I first encountered Vendela Vida's work in 2003, with the publication of her debut novel And Now You Can Go, a mesmerizing fast-paced novel about a woman who is held at gunpoint by a man who contemplates suicide and all that unravels after. Vida's keen attention to narrative detail, her exploration of psychological trauma and her lean, beautiful prose – none of these gifts are lost in her stark and incredibly arresting second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Simply put, Vendela Vida is a writer you should be reading.

After meeting at her KGB reading in February, Vendela and I corresponded over email about a number of topics, including: mothers in contemporary fiction, communication disconnects in her latest novel, and the threads of violence, forgiveness and travel, which are elegantly woven through her two slim, elegant novels.

Felicia C. Sullivan: Your first book, Girls on the Verge, investigated the rituals that help young American girls develop their adult identities. Through coming to terms with acts of violence, the characters in your two subsequent novels (And Now You Can Go, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) find themselves hunting for their identity. Can you speak to this thread that continues from your first book of non-fiction to your latest work? Do you believe that one's identity is inexplicably bound to or defined by one's origin?

Vendela Vida: I grew up in an immigrant household—my mother is Swedish, my father Hungarian—and neither of them had any knowledge that seemed relevant to my life as an adolescent growing up in San Francisco. I’m sure every teenager feels their parents’ advice is out of touch, but my parents definitely had foreign notions of how things were done (“When your friends come for your party on Friday night, you should wear a long hostess dress and a white apron"). I don’t mean to mock them, because I think they were and are very good parents and amazing people, but I left California, where I grew up, for the East Coast at the earliest opportunity.

When I was younger I tried hard to distinguish myself from my parents, but now that I’m a little older and have a family of my own, I find myself embracing my heritage. I think that’s a necessary part of figuring out who you are---abandoning the self you grew up with. I’m phrasing it that way deliberately: it’s not necessarily the person you were, but the person that everyone believed you were. Maybe that’s why travel is so important in both my novels—the characters have to divorce themselves from their familiar surroundings, and from people’s perceptions of them. Don’t get me wrong: Families and communities can be edifying, but sometimes other people’s perceptions can keep someone in a holding pattern.

FS: In your acknowledgments of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name you mention Galen Strawson’s essay “Against Narrativity,” which made you curious “about the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present,” and is the impetus for how your latest novel ultimately emerged. Your comment also reminded me of Woolf’s Moments of Being – for her, the past and present are inexplicably connected – there is little distinction between the two, rather they serve to constantly inform who we are. Can you talk a bit more about Strawson’s essay and how Northern Lights emerged?

VV: I edited an interview with Galen Strawson, a philosopher, for the first issue of the Believer. A year or so later, I came across an essay he’d written in the TLS called “Against Narrativity.” It’s about how most of us see our lives as a continuing narrative, but there’s a small percentage of people who don’t view anything they do now as being related to anything that’s happened in their past—Strawson calls these people “episodics.” I started imagining what kind of person could compartmentalize their lives like that, and came up with the character of Clarissa’s mother.

As someone who spends her life weaving together stories (even when I’m not physically writing), I consider myself a very narrative-minded person, so it was interesting to delve into the idea of what kind of person wouldn’t see their lives as a narrative. And even more challenging to try to create a narrative for someone who’s non-narrative. When Clarissa goes on her quest to find the truth about her identity, she’s trying to create a narrative of her life as well. (She and I would both agree with Woolf.)

FS: Speaking of weaving, or more specifically storytelling, I was reading an interview your gave where you said you were the kind of kid "who was making up stories and getting in trouble." Any anecdotes you want to share? Also, what were the kinds of stories you were writing as a kid/teenager?

VV: When I was 8 or 9, a friend came over to spend the night and I told a neighbor, a woman who happened to be very Catholic, that my friend’s parents’ had died in a terrible helicopter accident over the equator, and my parents were adopting my friend. I said all this while my friend was maybe 20 feet away. That night, the neighbor called my parents to tell them that she thought what they were doing was wonderful, and well…I remember having to apologize to the neighbor and to my friend, who was probably more confused than anybody.

The stories I wrote when I was young were very dark—I remember publishing one story in the school paper about a person’s secret self chasing their real self down a damp alley with a knife. This was in the fifth grade. But I was a really happy, well-adjusted kid so the stories just left everyone puzzled. One day my English teacher sat down with me to talk to me about my stories, and his reaction really amused me; I told him what another teacher had told me--that fiction shouldn’t be confused with autobiography. Basically, from the start, my writing has embodied a darkness that people can’t easily reconcile with my personality.

