Amanda Rizkalla is the author of Hungered, her debut novel. A recent Steinbeck Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow, she has been a writer-in-residence at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, among others. After graduating from Stanford University, she received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a Kemper Knapp Fellow. This interview was conducted by Gauri Awasthi, Editor, Q&A.
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Gauri Awasthi: “Mama says we eat with our eyes,” the opening line of your book, speaks to the immediate stakes of food insecurity and the real hunger for the speaker. Such a strong beginning choice; can you speak to the process of reaching this opening? Did it arrive in the chronological order of the book-writing?
Amanda Rizkalla: So often when I write, the piece I’m working on feels blurry until I find the right first line, which then brings the rest of the project into focus. This is true whether I’m working on a short story, or an essay, or a novel. As someone who typically does not outline and prefers to figure out the story sentence by sentence, the process of finding that first line feels like choosing the right door to walk through.
When I first began writing Hungered, I kept hearing the phrase “we eat with our eyes first” over and over again—while waiting in line at a café, at my college dining hall, in the judging portion of cooking shows. I bumped into that phrase so often, like it was a person I kept running into, that I eventually decided to write it down. I thought about what that phrase might mean if it was removed from the context of its intended meaning—which is that the way food is presented is part of the experience of eating it—and how it might translate to a situation where characters have limited access to any food at all.
There is also something distorting and surreal about being told to experience something with the wrong set of senses, which in this case means experiencing food with vision instead of taste. Although this book is fiction, it draws from a period of my life marked by housing and economic insecurity, and something I wanted to do from the first line is show, in almost a practical and logistical way, the strangeness, the oddness, of living in precarity.
GA: There is something so heightened in your usage of juxtaposing language in the book. There are the pearls and the amethysts in the speaker’s eyes, all while hunger rumbles in her stomach.
AR: That’s a great observation. I don’t think I was fully aware of that juxtaposition while I was writing the book, but I can definitely see it now that you’ve pointed it out. I think on some level Sofia is more likely to see amethysts in grape-flavored lollipops, or to view cherries as rubies, for example, because of the fact that much of the food she had easy access to before living in the car has now become a luxury. She is surrounded by these everyday items that, in their scarcity, have become glittery, treasure-like. Because she wants these things but cannot have them, these items have a gleam about them.
Additionally, this imagery has its roots in Sofia’s emerging identity as a painter. This attunement to color and texture and light affects how she sees the world, which means that on a craft level, it saturates the imagery she relays. She has fond memories of using watercolors and acrylics with her father, who also happens to be a painter, and I think of her willingness to see beauty in the world as a way she connects with him from afar, despite his role in causing this rupture in her life.
GA: The speaker addresses her mixed heritage through food and later more directly. Did you have any concerns about writing about the difficult topics you do: hunger, patriarchy, and trauma cycles—especially as you were navigating characters who are often stereotyped with some of these burdens?
AR: Since the story has some basis in personal experiences, I knew that when I was writing about the topics you mentioned, it was coming from an emotionally honest place. With that said, you’re right—there are always risks when writing about these difficult topics. At the same time, I think asking authors of color to refrain from writing certain stories because the themes are heavy, or have been wrestled with by other writers before, etc., can have a profound silencing effect.
GA: There are so many poetic moments in the book. Like on Page 313, the likening of brackets into eyelashes or the play of repetition with sentences like, “We drive. We park. We sleep.” What pushes you to write with experiments in form and such poetics?
AR: I think the relationship between form and content is one of the most interesting things about writing. As soon as I began to read more poetry, I could not unsee the effects of white space on a page or the way in which lineation shapes a reading experience, for example. Poetry awakened me to the idea that the structure of a story can give it unexpected contours, can illuminate something that another approach to storytelling might have obscured. It’s kind of like how the layout of a room affects how you move through the space—when the author has permission to put windows in strange places, or demolish a wall, or even just rearrange the furniture, something exciting happens.
I knew, in figuring out the form for Hungered, that I wanted the structure of the book to be flexible enough to evoke a life in flux. In the shortest sections of the book, particularly toward the end, Sofia’s capacity to narrate diminishes, and so the language grows terse and minimal, and the syntax becomes more rigid as she resorts to sentence fragments and lists to convey what is happening around her. In other moments language itself becomes insufficient to capture how she feels, and so Sofia looks to punctuation instead, and parentheses become eyelashes, like you mentioned.
Often, the books that stay with me the most are the ones where it feels like the author has carefully used every tool at their disposal to tell the story, and I wanted to try to do the same in Hungered.
GA: There is a sense of fraughtness as well as deep care in the mother-daughter relationship. The speaker exhibits some of the characteristics of what the internet calls the ‘eldest daughter syndrome.’ What was the visualization of that like through the book-writing process? Did you know this character intimately?
AR: As an eldest daughter myself, I certainly leaned on some of the feelings that I think a lot of eldest children are familiar with when I sorted through the dynamics between Sofia and her mother, Nina. As you mentioned, this kind of parentification is a common enough experience that there’s a name for it. To visualize Sofia’s specific experience of it, I had to think less about the universal “eldest child” experience and imagine how someone with her particular personality, age, and situation would react and respond to these expectations.
On the one hand, I think there is something affirming, maybe even thrilling, to Sofia about being entrusted with responsibilities of someone older than her, like looking after her little brother or holding onto an envelope full of cash that her abuelo gives her without telling her mom. Initially I think Sofia likes to be seen as someone who, despite her young age, can handle these kinds of responsibilities. But eventually that feeling wears off and she feels the weight of these expectations. It becomes this fog that looms over her life, worrying about things her classmates do not have to think twice about.
What is perhaps even more devastating to Sofia are the moments where the adults in her life infantilize her, and when this is directly at odds with how quickly she has had to grow up and how much this experience has aged her. But she cannot really turn to her teacher or the housing manager at the apartment—two adults who make her feel small—and say, “Actually, I have more life experience than you think.” So she is in this impossible situation where she has had to grow up quickly but cannot get credit for this additional maturity.
GA: What’s next in your writing world? And what books are you reading post the book coming out in the world?
AR: I’m currently at work on another novel, but I’m at the stage in my process where I have been prioritizing reading instead of writing. Recent reads that I loved are: the short story collection Please Don’t Touch the Body by Emily Doyle, the novel The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, and The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, which is a biography of the Mexican writer, Elena Garro.
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