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Idaho Review staff editor Kira Compton speaks with Elizabeth Gonzalez James about her writing process, generative research, and the cyclical nature of time.
IR: One of the many things I loved about your novel was the strong sense of place. At times, the land itself seemed like a character with agency. How much are you inspired by landscape and environment in your writing?
EGJ: George Saunders says to lean into your strengths, and I think writing descriptions of place is a particular strength of mine, so I tried to get in as much as I could without being exhausting. I grew up in South Texas, so it was fairly easy for me to write about what it looks like and how it feels to walk around down there. It's unbelievably hot, humid, and sunny. I have no idea how anyone lived there before A/C. So I had a lot of fun finding different ways to say it's miserably hot and sunny. And then because of the magical nature of the book, I could take some liberties with the environment. I have vines of purple flowers unfolding and pointing to the sun; I have an ominous rust red winter sky over gray snow. I wanted to give the sense that anything could happen.
I read a short story collection by a Polish writer named Bruno Schulz, and if I recall correctly he never really left his very small and obscure village in Poland. The way he describes his hometown, though, it sounds positively magical. I bet in reality it wasn't. But by his very intense and close observation of the streets and the buildings, he takes what's there and amplifies it and makes it unforgettable. That's what I tried to do, too.
IR: Personally, Remedio was my favorite character. He serves as a wonderful foil to other strange, almost omnipotent characters in the canon of westerns–McCarthy's Judge being the most obvious example. But unlike the Judge, Remedio is undecided on the true nature of humans, unsure of his place on the balancing scale of good and evil. This ambiguity adds a delicious layer of complexity to the world you've created. I'd love to hear more about Remedio's conception.
EGJ: Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed him. Once I decided to write the book with some magical elements in it, I settled very quickly on having the Devil as a character. But this presented some problems as I realized that the Devil can't really experience personal growth. He's too static. So then I thought about some of the functions that the Devil fulfills, one of them being, possibly, that he collects the souls of bad people and takes them to Hell. So then I had the idea of writing a character who isn't the Devil per se, but is a sort of soul collector, taking the deceased to wherever they're headed next. He's also sort of a scorekeeper, as he can see who's been naughty and nice.
I left his role a little ambiguous because I didn't want to try to outline the entire moral universe of the novel. But in writing his character I did have to clarify quite a bit for myself: What happens to bad people when they die? Why does God let bad things happen to people? Are descendents punished for the crimes of their ancestors? Is the universe a place of chaos and randomness or is there any kind of moral order? I didn't expect to get quite such a theological and philosophical awakening in the writing of the book, but I had to clarify my personal thinking on these matters so that I could find a moral framework for the story.
IR: Research plays a significant role in your writing process–sometimes in ways that might surprise readers, like a deep dive on Sartre for Mona at Sea, or devouring Peter Sellers biographies for The Bullet Swallower. In what ways has research shaped your work? Is there any tidbit you couldn't include in The Bullet Swallower that you found fascinating?
EGJ: Research was a HUGE part of writing this book. I thank the Oakland Public Library in an author's note at the end of the book because I could not have written it without interlibrary loan. The research I did wasn't just informative about the way people lived and the historical context of the period. It also helped me generate ideas. I encountered so many fascinating characters in my research that I ended up including some of them in the novel. Casoose was an actual Texas Ranger. He was Mexican, but when his family was killed by bandits he joined the Texas Rangers and essentially declared war on Mexicans. The scene where thousands of dead cattle are lined up on the banks of the Nueces River is also lifted straight from a memoir written by a woman who was an early inhabitant of Corpus Christi.
As for tidbits that didn't make it into the book, there are probably hundreds. In early drafts of the book Jaime, the Bullet Swallower's grandson, was a much bigger character, and I crafted a whole world around him in Mexico City during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. I regrettably had to cut all that out, but I'm actually turning that material into an all new novel, so it won't have been in vain.
IR: This novel is so concerned with time, going so far as to quote Borges through the adventurous (and hilarious) Peter. In prepping for this interview, I came across a line from Borges's The New Refutation of Time that made me think of your writing: "Our language is saturated and animated by time." Your language certainly is. Time is the heartbeat of The Bullet Swallower, and the characters constantly cycle back to it: time's passage, time's lack, how much time must pass for responsibility to wane–if it ever does. Did you find yourself consciously grappling with time, or did it arise organically in the writing process?
