Interview by Rodge Glass
‘You and your partner want a baby. But your two bodies can’t make a baby together.’
Kirsty Logan’s memoir, ‘The Unfamiliar’ has been described as “Cold, hard, raw writing that somehow sets your heart on fire”. In this new, exclusive interview with Rodge Glass for The Glasgow Review of Books, Kirsty shares her insights into the process of writing memoir, the constraints and limits of trying to capture complex, real-life on the page and what the experience of motherhood has taught her about love.
GRB: For those who haven’t read The Unfamiliar, can you please introduce the story, as you see it now?
Kirsty Logan (KL): The Unfamiliar is the story of how my wife and I had a baby. That’s the short version. It’s also about anxiety, about death, about what family means, about what a body means. It’s about mythology and outdoor swimming and ghost stories and sex.
It’s written in short sections because I wrote it as a new parent, for new parents. I could just about hold onto a coherent thought for one paragraph, and no more, and I think that’s a pretty universal feeling in that strange time of night feeds, hormone fluctuations and the beautiful, terrible pressure of keeping a tiny creature alive.
It’s a book about a very familiar story – how babies come to be. But it’s also unfamiliar, because every life is its own adventure.
GRB: I came to this book having only read fiction of yours in the past. Of course, it’s fresh territory, but I also felt like I recognised something in your tone and delivery – that playful, biting, fearless way of portraying characters that so marks out your fiction. But I’m more interested in how you see any commonalities between your writing in the two forms. What do you feel you feel you carry over, as a writer, from your fiction to your nonfiction?
KL: None of the characters in my fiction are me, but also they’re very much me. I’ve never danced on a circus boat with a bear, or performed as a mermaid on a haunted island, or been a teenager in the Middle Ages, like the characters in my novels. But I have confessed so much in my fiction. It feels safe to do so, because no one knows which parts are true and which parts you’ve made up.
And although this memoir is the most raw and honest thing I’ve ever written, I don’t recognise myself in it. The ‘Kirsty Logan’ in the book is me, in that everything in the book is something I experienced, thought, said or felt – but also I feel like I don’t know her. She’s very distant to me now, like someone I knew in another life.
GRB: You’re appearing at the Boswell Book Festival this month (on 12 May), at an event which focuses on fresh approaches to writing real lives. The event features you, the performance poet Len Pennie, and the great Shetlandic journalist Jen Stout. It’s important not to present what you’re all doing as similar – I think you all have distinctly different approaches to writing real lives. In The Unfamiliar, how would you describe your approach to writing your own life onto the page? What about writing the lives of those around you – your partner, your family?
KL: I think, if anything brings the three of us together, it’s that our books are about finding something positive in trauma. Finding connection and meaning even from the darkest and cruellest moments.
I try to never write anyone else. Other people are mentioned in The Unfamiliar, but I didn’t try to portray anyone as complete or realistic, because that’s not possible. Firstly, I can only write my own idea of someone, and that will be different to how they perceive themselves; they might not even recognise my version of them. And also, it’s just not possible to nail a complex, contradictory, real-life human to the pages of a book. I couldn’t even write a complete portrayal of myself, and I’m inside my own head! I wouldn’t even try to encompass anyone else.
GRB: The Unfamiliar covers sensitive territory from the first chapter. Even after knowing the ending, the way you present your complicated feelings about your donor at the very outset really stayed with me. You write that: “You know he contains multitudes, but you’re not interested in any of them. You’re interested in sperm.“
I’m always a bit suspicious of nonfiction writers who present themselves as wronged saints. You seem to lean into presenting yourself as complex, imperfect, capable of harshness as well as generosity and love. It makes for a more convincing portrait. Is this choice of how you present yourself something you thought about consciously while writing, or did you just write on instinct?
KL: It’s never a good idea to write to settle a score or indulge a grudge. It doesn’t work, and it’s bad writing. We can’t control how readers come to our books, we can’t control how they interpret our words, and we can’t control what they think of us as writers or people.
I had to allow myself to be as real as possible on the page, and if the reader found me an ‘unlikeable female character’ (how I love/hate that phrase), then that’s fine. The thing is, a reader can never know a writer from their books. ‘Kirsty Logan, Writer’ is a very different person to Kirsty just going about her daily life. I allowed myself to come across like that on the page by holding tight to the people who know me fully in my real life, and love me. I can handle someone on GoodReads disliking me, because I know that my wife and my mum and my friends will still love me, no matter what I write.
