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We often pigeonhole people and their abilities: you’re a writer or an editor, a poet or a novelist, creative or strategic. My (admittedly anecdotal) experience suggests that such binaries are a fallacy, and Jill Bialosky is a distinctive example of how one can successfully juggle “all of the above.” As Executive Editor of W.W. Norton, she shepherds talented writers through the publishing process; as a writer, she’s a poet, essayist and novelist; and as an interviewee, she’s tremendously thoughtful and engaged. The Deceptions reflects that sensitivity, examining both an individual’s complicated experience as an educator and writer, mother and wife. Most of all, the protagonist—like many of us—is seeking elusive concepts of success and love, and most of all, creating a fulfilling, and integrated self in a complex world.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mandana Chaffa
This is such a rich, multi-threaded novel. What was the central question that inspired it? And how did it change from that initial proposition?
Jill Bialosky
The central question for me was how will my protagonist survive her crisis and how will it change her. Her only son has left for college, her marriage is unstable, she’s anticipating the publication of her new book-length poem, The Rape of the Swan, that is partially in conversation with Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and also inspired by an entanglement with the Visiting Poet at the all-boys prep school where she teaches. At the opening of the novel, she learns that The New York Times Book Review has scheduled her book for review and it has her jittery. And then there is a situation that she is repressing regarding her friendship with the Visiting Poet. All to say, the deck is stacked against her.
Mandana Chaffa
When reading poetry, we often start by examining the title of a poem: I’d love to start the same way with The Deceptions. The use of the definite article informs one of the premises of the novel for me, a sense of the many deceptions we suffer under, participate in, ignore, acknowledge, justify, to ourselves and others. It had me wondering how much of our lives are deceptions versus truths.
Jill Bialosky
Yes, that’s true and something I wanted to explore. Deceptions occur daily; minor deceptions, for instance, about not telling someone exactly where you’re going, what you’re working on, holding back information for self-interest. And then there are larger deceptions with more consequences. We live in delusions about ourselves, or we rationalize our behavior. One of the questions my novel provokes is how well we can really know ourselves, and can we recover from deceptions we’ve committed and participated in. What happens when we feel deceived? My central character is a participant as well as a victim of deceptions, and that was a web I wanted to explore.
Mandana Chaffa
The description of the Academy at which the protagonist teaches—as well as the broader literary academy—feels especially true. One of the elements it underscores is the scarcity of praise, of power; across generations and genders, especially in poetry, but in the arts overall. There are also issues around what it is to create something new, how to balance teaching and writing, and essentially, trust and fairplay within the literary community. What are your thoughts about the shifting literary landscape as it stands now?
Jill Bialosky
I agree with your comment about the scarcity of praise, of power, across generations and genders, especially in the arts. My protagonist faces these hurdles both as a teacher in a patriarchal institution, as a poet in a male-dominated literary landscape, and perhaps even in her marriage as she strives to balance teaching, writing, and the pressures to be a “good” wife and mother. I asked a friend recently if she believes that the patriarchy still influences and shapes genders. This friend has a young daughter, and she sees how her daughter’s concept of herself is shaped by the male gaze. I trust many women’s conceptions of themselves have been unconsciously shaped by the male gaze now and throughout history. My protagonist connects contemporary life with the Greek and Roman societies she’s exploring both in the classroom (she’s teaching The Odyssey) and through the art and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum where she goes to seek sanctuary and answers.
I don’t inherently see that much has changed in terms of the literary landscape. Now that more women writers are hitting bestseller lists and winning prizes, it is interesting to note that in fiction by say Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, Ottessa Mosfeigh, and Han Kang, female characters rebel against patriarchal structures and are given agency. Sally Rooney’s female characters are smart, self-critical, confident, and ambivalent about ambition. In Luster, Raven Leilani dared to cast a young black woman in publishing who is not necessarily a moral character. In Ottessa Mosfegh’s fiction, we see women characters who as Ariel Levy wrote in The New Yorker, “tend to be amoral, frank, bleakly funny, very smart, and perverse in their motivations, in ways that destabilize the reader’s assumptions about what is ugly, what is desirable, what is permissible, and what is real.” In Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, we meet a woman who aspires to turn herself from a woman into a tree to escape patriarchal structures. All to say that the patriarchy still rears its self-important head, but writers are taking them on in their work.
Mandana Chaffa
The other side of deception is betrayal, and there are many betrayals in the professional and personal relationships in the novel, physical, emotional and otherwise.