EGJ: Yes, time was a huge preoccupation of mine while writing the novel. As I said Jaime was originally a much bigger character and so I had two timelines that were crisscrossing through the novel with a big collision at the end. This complex structure required that I have a tight grasp on when everything was taking place, and how callbacks and overlaps were introduced. As I was drafting I read the craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison. She focuses on story shape in her essays, but when we think about story shape we're also thinking about time. The timeframe will dictate the story shape and vice versa. It's all really interesting.
I also remember reading a line, probably in a Carlos Fuentes novel, about how in Mexico time moves in a spiral. It went something like, "How else can we live in skyscrapers in the city while there are peasants living in the dark ages out in the country." And that really struck me, this idea of how time moves differently for different people. I am also obsessed with fractals, something I got into briefly in Mona, and which were a sort of foundational principle for this novel. The Sonoros are like a shape that keeps repeating generation to generation. I was a history major, and I have a healthy appreciation for how history repeats itself over and over. I mean, Trump is running for president again. Don't tell me time doesn't circle back on itself.
IR: I'd love to hear more about this story's relationship with your own life, as The Bullet Swallower is based loosely on your great-grandfather. How did your personal ties to this story change your writing process, if it did at all?
EGJ: I tell a story in my author's note that I had a cousin who was a huge movie star in Mexico in the 1960s. He wanted to make a comedic movie about my great-grandfather, the actual Bullet Swallower, but when he asked my grandfather for his blessing, he absolutely refused. He didn't want our family's history in the public eye, nor did he want the character turned into a joke. And this story was on my mind when I was writing the book. My grandfather died before I was born, so I never could have gotten his blessing. But I'm a fairly woo-woo person and believe in ghosts and prophetic dreams and whatnot, and so as I wrote I was sort of on the lookout for signs that I should stop, that my grandfather was upset from beyond the grave, or that my great-grandfather had a problem being a protagonist. And I never got any signal that they were upset with me, so I just carried on. But this was part of the reason why I pushed myself so hard and rewrote the book as many times as I did - I wanted their ghosts to be at peace with the final product.
IR: Pulling back towards your body of work as a whole: though wildly different novels, I found the protagonists of Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower to have a charming commonality. Mona Mireles and Antonio Sonoro are both defined by the promise of what they could have been, some bright destiny waiting just around the corner. What draws you to these complex, desperate characters?
EGJ: That's super interesting. I don't find a ton of commonality between the two books, though I haven't thought about it too deeply, either. I can see what you mean about how they both feel they were meant for bigger, brighter destinies. I saw Karen Joy Fowler speak a few years ago and she said she's so hard on herself when she writes, and is never happy with a book once it's done. She tells herself, Well, that one didn't work out the way I wanted it to, but I'll get it right next time. And I feel the same way. The book in my head is always so much better than the book that comes out. It's ridiculous, because I can also sit back and appreciate that it's a good book and is something I'm proud of. But I can't stop that little feeling of disappointment that I didn't do better, and a companion feeling of spiteful ambition where I vow that I'll get it right with the next one. So maybe I feel some connection with characters who are never satisfied with what they have and feel like something better is just out of reach. That's sort of bleak isn't it? Haha.
IR: Finally, is there anything about your writing process or journey that you'd like to share with aspiring writers?
EGJ: Writing is a hard career with a ton of setbacks and very few external rewards. So my advice is to be kind to yourself and celebrate every victory. So you didn't write today because you worked at your job all day and then had to come home and deal with your kids and only had enough energy to do the Wordle and watch five minutes of Colbert? That's ok. The writing will happen when it happens. You might have to take weeks off, months, years. And that's ok. In the meantime your mind is your own and you can be thinking, questioning, daydreaming, observing. Juan Rulfo, who wrote what is arguably the most influential novel by a Mexican writer, was a tire salesman who spent years thinking about his novel, Pedro Páramo, before he wrote it down. So please don't beat yourself up because of some notion that you need to write everyday. And when something good happens, celebrate it. Don't wait for something major. Celebrate every victory, whether you finished writing a chapter or even just did some free-writing for thirty minutes. This slowly strengthens the part of the brain that's responsible for validating your own work without needing recognition from other people. And once you're writing for your own pleasure, no one can stop you.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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