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Take a chill pill” is a harmless enough—albeit rude—imperative: Calm down. Relax. Hush. But the phrase quickly transforms from harmless to insidious with a brief Internet search. Not only can you buy Chill Pills® for “natural relief” from anxiety and insomnia, but “chill pill” is, historically, a slang term for ADHD medication. The phrase came into popular usage in 1980, when the condition was first officially recognized. ADHD (then ADD) became part of popular debate, as pharmaceutical companies manufactured—and advertised—little pills promising relief from hyperactivity and wandering attention: symptoms that made schooling and the 9-to-5 more difficult. The height of the term “chill pill”? 2016, when American fears of a post-democratic, hyper-capitalist dystopia peaked.
In her exciting debut novel, The Enhancers, Chicago writer-pharmacist Anne K. Yoder creates a world terrifyingly similar to our own: a “chill pill” dystopia of pharmaceutical dependence, consumerist compliance, and productivity culture. Calm down. Relax. Hush. (Produce. Consume. Obey.) The novel is set in Lumena Hills, an insular town which becomes a pharmaceutical hub with the establishment of Lumena Corp. in—yes!—1981. Whether young or old, the inhabitants of Lumena Hills consume “natural” pills and supplements. There’s Valedictorian for enhanced mental agility and retention, Soporific for enhanced creativity and cognition, even XTRA_lyfe for enhanced pep and positivity. Bored and overstimulated, the three teenage girls at the novel’s center take pills for heartbreak and existential angst and academic achievement. And yet, despite all their brainpower, they can’t see that these pills have outsmarted them.
On a sunny Saturday in November, Anne and I talked about the novel’s chill pills and pharmaceutical voice, not to mention Byron’s bear and the American dream. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth McNeill
I want to start with your writing process. Did you find that, in order to build this world, you had to replicate your characters’ behaviors—keeping a million tabs open on several screens and continuously watching chimpanzee cams? Or did you find the opposite (and one of the novel’s key points) to be true: that you needed emptiness, silence, and boredom?
Anne K. Yoder
That’s an interesting question, in part because my process involves both. With this book, it started with an idea and an impression of Lumena Hills and Hannah. I needed silence and stillness to be able to enter that world and imagine it. In some way, it felt like an act of excavation, of knowing it was there. My sense of it was: There was something that was compelling me to write about this, but it was this large idea of the town existing and the characters within it. So, I had to sit with that. As I found the characters’ obsessions—for Hannah it’s the chimps—I followed their obsessions. So, I read some Jane Goodall and read about chimps, I watched animal cams, which I had at points done before, but never really been like: What’s out there on the animal cams? What can I see? I was reading about chimp behavior versus bonobo behavior and realizing, like, this all relates to human behavior. And then that informed the book, too. I work in modes. The writing and the creating involve a lot of silence and imagination. I find if I go the other way—if I do too much research—it weighs it down for me. I get really caught up in the research and can go down that rabbit hole.
Elizabeth McNeill
We get so many perspectives in this novel, even a pharmaceutical perspective that slowly comes to question its own expertise. At what point did you decide to make this book polyvocal?
Anne K. Yoder
It was polyvocal from the beginning. It was partly because, with this idea, I had more of a sense of the world and I wanted a certain amount of complexity. I wasn’t thinking about certain polyvocal acts, I was thinking more of a musical score containing multiple instruments. I was thinking, too, of Robert Ashley, whose Perfect Lives is an avant-garde soap opera. But he also called it a “performance novel.” It’s written according to music, but there are multiple voices creating this American landscape. And then I was thinking: Well, what else have I read? Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which is so different. The voices add a texture. And I really wanted the book to be from more than one perspective. I wanted to focus on Hannah coming of age as a teenage girl and her discovery of the world. In order to offset that, there’s the awareness of the pharmaceutical world she’s within. I also wanted there to be a pharmaceutical voice. So, I wanted to do a lot within one book, but I also feel like it took me so long to figure out how all of these voices go together. Early on, I had no intention of writing Hannah’s father, Harold. Then I just started writing. And he was just so easy to write, and I was just like: What is he doing here? He’s present and I’m just going to go with this. I was compelled to write him. Okay, but how do all of these voices work together? For me, this was an interesting question and took a very long time to figure out.
Elizabeth McNeill
That’s so interesting that you were thinking about music and literature coming together. I was wondering if you could talk more about language in this novel—maybe even harmonization. In an earlier interview, you said that you thought of The Enhancers as “a poet’s novel” when you began writing it, but that the narrative became more prominent over time.
