New Hope, Old Truths in “Responsible Adults” – Chicago Review of Books


In Patricia Ann McNair’s newest collection Responsible Adults, many of the stories take place in a fictional town called New Hope. One can easily imagine a town with this name exists in the Midwest, and it’s also fitting for the theme: each story teems with an ache toward hope, a moodiness tinged with heartbreaking determination and the search for something better. Characters struggle with grief and disappointment; they navigate domestic mundanity amidst traumatic experiences; and they evoke deep compassion from the reader as they fight to be seen and heard.

Exploring the fine line between irresponsible and dangerous, McNair guides us through the lives of the young and old, innocent and malicious, the lost and the searching. Guardians whisper in the dark about how best to abandon their children; a daughter dreams of a world where her mother doesn’t bring home another date; a stepfather’s secret is revealed by the next-door neighbor’s son; a writing teacher tries to be a mentor for her troubled students. These stories peer into the world of humanity with sharp and often devastating preciseness, pulling back the curtain on what it means to care and be cared for.

I was grateful to speak with McNair about her collection and what themes she saw amongst the stories, how the images came to her, and what role the Midwest plays in her writing.

Sara Cutaia

There’s a tone of longing and regret in these pages, one that made me realize how much of the stories seem to hinge on memory and reaching for truths. Was there a common theme you were thinking of when writing these stories, other than the relationships themselves that seem universally familiar and known?

Patricia Ann McNair

Reaching for truths. I like that. I do believe that there is the potential to find necessary truths in fiction. Like, here’s the story where this thing happens, but inside that thing maybe we can find some truth we hadn’t known before, a new way of understanding something, perhaps, or at least some better questions to ask. I am interested in the way you tie together longing and memory and truth searching in your question. I very much use my own memories as a sort of fuel for story, even if the final product is immensely different from the memory I started with. And I am always curious about why certain memories stick: a blanket that my brothers and I left up on the roof of our house after sunbathing — months after my father had died; a next-door neighbor older dude who dribbled and shot hoops with a basketball late into the night; losing my keys the night my first husband moved out; making out with boys in the dark corners of the roller skating rink. I think you are right on about longing. Each of these memories and the imaginings they have become are filled with some kind of longing. Grief and loss, loneliness, physical desire. I wasn’t thinking of this so much as a theme, as this is what I write, where my ideas come from: longing. Perhaps this is partly because my own father died when I was just fifteen, a complicated age for anyone, but I think maybe especially for girls. I was blooming, yearning, and then this thing happened that layered an aching loss in with that. You probably noticed an abundance of death, abandonment, and teenage girls in these pages. This isn’t so much by design or intention, but because of an ache that I carry always and that finds its way into the stories I make.

Sara Cutaia

In “Things You Know but Would Rather Not,” the first and last sentences are such a wonderful pair together. Do you write with beginnings and endings in mind like this, or is that something that comes together with edits?

Patricia Ann McNair

Thanks for that, Sara. I had to read that story’s first and last sentence back to back after you asked that question, and it is interesting to think of them in that way — the enter here, exit here doors to the story. As for beginnings, I often am pretty close to it when I start. I mean, most of my stories have some sort of image that gets me going, something I see or remember. Occasionally it comes from an idea that turns into a vivid imagining pretty quickly. But soon after that, I start to mutter a line in my head that starts things off. And this line often takes up an almost permanent residence. Once it’s on the page, it doesn’t change all that much.

“Things You Know…” was inspired by the photography of Sally Mann, images of her children I find a little disturbing. And I wondered what her kids must have felt about being these models. Her work seemed selfish to me; the art more important than the children. This was decades ago, long before parents took and posted photos of their children everywhere, before kids believed that their every move and cute pose should be documented and “liked.” So having these images exhibited in galleries was a breach of privacy to my character. And it made her want to die, in that thirteen-year-old way of things, and it also made her feel unseen by her mother, so she might as well be dying, who would know? First line: “She knew she was dying.” Last lines: “Shit. You are alive.” This brings me to the ending part of your question — I sometimes do have an ending in mind when I start to write, but I can’t think of a single story when I used that original end idea. I write until I find the ending. It isn’t unusual for me to write four or five endings, usually just the last couple of lines. I sometimes think of it akin to trying to find the perfect shoes for a special outfit. (Wow, that sounds silly!) I think it was Stuart Dybek who said whenever he could see the ending ahead of himself, he turned off that road. I like that idea. The ending you can see will always be there, but maybe a better one is off to the side here, let’s make the turn, what more can we discover?

