Interview: Shayne Terry
On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this February with Autofocus.
Leave is a literary nonfiction book that takes place during a disastrous parental leave—a period which turns out to be a fruitful container for interrogating what it means to give birth and to recover, both personally and collectively. After a serious but little-understood birth injury during labor, Leave’s narrator can’t sit upright or walk unsupported for weeks, let alone care for a new baby without the help of her partner, family, and friends. She writes from the couch as a series of women in her family cycle through her apartment and her memory, bringing with them old dramas: opioid addiction, absent fathers, and skeletons apparently summoned by the narrator’s recent birth experience. Leave is a clear-eyed book about healing, the devaluing of birthing people and their pain, pregnancy and labor in a for-profit healthcare system, and birth as a portal. It’s also a book that is delightfully difficult to categorize. It was wonderful to talk with Terry about fragmented writing, interruption, resisting the redemption arc, the instability of memory, and what it looks like to write a book from and through extreme pain.
—Randle Browning
Randle Browning: Leave is not what I would call “a light beach read,” but I devoured it in one sitting while at the beach with my daughter—a first for me since she was born five years ago. This is not to say that I wasn’t interrupted. Was it a conscious choice to make Leave legible to a reader who might have divided or limited attention?
Shayne Terry: It’s something I thought about while revising. While writing, that formal choice was more a function of my own divided, often fragmented, attention—but that’s also how I write novels and how I write generally. When I was revising Leave, I had a two-year-old and I was only reading books that could be read in one sitting. That was the only kind of book I could imagine either wanting to write or wanting to read at that time. I still love a very short book.
RB: Yes, me too. Because of her birth injury, your narrator in Leave spends most of her parental leave on the couch. She is virtually stuck there, often underneath a nursing baby. I hope that, as a culture, we are moving beyond the assumption that caretaking precludes artmaking—but I’m still interested in how the writer on the sofa might be different from the writer at the desk. Were you interested in engaging with that terrain? Is writing that comes from the couch different from desk-writing?
ST: That poor couch has been through so much! But yes, I think so. Because I wasn’t sitting at my desk, I was a little freer. It felt a little bit like I wasn’t writing anything, just taking notes, jotting things down to remember, so that I could really write about them later—but those notes became the writing.
When I’m sitting at the computer I try to get rid of everything else, to shut out the world and focus. But my notetaking was more observational and more stream-of-consciousness. When I was lying on the couch I was looking around, taking in the space. I think the writing has a different quality because of that.
I think that’s also one reason why the pieces or chapters are so short. On your phone, when you’re typing a note, the text looks very long on the screen—but it doesn’t take up as much space on the page.
RB: Much has been said in literary discourse about mother-writing, interrupted focus, illness, and the fragmented form. (I’m thinking of Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write as one example.) Would you consider Leave to be “fragmented”?
ST: Occasionally I’ve referred to the pieces as fragments, but more recently I have been calling them chapters. That structural choice is directly related to the writing process. The pieces came out in little bursts. I organized them under the title Leave, and to me, at the time, Leave was not a book but a time period.
RB: I’m interested in how writing transforms from private notes into something more constructed and intended to be shared. What did it look like to turn those notes into a book?
ST: A lot of the notes happened in real-time, when I didn’t yet understand what I was writing. In other notes, I reflected on events from weeks or even years prior. There is a loose linear timeline to the book, since Leave moves from injury, through the period of my parental leave, and roughly into the next year. I focused on putting the chapters into an emotional order rather than into a clear plot arc.
During final revision there was an important component missing—the visual aspects of researching my injury online—which I added at that time.
RB: The chapters where we see the narrator watching YouTube videos and googling?
ST: Yes, exactly.
I also incorporated notes from others during revision. But I was hesitant to touch any of the material that had been written in-the-moment. I wanted it to retain that feeling of “just happening.” There are chapters I would write totally differently today, both because I have a different perspective now and because I’m a different writer. Because of the perspective and the closeness of the injury, the writing felt delicate. If I pulled too many threads, it would just come apart.
RB: I’ve been thinking about the relationship between performing and writing. Is there a way in which the initial drafting is a performance? Obviously, we all have to revise, but is there a point where the writing is no longer the original performance, but a new thing?
ST: Yes. When I come across a book that is messy and imperfect, but with bright shining moments of perfection, I get a feeling that the editor knew when to take a step back. That can be lost in books edited for mass appeal.
RB: Leave is tough to classify for the market. I’ve heard you say elsewhere that you don’t quite see it as a memoir, and the book’s subtitle is “A Postpartum Account.” It has an interrogating quality.
ST: Yes! Leave is an interrogation.
