What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.
In Please Don’t Touch the Body, Emily Doyle delivers eleven inventive, genre-bending stories that explore the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and strange absurdities of modern life. Moving effortlessly between the surreal and the deeply human, the collection follows characters searching for agency, intimacy, and belonging—from a woman reclaiming herself through an anonymous advice column to Ronald Reagan reincarnated as a puppy and a young woman untangling the expectations of her religious upbringing from her own desires. By turns funny, unsettling, and emotionally resonant, Please Don’t Touch the Body announces Doyle as a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction. Doyle is also the author of the forthcoming novel Encounter. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and she has received numerous honors, including the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participant Scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside.
In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Doyle takes readers inside her debut short story collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body.
I love short stories and wish publishers took more chances with them instead of asking, “Sounds great… but do you have a novel?” I want to start off by asking, Why short stories?
You know what, why not short stories? When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. I had his collected works—that huge, cumbersome Barnes & Noble pleather-bound edition—and I would hole up in my bedroom and read his short stories. From the first sentences a delicious unease would settle over me, and I’d forget about how awkward it was to balance that tome on my lap, how my legs had almost immediately gone numb. By the end of each story, I’d be sweating and afraid and battling big thirteen-year-old thoughts about human nature. This is what short stories offer us: a whole world of drama and philosophical questions we can consume in one sitting. I hope my stories provide readers with at least a little of that.
Now I’m writing what I call my “gay Neanderthal novel.” Lingering in the same place with the same characters is a new luxury. But I still value—maybe above all other narrative forms—short stories for their brutal precision.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of Please Don’t Touch the Body? What was the earliest? The most recent?
The earliest was “Thursdays for Haru.” I first drafted it in 2018 while I was still in law school and pretending at a very different life. It wasn’t until I sat down with Harriet Clark, my instructor in a fiction-writing elective at the time, to discuss “Thursdays for Haru” that I wondered if I could become a writer. She took my work so seriously; she took me so seriously. And she asked me if I actually wanted to be a lawyer, hinting that maybe I should turn to writing instead. I think I responded with a weak “yes.” But right after that conversation, I snuck away to the bathroom to cry, relieved and pained at the same time, knowing the real answer was, no, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer.
The most recent story was “New Mercies,” which I drafted and revised throughout my MFA. This was one of the most difficult stories in the collection to write because of how structurally complicated it is—it’s a triptych of three overlapping perspectives and is meant to mimic to the collaborative style of renga poetry. And because one of the perspectives is distorted by the effects of dementia, the story also slides in and out of surrealism, all the while wrestling with questions of what it means to live freely, to live as a woman, and to maintain one’s hope despite surrounding darkness. It took me years of working off and on to get it right, or as close to right as I could muster.
What came between “Thursdays for Haru” and “New Mercies” were stories I worked on at different stages of life—while still in law school and then while working as a lawyer and then, finally, while completing my MFA.
What did you learn while writing this book over those years?
Of course I learned about craft lessons related to issues like point of view and structure and tone, but most importantly, I uncovered more of who I was. Each story revealed some part of my queerness, my fears and anxieties and hopes, my hedonistic desires. By working on these stories slowly over the course of about seven years, I became acquainted with myself. You can’t hide if you write, or at least not for long.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I started to believe that I’d actually written a collection when I sat down with one of my writing mentors, Michael Jaime-Becerra, in his office. He was one of the first people to read the manuscript in its entirety. I remember my nervous sweat as I waited for his pronouncement. Was it a book or wasn’t it? Maybe I shouldn’t have put so much stock in one person’s opinion, because he could’ve crushed me in that moment. But I trusted, and still trust, his taste and his guidance. And luckily, he said, “Yes, it’s a book, Emily. It’s definitely a book.” He even said he thought it would be a great book. Then we dove into the hard work of revision. I hope I’ve lived up to his expectations. I’ve tried to. Regardless, he helped me develop Please Don’t Touch the Body into something that was ready, at last, to send to agents.
