Lindsey Drager writes beautiful books. If you don’t already know this, get thee to a book retailer immediately to discover it for yourself. Her fourth and most recent book, The Avian Hourglass, came out from Dzanc in August 2024. It maintains the high standard of lyrical, meaningful work she’s set over the past decade.
Drager writes elegies for the human race, relying on science and poetics in equal measures to spin gently supernatural and far-seeing narratives about ordinary, deeply endearing people. In what follows, I asked her everything I could think to about her latest book, continuing a writers’ correspondence about craft that I hope extends into all our future projects.
Katharine Coldiron: One of the things I most admire about your work is how strangely and beautifully you balance between the abstract and the detailed. In The Avian Hourglass, I got a genuine sense of these characters’ lives every day, sleeping and eating and talking to each other; I also got the big, overwhelming feelings of despair and uncertainty from the world’s decline. How do you build a book that values both allegorical abstraction and realistic daily life?
Lindsey Drager: It’s so interesting to hear you articulate this, because it crystallizes something I was hoping to explore in a kind of meta way in the novel, which is the idea of living with (inside?) paradox. How can two seemingly opposite things both exist simultaneously and what happens when we have to live with that dual and oscillating reality? This is something that I’ve been feeling a lot lately and I’ve been discussing with others close to me. So I wanted to dramatize that tension and maybe invite the reader into it in this book.
But you’re right that the paradox of this world being both realist and allegorical was a really tricky balance for me to strike. Every time the logic of realism pulled me toward it, I found the story getting meta, trying to remind the reader (and me, the writer) that this was an imagined, faux world—a kind of stage. And if you think of the book itself as a retelling of the Girl in Glass Vessel narrative (at once an invented folk tale and a subplot that lives on the margins of the central story), then the rules and logic of realism go out the door. Fairytale and folktales very consciously privilege emotional truth for empirical reality all the time.
That is not to say that the only way to read the novel is as a retelling of Girl in Glass Vessel! But I do think that interest of mine in presenting a world that feels like it is both real and artificial at the same time can only be pulled off effectively if there’s something inside the story that acknowledges that the story is self-aware.
KC: This is the second book of yours I’ve read that invokes science, not just as subject matter but also structurally. Tell me about the place of science in your regular life as well as your creative life.
LD: I’m embarrassed to admit that my interest in science and math—while extremely deep and sincere—is also terribly amateur. I read Scientific American every single morning (often taking notes) and Nature once a week, and I spend time every day in my garden studying the ever-changing status of the plants. You can see that this is pretty hands-on, folk-esque science practice. But it informs my storytelling life in so many ways.
I’ve found that there are many parallels between storytelling and science as a discipline. Both science and stories are about finding patterns and giving language and making meaning of experiences that seem to escape or resist making (human) sense. They are both interested in gathering or featuring evidence that leads toward some kind of truth.
As you alluded to, I especially like borrowing structures found in nature or in theory for the overall form of a story. For The Lost Daughter Collective, it was a Möbius strip. For The Archive of Alternate Endings, it was the return of Halley’s comet over 1,000 years. For this latest book, The Avian Hourglass, the story is told in 180 parts (to mimic the 180 degrees in a half-circle) that count down, as an hourglass runs out of sand. The idea of infinity, the return of Halley’s comet, the hourglass as a technology to tell time—these are really ancient devices and concepts. It makes sense to me to borrow them to tell stories that are (hopefully) both timeless and timely.
I know that adopting these structures is risky and it’s lost me readers in the past. And I recognize that the hero’s journey and Aristotle’s dramatic arc are legible and comfortable for many readers. But I just struggle to fit my particular stories in those frames. It’s interesting that these alternative structures have been called experimental because I don’t see them as new or innovative at all. They really are received forms. I’m just borrowing them from nature.
KC: Talk to me about the relationship between theater and this book. Most of my understanding of theater comes from what distinguishes it from film, the medium I know best. Concepts and principles of theater seem to be essential to this book, both in form and in content. How did you set out to include theater, and how did that evolve over the course of writing?
LD: The Avian Hourglass actually started as a play, but one that was getting so long and dense and totally impossible to perform that I realized it had to be a novel. But then I started thinking: isn’t a novel told in first person kind of, essentially, one really long aside (a direct address from the actor to the audience in a play)? Could it be, or would it be possible to say that maybe this book—maybe every first-person novel!—is just one long monologue? Then, of course, I read theories of the origins of theater and its relation to the history of the book and, of course, many other far more brilliant people than me long ago pointed this out. But that discovery, for me, was really central to thinking through how mimesis was operating here.
What film and theater do have in common is that need for the audience to kind of suspend their disbelief that the Real Human in front of them is performing this Other Person, even as they are also very much aware of the Real Human at the same time. This is maybe why some film-goers struggle with certain actors—because the viewer can’t “forget” to detect the Real Human they are watching in service of giving themselves over to the Other Person.
In this book, that act of mimesis, of art “miming” real life like it does in theater, was doubly important when the book itself is read as a retelling of Girl in Glass Vessel. Is a retelling a kind of mime? I might argue it is, or can be.
I was also thinking a lot about playwriting’s relationship to puppetry. I was asking myself: is a puppet like a character in a play, totally dormant and without agency until the marionettist or actor animates them? Or does a puppet have more control than that? And does a puppet know it’s governed by someone else? What would happen if a puppet knew that? This is in part what the narrator grapples with—the knowledge they are inside a system they don’t have control over but not aware of what that system is, nor how to escape it.
