Lily King is an award winning American novelist. Members of the Fiction Board Katie Catulle and Serena Jampel interviewed her over Zoom on February 26th, 2024 to talk about writing: membranes, rules, and how badly we want it to be fun. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Serena Jampel: I recently read Writers and Lovers and loved it. You write so evocatively about the writing process. Was that inspired by your own writing practices?
Lily King: Yeah, I mean, I had to write about my own process in a lot of ways. I couldn’t have made up a completely different writing process. Although, you know, maybe I could have, because I could have just copied any of the hundreds of writers. But no, it was definitely from a lot of my own experiences of how to think about writing a novel. The way scenes kind of come to me in layers. I definitely wanted to capture all of that. There's that moment where [Casey] has to leave writing, how hard it is passing through that membrane. I was really glad to have a place to write about that, because I could never really write an essay about that. That wouldn’t make any sense. But I felt like it could make sense in fiction. Although, when I was writing it, I thought that nobody was going to understand what the hell I was talking about. So you know, it was a relief to kind of talk to other writers after I wrote that and have them be like, “Oh my God, so much of that was how it felt for me.” That really surprised me because it feels so personal.
SJ: Following up on that: do you think there is a universal experience of writing?
LK: No, no, I mean, sometimes you don't really want to write, but you have to get it out. It's an experience for artists across the world that you can't really find expression for. There's something kind of amorphous and very, very powerful. You have to get it out or you're just not gonna feel good. It’s funny, like a number of writers will say “writing saved my life.” But I've met other writers who were just like, “I just like to write,” you know? So I think everybody has different processes, but I do think people need it in different ways and come to it for different reasons. I can't help thinking there's this sort of churning inside of everybody, but I could be wrong about that.
Katie Catulle: That makes a lot of sense. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how inspiration comes to you and how that kind of personal process works?
LK: You never know where ideas are going to come from. Certain mental states make it easier to get ideas, definitely. For some reason, I get ideas in the shower, and I get ideas while driving. It's almost like when you're not focusing. Like, I cannot sit down and say, “okay, I need some ideas” and just start writing them down. It just does not happen. I would just freeze. They come a lot during activities where your brain has kind of gone into a different place, a little bit of a daydream place. But you're not thinking oh, I'm in my daydream, the place I'm gonna get some ideas from now, you know? It's very unconscious. I also get ideas while reading, and they're so not related to what I'm reading. But there's some feeling. They don't happen when I'm reading a bad book or a book that I'm not responding to. It has to be just a certain heightened state that I get into when I read something that is really, to me, just kind of working on all levels. And then somehow, something triggers something and I'm turning to the back of the book and I'm writing all these ideas for the novel I'm working on or a story idea or something that I’d like to work on years from now. You just never know. Those are, kind of, ways in which inspiration seems to strike.
I had this book, Euphoria, and I had handed it in to my editor and my agent. I think maybe I had even sold it by then. It was in many drafts. And I was meeting a friend for lunch. I was late and I was taking this exit off the highway, and I just saw the ending of that book. I didn't even know I needed an ending, because I thought I already had the ending. But I saw it all. And I had to get out a notebook and steer off the exit and just write it down. I wrote it that night. And that was such a relief, but I would never have gotten that if I hadn't been doing that thing.
KC: I recently finished Euphoria, and I was interested in how you kind of started from this place of nonfiction inspired by Margaret Mead, and then decided to write a fictional book with amended characters and peoples inspired by real indigenous populations. I was wondering about how that transfer happened for you and where that line was.
LK: I really had a slow process. I kind of had to go say that I would tell it in this Margaret Mead character's voice and I thought that it would be her story. And I couldn't do it. It just didn't work. I only wrote maybe three chapters or something before I realized I had to do something else. I just couldn't access her and I think it had something to do with her being such a famous figure, a well known figure, a person that many people in the country had met, especially back in 2010 or whatever when I was writing that book. I don't know. I felt really trapped by fact, and I had to give myself permission to write my own story. Take, you know, I had these three people and I had this moment that I was trying to get to through the whole novel. I was just trying to get to that, to that part where they have that breakthrough. And that was from real life, but I had to make up so much to get there. I had to get Bankson's voice. That was the thing that saved me.
