A Conversation with Lauren Aliza Green
BY JACKSON HOLBERT
Lauren Aliza Green is the author of the novel The World After Alice (Viking, 2024) and the chapbook A Great Dark House (Poetry Society of America, 2023).
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I first met Lauren—Lo to friends—in grad school in Austin, Texas, where we were both students at the Michener Center for Writers. Lauren and I have kept in touch since then, sending poems back and forth from New York to Oakland.
The World After Alice, her first novel, investigates losses—of children, of marriages, of family ties—and their afterlives. It centers upon a group of people bonded, ineffably, by a shared loss, and the lies they’ve told themselves and each other.
We conducted this interview largely in a Google doc, adding and deleting questions and answers over a few months. We had, in one way or another, talked through many of these questions on our own outside of this setting, but this is the first time they have been put down in writing.
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Jackson Holbert: You’ve published a chapbook of poems and are now coming out with a novel. How does writing poetry inform your prose?
Lauren Aliza Green: Poetry—and here I’m speaking primarily of contemporary lyric poetry—erodes boundaries between the self and other, the self and the world. I once attended a talk with Jorie Graham, who said a good poem ought to break down a person’s ability to compartmentalize their thoughts and feelings, inspiring motion toward a more unified sense of self. The sort of all-encompassing “hereness” that a poem occasions is challenging, maybe even impossible, to sustain in a novel, where there are somewhat artificial demands of plot, character, and stakes. Still, I like to think that the goal of transcending the everyday remains constant across forms.
JH: That “hereness” seems absolutely essential to me, and I agree that it’s more or less impossible to sustain over a long period of time, since it requires such devoted attention from both reader and writer. I once attended a talk by Jorie Graham in which she told us that to become poets we should smell—really smell—five things a day. Do you think this is true?
LG: Yes.
JH: Me too. What are three smells that come to mind when you think of this new novel?
LG: The ocean, rosin, stale Sweet Stripe candies.
JH: Ok, moving on from smelling…When did you know this story had to be a novel?
LG: Oh, right away. It boils down to a question of scope. If you set out to design a room in your head, you might envision a cozy attic room, or you might picture a palatial entryway that winds into a California-style living room appointed with a view of the ocean. I knew from the off that this book had the dimensions of the latter; it was simply too unwieldy to fit into any container much smaller.
As a form, the novel is beautifully elastic. There just doesn’t exist in this form the same demand for compression that one finds in a short story. Perhaps I simply like the effect of sustaining something for a long time. Whenever a friend asks me, “Do you want the short or long version?”, I’m always inclined toward the latter. I’m curious what you make of this as a poet—how time functions in novels versus other forms of writing.
JH: Time in novels always struck me as somewhat magical, but also heavily dependent on the believability of the characters. If I believe in the reality of a novel’s characters, then almost any jump in time works, because I believe real things were happening to those characters in that time, even if they are unsaid. If I don’t, gaps in time seem like more of an abyss. Your novel has some pretty significant jumps in time in it. How did you manage these from a logistical standpoint?
LG: Funnily enough, the first draft of the book did tackle those missing periods. It was only in revision that they were removed. Was such cutting essential to the final product? Maybe, or so I like to tell myself. When I used to do theater, I always found it necessary to build up the inner lives of my characters, to understand who they were before and after the scene. I approach writing in a similar manner. I like to know as much about my characters as I can, from what keepsakes they hold in their wallets to their lucky numbers, even if 99% of that knowledge doesn’t make it to the page.
JH: I love that lucky number thing. I’m always shocked at how close novelists feel to their characters. In poetry the idea of character seems much more slippery to me. Characters in poems have always felt much more stuck in time. When we do embody them—say, in a dramatic monologue—it’s for such a brief period of time that their language has to become highly symbolic, which in a way necessitates making the character less human, because humans don’t speak with poetic precision. I remember Yiyun Li—who I think is a masterful developer of characters—saying that you should know the brand of toothpaste each of your characters uses.
LG: Absolutely. A Sensodyne user is different from a Crest user. Such habits reveal more about us than we care to admit.
JH: As a Sensodyne kid, I agree. Your book has quite a few characters and storylines, yet I found it easy to follow. Were you thinking of the reader’s experience of these storylines in the early stages, or did that come later?
LG: Well, thank you for saying that. I don’t tend to conceive of the reader while drafting—I fear doing so would strand me too much in my own head. Only once I began the process of figuring out the book’s structure did I force myself to imagine the text in the hands of another. And then I had my external readers, who were instrumental in flagging instances of confusion. I owe much to them.
JH: Were there any authors you found to be helpful examples? I know we’ve talked a lot about Ferrante, who seems to me a master of structure. Do you find that she influenced this book at all?
LG: Oh, Ferrante. I recently undertook a reread of her entire oeuvre, from Troubling Love to In the Margins, and was bereft when I finished. What I love about Ferrante is the complexity of her relationships. Love in a Ferrante novel is never just love. The love Elena feels toward Lila is inseparable from her envy. The same goes for Elena’s relationship with Nino. Every character in a Ferrante novel acts as a mirror for every other character, and a trick one at that—a mirror that reveals to the observer his or her own flaws. What she’s writing about is the real stuff, the human stuff. What do you love about Ferrante? Why do you think we keep returning to her?