FS: I also read that your parents weren't big readers, but they had a library in their home filled with books purchased mainly at estate sales. What books fascinated you when you were younger and have your tastes dramatically changed as an adult? What are you reading now? What are your bookshelf mainstays?

VV: For some reason, I read a lot of W. Somerset Maugham when I was younger (around 10 or 11). I have no idea why. I don’t remember anything about his work except that the collection of his short stories we had was a two-volume set that fit neatly into a box, and I liked the feel of it in my hands.

Right now I’m traveling and have three books in my bag: Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, and Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark (someone recommended it to me after reading Northern Lights). My bookshelf mainstays are J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and A Heart So White by the Spanish writer Javier Marías.

FS: Switching gears, Olivia, Clarissa’s mother (who abandons her family and flees to Sweden), in Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, fascinates me. She evokes Ingrid of White Oleander, Elsie Fox of Borrowed Finery – mothers who don’t know how to be mothers, perhaps should never have been mothers. They practice self-preservation at the expense of their children. Towards the end of the novel, when Clarissa finally confronts Olivia, she asks, “Don’t you feel any obligation” when she really wants to know “Don’t you feel any love?” to which Olivia responds, “That was not my life. I had every reason to seek something else.” For Olivia, motherhood seemed like a piece of clothing one could easily discard. How did you come to create Olivia? This kind of mother figure?

VV: Well, Olivia’s character was definitely influenced by the Strawson essay, but by a few other factors as well. To some degree, I created Olivia in reaction to the mother in my first novel, And Now You Can Go. I love the mother in that novel; I love her strength and her sense of humor (both of which I based on characteristics of my mother). In many ways, the mother in And Now You Can Go tries to help Ellis, the protagonist, have greater perspective on the world, to not be so solipsistic. I think a lot of readers liked that mother, and I know for a long time people would say to my mother, “Are you as wonderful as the mother in your daughter’s book?” (“Yes,” she would answer.)

When I was starting Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I knew I wanted to explore motherhood and its legacy through a different lens, a different sort of mother. I wanted the mother to disappear one day, and I wanted that disappearance to say something about her. Once I knew this would happen, I became really intrigued: what kind of mother would leave her daughter in a mall and never come back? What would have happened to that mother for her to do such a thing? In trying to answer those questions, I began to think about Olivia as someone who’d experienced a “split” in her life, a defining moment that changed her personality. And that reminded me of a friend I had when I was growing up whose mother had been raped. I’m not sure how my friend found out—she probably overheard conversations— and told me. But we were so young—eight or nine—that we couldn’t fully comprehend what rape was. We didn’t even know what sex was so how could we understand rape?

Although I was young, I could see a change in my friend’s mother after the incident. She wasn’t as exuberant, and her laughter, when it came, was very studied and sad. For a long time, I’ve known I wanted to write about a mother like this, in part to figure out the answers to questions I couldn’t ask her when I was young, and would never ask her now.

FS: My god, I couldn't even begin to imagine. Not only do you have a mother who has to deal with the aftermath of rape, but there's this tragic communication disconnect – her unable to really communicate to her daughter what she went through and how it's changed her, and her daughter, your friend, too young to really understand what any of this means. I can see that the inability to speak and the inability to understand might create a kind of unavoidable distance or fissure in a mother/daughter relationship.

Recently I saw a Korean horror movie – A Tale of Two Sisters (a movie about family secrets, violence and how memory ghosts) – where symbols of blindness (e.g. statues of children shielding their eyes with their hands) were a constant. And this put me to thinking about Jeremy, Clarissa’s mentally handicapped brother, a minor character, but one who has been unable to speak since birth. His only intermittent utterances are screams. Is there a connection to Jeremy and the larger themes of the book? Violent, unspeakable acts, a mother’s desire for solitude and secrecy but a daughter’s need for answers in her life filled with a continuum of communication breakdowns and disconnects?

VV: Definitely. One of the book’s themes (one that I was conscious of, that is) is the difficulty of communication, even between people who love each other. The novel begins with the death of Richard, the man who raised Clarissa, and her discovery that he wasn’t her real father; he was so close to her—did so much for her—but never told her the truth. And then there’s Pankaj, Clarissa’s fiancé, who’s been withholding information from her as well. He thinks he’s protecting her by keeping a secret from her, but I believe what we don’t tell people speaks volumes.

