haunting. It’s off-limits to the public, but I had the good fortune to spend a day there shadowing the Park Service. I’m at the point now where I’m fleshing out the story, and trying not to let the nightmares keep me awake at night.

Read our review of The Unfinished Life of Elizabeth D.

Author Koren Zailckas, whose best-selling memoirs Smashed and Fury chronicled her troubled youth, again taps into her own life experiences—but this time, she’s writing fiction. Her debut novel, Mother, Mother, is the story of the Hurst family, whose perceptions of themselves have been twisted by the machinations of their narcissistic and overbearing matriarch, Josephine. We caught up with Zailckas to ask her a few questions about her debut.

Did you find it more difficult writing your first memoir (Smashed) or your first novel? How did the processes differ?

Smashed was probably the more difficult of the two. Before Smashed, I had only written poetry and interoffice memos, so I had absolutely no concept of pacing. All I had was youthful enthusiasm and the kind of poor boundaries that lead a person to overshare. I wrote the first draft in four months and it was at least twice as long as it was supposed to be. My editor really had to help me crack it open and find the book encased within this crazy word count. I guess you could say in Smashed, bingeing was both the subject and the process. I wrote it the same way I used to drink: with no sense of moderation.

By comparison, Mother, Mother was an exercise in restraint. Structurally, I was aiming for something that was a bit like Rebecca—one of those books where the sense of unease builds and builds until the moment of clarity (however twisted) feels like a perversely joyous relief.

That said, withholding information has never been part of my writing process. It took me a number of drafts to get the release valve just right—to find that place where the characters revealed their true colors slowly and organically.

I had an aha moment when I realized not all the Hursts could be self-aware because a narcissistic family doesn’t have a realistic self-image. From that point on, the book became more about finding the meeting place between the Hursts’ reality and their delusions of grandeur.

This story is told through the points-of-view of two of the Hurst children, William and Violet. Did you find that you struggled with either sibling’s voice, or did they both come naturally to you?

There were definitely moments when it was easier to tap into Violet than Will, and visa versa. But mostly, I felt like I could relate to them both. To me, Will and Violet represent the two dominant thought processes in the mind of anyone who’s had early life trauma.

Will is a little bit like the amygdala in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s stuck in his childhood fear and he constantly feels like his safety is at risk.

Violet, on the other hand, has more intellectual understanding about why the people around her behave the way they do. But she can also be a little too scholarly and metaphysical about it. Violet is kind of a Buddhist punk, and by the time we meet her, she’s heavy into drugs and Eastern religions. She smokes pot, she meditates, she stands on her head. She’s desperately hunting for a coping mechanism—some jumble of Sanskrit words she can repeat to make all the self-hatred her mom instilled in her go away.

The irony is, each of them needs what the other has. Violet needs to tap into her painful feelings instead of transcending them. And Will needs to stop being ruled by his fear.

You might say that Josephine keeps her family in a perpetual “gaslight” state: anything she did to them, she later vehemently denies, convincing them it was all in their mind. Is this type of behavior common with narcissists?

Totally. Even if you see the method behind a narcissist’s madness—and that’s tricky to begin with, they leave a trail of confusion—it’s nearly impossible to confront them about anything. They’ll say it flat out didn’t happen. Or they’ll question your memory. Or they’ll say you’re the one who’s crazy. They’ll cry and rage. They’ll blame and demonize you, and likely rally as many supporters as they can to do the same. Narcissists are beyond reproach or compromise because they live in denial.

I used to think it was really calculating. But I realized, very recently, that they’re actually speaking their truth. Narcissists can be kind of dissociative. When their perfect image is threatened, they literally blank out and go somewhere else in their minds. One therapist explained it to me by saying, “They’re not thinking that they want to hurt you. They’re not thinking about anything at all.” Their emotional landscape is kind of like the static station on the TV. It’s not evil. It’s just kind of blank.

How much research did you do on Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

For the past three or four years, I tried to read everything I could find about personality disordered parents. There are a few very helpful titles out there.  Karyl McBride’s Will I Ever Be Good Enough? is one. Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother is another. There are also some shocking examples of narcissistic parenting in Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.

NPD is a spectrum disease, meaning some people just have a few narcissistic traits and still others are full-blown malignant personalities. A lot of narcissists you meet are those people who give off the impression that how things look on the outside—the appearance of the family, or the company, or the marriage—are more important than the reality within. They’re also really great gossips. They control the flow of information. They pit people against each other. They choose to surround themselves with people who either bring them attention and status or people they can use as scapegoats for the negative emotions that don’t jive with the perfect image they’re trying to project.

But two things are really at the heart of the condition. One is grandiosity. Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents. With Josephine, you can see that in the way she pretends she’s this groundbreaking educator. The second is lack of empathy. Narcissists are biochemically incapable of putting themselves in other people’s shoes. Jo is pretty shameless in this latter respect. Faced with news of a cancer diagnosis, she sees no problem using it as an opportunity to bash the woman’s vegan lifestyle (Jo’s attitude is: “See, it just goes to show. . . . All those years of tofu and oat groats, all for nothing. I’ve always said that woman needed a steak.”)