Jill Bialosky
To explore agency, power, appropriation, sexual power, desire, and violation it was imperative to conjure betrayals.
Mandana Chaffa
There’s a lot of interiority with the primary character; and one wonders whether that also inspires some of her personal suffering. Is that part and parcel of being a poet, a writer?
Jill Bialosky
This is the first novel I’ve written in the first person. Hence, we only see the world through the narrator’s point of view. I wanted to dig into this character’s psyche and the thoughts, memories, desires that press upon her. I suppose some writers may be more attuned to interiority because we live in our own heads when we create. In The Deceptions I juxtapose a character who on the outside is functioning well—she’s teaching, writing, showing up at home for duties—and yet, this other interior world about her poetry, and her missteps is absorbing her. We all lead messy lives. We are all flawed and we don’t always act in ways that we think we should. We repress to move forward. Does interiority create more suffering? I’m not sure. She has a lot to absorb. The loss of one of her twins shortly after birth, her mother failing from dementia, concerns about her son, her marriage. And then this big thing she’s repressing that comes back to threaten to undo her. It’s a lot! And the job of fiction, as I see it, is to get into the interiority of our characters, into their messy lives, honestly.
Mandana Chaffa
There’s a hopeful—if bittersweet—epilogue in the novel that offers us a sense of closure, and perhaps an idea of what the outlook might be for future generations; was that an important element for you to conclude on?
Jill Bialosky
At a certain point in drafting the novel I realized that I wanted to create a new myth, as it were, for younger women where it may be possible to turn the clock toward equal agency. I like to think of the novel as a female, feminine, feminist fairy tale fueled and composed in a fever dream. One strand in the novel concerns my protagonist’s relationship with her neighbor’s daughter, a scholar of literature in the making. While my protagonist teaches at an all-boys’ prep school where she’s hoping to have some influence on their coming of age, she also mentors her neighbor’s daughter. The ending may have been inspired by a revenge fantasy! I wanted my protagonist to have the last word.
Mandana Chaffa
New York City plays a significant role in this book; the familiarity of the spaces, the way you insert delicate descriptions and nuances of what makes this city both intimate and impersonal is lovely. Would you talk about using location as a character?
Jill Bialosky
Authenticity of place is crucial. It’s where characters live and breathe, and of course place forms aspects of their character. New York City is a monster of a city where people from many diverse populations and social strata, from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, dwell together. It’s a city where you live a lot of the time on the street getting from one place to another. The city breathes and hums. It’s a place of intense ambition, and the very nature of survival is challenged. It is also the center of art, where art is created, made and displayed. And yet, amidst its intensity there is isolation, loneliness, and despair.
Mandana Chaffa
The book conducts a deep-dive exploration into the facets of intimacy and long-term relationships, between spouses, friends, parents and children. I especially appreciated how amid the sharp depictions of how we can betray each other, you also share a certain amount of forgiveness, though perhaps the hardest thing one can do is forgive oneself. “How well do we know each other? How well do we know ourselves?”
Jill Bialosky
I wonder if this is the fundamental question—how well we know ourselves—literature probes, besides love and death. We think we know someone and then we are betrayed. Betrayed in the workplace, in love and in friendship because of jealousy, desire, need. And then, we must evaluate our part in it. Consider who we may have betrayed and why. Even small betrayals have consequences. Literature can offer a window to remind and reflect. I hope readers may find that in The Deceptions.
Mandana Chaffa
The book considers the profound nature of loss, especially the loss of joy, the loss of desire, the loss of a child. I was equally interested in your contemplations of passion, and the absence thereof, the fine line between: “To want more is to test the gods. To want less is to decompose.”
Jill Bialosky
Those sentences, “To want more is to test the gods. To want less is to decompose,” are fundamental to the novel. I’m glad you responded to them. How do we balance our desires with their consequences? Every action has a consequence. What’s interesting about the Greek and Roman myths is the power figures like Zeus, Poseidon, Perseus wield. If they desire a mortal, they shape-shift no matter the consequences to have their desire satisfied. Desire has more consequences for women. For instance, let’s take the story of the Gorgon Medusa who was the most beautiful of the Gorgon sisters. Poseidon rapes her and Athena turned her into a monster. Why punish Medusa and not Poseidon? Are women to be punished for their beauty and for being the objects of desire? My narrator wonders how she will be punished if she allows her own desires to overwhelm her. But not so much the Visiting Poet. And yet if her desires aren’t realized will she decompose? So yes, we all live at that intersection.