Sara Cutaia

Your bio boasts so many interesting jobs you’ve held, and your stories also explore the worlds of a variety of working characters. How has working all the different jobs helped you write with more authenticity? 

Patricia Ann McNair

I first started working when I was fourteen years old, and I loved it. I loved earning my own money, I loved having something to do, I loved being good at some things. But even more than that, I was intrigued by the others who worked with me. Their stories, what they would share about their lives, and perhaps even more so, the stories I made up about them. This lady at the restaurant where I worked had a daughter at home who cooked for her, who she would wake up in the middle of the night to talk about the men she met; this guy that worked on the trading floor drank too much, and probably didn’t go home the previous night, what did his wife think?; this house where I sold pans was a hoarder’s paradise; how did it get that way? I bet you do that, too, Sara, as a writer. Imagine the lives of others. And sharing jobs with them, these workers, allows me certain access to their voices and the things they tell; at least I like to think so. 

Sara Cutaia

Thinking about the title of the book, Responsible Adults, I’m struck by the vast ways one could interpret it. Did you play around with the idea of actual irresponsibility (as in the story “Circle, Lake”) vs abstract irresponsibility that’s harder to judge?

Patricia Ann McNair

The title came after most of the stories had been written. For a while, I thought the collection was going to be What Girls Want, and I was interested in writing stories about girls’ longing. Yes, that is in here, the longing of girls — hey, that would make a good title! — but when I tried to be intentional about that, write or gather just these sorts of wanting-girl stories, things became pretty stilted. I can’t even remember when the new, final, title came to me, but it was after I had been printing and arranging a bunch of these stories together. I realized that all of these people who were supposed to be responsible for someone else in some way, were pretty shit at it. I had been thinking about politicians (aren’t we all these days?), people like George W. Bush, and how he would say that he accepted responsibility for something — only what did that mean? There were no consequences — yeah, you let Katrina ruin an American city, and you accept responsibility, and — ? And then the orange man moved into the White House while I was putting this collection together, and he never accepts responsibility for anything. These are examples of responsibility and irresponsibility on a world stage, and I started to recognize it in our small everydayness, too, our responsibility, our irresponsibility, and that brought me more fully into the writing.

Sara Cutaia

And speaking of the title, still: there’s a clear way the narratives make you question which characters are the adults, and which are the children. Though the ages might demarcate them, the positions they find themselves in makes the reader wonder. Was that an idea you wanted to get at with these stories?

Patricia Ann McNair

I am really glad that you saw that, Sara. I am pretty sure that I did not aim for this idea, the shifting of adult/child, child/adult, but it emerged in the stories in such a way I decided to capitalize on it more through the way I arranged them in the collection. We all understand that we may have to become our parents’ parents at some point, and maybe that is especially obvious to us as we age, as our parents need us, as we — in some cases, in my case — might have to do things like bathe our elderly mothers, feed them, sign their checks, explain things. That dynamic has always been interesting to me. And, too, I was a really responsible kid, first up on a Saturday morning to do chores, looking out for a couple of my older, dreamier brothers. That inhabits some of my characters as well. Who is the adult here, right? I remember my mother telling me (and her mother telling her) you will always be my baby. So even when I had to help her in a very adult way when she was in her last months, I kept thinking but I’m the baby, I’m the baby. It blurs, doesn’t it?

Sara Cutaia

I enjoyed the difference in length in this collection: flash pieces seemed to break up some of the longer ones. How did the construction of both the individual pieces, and then the collection as a whole, come together?

