There is a specific feel to the way time moves during a childhood and adolescent summer. It’s both sludgy and warp-speed, too slow when you need it to end, too dreadfully quick just when you need it to last. These summers are foundational in how a person learns to be: how you are when you’re bored is as important as how you are when you’re in the middle of the starburst of feeling.
Sofia Montrone, in her outstanding debut Nymph, displays a mastery of the effects of time, how the days themselves characterize us. The novel, set in rural Italy over two very distinct summers, is an elegy for the way time leaves us. It is a love story as much as it is a loss story as much as it is a celebration of the brutal, giddy risk of feeling. It has a wicked sense of humor. There are retellings of The Odyssey, deeply-felt family pains, a formative romance and a consistent sense of becoming.
But above all, it achieves what all great art aspires to: it makes the reader feel less alone. I came upon this novel in the noblest way, I think. A friend recommended it. He said, “This one’s something special.” He was right.
August Thompson: How vivid of a mental map of the hotel did you have? I find that my favorite locations in fiction are those that are both vague and specific. I couldn’t draw an exact map, but they still make logical sense, somehow. You nailed that. What was it like detailing the space itself?
Sofia Montrone: Think of the face of a person you really love. You’d know the shape and feel of it by heart, but how faithfully could you really describe it or draw it on the back of a cocktail napkin? I wanted the hotel to feel like that––familiar, but also somewhat obscured. I had a sense of what the exterior of the hotel looked like, as well as the layout of the rooms, but I didn’t want to get bogged down in trying to create a blueprint that I’d have to adhere to in every scene (perhaps at the expense of other things). Instead, I tried to focus on making the sensory experiences of the hotel feel visceral and immediate. I hope that readers will be able to hear the sounds of the cicadas in the trees, and feel the stuffy heat of the basement where Leo and her brother sort the hotel’s files. If readers can envision the dust catching that slanting, basement light, I have done what I set out to do.
AT: Let’s talk about the use of the present tense, which is somewhat atypical for this type of novel. What drove you to want to write in the present?
SM: I chose the present tense because of its urgency and unpredictability. The confusion that comes with grief––and also with being a young person––felt most truthfully rendered to me in the present tense, as opposed to in a more retrospective mode in which everything is already pre-selected and pre-processed.
Not only is the novel written in the present, it has almost no recourse to the past. There aren’t many traditional flashbacks, and most of what we learn about the characters’ lives outside of the hotel is revealed through dialogue. Leo can’t recapture her past, nor can she jump ahead to a less painful time in her life, and the present tense forces us to stay with her as she puts one foot in front of the other each day. I didn’t want the book or its readers to feel wiser than Leo, to look back on her as opposed to through her, with her.
AT: The ‘summer coming of age novel’ has somehow become a known quantity, almost a genre unto itself, at this point. Were you aware of the tropes of this sorta-genre, and did you try to deconstruct or combat them? Or is that over-intellectualizing?
SM: How is it possible that so many people have discovered summer as a perfect metaphor for adolescence? I thought it was just going to be me and you!
I’m partially kidding. It’s only right to talk about childhood through the lens of summer, when everything is bursting with sound and color and all your time is your own. I was certainly aware of the genre when I was writing, and, like a lot of young writers, was determined to do my own thing and convinced that there was only a superficial overlap between my intimate summertime coming-of-age novel and the hundreds that had been published before. Now, I’m just glad to be in good company. I wish that I had been keen enough to deconstruct the genre. Instead, I think I mostly paid homage to the things I loved in other people’s books.
AT: How did you balance the elegiac tone of the novel with your acute sense of humor?
SM: For better or worse, I am a person capable of finding humor in anything. People are so innately funny and strange––they can’t help themselves. And teenagers are especially funny. I’ve never met a teenager who wasn’t able to turn their angst into some kind of taunt against the world. It would have been insincere to write a novel about all these young people and have it be completely dour.
As I was writing, I came to see humor (whatever light touches may be present) as essential to keeping the novel in balance. I didn’t feel like I could ask the reader to stay at a place of heightened emotion for 256 pages; I needed to let in a little air and give the story space to breathe. I also wanted the grief to have a kind of mobility––to creep up or surge forward or take the reader by surprise––which only felt possible if the writing wasn’t paved over by purely elegiac prose.
AT: You use The Odyssey as something of a framing device through the book, what was your intent there? I love how you use the act of storytelling as a characterizing device. How we tell stories is, in many ways, who we are.
