5 Questions with Amy Monaghan
Today, we published the final installment of Amy Monaghan’s story, “The Newcomer.” Emily Lowe spoke with Amy about cats, writing the supernatural, and her background in screenwriting.
The Rejoinder: I am so compelled by the premise of this story, specifically the way that you incorporate cat(s) and the supernatural, a classic pair in literature. What brought you to write about these elements? What inspirations did you draw?
Amy Monaghan: The image of two inexplicably identical cats, one in the prime of its life and the other at the end, came first in terms of the story’s conception. My own cat, Hal, was about to turn nineteen when I wrote the first draft. Anticipatory grief was a major theme in early versions, but the core of what I now believe the story to be about only materialized when I revisited it after Hal died earlier this year. I think cats have always fit so seamlessly into stories about the supernatural because their personalities seem to embody the in-between. They can be logistically dependent on us for food, medical care or whatever else, and yet there’s always a feeling that they know something we don’t. I wouldn’t consider myself inherently a cat person, but maybe I am in a literary sense. I’m always drawn to stories where the strange stuff arrives quietly and without explanation. One of the biggest influences on this story was Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Death in Her Hands,” which also features a strange relationship with a household pet that culminates in something violent and disturbing.
TR: Lena Valencia, a writer previously published in The Rejoinder, once said that "when you introduce the supernatural in a story, the character has to make a decision and so does the reader. Is the supernatural experience really happening or is the character making it up?" This question feels in conversation with the violent scene at the end of Part Three. How do you walk the line between perception and reality in your writing? How clear do you want that line to be?
AM: That line is always pretty smudged for me. I remember in an early workshop in my MFA program I was writing a story where the main character kept having conversations with her dead ex-girlfriend, and when my classmates referred to it as a ghost story I would feel weirdly confused and defensive – like, it’s not a ghost story, she’s just sitting at the kitchen table with someone who’s no longer alive. What’s so strange about that?
Part of what I love about fiction is that it can present an “almost-but-not-quite” version of reality, and sometimes that involves having lunch with a dead ex, or acquiring a seemingly immortal cat. That said, a lesson I’ve slowly absorbed is that unless I as the writer am guiding the reader into the possibility of the supernatural in a really intentional way, they’re naturally going to interpret it through the lens of established genre tropes. I think Lena’s assessment is so true, and I also think that the reader’s response to those supernatural elements can be informed by the response of the character. Personally, when it comes to the strange and supernatural, I’m usually less interested in whether something is actually happening than I am in how the character is responding to it.
TR: I loved the setting of the Time Emporium and how it dramatizes the tension of the ticking clock metaphor. In many ways, Brynn is a stuck clock while Rosemary, her coworker, acts as her foil, both moving forward with her life and actively fixing clocks. What compelled you to build time into a concrete space and place it as a central location in the story?
AM: There’s a straightforwardness to the clock metaphor that I found appealing, in the sense that sometimes our own issues can be so starkly obvious and yet we still feel incapable of doing anything about them. I think that’s the case with Brynn. Her relationship with Rosemary is frustrating for both of them because they’re fundamentally at odds in the way they think about time, and yet they’re stuck together in this environment where time is ticking in the most literal sense.
I come from a background in screenwriting, so when it comes to setting I feel like I’m always instinctively looking for places that feel visually interesting and cinematic. I had such a distinct image in my head of this little shop filled with all kinds of clocks and timepieces, and I could really see how a character like Brynn would feel a sense of mental claustrophobia there. I also think it’s fun placing younger, queer characters into settings that are traditionally older and more masculine, and the clock repair industry is definitely one of those.
TR: By the end of this story, we see our narrator trapped in her own delusion. How did it feel to write an unreliable character? What do you most enjoy when reading from the point of view of unreliable characters?
AM: I have a real soft spot for unreliable narrators, both as a reader and a writer, especially when that unreliability stems from an inability to let go of the past. Nostalgia is a gateway drug to delusion, and a lot of my characters end up experimenting with it and ultimately succumbing to the addiction. Whenever I’m reading characters like that, characters whose perspective I’m not sure I can trust, there’s a level of engagement with the narrative that can feel more urgent, because you’re put in a position to not only guess what will happen but whether what happens will be conveyed in a way you can take at face value.
TR: What's exciting to you in fiction right now, whether with your writing or what you're reading?
AM: A few of my favorite contemporary authors who play with the surreal in a way I find really aspirational are Melissa Broder (Death Valley), Catherine Lacey (Pew), Isle McElroy (People Collide), and Laura van den Berg (I Hold a Wolf by the Ears). I just moved from Los Angeles, California, where I’ve lived for most of my adult life, to a small city in Arkansas, and the change has been intense, so I’ve been leaning into the comfort reads lately.
In terms of my own writing, I’m in the middle stages of a novel that I started last year during a residency at Grand Canyon National Park, which I’ve just realized is also vaguely cat-related (although this one involves a cougar rather than a housecat). It takes place at and in the Grand Canyon and, like most of what I write, is about a character who is trying and failing to reconcile the present with the past. And of course, there’s a bit of supernatural weirdness mixed in as well.