Interview: Molly Gaudry
Genre-bending is a not a new concept, yet it seems to have recently made its way into the mainstream (at least, as far as TikTok goes) with works such as the memoir/fantasy/gothic/horror In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, 2019), the epic romantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the lyric essay/memoir/philosophy/criticism Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009). At the core of genre-spectrum writing lies the question of “whether or not the leap from one genre to another works,” which Molly Gaudry explores in Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, published by Rose Metal Press in 2025. This “leap” that Gaudry refers to, in Fit, feels like a tiptoe, a wandering, or even a bold stride as the narrative moves between, around, and through genres. The following interview highlights Gaudry’s deftness, extensive research, and evident passion that challenges how we understand genre, trauma, and imagination, as well as how we fit within the stories we tell about ourselves.
—Amy Scheiner
Amy Scheiner: Fit Into Me, your memoir about trying to write Fit Into Me: A Novel, is an innovative experiment (I use this word knowing that you have a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah). From the first word, you’re teaching readers how to read this book, which moves fluidly between your personal story of surviving a mild traumatic brain injury and reuniting with your birth family in Korea, the imagined world of the tea house woman, meditations on the act of writing, and an assemblage of word lists, among other threads. Can you talk about the structure? How did you weave the threads together? How did you know what to leave in and what to take out?
Molly Gaudry: To the best of my recollection, Fit Into Me (the novel) began as fragments I submitted for my first fiction workshop at the University of Utah. Although I no longer think of the novel as being written in fragments, proof that I once did exists online in Necessary Fiction, dated April 2014, you’re reminding me now that these bits and pieces were originally intended to be read as ragged, torn, recovered parts of an apparently lost whole (clearly, this was inspired by Sappho, whose words I used to generate these fragments). If, now, a decade later, I am to believe what I disclose in Fit Into Me (the memoir), which is that it took another year before I figured out I could merge these fiction fragments with fragments of my old blog posts and journal entries, then Fit Into Me (the novel/memoir) began as an attempt to fit these many pieces of myself, and my writing, into some kind of coherence. Even in your description above, though, this book doesn’t sound very coherent; it sounds like it’s all over the place and doesn’t know what it wants to be. But that’s exactly how I felt, post-concussion and during my recovery, when I was writing it.
I wish I had a better answer for you. I wish I could say this is how I did it, this is how and why I structured the book this way, and this is how I knew what to put in and leave out, but the truth is I have no clear memory of these choices. What I know for certain is that the book began as fragments of fiction, then it became a nonfiction about making a fiction using those fragments. When I defended my dissertation half a decade later in 2020, I submitted a draft that looked pretty much like the published version of Fit Into Me—albeit with a few exceptions: 1) the final essay, originally “Naked As the Day I Was Born,” was replaced years later with a memoir-ized version of “Origin Story: An Essay”; 2) Abby and Kathleen at Rose Metal Press asked me to chop up the original prologue (which had been a self-contained essay written in anapestic prose tercets) and to distribute these throughout the book like a refrain; 3) they also asked me to write a new prologue, which I did by cannibalizing my chapbook Wild Thing; and 4) to write a new ending that would tell readers how I ended up, which I did not want to do because resolution and conclusion are not really part of this book’s project, and so we compromised with the solution of adding a few final footnotes instead. This wild, messy book came together in a wild, messy fashion, over many wild, messy years, and the best I can do now is say this: Here are the salvageable fragments of me that I have somehow managed, with guidance from many, many readers and editors over time, to piece together.
AS: Can you talk about the research process and the inclusion of footnotes?
MG: I’d like to disclose here that you sent me these questions over a month ago, but when I received them, I honestly didn’t know how to answer. All of the hybrid elements of this book were pretty much in place by the end of 2015, so it’s been over a decade since I had my hands in the messy mixing bowl of it all. Only recently did I realize that I could find my answers to your excellent questions by going back to earlier published versions of the book’s component parts to piece together a clearer understanding of its evolution and how it all came together.
I can start with what used to be the prologue: the self-contained essay written in anapestic prose tercets that I chopped up and redistributed throughout the rest of the book. That original (and very long) essay first began as a blog post that later became an essay titled “Because Mary Ruefle says she’s convinced the first lyric poem was witness to the moon and that the moon was witness to the event.” I would have been quoting from Mary Ruefle’s essay, “Poetry and the Moon,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey, and as the moon theme became further developed, I found and began integrating quotations from Melanie Kimball’s essay, “From Folk Tales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature,” which is about an Algerian orphan tale about the moon. So it turns out that my use of quotations probably began, simply, as standard academic citation.
This theory holds up; when I revisit another of my old blog posts, which was entirely about Marguerite Duras, I see I had gathered more quotations about nighttime and solitude from her book Writing, pretty much in the same academic fashion. These quotations later became part of the first nonfiction chapter of Fit. Then, when I began the essay about Nathaniel Hawthorne (which would later become the second nonfiction chapter in Fit), I was quoting heavily from his Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa journal entries, which led to quoting his love letters to Sophia Peabody, which further led to quoting The Scarlet Letter. All of this confirms that the first one hundred pages of the book were heavily invested in these other authors and their works.
