Megan Mary Moore’s debut novel, The Girl in the Pipes, whispers out to readers like the voices heard in the water of bathrooms and kitchens by protagonists Dani and Marley. If you have ever had an intrusive thought telling you to escape, to wish for something different than your present circumstances, then you will sympathize with Moore’s characters: Marley a poet who is recovering from a destabilizing accident and Dani a plus-size influencer facing a mysterious illness. At just 40,000 words the novel can be read in an afternoon but might stay with you forever, and for anyone who has ever found hope within darkness they may find a home within these pages. Megan Mary Moore brings a poetic sensibility to her prose and creates an emotional world that centers two women trapped, betrayed by their friends and lovers, and caught at the crossroads between escape and misery. It’s mysterious, gripping, and beautiful.
Luke Sullivan: Maybe we could begin with you telling us a little about how you would describe yourself as a writer?
Megan Mary Moore: Yeah, I got my MFA in poetry, publishing only poetry before this book, and I tend to still look at prose that way. For me there’s very little difference in the way I write each, and so when I’m sitting down to write a story I’m looking at each scene like individual poems that come together into one big poem. I took a semester of fiction writing and it didn’t really help me, but from poetry I learned so much about how every single word is important and about brevity. I hate long works. I don’t like reading them. I’m the type of person who thinks most movies need to be 10% shorter. That’s why I wrote a short book. I think of truth above all else, like what Werner Herzog calls the ecstatic truth. . .
LS: I’m unfamiliar.
MMM: It’s that even if something isn’t true, it still feels true. Narrative that feels true to the human experience. And I think that’s what poetry is supposed to do, take this truth we all know to exist and put it to paper. I really hope that’s what I did with The Girl in the Pipes.
LS: Yes, I think you definitely have. That poetic sensibility in terms of thinking through the consequences of words and seeing things is apparent. The brevity with which you accomplish certain scenes is incredible. For me, I read the book very quickly in two sittings. Is that what you wanted the experience to be like for readers?
MMM: I guess so. All of my advanced readers told me that they read it in one or two sittings, but I didn’t really think about it. I knew it was a short book because that’s what it was called to be. It needed to be a short book. I think that today there’s this big push towards short form media, and I think it’s a great challenge to try and make books short and easy to sit down and read.
LS: What were some of the authors who inspired you on this journey?
MMM: Definitely The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I read that as a summer assignment in high school, reading it on my back deck, and I remember thinking, “this is the most honest writing I’ve ever read that portrays a woman and her life and her yearning and what’s going on in her head.” The Awakening really hit me, and it influenced The Girl in the Pipes, the draw to water, escape, and the realization that the mold you’re being asked to fit in … you can’t. I think it was the first book that made me realize I appreciate truth above all else in books.
I am also a very vibey person; Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides are two other books that I really love. I love the ambiguity of both of those books. When I go to write something, I am always thinking about the things that have inspired me and got me here, but it’s not so much what they’re about but the vibes they give.
LS: I loved what you said about ambiguity. To me, it relates to the mystery that exists in Girl in the Pipes. What was your MFA experience like?
MMM: I was in a low-residency MFA program at the University of Miami at Ohio because a year before I had suffered from a car accident where I fractured my pelvis in three places. I was nervous to move far away and onto a campus. Hoa Nguyen was my advisor and I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. She taught me so much in the way of my own poetics and she always encouraged me to be as weird as possible. I have her to thank for that.
LS: Okay. Amazing, so how did you go from being in your MFA to the idea of this book?
MMM: So after that car accident I was in an identical situation to Marley’s. I was an undergrad at the time. I was living with my parents, so my experience is a lot better than Marley’s was. When I moved back to campus, it was in the middle of my senior year because I missed the first semester, and I was still on crutches at the time, but I really wanted to finish. I had my own accessible bathroom in my dorm, and I just remember sitting in the shower seat under the water and wishing that I could slip down the drain. Because of the pain and the way that people were treating me. This experience was the first time that I really realized I was living in a body, and that I didn’t want to. I think it started as a poem, specifically the first scene of the accident, until I took my first semester of fiction with Hugh Sheehy, who is amazing and blurbed my book. When it was time to submit for that class it was the first thought of something that would be really interesting to write about.
LS: A writer’s intrusive thought, truly.