As for these stories specifically? Each one is rooted in the same obsessions, which can be distilled into one question: why is it that being a human—and particularly, being a woman—is simultaneously pleasurable and painful? In working on this book and thinking about that question, I was interested in the pressures and hauntings and urges that exert themselves on our minds and bodies. Each story is very different than the next. Some of them could fit into the category of realism, while others feature aliens or ghosts. But they all orbit around that central question. Maybe I can’t write about anything else. Maybe that’s okay.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
I wouldn’t call it exactly easy to write. None of them were. But I did draft the flash fiction “Copernicus Is Dying” over the course of one late night writing session. I usually work in the mornings, not at night. But my neighbors—sweet and lanky musicians—had chosen that moment to have a photoshoot in their backyard complete with thumping music, and I couldn’t sleep. So I sat down at my desk. What came was a story about a woman who’s struggling to procure crickets for her son’s dying lizard due to a national shortage—a situation that exacerbates the son’s distrust in his mother. Later, I revised for depth and emotional precision, and the work was slow. But the initial shape of the story essentially arrived in one piece. I’ve drafted only one other story that way, and I wrote it very recently, so it’s not in the book.
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
I’ve already mentioned the torments of “New Mercies,” so I’ll focus on my other problem child: “Ronald Reagan Is Reborn as a Puppy and Learns to Behave.” With both of these stories, my ambition initially outstripped my skill.
“Ronald Reagan Is Reborn as a Puppy and Learns to Behave” began as a joke. Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, if Ronald Reagan—someone who, as a human, changed the world through the power of his charisma and humor and way with words—were reincarnated as a dog? Wouldn’t it be even funnier and darker if his owner were a young, queer girl? But a story can’t hinge entirely on a joke. Eventually, I had to move beyond the initial premise, toward something deeper, and this is where I started to run into problems.
I began to care about Reagan and wanted him to change, even if only a little. At the same time, I didn’t believe he could. I was thinking specifically of how deeply he failed queer people during the AIDS epidemic. He did not even publicly acknowledge AIDS until his second term, when his acquaintance Rock Hudson died. He did not meaningfully respond to the AIDS crisis at all until shortly before he left office, and that response was and is considered by epidemiologists to be insufficient. Through purposeful inaction, he allowed hundreds of thousands of people to languish in a disease that would turn out to be preventable and, when contracted, treatable. How could someone like that soften or grow or come to any realization at all?
What I had by then started to think of as “my Reagan problem” stumped me. But then I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. In that book, Saunders analyzes Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man.” This is a story about a horrible landowner who drags his servant into a blizzard to finish a business deal. Of course the landowner and servant end up stranded. But right before they both freeze to death, the landowner covers the servant’s body with his own, saving his servant and sacrificing himself. As Saunders points out, the landowner doesn’t commit this noble act because he has some sort of epiphany. Initially, the landowner behaves out of a much more basic impulse. I realized this was the key to my Reagan story. Reagan would find intimacy with his owner not because he had suddenly learned to accept her queerness, but because his body yearns for her familiarity, for her scent and her warmth. His doggy instincts allow him this meager growth. I like this ironic turn—how Reagan’s newfound animality saves a bit of his soul.
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
Oh boy, well, the stories in this collection are varied, and for that reason were a bear to sequence. Apart from subtle connections between three stories set in a retirement home, they are entirely unlinked. They also shift greatly in genre and tone. This was by design—what I love most about my favorite collections is how surprising they can be. But it posed challenges when figuring out how to order the stories.
With the help of a slew of people—mainly my writing mentors, husband Matt Aidan Getz, agent Amy Bishop-Wycisk, and editor Grace McNamee—I ordered the stories according to two principles: energy and expectations. I thought of the collection like a series of waves where surreal, high-energy stories would precede quieter and more realistic stories. I hope that as folks read the book, they feel a wide range of emotions. I hope there are moments that cause their hearts to race and others that cause them to ache. I guess I’m greedy like that.
Is there any story you wrote after the collection that you wish you could have included?
Yes, actually. Recently, I finished a story that I’m calling my “vampires and menopause story.” I would’ve included this story in the collection, but I simply didn’t write it early enough! I haven’t started submitting it to literary magazines, but I hope it sees the light of day soon.
Anyway, it’s about a woman who’s married to a vampire. She and her wife have mutually decided that she won’t become a vampire herself. But then the realities of menopause challenge her decision. At the beginning of the story, the woman is struggling through hot flashes and brain fog and is so irritable and uncomfortable she’d rip off her skin if she could. And then there’s her wife—preserved forever, untouched by the process of aging. Does she really want to remain human? What’s so beautiful about slowly decaying anyway?