"A name is as malleable as a past, a body, and every other part of the self." (An Interview With Lucy Hannah Ryan)
As part of the virtual tour to celebrate the release of Lucy Hannah Ryan’s You Make Yourself Another, journalists, bloggers, and editors across the Internet have been sharing reviews of the book for the past week on their platforms in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss reviews by Glen Damprado (“The stories were captivating, eerie yet peaceful, and somehow with these otherworldly experiences, the characters are still relatable.”), Isabel (“Each word and sentence evoked feelings I’ve personally dealt with before, such as the all-consuming yearning and the sometimes inevitable hopelessness that come with being trapped in a place where you feel like you don’t belong.”), and Quinn Lawrence (“The stories are short but jam-packed with tension, memorable characters, and spine-chilling experiences.”). Also, an interview with Lucy for Kith Books (“When I moved, when I danced and caught the rhythm, I didn’t have to be myself anymore. I was music and machine, infallible and beautiful and panting for breath.”) and an exclusive essay for the Half Mystic blog (“I did not dream the world in idylls. In the back alley of my mind a taxi leaked orange light against the worst of my wounding and I said, I want to leave that here.”)! Today, Lucy joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of You Make Yourself Another…
H/M: You Make Yourself Another is a collection that constantly shifts in shape and substance. How did the book change from its beginnings to its published form?
LHR: Most of these stories began disparately; I never originally intended them as part of a collection. Some are over five years old, actually, though they don’t look much like they did five years ago. Putting them together and picking out the common threads helped flesh them out. The word “substance” is very relevant, actually. The stories, the worlds within this book are much more substantive than they were in the beginning. There’s a real shift from sparseness to specificity.
“Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning,” the first story in the book, lingers within the raw ugliness—and agony—of chronic illness, rejecting the traditionally feminine delicacy with which such experiences are often painted in pop culture. One of the first things that stood out to the H/M team when we received your collection is just how dark it can be, how unwilling you are as an artist to flinch from the underbelly of suffering. As a woman-aligned person, how important are the subversion of delicacy and femininity to you, particularly when writing about illness?
The frail, sickly woman is such a pop culture juggernaut, isn’t she? She’s palatably ill, her beauty—inner or outer—never tarnished. The tragedy of Beth March isn’t so much that her life was cut short, but that her family lost the kindly, too-good-for-this-sinful-Earth sister. As a kid, when I did my almost nightly rewatch of Moulin Rouge, I ached for Satine, obsessed over the lone dribble of blood that marked and damned her. But I resented it a little, too. The sickness I lived with every day was not pure or beautiful. It was alarming and painful and ugly. I needed something unflinching. You Make Yourself Another isn’t a hospital drama, of course—there’s a lot of magic and levity in these pieces—but it didn’t feel right to shy away from the viscera of disability. Many years ago, when I did more writing about my own illness, I wrote an essay called “There’s Nothing Poetic About Having Needles in the Back of Your Skull.” That feminine loveliness, romantic frailty and innocence and tragedy—that just never fit me, and I need to tell stories that feel truer to my lived experience.
You Make Yourself Another finds its roots in transformation. Tell us about your personal relationship with metamorphosis: what does it mean to you to become new?
I’m certainly not living the life I imagined when I idly dreamed of adulthood as a child, and I have already been so many different people in that time. As someone balancing a few different markers of identity—being queer, disabled, working class, etc.—I have spent a lot of time wrestling with who and what I really am. When I started using my cane, for example, that was a decision obviously about my physical comfort, but it was also a decision to telegraph my disability publicly. In many ways, it felt like taking on a different form. I’ve been a shy and sickly but bright child, a young dancer on competition stages. I’ve been a body laid open on an operating table. I’ve been a support worker, an LGBT education advocate, a storyteller. All of those identities still crowd inside me, evolving and rounding out who I am and will be. I don’t think there’s ever an end point. Change is the constant.
The stories in this collection fall in line with many traditions of magical realism, and often reference vilified or tragic female characters in Shakespeare and classical mythology—Ophelia, Persephone, Lady Macbeth. What is your literary heritage? Where does You Make Yourself Another fall in that heritage?
There’s an anecdote I love to tell about being seven years old in a school classroom, looking through the bookshelf, and deciding that I wasn’t interested in stories about boys. I wanted to read about girls. There were so many books and films about boys adventuring and being the chosen ones destined for greatness; I wanted something that I could project onto and fantasise about. Thank goodness I found Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series when I did. My family aren’t particularly academic, but my mum always encouraged me to read, and I did so hungrily, voraciously, my whole life. I loved escaping into fantasy worlds, fairytales, myth, but I’ve also always loved a great and terrible woman: the White Witch of Narnia, or Helen Close’s Cruella De Vil from the live action 101 Dalmatians movie, which I had on VHS and watched religiously. All that starts to make up a bit of a picture, doesn’t it? I think it ties back to the purity and innocence of sickness from before. I have no problem with capital-G Good characters, ones who are soft and kind—in fact, that’s how I try to live—but humans need some grey areas to feel fully fleshed out. In a lot of the older, simpler stories, grey is easier to find in the villains than the heroes, particularly amongst women. I hope the characters in You Make Yourself Another stick in your teeth. I hope they’re annoying, needling, hard to pin down. Those are the kind of women I know I love best.