I had fun with the fact that Clarissa’s job is working as subtitler for foreign films—she’s supposed to clean up translated subtitles, and make them more accessible, more accurate. Yet she herself can’t even translate or make sense of the events that are transpiring around her.

I chose to make Jeremy mentally handicapped—and make it clear he’d never spoken—to underscore this theme of (non) communication. Clarissa’s so close to him, and yet she has no idea if he understands anything she’s trying to say to him. His non-verbalness was another exploration of the relationships Clarissa has that are unreciprocated.

Clarissa travels to Finland without knowing Finnish, so that obviously provides for a great deal of misunderstanding and unfinished sentences and hand gesturing. But the person she ends up communicating with the best is Anna Kristine, a Sami healer, who doesn’t speak a word of English. That was a deliberate choice on my part—to have the apex of communication in the book occur between two people who don’t speak a word of the other person’s language.

I think, as a writer, I’m acutely aware of the ways in which words can fail us.

FS: Mothers are sacred to us and they are wholly celebrated in much of contemporary fiction. Although there may be parental discord, in the end, there is reconciliation – mother and daughter made whole, abuse and pain are forgiven. But your book, for me, was different. Because although Clarissa seeks a reunion with her mother, wants to discover who her real father is, the confrontation between the two is not neat, redemptive. Rather, the story becomes more about Clarissa, her past and how it informs her identity as a woman and ultimately a mother. Has she, as her mother predicted her namesake, rewritten history?

VV: That’s a good question—and a complicated one. I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but, in some ways, Clarissa does follow in her mother’s footsteps, and in other ways, she breaks away from the cycle of betrayal and parental neglect. I think I’m incapable of writing neat scenes between complicated characters—it feels false to me. I’d rather create endings that force the reader to ask questions of themselves than tie everything up with a pretty pink bow.

FS: Both Ellis in And Now You Can Go and Clarissa in Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name could be perceived as victims – one forced at gunpoint to hear a man contemplating suicide and the other abandoned by her mother – or perhaps not. Do you see these characters as victims? Or more apt, do these characters perceive themselves as victims?

VV: I don’t see either of them as victims. Do they see themselves as victims? Well, that’s a question that’s at the heart of And Now You Can Go: how grave was Ellis’s gunpoint encounter with the man in Riverside Park? Ellis ultimately refuses to play the part of victim. I do believe it’s a choice—whether you want to play the role or not. I think our society often gives people the easy way out, and the way out is to play the victim. We can blame drinking or our childhoods or…anything, really. I’m not very interested in the victim mentality when I’m writing; I think of fiction as the antithesis of easy psychological explanations. Thus, I can safely say that Clarissa doesn’t see herself as a victim either.

FS: I recently read that Northern Lights is the second book in a three-part series, where you're examining the themes of violence and forgiveness. Can you tell us about your new novel? Is it set in Turkey?

VV: Yes, the new novel is set off the coast of Turkey. It’s about a 50-year-old woman whose daughter has died of a drug overdose. I don’t want to say too much about it, not because I’m superstitious, but because I like to surprise myself when I’m writing, and not have the entire plot set in stone beforehand.

FS: You're quite a busy woman – a mother to an eighteen-month old, a writer, an editor, a teacher, a wife – what's a typical day for you like? And I ask this selfishly as a fellow multi-tasker: When do you get time to write?

VV: I really wish I were someone with a set schedule; I’m in awe of people with schedules. But every day is different. Some days I find myself working on the Believer from the moment I wake up until well after dinner; other days—usually weekends—I devote solely to spending time with my family. I try to write 750 words every day, and this usually happens at night. I’ve found that if I tell myself I need to write for X amount of hours a day, that ends up being a bust: I’ll just stare at my computer for three hours and then say, “Finished!” But setting a word count keeps me honest.

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Interview with Robert Birnbaum

Vendela Vida is the author of two novels, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which was published earlier this year, and And Now You Can Go. Her first book, Girls on the Verge—a journalistic study of female initiation rituals—grew out of her MFA thesis at Columbia University. Vida is a founding co-editor of the Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and a board member and teacher at 826 Valencia, a non-profit youth writing lab.

Image Courtesy of Andy Rogers/PI