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A good short story can feel like a mystical experience, or leave a reader remorseful, longing. Kate Doyle’s debut is a collection of such stories, linked in subtle ways, that perfectly encapsulate what it’s like to reflect on your youth while you’re still in it. The young women in these stories are on the cusp of changes they’re not sure they want, because to let go of the past would be to lose part of themselves, for better or for worse.
I Meant It Once brought me back to Laurie Moore’s Birds of America, or Cara Blue Adams’s linked collection, You Never Get It Back. These narrators’ nostalgia bites in a deep, pleasurable way, as in the case of “Aren’t We Lucky,” in which an ongoing house renovation is a metaphor for familial dysfunction—out with the porcelain, expose those studs, look at all this rot. Or nostalgia is a vehicle for a relationship’s dissection, as in “Hello It’s You,” in which the narrator compares buying a second pillow to “poisoning the way things had once been.”
With these stories, Doyle proposes an experience of time and place that is gestural, and it’s no wonder: her background includes directing theater. And contained in the gestural is the self-portrait. We make effigies of these selves we’ve been, preferring certain versions over others. But with any kind of remembering, no matter how many times you go over events, they do not change. Only your relationship to them changes.
I met Kate last year over Zoom as Tin House Winter Workshop participants. It was wonderful to reconnect with her over Zoom a couple of weeks ago.
Arturo Vidich
The characters in this collection seem to answer each other’s existential questions. How did you decide on a collection of linked stories rather than a novel?
Kate Doyle
I started writing the first of these stories when I was in an MFA program, less with a sense of a book and more in a panic about meeting deadlines. With time, I started to realize what themes I had and more consciously wrote into that. My publicist and I always say it’s a book about your messy twenties, but when I was writing it, I had no concept of being messy. When I first started writing about Helen, she was going through a lot of things that I was going through at the time. She was a way for me to think about things that really bothered me about how to be in the world.
Arturo Vidich
You were writing it while you were going through it?
Kate Doyle
Yeah, trying to learn to write what felt real to me: realism—but also this preoccupation with nostalgia, and the very simple problem of living with memories—has always been really fascinating to me. As for why linked: Cara [Blue Adams] did a panel at AWP about linked stories, and she had this wonderfully broad definition of what a linked story collection is. I didn’t always think of it as linked because the connections between characters in the worlds are quite subtle. Everyone is clearly of the same universe, but then there are little things throughout to make that even more explicit. Locations appear across different stories. I always had this idea of a linked story collection specifically being linked characters, and then there was a point in the process when I sat down and made myself a map and started finding things that were like, roast chicken. Things that weren’t people.
Arturo Vidich
Study abroad.
Kate Doyle
Yeah. French language. Having a friendly relationship with a guy and calling him “my friend.”
Arturo Vidich
And some characters have friends in common. Charlotte, for example. And Shannon from “There’s No Telling.”
Kate Doyle
I have a secret particular love for that one because in the first story Shannon appears so kind. And then the hang up in “There’s No Telling” is that she feels insufficiently kind in some way. I don’t know that everyone reads that way or always catches them. But I think with that one, there’s something fun if you do.
Arturo Vidich
The title of the collection comes from the story “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote.” How do you see that phrase relating to the collection as a whole?
Kate Doyle
Very shortly after writing it into the story, it jumped out at me as a very potent phrase that summed up all these things I was thinking about. What you hold on to, what you can’t. The book is about memory, and the way storytelling functions as a way to make sense of memories you can’t stop thinking about, or aren’t societally endorsed important things to still be thinking about. By allowing themselves—often against their better judgment—to keep obsessing, these characters come to understand something more about themselves, and about the world through a particular lens.
Arturo Vidich
A lens of social acceptance that characters could benefit from, or reject. And of course, in stories like “What Else Happened?” the narrator doesn’t realize necessarily how bad things are going to get with this character John.
