Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split/Lip Press, 2019). Her story, “Which Truth, Patricia?” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department on May 20, 2019. Q&A conducted by Kosiso Ugwueze, Reader, Fiction.

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Kosiso Ugwueze: Relationships are at the heart of the collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. Many of the stories are focused on an intense, complicated love between two people. Others explore familial love in all its complexity. Why did you choose to focus your collection on exploring the multifaceted but often painful and destructive experience of love? What do you think our ability to love says about us as human beings?

Jennifer Wortman: Like they say, I didn’t choose the material so much as it chose me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been baffled by how love, the source of such comfort and joy, can give rise to such cruelty and pain. Love brings out the best and the worst in people, the selfless and the selfish, and sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. My interest in love is psychological and moral, but it’s also spiritual: Some of us try to fill the spiritual void by deifying other people. And then we resent them when they’re not the god we want them to be.

What I think our ability to love says about us as human beings is that we’re capable of great power and vulnerability, and the two are entwined.

KU: A particular line in “Love You. Bye” jumped out at me. The line “After childhood, nothing is fun. Pleasures are often complicated by pains-or derive from them.” Another line in “ What Family Does,” also stood out to me, the simple statement “It hurt and I liked it.” There’s this interplay between pleasure and pain in this collection, the two never quite far from one another. Why do you think the two are so interlinked? Do you think it’s ever possible to have one without the other?

JW: A psychologist or physiologist could probably answer this question better than I can, but, in part, I think they’re linked because the bodily responses can be similar: the hyperarousal of anger and excitement, the deep feeling that inspires tears of both sadness and joy. Also, the intensity and clarity of pain can give a peculiar kind of pleasure. And psychologically, we take comfort in the familiar: pain can feel like coming home. But I’m not out to romanticize pain! I’m just exploring its dimensions. Overall, it very much sucks.

I do think it’s possible to have one without the other — especially pain! But simple joys are also everywhere. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to better relate to pleasure without all the accumulated baggage.

KU:The collection also explores the different relationships that men and women have with technology. It examines how that in turn is reflected in their relationships with each other. What purpose do you think technology serves in today’s world?

JW: It serves so many purposes! Like love, it’s multifaceted and brings out the best and worst in people. It breeds connection and alienation, healing and mass destruction, democratization and nefarious politics. Unlike with love, though, the scales, I think, tilt toward the negative. As one of many examples, technology makes our lives speedier and speedier, which has its perks but on the whole impedes full engagement with the world. Even comparing Facebook — itself hardly a bastion of slowness — with Twitter is telling: things move way faster on Twitter than they do on Facebook. It can be hard to respond skillfully to all that input.

I’m kind of a grouchy Luddite, but I’m also hopelessly addicted to every kind of screen, and I do the bulk of my teaching online, which I love. Through social media, I’ve made great friends and experienced heartaches. So technology’s a real mixed bag for me, as I suspect it is for many people.

KU: One of the things I loved in “Which Truth, Patricia,” is the use of perspective, the way the story settles into one point of view then quickly pivots to another. It’s so masterfully done, adding to the sense of intimacy that the reader feels with these characters. How did you arrive at this structure? Did you know you would create a story within another story before you sat down to write?

JW: “Which Truth, Patricia?” took a decade-plus to become what it now is. The story started out as an entirely different animal, a Leonard Michaels-inspired absurdist tragicomedy about an adjunct instructor returning home to receive an honor from his high school that he never actually receives. At some point, I realized the plot was window-dressing for a more serious homecoming story about love and dysfunction and loss. The structure crept up on me: like Noah, I got stuck at Angie’s “goodbye.” While investigating why, I discovered exploring the stuckness was part of the story and the structure unfolded from there.

I also want to acknowledge the influence John Edgar Wideman’s remarkable short story “Weight” had on the structure of “Which Truth, Patricia?” While I didn’t consciously mimic it — and in no way have I achieved its mastery — “Weight” made an enormous impression on me when I first read it and its power over me only grew with time. I doubt I would have felt free to write “Which Truth, Patricia?” the way I did without having read “Weight.”

KU: What was your process like in putting together this collection? How did you start envisioning the types of stories that would come together to make up the collection?

JW: These stories were written largely in isolation from each other over the course of a good decade and a half. So the collecting mostly happened after the writing. I made halfhearted attempts at putting together a collection through the years, but nothing stuck. Then around 2016 I saw a description for a class on how to structure a short story collection; while I didn’t take the class, something clicked for me and I started to seriously contemplate how the various stories I’d already written could work together as a book. I ended up abandoning my initial idea for the structure — and abandoned more ideas after that — but thinking about the book structurally sharpened my sense of its themes, which helped me figure out which stories fit best and how they could interact. My editor, Amanda Miska, also had a hand in the book’s final form. Like any good editor, she could see things I couldn’t, so we made a couple adjustments for the sake of continuity and variety, and I think the collection’s better for it!

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