Interview: Sarah Yahm
There are few subjects that demand more courage like illness does; not just to endure it, but to write about it with clarity and truth. To write on illnesses is therefore to not only capture the slow, intimate undoing of life but also to confront them. A writer must coax themselves into dauntlessness, to look without flinching at what weakens and wounds. Writing about illness can be an appalling business, but it is also a necessary one.
As Kafka once said, “We ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for?” Sarah Yahm’s debut novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, is such a book.
The story follows Louise as she searches for meaning after her mother’s death from a degenerative neurological disease. When Louise herself is diagnosed with the same illness, she must come to terms with her body’s betrayal and her faith. In so doing, Yahm’s novel compels us toward the uncomfortable—to speak, with our loved ones and ourselves, about the inevitable afflictions of body and soul.
—Wambui Wa Mwangi
Wambui Wa Mwangi: The novel follows Louise, a cellist, as she develops a neurological illness that first steals the fine motor control in her bow hand and eventually her body. I am curious about this illness that eventually kills Louise; you don’t name it yet its symptoms—cognitive “scissor-cuts,” the slow betrayal of the body, muscle spasms—feel medically correct and metaphorically explosive. Was it deliberate? How do you track the disease’s progression so that it mirrors the fracturing of the mother-daughter bond between Louise and Lydia while still tuned to the internal logic of a real neurological condition?
Sarah Yahm: So it’s not a real disease. I made it up. I wrote this novel when I was experiencing weird neurological symptoms (luckily mine are not degenerative nor terminal), and I combined my symptoms with what I knew about prion diseases to create this invented Ashkenazi disease. In graduate school I read a lot of Elaine Scarry, who talks about pain defying language. I think the thing about having an illness, in particular being a woman with a strange set of symptoms, is that it’s incredibly lonely because there’s no common language to discuss embodiment. In some ways this book was an ethnographic project; I used what anthropologists call “thick description” to replicate how people experience their own bodies. I personally don’t experience my chronic pain in terms of sound, but Louise does. I do experience some of my neurological symptoms in the way that Lydia does, the feeling of “brackish water rising” in my abdomen. I primarily experience my pain in terms of color, but that doesn’t get me very far in doctors’ appointments. For obvious reasons, doctors don’t know how to respond when I say it feels like burnt ember in my neck today! What I would like this book to do is enable people to become aware of the metaphors that they use to describe their bodily experiences to themselves. I would like this book to create a larger, cultural conversation about the lack of a good language for pain, and the way this lack of language diminishes care, because there’s no common language between doctors and patients. I’d love to do some sort of public humanities project where people document their pain using whatever medium speaks to them (paint, music, clay, etc.) so doctors can access these highly personalized metaphors.
In other words, yes, this invented disease is an opportunity to explore questions of literal, metaphorical, cultural and epigenetic inheritance and transmission, and the complex entanglement of all of the above. But I actually don’t see the progression of the symptoms as a reflection or a metaphor for the fracturing of the bond between Louise and Lydia. They move in and out of connection throughout the book, and that persists even after Louise dies. I don’t see their relationship as degenerating in a literal way.
WWM: Ritual here is both a salve and a prison. One ritual involves Leon, Louise’s husband, attempting the Rosh Hashanah tashlich ceremony by throwing breadcrumbs into a river to cleanse sins. Another one is a kosher-meat scandal that sends the ultra-Orthodox neighbors boiling their dishes in bathtubs on the front lawn. How did you decide which rites to foreground—those that heal like Louise humming a C-note to open the cave, versus those that confine, for example the endless tefillin rewrapping?
SY: In the broadest strokes, the rituals my characters invent themselves are frequently liberating, but the rituals imposed upon them by organized religion (or each other) are restricting. Although even as I write that, I’m changing my mind. Lydia has OCD and so she is perpetually liberated and trapped by rituals of her own creation. Magical thinking is both her gift and her prison.
