Rivka Galchen: “What we run away from often determines where and to what we run.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses writers’ digital artifacts to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
The classy thing to do when introducing interviews is, I imagine, to praise and depersonalize, but I’m afraid here I must wax unprofessional. Rivka Galchen has been something of a first sister and mentor to me, both on and off the page, and I know I’m hardly an exception. Rivka is the kind of reader who will judge your work according to whether or not you sound like yourself; the kind of person who will meet you uptown for French fries and cake after you make the abrupt decision to, say, move out of your apartment, out of your life, pack most of what you own into a duffel on the back of your bike — and who will greet you with unshocked patience, glossing over patently unwise choices in logistics and transportation.
This expansiveness of spirit — Rivka’s ability to greet with equanimity the range of what life coughs up, and the various ways in which it coughs us up — is reflected in her acclaimed fiction: Her debut novel (2008) and story collection (2014) are marked by irreverence, humor, and a touch of obsession. It is further evidenced by her wide-ranging reporting and criticism for and , as well as by her 2016 memoir on motherhood, , in which her daughter appears as “the puma.” A novelist, reporter, essayist, doctor (she earned her MD at Mount Sinai), and professor of multiple genres in the MFA programs at both Columbia University and NYU, Rivka’s essays cover everything from Kafka to children’s books to earthquakes. She’s written her own, which is studded with math jokes, and displays a rare quality that I myself, as an adult, am always relieved to find: Finally, here is someone who will not lie to you, not least because of your age. In short, Rivka’s is a mind attentive to the world, appraising what Henry James called the “human scene” from an analyst’s remove — and yet with all the warmth of a relation of care, and the awareness of how connected we all are.
