The Short of It: Danila Botha & Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness

For Short Story Month, we’re spotlighting one author every Wednesday with a mini interview and excerpt from their short story collection.

All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection in a few short sentences.

Danila Botha: Thank you so much for having me. Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is a collection of thirty-two short stories. There are a lot of stories about artists (a photographer in “Sometimes I Like to Shoot Kids,” a sculptor in “Able to Pass” who builds a golem to fulfill her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s wish to save her sister, a struggling, charismatic musician in “Blasting Molly Rockets,” a writer who meets an adult Anne Frank in “Like An Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish”).

I also wrote a lot about Jewish identity and intergenerational trauma, health and the body and the ways it can affect our sense of self (“Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness”) and the pandemic (“There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say to You”) I also wrote a lot about meaningful female friendships (“Together We Stand,” and “Love Me Til I’m Me Again”) I wrote about relationships and identity and I realized how much I love to write
morally complicated female characters. “Stories like Always An Angel, Never A God” was really interesting to write. It’s fascinating to delve into why people defend the indefensible, and it’s interesting to take the characters as far beyond their limits as they can go.

ALU: What do you love about the short story form?

DB: I truly love everything about short stories, about writing them and reading them. I have almost eleven shelves in my bookshelves of nothing but short fiction.

I love the economy and elegance of the form. I love the challenge of the tightness of its structure and having to be as concise and specific as possible. I love that in a short story, not everything can or should be wrapped up, so a lot is left for the reader to consider and wonder about after. I think it can be similar to the feeling of connecting deeply with a stranger on the subway, where it feels safe to reveal anything because you know you’ll never see them again. It’s the perfect place to give the reader a very close impression of a character, a moment of vulnerability, a key event in their lives, to give it a focus and intimacy that is harder to achieve with the same urgency in a longer piece. I think short stories are amazing vehicles for voice, and for the writer they give us the perfect entry and exit points. I’m almost always writing short fiction, and I feel so privileged because I enjoy myself so much even in moments of struggle. Short stories are just such a joy to write, every step of the way.

ALU: Who are some of your favourite short story writers?

DB: I have so many! Etgar Keret is one of my favourite short story writers of all time. I love how surreal and strange and funny his stories are, with so many unexpected elements. He’s so concise, his imagination is wild, but his stories are always so full of heart. I love the range of the emotion you feel as a reader throughout his collection. I have all of his collections and I’ve read them multiple times.

Nathan Englander is another, especially his collections What they Talk About When They Talk about Anne Frank, and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. I love the way he writes, I love the mix of social observation and interiority, his ability to address emotional complexity, his humour and his literary references.

I love Carver and Cheever and Denis Johnson.

David Bezmosgis’s collections were a huge revelation for me.  I had no idea that settings that I was so familiar with, and the lives of Jewish immigrant families in Toronto, which  includes my own, could be considered literary. I continue to be inspired by his beautiful writing.

I love Heather O’Neill’s Daydreams of Angels so much too. Her descriptions are so beautiful, and evocative and her attention to emotional detail is always so inspiring.

Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch is another collection I’ve reread a lot, he’s so funny and smart and emotionally acute. I love Anosh Irani’s collection Translated from the Gibberish; it’s brilliant.

I love Jhumpa Lahiri.

I love Kevin Hardcastle’s collection Debris. It’s such powerful, precise writing, every word is so carefully weighted. Kris Bertin’s Bad Things Happen is wonderfully dark.

I think Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth is so vibrant and beautiful.

I got to read some fantastic books this year for the Danuta Gleed awards. Every book on our short list is extraordinary and so inspiring.  

Lisa Alward’s Cocktail, Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories.

Kathryn Mockler’s Anecdotes and Idman Nur Omar’s The Private Apartments are all amazing, and I can’t recommend any of them highly enough.

Lately I love stories with magical elements, like Mariana Enriquez, or Carmen Maria Machado, just to name two.

Cherie Dimaline’s collection, A Gentle Habit is so beautiful.

Anuja Varghese’s Chrysalis is absolute magic, and it’s remarkable to think that it’s her first book, it’s so accomplished and her imagery and descriptions are gorgeous.

Lindsay Wong’s Tell Me Pleasant Things about Mortality is so wildly imaginative and standalone. It’s so innovative and original.

Valerie Bah’s The Rage Letters is brilliant- so funny and sharp and incisive.

I also loved Tim Blackett’s Grandview Drive, and Alison Grave’s Soft Serve.

I actually love a lot of the Newfoundland authors: Lisa Moore’s short stories, especially Open Eva Crocker’s collection, Megan Gail Coles, Michael Winter, Carmella Gray Cosgrove.

Zoe Whittall has a new collection called Wild Failure, that is absolutely fantastic.

