Beyond Philosophy: An Interview with Makenna Goodman

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The Shame, Makenna Goodman’s first novel, explores consumerism, social media, and sustainability through a protagonist who could be mistaken for Goodman herself—a woman who left New York City to build a life on a rural homestead in Vermont. In several interviews for The Shame, she resists the fiction/nonfiction binary, responding in an interview with Adroit: “I think all writing is inherently biased and informed by the writer’s experience and philosophy,” and “neither lens is telling the truth.” 

Goodman remains preoccupied with the gap between an idea and a reality: what it means to live beyond the theories we construct to make sense of living. The central protagonist of Helen of Nowhere is a man (stylized as the Man throughout the book); a professor whose career is upended during a cultural reckoning with male power. His wife (the Wife), a former student, becomes an academic and writer. “Marrying her,” he says, “was the greatest revenge against her brilliance.” But eventually, the Wife wants a divorce, “after years of resentment and fog.” With both his marriage and career on the rocks, he considers moving to the country in search of a way to start over and find peace. A realtor shows him a bucolic house, and when she offers to channel the spirit of its former owner—the eponymous Helen—on his behalf, the Man agrees, not understanding what the transaction will cost him.

Helen is written in the first-person from multiple perspectives: the Man, the Wife, the realtor, and Helen. The novel presents itself as a stage play, complete with lighting instructions, taking place in six acts. The action is mostly contained within two domestic spaces that could be theater sets: Helen’s house and the Man and the Wife’s apartment in the city. This formal containment is deliberate: Helen of Nowhere is a performance, yes—in line with Goodman’s ongoing interest in the performance of ethical living—but it is also a Platonic dialogue of competing points of view. While reading Helen I was reminded of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote: “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.” In finding community, Goodman’s characters often hit dead ends. The parable of the pond in Act 3 is a case in point: Helen’s  vision of collective responsibility collides with her neighbors’s sense of individual autonomy, with no clean resolution.

An editor of books on agriculture, ecology, and horticulture by day, with her sophomore novel Makenna Goodman continues to reveal herself to be a deeply philosophical writer concerned with the distance between how we think we should live and how we actually do. Over the course of one month, Makenna Goodman and I emailed back and forth to discuss her influences for Helen of Nowhere, from bell hooks to Buddhism to Agnès Varda, from our respective corners of Vermont.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Morgan English: In your essay “Who Gets to Live ‘the Good Life’?” for the New York Review of Books, you write about the hypocrisy of the back-to-the-land movement, suggesting that despite Helen and Scott Nearing’s homesteading success, they failed on the level of theory—colonialism, racism, ableism, and eugenics are at the root of their vision of utopia, accompanied by a romanticization of early America you aptly describe as “at best, a fantasy; at worst, complete delusion.” How much of Helen is about the failure of a sound theory to base our practice on?

Makenna Goodman: That’s a very interesting question. I would say that the act of writing, for me, is a practice to better understand some elemental, essential feeling. I guess it’s playing with the philosophical, which I suppose is theoretical. A theory can be challenging and comforting at the same time because it provides a path to both follow and to argue with, and the novel can be a space to really hack a theory apart and put it back together. And there are both ridiculous and plausible theories. One can most effectively practice love by loving, not by theorizing about love. I believe if there is a trap, it is not that we aren’t living up to good enough theories, but that we think we need theories in order to live. And then, when change is necessary, we hold fast to our theories even when they stop making sense. A theory is only as good as our belief in it.

ME: This novel takes the form of a stage play, beginning with brief character descriptions and taking place in six acts. How did you land on this shape for Helen? Does a playwright have a different relationship to their characters than a novelist? 

MG: I was reading Plato’s Symposium when I wrote the book, which takes the shape of a dialogue. I knew from the beginning I wanted the book to be a dialogue between the Man and other voices who were echoing his point of view in refracted ways. But exposition kept creeping in and was getting in the way. With each edit, I stripped more and more exposition out, and eventually I realized that if I stripped it out entirely, it would feel like a play. I have no background in theater. I have no idea, therefore, what a playwright does or doesn’t do, and maybe that’s why I find the form so interesting. 

ME: When I saw in the front matter that each character is given their own act, I found myself looking forward to “Act 5: Wife.” I wanted to know what she had to say. “Say you were a woman” Act 5 begins, and then the narrator course corrects to: “Say you were a man.” This seems like an important formal choice—to limit the voice of the Wife. Can you tell me more about your intentions, or your process, in writing Act 5? 