JH: For me she seems to capture an entire era in four books. Her work strikes me as both deeply humble and deeply ambitious at the same time, which is a rare mixture. I also find them very accessible, which is something I value tremendously. There are times in reading her works where I feel like she has put an entire way of life, an entire belief system and history, into a book. That is what I come to novels for. But back to you. Your novel looks at family and enormous social dysfunction. I know, in many ways, a lot of novels look at dysfunctional families, but your novel has eight or nine friends and family members colliding into each other. It seems like something that would be difficult to create without successful examples by your side. Were there any novels or books that you found helpful as models in that regard?
LG: I studied Russian Literature in college and maintain that anyone who wants to examine the novel in its fullest form need not stray further than Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov. I’d put Virginia Woolf up there too. What she manages to accomplish in To the Lighthouse stirs inside me feelings of pure awe. Though to quote our beloved Ferrante: “Writers often give themselves grand literary forebears whose echo in their works is in fact tenuous. So it’s better not to name names—they indicate only the degree of our pride.” Hear, hear.
JH: I also bring up Ferrante because your novel spends quite a bit of time giving us a sense of this New York City milieu and then it pulls all these characters out of the city and into rural Maine. What is your relationship to New York? And what did you find your characters did differently when you took them out of the city?
LG: I love New York, as you know, and it seemed like the right place for these characters, who are overly invested in the social web of upper-crust Manhattan and the meritocratic system on which it’s supposedly based. The city is also, poignantly, the site of the story’s tragedy. The psychic force this exerts over each character cannot be overstated. By removing them from Manhattan, I hoped to force them to confront what they’d otherwise been avoiding. There’s a kind of centripetal force that binds the characters together once they’re taken out of their usual environs. You too write much about place, having grown up in rural Washington. I’m curious, what is your take on city vs. country in novels?
JH: In country novels it’s the landscape that annihilates you, that breaks you down, or as you say, erodes boundaries between self and other. In city novels it’s the people and buildings that erode those boundaries. I think of the final lines from Louise Glück’s poem “Aboriginal Landscape,” “The city—the city is where I disappear.” Both of these structures breed their own types of isolation, which makes me think of your characters, who are so often isolated from each other through deceit. The World After Alice seems, in particular, a book that is focused on deceit. Is that a fair thing to say?
LG: Yes. These characters are people who, despite their best efforts, cannot stop wounding one another, and so they turn to deceit in the hope that their lies will prove less painful than the truth.
JH: Something you and I have talked about at length is titles, and how hard they are. Can you tell us a bit about how you arrived at this title?
LG: The title originally came from a line in the book, which has thankfully since been cut (though I love this Family Guy clip on this matter). Titles are impossible. I had a running list of ones I thought I might use, sourced mainly from the Bible and poetry. My editor nixed all of them until we landed back on our working title. I remember talking about the title of Winter Stranger with you. What ultimately made you land on that one?
JH: I remember going through your list together last summer. There were some good ones in there. “Good Evening, Beautiful Deep” was my favorite, though I agree that it was, perhaps, less marketable. When it comes to my book, Winter Stranger seemed like the only option that didn’t do harm to the poems. I went through hundreds. Poetry titles are difficult because there’s no way they can connect to every poem in the book. The title addresses, solely, the sum of the book’s themes. At least that’s my excuse as to why I find them so nightmarish to come up with. Not to give too much plot away, but your title gives us a sense that this is a book centered around the loss of someone. What were your thoughts on giving that foreshadowing in the title?
LG: It was important for me to convey that sense of loss up front. Woe to the reader who enters a book expecting a sunny romance and ends up reading about a family on the verge of dissolution.
JH: Nothing is worse than a misleading title. I remember I found a copy of John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest in my high school library, and read two pages waiting for actual rabbits to appear. Never read him since. I want to touch, briefly, on social media. You don’t like it. What do you think is the role of the novelist in America today? (I know that is a ridiculous question, so do with that what you will.)
LG: The novel strives toward truth, whereas social media strives toward distortion. One allows for flaws; the other conceals them. These two are fundamentally incompatible, and I worry that the authenticity toward which the novel strives is perverted by the illusion of authenticity that social media seems intent on perpetuating. Even this interview feels far too revealing. I just want the work to do the talking.
JH: Sorry not sorry. Can you say more about how the novel allows for flaws? It strikes me that novels are much more capable of depicting flawed people than poetry is.
LG: Maybe so, though Prufrock is a great counterexample. I’d be hard-pressed to find any novelist who achieves the precise characterization Eliot does so concisely.
JH: That’s true—we all know what Prufrock was feeling. I want to poke you a bit more though. What flaws does the novel allow?