At first I tried telling it from all of their different voices. When I'm stuck, I write a character's autobiography on a different file. And I just start with each main character from the beginning of their life to the moment where we see them in the book. And that's very helpful for me to kind of start to understand a character that's confusing to me. So I had done that for all three of them. And I was trying to kind of weave in their voices. But Bankson's was just so much stronger. And I really identify with him personally. For some reason I just really felt for him. I read his biography of Gregory Bateson and I was just so enamored with him, I think because the biographer was so enamored with him. He just really captivated me and I was just lucky to feel like I could find a voice through which I could tell the story. And people have gotten mad at me. You know, here and there. Because I did play with major facts. And I didn't give my Margaret Mead character the life and the power that Margaret Mead ended up having. But that's not the way my story unfolded. I just had to stay true to that.
SJ: Well, you saying that actually brings up an interesting question for me. What do you think the fiction writer owes to historical controversy or, in terms of anthropology becoming an increasingly contested field or contested practice? What do you see as the role of the novelist in addressing that controversial or potentially damaging content?
LK: Yeah, it's a really, really good question. I mean, I was gonna say I probably wouldn't have written that had it been 2020 or something. I was already pretty uncomfortable with it as it was. I just don't know if you can kind of make a set of rules for these things. Some people can write with so much heart. Some people can write with a lot of cruelty. And I think when you make rules about what people can write about, you can't write without it just feeling like those rules. They don't allow for the possibility of real human exploration by generating heart and feeling and understanding.
And I mean, I think the question of that intersection of fact and fiction is always problematic. You know, it just always is, in one way or another, and I think it's the writer’s job to really examine what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what kind of harm it could cause. So I’d really like to hear what you're thinking about those things.
SJ: Yeah, thank you so much. It's super hard. I'm not sure how I would answer it differently than you just did. Other than that, it's about speaking to some truth. In whatever medium you have to use.
KC: Yeah, I think that captures it perfectly.
SJ: You mentioned that perhaps writing isn't fun for you. Could you say more to that?
LK: I want to have fun so badly. Like that's my question when I interview other writers now, I’m like “Do you have fun?” Usually they look at me like I'm absolutely crazy. Every now and then there's a writer who had fun. Like Ann Patchett in her last novel, Tom Lake, she had fun, apparently. With a novel that I've just finished a draft of, I feel like I had fun for the first 70 pages, and then I really stopped having fun.
KC: At what point did that shift for you?
LK: Well, it's a combination. I mean, I'd like to say it's because it took this big leap and it ended up like kind of in a hospital deathbed scene, which was a bummer. And that made me sad, but it kind of was before. I have yet another love triangle. And so one of the characters of the love triangle leaves town. The whole thing just falls flat, you know, like you can't get rid of one of the points on the triangle. So that's my problem with that book right now. You can just see it was so fun. There's so much tension, and then nothing.
KC: I had a question about the love triangle in Euphoria, actually. When I was reading it, I thought the book was kind of questioning normative conceptions of sexuality and monogamy. I was wondering how you saw the description as a love triangle, like is that how you would describe it, or would you challenge that term at all?
LK: Yeah, that's interesting. Really, technically, it's not a love triangle just because there was Helen, who was offstage but very, very much a part of Nell Stone's romantic inclinations or love. Her feelings of love and desire. I feel like in that book, I really was, at first anyway, following their lead. I mean, these real life characters, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, I wished I could have done so much more with them and had more years with them to explore what they were interested in. They had such strong notions of this idea, of constructs from your environment of what is male, what is female, who's attracted to whom. All that kind of stuff. And both of them in real life, you know, very much explored sexually. And then, Fen was so rigid, conservative and not open to any of that. And you can see that in his whole personality in so many different ways. I mean, honestly I'm always surprised after I write something and then it gets defined back at me. And both these last two novels got this defined as kind of love triangles, and it's really not the way I was thinking about it. But I understand that things need to be simplified. But I do feel like it was more complicated than a triangle for sure.
SJ: So we always finish our interviews with a bunch of rapid fire questions.
LK: Great. When I interview people I also do rapid fire questions. I might steal some of yours.
SJ: We came up with some funky ones.
KC: Who is the first person who reads your work?
LK: My husband.
KC: What is the last gift you gave?
LK: Hyacinths.
SJ: What is the last gift you received?
LK: Hyacinths.
KC: What are you currently reading?
LK: Actually today, my friend Caitlin's manuscript because my writers’ group meeting tonight is discussing it.
SJ: If you could interview anyone dead or alive, who would it be?
LK: Virginia Woolf.
KC: What was the last movie you saw in theaters?
LK: Poor Things.
SJ: Do you have a go-to snack while you're writing?
LK: Apples or bananas with peanut butter.
KC: And then maybe this will be our last one. What's something you've always been bad at no matter how hard you try?
LK: Playing an F chord on my guitar. I mean, you've got to play F if you want to play the guitar and I just can't do it without it being like blah, you know.
2025