Sarah Gerard: On Writing Stories Without Conflict, Cats as Metaphor, and Her New Chapbook ‘The Butter House’
I spoke to Sarah Gerard over Zoom the day after the country endured an arctic blast. Arctic air made its way all the way from Siberia to the U.S. bringing extreme cold, heavy snow, and intense wind with it. In Nashville, the sky opened up with a light drizzle around dinnertime, but by midnight, my husband and I marveled at the influx of snow and how it burned our faces just to be outside. To be honest, it felt like I was inside one of Sarah’s stories, all forces of nature against the protagonist who is just trying to sift through the chaos of the everyday and figure their shit out.
When I logged into the Zoom, it was 0 degrees outside, snow still covering the ground from the night before, a blanket of white across our front lawn and back porch. I longed for the sunshine and tropical lush landscape of The Butter House.
Gerard’s writing often focuses on place, as their work always grounds the reader in a specific setting and uses location to build upon story. The cover art for The Butter House is totally giving Sunshine State vibes, flora and fauna springing up and out of the head of Little Gray Cat, yellow-eyes gleaming in a stare back at the reader. The newly released chapbook does feel like a nod to their collection of essays that longtime fans of Sarah like myself have come to understand as required reading for any nonfiction writer.
The Butter House lands us in Florida and feels like a sequel to Gerard’s novel, True Love, in that the protagonist has escaped life in the big city and is now exploring the dichotomy of small spaces vs. wide open spaces (cue “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks). Although it’s not a direct continuation of the same story, Gerard’s characters continue to grapple with such dichotomies: city vs. country; the freedom of young adulthood vs. entering into a domestic partnership; nature vs. nurture; wild animals vs. animals as pets; cats vs. more cats.
“The girlfriend,” as she’s named in The Butter House acts as the reader’s eyes and ears as we traverse an almost mythical bungalow life. Along with “the boyfriend,” the two have just moved from New York to Florida, a welcomed change in this new phase of life. The girlfriend spends her time gardening and tending to the earth, a larger metaphor for her newfound passion for caretaking. As she dives deeper into the natural world, she encounters the neighborhood’s feral cat colony. The Butter House is a chronicle of cats, it’s a turn back to nature and the land, it’s an answer to the question what it means to care for something outside of yourself.
Brittany Ackerman: What came first for The Butter House-- the cats or the house itself? OR, was it the girlfriend and boyfriend? Or none of the above!
Sarah Gerard: The Butter House is a real place we (Sarah Gerard and Patrick Cottrell) lived in St. Petersburg, FL back in 2018. We quickly realized there was a colony of cats that lived in the neighborhood. It was our first time living together, the first time our cats were cohabitating as well. We were enamored with the lushness of the landscape, the jasmine bushes blooming from the front yard. I started getting into gardening and also observing all these different cats that lived there, they each took on very distinct personalities, noticing that we were making up a language around the cats, bordering on absurd. We really thought it was funny; we kept a list of names that grew to over a hundred entries.
The chapbook also grew out of a challenge that Patrick gave me to write about “good love,” the antithesis of my novel, True Love, which is dark and cynical. I was still carrying cynicism, and being in a healthy relationship with Patrick where love is appreciated, I started wondering what it looks like to tell a story without any conflict, or conflict that is more quiet, a subtle inner-conflict. In all, it’s a very domestic story about house cats.
Cats became the conflict, and not in a dramatic sense– ‘everything in true love is over the top, or things are breaking and things are ruined and people are having abortions and cutting themselves.’ But this was more about how do I provide care for another being? How do I recognize my own limitations of care, yet still hold space for someone else? How can there be compromise and conversation?
BA: As a fellow Floridian, I'd love for you to talk about how Florida and its lush landscape play a large role here, even larger than plot. How can setting or environment be a character in a body of work and how do you achieve this?
SG: I always write about places when I’m not living in them anymore. It takes me so long to write something because it takes me a while to think about what these places meant to me at different stages of my life. My relationship with them evolves all the time. Life leads you places. Now, living in Denver, I can already see how it is infusing into my work –the West, the Wild West, all the different shades of colonialism and history that exist here for different peoples and across eras. I’ve been thinking about the railroad and trains.
Place is always a character, and Florida itself is so many different characters for me.
BA: I'm sure you've seen Inside Llewyn Davis, the Cohen Brothers movie from 2013. I mention it because there's a cat named Ulysses that plays a huge role in the story. I was reminded of this in The Butter House: "When a cat slips out the door in a movie, it’s an injection of fear into the narrative. A bad omen, sign of bad things to come. An indoor cat can’t protect himself, his survival skills dulled with time and lack of use. He wants to be where he is comfy, protected, and fed. Outside he may lose his way, literal, figurative. He could be run over or eaten. Should you see him later in the film, it means there has been a miracle."
There are so many famous cats in literature and cinema- thinking of the Cheshire Cat, The Cat in the Hat, The Aristocats, Crookshanks, Felix, Grumpy Cat, my personal favorite-- Garfield. Are there any cats you'd like to mention here, whether fictional or real, that have inspired any of the cats in The Butter House, or who have served as a larger inspiration for any of your writing?
SG: In the book there are allusions to Garfield and Sylvester. I grew up with all those cartoon cats– the Pink Panther, Tony the Tiger. These cats are caricatures, but I wanted them to have full lives. I really began to notice the lives of the cats in the neighborhood; where they would turn up and who else knew them, discovering one of the cats had belonged to someone and calling them to check in, driving the cat back to them. It felt like everyone was letting their cats roam free. Another one, the Tiger cat who lived next door, his eyes were so infected. And the woman who lived next door was this ornery lady and kind of mocked us at one point because we expressed concern about the cat’s eyes. She told us he was on medications but there was no sense of responsibility there. The other nextdoor that cat had gone missing and she hadn’t seen him for a long time.
The cats ultimately feel like metaphors for all the things we try to save in this world and can’t, the ways that the world breaks your heart every day.
I wanted to tune into this subtle connection that we share with animals, a language that doesn’t necessarily translate logically.
There’s a passage where the girlfriend alludes to a book called Animal Internet, a book by philosopher Alexander Pschera. The girlfriend doesn’t name it, but the idea is discussed that domestic animals are sentient throw pillows that we keep imprisoned in our houses, which is absolutely the truth in some ways. The cat wants to go outside but I am thwarting his will. Is it for his own good?
BA: Fuck, Marry, Kill: Plot, Setting, Character.
SG:
Marry Character
Kill Plot
Fuck Setting
BA: What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?
SG: I’m working on a nonfiction book about a friend who was murdered in 2016, and a novel in the works as well. As I was finishing The Butter House, I understood that it’s important to maintain a sense of play in your work because you discover things as you write. I very intentionally wanted to spend time with this character and laugh at myself. The girlfriend is a nice person and it was good for me to spend time with her.
I’m currently reading a few ARCs.I Felt the End Before it Came, a memoir by Daniel Allen Cox about growing up queer and a Jehovah’s Witness, published by Viking. Also, Proximity by Sam Heaps with Clash Books.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the novels True Love and Binary Star and the essay collection Sunshine State. They are the recipient of a 2021 Lambda Literary Dr. James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Sarah’s short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and the anthologies We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism, Tampa Bay Noir, Erase the Patriarchy, and I Know What’s Best For You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom.
About the Interviewer
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers. She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
