Interview: Ashley Whitaker
In Ashley Whitaker’s hilarious, satirical, and at times devastating debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, we follow Joan, a recent college graduate with an Adderall problem who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Her biggest obstacle? She’s plagued by an incessant internal debate about whether her ideas are total gold or utter trash. She spends her days interning for a Republican politician at the Texas Capitol and her nights spiraling deeper into substance abuse. She dates men of various backgrounds and tells herself that they’re all just fodder for her writing, though the one person she does connect with above all else is her cousin, Wyatt. Like Joan, Wyatt comes from the same larger-than-life evangelical Texas family and craves to be an artist. As life bucks them around like the broncos at their favorite rodeo, both Wyatt and Joan try to hang on, but eventually lose their grasp.
Ashley and I briefly overlapped in the same writing workshop in Austin, Texas, and ever since I first read her work, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this debut. We spoke via Zoom about writing autofiction, the process of turning stories into a novel, the disease of addiction, and people’s capacity to change.
—Shannon Perri
Shannon Perri: I love how the chapters have names. You don’t see that often. Why did you decide to give each chapter a name, and how did you come up with them?
Ashley Whitaker: The book started out as stories, so there were some titles that I was pretty attached to, like “Should’ve Been a Cowgirl.” When I was revising with my editor, I started shortening the chapters big time, so suddenly—I don’t remember how many chapters there are now—but it went from like fifteen to forty or something. Then I had to come up with a ton of titles to justify keeping them.
SP: What was the process like of turning linked stories into a novel?
AW: When you’re starting out as a writer, in the academic track, you’re reading short stories to learn about fiction—they’re just easier to teach. So, you’re reading all these great short stories, and that’s all I wanted to do, right? I was writing short stories, and I wanted them to be part of a linked story collection. My professor was like, “Well, that’s not really a thing.” And, of course, it is a thing because it exists and it’s been done, such as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from The Goon Squad, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, and Ramona Reeves’s It Falls Gently All Around. But in the publishing industry, it’s not a widespread practice anymore. No one wants to put “novel-in-stories” on the cover of a book.
But I think my book wanted to be a novel. There were probably only two stories that actually felt to me like complete stories. The rest of them were more like vignettes. They weren’t really working on their own. My agent pushed for the novel, and she was like, “I’m not just saying that. I really think this is a novel.” It was a long road, though, to really meld the stories. It wasn’t just as simple as putting them in order, and then you’re done. I tried that. There was no through line, even though it was about the same family. So, I had to do a lot of creative and structural work, a lot of studying of plot structure.
SP: At your book launch, you were open about how the narrator, Joan, shares some similarities with you in terms of a shifting political identity, growing up in a conservative Christian Texas family, and yearning to be a writer. What were the challenges and benefits of using your own life as a springboard for the project?
AW: When I started, I was really avoiding autobiographical details and I tried to write a “blank slate” narrator. I was constantly told by my professors that my protagonist was just an observer. I had a teacher, Eileen Pollack, who was like, “Observing interesting things doesn’t make a character interesting.” Joan had to have her own agency. I think I was trying to protect myself, but at some point in the writing process I said, who cares? I’m just going to use my past as a lens through which to see this character, a self-deprecating look at my messier years—I had a messy 20s. There are a lot of fictionalized behaviors and decisions, but there’s a lot of reality with the delusional thinking, and I, too, was a Republican intern in 2010. I probably started doing the autofiction thing in 2016 or something. By then, I had changed so much and it had been enough time to be able to look at that part of my life in a satirical way.
SP: This book is a lot about trying to be a writer, and those swings between grandiosity and crippling self-doubt many writers experience. I found myself wondering if we should read this as Joan’s finished book, if it has a meta quality. Was this your intention?
AW: I’ve suffered a lot as a writer, so I think making her a writer was an authentic experience I could speak to. I don’t know what drives a writer to believe that they have something that needs to be shared. It’s so strange. You’re oscillating between this delusional grandiosity and then false humility. And she’s not really able to produce much writing in these extremes. I think that was what I was trying to highlight, because in my experience, I’ve only been able to produce decent work when I’m grounded—not feeling like a piece of shit, but also not feeling like God’s gift to the world. I’ve never thrived in the chaos or the misery. Joan is in those extremes because she doesn’t have a solid foundation for her life at that time.
SP: Much of the writing journey is dependent on other people judging you. It’s vulnerable.
AW: Yeah, it hinges on this external validation, and it can feel very personal because you feel like your writing is you or a part of your soul. So, you can feel like your soul is being rejected, when really, that’s not what’s happening.
SP: Do you see Bitter Texas Honey as Joan’s finished book?
AW: I think this could be a book that she writes much later, but I don’t see this as the book she was working on in the novel.
