An Interview with Tess Gunty
Molly Lambe
Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a captivating mosaic. Set in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a post-industrial center loosely based on Gunty’s own hometown, the novel follows an eclectic cast of characters, many of whom live in the titular housing complex. Among its residents are Joan, a middle-aged woman paid to moderate comments on an online obituary website; Hope, an anxious new mother frightened by her baby’s eyes; and four teenagers fresh out of the foster care system, including Blandine, a precocious eighteen-year-old who takes refuge from her traumatic past in an obsession with the Catholic mystic, Hildegard von Bingen. The novel opens with Blandine transcending her own corporeality, an experience she has long desired. She explains, “Nobody can break into you if you break out of your body first.”
The characters search in ways both quiet and insistent, and frequently unusual, for connection, freedom and a sense of belonging. Though failed and abandoned by the systems that surround them, there is a palpable hope in their persistence to find meaning and solace in a crumbling city and a burning planet. As I read The Rabbit Hutch, I was struck by the sharpness and humor with which Gunty captures the nuances of loneliness, longing, and human eccentricity. While the novel never shies away from showing the intricacies of Vacca Vale’s grim reality, it deftly balances its darkness with glimmering slivers: an olive pizza shared in the midst of a historic flood, a walk in a natural sanctuary untouched by industry, an unexpected visit to a stranger. The Rabbit Hutch won Gunty the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction.
I talked to Gunty about the nuts and bolts of writing her polyphonic novel, challenging the notion of what a “novel” is, and what it meant to her to win the National Book Award. She dialed in over Zoom from her Los Angeles home, where she sat before a wall packed with bookcases, her gray cat sauntering in and out of frame.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Can you tell me a little about fictionalizing the town you grew up in for creating the novel’s setting?
GUNTY: For me, fictionalizing the place was essential. If I had tried to reproduce my town as it was, I wouldn’t have been able to see it clearly, and I would have felt overwhelmed by the task. I would have probably exchanged emotional truth for factual accuracy. I also didnt want to make it a replication of my own town because as soon as you do that, especially with a place or a community that’s underrepresented, the risk is that other people will interpret it as a definitive representation. I didn’t want to suggest at any point that this was a comprehensive portrait of my town, and certainly not of the post-industrial Midwest as a whole.
But it’s also true that I had to leave South Bend in order to write about it. I’d lived there for my whole life, and then when I was twenty-two, I moved to New York for my MFA. I needed about a year of distance until I could begin to write more honestly about it. I was able to access positive associations of the place—a new knowledge of its beauty, its complexity, its vastness, its vulnerability. There’s a communal care that I sensed there that I didn’t truly appreciate until I left. Fictionalizing the place and achieving some temporal distance were both essential.
I wouldn’t have been able to write about the town at all had I not anchored each scene in different characters. When I was doing an event in New York, someone asked me if it’s possible for a reader to develop a relationship with a place that’s as strong as a relationship with a human character. Perhaps that’s possible, but it would still require some life form. Place is most vibrantly expressed through its living creatures, whether they’re humans or non-human animals or plants.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The Rabbit Hutch renders a portrait of a place through the multitudes of voices that make it up. What inspired your decision to structure the novel this way?
GUNTY: At the time, I was reading a lot of contemporary polyphonic work. I had read NW by Zadie Smith, which is structured in three interlocking novellas. Great House by Nicole Kraus follows a desk as it travels between generations of people in different countries. If David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest has a main character at all, it’s probably loneliness, and the main character of Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is time. As I was revising the book before finally submitting to agents—it took me five years to draft it—I read Middlemarch by George Eliot and I listened to Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood, which is this multi-voiced portrait of a town over the course of one day. I was so drawn to this form because I found it very electric and varied and alive. In each of those books, I felt respected as a reader. They gave me a very rich and complex ecosystem and trusted me to wander through it, to get lost in it, to find the resonances and reasons. One thing I often say is that in any healthy ecosystem, every life form, no matter how small it seems, is essential for the health of the whole. I think that’s what those books taught me—how to make the seemingly peripheral, irrelevant, throw-away material of life absolutely vital in a narrative.
