Inside The Body Builders: Albertine Clarke on Dreams, Identity, and the Psychology of Writing

Albertine Clarke’s debut novel, The Body Builders, is a surreal daydream. In it, we look into the protagonist Ada’s subconscious as she struggles to see herself through mirrors, through her own family members, and through the mysterious facility where the middle section of the book takes place. Symbols and dreams are the skeleton of this novel. Together they form an unconscious portrait that considers whether we can ever really know who we are. It is a debut novel from a writer of unparalleled vision into her own unbroken chain of spirit.

Albertine and I sat together in a café in Brooklyn, drinking tea, while an elderly woman loudly played the piano and sang Death Cab for Cutie songs off-key. At times, we misunderstood each other, and at others, we seemed to almost coalesce on an understanding of literature, the dialectic, and why childhood pets die.

Luke Sullivan: You said that the idea for this book came from the first year in your MFA. You were having an emotional unraveling. I thought this was interesting. How did you feel while you were drafting this book?

Albertine Clark: I’m very strongly of the opinion that writing is an emotionally unhealthy activity, and I formed this opinion from my own experience, which is that writing this book made literally everything in my life worse. I am very proud of the book, and once I finished it, I felt like I had exorcised something. Writing is narcissistic, and it allows you to indulge in your own feelings in a way that puts you totally out of touch with reality. Because you are building a physical world where your feelings influence what’s happening, you make decisions based on how you feel, and the characters become cyphers for those feelings. You get stuck in this self-directed dream space, which is what the facility is for me.

LS: Is that a wish fulfillment? That Ada can conjure things out of thin air in the facility.

AC: It’s a bad thing. You know, we think that getting what we want would make us happy, but what she discovers is that’s absolutely not the case. And what I discovered is that writing involves repression and indulgement at the same time. So you repress your awareness, or yourself, your analytical instincts, because you can’t be analyzing yourself while also trying to write. At the same time you are dredging up things and engaging in this emotional process of “Me, me, me”, “What do I feel about this?” “What do I think about this?” That, I think, is very unhealthy, and essentially made me crazy.

LS: Do you think that Ada is analytical?

AC: Well, there is a novella by Natalia Ginzburg called The Dry Heart, which has been one of my biggest influences. It begins with a young woman shooting her much older husband, and she says, “I don’t know why I did it.” In the end, it’s perfectly clear why, and what I like about it is that by the end, she still doesn’t know why she did it, but the reader knows.

Ada is a character who doesn’t have a sense of self. I think that what that means is she is a character who is making decisions based on her unconscious impulses. And a character with an unconscious mind is, for me, the highest level of literary art because giving your character an unconscious mind means that everything has to be symbolic. If they can’t say to the reader, “I did this because of this,” then you have to find ways to show and not tell. That’s what I wanted to do with Ada. That’s what the metaphor of the fake body means, that she is not a complete person.

I thought of the book as a dream, as a dream I am having, which means I cannot reconstruct everything as an image. Ada is the face, but it is not happening within her: it is happening outside of her.

LS: Do you think about dreams a lot? How else do they come into your work?

AC: I had a rather intense course of psychotherapy while I was writing this book and my therapist was obsessed with dreams. I’d go three times a week, and all we would do is talk about my dreams. I’m a person who has extreme nightmares and also very happy dreams. I’ve sometimes felt like the version of myself that exists within dreams takes up more space than my waking life, which is a strange feeling.

A lot of my writing process was daydreaming. I couldn’t use my own dreams because I needed them to be mysterious and my therapist would have just decoded them for me. It wouldn’t have been mysterious.

LS: How did that play out in your writing of this book? 

AC: I wrote the book very quickly, it took me six months for a first draft and that was because I didn’t think about it at all. I wrote down exactly what came into my head. That was the dreaming process. I wanted the link with the unconscious to be as unbroken as possible. I felt like if I stopped and thought about it, if I thought, “oh what does this mean?” That it would break the illusion completely.

LS: What about the revision process? What was that like?

AC: I’m quite anti-editing. Well, the type of editing I don’t like is going in and changing every little bit around, right? Because I think it makes things feel like a patchwork and I wanted one unbroken picture. So I rewrote the whole thing four times.

LS: That sounds like a very unique method of editing. Did you feel mesmerized by that process?

AC: Yes it’s very hypnotic. People will play around with sentences for days and I could not. I think there is something about aiming for the idea of perfection, which to me completely negates the point. If this is a product of my unconscious, why would I then try to change it to meet some kind of aesthetic ideal? The object is me, and I am not perfect, so why would my book be perfect?

LS: I wanted to ask you about the structure of the novel. It’s broken into four parts and each part feels very distinctive while the whole feels cohesive. How did you go about achieving that?

