Megan Giddings: Author of "Lakewood" Discusses Anxiety, Memory and Working While Writing in America Today
Listed as Refinery29’s Books by Black Women We are Looking Forward To Reading as well as one of Electric Literature’s 56 Books by Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color to Read in 2020, Lakewood by Megan Giddings is a thrilling debut about class, race and what the body can endure.
When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, she drops out of college to support her family and takes a job, with generous health insurance, in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program—and lie to her friends and family about the research being done, on herself and the other Black, Indian and Latina. Lena soon finds herself at the hands of white doctors who isolate her from herself and her body, to the point where she almost forgets her own humanness. “A body is like outer space,” she says. “The more you actively think about it, the smaller you feel, the more detached you feel from the business of living.” Should she stay for the sake of her family? How much should a body endure for those you love?
I had the pleasure of speaking with Megan over the phone where we discussed the slippery genre of Lakewood, medical care in America today, how anxiety affects memory and how being told to write every day has become a sentiment of the past.
Kailey Brennan: What urged you to write Lakewood?
Megan Giddings: I started Lakewood in 2014. So it was about a five year process of writing the book from starting a draft, that would change many, many times, to selling the book, to working on the book with my editor. A simple component is that I had to start a novel because I was in an MFA, in a novel writing class and I had to write a significant number of pages. But later when I was drafting and thinking about what I was trying to talk about in Lakewood, I had a family member who had a pretty big health scare. We found out that they had gotten a wrong diagnosis, and we essentially had to spend all of our savings despite having insurance. And we also, because of the diagnosis that was given to him, we were coming into everything's assumption that if this was right, things were going to be really bad.
We were talking about what could I do to help us make more money? And especially if he wasn't going to be able to work or if things were going to be really bad, what more could I do? What more could we do? I'm still really angry at how terrible our healthcare system is in the U.S. and I think that was kind of the emotional Genesis of what the book is. This kind of anger at the number of situations that Americans get into to try to just have enough money to survive.
I feel like for a lot of Americans right now, we're all asking, how do we stay healthy? How do we work? What can we possibly do to take care of ourselves?
KB: I was reading a review for Lakewood by the Kirkus Review. It spoke about Lena and the position she finds herself in after her grandmother’s death as “a reminder that hundreds of years of structural racism have made it difficult for black families to accumulate and pass on wealth.” Was this something you were seeking to address?
MG: I didn't really come into this assuming that I would talk about structural racism. It's sort of a complicated question because, on the one hand, I don't believe it's possible to fully write about a non-white character in the United States without in some way some form of structural racism coming into play. So I can't say no, but I'm also hesitant to say yes because I think if I really deeply wanted to talk about that, I might've been even more explicit in some ways.
KB: The experience Lena undergoes bends her reality and her memory in a number of ways. From the drugs that literally alter her brain function to the isolation she feels, never knowing what is real, what is staged or what is her own paranoia. What fascinates you about memory and how memory influences our perceptions of reality?
MG: I'm really interested in how emotions color and frame memory because I think the things that I remember the clearest are intensely emotional —it's happiness or sadness or anxiety. I thought a lot while writing Lakewood about how much anxiety messes with memory. So some of that is just, I think, a natural occurrence to people who have been deeply anxious or have diagnosed anxiety where there are moments where things are either hyperintense or later when you think back, they're a little muddy. You start to just kind of poke a little bit. Was this what the other person would think or is this what I'm thinking happened because of anxiety? Because I was kind of overwhelmed with this emotion at this moment? This is kind of how I got walking toward the way the book portrays Lena’s memory in it.
I did write everything — because it's the only way I could do it— with the belief that everything she experiences really does happen. But it's kind of a delight that so many people who have read the book now and are engaging with it, approach it so differently. What is real or what isn't? There is a lot of talk about what's paranoia in this book? Is it like a dream? I like seeing the number of ways that people are starting to make this book theirs. It's really delightful.
KB: Lakewood is being described as part horror novel. Would you put it into that genre? And if so were you inspired by any horror novels or films?
MG: You know, I don't really think of it as a horror novel. I hesitate with that because the few horror novels I've read I think are far scarier than Lakewood. I think Lakewood is really tense, but it's hard for me to say it's scarier or grosser or even frightening. I think there's something much different between being frightened and being tense.
KB: Yeah. I think horror is such an intense word and evokes such a specific type of movie or book. So I was definitely curious about what you thought of it.