The beginning-middle-end, single hero, rising action, climax, falling action, three-act structure—whatever we consider conventional, contemporary realism—started to feel like a total betrayal of reality to me. And while I can enjoy reading books that are structured that way, I just couldn’t write one. They felt fraudulent when I tried—mannered and forced. So this more chaotic form was both the one that felt most exciting to me and the one that felt most natural. And then, of course, when you’re writing about a place, you can reach a more balanced portrait when you invite many voices to the table.
But not all great fiction about a place is polyphonic. The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, for example, are conventionally structured, anchored in one perspective, one friendship, but in sum, they form an extraordinary portrait of a neighborhood over time. So no one form fits all—this was simply the form I felt most electrified by from the age of twenty-three to twenty-nine.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: That makes me think of Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, where he talks about how the three-act structure is a Western conception amongst a huge breadth of literary traditions. I feel like when you start reading more widely, particularly literature from around the world, you gain an understanding of how many ways there are to tell a story and how much is possible when you don’t follow that formula.
GUNTY: Exactly. In undergrad, I studied English and did a concentration in Creative Writing. Notre Dame has a fairly experimental Creative Writing department, which I didn’t know going in. At first, I was resistant to the avantgarde fiction that those instructors assigned, but I was completely converted by the end of my degree to a much more flexible view of the novel. One thing that nearly all of my undergraduate classes made very clear was the wide, varied range of expression that fiction takes across time and place. Nothing about so-called “conventional realism” is inevitable, and it’s not a foregone conclusion. Even something modern Westerners consider fundamental to storytelling—moving forward in time—is challenged when you start to read outside of the anglophone canon. Once you explode the impression that a novel has to look like Anna Karenina, then you’re liberated to create something true to you. And it might end up looking like Anna Karenina! But at least you know that whatever form you take, you are doing so freely, not because it’s the only template you’ve ever seen.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: “Variables,” the chapter that details the relationship Blandine has with a teacher when she is seventeen, provided such a rich and layered portrayal of the ways that experiencing an abuse of power can derail one’s life and sense of self. It was previously published in a different form in The Iowa Review in 2018. How did you rework it to include in the book?
GUNTY: That piece was possibly the beginning of the novel. In the beginning, I wrote a few scenes involving Joan and some other characters, and I knew they all existed in the same world, but I couldn’t put them together until I had “Variables.” When I’m composing a first draft, simply paying attention to what I’m drawn to over and over again and obeying that gravitational force, hoping that something will come of it, is the most useful habit to cultivate. “Variables” was also the piece that I couldn’t leave alone. The more I worked on it, the more it became clear that the character called X in that story was the same as Blandine. I don’t even remember the shift. It was such a gradual and natural evolution.
The novel is thinking about the ways people fail each other even when they’re trying not to, the ways that structural power abuses generate interpersonal power abuses. What happens in “Variables” seemed like an apt microcosm for what’s happening to all the characters, their town, their state, their country, their planet. It allowed me to examine a complex abuse of power on a micro, intimate scale.
I drafted that piece right before the #MeToo movement exploded, and I revised it throughout. The #MeToo movement and the increased visibility of stories like these all around the world certainly influenced the development of that storyline. One of the things that became important to me was to portray a damaging abuse of power to which each party allegedly consented. There were more black and white cases of abuse that happened within Blandine’s lifetime that I chose not to include because there was no nuance. Simone Weil said: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” So much of the abuse that my characters suffered before the book begins fits Weil’s description of real evil. But “Variables” offered a more complex chemical equation—whether it contains real evil is for the reader to decide. But in any case, it’s true that the rest of the novel unfurled around that chapter.
“Just carefully describing the way that a character is sitting in a chair might lead you to discover that your character suffers from chronic pain, which will inevitably make you wonder how your character copes, what kind of medical assistance she has found, which will force you to think about the healthcare system. Whatever matters most to you will naturally surface if you trust an associative, subconscious logic.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The Rabbit Hutch touches on a myriad of problems—unregulated capitalism, the extraction economy, the climate crisis—that this community bears the burden of. Did you approach the book with certain central questions you were interested in addressing?
