Emerging Writers Series: Anna Kate Blair
The Modern (2023) is Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel. Told through the narrator, Sophia, the story is centred around Sophia’s life as she becomes engaged, meets new people and questions her relationships, sexuality and place in our modern, changing world. Woven intricately through the novel is Sophia’s intense passion for art; a preoccupation which acts as a backbone to all other aspects of her life.
This was a thought-provoking read for me, and I was privileged to have the opportunity to ask Anna about her writing process, art and definitions of modernity, and delve into some of her intriguing thoughts on Sophia’s characterisation.
As one would expect from the title, the protagonist Sophia spends a lot of time contemplating what it means to be “modern.” Did you use these musings to reflect your personal experience of the modern world? The “disenchantment” you describe seems unfortunately very fitting, I wonder if you were offering a wider critique on society, and the future we are headed towards?
This is a tricky question, because it depends on one’s definition of the modern world. I tend to see postmodernity as something separate from modernity, and so this novel is based more on my observations of the modern world’s aftermath than the modern world itself. I have a critic’s orientation to the world, generally, and the novel is shaped by this, but I didn’t want The Modern to serve as a critique, necessarily, because critique can be quite didactic and one of the delights of novels, I think, is that they open up possibilities rather than closing them down, that they’re generative rather than argumentative.
This was, in part, why I wanted to write a novel; so many questions of what modernity is, or was, have played out as academic arguments, and argument elevates rationality, whereas I wanted to explore ways in which modernity and its subjects seek rational justifications for what are, at the core, emotional decisions. If the novel offers critique, I think, it’s of the impulse toward definite answers and the ways in which we try to create order to protect us from the wilderness of living and feeling. I think we’ve seen, over the last few years, a kind of nostalgia for a romanticised version of modernity, even as modernity laid the groundwork for the world in which we’re living today. I like that novels, and other forms of art, can create a space of ambiguity and multiplicity, a space in which possibilities can be tested without requiring neat conclusions and solutions.
I thought Sophia’s character was really interesting. To be perfectly honest, I found her quite unlikable, in the sense that she is very self-obsessed, and a bit melodramatic. To me this felt like a little nudge to perhaps take a look in the mirror and realise the world is sadly full of Sophias. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on her. What were your intentions behind her characterisation?
I wonder, sometimes, about the practice of labelling characters “unlikable,” largely because my aim is to create characters who feel human and I’d rarely label a person “unlikable.” In life, if I dislike somebody, I try to take it as a cue to consider the forces that shaped their personality and to examine whether the dislike stems from my own relationship to certain traits. I wonder if what we are doing, in describing characters as “unlikable,” is trying to create distance between those characters and ourselves. I thought of Sophia, as I was writing, as a nightmarish version of myself; each time I noticed we shared a flaw I tried to amplify that flaw, to make her worse than me. I wanted, also, though, for these flaws to reflect her position in relation to modernity – being self-obsessed, for example, is in many ways a logical extension to the modern emphasis on the individual.
Sophia is intended to be frustrating, but I also wanted her to be a character who, like many people, makes more sense and is easier to feel compassion for once you understand her psyche, and pay attention to the aspects of her life that she’s determined to dismiss. There are hints about her childhood in the book, but I wanted these to be very subtle, so that there’s space for the reader’s projection and so that the book rewards concentrated attention to small clues and notable absences. I wanted to avoid what Parul Sehgal calls “the trauma plot,” in which the question of trauma propels the narrative and everything’s neatly explained, but I do believe most of our approaches to love and desire are shaped by childhood, and are a kind of repetition compulsion. Sophia is melodramatic, but many people with attachment issues spiral because romantic relationships activate attachment wounds. I wanted Sophia’s skewed perspective, and the degree to which she’s projecting certain narratives onto people and situations, to gradually become clearer as the novel progresses, causing details that originally might have read in one way to possibly read in another.
I noticed some similarities between Sophia and Mrs Dalloway, and found she didn’t fit snugly within the current rise of “millennial sad girls” in modern novels. Was the current trope something you considered while writing, or were there other literary inspirations behind Sophia?
I didn’t think about the “sad girl” trope at all, to be honest, though I enjoy the novels with which it’s often associated. I would differentiate between modern and contemporary novels, though, and I’d note that this trope is largely associated with the contemporary novel, whereas The Modern is influenced more by modern novels. I saw The Modern as offering a queer contemporary take on the modernist tradition of the first-person novel exploring female subjectivity and societal change, and so my inspiration was largely mid-century novels by critics, including Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat. I loved, also, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado and Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and their striking, solipsistic protagonists. I haven’t read Mrs Dalloway in over a decade, but I’m always thinking about Virginia Woolf, so I’m not surprised by your comparison.
There’s a line in Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, which I read a few weeks ago, noting that current literary tastes are more Victorian than modern, and this thought has helped me understand my own book’s relationship to contemporary novels. In contemporary novels, plots are generally driven by action, and progress quickly, whereas The Modern is driven by ideas, and shaped by an interest in uncertainty and stasis. I wanted to explore the modernist myth of progress, and ways in which this might map onto characterisation and plot, and so it’s this, more than specific characters, that inspired Sophia. I do read a lot of contemporary novels, and admire many contemporary novelists, but it’s probably telling that the contemporary novel I found most influential was Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, which was itself inspired by Elizabeth Hardwick and Henry James.
There’s a line in the novel where Sophia mentions that you can either have success in relationships or work, but not both. I found it refreshing that Sophia is, in many ways, alone at the conclusion of the story. Was this always your plan from the beginning, or was it something you decided on later in your writing process?
