A conversation with Karen Tucker (Fiction ’10) and Matthew Zanoni Müller (Fiction ’10)
This week in the Missouri Review, fiction alum Matthew Zanoni Müller interviewed fellow alum Karen Tucker about Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:
Following Each Dangling Thread: An Interview with Karen Tucker about Her Debut Novel Bewilderness, and Writing about the Restaurant Industry, Friendship, and Addiction
Matthew Zanoni Müller: Your two main characters, Irene and Luce, both work restaurant jobs. This is how they make their money, where they meet, and where they forge their friendship. It is also where they encounter a host of challenges, from sexual harassment, to low pay, to difficult customers. Your book seems very interested in exploring this industry that you worked in yourself for years. What was it like mining this territory? Were there specific things you hoped readers would take from Irene and Luce’s experiences?
Karen Tucker: It’s funny: back when I was mired neck-deep in the restaurant industry, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was write about it. Imagine working so hard your legs shake as you walk to your car at midnight, going home and having yet another waiter nightmare that leaves you stressed-out and exhausted, and then waking up to spend even more time in that world by writing a story about a couple of food servers? No, thanks. But at some point after those twenty-plus years had passed, my ruined legs and I decided to allow ourselves to be exploited in a different fashion, and together we finagled our way into grad school. In Florida, with a sizeable pay cut, I taught writing to undergrads in exchange for time to work on a novel. Of course I deeply missed my restaurant colleagues––the funniest, most creative bunch of humans you could ever assemble––and at last I was ready to tie myself into an imaginary apron and write about the lean and hungry experience of waiting tables. One thing I wanted readers who haven’t been on the other side of the table to understand is that it’s not the romanticized version of low-income work we see so often in various stories. Forget the popular customer-as-savior trope––harassment is a million times more likely. No one theatrically quits midshift in protest over harassment; you can’t afford to. Your manager probably won’t defend you if you complain, but you also won’t get fired on the spot if you say something rude to Mr. Harasser. Your manager will instead wait for you to finish out your tables, do your sidework, turn in the cash and credit card slips you’ve collected, and leave the building. Only after you’ve shown up for work the following day, hoping to earn a few more crucial dollars, will they give you the axe.
MM: This is foremost a book about addiction. We follow Luce and Irene as they score drugs, go to meetings, and experience the highs and lows of pills. How did you approach balancing the very real and specific characteristics of both Irene and Luce’s addiction with the larger and more universal workings of this world that so many experience?
KT: By no means did I set out to scrutinize the pharmaceutical industry, the rehab industry, the health insurance industry, or any other for-profit systems that routinely fail people with substance use disorder. I have no experience in that kind of reportage. My only goal was to take a close-up look at two characters: Irene and Luce. As I came to discover, peering through a magnifying lens tends to reveal something unexpected, and you can’t tell the full story about food servers in a former mill town unless you’re willing to follow each dangling thread. In the end I spent as much time researching the circumstances of these characters’ lives as I did imagining them. In this way, I often felt more like the novel’s reader than its writer. Some days it felt as though the story were being told to me. Not in a spooky mystical sense––no characters were channeled in the drafting of this story––but I learned so much about my novel and those who inhabit it by reading numerous accounts of shady pain management centers, criminal rehab centers, doctors who accept payments from pharmaceutical reps in exchange for overprescribing opioid medication, and doctors who refuse to prescribe meds to patients with real pain.
Read the rest of the interview here: https://www.missourireview.com/karen-tucker-on-her-debut-novel-bewilderness/