GUNTY: The brutality of the extraction economy is fundamental to the narratives of post-industrial cities. The resulting destruction is visible everywhere you look. In my own hometown, in my immediate community, I saw the ways that this economic devastation wreaked havoc across generations, the fact that the future foreclosed on some people before they were even born. The economic devastation that resulted from impersonal structural decisions—an automobile company shut down—imposed enormous pressure on communities, which resulted in extremely personal consequences. All the violence and pain, addiction and fractured relationships and poverty and incarceration and damage—you could trace all of this pain to a poorly regulated, heartless extractive model. I often felt as if the very soul of my hometown had been extracted before I was born. It seems abundantly clear that all of our major social crises, like white supremacy and the prison industrial complex and the climate crisis and the daily inequalities of our healthcare system are, if not caused by, aggravated and enabled by barely-regulated capitalism. It’s on my mind all the time because it is the central narrative of millennial American life. I think the only way to build a livable future is to find a new, humane economic model.
I never sit down with a thesis or treaties or a set of social issues that I want to address in my fiction. I firmly believe that when you’re paying attention to the micro, it will lead you by the hand to the macro. Just carefully describing the way that a character is sitting in a chair might lead you to discover that your character suffers from chronic pain, which will inevitably make you wonder how your character copes, what kind of medical assistance she has found, which will force you to think about the healthcare system. Whatever matters most to you will naturally surface if you trust an associative, subconscious logic. In my experience, that logic is far more truthful, interesting, surprising and revelatory than conscious logic.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The chapters in this book take many different forms—obituary comments, a newspaper article, and most surprisingly, drawings. What do you think this particular element brings to the story as a whole, and why was it important to include?
GUNTY: I was always interested in incorporating the textures of my characters’ lives into the book. I wanted it to feel like a found object rather than a written one. In the early stages of writing this book, I knew that Todd was an illustrator, and I knew that I wanted him to draw a series of uncanny cartoons to capture the scene in question. In part, this was just a solution to a problem. The scene that I was trying to represent was so action-packed, it involved so many characters colliding at once, so many bizarre events, and I was afraid the scene would be too confusing if I tried to describe it in words. In my mind, I kept seeing the scene as a comic strip, so it felt like a natural choice. When I finally asked my brother to make these drawings five years after I initially conceived of the idea, he suggested creating a figurative visual interpretation of the scene rather than a literal one. This direction was so much more compelling to me. By then I’d written a scene called “The Facts” where Jack does write a series of statements about what happened. Nick [Gunty’s brother] reread that chapter and then said, “Let’s think of these drawings as Todd’s confession, Todd’s defense.” I had never thought about it that way. It was one of the many examples of a smart reader helping me understand my characters and their motives better.
I have three older brothers and Nick is closest to me in age. It was a really easy and harmonious collaboration. He’s a fantastic artist, with a wide range, and also my first friend on Earth. He understood the aesthetics of this book. We collaborated for a few months, and he made several rounds of mockups, we talked about each one, made changes, and eventually he made the drawings for real. He used black marker and paper the size of printer-paper because we wanted to suggest that Todd had created these drawings after the novel itself finishes, possibly from prison.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking of your family, you grew up around creative people. Your brother is a visual artist and a musician, and your mother is an art teacher. What specifically about the form of writing were you drawn to?
GUNTY: I’ve been writing ever since I was really little, and like lots of writers, I began as a really voracious reader. My parents say I was drawing connected scenes and narrating the “story” to them since I was a toddler, but I started to properly write fiction at my friend’s house. A family that was homeschooled took care of me a few days a week when I was very little. They had a child my age, Cassadhe, who was an extraordinary artist and writer. A true prodigy. Their mom would give us these prompts called “quick writes.” Writing stories was a seamless extension of all the other activities we were doing at the time—drawing, theater, singing, imaginative games. But writing fiction was electrifying for me, especially when I saw how brilliant my friend’s writing was. There was no envy or competition in that friendship—I drew inspiration from their triumphs. Writing fiction instantly submerged me in a sense of freedom and play. It delivered a kind of high that I was always chasing.
I often felt trapped when I was growing up—I experienced this unshakable sensation that the ceiling was lowering on me. As a kid, I had a recurring dream that I hoped for every night. In the dream, I found a hidden room in our basement. I’d enter the room and discover this expansive, bright space without gravity, where I’d float in some wild euphoria. Reading and writing fiction delivered me to that room.
