INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN ARNETT

By Madison Shanley

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, invites readers to step inside Central Florida through the eyes and mind of Jessa-Lynn Morton. Left to pick up the pieces after her father’s suicide, Jessa throws herself into the family taxidermy business. As the Mortons come to know love and loss in a deeply intimate way, they have no choice but to try and understand who they really are. Published in 2019, the novel quickly became a New York Times Bestseller and garnered acclaim from critics and fans alike.

A lifelong writer, Arnett was quick to find inspiration for her next novel, With Teeth, forthcoming in June 2021. This time, the plot follows two mothers and their complex relationship with their difficult son. Domesticity and intimacy are central themes as these Floridians attempt to navigate their way through their deeply complicated life. It’s a story that leads the reader to wonder if there is any point of view they can entirely trust.

Not only a novelist, Arnett’s essays and book reviews have been published in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times. The self-proclaimed “lesbian Willie Nelson” possesses an unbelievable ability to capture the lives of people who often get overlooked.

I spoke with Arnett about her novels, her experience as a queer Floridian, and how she became the writer she is today.

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MS: I’m deeply interested in the way people choose to title their work. Do you find that the title comes to you while you’re working on a story? Or do you begin with a title?

Arnett: Anything I ever work on I have to have a title first. So Mostly Dead Things was Mostly Dead Things before it was a book. Felt in the Jaw got named Felt in the Jaw because that was the title of the titular story in that book. Anytime I’m writing a short story, the title comes first. If I’m writing an essay, the title comes first.

The most interesting thing that happened with With Teeth was that it was not called With Teeth. That change happened not that long ago. That was maybe a thing I really wasn’t prepared for because I always title work first. I had to talk with my publisher about renaming it because it used to be called Samson.

MS: And that’s the name of one of the main characters in the book, right?

Arnett: Yeah, and I had reasoning for it. I liked it as a title. But my publisher also had really compelling reasons why they thought I should re-title it. So, we had conversations over the phone and I was like okay, I agree. And they agreed to let me be the one to rename the book, so I came up with the new title, which felt good to me. It was still me coming up with it and I liked the new title. But it was strange. Because I never, ever, ever titled anything like that before. I always title first.

MS: Let’s talk about your debut novel, Mostly Dead Things. You have two quotes as the sort of introduction to your novel, one being the t-shirt proverb that claims, “Happiness is a large gut pile”—which I found really funny—and then the other is a Thomas Harris quote, “Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure, and we are drawn to it.” What was the significance of these quotes for you?

Arnett: When I was thinking about what I wanted to put at the front of the book—because I am a huge fan of quotes opening novels—I always like to see what other authors choose. I’m a big Stephen King fan, actually, and he always has at least one. Usually, he chooses like three or four. I think he has a hard time paring them down. So for me, I wanted whatever was going to be at the front of the book to really represent how the book felt to me. And the book felt like a mixture of kind of dark, and also absurd, and kind of funny—a kind of dark comedy. So, the gut pile thing was very much something that made me laugh when I was doing all my research. The other one, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to frame the narrative ahead of time, and so much of taxidermy has to do with hunting—even though there technically isn't any hunting in the book, at least not anything that pops up in the text. But I wanted it to have relevance to how we process animals. Like, the death and then the processing. And then have that go hand in hand with the leftovers, the remnants, which is the gut pile left after. Those two ideas seemed to fit nicely together, and they made me laugh on the page. Honestly, at the end of the day, that’s what I’m looking for: different ideas or content that I can put together and they can make me laugh or think something unexpected.

MS: Did you seek those quotes out? Do you have a collection of quotes that have resonated with you over the years, or did they reveal themselves to you while you were working on the novel?

Arnett: I didn’t set out specifically to find them. I read a lot of horror, so I kind of halfway remembered that quote; I ended up having to look it up and find it. The t-shirt quote I found on accident. I was on a lot of forums and chat rooms with people who do taxidermy and it was a shirt that people were selling, so it was just very funny to me and I felt like I had to put that in there. Those things just kind of happened.

MS: When you’re writing a character, do they take time revealing themselves to you or do you feel that you need to understand them before you give them life on the page?

Arnett: I definitely don’t know anything while or before I’m writing. I’m not a person who outlines. I think that’s a good way to put it—I think characters, quite often while we’re working, reveal themselves as we’re writing. Even if people do outline, I think characters shift and mold, which relates

MS: I think that is something that translates really well throughout the novel. In the beginning, I was sort of expecting Jessa to be this kind of deranged individual, and while I think she is to some degree, it is not nearly as severe as I thought it would be. She was far more complicated than I gave her credit for in the beginning.

Arnett: Just like how human beings are complex. I don’t know if I want to say, “I super enjoy writing.” I love to do it, but it can be frustrating and stressful. But that’s one thing that’s very interesting to me, working on a novel or a story and discovering what kind of humanity characters contain. You know? People contain multitudes, so characters do too.

MS: Definitely. You even have really complex ideas throughout the novel, specifically this notion of remembering and nostalgia. Jessa seems to have the kind of experiences that one would want to forget, and I think the way you framed the narrative—with time jumps, having chapters flip between past and present—really helps to highlight those complexities. I’m curious to know what your thoughts were on how the past can ultimately stay in the present.