MG: I was just reading an interview with the filmmaker Agnès Varda, where she was asked about her film The Gleaners and I, which is a film that, like much of her work, combines documentary with memoir. The interviewer asked her what came first: the story about the gleaners, or the story about herself? And Varda’s reply was very forthright. What does it matter what the intention was, she said, when the film as it is now is what matters. I found that really interesting. How a writer intends something to work isn’t always how the reader experiences it. And if they don’t match up, does that change the experience? For example, I don’t see the voice of the Wife as particularly limited. I see the Wife as all-knowing, as the only reliable narrator in the book. In creating Act 5, my intention was to shift power back to the Wife, narratively speaking. 

ME: In several interviews for your first novel, you were asked to confirm its connection to your own life. Can you talk about your decision to destabilize the “I” by writing from multiple perspectives in Helen of Nowhere? Did you feel the need to create some distance between the “I” and your own identity? 

MG: I resist the term autofiction, because I’m not sure any writer’s story exists outside of their identity. The self is embedded there, like a code, whether or not the writer wants it to be seen. I write as a kind of study of the self in society, and as I am the self who is writing, naturally I am “in” it somehow. But not literally. In The Shame I was exploring the development of psychic self-awareness. In this book I was interested in what happens when a person is in a relationship with someone else. So naturally there had to be more perspectives. Both books are about characters grappling with their own existence. I see them as part of the same project, in many ways. How are we storytellers of the world and of our own lives? And where do we get it wrong?

ME: Where don’t we get it wrong? The character of the Man in Helen proclaims to love women, yet he feels betrayed by “a faction of women” who are “hysterical . . . and maybe evil.” As an example of what he considers to be sensitivity towards his wife, he says (or thinks), “I had tuned in so devotedly to her cycle I could predict an outburst. I wanted her to feel seen . . . And this angered her. Me, seeing her clearly!” What’s more, he doesn’t trust theories; he longs “to be free from criticism, to just exist.” As the storyteller of his own life, he gets a lot wrong on the level of both theory and practice. 

MG: A theory is a story. It is created and all zipped up. Whereas living is messy. I’m writing this while on a camping trip, and my brain feels free of theory entirely. I am only the sea, the hammock, the fire, the act of heating water, the dish washing in the woods, and the porcupine in the oak tree above my tent. It’s a lovely, if empty, feeling. But the emptiness is momentous; filled with the moment.

ME: The tension between country and city is present in all your work. Did you, like Helen, leave a city and never look back? What does an artist need to do their work—isolation or stimulation? What do you need, and has it changed?

MG: I wish I knew the answer to this question. I did leave a city twenty years ago, but I have gone back to visit, and I go back for work often. In the beginning, though, I really resisted it. I don’t know what an artist needs to do their work, but I’m sure it’s different for everyone. For me, it’s quiet, it’s walking in the woods, but for many people it may be the din in a dark bar. I guess the thing that matters is to live truthfully, or ask questions that propel your intrigue. You could ask them happily or anxiously, and either way good writing can come. It doesn’t matter the conditions, probably. Certainly, time and space help with creating, but I find my best work has come in spurts late at night when I have twenty minutes alone, before falling asleep with my pen in my hand.

ME: The character of the Wife does not have children, and neither does Helen. But the house is sort of like Helen’s child. A house must be looked after. Is caretaking at the heart of Helen, even without children in the equation? 

MG: My guiding question in Helen is an exploration of love, and what we must give up in order to fully embrace another person. It’s about sinking into the bodily experience of being. It is very anti-self, even though of course the self is the one experiencing it. Love fascinates me—we do everything to attain it, yet it is such a hard journey for so many of us. 

ME: One person’s idea of love can differ greatly from another’s, and I think you explore this substantially, and with nuance, in this novel—in both novels. “An exploration of love” as a description of this complex work sounds a little flimsy to me. 

MG: Love is an abstract word, fine, but the impulse to decipher it down to the atom is what this book is in conversation with, I think. The Man and the Wife differ on how they define love—to one, it is enough to perform love; to the other, it is about taking action in clearer terms. But who is right? “Love” is a language they are speaking, but they are not understanding each other. The point of finding “it” is not to be clearer on the definitions, or to change theirs to the correct one, but to understand each other’s definition of love, which is really hard when the self feels damaged or victimized. When one is too rooted in “self,” it’s very hard to see the story from the other perspective, which is a fundamental problem with humans. And I wonder if the conversation around definitions of love and how it’s practiced can actually obscure what love is at its true essence, which I interpret simply to mean decentering the self to allow space for the other. 

