Interview with Liska Jacobs
Interview with Liska Jacobs
By Shawnacy Kiker Perez
Liska Jacobs is swiftly gaining a reputation for her ability to chronicle the lives of women who challenge convention. Protagonists in a Jacobs novel are not afraid of their own agency, making decisions, often intentionally, in opposition to social expectation; and which, perhaps equally as often, have dire consequences. In a Jacobs novel, there is always a dark side to paradise. Her debut novel, Catalina (FSG, 2017), is the story of a woman who, according to the Los Angeles Times, “embodies the potential menace of a sharp, gilded edge.” The Worst Kind of Want (MCD, November 5, 2019), a literary noir set in Italy, has been described as the “haunting portrait of one woman’s transformative and, ultimately, tragic summer.”
Compelling and highly readable, these novels confront the reader with people and circumstances that provoke deep and emotional responses, and beg the question, why is this provocative?
CHARGE MAGAZINE: I’m so excited to talk about these books with you Liska! Both Catalina and The Worst Kind of Want feature female characters whose circumstances and urges impel them toward dangerous and destructive behaviors. What do you think draws you to engage so deeply with these kinds of characters?
LISKA JACOBS: Humans want things—every day it’s just a negotiation of what we can and cannot have. Small things like a donut or a candy bar to big things like slapping the smile off your boss’s face or driving to the beach midday to stick your toes in the sand. I think women negotiate their wants with the wants of their partner or family or friends. Often all three. Show me a woman who isn’t spinning a thousand plates, many of them not her own, and I’ll show you a ‘dangerous woman’. It’s not their destructive behavior that interests me, it’s the fact that when they choose not to spin a plate the entire infrastructure comes crashing down.
Photo by Liska Jacobs. Used with permission.
In Catalina, Elsa knows this and doesn’t care. She basically says fuck it, and fuck you. I did everything right and it wasn’t enough. Her tragedy is that she doesn’t realize there’s still farther to fall. Cilla, in The Worst Kind of Want, is the other side of the coin. She has never said fuck it in her life. In fact, she prides herself on being the dutiful daughter. Her self-worth comes from being needed. It’s only now, as she approaches middle age, as she stands on the abyss of her invisibility, does she step out of line.
CM: It’s telling, isn’t it, that simply declining to assume a proscribed female role becomes equivalent to disaster. What might you say to someone who would point to these characters’ downfalls as cautionary tales, or reasons to stay within more conventional boundaries?
LJ: I’d say where’s your anger? Women shouldn’t have to be anything other than themselves. The rules shouldn’t be different for us. Especially in 2019. When I started writing Catalina I was trying to do an updated retelling of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight, in which a woman messes about and pays the consequence. It was profoundly upsetting to realize the ending to my book would have to be much the same because nothing has really changed. I mean, Rhys’s book came out a hundred years ago! My dream is someone reads Catalina and says, My god this writer is pissed. And then they read The Worst Kind of Want and they think, She’s going to burn this place to the ground. And I’d tell them, Yeah, you should get angry too.
Photo by Liska Jacobs. Used with permission.
CM: The characters in your novels deal with a number of difficult losses and disappointments. The deaths of loved ones, career failure, relationship collapse, missed opportunities; all factor in to the psychological situations in which your characters find themselves. Of course, everyone deals with grief uniquely, but what is the relationship, for you, between grief and desire?
LJ: Last year, in the middle of rewrites of The Worst Kind of Want, my grandfather’s health took a turn. I’d experienced unexpected death before—car accidents, overdoses, suicide—but with my grandfather it was different. It was the conclusion of a life, the final point we reach if we make it to old age. Being part of that, really nursing him through those final moments was profoundly difficult. I found that during that time I became hyper aware of small pleasures. Sweetened tea, making sandwiches with my grandmother and Aunt, the smell of the honeysuckle after the sprinklers had run. It doesn’t always have to be sex and death—those are just opposite points on the spectrum.
CM: Both novels involve groups of people vacationing near the seaside, and the ocean plays an important role in the events that unfold. Is water imagery important to you? do you think it speaks to the encounters and struggles that the books discuss?
LJ: Growing up within a short drive from the beach had a big influence on me. And it being the Pacific, especially. It’s sort of the end of the road. Manifest Destiny stops here. That definitely influenced Catalina. As for The Worst Kind of Want, it’s a much more traditional riff on the ocean. Oiled up bodies and the sun beating down. Partly because it’s the Adriatic and more exotic than the Santa Monica Bay but also because something happens to a person when they’re on ‘vacation’. It isn’t real life, which allows for interesting dramas to play out.