This book is also about finding transcendence in everyday life. But my argument, I guess, is that transcendence has to be creatively stumbled towards each time anew. The ultimate gift is a willingness to enter into the ritualistic logic of others.
WWM: Leon is a therapist who once studied under an eccentric mentor. In midlife he revives a Stanislavski technique: inhabit the patient’s obsession so completely that you become it. When Shmuel, their ultra-Orthodox neighbour’s son, begins burying silverware to purify it, Leon kneels beside him and throws dirt into the grave. Leon decides to “be with him,” which ends up being instructional to the reader. I interpreted his therapeutic methodology with Shmuel as a reflection of how we read trauma: by entering the obsessive logic, not dissecting it. Was this your intent?
SY: Leon’s therapeutic practices, although largely invented, were inspired by the anti-psychiatry movement spearheaded by R. D. Laing in the 1960s and 1970s. There were a number of group homes in the UK and in the US where people in the midst of psychosis lived with staff who were committed to “being with” them in their extreme states instead of curing them.
As somebody who had childhood OCD, and whose clinician parents attempted to cure her, I longed for someone to enter into my experience and help me feel less existentially alone, less trapped in my own tormented mind. The older I get the more I believe that “being with” is perhaps the only foundation upon which true healing can occur. And I think play, for both children and adults, is the deepest way to create that sense of connection.
My shorthand for this concept in the book is “blowing bubbles,” because Leon joins Lydia at the sink when she is compulsively washing her hands and blows soap bubbles with her. I do wish that more therapists would “blow bubbles” with their clients, but I can’t see Blue Cross Blue Shield getting behind that.
WWM: Louise is haunted by the women who came before her, in particular her mother, a sharp-tongued Freudian analyst who salted her pockets against dybbuks. The image of nested matryoshka dolls becomes a Rorschach-like motif Louise sees in cracked plaster ceilings. These dolls echo the generational curse and a genetic liability from Freya to Louise to Lydia. Why was it important for you to avoid flattening these women and still honor the genetic inevitability that haunts them?
SY: We all live with various forms of genetic inevitability, and we all face the reality of death. These women just face it earlier in their lives than others. Although obviously they have an extreme circumstance, I do feel like their experience mirrors the larger human experience just more so: how do we make meaning in the time that we have left?
WWM: The novel’s narrative is a palimpsest. 1974 bleeds into 1996, the Cape Cod wormhole collapses into the Monsey chicken scandal. What craft decision led you to let flashbacks infect the present tense, as if memory itself were a highly transmissible memory disease?
SY: Although they are perpetually moving in and out of memory, the plot is pretty linear. The book is structured within conventional chronological time. But I did want to replicate the circularity of memory and the ways in which we contain multiple selves. I think that’s the real matryoshka doll, the multiple versions of self that we carry with us in every encounter.
WWM: Susan Sontag writes that illness is “the night-side of life,” a kingdom ruled by metaphor but throughout the book, illness is stripped of heroic metaphors. Louise’s disease is never allegorized as “battle” or “journey,” yet the novel’s very structure—its repetitions, jump-cuts and temporal folds—feels symptomatic. Did you consciously resist metaphor, or did the form itself become the disease’s metaphor?
SY: I’ve read a lot of Sontag, and so I deliberately reject military metaphors when it comes to illness. In fact, that’s one of the foundational questions of this book: if you eschew the cultural narratives provided for patients, how do you understand your own body? Louise and Lydia are perpetually searching for metaphors that enable them to understand their illness in ways that feel authentic. I love that moment where we see Louise and Lydia both stumbling upon “ants” as the best way to describe temporary paralysis. I like the idea that it’s not just their physical experience that’s similar, but the metaphorical understanding of their bodies. That feels like a profound intimacy to me.
