AG: The women in your new collection, Always Happy Hour, are very fleshed out, with clear convictions and full, honest personalities. They also have deeply singular but relatable experiences. Do their personalities or their experiences come first for you? Do you develop character or plot first, or do you deal with them simultaneously?

MM: I'll generally have a line of dialogue and the image of someone speaking (what they look like, where they are) before I begin. I rarely have a fully formed or even half-formed "plot," though I might have an idea—in a story I'm working on now I know the narrator will be kidnapped but at the moment she's just home alone watching The Virgin Suicides on her laptop and waiting for the "Crazy on You" scene to come on.


2.

AG: I've been thinking about how fluctuations in ego and emotion play into your writing. If that makes any sense to you, is it something you feel you have control of as a writer? Have you ever been scared to publish something? And/or has anything you've published gone on to have unforeseen results?

MM: Hmmm . . . I'm not sure I know what "fluctuations of ego and emotion" means. The good thing about writing about exes and people who don't read is that you either don't care what they think or don't have to worry about it. It gets trickier when the people are still in your life and will almost certainly read something (or a mutual friend will read it and report back). I spend a lot of time in Oxford, Mississippi and most of my friends here are writers. Last Friday night, we met at the bar, as we do, and then we all went home and wrote about it. Or at least a few of us did.

The whole point of writing is to be truthful, though, and the truth is bound to make people look bad. 

Once I wrote an unflattering portrait of a woman and expected her to hate me forever, but she was okay with it. We're actually closer than before I published the unflattering thing about her because it opened up a line of dialogue that wasn't there before.


2 ½.    

AG: Do your readers ever misunderstand your tendency to . . . ?

MM: . . . make ample use of bathrooms? In nearly all fiction, the characters eat and drink but they never go to the bathroom, which bothers me. I just finished a novel and this narrator—a woman—avoids looking in every mirror and reflective surface she passes; she pees once and showers maybe twice? though we see her eat and drink a lot and walk the city for hours each day; we know every building she passes and cat she pets. But she needs to pee! And she's so dirty! She also needs to brush her hair and floss and pluck her eyebrows. And there's almost certainly a stray hair she needs to address.

I'm bringing back bathroom culture. I'm on track so far. Laurie Muchnick, in her NYTBR of The Last Days of California, said "Elise . . . and Jess do spend more time in bathrooms than the main characters of any novel I can think of."




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Read MM's story.

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