Do you believe these stories take place in the same world? If the characters across You Make Yourself Another met, would they recognise each other?
I wonder how they might interact. I’m sure Emma (“Satellite Child”) would love to sink her teeth into Rowan (“Carcass”) or Daphne (“In Bloom”), but I don’t think the latter two would be able to stomach each other. There are many lines of intersection between these characters. They have so much in common that they might not get along at all, like magnets with the same polarity repelling. Is it all the same world? Maybe. Even the mundane stories have a sense of the uncanny to them that I like to believe could translate to a reality wider and stranger than our own.
Give us five albums that we should listen to as we read You Make Yourself Another.
Only five? Let’s say:
1. Back to the Woods by Angel Haze
2. His Young Heart EP by Daughter
3. Petals for Armor by Hayley Williams
4. Puberty 2 by Mitski
5. Bang EP by Empires
They’re quite different, but I think they have a shared restlessness to them.
The dedication of the book reads: For my grandmother and her old haunted house. Haunting plays a role across several of these stories, most notably “When We Were Just a Trick of the Light,” and we can’t help but think of Dickinson’s poem “One need not be a chamber—to be haunted.” How do place and spirituality intertwine in You Make Yourself Another? If the settings are their own characters, what haunts them?
I would say Amy’s (“Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning”) bedroom is full of phantoms, echoes of screams, futures that might have been, if not for sickness taking her life over; the park in that piece, too, has the restless spirits of past summers all jostling around inside of it. But even in stories featuring dead characters, more often than not it’s my protagonists that do the haunting, looming like spectres over their own lives, trying to break through and feel real again.
In “In the Absence of Moonlight,” Esi changes her name to Maria to signal the beginning of her new life without her lover. What significance does the act of naming hold to you? How did you name the characters in these stories?
Names are finicky things. In faery folklore, names are currency, not to be given lightly. Funnily enough, in “Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning,” the story most invested in that folklore, the protagonist’s name is never mentioned even whilst Amy’s dominates the page. Names change often throughout our lives—education gives us new letters to add before and after, marriage changes our titles, we use and gain nicknames. So many of my queer friends have relished the chance to rename themselves. To me, a name is as malleable as a past, a body, and every other part of the self.
As for the specific names of characters, I follow my intuition. Daphne, of course, comes from the Greek myth (and her date’s name, Felix, is a loose homonym for Phoebus, the romanisation of Apollo). Maria, picked in view of a church, is also symbolic. The others really just felt right. I have been known to steal names from old friends and overhead conversations. Maybe that’s the fae instinct, hoarding names and personalities to mould into something new.
Your stories are sonically captivating, begging to be read out loud. What role does music play in You Make Yourself Another? How do you navigate the process of incorporating sound into text?
I can’t write anything that doesn’t roll off the tongue. I often talk my stories out, speaking phrases until they smoothly flow. Maybe that’s because I also write poetry, where I tend to use wordplay and soundplay, rhythm changes and half-rhyme. It’s a bit like a dance with language. It’s choreography. There is also literal music peppered throughout the book: birdsong haunts “Maybe It’s Better When It’s Burning” and “In the Absence of Moonlight.” “Satellite Child” takes place in part at a punk concert. Daphne from “In Bloom” listens to Stevie Nicks, and Rowan from “Carcass” sings “Me and Bobby McGee” in a morbid reference to Janis Joplin being in the 27 Club. I can’t get through a conversation without making references to song, so of course it hides in my fiction. That said, funnily enough, the only story where dance plays a major role doesn’t reference any specific music at all.
You Make Yourself Another ends in sunlight. As you come to the end of the path these stories have cleared for you, to what are you reaching now?
I think maybe I’m reaching for the light, as well. We’re really coming into spring now in London, and I saw birds illuminated on a telephone wire yesterday and felt my whole body hum for a second. The darkness is in retreat, at least for a little while. It’s time for sun.
Who are you, really? That is the question at the heart of Lucy Hannah Ryan’s short story collection You Make Yourself Another, a visceral, tender, and elusive meditation on transformation in its many guises. Named for an insult hurled at Hamlet’s Ophelia, You Make Yourself Another blurs genre and gender lines to illuminate a state of sharp, queer flux. From a girl whose illness has her slipping between the veil of life and death to a grieving model on the path of self-destruction, from the mystery behind a teenager’s disappearance to a woman’s journey through bodily autonomy via strange metamorphosis, this collection haunts and hollows in equal measure.
The virtual tour for You Make Yourself Another features advance reviews, interviews with Lucy, and exclusive, never-before-seen content on the creation of the book. You Make Yourself Another is available for preorder now.