Zen poet Ryōkan wrote: “Who says my poems are poems? My poems are not poems. When you know my poems are not poems, then we can speak of poetry.” Insert “love” for “poems” here—we must remove ourselves from the definitions in order to discover the meaning. My interest in exploring any definition—whether it’s love, parenting, community, death, politics, whatever—is rooted in the idea that there exists a consciousness beyond definitions, and within that consciousness one can find a certain peace. In my book, the Man is grappling with this concept, and how it plays out in not only his marriage, but his position as an intellectual. Helen is grappling with this concept and how it plays out in agriculture, in politics, and community. I believe the reader—all of us—are grappling with this concept. How can we gain peace within ourselves? How can we quiet the demons in our mind? Fiction is a way to ask these questions in a way that doesn’t get too bogged down in philosophy. This makes me think of the novelist Vigdis Hjorth, whose every book is in direct conversation with the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. To read Hjorth’s novels one can really feel his teachings come alive in the body of the text. It’s a thrilling thing to see how she has “translated” the fundamentals of his complex philosophy into books that are so urgently and immediately felt.

ME: What else were you reading, or paying attention to?

MG: I’m sure I’m forgetting important books that resonated in some way. Certainly I was reading Plato, and Aristotle. I’m interested in classical philosophy as a story, and at the time of writing I was teaching high school English and was researching the Socratic method, and I wanted to integrate Socrates’s teachings into an exploration of a modern marriage. I was reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, all of bell hooks’s educational books like Teaching to Transgress and also All About Love. I was reading Goethe’s Faust, Esther Perel, Buddhist texts, Annie Besant, mystical stuff, everything about Helen and Scott Nearing, Tove Jansson’s novels and her letters. I was reading a lot of philosophy, but reading it badly. I do think a lot of philosophy is overcomplicating what are ultimately very simple and basic ideas, and that fiction is an interesting place to play them out, but without alienating the reader. I was re-watching Agnès Varda—I love how she plays with genre and documentary. I love Le Bonheur, especially, and The Gleaners. I was watching shows like Ted Lasso and The White Lotus, other mainstream stories about marriage and the wealth gap. 

ME: Tell me more about the mystical stuff, as something quite mystical happens in the last act, if I am reading it correctly. The ending really caught me off guard.

MG: I recently read Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism, and in it he discusses, among many other things, the idea that mysticism is about freeing the mind from habitual notions of self. He discusses Nick Cave, Anne Carson, and Annie Dillard as mystical writers, and says something like a “mysticism” in literature occurs when the work not only describes experience, but creates in the reader the experience itself. I wanted the second half of Helen to create an experience for the reader beyond just reading, so that the book felt like it was happening at the bodily level. You are—whether you agree with the Man or not—on the journey with him, and so the transformation that occurs in him also, in a sense, occurs in us as the participant.

ME: Shame was an important theme in your first novel. Tell me how you see the role of shame at work in Helen. Alma and the Man have very different responses to shame, I think?

MG: In both of my books the characters are dealing with their dissatisfactions about how their life has gone thus far, and their dreams of what “could be.” They are ashamed of their vulnerability. It scares them. But both the Man and Alma share a fundamental human position, at least a human with a certain degree of privilege: they want more than what they have, and their view of themselves is warped by injured notions of Self and mythologies of “better.” They have a choice about certain aspects of their life. While writing Helen, I read a bit of Eckhart Tolle, trying to see what so many people found resonant in his work. He said (and I forget where): “Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness.” That seemed surprising to me, that such a profound notion was so easily palatable to the general reader. In other words, this is not some niche psychoanalytic ideology, but a truth that resonates with people on a major level.

ME: What did your writing process look like for this book? Did you share the work in progress with any first readers?

MG: I share my writing with very few readers while in process, but two come to mind: my friend Sheila Heti, and my husband, who I consider my most important reader as he is very discerning and completely unswayed by the industry of literature, which he has no interest in. This helps me stay true to the core of questioning and not get sidetracked by style or literary ambition. He’s a carpenter by trade; he builds and fixes things, and while his intellectual life is rich, it’s not informed by pretense. It’s real, in a sense. As real as it can be.

ME: At times the Man appears to be more of an archetype than a character, because he embodies a way of male thinking so familiar. But alongside rage, I feel empathy for him, and he feels very real to me despite his stereotypical behavior and modes of thought.

MG: It can be hard to swallow the aspects of the Man that we are either repulsed by or even that we recognize in ourselves and wish to disavow. And it’s easy to cast all men aside, in the service of doing away with the patriarchy. When I wrote this book four years ago, we were definitely in a post cis-male moment, but now we are not. Either way, these reductions and classifications are intriguing to me. My kids would say, “men aren’t the main character anymore.” But this is not actually true if you look at the way society is governed in this country. It may sound good, it may be intellectually appealing, but it’s not actually true. As a woman, myself, it is easy to say that “men” are such-and-such way and therefore “women” are not. It is easy to think of myself as “non-man.” But I think we are all confused. We are all searching. Some people might think of this as a regressive thing to say, especially nowadays. But I don’t mean it to be—the Man is on trial in this book, but then again, so is Helen. And the ending is, depending on how you read it, both punitive and redemptive. The Man does have to give something up which matters a great deal to him, but it’s worth it, don’t you think?