Patricia Ann McNair

I am a huge fan of the short form, but to tell you the truth, I was not too keen on flash or short-short work for a long time. I thought it was so gimmicky, too often written with a punchline. (How’s that for a lit-snob response?) But then I looked more closely at work that I have admired for years — Kafka’s dream pieces, “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” — and realized that the compression and craft of them were really intriguing. My thesis from decades ago, very much an apprentice novel, had this one very small section that I would read at open mics on occasion. Fewer than 700 words, I think. And a writer I admire, A. Manette Ansay, told me after one of these readings that the piece was a flash piece on its own. And when I thought of it that way, I could see how it might be with a little tweaking, a small bit of story heightening. It became “The Joke,” the first flash piece I ever had published (it’s in my first collection, The Temple of Air), and frankly, it is all that has survived of that thesis-novel. So why am I telling you all of this — because, just like this answer proves, part of me still believes that you have to write hundreds of pages to get to the two or three where the heart of what you are trying to say is. And some of the very short stories in Responsible Adults were things that were part of something that I thought must be longer. A lot of them, though, were challenges I gave myself: write a five-hundred word story, write something in 1000 words or fewer. Others were in response to submission calls for very short pieces. I grew to love that form, too, the brief and urgent one, and decided that maybe I could write those by design instead of by accident like I had with “The Joke.”

So I had a handful of these, and the longer ones that I get lost in as they open and open and open under my pen or my fingers at the keyboard. Most had been published here and there, and I started to see what they had in common, and began to put them in a binder, collect them in one place. Gathered like this, they started to look like a book. But you know, some of them were written in the early 2000s, some in the last five years. I’d been gathering them for a while, weeding out the ones that were redundant or not quite in keeping with the longing you mention earlier, or the idea of adult responsibility (or lack thereof) and pumping up others that had not yet found their fullness. And then the arranging began. What I submitted to the publisher, Cornerstone Press, is a little different from what we have in hand now. And that happened because I worked very closely with smart readers/editors, and things I had thought were good enough, weren’t quite anymore. They asked questions I had ignored about some of the pieces, and I started to see it all through their eyes. We moved things around and around — mostly staying with a long-short-long(ish) order to create a sort of tension and release — but settling on a kind of aging of characters from beginning to end, and a shifting of responsibility, as you noticed. The one that is a little out of that order is the very first, very short one, “What Was to Come.” But I wanted to provide a gateway to what was to come, and I also wanted to introduce a couple of recurring characters who show up later.

Sara Cutaia

The majority of these stories, even when they don’t mention it explicitly, have a very Midwestern setting and feel. What do you think this region has to offer for writers, or for the backdrop of stories, that other regions don’t quite have?  

Patricia Ann McNair

Gentleness. My husband and I used to have a house in a small town very similar to New Hope, the fictional place where a lot of these stories are set, where my first collection takes place. And we would drive out there (Illinois, twenty miles from the Mississippi River, three hours from Chicago) and as we got closer, the fields would open up around us, the road would lift on the easy hills and bend in shallow curves. I’d say, look at that, isn’t that beautiful? He’d say, well, it’s not California, is it? (He’s British, and a sucker for dramatic American landscapes.) But after our years of driving through these places, he came to love it, too. There is something comforting in a landscape that is not obviously challenging, something alluring about a long strip of black highway that runs through fields of corn, past windbreaks of tall trees and the clapboard-sided houses beyond them. I come from Midwestern farmers, even though I grew up in the suburbs, but summers and holidays and long stretches of time were spent on my grandparents’ farm in Southern Illinois, on my brother’s in Northern Wisconsin. I lived in a small town in Iowa when I dropped out of college (the first time). I worked in the local tavern, pulled beers for the guys who drove tractors and trucks. The Midwestern landscape is part of my essence, and by extension, essential to my stories. So yeah, there is that gentleness, and it is occasionally battered by the weather — flooding, tornados, hard winters — and often the quiet backdrop for something not quite so serene. The things that people do to one another or because of one another that show up in these gentle places like a dark purple bruise on pale pink skin. 

FICTION
Responsible Adults

By Patricia Ann McNair
Cornerstone Press
Published December 15, 2020



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