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Courtney Zoffness has a way with beginnings. Consider the opening sentence of her essay, “Boy in Blue”: “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.” Or the instructions at the start of “Holy Body” on how to prepare your body for a mikveh, which involves not just washing every limb and hair but emptying both your nose and bladder. Motherhood, it could be said, is to be in a constant state of beginnings, and it is this very human condition of fluctuations that Zoffness examines in Spilt Milk, her debut collection of memoirs. Whether with the broken glass of a wedding ceremony, the reimagined streets of 1960s Aleppo, or an anxious child waking with “wild, lidless” eyes, Zoffness continually immerses readers in the tactile and emotional specificities of her world, where inheritance passes beyond familial bloodlines to encode itself on whole countries and cultures. These ten essays are generous and vulnerable, warm and acerbic all at once, much like their author, whom I had the pleasure of speaking with in early February.
Sara Batkie
Tell me how this collection came together. At what point did you know you had enough material to make a book?
Courtney Zoffness
It came together kind of accidentally. I think of myself as a fiction writer who was writing these one-off essays, and then I was giving a reading and the friend who was curating the series went onto one of these databases to find some of my work that he could share with his classes beforehand and found a bunch of these essays. So when I started reading them in preparation for the event I discovered they all had a common thread, along with the one I was working on, and I realized that the thing I always thought of as my side hustle might actually be a book. I also had several ideas for other essays that attended to similar themes, so that’s how it came together: because I didn’t think of it as a book. The timeline is a little tricky but the oldest piece in there is the one about visiting Freiburg, Germany before I had kids, but most of them, I’d say 80% of the book, were written in the last three to four years.
Sara Batkie
A well-put together collection like yours always reminds me of a good mixtape. There’s a sense of rhythm to it, not just in considerations of length or content but in how it feels. Was that something you were consciously thinking about while editing? Did you move things around or consider other orders as you went?
Courtney Zoffness
I love the mixtape analogy. You’re talking to a child of the 80s. The book had several different orders, and there were even different preferences among the literary professionals helping me put it together. For me, the opening and closing essays were always clear, and it was what followed or came before, as it were, that needed to be figured out. So I trial ran a couple of different orders before I settled on this one. I care a lot about language and tone so I was thinking a lot about the juxtapositions of the pieces, and also the information in them because it’s a memoir in essays and there’s the question of how much one needs to know in order to comprehend bits of biography.
Sara Batkie
You mentioned that you think of yourself primarily as a fiction writer. Is there any difference in how you approach that genre compared to memoir?
Courtney Zoffness
Craftwise, less so. But yes, in fiction I can invent whole worlds and I just don’t have that luxury here. I’m really limited to my life. But I do think being a fiction writer has been very useful in prioritizing narrative when writing memoir, as opposed to meditating on an idea, which is how I’d characterize a lot of essays I love. But I tend to write narrative essays because I was trained as a fiction writer and it’s what I did first, and what I love to do, so those impulses helped shape these pieces.
Sara Batkie
Inheritance—not just what’s passed on in families but in whole cultures and societies—is one of the major thematic threads of this collection. Were you interested in this subject prior to becoming a writer and mother? Have your feelings on it changed at all since?
Courtney Zoffness
I think my interest in it was really activated when I became a mother. I don’t think the book would have been written had I not done that. Even the earliest piece had threads of my thinking about starting a family, and it’s the lens through which I view all the subjects that I tackle in this book. As far as how my feelings have changed, I think that relates specifically to the essay on anxiety, which evolved over lots of years as I worked on it. It used to be very research heavy and I went down this scientific rabbit hole looking at things like parent-child transfer. I think where I have arrived is the futility of that exercise, and my acknowledgment that it wouldn’t have mattered if I found some sort of proof that I gave my child my anxiety or that my parents gave it to me. I’m still very interested in the subject but writing my way through that experience has brought me to a place of maybe a healthier perspective, which is: so what? What does that say about my unique family dynamics and what light does it shed on anything?
Sara Batkie
Motherhood in many ways feels like such a fraught topic to explore. People seem to have so many opinions about it, whether they’re a parent themselves or not. Did you have any apprehension or fears at all about putting so much of that aspect of your life front and center for the judgment of others?
Courtney Zoffness
Curiously, the answer is no. But I just wrote an op-ed about having a six-year-old with Covid that was published in the New York Times and, because it has such a wide readership, I became a real troll magnet for all kinds of folks. The Internet is a dark, dark world. So while I didn’t have any apprehension in composing these pieces and I didn’t have any in putting the book together and publishing it, I am more eyes-wide-open now about what the reaction might be. I don’t know how one steels oneself against that, but hopefully folks will be kind. As you’ve probably observed, the stakes of motherhood feel high for me and this is one of the motivations for thinking hard about how I parent. Of course it’s going to sting a little more when that’s a role I’m being criticized for.
Sara Batkie
Reading this, I often thought about Lorrie Moore’s quote that you should always write things you’d be scared to show your parents. But in this case, of course, you’re often writing about your children. Do you think they’ll ever read your book? What do you think they’d make of it?
Courtney Zoffness
You know, the gestation of a book is so long, so by the time I wrote it, circulated it, got it accepted for publication, edited it, to now publishing it, my son is now several years older than when I was first writing about him. So I have some galleys lying around and I’ve caught my nine-year-old a few times reading it. At first he was excited because he thought he was famous. And I had to explain that being in an essay collection with a small press does not result in personal fame. But it’s hard to imagine what they’d make of it because by the time they’re old enough to really metabolize it in all its layers and with all its intents, I don’t know who those people will be. They’re young versions of themselves, but I felt okay including what I did on the page because, for the most part, they’re under five in these essays, in their masters of their universe stage. Now I ask their permission to include them in things that I write, if I feel so moved to write about them now.
Sara Batkie
I love the title, “Spilt Milk,” which a lot of us probably recognize as an admonishment from childhood. What does the phrase mean to you and why did you select it for the book?
Courtney Zoffness
The idiom does evoke parenthood and childhood, but it also evokes accidents. And I was thinking about how it’s used in popular culture now. I see politicians invoke it as, like, let’s look forward and not back, “no use dwelling on the past.” I saw it being used during the Black Lives Matter movement, after brutal killings as a means of dismissing people. It really is a way of saying “get over it.” I think that’s kind of the implication. But I think there’s a lot of value in looking back and looking hard at mishaps. Not to the point of immobility, but I think there’s a tremendous amount of importance in looking back to look forward. How do my models of motherhood inform how I mother? That’s the kind of question I want to explore in the book.
Sara Batkie
What’s next for you? Any virtual events that our readers can attend?
Courtney Zoffness
I’m back to working on fiction, thank God. I’m so sick of myself. And I don’t know what this project is exactly. I’ve given myself permission just to play, and it’s a joy to not be limited by my own life. And I have a pretty robust virtual tour with several upcoming dates that I hope readers can join.
NONFICTION
Spilt Milk
By Courtney Zoffness
McSweeney’s Publishing
Published March 2, 2021
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