I had severe anxiety as a child, and writing allowed me to simultaneously escape from and confront certain fears, certain tangles of thought. I continued doing it throughout my life really obsessively, without much thought of publishing. I didn’t think of writing fiction as a structured pursuit until I got to college and someone told me about MFA programs. I never assumed that I would make a career writing fiction, but this did give me hope that I could pursue improvement more intentionally, more seriously.
“Before I submitted this novel, I had spent years accumulating rejections. Since entering the MFA, I’d written one short story collection, two half-drafts of other novels, and two novellas, almost none of which will ever see the light of day. Years of discouragement can make you very cynical about your career, your prospects, publishing in general.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: 2022 was a busy but thrilling year for you. You not only published your first book, but have also gone on to win several awards for it including the National Book Award. How has receiving this kind of attention changed your relationship to your writing?
GUNTY: I have the kind of brain that takes many years to process big information so I probably won’t understand the effect this has had on me until I am forty-five. But there are some visible benefits that arrive immediately. One is that I had an extension on my next novel, which was an enormous relief. Another is that the book is finding more readers. That’s the greatest gift that a writer can receive, especially a first-time author.
In terms of the psychological benefits, I’m still processing. Before I submitted this novel, I had spent years accumulating rejections. Since entering the MFA, I’d written one short story collection, two half-drafts of other novels, and two novellas, almost none of which will ever see the light of day. Years of discouragement can make you very cynical about your career, your prospects, publishing in general. I’d received the impression that American publishing was risk-averse, that your first book cannot be too strange. Because of this perception, when I finished this novel, I thought it was way too peculiar for the market. I couldn’t place it, I didn’t know how to summarize it, and it was constitutionally unsuited for an elevator pitch. But I also knew that I would rather write a new novel than try to compromise this one, to force it into something that it wasn’t. I had absorbed the myth that you only have one chance with each agent. So I decided to revise The Rabbit Hutch for the millionth time, print it out, bind it really nicely at FedEx, and then move on. I would write something “normal,” which is, of course, shorthand for less definable qualities.
But I couldn’t write something normal. The fiction I loved wasn’t normal, and the fiction I made refused to submit to whatever definition of “risk-averse” I had internalized. When I was months into attempting the Normal Novel, miserable and dejected about everything, I started venting to my friend Kate Doyle—a classmate from NYU. She said, I think you should submit The Rabbit Hutch. I think there is a place for this book. I don’t think publishing is nearly as averse to deviations from the norm as you’ve been led to believe. So she sent me a list of agents that she had submitted to—she’d already signed with someone—including notes on who she thought would be a good fit for me. Some of them were agents I had been following for a long time, hoping to submit to one day. Thanks to the miracle of Kate’s intervention, I submitted the novel to a few agents in one day. I literally closed my eyes as I clicked “send” so that I wouldn’t have time to talk myself out of it. I was shaking as I did it, convinced it wouldn’t work.
I say all that to communicate just how shocking the reception of this novel was. Even before it was published, I was shocked by my good fortune. I found the agent of my dreams, Duvall Osteen, and the publisher of my dreams, Knopf, and the editor of my dreams, John Freeman—that was all too marvelous to believe. And to receive any kind of reception at all in literary fiction felt like a triumph. But the National Book Award ultimately registered as collective public permission to be risk-forward, to be strange, to be abnormal. Kate was absolutely correct: Publishing and bookselling are, in fact, tremendously open worlds, full of people who are willing to champion art that is relentlessly itself. It is not at all risk-averse! And I’m not just talking about my book, but the other books I’ve seen celebrated by the whole ecosystem of publishing. A lot of them have not been obvious fits for the market. A lot of them have been hard to pitch. A lot of them are challenging norms or breaking taboos or writing into spaces that are not normally written into, making excluded perspectives or concealed experiences visible. There’s still work to be done, obviously, but this whole experience—yes, winning the award, but really far before and beyond that—has revived my hope in literature and its industry. Now more than ever, I see them as agents for positive social change.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I really felt like the joy of this book is its strangeness. In your acknowledgements, you thank your editor, John Freeman, for “understanding and never taming its wildness.” You were in a unique position of having your former professor as an editor. How was the experience of working with him?