LG: Let’s say you see a picture on social media of a group of friends at dinner, holding up their wine glasses and smiling. That image of ideal friendship—Look at us! So sparkly and happy!—can warp the viewer’s mind. We tend not to interrogate what we encounter on the web. But say you come across that same image in a novel. Well, now there’s a story. The novel reveals that the first person in the scene is cheating on her husband; and the second is miserable and didn’t want to come tonight because her ailing father is back home; and the third is focused on his unrequited love, who happens to be seated across the table; and the fourth is struggling to connect and wondering whether it’s time for him to move on from this particular group of friends. That is the kind of truth a novel can convey. There’s no room to dissemble on the page—who has time for that? Who would want to read it?
JH: I like that. A good novel is never satisfied with the superficial, and actively works to undermine it and complicate it at every turn. The titular character, Alice, is deeply involved in the child classical music scene in New York. I know it’s a scene you are familiar with as well. How did it shape you—and how did it shape Alice?
LG: The world of childhood musicians is very insular and strange. Part of its terror comes from the way that youth orchestras rank their musicians: first violinist, second violinist; first chair, second chair, third chair—you get the idea. There’s little opportunity to delude oneself when one’s talents are constantly being pitted against those of one’s peers. It takes much fortitude for a child (or even an adult) to flourish in that world. For Alice, she has arrived at a point where she no longer wants to perform—and I mean that in every sense of the word. The pressure at the top is overwhelming. But what does it mean to give up the thing you’ve spent all your life working toward? What does that look like in practice?
JH: God. Can you imagine a first chair fiction writer, second chair fiction writer? Do you think growing up in that environment changed your sense of how you want to go about your writing life? (I know all too often writers compare themselves, endlessly, to another.)
LG: I shudder at the thought of ranking writers, though I do know some MFA programs do exactly that to determine student funding. But wait—you and I have never talked about writer comparison before. Do you think writers do this in reality?
JH: To an extent. I think there is a certain kill-your-parents energy with some writers, where to get the work done they have to believe they can do it better than the people who have done it before. (I don’t think this is necessarily bad or unproductive.) I think the scarcity of jobs teaching writing probably leads to direct comparison as well, which I imagine is always unproductive.
With music, you are playing the exact same piece. Your imagination is starting from a shared space, and then the talent becomes visible in how you deal with what you’re given. In writing everyone has different subjects and styles, literally no one starts from the same place.
LG: You’re right. In music, it’s easy to evaluate one Chopin etude against another. In writing, both the material and the execution are the work of the creator. I don’t know if that makes receiving criticism better or worse. On the one hand, the writer has at their disposal the easy rebuttal, “You just don’t get what I was trying to do!” On the other hand, the writer must arrive at the devastating realization, “You just don’t get what I was trying to do.”
JH: Can you talk a little bit about your personal relationship with music? I know we’ve touched on how the classical music scene affected you, but can you say a bit about what music itself has taught you about writing?
LG: Can we talk Handel for a minute? He’s a genius at counterpoint, guiding the listener’s ear from one vocal part to another, much like a novelist might weave together points of view. The true moments of magic in Handel, when all the disparate parts converge, are sublime. I’m thinking of the “Wonderful! Counselor!” moment in “For Unto Us a Child is Born.” Here, the audience is made to experience the imperial glory of these words. How do you summon forth such emotions in another? So much of music, and of literature, reads as an answer to this question. Then there’s the discipline aspect of practice, and the impulse toward exploration and play. It’s all connected, I think, is what I’m trying to say.
JH: That discipline seems so vital to me. It’s something I try to get across to my students—that writing, like every other art form, is something that comes from practice. Years and years of practice.
LG: Right. I had one teacher tell me that to write a novel, you just have to write 250 words every day. At the end of a year, you’d have 91,250 words written. It’s nice to break up large goals into achievable tasks. As a musician, you learn this rather quickly. My piano teacher used to have me break down complex pieces by playing the right hand first, then the left, and then returning to all the measures with tricky fingerings—all this before I finally put the two hands together. Remarkable.
JH: The novel is so much about the afterlife of grief, how one act sends interminable shockwaves through these character’s lives. It made me think of something a poetry teacher told me once, which is that writing about grief doesn’t make it better, but it does change it. I guess my question is, in the end, do you feel like the grief is at all dissolved for these characters, or is it as present as ever, just different? (And, I guess within that, is it the purpose of a novel to work toward this dissolution of grief/pain, or is its role simply to depict it?)
LG: The Law of Conservation states that mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions, only changed. Such is true of all things in life. The grief may indeed dissolve for these characters, but that doesn’t mean it disappears. What it might mean instead, however, is that the new state it occupies is one the characters can more easily hold inside themselves.
As for the purpose of a novel, I would hope that in depicting something accurately, we temporarily harness the power to transform it. Think of Adam in the Garden of Eden. The first thing he did was name every creature he saw. To occupy a place, we must take what is inside it and make it our own. The same goes for these characters, who are adrift in a world remade by grief. If they can identify their grief for what it is, or at least what it is to them, they’re one step closer to coexisting with it.