AC: So I wrote the first part of the book thinking it would be a short story, and then I got to the end of part one and I thought, “this is too long to be a short story. It’s too short to be a novella, and nothing has really happened yet.” I felt quite stuck, and I took a philosophy class on The Dialectic. This totally cracked open the project. I had an amazing professor named Phil Wegner. It was a four hour lecture, twice a week, and he would just talk at us about what he thought about the dialectic and about Hegel and I just sucked it up like a sponge. And in those classes I would sit and write the second part of the novel. It was completely immersive. I had the stuff coming in. I had never really studied philosophy before, but he would just say these things that made sense below, not on the level of intellectual, but made sense on a really fundamental level. The book was my thesis and he was on my thesis committee, which was really nice.

The book is very dialectical in the way it switches back and forth. It is the playing out of different scenarios. The, “what if how I felt was real.” The point about Ada is she feels weird and bad about her body and about this man she is having a relationship with. And what I like about the book is that it could just be a metaphor for disconnection, but it becomes real. That is the dialectical switch for me. I felt I had hit the conclusion of what I thought could happen in the real world. What the class taught me is that there is nothing wrong with doing what you want, the breaking of the boundary is really important for me.

LS: Can you tell us about some of the characters in the book and where they’ve come from?

AC: For me every character in the book is Ada. This is what I found funny. She thinks Atticus is her, but actually everyone is her. The mother is Ada’s super ego, she is the surface of the consciousness. She looks like not a very nice mother, but she is right about her daughter. She is a truth-teller really. You know I had anxiety as I was finishing the book, and the mother was the part of me that would look down and say, “what you’re doing is crazy.” I think I needed that because often that’s what a parent is, someone who can see you in ways that you can’t see yourself. And that means that criticism from that person is life-ruining.

Atticus is a weird one because Atticus, that part of the book, is the only part that is from real life. Without getting too specific this is a relationship I had with a much older writer when I was quite young and trying to psychologically deal with the situation. The way I justified it was , “we are the same, so that everything that is happening to me is happening to him because we are the same. There is something we share that means all of these demographic morals, scruples, don’t matter. I wrote several short stories about young women who are having relationships with much older men and they start to believe that they are the older man.

LS: This speaks to me as someone who has been in love with people who aren’t available in the way you want them to be, and it’s almost like you are trying to picture their whole life to understand why you don’t fit into it.

AC: Yeah, it’s obsession and fantasy, she doesn’t really know this person. That was my starting point, trying to capture what it feels like to have that kind of relationship, that isn’t really real. This has taken me out of the reality of my day to day life in a way that is very exciting but that is also very destructive.

LS: Should we talk about the dad a little bit too?

AC: I love the dad.

LS: I love the dad too. He is the gravity that so much of the story is orbiting. Did you always have him at the end, or was that something you moved around?

AC: This was my editor. Mo Crist at Bloomsbury, their main note was, “we need more of the dad.” At the end, the last part wasn’t working very well. The end felt like a natural place for him to be and for him to tell his side of the story. I had to learn a lot about bodybuilding. I still think I got most of it wrong. The biggest influence for this book is Pumping Iron, the documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger, I watched that like six times. He’s the dad. I wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger on the book cover so bad. I love that man.

My idea was that if anyone in the book is not Ada, then it’s the dad. But they share a common feeling that has caused him to do this thing to his body, to become really beefy, which is the same thing that makes him retreat. Him and Patrick are to me the realest people, and they provide Ada with a lifeline back to reality, because I didn’t want the book to be completely depressing. There needed to be a way for her to look forward, like Orpheus, people who lead her back into reality.

LS: Did body building always exist in the book? Did you come up with the double meaning, or do you remember a moment in time where it all came together for you?

AC: I don’t exactly know. That part of the book has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. But the bodybuilding, it was actually something that happened to one of my friends. His father left the family and became a bodybuilder, so I just thought that it operates as the perfect metaphor for divorce and narcissism, and men thinking that what they want and need is more important than what everyone else wants and needs. It just works really well as a metaphor, I’m going to make my body really big and I need to leave my wife and child to do that. I’ve known so many men who have said, “it just makes me really stressed when people need me.” I think it’s part of the masculine conditioning that you don’t want to be needed. The dad engaging in that behavior but also being a sympathetic character was really important to me.

 LS: It’s interesting because in the facility that conditioning really flips.

AC: Because what you think if you are the anxious one in the relationship is, “if this were the other way around, if I had a partner who was obsessed with me and always wanted to be with me I would be happy.” But what Ada discovers is that that is absolutely not true and it’s terrible on both sides.

LS: I’d like to talk about the dead animals.

AC: That is pure unconscious, and also every pet that I had as a child died under slightly disturbing circumstances. Our family dog ate a tube of ceiling glue and ran away, and I think it imprinted this awful thing on my brain. Then we got hamsters and they all died. Fish and they all ate each other. It was so traumatic for me as a child. I keep getting these animals and I thought I was killing them with my feelings. My parents were getting divorced at the time so they would always get us these pets to make us feel better but they kept dying. It turns out it was actually because our house was so cold. I thought that I was so unhappy that I was killing them. I just finished the second book and it is all about animals, specifically about a dog. We sometimes think animals are a way of externalizing feelings and don’t see them as independent.