Shashi Bhat’s new collection, Death By A Thousand Cuts is wonderful too.

I also love shorter short fiction by authors like Lydia Davis, or Amy Hempel. I  could talk about short stories for hours.

ALU: What are three things on your writing desk/place of writing?

DB: I have a lot of books on my writing desk, usually related to either research for what I’m working on, or books that are so good I know I’m going to want to reference or reread them. I usually have art supplies, because a big part of my process is either sketching or painting scenes, it helps me to embody my characters or place them in a setting I can see, to think about their body language or facial expressions and other details I don’t think enough about in early drafts (plus, I really love painting and drawing) I also have a lot of kids stuff on my desk- my daughter especially loves to draw and paint and she loves to work side by side 😊

I also always have water, a big water bottle with ice to drink, and a little cup of water for painting.

Always an angel/never a God/I don’t know why I am the way I am.

—Boygenius, Not Strong Enough

I used to tell people I was a crack baby. It’s not exactly true but it’s not entirely untrue either. They’d either blink at me in shock, raise an eyebrow slowly like sorry, what? Or they’d laugh. I always liked the ones who laughed, the more the better. If nothing else, I’ve always been an entertainer.

People used to look at me like I’d led an extraordinary life. They’d ask me questions about my past, like how partying and being self destructive inform my art. They’d ask me if I consider myself a nepo baby, if I think I deserve the things I have.

The truth is, does anyone? If you’re born white, speaking English in America, you have advantages that a lot of people don’t have.

If you had parents who were famous, a mom who was a model and a muse to many a notorious, sleazy guitarist, and a dad who bounced around had lots of kids but still managed somehow to be a respected actor, you have it better than most. I’d never argue with that.

But if you think you wouldn’t have done exactly what I did if you were in my situation, you’re kidding yourself.

It all started with the intoxicating freefall of getting paid to stand around in fancy underwear. A few hours of posing, money deposited straight into your bank account. If you’re fourteen, and you’ve never had a job, thousands can feel like millions, your parents stepping out of the shadows for the first time, saying they’re proud, your dad springing for an apartment, your mom paying for a full-time housekeeper to help you keep track of things.

I wasn’t tall, so I couldn’t do runway, but I could do print, all those ads of underage-looking girls, suggesting sex, selling you unisex perfume, oversized jean jackets, and tiny, white cotton undies.

Editors and photographers told me that my weird looks were charming. “Look at the way her eye teeth stick out, she’s a regular girl next door. Look at her messy waves, like she just came back from surfing. Look at her full lips, and her porcelain skin, she looks like a doll.”

They liked it when they could see my clavicles, my hip bones, they liked it when my cheekbones stood out.

It was a small price to pay.

It was like living in my own hotel room, the bed sheets made with stiff hospital corners, the toilet paper folded down into triangles, a fridge stocked with food I’d never eat. What I remember most of all is the decadence, the constant clacking of friends’ stilettos, cute shaggy boy actors I lost my virginity and any sense of urgency to, and drugs that felt like my mama’s full lips pressed warmly against my forehead. I could give you the usual BS about drugs and genetics, I could say I was addicted to heroin in utero, and it was a matter of time before I’d wanted it again, but it was even simpler than that; felt amazing until it didn’t. I danced at clubs when I was underage, and I had socialite friends, and did all the drugs, China White, Black Tar, Molly, and I drank tons. But after a while, I was throwing up and forgetting to eat, getting sentimental when I went to movies, crying on swings. My parents agreed to send me to rehab, where I tried to take it seriously, even though I knew I was different from them.

I lived in lots of different houses growing up. When my parents were together, we lived in a big house. The windows were always covered, and in the mornings, when the sun streamed in, there were half dressed adults sprawled out all over the floors and beds, like a disquieting Delacroix painting. My dad went to jail for drug trafficking, and later, when I was five, and accidentally drank a cup of his mescaline tea, and almost died, he went to jail for trying to kidnap me.

I have movie still memories, coated in candy floss clouds, of chasing my little sister around a field of high grass and dandelions. We were wearing white dresses and black rainboots, playing in mud, chasing, making daisy crowns. I think it happened, but there are no photos.

Danila Botha is the critically acclaimed author of short story collections Got No Secrets and the Trillium Book Award, Vine Awards, and ReLit Awards finalist For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known. Her award-winning novel Too Much on the Inside was published in 2015. It was optioned for film by Pelee Entertainment in 2023. Her newest short story collection Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness was released in April 2024. She is currently working on a new graphic novel and has a new novel forthcoming with Guernica Editions..

Thanks to Danila for answering our questions, and to Guernica Editions for the excerpt from Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness, available here on All Lit Up or from your local indie bookseller.

Check out our whole month of The Short of It features here.