MMM: Right. I thought, “well maybe it’ll do something for me later on.” It took ten years. Eleven now, I guess. But I finally wrote something that I’m really proud of. For a long time I just had Marley and I asked Jen Givhan. She is a horror author. She read it over for me and she told me I needed a part two with a second person, and I thought she was right. Immediately I knew that it was going to be a plus-size influencer because I had been getting some traction on a few of my Instagram posts. I’m not an influencer, nor do I have the desire to be one, but just randomly something in the algorithm was causing my posts to pop off, and I started getting a lot of comments from people I didn’t know. It was my first time really being in the public eye and I remember thinking, “I cannot imagine doing this for a living.”
Dani also comes a lot from Cheslie Kryst who was a former Miss America and committed suicide in 2022, and she was gorgeous. She was a lawyer. She was Miss America, and she seemed to have everything going for her. I thought that’s because we don’t see so much of what is going on. Right now, girl lit is such a big genre, and so much of this “weird girl lit” is exploiting the weird girl behavior and not looking at, “how did we get this weird girl? How was she born? How was she created?” And I hope that The Girl in the Pipes looks at the other side of that, rather than, “look at this crazy bitch.”
LS: Ok, so I wanted to back up just a little bit before the MFA and before even undergrad and the car crash. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
MMM: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be. I like to tell people about how my first existential crisis was seeing my mom write things down on a notepad, and by then I had figured out that books were written, right? So I saw her writing things down on a notepad, but, to me, I couldn’t read yet so it was all just scribbles. So I thought that was how you wrote and I would take a pen and scribble in it and I gave it to my dad, and he said, “I can’t read this. It’s all scribbles.” And my heart broke because I realized there was a whole world I didn’t understand. Writing is magic to me, somewhere it clicked in my brain I wanted to make that magic. I wanted to figure out how the magic works. So I did. My local Harrison branch library had a writing club, and it was a teen writing club but I was ten years old so not a teen. I went to the librarian and said, “can I please be in your writing club?” And she let me try it out. And I came and we wrote and it was so much fun. I had the time of my life, I talked to people who I never would’ve talked to before and I learned that I wasn’t alone in this passion. I learned that other people too want to see the world around them.
LS: Do you still have any of your early stuff?
Megan Mary Moore: Yeah, I have tons of journals and files of things and they’re all really sad. Extremely melodramatic. I may have started with the melodramatics a little earlier than some people. My poetry only continued to get more sad and more dramatic. I remember the things that made me feel really strongly. Anytime I would watch a movie, or read a book, or really consume any media or art it left a bruise. When I was a kid I was trying to emulate that feeling and I wanted to do that, I wanted to make people feel things. A lot of it is about the female body, loving and hating it simultaneously.
LS: That makes a lot of sense. In my experience as an educator I find that children can feel very disempowered, which can makes things more melodramatic. What came next?
MMM: In the 11 years of writing the novel I published two collections of poetry, Dweller and To Daughter a Devil, but Girl in the Pipes was always there. This is when I was going through a divorce, and I was working as a preschool teacher at a Montessori school, so I had a lot going on and I used this as my escape. In Montessori it’s very important to take notes and I was on recess duty, so every day I would have this piece of paper in front of me. I would write a full scene of Girl in the Pipes then the next morning I would transcribe what I wrote onto my laptop. Eventually I had a good enough draft.
LS: When you said that you had a good enough draft it made me think about the revision process. Would you say that being a poet helps you revise?
MMM: Oh yeah, I do not structure anything at all ever. So I would go into it and be like, “okay I want this to happen,” and I would write what was happening. And they weren’t in order either, mostly just random scenes of whatever was fun to write in the moment. That sounds awful because the book is so sad. Eventually I had a big word document with everything in it and my favorite way to edit is at night, in bed, on my phone in Google Docs. Then it’ll seem so obvious what is missing because that’s where I like to read, in bed. So I’m in that mindset of reading a little more critically rather than creating.
LS: How did you think about genre as it exists in the novel. One of the blurbs on the back of the book describes it as “body horror.” Is this a categorization that you agree with? Or was this all something that was secondary to you?
MMM: I knew what I was creating as I was creating it. I also knew that I didn’t really adhere to genre the way so many mainstream books do. When I first reached out to the publisher I called it feminist speculative and that made the most sense to me. A lot of people have called it horror. I love horror, so it doesn’t surprise me. I read a lot of horror so some of that voice came into the writing. However, I didn’t think of it as horror at all when I was writing it, and I was very surprised by the reaction it was getting. To me, body horror is extreme things that don’t happen every day. In Girl in the Pipes there’s pain, and vomit, and diarrhea. It’s really interesting because I think your experience as a human really is going to inform how you see the book. Because I have noticed, and this is just an observation, most women who read and react to the book don’t find it to be body horror. And most of the people who have called it a horror novel have been men. So I think so much of your life experience depends on how much horror you see in the novel.