LS: I wanted to ask you about setting because I think it functions in a really interesting way in this book and how you choose to describe it.

AC: When I teach creative writing, as I did as part of my MFA, the piece of advice I gave again and again was that if you wanted things to feel real you had to be specific. And often that means taking things from your real life. The blanket is a real blanket I got for my birthday. The house is the house that my mother and stepdad were living in. That was an area where I didn’t want to have to make up a bunch of stuff. And then in the facility I got to make up everything.

LS: When you teach writing as it relates to setting, what are the mistakes you see people making over and over again?

AC: Being vague. Also using prophetic fallacy too much, where the whole world is supposed to mirror the character’s emotions. I usually try to do the total opposite. I often don’t want anything symbolic in the physical spaces. In a book like this that is so fantastical and in the character’s head, there needed to be an anchor to real spaces to tie the characters to the real world. I wanted those settings like London and Greece to feel real.

LS: What are the things as a reader that make you lean in or feel inside of something?

AC: I was thinking about it this morning. So, I read a lot of quite high-brow, lots of translated stuff. Because I work in a bookstore I got a copy of Heart the Lover.

LS: I love her. I love that book.

AC: I didn’t want to read it because I thought it would be too emotional and I literally did not put it down until I finished it. Just because it is so entertaining. The more and more I think you just have not to be boring. Sometimes I’m reading and I feel stuck in this neurotic overwritten world, and I just want someone to tell me a story.

LS: While you are writing what is the goblin insecure part of your brain saying?

AC: It’s saying, “don’t be boring,” “don’t be obsessed with yourself too much,” which was hard with this book because I’m trying to say something about myself, but I wanted it to be relatable and connect to the world. I had a writing teacher who took the manuscript and crossed out all the metaphors and it brought the whole thing up a grade level.

LS: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about one of my favorite parts of the book, which is Patrick’s play. He describes love as two people being stuck inside of a train car that has crashed. How did you come up with that?

AC: So Patrick is my friend, Dan, who is also a playwright. Dan is very interested in landscapes, and so I took this core thing about me and Dan having a chat and tried to make it as weird as possible. It’s the dialectic. Pushing it in one direction until I hit the wall. Okay, two men are in love. That’s kind of boring. Turning it the other way, well what about the environment can I change, okay a train, and then the train crashes. Until I felt like I had a story inside of a story. Then Patrick says that he has never been injured and he wants to be injured because then he’ll be lovable. I think that sometimes people want to be hurt because it gives them a reason to feel the way that they feel. When I was younger and hurt myself, I would often be disappointed that I hadn’t gotten more injured. That’s what Patrick is saying, “I wish my dad had hit me,” because that is a shortcut way of saying “I feel really bad,” and people will give me sympathy. I don’t think we take emotional pain seriously enough, and we take physical pain way too seriously, so people feel like they have to go through something for people to take them seriously.

LS: Finally I wanted to ask about how the book got published.

AC: So I finished the book before the summer of my second year, and it took about a year to get an agent. My MFA was amazing. I made connections and my professors really helped me. I got rejection, rejection, rejection, and then one day someone liked it. I feel very lucky. Getting an agent, rather than getting the book published, was the most exciting moment of my life. I have a parent who’s a writer, which might have given me a leg up in getting an agent. It would not be completely truthful to not to mention it, but also the manuscript had to be really strong and ready to be published for them to consider it. I don’t want to give anyone a false sense of how easy it is. 

LS: How do you feel about rejection?

AC: Okay, rejection is terrible. It makes me feel insane. It’s like, “I’ve made this thing and it’s me,” and people don’t like it. I got a really bad Goodreads review yesterday, two stars, and I looked at it for probably six hours and then I had to block Goodreads on my computer. When I was querying the book and it got rejected and they provided a good reason, that was fine, but rejections when people are like “I just don’t like this book” is like a knife to my heart. It’s just hard and there’s no way to make it easy. And writing as a profession means you put yourself up for judgment again and again and again.

LS: What about working with your editor?

AC: So the agency sent it out immediately to publishers. It took two months to sell in America and about a year to sell in England, and that was terrifying, hearing that people passed. Thank you, Bloomsbury! Then, once the book was sold, we started to change things. Then I did a big re-draft with their advice. I changed the ending. The ending was much darker originally. They helped me rebalance things. I’m excited for it to be out. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Albertine Clarke received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Lewis Edwards Memorial prize for creative writing. Raised in London, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:  Luke Sullivan is a New York City-based writer and teacher. He is an mfa student in creative non-fiction at City College of New York, and a third-grade and creative writing teacher in the city. You can find him on Substack.