Back Draft: Miranda Popkey
Photograph by Elena Seibert Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, traces ten significant encounters over twenty years, each of which shapes the unnamed female narrator’s views on gender and sexual politics. The excerpt above brings together a group of single mothers reflecting on their circumstances while their babies nap in the other room.
In the style of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, Popkey trusts her narrator’s voice to carry the reader along, eschewing many conventions of plot. I asked her about the process of revising her “nontraditional” novel and what other traditions she subverted along the way.
—Kate Dwyer for Guernica
Guernica: I’m curious about the detail of the eye-rolling. What made you add it?
: What I’d had in place of the eye-rolling (“The stench on her …”) was meant to communicate the narrator’s dislike of Fran and her ambivalence about motherhood; but, trying to do two things at once, I found it was doing neither well. It just read as mean—and worse, slightly confusing. The eye roll is clear—a very legible gesture. The reader gets the narrator’s contempt for Fran and also, possibly, one reason for it: Fran, sharing the joy and camaraderie she felt, seeing Sandra, is making herself vulnerable; our narrator hates vulnerability. Trying to do less, I sharpen the tone (I hope). Perhaps, because the comment now reflects back on her alone, I also make our narrator
