I Lost a Whole Neighborhood: Talking Brooklyn and Loss with Amina Gautier
Amina Gautier is 100 percent Brooklyn. Gautier’s first collection of stories, At-Risk won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2010. Since then, she’s had two other award-winning books—Now We Will Be Happy, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The Loss of All Lost Things, which was awarded the Elixir Press Fiction Award.
A friend since we first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, we meet every couple of months at a café or restaurant or diner and catch up. We talk about Star Wars and superheroes and stories and, well, life. Often we end up laughing our asses off. This time we discussed her latest collection of short stories, The Loss of All Lost Things, and her Brooklyn.
What is the origin of The Loss of All Lost Things?
I’ve put together all three of my collections the same way—by writing and waiting. I write the stories that interest me at any given time and allow them to accumulate. I don’t ever have an outline or a plan or anything as structured as that. As far as individual stories go, I write them in bits and pieces—a bit of dialogue here, an image I think of and jot down in a spiral notebook there. I add and add words in notebooks, which I then type into various word documents. I build the documents, multiple documents at a time, without trying to make any sense out of them, until one day my curiosity leads me to check on a specific document and I see that it’s large enough (3,000 words or more) for me to begin to play around with. So I go in and I move things around until I start to see the story. Then I hunker down and write and revise.
After I’ve written a bunch of stories—fifty or so, I can take a step back and see what I was thinking. It becomes apparent that while I was writing what I liked, there were certain issues, topics, or themes to which I would return every five or six stories. It becomes clear that many of the stories speak to one another and can group themselves into various thematic piles. That’s how At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things originated, from me writing and waiting and not forcing anything.
In the title story, as the parents’ try to make sense of the loss of their son, every other loss they experience is amplified. But the story is also about the passing of time and its effect on our perspective of loss. Can you talk about the experience of writing about loss in its various forms?
I really hate to lose things. I’m not really a que sera sera person when it comes to mistakes. Therefore, I live a very preventive life. I’ve always believed that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, to quote a familiar idiom. I firmly believe that it’s much easier to not cause a problem in the first place then it is to correct it afterwards. I think ahead and imagine how it would feel for me to lose a certain thing—a friendship, relationship, treasured item, a certain type of security etc.—and typically, the thought alone is frightening enough to make me behave in ways so as not to help that fate occur.
I’ve learned many adult life lessons through literature— simply reading about the mistakes others have made and witnessing the damage and upheaval it costs or the length it takes to repair said damage has taught me much about making foolish mistakes. I know poverty firsthand and things it taught me is just how expensive it is to make a mistake. I have long regarded mistakes and screw-ups as the special province of people who have certain types of emotional and financial support to buttress their failures. I’ve seen firsthand how one mistake can cause an entire family’s down spiral. One missed paycheck, one family member that dies without life insurance, one person that chooses the wrong spouse and one’s whole life can shift so sharply downward that a lifetime is not long enough to climb back up or simply get back to level ground.
When you mention someone has suffered a “loss,” I think we typically associate that with a physical death. And that’s a loss we can all relate to; we are naturally sympathetic when others are grieving. But what about all of the other things we can lose that define us? How is it different when the “loss” was actually forcibly taken from us? And how is that different than when we’ve “lost” something due to our own negligence? I’ve never met a single person that isn’t still in some way impacted by a long-ago loss. Look at me. I lost a whole neighborhood.
Whether it be a “small” loss—say a favorite team’s loss in a championship or a jacket you loaned a friend one night and never got back, or a larger loss—say a childhood, because you were forced to grow up sooner than expected, there always seems to be a sense of injustice, a frustrated sense of helplessness, a reimagining of how things could have gone differently.
How did you come to reading and writing?