Interview by Jesse Holth
Allie McFarland’s debut novel, Disappearing in Reverse (University of Calgary Press, 2020), features an unnamed narrator as the main character—a picara who is on a journey of grief, discovery, humour, and burgeoning adulthood.
Jesse Holth: Congratulations, Allie! This is your first novel—what made you decide to write a picaresque?
Allie McFarland: I was sitting in a poetry class reading No Fixed Address, by Aritha Van Herk, under the table—when Aritha walked past the open door and caught me reading her book. She came into the class and said, “Don’t write a picaresque! The characters will run away with you.” So I thought, obviously I have to write one now. I didn’t know much about them—it was a first encounter, but I really liked the idea.
JH: There is a recurring theme in your novel of silence, or being silenced. The narrator struggles with communication and feels alienated. At one point, she strongly identifies with an elderly woman who has been purposefully misunderstood. Maybe she feels the world has failed her in the same way—can you speak a bit to this division between her and society?
AM: I think with the process of reinvention, trying to redefine yourself, you need a quiet space for that to happen—but you can also feel misunderstood by your silence, or that you have to be silent if you’re not “fully formed.” It’s a forced silence. You can feel trapped by your own reinvention process—something that is quite pressing for this character, because she’s very uncertain about herself.
JH: It’s almost like she didn’t have the space to figure herself out when Devin was alive, and now she’s making up for it—I think that happens a lot, for example, when people have overbearing siblings.
AM: Yes, exactly. And it’s especially true when you idolize that person, like the narrator does with Devin; you don’t want to be anything other than what they want you to be.
JH: There aren’t that many novels featuring picaras—and even fewer are written by women. Was it difficult to write a picaresque? What were some of the challenges?
AM: I think the biggest challenge was stringing it all together into something coherent—I tend to write all over the place, scene to scene, and the genre allows you to more readily jump across action points instead of needing transitions. So the biggest challenge was organizing the scenes into a narrative. An earlier draft was a lot more mystery: it was, “Is Devin dead? Was she ill? Was it an accident?” There was a lot of uncertainty throughout. The final version is pretty upfront near the beginning, regarding Devin’s cause of death—especially the scene with the aunt in the kitchen. Originally, that scene was close to the end. The picaresque is a genre that other genres can work within, and at least for this story, I found that mystery wasn’t a great partner genre for it. There was no real objective correlative for the reader, and knowing about the infection also brings out trauma and grief more clearly.
JH: If the narrator’s connection to Devin had a label, it would probably be “It’s complicated.” What was your process for exploring their relationship?
AM: It was very tied to the unreliability of the narrator—she’s so uncertain about what happened and what Devin meant to her. If you’re not given a blueprint of love, outside of romantic love, what does your mind do? Conflate that with exploring one’s sexuality, and strong feelings that you don’t even know what they are—whether they’re romantic or sexual or just friendship—and it’s definitely complicated. I had noticed, especially in Western media, that there aren’t that many representations of female friendship where they aren’t backstabbing each other, or where it’s not a sister relationship, growing up together through all stages. Even though they are family, Devin and the narrator weren’t actually in the same space, so they had this very brief time when they were living together. Devin is a big personality and is dealing with her own trauma—she kind of overtook the narrator in a way. But the narrator also holds her up on this pedestal, so she can’t blame her for anything.
I think the narrator gets to a point where she isn’t sure what happened or didn’t happen, or what she wanted to have happen—she’s trying to invent a story that she can live with.
JH: The narrator takes on other personas as she travels. She is trying to find herself—she starts out with a lot of insecurities, but slowly grows more confident. How important was it for you to write a coming of age story?
AM: I feel like it just happened because of where I was when I started writing. I was nineteen or twenty, meeting new friends, discovering different versions of myself. And it was also the kind of journey I wanted to read more about. Coming of age stories tended to be about men or boys, so I wanted something different. Instead of a teenage boy, off on an adventure, I wanted a coming of age picaresque for girls and women, where the main character didn’t have to be “likeable”—I always hate when characters are judged on their likability.
JH: Much of the book is focused on remembering and forgetting. The narrator pretends to forget, represses “all the memories [she] didn’t want to keep”—but part of her journey is finally reclaiming those memories, recalling her moments with Devin. They even begin to bleed into the present. What are you trying to say about memory? Is it tied to the guilt of forgetting?
AM: I think memory is such an interesting topic. For this story, it’s definitely tied to guilt—and self-preservation. Sometimes you have to forget certain things, or you’d be incapacitated. But there is also a benefit to remembering these things—it can be generative, and help you figure yourself out. Anyone who has lost someone grapples with: are you allowed happiness? Are you allowed moments of completely moving on? And the guilt feels like you’re doing a disservice to that person—but it’s also ridiculous, because you can’t live your whole life like that. The specter of grief and loss is something the narrator works through as she’s trying to define herself.
JH: The narrator often blames herself—for Devin’s death, for her mom leaving. She experiences a lot of abandonment. Did this push her towards picara-hood, or was she always meant to be one? In your mind, are picaras born or made?
AM: That’s a good question. I think for this character, it’s really about becoming—she outright says it with Dacy, you’ve got to leave before you get left. She’s been left in so many ways, and she’s trying to outrun that happening again. She tried to outrun her grief and trauma, and to outrun working on herself in any way. In this case, she was made by the circumstances. She doesn’t really understand people who are okay with change that isn’t directly caused by them—she has a problem with agency, or lack thereof.
JH: What will you be working on next?
AM: I’m working on some sci-fi short stories that are all set in the same world, and all relate in some way to the idea of memory. I’ve also been working on some poetry, and sending out my second novel to publishers. It’s about a young woman who is grappling with recovery from an eating disorder, told in four parts: before it gets bad, her sister’s response, then her in-hospital time, and recovery afterwards. So that one is very heavy—but she also decides to become a professional cake baker, so it’s kind of wry.
Allie McFarland is a bi, white settler originally from Calgary, AB on Treaty 7 territory. She holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of English, where her thesis, a manuscript on eating disorders currently under consideration with multiple presses, was nominated for the College of Arts & Sciences Thesis Award. She is a co-founding editor of The Anti-Languorous Project, which publishes antilang. magazine, soundbite, Good Short Reviews, and the On Editing blog series. Her poetic suite “Lullaby” won the 2015 Dr. MacEwan Literary Arts Scholarship. She is also the author of the chapbook Marianne’s Daughters (Loft on EIGHTH, 2018). Allie currently runs a not-for-profit used bookstore on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen people of Vancouver Island, where she lives with her partner and chubby cat. Disappearing in Reverse is her full-length debut (University of Calgary Press, Brave & Brilliant series, Fall 2020).
Jesse Holth is a writer, editor, and poet living on Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ territory. Her writing has appeared in Room, Grain, CV2, Canthius, and other publications. She previously served as Assistant Poetry Editor for The Tishman Review, as well as Editor-in-Residence for The Puritan’s Town Crier, where she worked on a series of essays about ecopoetics and the climate crisis. She is currently writing a novel and two full-length collections of poetry.