GUNTY: In his craft class, occasionally we’d write creative exercises. I submitted “Variables” for one of these exercises and didn’t think much of it. Months after the class ended, he contacted me out of the blue and said, “I submitted this to The Iowa Review, and they want to publish it.” I couldn’t believe it. That was my first real publication. John was an incredible teacher in part because he was an incredible editor—he was always honest about your writing, unafraid to explain why something wasn’t working, offering a precise diagnosis without being too prescriptive about the solutions. One of the reasons it was so easy to say yes when he offered to be my editor was that I knew he would always tell me the truth about my work.
A lot of writing instructors can’t help but impose a certain style or tradition on student work. John never did. He always listened to the writing, understood its terms and conditions, pushed it to be its best self. I think he developed this ability as an editor of journals and magazines, editing writers around the world. He has spent his career refining and celebrating a wide and varied body of work, and that makes him a very unique reader, writer, and editor. On top of his experience as an editor, he has the kind of rare, bone-deep humility that is necessary to edit well, which is to say, it’s like he undergoes an ego death before he starts to read— he can speak the language of the book, absorb its logic, identify where it wants to go and help it get there. That’s the difference between a good writing teacher and a bad one. It takes a very special mind to be able to speak so many aesthetic languages fluently. Rivka Galchen was another professor of mine at NYU who could do this. She could immediately understand what people were trying to do and push them toward themselves.
“I am guilty of becoming pretty monomaniacal about the writing, but often the answer is to step away. Exercise, cook, play with your pets, go to the woods, swim, fall in love, laugh with friends. The best part about being an artist is that any activity that makes you feel alive is an essential part of the work.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You mentioned that it took five years to write this book. During the moments when you weren’t sure of it, what helped propel you forward?
GUNTY: There were times when I stopped working on the manuscript for a few months. I’d work on other things and return to it when it no longer nauseated me. I’ve often found myself happiest, healthiest and most productive when I have a few different projects that I can travel between. I could maintain interest in what I was doing, but maintaining confidence was much more difficult. As soon as I started to evaluate whether anyone would want to read it, the energy drained away. So it was important to take time away from the manuscript when I needed to—the distance allowed me to complete the manuscript while also making me a better editor. It’s that famous advice from Zadie Smith: You have to become the reader of your work rather than its writer. You have to put the manuscript in a drawer.
Another thing that helped was an exercise from John Freeman’s class. For our final assignment, he asked us to map out the projects we were working on. The map could take any form. I never outline my fiction before I write it, but because I had three-fourths of the draft done by that point, it felt like becoming a detective of my work rather than an architect of it. I made note cards of each major event and tacked them around my room. That really helped me revise, reconstruct, and determine the last fourth of the book, how all these disparate threads had to collide. It also helped me figure out what needed to go. Hundreds of pages got cut. By the time I was writing the ending of my book, it was years later, I had graduated the MFA, my confidence had plummeted, and I had already decided I wasn’t going to submit it anywhere. I was only able to write that final fourth because of the notecards. By then, I’d been living within those notecards for so long that it felt like I was recording something that had happened rather than inventing something.
It helps to exchange work with readers that you trust, to be held accountable in formal and informal workshops. I also allowed myself to be playful when I was working on this book. If I felt like I had cornered myself into some kind of trap, there was always a way to reframe the question and make it come to life again. In literary fiction, you’re seldom beholden to anything your past self has contrived; you can always change things. So when an idea felt boring and lifeless, I allowed myself to reframe it, try something new, experiment, attempt surprising forms that unlocked the sensation of discovery.
And reading. Reading is the thing that always sustains me—taking my reading as seriously as I take my writing. I know of some writers who can’t read anything other than their own work while they’re revising, but I need to be pulling books from the shelves, building piles of dog-eared work all over my apartment. Encountering other art forms helps me too. If I’m feeling really stuck and I go to an art museum, a music performance, a dance, a film, a play. Other forms can jostle your brain and revive you.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Definitely. Writing involves so much brain work and it’s so easy to live entirely in your head that it can be really generative to shift toward a different art form, to engage your body in ways that writing doesn’t always allow for. A lot can happen when you pivot even briefly.
GUNTY: Right? I am guilty of becoming pretty monomaniacal about the writing, but often the answer is to step away. Exercise, cook, play with your pets, go to the woods, swim, fall in love, laugh with friends. The best part about being an artist is that any activity that makes you feel alive is an essential part of the work. In its healthiest iteration, writing incentivizes you to live your most alive life.