I don’t think this was my plan at the absolute beginning, but it was probably my plan from around the time when I seriously committed to the book. It made narrative sense in terms of Sophia’s character and it made sense in terms of the book’s relationship to traditional narrative and the concept of the “marriage plot.” I’ve found, too, that novels about queerness often end with a particular person being chosen and that choice being seen as conclusive and representative of a relationship to one’s own sexuality, and I wanted to avoid this.
There are some parallels between yourself and Sophia, particularly in terms of your love for art. I noticed you’ve also worked at the Museum of Modern Art. How did you draw on your own experience when writing Sophia’s character?
I drew on my own experience more in setting than characterisation, but the setting evoked some intellectual interests that I gave to Sophia. There was a sense, working at MoMA, of reckoning with modernity’s afterlife, in that there’s a paradox to the modern art museum as a collecting institution, effectively historicising and canonising movements that are about breaking with the past, creating something new. I enjoyed the self-consciousness of curatorial conversations at the museum, with everything examined in relation to modernity’s definitions and the museum’s purpose. I liked, at MoMA, that none of this was taken too seriously; there was an awareness that modernity often contradicted itself, and that practice couldn’t always match up with theory, and so these conversations were about the pleasures of thought rather than a need for resolution.
I wanted, too, to explore the way in which working at a museum can provoke a more casual approach to art; Sophia spends her life with the collection, and so she can treat art as a backdrop to her life, putting her own problems in conversation with it, rather than treating it as a scholarly subject that needs to be taken seriously and discussed objectively. I’m very interested in the intimacy of museum workers’ relationships with art.
As an art enthusiast, I loved all the inclusions of various artists and artwork. Your mention of Kusama was a little ‘ooh!’ moment for me. I found Sophia’s connection to Grace Hartigan extremely relatable – I also have a particular artist (though mine is a poet) who I think of often. Sophia talks of Grace with such tenderness; I wonder if Grace is also your special artist? Were there more personal reasons you chose her other than the obvious parallels between her and Sophia?
I wasn’t a huge fan of Grace Hartigan’s paintings when I started writing this novel, though I came to appreciate them through the process of researching them. I love Grand Street Brides, but my own preoccupations are as often Robert’s preoccupations as Sophia’s… I’m always thinking about the Appalachian Trail and Anne Carson, for example.
Sophia, as a character, developed alongside her study of Grace Hartigan, which sprung from the haunting, ambivalent quality of Grand Street Brides, but the reasons Sophia studies Grace Hartigan are personal to Sophia rather than to me. Grace Hartigan left her child in order to move to the city and paint, and I suspect the academic subjects we’re unconsciously drawn to are those that allow us to puzzle over aspects of our life that we won’t allow ourselves to examine directly. Sophia’s avoiding the questions of her childhood, but she’s drawn to relationships and subjects of study that aren’t, psychologically, so far removed from it. I’m not sure if this is one of the obvious parallels that you note, as I don’t make this explicit in the novel; I don’t think Sophia’s self-aware enough to know or admit to herself that this is part of Grace Hartigan’s attraction.
You’ve had quite a few publications in various literary magazines and journals. Have you always been building up to writing a novel? How did your writing process differ with the novel than from crafting smaller pieces?
I don’t think I’ve always been building up to writing a novel, but I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’d imagined I’d be a nonfiction writer, largely because I have more confidence in my research abilities than in my imagination, and because I studied History of Art and Architecture, but then, in the end, I was attracted to the formal possibilities of the novel, and to the difficulty of it.
There are quite a lot of differences in terms of approach, I think, but I tend to write short stories in quick bursts, without doing any research, in response to an idea, and then forget about them, whereas a novel is more of a long-term commitment and involves much more research than writing, with the ideas emerging from the research. I write more lyric essays than short stories, though, and they’re different again; they usually involve writing way too much and cutting ninety percent of it away.
Many debut authors talk of pushing through many rejections and setbacks. What was your path to publication like? Do you have any advice for aspiring writers on putting their work out there?
I am not a writer who deals well with rejections and setbacks, unfortunately, and I’d advise writers like me, who are easily crushed, not to assume that rejection is guaranteed. I spent so much time, writing The Modern, feeling depressed in anticipation of rejection which ultimately never came, and I don’t think that narrative of difficulty was helpful. I was very lucky, though, and lucky people generally give terrible advice. If I think, instead, about other setbacks, my advice would be to ensure that you have friends and a sense of purpose beyond writing, so that your sense of self isn’t wholly dependent on literary validation.
The different writing habits of authors has always really fascinated me. For instance, Virginia Woolf always wrote from the same chair in her study (supposedly!). Did you have a strict routine you stuck to? Did writing The Modern come easily, or was it something you worked on slowly over years?
I am unlike Woolf in my choice of furniture; I write lying in bed, sitting on the ground or on a couch, on the backs of receipts while standing in galleries and on my phone while walking, but almost never in a chair or study. I wrote The Modern without routine, while shuffling between short-term contracts and different countries. I worked on it in bursts, focusing intensely for a week or a month, and then set the manuscript aside for ages, with my dedication wavering when I lost my belief in myself. I wish my writing habits were better!
Anna Kate Blair is a writer of fiction and non-fiction exploring art, architecture and place. She has a PhD in History of Art and Architecture, and her debut novel, The Modern was published in September this year. She has worked in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has taught in universities, museums and other institutions around the world. Find her online at https://www.annakateblair.com
Martha David Jetis is a student from England, who spends her time oscillating between her two loves: science and literature. Whatever happens after she graduates, she hopes there will always be room in her life for books and writing. Find her at mdavidjetis@gmail.com