Carmen Maria Machado: I was just rereading White Cat, Black Dog last night and this morning and was thinking a lot about the nested narration, the story within the story within the story, these almost pocket universes. What is it that draws you toward that structure?
Kelly Link: It feels very true of real-life connections. We’re storytelling creatures. Gossip is a story we tell people about the rhythms of our day in narrative structures. So the primary story that we live is embroidered with all of these other stories—in fact, they are a way of thinking about the larger situation that we’re engaged in.
In terms of using it as a literary con-ceit, I think I became aware of it as a structure with Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which I love, and with Isak Dinesen, again, who has that very formal, but at the same time, very conversational feel of people telling stories to each other, who are themselves in a story. It’s also present in all of the horror stories that are framed as a bar conversation in which the frame story is the skeleton, the clothes hanger.
CMM: You mean a club story, that structure?
KL: Yeah. A club story, which I love because it’s possible to vary the depth. The frame story can be huge and the stories inside can be little, tiny pieces; or the frame story could be hardly there at all, just an invitation to me, an acknowledgment that a story is occurring. You’re invited into this atmosphere in which storytelling is a natural and entertaining thing to happen, in the same way that it is, I think, in life, when you’re hanging out with friends and somebody begins to relate a story about something that happened to them or something that hapened to a friend.
CMM: I have this one story about an ex-boyfriend of mine. My friend Tony, whenever we’re with any new people, he’ll be like, “Tell the one about your boyfriend with the pineapple rings.” I’m always like, “Okay, all right, so I was dating this guy…” It’s such a pleasure to just be like, “Okay, yep. Got it. Time to tell My Story about that One Time.”
They’re the closest things to magic tricks that people have. I can’t do magic, but I can produce a story if other people are like, “Tell that story again.” I’m extending an invitation to delight. I don’t want the story to feel like you have gotten an