Now, looking back at those early fragments published in Necessary Fiction, I see that in the tea house woman’s opening sex scene, the lines from Truman Capote, Weike Wang, James Joyce, and Bernadette Mayer—which are in the book’s final version—were not originally there. But a few fragments later, in the flashback to Christmas Eve with her Portuguese lover, he was always reading from Jose Saramago’s Blindness on the couch. I’m going to assume that this first major quotation in the fiction is what began my transition away from formal academic citation and toward collaging others’ language into my own. During my coursework at the University of Utah, I read and studied William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, David Markson, and I was obsessed with my advisor Lance Olsen’s new book at the time, [[ there. ]], and with Roland Barthes’s the text is a tissue of citations. I was also reading Don Quixote and Moby-Dick and Wuthering Heights and Joseph Andrews and Gargantua and Pantagruel and so this is probably when I would have chosen to eliminate the quotation marks and to italicize the quoted text instead for a more seamless, stylized citation system.
During my dissertation defense, my committee members/examiners and I spent a lot of time talking about why I chose to italicize the quoted text rather than use quotation marks, as well as about whether I should keep the footnotes or turn them into endnotes. Ultimately, the published version of Fit Into Me reflects what I figured out during my defense: 1) the use of italics to indicate quoted text is not that different from using quotation marks, and eliminating these clear markers could be productive for the project and for me, thinking about my own voice as just one of many voices; and 2) without quotation marks, footnotes are essential.
AS: Fit Into Me is an ongoing conversation with readers of your previous books. What do you hope readers of We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting will take away from Fit Into Me?
MG: In Fit, I share that I had a lot of anxiety about writing and releasing Desire, because I worried fans of We Take Me Apart wouldn’t like it as much. And then it turned out that nobody really read Desire, at least not in comparison, so then I had (and still have) a lot of anxiety about writing and releasing Fit. I don’t think I really have anything that I want readers to take away from Fit, other than some small readerly pleasures upon discovering Easter eggs or perhaps from learning more about how Desire, in particular, came to be and what it means to me.
AS: While you deal with many heavy themes, there still seems to be a playful nature to this work. I’m referring to the ten word lists you include, which you state began as a writing exercise from your generative stage. Do you see these lists as levity or reprieve? What do you think would be lost if they were removed?
MG: Well, I never included the word lists that inspired and led to We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting, so it’s interesting to consider what might be lost if I hadn’t included them here in Fit. It’s especially interesting, because I’ve recently finished another novel, The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel (which is currently on submission), about an assistant professor trying to write a memoir about being stuck in a time loop as a metaphor for being stuck in grief. And in this novel, too, I expose the constraint (which, for the first time for me, isn’t word lists). So here we are: two books that don’t expose the constraint; two that do. I wonder why this shift? But for now, anyway, as I think about my choice to include these word lists in Fit, I see they probably do add some levity and create an effect of playfulness. I like that, Amy. I’m glad you pointed it out.
AS: With the blurring of creative nonfiction and fiction, you’re putting genre under a microscope and asking readers to question the boundaries of storytelling itself, and as Lee Gutkind explained of creative nonfiction, you can push the boundaries as long as you, “don’t violate the reader’s trust, and in the process your own credibility.” How does Fit Into Me address this statement?
MG: Other than in the “New Work” section of “Origin Story,” the final nonfiction chapter in Fit, I think I’m fairly transparent throughout about what’s nonfiction and what’s fiction. Credibility-wise, I should be mostly okay here. But the more of these interviews, and podcasts, that I do, the more I’m thinking about something Mary Karr writes about in The Art of Memoir, which is that after her first memoir was published, her version of events later became her mother’s and sister’s version of events: “I had inadvertently become the official chronicler of our collective memories, and who knows what I was screwing up?”
And so I am now starting to worry that I am inadvertently becoming the official chronicler of my own memories, because while I tried my best to be transparent in my book about what I do and do not remember, what I did and did not think, or feel, or say, or do, now, every time someone asks me to clarify in an interview, or to speak to specific instances, I begin to write and think about some of these events in ever-more solidifying and troubling ways. A sound bite becomes an answer, becomes repeatable and is repeated, becomes the answer, which becomes a story, the definitive story, which takes over and dominates, eradicates even, what was, at best, the hazy, half-understood partial stories, the fragments, ragged and torn, that they always were.
So, in response to the Gutkind quotation, I think I would caution people to be more suspicious of the paratextual narratives I am being asked to supply about and around and behind this book than of those I wrote inside it.
MOLLY GAUDRY is the founder of Lit Pub and the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. Desire: A Haunting, its sequel, and Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, are further explorations of the same storyworld and characters. Molly holds master’s degrees in fiction and poetry from the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, respectively, and a PhD in experimental prose from the University of Utah. An assistant professor at Stony Brook University, she teaches nonfiction and poetry in the BFA and MFA programs. Summers, she teaches fiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.
AMY SCHEINER’s writing has been featured in Slate, HuffPost, The Southampton Review, and Longreads, among others. She is the co-editor of Moonlighting by Lit Pub. Her memoir is forthcoming with Beacon Press in 2027.