RB: Leave is also a book about pain and recovery. Your narrator suffers from a condition not widely discussed, OASIS, or Obstetric Anal Sphincter Injury. Your narrator ruminates on the relationship between pain and plot. “The story is supposed to be one of healing; what was torn should be made whole,” but a linear narrative would be “inauthentic,” she observes. Can pain have a narrative arc? Does pain interrupt narrative?
ST: While I was writing, I thought that at the end of my leave I would go back to work and feel healed. But, as my recovery went on and on, I wasn’t healed. It turned out that going back to work was really difficult. I worked on the book for years after the birth, thinking that, at some point, there would be an end to this story—and yet I haven’t finally healed. I have a very different body now that has continued complications from my birth injury, and that is ultimately what this book is about—rejecting the ideas I had around physical healing as I had thought of it previously.
Along the way, I was able to find some emotional healing with the people in my family. Of course, those are ongoing stories as well, but there were moments when the birth injury brought about actual connection with the women in my family, or at least gave us a greater understanding of each other. That’s its own form of healing.
RB: Maybe there is no narrative arc for pain, but can there be closure for that emotional arc?
ST: I very much wanted it to feel, at the end of Leave, like nothing’s resolved. Things go on. Life goes on until it ends.
RB: Is there a difference there in terms of how you write fiction?
ST: Actually, no.
RB: Getting back to your birth injury—were you nervous about exposing those personal medical details? I’m thinking in particular of the scene with the sister in the emergency room. It can feel uncomfortable even to voice certain words. Somehow, we’ve only said “sphincter” once in this interview!
ST: The emergency room scene was one of the moments where I paused and asked myself, “Am I really going to tell people about this? Am I really going to put this out into the world?” But I felt that no one knew about these injuries. I didn’t want to be a part of that. I didn’t want to dance around it. I wanted to tell it like it is. I couldn’t give some details and not give the others. The emergency room scene had to go in, even though, until the book came out, it was one of the most secret, shameful things that had ever happened to me.
RB: And it was a shared moment with the sister, who has wildly different ideologies from the narrator. Were you looking for any kind of collective healing?
ST: I was looking for healing in my own life. In a way, I do think this is a book of the first Trump presidency. In the years leading up to my getting pregnant and having a baby, my mother and I had been arguing about politics, and it had frayed our relationship. I remember watching the Democratic primary debates while I was stuck on the couch. This is a political book. One subtext in Leave is our broken country and our inability to talk to each other. There are so many things in this story that are uniquely American, such as the incidents of gun violence, the lack of parental leave, the ways in which our for-profit healthcare system impacted my recovery or lack thereof. I was looking for healing from all of those things, and then, to have my mother taking care of me—having to say, “I need this woman.”
RB: The mother is an especially complicated character, and she actually weighs in on her own depiction. How did you decide if and when to share drafts with your living subjects, and how did you work with their feedback?
ST: I only shared the book with people whose opinions mattered to me to the point that I would change something they didn’t like. There were some parts that I took out because my mother was uncomfortable with them, but I probably left a lot more in than she wanted. I took out some parts that were her story and not my story. With my mother and grandmother, there was one little part of their story that I happened to know, but I wasn’t there for it. The parts that I kept in were moments that happened between us, when I was present.
I’ve been asked about the meta narrative, how I allow people to comment on the book from within the book. I think that that comes from my fiction, actually. That’s the way I know how to make a story. I introduce another character who gets to talk.
RB: Yes, you normally write fiction. How did you decide that Leave would be a nonfiction book? We’ve talked about this some, but how does Leave relate to your other work?
ST: There’s a particular type of book that I’m drawn to as a reader, and I want to make books like that. A lot of these books don’t fit neatly into fiction or nonfiction categories. With Leave, I didn’t purposely fictionalize anything, so I wouldn’t call it autofiction or an autobiographical novel. But I also never use the term nonfiction for it, because it feels slippery.
A book that had a big influence on Leave was Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan. One thing I love about that book is that Nunez questions her memories. She doesn’t necessarily introduce other narratives or others’ versions of events, but she does wonder: Am I imagining? Was it really this year or was it another year?
I’m highly conscious of the fact that my memory is not reliable. Memoir feels artificial if you try to say, “This is what happened—first this, then this, and then this was the outcome.” How can you really know what happened, even if you were there the whole time? Pretending we know feels artificial to me. I didn’t want that. I wanted to find a way to crack that myself.
SHAYNE TERRY is the author of Leave: A Postpartum Account. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and she has been selected for workshops and residencies at Bread Loaf, CRIT, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in Illinois, she lives in Brooklyn. Find her on Instagram @shaynester.
RANDLE BROWNING is at work on a nonfiction book about four generations of mothers in her Texas family. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and Electric Literature, and has been supported by the Jentel Artist Residency. She lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn with her partner and young child. Find her on Instagram at @randlebrowning.
