You Live and Die by the Prep Work: an Interview with Karen Tucker (Fiction ’10)

The Millions recently interviewed 2010 fiction alum Karen Tucker. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

You Live and Die by the Prep Work: The Millions Interviews Karen Tucker

Whitney Gilchrist: When people ask you what your book is about, what do you tell them? Is it a different answer from how you described it when you were writing it?

Karen Tucker: As someone with questionable skills in the verbal department, I usually say something like, “You know. Friends, drugs,” and let my voice trail off. Sometimes I add the food server angle, and––depending on who I’m talking to and their personal interests––I’ll mention the many pee and poop jokes. I’ve found “trauma and grief and substance use disorder” doesn’t quite have the same zing.

WG: With addiction so stigmatized and misunderstood, you must have made countless decisions in order to write about it responsibly. Could you talk about the choices you made that you felt were important in portraying the opioid crisis?

KT: The correct answer is that I’m an irresponsible writer, since I spent little to no time considering how to present the opioid epidemic in a responsible fashion.

Certainly I did copious research to better understand how this disaster unfolded (late capitalism strikes again!), but my obligation, as I saw it, was to portray these characters’ lives as fully as possible. To not omit the moments of genuine joy and pleasure, and to avoid prettying up any ugly choices or brutal events.

Not that this was easy. Among other things, Bewilderness is about a painful disorder––and who wouldn’t want to inject a hefty dose of order if it meant relieving some of that pain? I did my best, slipped up plenty, and at last I had a novel. No doubt I would have abandoned the manuscript in its earliest stages if either I or the characters always did the responsible thing.

Read the rest of this interview here: https://themillions.com/2021/08/you-live-and-die-by-the-prep-work-the-millions-interviews-karen-tucker.html