Mandana Chaffa
Let’s talk about visual art, which is woven through the book. I thought it so effective and unexpected in a novel to view so much artwork: first, we see what inspires the protagonist, and second, readers develop their own relationship with it. It’s almost like ekphrastic prose. Did you anticipate at the outset that you’d include so many images?
Jill Bialosky
The novel was inspired by a visit to the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I wandered through the halls exploring the artifacts, the statues of the Greek and Roman gods, of men and women of Greek and Roman society, warriors, athletes, nymphs, I thought this is where it all began, these ancient civilizations that have formed the framework of society. Suddenly, in images of Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, etc. the patriarchy loomed its ugly large head. This experience reminded me that the issues that concerned Ovid, Homer, and Virgil have never vanished far from our own culture. I took photos on my iPad of the gods and goddesses and other figures and artifacts, and they became integral to my project, and I felt strongly that they needed to be in the book.
Mandana Chaffa
The investigation of mythologies—and let me say, I still have my copy of Edith Hamilton’s book from junior high school—is particularly robust in The Deceptions. I think our personal and cultural myths also offer meaning and direction as we seek ways to examine and conduct our lives in such complicated times, especially the friction between what we can control and can’t, self-determinism and fate. But specifically about “Leda and the Swan,” which is a rich and complicated topic for both your protagonist and for us. The visual and literary perceptions of how the rape of Leda by the swan are depicted—even, unimaginably, as a seduction in some quarters. What do you think this says about societal perspectives of female autonomy and female voice, especially now?
Jill Bialosky
The investigation of mythologies has been important to my researching and writing of The Deceptions. I also have Edith Hamilton’s book on my shelf along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey. During the early months of the pandemic, I listened to Claire Danes read the great poem on audio and it was mind-blowing. The theater of Homer came alive for me in a different way, especially what these poems tell us about the whole of society.
I just read a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn about a new translation of Metamorphoses in The New Yorker, and the last paragraph gave me chills because it explained exactly my project in writing The Deceptions. It is a reference to Stephanie McCarter’s introduction to her translation where she writes about Ovid’s themes. They are about “the way power works; the traumatic effects of loss of agency; the dark force of the objectifying gaze; the sometimes surprising interplay among desire, gender, and the body, gender fluidity and asexuality, the human will to self-expression.” I thought, holy moly, this is a great description of The Deceptions.
Mandana Chaffa
There’s the implication that art provides solace during times of challenge. I wonder, though, can it also supplant real-life interactions, which are messier, less engaged with beauty and perfection (the latter in many ways the antithesis of our ordinary, quotidian lives)? When I was re-reading the book, I thought that one of the subtle suggestions of The Deceptions could be how exterior “passions” may interfere with intimacy with the imperfect people in our lives. Or is this another occasion of my overthinking?
Jill Bialosky
No, I don’t think you are overthinking. I do find that working on a creative project is indeed like living in a separate reality just as one is creating a separate reality. You go down the rabbit hole and it is a completely private and obsessive experience. And of course, in my experience it is grander and more dramatic and sometimes more rewarding than the quotidian life. When you write in first person, the perception to some is that the author is writing about herself. If that were true, I’ve joked that I’d have to be on a high dosage of meds because my character is on the edge and has experienced tragic events she can’t undo. Of course, I too have experienced tragedy in my own life, but writing a novel is creation, it isn’t autobiography. The short answer for me is that indeed, life can be more vital on the page, and it can fuck you up.
Mandana Chaffa
I’ve also been re-reading your poetry, and I found myself returning to the last couplet of “The Lucky Ones:” “It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace / incarnate, how we never knew.” Throughout The Deceptions, there’s a subtle, strong thread—whether it’s about children moving on, marriage evolving, friendships shifting, or our closely-held dreams shattering—regarding the pain of knowledge, of truth. Even the mythologies referenced in the novel often entwine knowledge with downfall. As a poet and fiction writer, is there such a thing as too much truth? Would any of the characters in The Deceptions have had a different outcome if they had handled their situations differently?