MG: Yeah. I think it's really just people's opinions about it. One of the things that really interested me and my agent is that the book was sold as a straight up literary novel. Along the way we've seen it described as so many different types of books from horror to thriller. Some places listed it as fantasy. Amazon decided it was a science fiction novel. I described the world of Lakewood as a little slippery in a different interview, but I also think the genre of the book is slippery too. It's kind of a looking glass at the moment to the people reviewing and talking about it and thinking about it. It tells you a lot about how they view so many different elements of our culture and moment at the moment. It's very strange to have that happen for such a longer project.
KB: I know you mentioned that you started writing in 2014. Do you have a particular writing routine or a schedule that you like to keep?
MG: I wrote parts of it, on and off, throughout the MFA. Then I got really serious the summer after, where I was job hunting and while I had written a short story collection for my thesis. I was like, you know what, if you're going to leave this program, you might want to just focus and it might feel really good if you have a project, while you have the momentum to actually write it.
It seems that about 50% of the writers I know, right after their MFA, they kind of stopped writing for a little bit. They need that brain space to breathe after two or three years of it. I ended up really going with it and about 75% of the way through the first draft I signed with my first agent of the basis of some short story collections and pages she saw. From there I ended up picking up a ton of part-time freelancing jobs so I couldn't really have a routine. It made me a lot less precious about writing in some ways because if I wanted to write, it would be an hour on a bench here or during my 30 minute lunch or staying up at night.
I sometimes have a really jaded idea about what it means to be a disciplined writer. I think it's based on this idea that is very from the past — my only responsibility is writing. And I think sometimes when people say your butt at the same desk on this day, I think it doesn't take into account if you don't have money or if you're a woman and you want kids. It starts to build this idea of a writing life that I think is not accessible to the average person.
I teach Lifelong Learning and most of my students have jobs that are far outside of writing and most of them have a similar story. They loved writing in college, but they got another job and they didn't know how to make space in their lives for [writing]. So we talk a lot about what it means to be a writer and how you don't have to do this every day. I talk about Mary Robison and one of her models is to write random fragments. The story about her is, essentially, she wrote all of those on note cards whenever she could. And it's something that I think a lot about because it wasn't about the rigidity of it. It was more about how inspiration, at times, comes when it comes and you should just be ready and grab it.
KB: Yeah. I’m so glad you mentioned that. Just within my own personal life, I can't support myself with writing right now. My other jobs are not related to writing. And I think that that's how most people live. But there is so much content out there talking about really rigid writing routines and that you need to write a lot every day. I think it causes a lot of people to be discouraged because most can't write or write a lot, every day and you're really, really fortunate if you're able to.
MG: Yeah. I was talking to someone about this and a number of women are just so sick of hearing that because life is so much more complicated than that advice will even remotely acknowledge.
KB: You are also an editor for The Offing and The Rumpus. What came first, writing or editing for you?
MG: I've always been interested in writing. For a long time, I wanted to be a poet, not a fiction writer. And then in the middle of college, it kind of switched for me, even though I put a lot of emphasis on poetry for a long time. Then editing came along the way. I kind of got thrown into a position during my senior year of college, where I edited a literary magazine because I was the only person who was organized and who would say yes when the faculty advisor was desperate to find an editor. And then I came back to it when I won [a fellowship]—back then it was called the Kathy Fish Fellowship over at Smokelong Quarterly. I started reading submissions for them and then I stayed on after the fellowship period as an executive editor. Then I kind of kept moving to other things where at The Rumpus, I edit only nonfiction and it's really pleasurable for me. And at The Offing, I still get to help edit like experimental and kind of genre slippery fiction for them.
KB: My last question for you is what are you currently reading?
MG: So I'm currently reading two things. I'm reading Alexandra Chang's Days of Distraction. It comes out on March 31st. It's really, really good. I think she has such a good sense of humor where it's not like laugh out loud., but it's the type of sense of humor where she can make a really simple situation seem very funny and actually interesting.
And then I'm rereading Get in Trouble by Kelly Link. It's a good short story collection. I've taught the book before and there's such a variety of styles that it's a great collection to talk about the different ways you can write a story.
Megan Giddings has degrees from University of Michigan, Miami University, and Indiana University. She is a fiction editor at The Offing and a features editor at The Rumpus. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Her stories are forthcoming or that have been recently published in Black Warrior Review, Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Her novel, Lakewood, will be published by Amistad in 2020. She's represented by Dan Conaway of Writers House. Megan lives in the Midwest.