SM: The questions asked by the Homeric stories––What does it mean to leave home? How should I feel about my parents? How do I live a meaningful life?––have always felt profoundly adolescent to me. When you’re young, everything seems to have a mythic proportion, especially your own parents. I remember being totally enraptured by the yarns my parents used to spins about their own childhoods, set at a point in ancient history when people still had landlines and you could pay to see a movie using only the change in your pocket. Instead of having Leo’s father present the details of his own childhood in a matter-of-fact way, I wanted the reader to feel swept up by the same wonder and mystery that Leo feels as she tries to discern her father’s past.
The Odyssey is such a well-known text that it was able to become a neutral screen onto which the characters (and one very lucky author) could project their own meanings. It was important to me that each character see the story in a different light, that the lessons Leo takes from Odysseus and Achilles are different from the ones her father meant to teach her. Isn’t that so much of growing up? Learning to tell your own version of an old story.
AT: You write so well about the idiosyncrasies of having a body, all of its grotesqueness and glory. How did you approach thinking about these details?
SM: I mostly tried not to be embarrassed. I was a self-conscious teenager who went through a long season of abject ugliness, and the attention I invested in my body at that time has now been given a second life in this novel. I also spent years observing other people’s bodies––looking up their noses, checking their sheets, and rummaging through their bathroom garbage like a raccoon. I was amazed by how much the body could imprint itself on its environment, and how blind we become to its slimy little trail.
My intent in writing about the grotesque realities of the body was never to be shocking. I wanted there to be a physical analogue to the emotional shifts happening in the novel, for the bodies to be as changeable, messy, and subversive as the characters’ inner lives. It also mattered to me that the bodies in the book were defined by their transience, which is why there’s so much shedding of hair, nails, skin, and the like. The human experience is embodied and fleeting––fleeting precisely because it is embodied. You can’t escape yourself and you can’t escape time. If this novel has a thesis, it is something along those lines.
AT: What were the biggest changes you made as you edited and rewrote the book?
SM: Is it crazy to say that the book didn’t really change? Probably it is more accurate to say that I knew what I wanted the book to be from the outset, and so I never quite felt like I was rewriting the book, just spreading it out here and there at the edges to fill the shape I had in mind. When I first conceived of the book, it was initially a lot more about soccer and gender envy and Big Themes. There was also an epilogue (never written) where Leo is in a bar in Berlin, watching a penalty shootout while she waits to reunite with Dolores. Such a terrible idea, thank god it’s not in there! As I was writing the book, the story started to feel more personal than all that. It was really a book about being this person, Leo, and the rest was just window dressing.
This isn’t to say that there wasn’t a rigorous editing process––the book, of course, went through a thousand changes both large and small. On my initial call with my editor, she told me that she found the book immersive but difficult to describe, and that the challenge before us would be to give readers a sense of what kind of story they were entering. It totally reframed the way I thought about the function of plot in fiction. Most of our edits together were in service of bringing forward some of the book’s plottier elements, giving readers a path to follow or, at least, a way of describing the story to themselves and (hopefully) others.
AT: What books influenced Nymph before you started, what changed the trajectory of the novel as you worked on it?
SM: I was reading a lot of diaristic fiction when I started the book. Kate Zambreno’s Drifts and Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions felt revelatory to me because of the ways in which they seemingly blurred real life (or fiction’s mirage of “real life”) with the authors’ interests in sports, books, and reality television. I wanted to write something that had the same quotidian feel, but with the narrative distance and plot scaffolding of a more traditional novel. Because I was writing about sanctimonious teenagers, I was, naturally, reading a lot of Salinger. About six months into writing Nymph, I read The Summer Book, which is an absolutely perfect novel. I wish I had written it. And then there was Salter. A fabulous, beautiful sentence writer, and very funny to boot. I read Light Years and started using comma splices again. Many apologies to my copy editors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sofia Montrone is as an adjunct assistant professor in Columbia’s undergraduate writing program, and formerly served as editor-in-chief of The Columbia Review and the director of Columbia Artist/Teachers. Her short fiction and criticism have appeared in The Columbia Review, Quarto, and Adroit. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. Nymph is her first novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: August Thompson is from the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, and has lived in Los Angeles, NYC, Berlin, and Madrid. His debut novel, Anyone’s Ghost, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for the Center For Fiction Debut Novel Prize and named a best book of the year by Amazon, Vogue and Elle. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine and beyond.