LS: That’s really interesting. I’m fascinated by the way people bring their own perspective in and read things into a book. I think that harkens back to the emotional reality of the book, which speaks to the craft of it. I wanted to ask you about the pipes as a metaphor and what you think of it.
MMM: I want the reader to come up with their own conclusion about the pipes. My conclusion is sort of amorphous and changes daily. Sometimes when I look back at it I see the pipes as a happy ending. Let me say this, I think I looked at the pipes the way I look at the Little Prince. So he’s on Earth but he needs to go back to his planet, and in order to do that he allows the snake to bite him, and he leaves his body behind to return. That’s all we know about the Little Prince and that’s all we know about Dani and Marley and whoever came before them. They’re in the pipes now, they’ve left their bodies behind and they are somewhere else now. Wherever that is, that’s up to you.
LS: Yeah. That makes sense. How did you think about place in the book?
MMM: With Marley, her part is so insular. She’s trapped. I like the idea of really not acknowledging the outside world too much. Everything that’s going on with her is going on in her head and in that room except for when she escapes and the original car accident. However, with Dani, there were a lot more flashbacks. I really wanted it to be in a hot place because I wanted her to end in a pool. I needed it to be somewhere that’s really warm, really hot, but Dani needed to be able to change the thermostat despite being hot. I had spent quite a bit of time in Texas too and felt comfortable enough to write about it as a place.
Luke Sullivan: So I wanted to ask another question about these two characters. The way I read it, they are sort of oppositional to each other in a few ways. Dani plays that video of Marley and it allows her to fall asleep, but even Dani herself doesn’t fully like her because she looks like the skinny girls who bully her online all the time.
Megan Mary Moore: I think the tragedy of Girl in the Pipes is that Dani and Marley probably would’ve been really good friends might they have been able to help each other through this, but they are pinned against each other. Instead they are both very, very alone and all they have is a perception of the other person through their phone.
Luke Sullivan: Yeah, it’s interesting the way you’ve crafted them as symbols for what the other dislikes. I wanted to ask you one more specific question and then two more general questions about the publishing process. I was very interested in the clown stuff. Where did it come from?
Megan Mary Moore: I think there are two reasons. One was to make him also a performer, in a similar way to Dani. When Marley fell in love it was the idea of performance she fell in love with, this perception of him that she had of him, not him as a person. That’s who she wanted to have sex with, that’s who she fell in love with. It’s the same thing with Dani, Michael got Dani’s attention by posting and commenting on her page even though she thought it was weird at first. I also imagine Michael’s probably exhausted after a day of performing and making everyone smile. That’s just me cutting him some slack, he’s still horrible, he’s irredeemable, but he has to perform all day and then take care of Marley. It’s probably a hard job for him.
Luke Sullivan: Amazing. So I would love to hear a little bit about the journey to get this book published.
Megan Mary Moore: Yes, so Dwellers was my first poetry book and that was my final project for my MFA. I got lucky that Unsolicited Press liked it. From there I had a good relationship with Summer Stewart, the person behind Unsolicited. I felt like she really got what I was doing. When I was writing Girl in the Pipes I wanted to go a traditional route but after talking with Jen, the same conversation where she suggested Dani as a character, she told me this was going to be a hard one to publish. She told me I could try but she didn’t think it was going to get picked up. That made me think a lot about what I was writing and how I wanted my work to appear in the world, what would be the most honest way to do that. And I thought to stick to the indie route because I love this story. I wanted this published with as much of me in this as possible, as much of my vision. Once I had a good draft I was happy with I sent it to Summer, technically it’s a novella, which is harder to sell. She loved it and once I signed the contract I was able to have fun with the book because I knew it was going to get out into the world. Sometimes all you need is one person in your corner that says, “let’s do this.”
Luke Sullivan: Hell yeah, you’re obviously so talented and I think this book is going to have all of the success it deserves. Last question, what is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring author?
Megan Mary Moore: Don’t stop. Don’t stop. It’s the people who stop who don’t make it. It’s funny when you are a writer and someone asks you, “what do you do?” And you say, “I’m a writer,” 90% of the time they’ll say, “oh I write too,” or, “oh I wrote in high school,” or “I have a great book idea.” The difference between a writer and someone who has a great idea is consistency. Find the time to write.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Megan Mary Moore holds an MFA in poetry from Miami University. She is the author of Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in Rattle, Grist, and Contemporary Verse 2. She lives in Cincinnati where she frequently dresses like a fairy princess, watches too many horror movies, and writes poems about things that scare her.
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.