An Interview with Kate Cayley

 

Sophia T. R. Godsoe: In the best way possible, I was made very uncomfortable by the recollections of the narrator in your short fiction piece, Certainty. I have stinging remembrances of the “Little Johnnys” of my life—people who, for one reason or another, a group of friends and I decided were up to no good. Some of our assessments carried weight, some did not, but all got away from us. The momentum of the stories we tell each other about folks we feel justified in hating is frightening. I’m impressed by the way you allowed your narrator to unflinchingly recall their sharp judgmental nature. How did you strike the balance there, giving us a narrator we want to sit with but also one we can join in their self-criticism? 

 

Kate Cayley: I think it's important, in the story, that the narrator is in middle age, with a child (and students) around the same age she was when the remembered action of the story takes place. This means she sees herself differently, noting both how young she was, but also how foolish, and ultimately how culpable. Being in it myself, I think this is a time of life of deep introspection (almost fretting), in which you look back and realize you were wrong, or not as right as you thought you were. Where you can look back clearly on the impulse to close ranks as a group, how strong it is at particular times in one's life, how frightening and how exhilarating. That even if you are, to some extent, justified, your justification is never as total as it seemed, because of the primal joy of casting someone out. 

  

STRG: What made the academic social landscape particularly appealing as a setting, in terms of both time and space? 

 

KC: I think this is one of the only stories I've ever written set primarily in an academic context (I'm not an academic). In full disclosure, this story is very nebulously inspired by something that happened while I was in first year university in the late nineties, though I've of course sharpened and heavily fictionalized the stray detail that gave rise to the story. University is such a heady time-you are away from home, usually for the first time, trying to establish yourself as an adult, still a child, simultaneously coddled and thrown in at the deep end. It's a time in which you are often learning to view the world in political terms, which can lead to easy judgments, to seeing yourself in political terms, but not anyone else. Simply put, these are contexts in which the reality of class and the depth of student privilege is often rendered invisible. I am fascinated by this: how much it's a time of expanded consciousness and blinkered perceptions at once.

STRG: You capture, with a terrifying precision, the painful bite inherent to a lot of relationships between women and feminine individuals, both tinged with queer desire and not. I found myself swimming in that sea of constant socialized critique and appraisal of others as I read, remembering times I have been both the appraiser and the appraised. But there can be such love there, too, which I think you also capture very well—the love between our narrator and Nina, for example, which we learn has lasted in the form of a years-long friendship. How did you navigate portraying these complex relationships—from the intimate to the semi-distant or even the antagonistic—without compromising the nuance of each? 

 

KC: With great difficulty! I'm so happy that you've highlighted that there's love in this story, as well as appraisal and cruelty. It's important to me that Nina and the narrator are lifelong friends, and even if they never directly address their shame I think they both have it, and know the other one has it, and that this is part of their friendship. Of course, when they meet there's an element of desire (Nina ultimately lives a queer life, the narrator doesn't, but when you are that young it often doesn't matter, it's such an amorphous time) and of competition (they are both figuring out who they want to be), but over time, that settles into lifelong friendship. 

 

STRG: Your narrator’s preoccupation with their memory of Little Johnny’s physical presence is quite striking. Actually, their recollections of many people who passed in and out of their life—the women working in the dining hall, “needy conventional” Emily from the baby group—are painted with a kind of grotesque realism that felt to me both value-laden and detached. What was the goal behind these descriptions and how do you envision them connecting to your narrator’s self-assessment? 

 

KC: I think I just really like grotesque realism (big Muriel Spark fan, would hate to have known her), but I also want the narrator to have come to a point of terrible honesty with herself, in which she actually admits how cruelly she's judged others. I kept taking the Emily episode out as too tangential, and then realized I needed it because university is a time in which you can be very tempted to cast yourself as blameless. And so is having small children: you are sleepless and stretched thin and looking for company, and it can make you forget compassion. The episode with Emily is twinned with the episode with Johnny, even though Johnny is the focus of the story, and is part of the narrator facing herself.

 

STRG: I was particularly struck by the last two paragraphs of your story: the first taking place when the narrator is older, outside the Baptist church, the second occurring right after Nina and our narrator stand outside the dining hall with their signs, when Lindsey remarks, “You never asked me.” Rather than equating these scenes in a moral sense, I see you simply grappling with the illusion of certainty as a concept, the simultaneous comfort and discomfort of that strength of conviction. Why was it important for you to sit in that nebulous space and have readers do so too? 

 

KC: I remain unsure about "you never asked me." Like the Emily episode, I kept taking it out, but for the opposite reason: it seemed too obviously an emotional climax. Then I decided to just run with it. The paragraph outside the Baptist church is, as you say, also part of leaving the reader to mull over the title. Seeing the anti-choice protesters, the narrator gets a jolt, reminded of Nina and of herself, no matter that they sit on the other side of the political spectrum. I hope the ending lands ambivalently: not that certainty is the original sin (though I think it might be), but more that certainty is inevitable. We need some certainties in order to live, in order to do anything at all, and yet the minute we are overtaken by our certainties, by our judgements, we fail morally. It's just the condition of living, but that doesn't make it easier. In the end, I hope the reader feels that both Lindsey and Johnny have eluded the narrator, that they might have a totally different version of events, which would also be partial, and true.