Arnett: In writing the novel, I wanted to write about inescapability. As human beings, we don’t get to choose when we remember something. Wouldn’t that be nice if we just chose not to remember the things that were painful? We don’t have Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or anything. There are certain things that trigger memory within us, and regardless of whether or not they’re painful or they’re good, they contain a lot of stuff.

Obviously, I’m the author so I’m writing from a personal perspective, but it seems deeply human to have a scent trigger a memory, or a song or a commercial that reminds you of something. Especially if you’ve lived in a town your whole life. I grew up in Florida and I’ve lived in Florida my whole life. I’ve lived in Orlando for most of it, so there’s a ton of stuff there I have memories attached to. A character who has only lived in one place and has all this love, loss, grief, anger, pain and happiness—also, her family, and all of this is attached to her hometown—how could she escape these memories? I wanted to find a way to set this inside the narrative so that it feels very human. Having every other chapter be a memory felt like the way to show that the past is continuously happening. The past kind of syncs up with the present.

MS: Your next novel, With Teeth, also focuses on the particular dynamics of one family. What is it about that theme that makes you want to explore it in a novel?

Arnett: I am really interested in domestic squabbles. Families are all different but they’re also very similar. There’s endless conflict and drama and different kinds of stories to mine from families. A thing I think about a lot is the idea of storytelling in households. All families have stories. Even the messiest families have good stories, bad stories, funny stories, sad stories, and everybody in the household tells them differently. Even if it’s the same story that everyone shares. So, technically, everybody in the household is an unreliable narrator because nobody is telling the same story even though they are. Families and the domestic are endlessly fascinating to me. I’m especially interested, as a queer person, in looking at what queer dynamics in families look like. How are they the same? How are they different? What kind of aspects do they share? I think as writers, we’re constantly writing the books we want to read. For me, I want to read queer domestic stories and books and essays. That’s a topic that’s endlessly fascinating to me. Queer stuff, household stuff, family stuff and Florida stuff; that’s all really interesting.

MS: How accessible was queer content for you growing up? I don’t mean to imply that you’re old, however I think mainstream queer content has only recently come about. There’s been a sort of steady increase over the years but even when I was young it felt like a rare occurrence to see queer stories, specifically lesbian. So, I’m curious what your experiences were?

Arnett: I think that, for many people, finding queer stuff growing up, you just find little pockets where you can. You watch things and you get the context from it to put queerness on it, if that makes sense? There are certain movies I watched and I liked them and it wasn’t until later that I understood that I was watching it and queering it in my head. I loved the movie Bring It On, but I was like, why am I really into this movie? It’s a fun movie, but I think I was looking at this dynamic of two cheerleaders who are really good friends and also have sleepovers, and there’s queer dynamic embedded, kind of hidden. That’s the kind of thing you had to do when I was growing up. There just wasn’t stuff. The stuff there was, I mean, my family wouldn’t let me watch it. My family is very Southern Baptist, very strict Evangelical Christian. I was constantly hungry for that kind of content. It is that kind of thing where, if you don’t have the things you want to read, you write the things you want to read. It’s so nice now that there’s so much more and that it continues to grow. But, yeah, you just made your own queer stuff. You either wrote your own or you put queerness on something that wasn’t technically queer.

MS: I get that too, because even though there is more representation today, I still tend to do that to some things. I find it kind of fun.

Arnett: It’s great. And it’s a thing we do because there is queer stuff now but there’s still not a ton of it. There’s definitely more, but when you’re watching tv or movies, the main storyline is usually cis, heterosexual and white. So it’s like watching things through this specific kind of lens.

Even when trying to get Mostly Dead Things published, people were saying, “Well, we already have a gay book that we published this year.” You see more and more now and that’s good because when you have something come out and it’s successful, it opens the door. And then you get to open the door for other people to come out and have more queer stuff. My book is a queer book but it’s personal. It’s a cis, white, lesbian perspective. So it’s exciting to see that more is happening, but I think it makes sense that we watch things and queer them in our heads.

MS: My final question is about the cover art for your works. I would imagine you play a huge part in picking what is going to be the image on your cover. Is that accurate?

Arnett: Publishers have their arts department and marketing department and they come up with ideas and they pass those along to you. You get to say if you approve of it or not but both times… Like, when Tin House sent me the cover they were interested in for Mostly Dead Things, it was the cover on the book. It had the pink flamingo and the green and I loved it. It felt absolutely perfect to me. Aside from the fact that flamingos are cool and very Florida, it’s an Audubon flamingo. When Audubon painted birds, he would first have them taxidermied and he’d paint from the taxidermy. That felt especially perfect to me. I love how that looked.

Then, with With Teeth, they didn’t even send me any other ones. My editor, Cal Morgan, at Riverhead sent me an image and was like “this is what we’ve come up with, I’m interested in your feedback but we all really love it,” and I opened up the file and I loved it. I thought it was great. The two books, Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth, don’t look exactly alike but there’s kind of a cohesion between the two of them. The fonts are similar, they both have the kind of Florida-style colors going on. The front has an image that could be a Florida image, With Teeth has that mouth that also kind of looks like an orange. I think that they are in conversation with each other.

Any author gets to have some veto power when it comes to it, but they have an arts department for a reason. They’re specialists and they want the look to match what your work should be. So, I was thrilled with both of them. I feel really lucky too, because sometimes people don’t like their covers that much. But I love both of mine.