In Molly McGhee’s genre-busting debut Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, the eponymous Abernathy accepts a job auditing the dreams of everyday employees. The gig, more snake than ladder, involves a kind of hazmat spacesuit and a shiny metallic elevator. Also innumerable checklists. Abernathy struggles with the new vocation, falling ever farther from his personal goals of romantic fulfillment, self-actualization, and financial stability.
Careening from daydream to nightmare—sometimes his own, sometimes not—Abernathy is a facetious parable for our harrowing terms of national employment. McGhee, who teaches undergraduate creative writing at Columbia, has a lot to say about work, writing, and debt.
Eric Olson: The rhythm of your writing really shines in this book. As a teacher, you must think about this quite a bit. How do you teach something as complex as the rhythm of a sentence? It’s a hard concept to pin down.
Molly McGhee: I think rhythm really comes down to voice. A music metaphor would help us. If voice is the bass of the text, the rhythm is the drums. They go hand in hand, and on most songs are intricately linked. The way you manipulate one will change the way you manipulate the other. So the voice creates the rhythm, the rhythm creates the voice, vice versa. When I teach rhythm, what I’m really teaching is the art of what we sound like. Punctuation and the manipulation of colloquialisms are ultimately tools that can be used to achieve mimesis.
EO: I love the fragmented sentence style that you often drift into, in particular the checklists and bullet points, the extended techniques like changes in page formatting, things like that. Were there any authors that directly influenced you with that stuff?
MM: I’m not sure about direct influences. But one of the techniques I was thinking about when I wrote is called free indirect style, which has to do with the way we understand the distance between narrator and character interiority. I’m pretty sure it was invented by Ms. Jane Austen and later used by folks like Mr. Joyce and Mr. Kafka. They really revolutionized the way that we experience interior perspective. I wanted to think about how we could capture interiority in a contemporary way, using contemporary techniques and tools. I wanted the readers’ experience of the text to mirror the feeling of racing—or spiraling—thought.
EO: And then sometimes you step back and there’s a narrator voice, which is consistent throughout.
MM: I love the trickster gods of literature. I love it when people are playing tiny little jokes in the text.
EO: This book had to do with dreams, which are naturally colloquial and fragmented. Did the subject matter affect the style?
MM: The character is what informs a lot of my choices. And so the character of Jonathan Abernathy—and specifically his neuroses, his understandings of life, his anxieties—were the driving force behind many of my decisions, including theme, style, tone, and the like.
EO: Right—let’s talk about Abernathy a bit. Even though this is a funny book, very tongue in cheek, you never want to be Abernathy. His life is, well, without spoiling too much, incredibly sad.
MM: Every reader comes to the book differently and feels different things towards Abernathy based on where they are in their own life. Some readers have the chance to see that his is really a prison of his own making. Then some readers are like, Wow, I really identify with being stuck. In many ways, Abernathy is a victim of his own time and they systems he’s trapped in. Impatience and anxiety, hopefulness and hopelessness—these played a big role in the plot.
EO: Speaking of plot, we already touched on how incomprehensible dreaming is. When you were going into this project, did you worry about trying to explain some of the things that happen in dreams?
MM: I’ll say this: I find all of life incomprehensible and deeply confusing. During the day we all walk around and talk to each other as if any of it makes sense. Dreaming is the only medium where we allow the illogical nature of our existence to go unquestioned and unformatted.
EO: There are a lot of little one-line affirmations in this novel, things Jonathan tells himself to cheer up. One of these became the title of the novel. How did these come to play such a major role in the book?
MM: The affirmations just seem to sum up Jonathan’s character. And they fit the rhythm and pattern of the novel, so much that they became inseparable from the book, which I guess resulted in the title. My editors originally wanted me to change the title. But it felt very important to me.
EO: To pull back from the book a bit: what’s your general writing routine like?
MM: I have bad insomnia. So I spend a little too much time awake. I do about two shifts of sleep a night, and in between them I sort of write and generate, sometimes on my phone and sometimes on my computer or by hand. And then the next day I’ll either continue that line of thinking or look back on it. I’m working on a new project now, and my writing process for it seems very different than the writing process was for Jonathan.
EO: Although this book is, as I said, pretty tongue in cheek, it has a lot to say about contemporary working culture in America. And what it has to say isn’t good. In fact it’s a pretty dark look at how Americans work, how work-obsessed we are, how hopeless a lot of our working situations are. Did you know that was going to be so upfront when you were going in?
MM: I knew that working was one of Jonathan’s central struggles, and to me, that is a very understandable and relatable struggle that impacts and controls so much of our lives. So when I set out to tell Abernathy’s story, yes, I anticipated writing a novel about work, and what it means to work. When you have to work to be alive, at what point is the work you do harmful to others? How does work take away from our communities? How do negligible and broken systems that are actively harmful stay operational? The answer is usually that someone at the top is profiting, often at the misfortune of others. How do we as workers remain complicit in these systems? Well, it really boils down to the fact that debt is a trap. We can try to outsmart it, outmaneuver it, anticipate it or get around it. But there’s really no way to escape.
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