SP: Addiction lies at the heart of this novel, and Joan’s struggle with it demonstrates how a person can only fool themselves for so long. I appreciate how deeply you immerse the reader in her experience—the cravings, the delusions, the shame. Can you talk about writing a character who is so active in her disease?
AW: I had a horrible addiction to Adderall, and I’m not a very imaginative person, so I gave that same addiction to Joan to highlight how much it’s a family disease. Because she’s dealing with her parents, who are also addicts, and they’ve kind of figured it out—halfway. She’s trying to figure it out for herself and is not really willing or able to learn from them. She’s stubborn. Then, her brother is the hero child. Dysfunctional families all have these roles. He’s the typical “hero” who has dug himself out of dysfunction through achievement. Joan is the scapegoat. The family has to have someone screwing up to focus on. I’ve done a lot of self-help reading and therapy, so in addition to experiencing it all, I have a larger psychological perspective on it.
SP: I appreciate how present therapy and self-help are in the book. Several of the characters are in AA or some sort of therapy. Some of the lessons they seem to be getting from therapy are really good, while others made me cringe, which rings true.
AW: I mean, therapy can even make some things worse. It’s so driven by the client, right? Like, you can use therapy to solidify certain beliefs because the therapist is only human. They aren’t God; they’re not all-knowing. A lot of the time they’re just kind of reflecting back what you’re sharing with them, and it’s your job to find the truth and change. It’s a messy process, and it can be quite comedic when people are fumbling around with it. But I think it’s a beautiful thing for someone to be trying, even if they’re still face-planting.
SP: I also wanted to discuss writing about politics. Joan identifies as a constitutional conservative, though she’s full of many contradictions, as we all are. What drew you to this territory, and why do you think we don’t see that explored more in fiction?
AW: Like Joan, I used to identify as pretty conservative. When I got sober, my sponsor told me to tune out of politics because partisanship is just a way to separate yourself from others. What I needed for sobriety and recovery was to connect with everyone on a human level, so I totally stopped engaging with politics in 2013. No radio, no news. I didn’t focus on it, and I was happier. When Trump emerged, I was in the MFA in Michigan, and I was just like, what happened? How did this guy win? Is this the same party? That’s when I thought it would be interesting to have a character who is a Mitt Romney Republican. It’s not a point of view I was seeing at all in literature, and there was interesting stuff I remembered from my experiences, like that Young Conservatives of Texas convention where Ted Cruz was up-and-coming. I thought it was interesting to look at the origins of Trumpism amidst all that was happening back then, when Trump was just a peripheral figure peddling birtherism. I obviously didn’t go that far into it. It wasn’t the point of the book, but I only found encouragement from my agent and my editor. My editor is actually the one who wanted me to open the book with Joan listening to conservative talk radio. It was probably a good idea because if someone can’t deal with that, they’ll know on page one.
SP: What we believe is so informed by our own psychology, so shaped by our family’s perspective—either agreeing or rejecting. What motivates our opinion is often not even the issue in front of us. Do you think people can really choose their politics or philosophies, or do you think our beliefs are just a response to where we’ve come from? I think what I’m trying to ask is, do you believe in free will?
AW: Yeah, I think we have free will. But I also think that being aligned with your family can make your life significantly easier. What I have a hard time with is if your politics are motivated by judgment and looking down on others. Like if you’re listening to all the radio that Joan is, just thinking about how bad and wrong other people are all the time and how much smarter you are than everyone else, that’s where it gets toxic.
SP: It’s like a way to soothe yourself, this certainty of being right.
AW: Exactly. If I’m ever feeling like that, I know that I’m not really engaging with the truth.
SP: I have to ask about Wyatt. I’m also really close with my cousin. What do you think it is about cousin relationships that gives them the potential to be so uniquely special?
AW: One thing is just the age closeness, because they’re only six months apart. You can’t have a sibling that close, that much of a peer, unless you’re a twin. Joan and Wyatt both have older siblings, and they both know what it’s like to grow up as the youngest sibling. They’re living these parallel lives, but they’re not in the same home, so they’re more like friends than siblings. They’re coming from the same family dysfunction, but they can each have their distance. They’re not of the same dysfunctional unit.
SP: What’s next? Could we ever see more of the West family?
AW: I’ve been working on a campus novel that’s related to this one, Joan’s MFA experiment. Who knows what will happen with it. I can’t help but write it. I feel like you don’t choose your material, it chooses you.
ASHLEY WHITAKER is a writer from Texas. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House and StoryQuarterly and has received support from the Ragdale Foundation. She currently lives in Austin with her husband and two sons. Bitter Texas Honey is her first novel. Find her on Instagram @ashtraywhitaker.
SHANNON PERRI holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas. Her fiction, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Millions, Texas Highways, Sycamore Review, Joyland Magazine, NBC News, and elsewhere. She lives in South Austin with her husband and two children and is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Find her on Instagram @Shannonperriii.