Kate Doyle
Right, the narrator is telling the story almost to calm herself down about what happened, because it still carries this frightening, ominous quality for her even though it’s so far in the past. It was so interesting figuring out how to write a short story that is not about getting closure, but about a memory that never resolves. It felt so true to experience: there are things, of course, you don’t get closure on, but so much of what we say about short stories and how they should work is that there should be some change or resolution.
Arturo Vidich
In college, and again in your twenties, the world opens itself to you and there are options you didn’t see before, even more so in hindsight. Why do you think we do these autopsies on our lives?
Kate Doyle
I think my answer to this has changed at different points over the years. Right now, my answer would be, growing up, there’s so much about the world, the society we live in, that you’re told is true. I grew up in the 90s, and the Girl Power energy that came with it. You’re told girls can do anything. And when you’re coming of age, it’s like, wait, this doesn’t feel totally true. Going back over a memory is a way to square what you felt with what you’ve been given to understand about life or society. By doing these autopsies of stories that have stuck in their minds, these narrators are able to make sense of the anger that came from that experience. Often, it’s things that are innocuous, like the scones in the first story. They’re literally baked goods. Is there anything more innocuous than heart-shaped baked goods?
Arturo Vidich
Right, simple things that shouldn’t matter can take on a weird symbolism. There are two obviously queer narrators in this collection in “At the Time” and “Hello It’s You.” And there are a few narrators who could be construed as queer or questioning, as in “This Is the Way Things Are Now” and “Two Pisces Emote About the Passage of Time.” Could you talk about how queerness comes up for you in your writing? And what for you is the difference between writing a character that’s clearly an unashamedly queer versus one who might be more ambiguous to the reader or even to themselves?
Kate Doyle
“This Is the Way Things Are Now” was one of the earliest stories in the book. In the first writing workshop I brought it to, I remember somebody’s feedback letter saying, “Was Helen in love with Catherine?” As I hoped would be the case, you know? And to me the answer was no, and that is productive. More than answering that question, I’m most interested in why we think that’s important to know. Does it change our understanding of whether the story’s important or not? Because I think there’s a temptation to say, if she’s in love with her best friend, then this is longing, and that is sad and worthy of our attention. And if it’s a friend, we want to say, Oh, you’ll have other friends. Like, get over it.
We don’t make a space in our culture to mourn the loss of a friend who we had emotional intimacy with. There’s a lot about men and women and a certain kind of anger about gender power dynamics in heterosexual relationships. I felt that by writing about these explicitly queer relationships there was a way—I’m purely talking about this from a craft perspective now—to hit a certain note: friendships between women in contrast to the spiky, angry dynamics in the straight couples. The way those three dynamics triangulate became very interesting to me. They start to reflect on and echo each other.
Arturo Vidich
You write uncertainty so well. Even as contingency seems to pinch shut in your stories, doors open in the imagination, and vice versa. Every good flip of the coin has its obverse: a decision avoided, a choice dodged. What is it about uncertainty and contingency that makes a story come to life for you?
Kate Doyle
I’m someone who mostly, with a few exceptions, writes a draft of a story and that draft kind of stays roughly the shape of what that story will be. A lot of contingency comes out of the tension in the first couple of sentences. When I was just starting to write, I was so fascinated by the way an individual word could color a whole sentence. The story “At the Time” suggests both that it’s not that way anymore, but also it’s the context for something else that was going on. In the first sentence in the book—“This happened to me when I was still in college”—right away we have this sense that we’re kind of looking back, fixated, wondering how they could have changed the outcome. Or they’re fine with where they are now, so why are they still thinking about this other thing? We live in uncertainty. Story is our way of making sense.
Arturo Vidich
I know you’re writing a novel because I’ve experienced one small piece of it! Could you tell us about it?
Kate Doyle
It’s a novel about the character Helen who appears in several of these stories, and her siblings, Evan and Grace. As in the stories, the three of them are very close but with quite different approaches to life. If these stories are about being a mess in your twenties, the novel is about being in your thirties, making some of the bigger choices one makes in those years about the kind of life you’re going to live.
FICTION
I Meant It Once: Stories
By Kate Doyle
Algonquin Books
Published July 18, 2023
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