Felicia C. Sullivan interviews Rachel Sherman, author of The First Hurt

Rachel Sherman was born in 1975. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Open City, Post Road, Conjunctions, n+1, and Story Quarterly, among other publications, and in the book Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve Anthology.

The first line. Some authors say it comes with an event, an image, or a bit of dialogue from a character. Does the first line of your stories come to you quickly with the rest of the narrative slowly unwinding? How do you find your "in"?

Usually I will get a line in my head and begin with that, even if I eventually end up erasing the whole beginning. It can be frustrating waiting for or finding that first line. I know writers often talk about the blank page in front of them. If I am not inspired, do not have that first line, I usually don't try to write. I'm not a very disciplined writer. Sometimes I will let a story boil up in me for a long time before actually writing it. I don't have a specific schedule for writing, though. I wait to be inspired.

There are many dreamers in your stories, literally. In "The Reaper," a comely teenage girl seeks refuge with her outlandish solider pen pal. She dreams of them falling into the Bermuda Triangle, but they're somehow suspended mid-air "holding each other's hands like parachutes do on their way down." In "Two Stories; Single Family; Scenic View," a father of brain-injured newborn twins and a husband of an anguished wife, fantasizes a waterfall swim with a carefree, voluptuous neighbor. In "The First Hurt," Sarah, an outsider, desperate for clear skin and a pure-bred boy named Hamilton, dreams of a woman in a blue bonnet looking up from the bottom of a lake, her face rotting. And in "Homestay," when a sexy Danish au pair threatens a fragile Long Island home, the narrator dreams of kittens, sick and locked in a trunk of a car. I love this inside lens into your characters' mind. These dreams are disturbing, arresting, the kinds of things people do think of, but never say aloud. Do these dreams serve as possible escape routes for your characters that are sometimes desperate, lonely, sometimes drowning while they're awake, standing up? How do they figure into these particular stories?

I think that the characters are more whole when you know what they are dreaming. I am interested in dreams, and how they echo and twist life. Many people don't remember their dreams, which I find so strange. Dreams are such a large part of life. The characters I make up have vivid dream lives, and their awake lives blur into them. They are dreamers because their lives while they are awake are not necessarily the lives that they want. Their dreams might be disturbing, but they are a distraction from the lives they have created. The dreams also tell a lot about who a person is, what they know and don't know about themselves; the unconscious.

The women in your stories are honest, unapologetic, angry, ashamed, afraid and filled with a desire to be loved, to be "normal" and play sports. They want to blend in but they're loners, the skirt the periphery. They're the girls that sneak tokes with the hottest boys in school, but can never get closer than that. What attracted you to these women, these characters, you seem to wholly love. Beautiful women who don't feel beautiful in their bodies? Is there one character/story that affected you most?

I think the story that makes me feel the most is "Homestay." It freed me a lot to write in the second person. The loneliness and isolation that I feel that I was able to convey in that story is what I aim for in my writing. I feel that I was most successful there. I think that more girls feel the way my characters do, perhaps without the words to say them. I have always written about these kinds of girls. In college, I majored in both literature and photography. My photo subjects were also teenage girls. I guess that sounds creepy... I feel I understand this kind of girl. But perhaps saying "this kind" is wrong. Every girl has a story.

In the title story, sixteen-year-old Sarah witnesses her recently moved-in grandmother dying of cancer from radiation treatments performed that promised clear skin, but is now killing her. In love with a boy Sarah can never have who dates an anorexic blond named Gretchen, she too has inherited skin that begs to be picked at. At one point Sarah reveals, "On my chest, my back, my arms, I have things growing at the base of me that only I can feel the first hurt of...Once you start to touch somewhere, new things come up, because you have been picking. You can find a place on your body you never thought of and just start touching it, scratching it. Soon there will be bumps, I promise...All you are doing is wiping yourself with love." Picking at her skin gives Sarah control, power, a means to numb her pain and alienation; this self-hurt/self-love, a mild, slow mutilation, might reveal a whole new terrain underneath, a map of country, of a body, she's willing to live in and with. Sarah, as well as a few other characters in the collection (Ida in "Jewish Hair" immediately comes to mind), have a strong relationship with their bodies, more specifically, their skin. Might you talk a little about this relationship and what it reveals of character?

