Interview by Bruce Geddes
Radium Girl is Sofi Papamarko’s debut collection of short stories, exploring themes of loneliness and alienation, and women reclaiming their power. What follows is a conversation between Sofi and Bruce Geddes about vengeance, flawed characters, and the inspirations behind the collection.
Bruce Geddes: Radium Girl leads off with “Margie and Lu,” the only short story I’ve ever read written from the perspective of conjoined twins. What was the origin of this story?
Sofi Papamarko: I’d seen a documentary about these famous conjoined twins and I started wondering, what happened when they had conflict? What did they fight about? How would it get resolved? And then, at around the same time, Donald Trump won the U.S. election. It seemed to me that so many people had voted in a way that hurt the other half of the country. I wrote that story as a way to explore what happens when half of a whole is so self-interested that it is completely willing to fuck up the other half.
BG: That story is also one that explores loneliness in an interesting way. At one point, Lu says, “Loneliness is a luxury.” Could you tell me what she means?
SP: What she actually means is that solitude is a luxury. Introverted Lu is never truly alone and would love to be, to read books and be alone with her complicated thoughts. By the end of the story, both Lu and the reader understand that despite never being alone, Lu is still incredibly lonely.
BG: You get the sense that Lu wants to belong—just not in the same way as her sister Margie. I see that same yearning in other stories, like “White Cake.”
SP: Exactly. The protagonist in “White Cake,” Carol Orfus, puts a lot of emphasis on winning the office prize for baking a cake, thinking that it’s going to help her fit in at work. But this desire to be accepted blinds her to other things, like how the rest of the office mocks her, or how terrible her marriage is. Her desire to be loved robs her of her dignity.
BG: It’s a real emotional roller coaster. Funny at first, but ultimately sad.
SP: Even when Carol gets her revenge and you’re happy for her, it’s still kind of sad, in a way.
BG: Carol isn’t the only character with a surprising dark side. I wonder if moments of vengeance in this collection represent the culmination of natural character arcs? Or are they moments catalysed by the events of the stories?
SP: I think it’s both. If these characters didn’t have conflict and pain in their lives, these surprisingly dark moments would never have emerged. But because of the rejection and cruelty they face, I feel they’ve been pushed to do what they do. It’s really about women reclaiming their power. Like Lily from “Controlled Burn,” who has been bombarded with messages about how she’s “less than” because of her size. In the end, what she does to her ex-lover is revenge on an individual—but it’s also an expression of what she wants to do to the patriarchy.
BG: No spoilers, but what she does is extreme.
SP: I feel it’s proportionate.
BG: The men in this collection don’t come off too well—they are largely rapists, adulterers, liars, and predators. Was this intentional?
SP: You know, I didn’t realize how horribly male characters came off until I first sat down to read the completed collection. And that’s when it really struck me. The only redeemable male is Marcus in “Something to Cry About,” and he’s an eleven-year-old boy. I didn’t consciously intend this, but I think it might be a reflection of how I was personally engaging with men in my mid-thirties when I was writing these stories. I had so little faith in the gender as a whole that I started a list titled “Nice Men in My Life” to remind myself that not all men are terrible. A lot of the women in the stories are terrible, too. It’s basically a collection about god-awful people. Who you will hopefully still like.
BG: I recently read the old Barbara Gowdy story, “We So Seldom Look on Love,” and I couldn’t help but see a connection between the world she creates and the worlds of your stories.
SP: Oh yes. Gowdy was the very first short story writer I ever loved. Before Munro. Before Atwood. When I read that collection at age sixteen, my mind was totally blown. Like in many of the stories in Radium Girl, the characters in her collection We So Seldom Look on Love are deeply flawed and often heinous, but still compelling and wonderful and even likeable. The stories are sexy and violent and disturbing but sometimes funny as hell. I remember being stunned that Gowdy was even allowed to write what she did. She has been a major influence on my writing.
BG: The title story, “Radium Girl,” reads like an origin story for a comic book hero with a long literary and/or cinematic life.
SP: That’s definitely what I was going for: a woman who takes back her power by becoming superhuman and kicking ass. Female superheroes are so often sexualized. I wanted Radium Girl to be brawn and brains, with no mention of boobs. I was influenced by a wonderful passage in Michael Chabon’s description of Luna Moth in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I was obviously also influenced by the real life superheroes known as the Radium Girls. These young women took their former employer—a Goliath of the radium industry—and won damages for labour abuses, all while ill and dying of radiation poisoning.
Sofi Papamarko is a former regular columnist for The Toronto Star, Sun Media Newspapers and Metro Canada. She’s also written for The Globe & Mail, Chatelaine, Flare, CBC, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Exclaim! and many other publications, both living and dead. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their children.
Bruce Geddes is a Toronto-based writer and author of The Higher the Monkey Climbs. His short fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Road Runner Review, Blank Spaces, and Great Lakes Review.