Anna B. Moore is the author of the novel Don’t Pity the Desperate (Unsolicited Press, September 2024). The Offing published her essay, “That Our Stars Had Become Unmanageable.” Insight Assistant Editor Marie Look conducted the Q&A.
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Marie Look: First, congratulations on the publication of Don’t Pity the Desperate. I thoroughly enjoyed it, just as I did your essay “That Our Stars Had Become Unmanageable.” They share a great deal of connective tissue in that your essay discusses your (and your father’s) struggle with alcohol, and your novel is about a teen subjected to treatment for alcoholism. How much did your own experiences play into the genesis of this manuscript? And had the story of your main character, Myra, been taking shape in your mind over a long period of time?
Anna B. Moore: I was in rehab as a teenager. As that experience grew further and further behind the present, I was struck by the way it had shaped my view of myself: there was a before and an after that had little to do with whether I was drinking or not drinking. Myra (and myself, in ways similar and different) becomes morbidly self-reflective in a very short time; she ultimately sees and comes to see herself as defective in nearly every way—and then her purpose in life is to overcome and change all that’s wrong with her. There is very little going on for Myra externally—she doesn’t make art in any way, doesn’t play a sport, doesn’t do much of anything. She goes to school and home and considers her own psychology, weighs her self-worth, ruminates on her obsessions with other people and herself, and wants. She’s really stuck here. And she does not choose this purpose to start out with—it’s a path made by the omnipresent superficiality of popular culture, Twelve-Step language and rituals, and the lack of adult mentorship in her life. She dives into it and she’s also pushed into it.
ML: I found the voices of the young people who are at the treatment center with Myra to be so authentic. It’s always impressive when adult authors can write teens well—their language, their clothing, their mindsets. How did you approach getting into Myra’s head and the heads of the other young people she meets at Our Primary Purpose (OPP)?
ABM: The teenager I was, and the teenagers I knew back then, and the teenagers I know now, all possess visible and clear emotional vulnerability that to me is the essence of adolescence. And it’s a rich literary space to explore. This teen fragility, for whatever reason, never really left me; it’s an easy space for me to access and write from.
ML: It was a little thrilling to recognize the pop culture references scattered throughout, such as what was happening on the country’s political stage. I especially liked coming across the musical artists the characters listened to or mentioned, such as Joe Cocker, Metallica, Michael Jackson, and Joan Jett. Did you have a particular year in mind as you were writing, and why did you choose the decade you did?
ABM: 1986. The toxic and policy-vicious onset of Reaganomics was a period that created a before and an after for the United States. Myra is inhabiting this before-and-after space internally. It’s a striking parallel.
I was born in 1970, so I felt only ten years of the before-Reagan period; the huge before-and-afters that preceded his election, like Vietnam or Watergate—I have no memories of those. But when Reagan won in 1980 by what could only mildly be called a landslide, my father was crushed. That moment in the novel where Keen (Myra’s father) says, “If democracy can elect someone like Reagan, then to hell with it,” is a quotation from my father; when he said that, I felt it. Tremendously. I knew something had ended. I realized decades later that something had also begun. (And well… look at us now.) So the before and after in this context is not a political view or a list of all the profound institutional and moral losses since his election. The space between, which Myra occupies, and I suppose all of us do at one time or another, is a mood or a space for me as a writer immersed in the setting. One of those childhood moments where you know something has changed and you feel it in your gut.
ML: Your decision to give some of the other patients their own chapters helped me get to know them and sincerely care about them. These teens’ lives have been hard. What made you decide to spotlight these individuals?
ABM: Vignettes are still my favorite form to write in. Moments that encompass so much story. I think it had already become clear to me that the novel needed more voices so that Myra wasn’t the only representative of this world. When I finished a solid draft, I got feedback from the fabulous [author] Samantha Dunn that I needed more pages in order to make the novel a typical (marketable) length, and then I wrote the backstories of Myra’s peers. Because their lives have indeed been hard, because they’ve been neglected or abused or mistreated or silenced, I especially liked creating their complicated victories. Nancy accepts her mother’s departure and improves her life, Victor walks out of high school in the middle of the day because he’s so aware of all the hypocrisy. I aimed to counter tropes and create full adolescent characters. I’m so glad you felt them on the page!
ML: When you introduce each patient, you also include the program day they’re on and their drug of choice. Little details like this make OPP feel like a real treatment center but also a place sort of similar to a high school, where teens often use identifiers and build their own hierarchy and cliques. Can you speak to these parallels?
ABM: The high school space follows these characters everywhere they go; OPP becomes to a degree a continuation of that space. Those signals indicate both a shift in the characters’ self-perception and their embrace of this shift. After they leave rehab, whether they join a local Twelve Step group to stay sober, or join a group and use in secret, or use and never go, or eventually find moderation, their addict-ness will always be part of them. They’ve absorbed the rituals of introspection and confession that the world of recovery defines itself by. Those signals were also technical—a great “organic” way for readers to keep the characters straight.