Photo by Liska Jacobs. Used with permission.
CM: I love the exploration of this idea of vacation, and its relationship to reality. It can seem almost as though these experiences are parenthetical, enclosed and separate from our more mundane everyday existence. Do you think we achieve a greater or lesser sense of enacting ourselves authentically in these parenthetical moments?
LJ: I just got back from a trip so this is very fresh in my mind. First there’s an adjustment period in the beginning where everything is a little uncomfortable. Then suddenly you’re used to wine with every meal, walks at dawn, wandering museums at leisure. You lose track of what day it is and begin thinking of your life—the one back in Los Angeles with weekdays and weekends as being ‘other’. I think this is when it starts. That letting go of monotony and being open to adventure. I can’t say it’s more or less your authentic self, but it almost always has consequences because you eventually have to return to your ‘other’ life, and that life has rules.
CM: In reading The Worst Kind of Want, I was drawn over and over again to the relationships between the female characters. The main character, Cilla, has complicated relationships with almost all of the women in her family: her ailing mother, her deceased sister, and her young and vibrant niece. Not only are these family connections strained, but there are tensions in her dealings with other women as well. There is so much in this book about mothers and daughters, about what one might call the phases or the maiden/mother/crone archetypes of womanhood. As an unmarried woman with no children, Cilla feels perhaps shut out of the experience of motherhood. She is keenly observant, and questions other women's behavior, doubting that their words and actions are authentic. "I realized that she invited me not to give her support," you write, "but to bear witness to her greatness. To the spectacle of her in rare form." Was this issue of female identity and relationship something you went into the project wanting to highlight?
LJ: Oh Absolutely. To me, relationships between women are so interesting! I think it’s because I come from a large matriarchal family. I know how complex sisterhood and motherhood can be. For Cilla and Emily their relationship was heavily influenced by how their mother treated them, but also by the competitiveness that happens between siblings, especially when one is considered better looking.
But I don’t think Cilla sees herself as shut out of the motherhood experience, she has mothered most of her life. First caring for Emily, then her dad and now her mom. Being called to Rome to babysit her niece is a kind of pseudo-motherhood too. It’s not that she feels shut out of the experience but rather she’s had her fill of it. Her spiral is really a result from rejecting the one role women are expected to play, that of mother.
CM: She has definitely taken on the mothering of so many people and events in her life, including that of her own parents. She has eschewed many of her personal goals and desires in order that she might tend to the wishes and needs of others, making her life’s function –as is true of so many mothers—the facilitation of other people’s lives; an actual as well as an emotional concierge, one might say. Yet, in the book, Cilla seems to feel that other women exclude and perhaps pity her lack of children. “She gives me that look, the one that says there is a divide between women who have children and those who do not. She is privy to something I can’t understand.” And later, “Maybe in another language, an ancient one, there is a word for motherhood that makes space for me. That includes what I am.” Do you feel that between women, there is a tension – perhaps a mutual envy that doubles as a mutual sense of superiority – between women who have children and those who do not?
Photo by Liska Jacobs. Used with permission.
LJ: I don’t know if it’s mutual envy, but it’s definitely something. It’s sort of ingrained in our society that a useful woman is a mother, which automatically pits those who have children against those who don’t. They’re, sadly, two different tribes.
CM: What were some of the struggles you encountered writing the new novel? what were some of the surprises? What were some of the joys?
LJ: A major struggle was the deadlines. To do such tight turnarounds with my editor I sometimes spent four or six weeks at the desk. I’m talking no weekends, all day, nine to five. It was hell on my body. I had compression socks and by the end of it was dunking my hands and forearms in ice baths. But a weird part of me enjoyed the grind. It was like writing in a fugue state or a fever dream.
As for surprises…I’m always surprised by how a novel comes together. You can have intentions for characters, an idea of what’s going to happen but they always surprise you. For instance, I didn’t expect the sisterhood between Cilla and Emily to play such a major role in the book. That happened organically.
A joy was my editor’s reactions to some of the steamier parts of the book! I wasn’t sure if I’d gone too far, but she was all in. I loved having that kind of support.
CM: What most excites you right now?
LJ: Recently I went to the Venice Biennale and the work I saw there blew me away. The theme was May You Live in Interesting Times, which we certainly do. It reminded me that sometimes the greatest artworks are created when things are difficult. So I’m excited about the next book I’m working on. It’ll give me a chance to channel all my feelings about this infuriating and surreal time into something monstrous and deeply satisfying. I can’t wait!
Liska Jacobs is the author of Catalina and The Worst Kind of Want. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and The Hairpin, among other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.