Making Meaning in an Honest Way: The Millions Interviews Dana Spiotta

It’s an odd privilege to learn from someone you are in awe of. The senses seem to shut down, overwhelmed by brilliance. I know this from experience. Dana Spiotta was a teacher of mine. Her unsparing curiosity, her care for details, her devotion to the craft—in person, on the page—have been an endless source of inspiration. In Wayward (out now from Knopf), Spiotta continues her quiet run at the front of American fiction, with a novel that achieves ends sometimes thought exclusive: formal innovation and profound emotion.

Wayward might be most distinguished from Spiotta’s previous four novels by its subject. In the chaos of the recent past, at the time of Donald Trump’s election, through the particulars of a family in Syracuse, Spiotta confronts readers with the unseen terrain of menopause. Sam wakes at night in the Mid, which “always seemed to be precisely 3:00.” Sam struggles with comedically-rich impulses, such as “the urge to scream…at young women sometimes. She imagined herself shrieking ‘Menopause! Menopause! Menopause!’” Shopping, Sam reflects on clothes that were “flattering…to a grotesque midlife misshapenness—a blurriness, a squareness, really.” Sam becomes obsessed with the story of a middle-aged white woman who sneaks aboard planes without consequence. To age as a woman is to become invisible to the culture, Spiotta tells us, as she beautifully offers form to all the culture refuses to see.

Spiotta and I spoke over Zoom and exchanged emails about her new novel, the definition of structure, Ward Wellington Ward, lists. I was confident that, at the end of our conversation, I had just completed a master class on being alive.

The struggle to be a better person—in an existential sense, in a moral sense—features prominently in all of your work But it’s a struggle that has evolved from to , and, in its most recent form, it appears varied,