Anne K. Yoder
When I started writing the book, I thought it would be easier, in some ways, to write a polyvocal book that is more language-driven than a polyvocal book that is narrative-driven. I was really interested in language and how that creates voice. So, I think a novel that’s more language-forward and maybe more philosophical—having that as the guiding force was really compelling for me. I started this book in grad school, then took a break: I was trying to figure out my life post-grad school. And I continued. Then I realized that I had written more of a plot. I think a lot of this process and time was, like with Harold, realizing what the book is and trying to find a way to bring my ideas about the book in line with what I was actually writing. The pharmaceutical voice is the closest to the original in terms of being poetic. Its presence isn’t grounded in any one character, and it’s interwoven throughout the novel. The other thing I was thinking about with the “poet’s novel” was the structure. I was thinking about a package insert for medication. The structure of the package insert is very specific: the FDA has a template for it. There aren’t really variations. I’m sure there are things you could add or exclude, but there is a certain order. I was interested in how that could help shape the book. I also had just read Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. It’s a scientific tract on a fictional sea creature; it’s almost like a pataphysical text. I had read this around that time and I was just thinking: How can I create a scientific structure for this text? At the beginning, I was thinking of it adhering a bit more rigidly to that structure. That remains in some ways, but it’s very flexible and fluid.
Elizabeth McNeill
Tell me about the role of literature in The Enhancers. You just talked about Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. And in the book, you reference Dante’s Inferno and Shelley and Byron’s Romantic poetry. I especially enjoyed when Hannah becomes a pharmaceutical Bartleby after a nurse asks if she participates in “mood-boosting activities.”
Anne K. Yoder
I felt like I needed to study literature before I could write. And maybe to a fault. You can obviously read more in the sense of, like, someday I will have read enough to write a book. I also really loved books that reference literature—not just name-dropping but allusions, like Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman. It’s such a good book. It’s funny how the Romantic poets play a big role in it [The Enhancers]. I was obsessed with Shelley and Byron for a while and had taken a class on them in college that focused on their time together in Switzerland and Italy. They have a presence because Hannah in Lumena Hills is so isolated from nature. Pharmaceuticals have replaced this fascination with nature and being part of it. Hannah’s fascination [with animals] relates back to that. At the same time, she’s just getting sound bites. Also, Byron had this whole menagerie of animals that he lived with. He had a llama! Go find the list of the zoo animals he lived with—it’s insane! I think he had a pet bear. He was somehow able to keep it. Because he was Byron! Percy was also someone Hannah could look to because he was kicked out of school for his writing on the necessity of atheism—that sense of both immersion in nature and pushing back against the society that you’re in. Being in that space of writing and literature and imagination: it’s borrowing without recognizing it because it’s sharing that space, it’s taking from life and literature.
Elizabeth McNeill
Hannah’s father, Harold, takes a pill called Empathy, and he’s particularly caught between action and inaction. He wants to close the distance between himself and his loved ones, but he buckles under the impossibility of doing so. Could you talk about Harold as the character who feels the most in the novel, thanks to a handful of pills?
Anne K. Yoder
It’s one of those contradictions in the book: the role of pharmaceuticals. He’s taking pills to compensate for this memory deficit caused by taking pills, but yeah, he does feel more than the other characters in the book because of this. It’s full circle in some ways. This dependence was created by the pharmaceutical industry, but he’s also able to be more present because of it. Maybe that paradox is not far off from what I think of as our own social relationship to the pharmaceutical industry. I’m thinking about the vaccine for COVID and how instrumental that has been. We’re obviously living in a similar but very different society than Lumena Hills. I am so grateful for the COVID vaccine, but there are all of these pharmaceuticals that do have side effects and that we just learn to deal with. One example would be the prescription of antidepressants. A lot of times, they’re given by a general practitioner or it’s the most direct way to deal with depression, but maybe not the best way. At the same time, antidepressants can be lifesaving. There was a recent article in the New York Times about teenagers and their depression and anxiety and the medications they’re on—overmedication, frequently. It’s complex. I had a friend who asked me, “Are you scared that anti-vaxxers will read your book and think you’re speaking for anti-vaxxers?” The thought had crossed my mind, but nothing is straightforward. I’m asking more questions and part of the pushback against pharmaceuticals is really about capitalism, rather than one thing being good or bad. They’re just tools.
Elizabeth McNeill
The cycle of pharmaceutical consumption leads really well into this other question I have about what you just called “our own social relationship to the pharmaceutical industry.” The setting of Lumena Hills is eerily recognizable from our present standpoint. Hannah calls her mother, Judy, “a layperson’s chemist,” which I understood as a Big Pharma self-actualization coach. Is that what you meant?
Anne K. Yoder
Oh, totally.
Elizabeth McNeill
Great! [Laughs] And then Judy controls Hannah’s consumption to maximize her chances of success, as if controlling Hannah’s intake controls her uncertain future. Was a critique of capitalism and modern consumption and productivity culture on the table from the get-go? Or did it result from building the novel around the enhancement pills you so convincingly created? Basically, chicken-and-egg: Which came first?