Today when I was getting the laundry basket from my child’s room, I bumped into the doorframe, knocked my glasses off my face, and was so surprised I farted (another gift of childbirth). It’s impossible to get airs and graces, to flounce about calling yourself an artiste, when you’re constantly reminded that you are, in fact, just some dickhead.
GRB: I’m always fascinated by a writer’s choices when they’re rendering real life experience. Tell me, did you consider any other approaches to telling your story? Like, starting earlier or later, including or excluding anything – foregrounding or backgrounding anything you were unsure of?
KL: I didn’t intend to write in second person. It felt too self-indulgent, too revealing, to write in first person. I started in second, which allowed me enough distance from myself to tell it all true. I remember telling myself that I could always change it to first later. But I never did, because second person felt right.
I knew exactly where I wanted to start – with needing some sperm – because I thought that was the point that my wife and I became ‘unfamiliar’: the point where it became clear that our bodies together couldn’t do what we wanted them to.
It was harder to choose where to end. With the birth? When I went back to work? When the baby started nursery? I finished when the baby was six months old, because I had to finish somewhere. That’s the messy part about writing from life: there are no clear start and end points. As writers, we have to artificially create them.
GRB: I love the way you challenge assumptions about parenthood and motherhood while keeping the story centered on your own experience. In other words, you don’t need to make a case for queer motherhood being as real and valuable and complex and painful as any other kind, you just show it. And readers can see. The book is subtitled ‘a queer motherhood memoir’. I’m curious. What have the responses to the book been like, both from queer and non-queer audiences?
KL: The responses have been truly, truly beautiful. In writing something so deeply personal and individual, it’s been a surprise to see how it has spoken to many different people. Other parents, of course, and other queer people – but also people who don’t have kids, people who never want kids, a woman in my local charity shop, the vicar at a nearby church, my cousin, and many people who I don’t think would have usually picked up a book about pregnancy.
The strange thing is that the more specific and personal your writing, the more people it seems to connect with.
GRB: One of the things I was interested to see play out was how your relationship with your partner evolves as the challenges you face change. Especially after the book turns, about 40 pages in, and the physical focus moves towards you. The line on page 42 stood out to me – your partner ‘always sees people in the fullness of themselves’ you write, and it got me thinking about what power we have as nonfiction writers to praise and recognise others. My final question is, did writing The Unfamiliar change the way you consider writing about love?
KL: My first thought was: absolutely, yes. Throughout our lives we experience many different types of love, and each of those expands what we thought we knew about love. I know every parent says it, but cliches are usually such because they’re true: before I became a parent, I didn’t know I had the capacity to love so deeply.
I thought I did. I thought I loved my wife as much as humans could love one another. But I think she and I would both admit that the love we feel for our child surpasses even the love we have for one another. I’m happy to concede this is biological rather than spiritual, that hormones are extremely potent and humans have evolved to feel this overwhelming love for their offspring so that they don’t get annoyed and throw them in the sea.
However.
Other than the memoir, I’ve written another book since my child was born. It’s a story collection called No & Other Love Stories, and I would describe it as fucked-up love stories.
There’s a story about a woman with a cannibal fetish and her butcher husband, one about an expectant mother obsessed with feeding meat to the wasps’ nest in her shed, one about a war widow who discovers that she loves her husband much more as a ghost, one about a teenage girl infatuated with a bloodthirsty succubus. They all have what I would consider happy endings, even when those endings consist of mayhem, blood, and/or death.
So I will say that my approach to love doesn’t appear to have become sweeter! Perhaps motherhood has fed into this. I thought the love a mother had for her child was simple, and in some ways it is – my love is complete and unconditional.
But it’s also a complex and strange love. The way you can feel irritation and bliss and rage and tenderness and frustration and an overwhelming something that you can’t even name, all in about five minutes of singing your restless child to sleep.
The way I write about love is different now because the way I love is different now. In a lot of ways it’s more complicated, but it’s also simpler.
GRB: Kirsty, thank you for taking the time to speak with The Glasgow Review of Books.
For more about Kirsty and her writing, you can visit her website. The Unfamiliar – her “unconventional, unexpectedly funny, brutally honest memoir about infertility, pregnancy and motherhood” – is available now from the publisher and all good booksellers.
For more information on the Boswell Book Festival – “the world’s only festival of biography and memoir”, you can visit the Festival website here.
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