In an age where woman are repeatedly told to lean in, and that they can have it all, do you find that mothers—more so than fathers—feel pressure from society to look perfect on the outside (balancing a home, work, family life and relationship) while they may be struggling on the inside?

I’m not sure our society demands perfection from mothers, but I do think it scares the bejesus out of us. It’s constantly trying to convince us that we’re unwittingly inflicting irreversible damage. You see that all the time in TV news headlines: “What are you packing in your children’s lunch that has the hidden potential to kill them? Find out tonight, during Fox at nine.”

Now that I’m a mother myself, I feel that panic. And I see this smothering self-doubt in my female friends with kids. It’s this fear that you’re going to mess your children up by way of not being informed. The Internet has a lot to do with it too. If our parents suffered from lack of parenting resources, we suffer from too many. There’s just so much unqualified, polarized information online and no one really knows what to do with all of it.

"My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy."

Get a group of mothers together, and the number one question you’re apt to hear is: “How concerned should I be?” How concerned should I really be about the arsenic in rice? About BPAs in cans? How concerned should I be that my toddler can’t say 20 words? What about the fact that my baby doesn’t sleep through the night?

The antidote to parental narcissism is entering your child’s world. Noticing them. Talking to them. Acknowledging their full range of emotional expression and letting them clue you in to their own distinct, individual needs. When you’re looking at a computer screen, it’s easy to neglect some of that.

At one point Edie says to Josephine, “Ask any farmer, they’ll tell you some moms just aren’t naturals. Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you f***ing Beethoven.” Do you agree with that statement? Did you worry about your own ability to adapt to motherhood?

Definitely. My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy.

Also, from a really young age (like, I was still playing with dolls) my mother would tell me that I wasn’t maternal. In retrospect, it seems like a strange projection, something she was just working through on her own, but you don’t understand these things when you’re little. As a kid, you simply take it as fact. As a result, I shied away from babies and toddlers for a long time. I sort of felt like the woman in the psychiatric ward during Violet’s stay—the one who has an Edward Scissorhands complex, the one who wants to hold people but fears she’s going to maim them in the process.

It took me a long time (and a lot of therapy) to realize I wasn’t my mother, but at the end of the day, I still felt like I was missing the maternal handbook. The things I remembered my mother doing when I had play dates over were not the things I wanted to do with my own kids’ friends came over. The things I remembered my mother saying when I hurt myself were not the words I wanted to use to comfort my own kids.

But then, I realized I’ve had a lot of other kindness in my life to draw from. I’ve had really maternal teachers, aunts, uncles, second cousins, in-laws, friends. And those people inspire the way I relate to my kids. They’ve given me a lot of love to pass on. Collectively, they’ve taught me a lot about mothering.

You are very open about your difficulties with your mother. Were you worried that writing a book about an abusive mother figure would worsen your relationship?

It’s been about a year since I spoke to my mother. I wish her well, and I understand the way her upbringing gives her certain emotional limitations, at least in the way she relates to me. This isn’t one of those situations where I stopped talking to her because I didn’t get enough hugs as a kid. It was more like the present issues had become far too disruptive.

Hopefully, if she reads Mother, Mother she will recognize it’s fiction—a way to deal with real feelings by way of a fictionalized family and an imagined scenario. Somehow I doubt she’ll see it that way, but it’s the truth. Life is full of thorns, and I’m just trying the very best I can to tend my own garden. Writing is a survival mechanism for me. I can’t not do it. It’s the only way I know to make sense and meaning out of difficult things.

How much of your past addiction history—i.e. the need/desire to escape through drugs or alcohol—did you draw from when creating Violet’s character?

Well, drinking was my drug of choice. Violet is more into drugs, but I still drew quite a bit from my own addiction history. It’s taken me 10 years, but I see now what I couldn’t when I wrote Smashed: my home life was so painful, binge drinking was an attempt to kill myself in a way that seemed accidental and, even, socially acceptable (at least for a teenager or college student).

Violet’s drug use, in part, is about numbing out. No one in her family cares what she’s feeling—in fact, any expression of emotion gets her into trouble—so why should she acknowledge her despair, even to herself?

There’s also another reason Violet turns to drugs (and this is the truly sick one): on some subconscious level, she’s really trying to appease her unappeasable mom. Josephine is angry, she’s sick, she’s out of control. But being kind of emotionally stunted, Jo needs Violet around to act out those feelings for her.

Jo has left Violet with little choice except to be the “bad” Hurst. If, say, Violet swung the other way and tried to be an honor student, Jo would swoop in and take all the credit. If Violet went out for school sports, her mother would mock her. If she put more effort into the way she looked, her mother would accuse her of putting on airs. The Hursts need Violet to be a slacker and a problem. Without that low-level distraction, they’d be forced to confront the source of their issues. And no one in the Hurst family feels safe doing that.

What are you working on next?

I’ve got a few other psychological thrillers in the cooker. It’s strange the way imagining scary stories can feel almost healthy. I feel like I’ve had a kind of awakening. In all my years of writing, I’ve never had more fun.