Give us your elevator
pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
“Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I
cannot find you!” Heathcliff begs this of his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be
haunted – he insists on it – and I do too. The essays in Be with Me Always explore hauntedness – not through conventional
ghost stories but by considering the way certain people or places from our
pasts cling to our imaginations. Some
essays are traditional in form, others are lyric; together they reveal the unexpected value of being haunted.
Which essay did you
most enjoy writing? Why? And, which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
I really enjoyed writing “The Heart as a Torn Muscle” [link
below]. Well, I enjoyed the writing of it – but not the pain part. I
was on a residency at the glorious Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and
was thinking about writing about the timeline of a crush. But before I began, I
tried to move my desk so it faced the window – and I pulled something deep in
my lower back. Instead of writing, I started researching. I looked up “torn muscle”
on WebMD and slowly saw that the treatment plan for a torn muscle was similar
to the treatment plan for a bad crush. Then I realized that the heart is also a
muscle – and the essay almost wrote itself. It became what’s known as a hermit
crab essay, an essay that borrows its form from another kind of writing (the
way the hermit crab borrows its shell from another kind of animal). In this
case the essay’s form was a WebMD page, with sections on symptoms, treatments,
“Exams and Tests,” etc.
The essay that gave me the most trouble was “Ambush.” It started out as a more of lyric essay,
divided into sections, and each section started off with a quote about ambushes
from the Army Ranger's Handbook. I kept playing with the order, trying to make
each section fit with each quote and each type of ambush. But one day – a
Sunday – I decided to take out all the quotes and the sections of the essay
fell into place, and it was exactly the way I wanted it to be. I remember that
it was a Sunday because I had just read the Modern Love column in the
Sunday New
York Times and I thought, this essay feels like a Modern Love
essay. So I sent it in. (And I was right!)
Tell us a bit about
the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
This book's road to publication felt like a game of Chutes
and Ladders. Early on – too early, really – a fancy New York agent found me
through the Modern Love piece I had published. She took me out to lunch at Nobu
and asked me all the right questions. She read my whole manuscript and said all
the right things. But after I had signed with her she wanted me to revise my
collection into a memoir. I tried to arrange the essays chronologically, to
have something of a thorough line, but for me, memoirs and essays are two very different
organisms. It was heartbreaking to think of filleting all my essays of all
their spines and then trying to mold them into some kind of book-length
fish-cake story. And in the end I couldn’t do it. My agent and I parted ways. I
thought I had missed my chance.
But I kept writing. I kept publishing individual essays. The
theme of the collection shifted and I started sending it out again – this time
to agents and presses that champion essay collections. It took a while, but
then one of my dream presses – the University of Nebraska Press – said yes. Although
the whole process took much longer than I might have liked, it worked out beautifully
in the end. Be with Me Always is a
much better book than its earlier versions. I couldn’t be happier.
What’s your favorite
piece of writing advice?
It comes by way of
Henry James: “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
My favorite writing
advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the
writing of this book?
How much of it – the writing and the ordering of the essays
– happened intuitively. Dinty Moore has described essay writing as following a
“invisible magnetic river,” and that’s what much of the process felt like.
How did you find the
title of your book?
I struggled with the title. The collection is loosely themed
around hauntedness but the essays address so many different things (a
near-death experience, Anne Boleyn's relationship with Henry VIII, the chemical
composition of Tylenol, the mythical properties of different gemstones) it was
hard to settle on a title. But then I reread Wuthering Heights for
the essay "Striking," and that line from Heathcliff almost knocked me
over: "Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I
cannot find you!” I thought, That's it. That’s what all these essays are
about – the things that haunt us, that stay with us always, that never want to
be lost and not again found.
Inquiring foodies and
hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any
recipes I might share?)
In “Yet Another Day at the Jersey Shore” I write about the
yellow cake my grandmother used to make. Hers was Duncan Hines, but mine is
from the Magnolia Bakery in New York City. When I lived there I would end the
week by buying two cupcakes; I’d walk down the block to the Bleecker Street Playground
or Abington Square and eat one (sometimes both, although I always planned to
save the second one for later). When I moved to DC I bought The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook and have
made this lovely cake for birthdays, snow days, any day ever since.
****
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: www.randonbillingsnoble.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR PILE: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496205049/
READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “The Heart as a Torn Muscle”: https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/torn-muscle/