Louise also tries to cure herself through metaphor. She experiences her disease as a harmonic dissonance, and so she tries to cure herself through musical resonance. At the end of the novel, we find out that Louise has wired an Airstream trailer with speakers so that she can listen to frequencies which counteract the dissonance of her disease. Although the “Soundbath/spaceship” is absurd, it’s also a literal manifestation of this intellectual and emotional project.
WWM: Louise’s final letter to Leon is a memento mori of bodily minutiae: “Don’t pack tuna fish, it’ll make her Fish Girl again, pack PB&J with blackberry jam, count to two hundred before removing your hand from a sleeping toddler’s back.” Why were this and other quotidian details relevant to the plot as though they’re “holy enough” to survive erasure?
SY: When it comes to motherhood the mundane is the sacred. You literally feed your child with energy that comes from your own body. It’s like photosynthesis. It’s fucking nuts when you think about it too closely. Nursing, like most aspects of parenting, is transcendent and also completely quotidian and tedious.
Motherhood is about minutiae. Paying attention to that minutia, caring for the tedious needs of your child is deeply intimate. I read my child’s body all the time to determine if she’s hungry or overslept or sad or anxious or too hot or too cold. I have a deep archive of knowledge that represents my profound love for her, which is on its face just tedious facts. This letter is Louise letting go of that archive and in so doing finally accepting that she and Lydia are two separate bodies. When she’s done with that letter, when she’s giving that repository of daily knowledge to Leon, she feels more alone than she ever has in her entire life. Emptied out, devastated.
WWM: Mothers in the novel weaponize absence. Louise vanishes to Israel with a three-line note; her own mother dies mid-sentence, leaving only the cryptic words “Life is a tomato test,” and Lydia’s lies to schoolmates about Louise’s whereabouts. Why did you weaponize absence as the ultimate maternal language in the novel?
SY: Oh, it’s interesting that you see it that way. That’s not the way I see Louise, but I love talking to people about her, because she’s such a polarizing character.
I see Louise’s decision to leave as an act of love. A narcissistic and misguided act of love, but an act of love nonetheless. I’ve written about this before, but I wrote this book when my mother was dying. On the drive back from visiting her in hospice one night, my sister and I had a huge argument about Louise. I told my sister that watching our mother die was torture and Louise was right to leave. My sister disagreed. Arguing about Louise was a wonderful break from the trauma that we were living through. I actually was really glad that I was with my mother when she died; I very much wanted to be with her in those last moments. But another part of me wished that she had spared me from watching her suffer. This book lives at the intersection of those two feelings.
WWM: Late in the book Lydia refuses genetic testing for the same illness that killed her mother and grandmother. She chooses the protective myth (Mom is in Cuba with Assata Shakur) over the lethal fact. In a novel where the characters’ destiny is predetermined by their genetics, and storytelling a salvation, where do you land on Sontag’s warning that knowledge of illness can become “a parody of omniscience?” Did you write the novel to argue that sometimes the myth is the mercy?
SY: It’s not that she chooses a protective myth, it’s that she chooses a story to live inside for a while until it no longer serves her. And when she is sick and can no longer deny it, she finds another story. And that story is about how accepting her illness gives her a sense of peace. That story is simultaneously a protective myth and a truth. Lydia lives in the world as it is, and she also lives in the world of her imagination. And sometimes she feels the need to align those two worlds, and sometimes she can accept the contradiction.
SARAH YAHM has worked as an educator, oral historian, documentarian, and writer. She’s taught at colleges and universities, and in public parks and elementary schools. She’s published in Slate, Bellevue Literary Review, and placed pieces on NPR and affiliates, among others. In her work as a writer and an academic, she’s focused on the lived experience and social meaning of illness and disability. She lives in the woods in Central Vermont with her family.
WAMBUI WA MWANGI is a writer from Limuru, Kenya whose work moves between fiction, creative nonfiction, and art criticism with publications in Usawa Literary Review, The Weganda Review, Africanah.org, Nairobi Print Project, and elsewhere.