Jill Bialosky
I don’t think there is such a thing as too much truth. Knowledge is power and “truth is beauty, beauty is truth,” as Keats so wisely expressed in “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Outcomes would be different if the characters in The Deceptions handled their situations differently. As a fiction writer, we set up these circumstances and then make a choice in terms of the outcome. As creators we create a divine universe. Action is character. What happens when a person intrudes upon a life? Can we control these impulses when we don’t know what the outcome will be? How do situations change us? A fiction writer stacks the decks. We must remember that our lives are determined by the clogs along the clock of life. In other words, we don’t always know where our actions will take us, what challenges come before us, and what will be the outcome. We also don’t always know another’s intentions. This was part of the fun in creating The Deceptions.
Mandana Chaffa
Related to the question above, between poetry and fiction, do you think there is a different relationship to the truth? What does each genre demand and offer you and the stories you’re interested in investigating?
Jill Bialosky
Both poetry and fiction demand focus and intention. They both demand a command of language and craft that serves the art form. I began writing as a poet so it was my first language as a writer, if you will. Through poetry I learned about the use and power of metaphor, how to create tension, enjambment, music in a line, and how to build narrative tension. I also learned to trust the process. One never knows the outcome of a poem, where line by line it will land. I love the surprise of writing a poem and coming to an end and seeing something transform, an epiphany, or a truth I hadn’t planned or predicted.
All of this is true for fiction as well. The difference is that fiction requires, to some extent, keeping more balls in the air, because you must consider character, plot, narrative tension, pacing. In fiction, the characters drive the action. Plus, you don’t know if it is going to finally work until you get to the end, so it also involves suspending judgment for a longer period of time. I suppose I turn to fiction when I want to probe character at a larger scale and to tell a story and see where it will unfold. Poetry is different. While both fiction and poetry must emerge from urgency, with poetry I sense something building in the psyche that needs to find its form almost like Athena who bursts from Zeus’s head fully formed and is born. Sometimes melancholy inspires a poem, or a need to be in a pensive mood. At their core, I believe both genres demand the same concentration, though poetry is perhaps a purer art form.
Mandana Chaffa
What excites you about the modern publishing landscape? How does your essence as a writer impact your work as an editor and publisher?
Jill Bialosky
I’m excited by the diversity of voices and the rise of new vehicles of story-telling that we see published in this new landscape. I like the emergence of the lyric essay, which is a blend of poetry and essay, and novels that are essayistic, or told in new ways. I marvel at the way, for instance, Rachel Cusk formed a novel by having her narrator listen to other characters, and through this, we learn about the narrator. That’s a big risk and operates poetically, as the narrator’s world is revealed through indirection. I enjoy novels that explore small worlds, and then novels of epic scope, as well as novels that are voice driven and don’t so much depend on plot. If it works, it works. One thing I don’t like in the publishing landscape is hype. I believe that the same handful of books that take up all the media space in a season is doing a disservice to other books and I wish there was more a sense of discovery, for instance, in the way in which review editors choose the books they want their publication to review. You open several review outlets, and you see all the same five or ten books reviewed in each one. Same for round-ups. Smaller books, the ones that aren’t as expensive to purchase by publishers, ones that are riskier, or perhaps more intellectual, often get ignored. As publishers we sometimes forget that we are indeed tastemakers, and I wish that books were not published for the sake of commerce alone. Luckily, I work for an independent employee-owned like-minded publisher where our decisions of what we publish are collective and our mission is to publish books that live, meaning live beyond one publishing cycle.
My impact as a writer on my work as an editor is hard to track. I suppose I understand more about the creative process than editors who are not writers. As an editor, I ask the questions, but the author needs to find the answer and I trust that process because I know that finally it is only the author that can authorize a project. You can’t push an author in a direction that doesn’t feel authentic to the work that is being created. As a writer, I am immersed in my own internal creative process, as an editor I am ushering a book toward publication in tandem with a team. I see myself as the first critical reader, a sounding board to eke out the author’s intentions.
Mandana Chaffa
Assuming your protagonist’s preference isn’t your own, what’s your favorite museum in New York? Where do you return to repeatedly?
Jill Bialosky
That’s a hard question. It depends on the mood I’m in. If I want solitude and to be immersed in works of the past I’ll turn to the Cloisters or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which indeed is like a history book through art. When I’m in the mood to be surprised and energized, I’ll go to MOMA or the Guggenheim to see a new exhibition or to roam the permanent collections. I enjoy seeing new risky work at the Whitney as well, and I also enjoy going to galleries for inspiration. At one point, I considered calling my novel The Museum Goer, but then I realized that it was more than that, but perhaps that is what I might call myself.
FICTION
The Deceptions
By Jill Bialosky
Published by Counterpoint
September 6, 2022
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