I often think about how skin is an organ. It always seems strange to me. I am very interested in the way peoples insides relate to their outsides. I am also interested in the way people express themselves in ways that show on their bodies because they are unable to say them. Because many of my characters spend a lot of time alone, their physical selves are both a distraction and a salvation. Many of my characters are looking for a way to both comfort and punish themselves. And their skin is the first thing they see.

Home, a place of refuge, of safety, is frequently just the opposite in your stories. The fragile cul-de-sac house in "Homestay," empty homes and the urgency to fill new ones in "Tag Sale," development housing which could be serve as a metaphor for families in stasis, in development in "Two Stories; Single Family; Scenic View." Was this deliberate on your part: to create a home that are anything but, or was this incidental, an after-thought?

I guess I don't feel like any of the things I write about are deliberate in that way. I think it's great that you connected those parts of my stories. The home is definitely something I think about, but most themes in my stories are not planned.. I'm not a writer who charts out their stories or decides what I want to convey in that way. My writing is very organic.

But safety and comfortability in a home are themes that seem to be in my writing. I think that perhaps my characters have trouble feeling comfortable anywhere.

What I love about your work is that it is wonderfully spare, deceptively simple. The language is remarkably clean and the stories are quiet, deliberate, but they pounce when you least expect it. As examples, I'm thinking particularly of "Homestay," and "The Neutered Bulldog." "Homestay" is methodically structured; subtitles such as Housing, Responsibilities, and Privacy liken the story to a simple transaction, when the story within the subheads is anything but. It's terrifying, arresting, how replaceable au pairs with their blondeness and foreignness, can shake an entire home: "You are dangerous. You could walk in anytime. You are one more person in our small, weak home."

In "The Neutered Bulldog," we meet Sarah, a teenage girl fixated on her beautiful schoolteacher trapped in a loveless marriage, who is having an affair with Brian, one of her students. The story is oddly comic and eerily disturbing (late night phone calls from a giggling teacher talking about her sexual conquests), yet still simply told, and it isn't until the very end that we see the degree of Sarah and Brian's extreme emptiness and desperation. Although both these stories are different in form and tone, what makes them similar, for me, is how they quietly unravel-the simple leading to the tragic. Can you talk about how you came to choose the form for "Homestay" and how you came to both the subject matter and the ending for "The Neutered Bulldog"?

I wrote "Homestay" in one sitting. So I guess "Homestay" was boiling up in me. Sometimes I feel like it's almost "throwing up" the stories. That was one of those.

I am interested in innocence, obviously, and the point just before all of that is gone. In "The Neutered Bulldog," Sarah has no idea about so many things, but is being pulled into the strange world of her teacher who is inappropriate, but also experienced. The ending seemed to make sense to me, because although Brian and Sarah are at opposite ends, they are also in the same situation. On the couch, in the teacher's house, there is nowhere else for them to go but to each other.

Again, while writing I am not so conscious about how I am making the story build in a certain way. It is only after that I see it, so I don't want to tell you that it was on purpose. I guess when I go back and edit my stories, I look to make the story whole.

What are you reading at the moment? What are your bookshelf mainstays?

Right now I'm reading Anna Karenina. I never read it before, although I started it a bunch of times. I tend to read books to a few pages before the end and then stop. I think it's because certain books I don't want to end. I would hate if someone did that to one of my books, though. Some of my favorite books are Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge, American Pastoral, Jernigan, The Ice Storm, and Lolita.

If you could host a salon of writers and artists in your home, living or dead, who would be in your circle and why?

I know this sounds bad but I don't like talking about writing that much, so whoever would be there would have to be a character as well. So, Truman Capote, because I know he would be fun, although probably mean. I know a bunch of writers who I love their work but don't think I would like in person. I think that is something very interesting-how you can like someone's art but not them. Sylvia Plath, because her writing makes me feel close to her, and I think she would be an honest person. Freud.

Visit Rachel Sherman's website.