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 The Body of the Thing, Karishma Jobanputra delivers a lyrical and visceral collection exploring the hierarchies that shape women’s relationships with their bodies and with one another. Moving from first loves and sexual awakenings to motherhood, miscarriage, illness, caregiving, and death, the stories examine what happens when women’s bodies are desired for their beauty and youth, dismissed when they become ill, or valued for what they can provide to others. Set across Manhattan, Italy, coastal Maine, and London, The Body of the Thing is a fluid, sensual, and fearless examination of what it means to look at and live in the female body, in all its complicated realities and wonders. Jobanputra is a British-Indian writer based in London and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program. Her work has been listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction. The Body of the Thing is her first book.
In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Jobanputra takes readers inside her debut short story collection, The Body of the Thing.
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?
For me, the question is about the right container for what I am putting down on the page. I’ve written poems and flash fiction before and even 60,000 words of a novel (which I didn’t end up liking, so it’s banished to the drawer). With all of those, as with my collection, it was never an active choice. It’s more that whatever I’m writing has an ideal form and I’ll know what that is when I start putting pen to paper. And when I do, I feel a sense of elasticity in the plot and the characters. Some things stretch to more pages and need more space; others are just meant to be a half-page. Even in this collection, there’s a lot of variation – the shortest story is about a page and the longest about fifty.
All that said, I think I probably subconsciously gravitate toward writing things that fit the form of a story because I find it much harder to write things that are long-form. Sustaining voice, tone, character, plot, and everything else over hundreds of pages is so tricky, and it’s not helped by the fact that I have a new idea every few minutes. Plus, when I started writing seriously – with people I was actually accountable to for handing in pages of my work – I was surrounded by an amazing literary scene in New York City, which included many incredible short story writers, and I was reading more stories in those few years than I ever had in my life. I realized I loved reading them and that they can hold the same expansiveness and power as a novel or a novella. I ended up falling in love with poetry then, too. All to say, I have no doubt that that environment impacted me.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest story you wrote? The most recent?
The earliest stories in here were part of my master’s thesis, which was actually a short story collection with the same title. I think only a couple have made it from that thesis to this published book (and have been heavily revised over the years) – definitely “Witterkerke” and “This Constant Living” (though back then, it was called “Bruises”). I can’t remember exactly when I started work on them, but it was probably around 2017. The most recent was “The Red Room” or maybe the title story, which I totally rewrote quite late in the game, maybe even after I’d signed with my agent.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I knew I’d need a finish line. Else I knew I would just keep writing stories or poems of pieces of a novel and never step back to consider if any of what I had done could cohere to be something I could send out and maybe even get published. My birthday is on the thirteenth and I thought, if I write thirteen stories that I feel pretty good about, I’ll consider that some sort of finish line crossed and force myself to take a step back and consider if they work together as any sort of collection. Knowing that was an endpoint I wanted to reach, it shaped the later stories I was writing, so they sort of fit the broader themes and the order of what I already had.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
“A Love Story” was the easiest to get down as a first draft and also the easiest to revise. It’s about two people falling in love but told through food experiences in New York City. It felt so easy because I was surrounded by all of it in real life – love, eating, the city itself. There are pieces of reality throughout the whole collection, though, so that’s not really the differentiator. I think it was easiest because this one is about food. I find it so much fun to write and think about food, and it came together on the Notes app on my phone over a few days, if that. If I couldn’t remember or imagine what something tasted like, I got on the subway to find it.
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
Miss Marie was definitely the hardest to write. It’s the longest story of the bunch, though the length didn’t impact how challenging I found it. I think it just reads with a different tenor to the other stories. It’s much more hopeful, in my opinion. It raises all sorts of questions about relationships and power dynamics, but I think it’s one of the few things I’ve ever written where whole sections feel like they have an undercurrent of joy. But I had to access a different register in my brain to write it, and it was tricky to get the ending to a place where I was satisfied with it. I’m not a fan of a neat or twee ending, but I also knew this one just wasn’t going to end in an overtly dark way, as some of the other stories do.
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this? When I sent the collection out to agents, I had no idea how to order them. I played around for a while – printed them out and tried to rearrange them on my bedroom floor to see if that might help me see some sort of logical chronology. (It didn’t.) I gave up and just sent it out, making sure the stories I liked best were in the first half of the book so that hopefully agents would keep reading. In the end, it worked out quite neatly because they’re now ordered in what is a pretty linear sequence – the first stories have younger protagonists trying to work out love and lust in their twenties, and then, as the collection goes on, the focus moves to motherhood, and then by the end, it’s about caring for one’s own elderly parents. Before we went to print, me and my editor had a conversation where we considered moving the story “Mum?” to be first, but then I would’ve wanted to reorder everything, and we decided against it.
Is there any story that didn’t make the cut that readers can read somewhere online? [it’s okay to skip this if you don’t want to share or there isn’t one]
There is one, yes. I mentioned earlier I had aimed for thirteen stories, but The Body of the Thing has twelve. My editor made the very good point that the thirteenth story – which was actually originally the first in the collection – read very similarly to “The Therapist” (which is now the first story). They covered similar themes, and the protagonist was a very similar character in both. To avoid having two stories that were too close to each other in voice, plot, and character, we cut it. I have a soft spot for it, though – it was the first story in my thesis too, and where I managed to work out a lot of things that came in handy in later stories and beyond, like how to think about pace, or move between timelines. It’s not published anywhere, but maybe in the future.
What short story writers have influenced you and continue to inspire you?
Carmen Maria Machada, Julia Armfield, and Lydia Davis immediately come to mind. I also really love and was inspired by Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, and A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. I couldn’t stop reading “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid for a while there, though I’ve heard that described more as poem or prose poem. But I suppose that’s a great segue for me to say that I’m often inspired, as much by short story writers, collections, or stories, as by novels, poems, and non-fiction. So much of what I’ve written in this collection and more broadly has come from reading a single line (or more, of course) I couldn’t forget by writers like Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss, Ocean Vuong, Roberto Bolaño, Paul Beatty, Sheila Heti, Meena Kandasamy… the list goes on.
What are you reading now?
I’ve just finished Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (exceptional, unsurprisingly) and am now flipping between On the Calculation of Volume I (for my book club), Record Lows by CJ Green (which is out next year; I’m excited to see if it lives up to the hype it’s getting), and Clam Down by Annelise Chen (who I think is a phenomenal writer, so I have high hopes).