KC: In another conversation with me, you talked about Here by Richard McGuire. There’s something in that book and in your books that I so rarely see elsewhere: a poetic, unblinkered sense of time, a way in which the human lifespan is both irrelevant to the whole canvas of life on earth and central to the experience of being alive on earth. McGuire, like you, is capable of telescoping in and out, from a moment of daily life to the sweep of human existence, but I think the reason his project was so successful was because he focused on such a small space, and used that constraint to frame meaning. Do you put on similar constraints in writing about such big ideas and topics?
LD: How I love Here. I love Here so very, very much. It’s just about the perfect book, to my mind. I have no idea what it means that it is a book that contains nearly no words at all…
As far as constraints, I am always using them. To some extent, this is where that notion of using structure from nature comes from—those are temporal constraints that are ancient and ephemeral, so I know I’m not risking anything by borrowing them because they’ve been around so long. But I also think one of the greatest pleasures of fiction is playing with time. Time can be tightened or elongated, skipped and jumped, scrunched and compressed, woven and pixelated, re-ordered and disordered for rhetorical effect.
I think your term here “frame” is perfect, since it relates to our own relationship to time in these human forms, so susceptible to entropy. We ourselves are framed by our moment on the earth, but science tells us this world has been for a long time and will be long after we are gone. I love using frames like those found in McGuire’s Here or Daniel Mason’s Northwoods in part because I think it reminds us of our own bodies as a frame.
KC: Does Girl in Glass Vessel have a relationship to Plath’s bell jar? If not, how did you invent it/perceive it/want it to be perceived?
LD: I had not even thought of Plath! There certainly is a parallel there.
I don’t want to speak for every woman, since I am only one, but I think these metaphors of women in containers are interesting, especially as they are so ubiquitous. Shy girls should break out of their shells. Working women hit a glass ceiling. The “gilded cage” has become a metaphor for a woman locked in a beautiful prison, whether literally (see Saint George Hare’s 1908 painting) or figuratively via marriage (see Arthur J. Lamb’s 1900 song). I was thinking of all these idioms when trying to come up with the tale Girl in Glass Vessel and also thinking about the ways in which sometimes invisible systems govern how and in which direction women are able to navigate the world. The symbol of the bell jar in Plath seems right in line with these other figurative meanings and absolutely fits with what I was going for in creating the Girl in Glass Vessel tale.
KC: Can you give me a rundown of Cruel Optimism? You mention it in your acknowledgments, and I wanted more detail about how it impacted this book.
LD: Oh, of course! It’s this brilliant book by the late Lauren Berlant, a social scientist, literary scholar, and cultural theorist. Basically, Berlant defines “cruel optimism” as the longing for something in your life that ultimately proves to be an “obstacle to your flourishing” (to borrow their terms). In short, it’s about cultural conditions creating desire, while those same cultural conditions make that desire impossible to satiate.
The book was written in 2011, but I find it even more relevant now when Millennials like me are desiring things that our parents had but we cannot be guaranteed: a good job, funds to one day retire, the ability to own a house, the ability to pay off our student loans, the idea of really any kind of long-term financial security. Berlant focuses their discussion on the post-Thatcher era in the UK, but it applies equally to the myth of the “American dream” here in the U.S.
When I first read this book, I thought someone had finally put language to so many of my own inexplicable struggles as a young person growing up in the Midwest, as well as the struggles of those around me. I tried to work through some of that in The Avian Hourglass where this central premise of the thing you want actually holding you back (in sometimes invisible ways) becomes, to some extent, the central antagonistic force. The irony, of course, is that — in cruel optimism — the antagonistic force is always self-inflicted. That’s how the system keeps one down.
It made me think: What might unfold in a story where the protagonist and the antagonist were actually the same character and the reader knew this but the character herself had no idea? That is something of what I tried to do in The Avian Hourglass—to dramatize a reality I had lived and was seeing around me, a reality Berlant gave language to in the phrase “cruel optimism.”
KC: You draw on mythology that exists (Icarus) as well as mythology that you yourself invent (Girl in Glass Vessel) to build the background allegories across which the story of the novel unspools. Why use both, the real and the invented, instead of all one or the other?
LD: The easy answer to this is that I needed the Girl in Glass Vessel to do very specific things that were echoed in the frame narrative to convince the reader the novel is in fact a retelling of that tale. So I had to make it up. And because I was nervous about no one knowing the story of Girl in Glass Vessel (because it doesn’t exist!), I wanted to pair that with some kind of familiar touchstone, which became the Icarus myth.
About halfway through writing the book, I realized that the interplay between referential material that maps over our world (Icarus) and material that only refers to an imagined world (Girl in Glass Vessel) were actually dramatizing the paradox I was hoping to ask the reader to kind of linger inside throughout the book. I think this speaks (correction: I hope this speaks!) to the larger theme in the book of the power of art to help us cope with disaster and failure and crisis (even while it can’t actually fix anything) not because it mirrors our life but because it estranges us to what is so familiar, letting us see it anew.
The Avian Hourglass is definitely not a realist book. But it’s not entirely unrelated to real world concerns. My hope is that it oscillates between these two, just as really good allegory should: it’s moving kind of fluidly between the symbolic and the signified so you can’t quite ever firmly land on either side.
Allegory has such a bad reputation because it’s historically been aligned with propaganda. But I think really evocative allegory isn’t about some hidden agenda, but rather about enacting — through this oscillation — the surreal experience of living within and between two kinds of reality. And allegory — for better or worse — seems to be the genre that makes the most sense to me right now, here in 2024.
