In the Process of Becoming: The Millions Interviews Amina Cain
I first encountered Amina Cain’s writing with her first book of short stories, I Go to Some Hollow, published by Les Figues Press. I remember impressions—her laconic precision and distinct voice, which have continued to evolve in her second book, Creature, and in her novel, Indelicacy, just published by FSG.
Cain’s writing is succinct in a way that conjures Dickinson or Duras, with her swift and deliberate delivery. Reading Indelicacy feels like inhabiting a painting. Or to play with the metaphor that writing a book is like building a house, my experience of reading Amina Cain is akin to wandering through a series of exquisite rooms where I’m surprised by a decisively placed fixture or an oblique passageway. They are rooms I’d like to return to again and again.
Indelicacy’s protagonist Vitória is a writer and a former cleaning woman, who was rescued from her job when she married. She is concerned with note-taking and observation, and with the authenticity in her life. Just as Vitória is seeking, so is this novel in asking what it means to be free, to think, to be true to oneself. This quandary of being and becoming is quite the opposite of self-help: Vitória is indelicate and self possessed. For example, she tells her former employer, who is quite cold to her, that he is “Like a tooth that hasn’t been brushed in years and is growing hair.”
Vitória’s solitude without loneliness is a quality I’ve considered quite a bit over the last month as the following conversation with Cain has evolved, and even more so now that we are living
