Interview With Sarah McColl

Sarah McColl is the author of the memoir Joy Enough. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly and other publications. She has received fellowships from the Millay Colony, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony, where she was named the 2017 Mary Carswell Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I’ve considered myself a writer at various points in my life—in sixth grade, writing a short story in the old apple orchard at my grandmother’s house, writing poetry in high school, writing a blog in my twenties—but the time I really knew I was a writer was at the MacDowell Colony. A poet showed me to my writing studio in the woods my first night after dinner. Just this small cabin, a white-washed space with desk and a simple rocking chair and a screened porch. I saw the names on the walls of all these writers I admired who had worked in this studio, too, like Thomas Lux and Jane Brox. I put my head on the desk and cried. I was so happy and so moved, and I knew then in my bones I was a writer, too.

I loved reading your essay on Connie Converse, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. What drew you to her as a subject and how did writing about her affect your perception of her?

Thank you! I’m so glad you liked it. You know, I heard Connie Converse’s music on Spotify—one of those Discover Weekly playlists—and I found it so haunting. Her voice and her music were so affecting—strange, beautiful, but almost creepy. It was like no other music I’d ever heard, and certainly nothing from the 1950s. I remember googling her and trying to find more information, but her story was a mystery. The short version is that she dropped out of college in the 50s and moved to Greenwich Village, and she was basically ten years too early for the folk singer-songwriter scene. She played and recorded some demos, but she was discouraged and eventually moved in with her brother in Michigan. Life went on, without music. Then one day, she drove away, never to be seen again. What happened to her? Why was her music so out-of-time? Why had she given up on it? I must have identified with her on some level. I admired her vision, and her ambition, and her mores-breaking. I thought she was a badass, and so she inspired me personally and creatively. But I also thought she was tragic. She was depressed, she threw in the towel. She didn’t take pleasure—or enough pleasure—in the work itself. The more I obsessed about her, the more I came to see how I was the best and worst of Connie, too, and so what did that say about me? The process of writing this essay was one of my favorites, but then again, I just love essays. There is something that sticks in my side, something I can’t let go of, something I have to figure out. Snaking my way to understanding on the page, as I eventually came to in writing about Connie, mental health, and creative ambition is just the most satisfying work in the world.

What was the process of starting a book like Joy Enough, your first book and an intimate look into your life?

It wasn’t unlike the process of writing about Connie Converse, really. I was obsessed with something—in this case, the death of my mother—to the exclusion of everything else. I couldn’t write about anything else; I could hardly talk about anything else. I had loved someone so much, now she was gone, and what did that mean? I suppose my writing is always in pursuit of meaning. In some ways, writing about my mother was a way to continue to be in relationship with her. I simply didn’t want her to be dead, and in writing, she wasn’t. She was very much alive to me.

What draws you to the form of memoir?

I love first-person narratives. It doesn’t even have to be memoir. I just tire of my own brain and my own life—don’t we all?—and love the experience of being dropped into another consciousness. The way it sees and understands, the way it thinks and questions, its neuroses and obsessions and loves. I love the immediate and unmediated access of first-person. In some ways, I am more interested in ideas than story, and as a result, I am more interested in seeing how a narrator thinks and is. Certainly, one can see thinking—arguably more of it—in third-person narratives that inhabit multiple perspectives, but I find the “I” intense and intimate in a way that is irresistible.

How did you know when you were finished with the book?

You know when you keep futzing with a thing but you’re not making it any better? That’s how I knew.

Were there any surprises in the life of the book after publication?

There were so many surprises! I’ll say the biggest were 1) Emma Roberts selecting Joy Enough for her Belletrist book club and 2) learning that I have a great deal more comfort with emotional life than most people.

Could you see yourself writing fiction?

Yes, for sure! I’m working on a novel right now.

Are you intentional about what you read for pleasure when you are in the process of a project of your own?

Not really, not any more than usual, and not in the sense that I have rules for myself, like I only read fiction when I’m writing nonfiction or I only read poetry when I’m writing fiction. My main intention is to read broadly, not only across genres, but across time.

What subjects do you find yourself curious about in your writing lately?

A writer once told me we all write the same story over and over. Is that true? I don’t know. It’s certainly kind of an annoying thing to say. But I do see how my work touches on what I might call my old reliables: the pleasures of relationship versus the pleasures of personal autonomy; an artist’s relationship with her work; fertility, sex, desire, longing, being a woman, creativity of all kinds; ambition. I’m experimenting more with writing about elements of our culture in the present moment, since it scares me. I can’t, for example, stop thinking about those scooters splayed on street corners and the many reasons why they bother me so much. So much freedom for corporations, exercised carelessly, and at the same time, women are marching in the streets for control of our own procreative rights?

What was the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?

Make time to get bored.

Riley Mang is LAR’s Editor-at-Large. Find more of her work here.