ML: There are also several references to grassy areas and images of farmers or cowboy-like figures throughout. The first was a mention of farmers having to stand on horses’ backs to see the cows that have wandered off. But also, I loved a few lines in particular, like this one: “Who she wanted to be was approaching. A boat parting the waters. A cowboy on horseback riding through a mountain pass. A pioneer cutting through tall grass.” And: “She tried to hear that, pictured herself standing in the middle of a prairie, staying dry while rain poured around her.” What made you return to this type of imagery?
ABM: The cowboy! I didn’t realize that I had used that term twice—which was indeed accidental. But moments like these were meant to illustrate how little Myra knows about where she is: Iowa. And how Iowa became Iowa, with beautiful, powerful natural prairie cleared away to make room for agriculture, industry, and “civilization.” The natural world and its erasure are elusive to Myra, and she suffers as a result; this hole in her heart is a void of knowledge, too, and it adds to her passivity and sense of being acted upon by everyone. But she also doesn’t try to learn anything about the physical world. She can’t. She’s too absorbed in her own narratives and too… well… desperate for social acceptance. She doesn’t know all that she needs to know, or what might bring her comfort—her longing for love and acceptance is also longing for knowledge of the natural world. Where did humans come from? Why am I here? What is the point of my being here?
ML: That existential struggle really resonates with me, as I’m sure it will with other readers. Another thing Myra struggles with is the loss of her mother, which has left a huge deficit in her life where love is concerned. It’s clear her father loves her, but he doesn’t express it in the way that Myra craves. So Myra tries to fill these voids by having relationships—or sex, anyway—with the boys in her sphere. And a significant portion of Myra’s story has to do with her connection with Charlie, one of the other patients at OPP. In the beginning, she’s very concerned with whether or not he likes her, loves her. When Charlie does tell Myra he loves her, it seems very casual for him, but it means everything to her. Later, when they say goodbye for the final time, you write: “Please be my boyfriend, she didn’t say. Please mean I love you in a way that I know you don’t.” Was that the lesson Myra needed to learn from Charlie—that they defined love differently?
ABM: I think Myra learns from Charlie that the world of recovery has a different definition of love than she knows. Especially in the teen recovery world at that time—I love you was constant. If you were watching a teen meeting from a distance, say, you’d have no idea who was in a committed, sexual relationship and who wasn’t—everyone said it to everyone. And hugged. A lot. There is a deep truth to this “I love you” ritual, a way of expressing how the addicts are all in this together. And, like so much else in this world, a layer of superficiality. So Charlie can say “I love you” without accountability, without worrying about how Myra might take it. He’s not aware of the fact that the expression gives him cover. Charlie is a pretty good guy. But “I love you” is ultimately just another ritual in that community.
ML: Myra has a complicated relationship with religion. At one point, you write: “She had to rely on a Higher Power (which everyone called God) to change her patheticness into confidence, to keep from feeling afraid, to stay sober. She knew the wizard she had tried to believe in was silly and childish; Myra was able, sometimes, to dismiss this vision. A giant man in the sky was physically impossible. But she was unable to question the process, the choosing-from-above who received grace and who did not. The imposed randomness felt accurate; she didn’t want to believe in it, but she did, and she could not admit or articulate this. Instead, she decided to start over, begin belief anew.”
Does this passage sum up Myra’s take on religion? Does she legitimately buy into the belief system or just want to belong to the club of believers because she’s seen how it has helped other patients in their recovery?
ABM: What a great question. She absolutely wants to belong to the club and leans into God to do so. But she also absolutely wants to believe in God and be better. She isn’t fully aware of the conflict in having both these desires, but her faith is not deeply authentic. She’s always looking for that euphoria, that gratitude, that joy, that sort of high that’s all over Twelve Step literature, especially the Big Book. Yet wanting it and praying for it is as far as she can get.
ML: Do you see Myra as representing a part of all of us where faith is concerned? And is there a question you want readers to be asking themselves about their own belief systems?
ABM: I want readers to feel what it’s like not to have faith but to want it so much that you manufacture it—you believe in the vapor of a thing and then try to make it the thing. Maybe this is universal to some extent? I have never been a person of faith—so I’m not sure, and I didn’t mean to push readers to question their own faiths or beliefs, although I can see how some readers might, now that the novel is out there. In sharing this and other parts of Myra with readers, I think I, as a writer, broadly speaking, want to ease suffering. I do have faith in the act of sharing to soften grief, to soothe the sting of despair. But Myra herself is not able to be honest or genuine. She cannot find relief in community. She can only reach for it.
ML: The final scene concludes with her holding her “Big Book” and praying. I thought perhaps it was a moment of her letting go of the things that have been weighing her down throughout the novel—which I suppose can still be a form of prayer. Or maybe more of a prayer to herself, since she has finally developed some tools of self-reliance.
ABM: That ending—I meant to show Myra using the mantras and the internal program dialogue as principles she’s trying—hard—to internalize. But she can’t. I see the ending as Myra clutching to what she thinks might help her. What other choice does she have?
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