Interview #64

What made you write this story?

Well, it’s a story about four women. For one, you wouldn’t call it a story, that’d be discounting the fact that an actual story normally takes the form of a certain length and shape, whereas anyone familiar with what I write knows that there is a substance lacking, I see the soul and vague figure of something beautiful, and go on to cloak it with faint, silky curtains. This is something I’ve had in my head for a while, I’ve always been closer to women and have met my share of the crazy, interesting and in a way I attempted to embody the very aspect of femininity I know into each one of these characters, but that failed, because gender itself to me is a bendable and organic thing, you may have the breasts and hips of a woman, but the heart of a lion, so the first thing I knew about my four characters, was that they were women, but then onwards, they began to develop their own voices and personalities, so my original branding of each, respectfully, as The Siren, The Songwriter, The Gossip, and our titular protagonist, The one with the Boyfriend,persisted only to a point. I wrote this not to convey any particular message, but to explore the depth of a feeling, this furious curiosity about the things just beyond our view, the proverbial closed door and what sizeless temptation lies behind it.

The character of the Boyfriend, whose existence remains in doubt even after the end, never makes an appearance, and is present mostly as a rumor. Did you write this character to represent something?

Not exactly, as I wrote this, I had a separate worksheet, a corner where the boyfriend lived, another dimension of fiction where he lived a full and open life, perhaps ventured into an affair or two and had his share of trouble and heartbreak, none involving any of the four women here. And from this, I took to pulling him into the world of these women, reducing him into a half-human sort of, and see what the idea of a man or boyfriend brings out of a women, how the four are affected and to try and observe how an obsession of this nature seeps into their friendship and bond.

And the ending, when the holiday ends, and only three of the girls pack up and leave, where did the fourth go?

I think leaving, redemption have become a running theme in my work, and its almost inevitable for me to not forcefully take something from a beloved character, and in this case you can see, the four, return without a whole, severed somehow. And four women, this is the third time I’ve used this combination, I guess I should tell you why, it’s because I know some women to be competitive and ambitious, and groups of women with more than one strong, dominant figure tend to be self-destructive. What happens at the end, tells the entire tale minutely, I feel, in an effective and straightforward way I’ve told what needs to be told, and to expect me to follow a conventional start and end and offer up a fruit all red and sweet, we’ll leave that to authors who know what they’re doing, I’m merely experimenting with thoughts, engage the reader and inspire bewilderment, I orphan my work into the wild, for them to be picked up and raised, in a way that the reader wants to.

The Girl with the Boyfriend is a 4-page non-story, that comes in the author’s collection “Armor of Fiction” due this December.

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