Anne K. Yoder
Right, maybe they both came at once! I don’t even know, in part because I’ve worked within the pharmaceutical industry. I probably couldn’t write about pharmaceuticals—within a town where there’s a pharmaceutical company—without also including some type of critique. They were both there. I think the critique and focus on productivity runs across so many workplaces. But in pharmacies, they’ll count how many prescriptions you do per hour. They have a certain ratio that’s within safety levels, and I’ve worked at places where they try to keep you at the max of what’s safe while increasing your workload. I’ve been at places where, if it drops to even a more manageable pace, then they’ll have one fewer person on shift—to maximize capital, or their own profit. There are just so many ways that I’ve witnessed this, both in terms of achievement and productivity and self-care, seeing different supplements and probiotics. I’ve seen Goop companies offering regular probiotics that are packaged really nicely for insane amounts of money, where you could just buy it off the Internet for a fraction of the price. It also comes from personal experience: growing up in a family where academic achievement was really focused upon, at least in elementary school, high school. My older brother was the model student. I always pushed back against that in some way. I could see both his drive and his unhappiness. Over time, seeing how this has played out in our lives… we kind of switched places, in some ways. He spent all of his teenage years focused on achieving and he went to Yale Law and he’s just like, “I have other things to do than live my life at a firm!” The drive to achieve can really overlook so many of the more interesting aspects of life. What is success? It’s a question, too, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and rugged individuality and this sense that each person has the freedom to become whatever they want to be. The American dream is based on achieving, and often with capital. It’s also such a lie in so many ways! In Lumena Hills, it’s easier to create this space where everything is focused on achievement and the stakes are: either you can have a job in the pharmaceutical industry, or you can live on the outskirts of society. One of the reasons why I wanted to involve Judy, Hannah’s mother, was because she, as a layperson’s chemist, really buys into this narrative of achievement and wants this for Hannah. But she also wants it for Hannah in the sense that she can’t separate her own desires and needs, her desire for success, from her daughter and her own needs. Judy, in spite of her faults, was compelling to me because she wants what she thinks is best for Hannah—but it’s obviously not—because she’s so much a part of the system.
Elizabeth McNeill
For me, the novel’s biggest question is: What is a self, especially if a self is composed of and enhanced by so many non-selves? What were your main influences and realizations as you turned over this question?
Anne K. Yoder
Well, what is a self? I had read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience and was reading different essays of his on consciousness. I was reading Henri Bergson on memory [Matter and Memory]. There’s no way to actually contain a self. There’s mental illness in my family, and my grandmother was schizophrenic. I didn’t know this until I was a teenager—and I spent a lot of time with her. What is madness? What is delusion? How can different selves have such different ideas of the world? It really doesn’t have to be psychosis or something like it. It can be: How can two people experience the same thing and have completely different ideas of it? Just look at American politics to see such polarization. I was more interested in the ways that chemicals can alter how we think. On a fundamental basis, we’re composed of different chemicals. And taking a small pill can totally change your perception, at least temporarily, but also in some ways long term. What does that mean? Are you a different person? What I came to realize in this questioning of self is that you can’t isolate one self from time. In thinking about Hannah taking Valedictorian and mental augmentation and it not sitting well with her, I thought: Who would people be without Valedictorian in this novel? I ended up thinking this isn’t a question to even wonder about because you continuously make decisions in life and each decision leads to a different path. Maybe it’s easier to think about choosing one route within a quantum life.
Elizabeth McNeill
[Laughs] Oh, wow!
Anne K. Yoder
[Laughs] That’s really too complex. A self is fluid and a product of environment and thought. Hannah is wondering: Who would I be if I were someone else? Well, you would be this other version of you—which is what leads to thinking of quantum lives. You can’t know! I was reading a book by a journalist who had started taking Adderall or Ritalin for ADHD and became addicted to it, then went off of it [Casey Schwartz’s Attention! A Personal History of Finding Focus (or Trying To)]. She’s writing about drugs and experience. In a conversation about the book, she talked about this desire to go back before she had ever started. Maybe some of that has to do with her addiction—but it’s this idea of being a blank slate, of being able to return to this place before you had this experience. It’s a human inclination: nostalgia. Of wanting to go to the past and go back and do things in a different way. But there’s also the reality: You take a certain drug, you go to a certain school, you help your friend escape from the town, then you face your life forward. You can have nostalgia for other choices you might have made or other things that might not have been forced upon you. But the self is who you are in one specific moment in time.
Elizabeth McNeill
How has writing The Enhancers changed your self—as a writer, pharmacist, and human?
Anne K. Yoder
It’s really the way I’ve integrated my practice and knowledge of pharmacy into my creative work. I felt like they were two different things that I did—even though I’m the same person—and I kept them separate. For so long, I’ve wanted to write a book. I think most writers feel at some point the impossibility of it. By spending so much time with these characters and ideas, my perceptions have changed along with the book, too. In writing a novel, I had to learn how to listen to and write the different voices, and that required a certain compassion for the characters. Although I can’t pinpoint it specifically, I do think there are ways I had to grow in order to write this book. This is a book that, with its many voices, took a while for me to figure out. There’s a difference in wondering whether I can pull this off. It’s here and present. There’s that sense of release. Okay, this project is done, and I don’t know what’s next. I’ll probably know better how it’s changed me a year or a few years from now!
FICTION
The Enhancers
By Anne K. Yoder
Meekling Press
Published October 4, 2022
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