“I always write until I know the character very well”: An Interview with Matthew Fox

All Lit Up: Congrats on your new book, This Is It. Can you tell our readers a bit about what they can expect from these stories?

Matthew Fox: A family epic! But also a love story. This Is It is about a compelling coward named Gio. He runs away from his boyfriend, who is suffering with brain cancer, only to find himself in New York City on 9/11. He faces a moment of truth, which sets him on the journey of the rest of the book: excavating his family’s history to find how he became so gutless. He and his boyfriend grow closer and closer as they look into key stories from the past generations, going all the way back to the 1930s. Each one reveals a piece of the puzzle, and in the end it adds up to a hugely satisfying picture—and a scandalous revelation. The book is sweeping in scope, but intimate in the storytelling.

ALU: A novel-in-stories straddles two different genres—it doesn’t follow the structure of a traditional novel, but the stories aren’t totally unrelated either. Can you talk about your personal approach to writing this type of book? How did you balance writing vignettes and short stories with the overarching narrative?

MF: I always imagined This Is It as a novel-in-stories. It’s the perfect format for capturing the feeling most families have when they tell the same tales over and over. Versions morph over the decades, adapt to the teller’s agenda, and change depending on memories. My first draft presented a simple set of short stories with repeating characters. That didn’t work. It wasn’t satisfying enough. A brilliant friend suggested I bring in a more aggressive through-line, so I added a storytelling meta-narrative on top of everything. Suddenly, it all clicked. I rewrote the whole book with this in mind, connecting each of the stories to one narrator—like attaching strings to marionettes, and connecting them up to a puppet master. This nudged it closer to being a novel, but the stories can still hold their own.

ALU: Short stories require an economy of language given their length limitations. How do you approach character when you’re writing shorter pieces? How do you make them feel like real people?

MF: I always write until I know the character very well. I then go back through the dross and laugh at myself—at what I thought I understood at the beginning of it all. I cut those bits, then squeeze remaining ideas together into one line, one action, or one exchange of a dialogue. A single notion, standing on its own, is always more powerful than lots of explanation. Readers know I’ve chosen this moment to fill in the character. If I’ve done my job, they can fill in the rest based on context. I try never to underestimate readers. I want to meet them halfway. They’re bringing themselves to the story, and if there’s room for them to shade in my character with their own experience, my character will feel more real.

ALU: You’ve moved around quite a bit, from Canada to the US to Berlin. How has your writing been shaped by the places you live?

MF: Moving around has given me perspective on where I’ve been. This Is It is based largely in a Southwestern Ontario town. I’ve spent a lot of time in Guelph and Windsor, but it wasn’t until I moved away that I was able to find ways to make that region accessible to readers who don’t know it. Ditto Montreal, which is another setting from This Is It. Moving around has shaped my writing because it allows me to capture the similarities between places in order to make them understood. It also reveals the key elements that make them unique, and help set out what I need to do to make them approachable.

ALU: What do you hope readers take away from your writing?

MF: It’s not for me to say what they should take away from it. Once the writing is out there, it belongs more to the world than it does to me. I don’t have an agenda with my writing; I don’t want any preoccupation to prevent me from getting the story to where it should be. I suppose I hope that readers want to know what happens next, even after the last page, and that I’ve fed their imaginations enough to take them there.

ALU: Lastly, are there any books you’ve recently read that you can’t stop thinking about?

MF: RM Vaughan’s Pervatory hit me hard. Vaughan passed away a few years ago. It was a terrible loss; he was a bold queer Canadian writer. I was overjoyed that Coach House put out this novel posthumously. It’s not only a raunchy, catty, hilarious, devastating book about love and obsession, it’s also Vaughan’s swan song—or final middle finger. Another one I keep thinking about is Daniel Allen Cox’s I Felt the End Before It Came. It’s a set of personal essays about his split from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is amazing how the experiences he describes—breaking from something you always thought was true—are observable in everyday life. It’s helped me understand what motivates people, and what drives my fictional characters.

* * *

Matthew Fox is the author of the story collection Cities of Weather. He grew up in Ontario, before moving to Montreal, London and New York, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His work has appeared in Grain, The New Quarterly, Big Fiction, Toronto Life and Maisonneuve. He currently lives in Berlin.