The Universe Just Doesn’t Care

Kate Durbin interviews Juliet Escoria about her new story collection “You Are the Snake.”

By Kate DurbinSeptember 24, 2024

• Fiction

WHEN I WAS in grad school, Juliet Escoria was my “student.” I have to put “student” in quotes because this was my first-ever teaching job, and I was encouraged to teach directly from a generic textbook I have now forgotten the name of. (I never taught a class that way again.) Juliet and I were also the same age, and from her first workshop submission, I could see she was clearly a genius, already fully formed. I looked forward to her stories almost as a guilty pleasure. She has a way of rendering with crystalline precision our most taboo thoughts and urges, and her teenage characters remind me of girls I grew up with. There are no heroes in her fiction—only people and the messiness of desire.

Juliet has published a novel, Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, 2019); a collection of short stories, Black Cloud (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014); and a poetry collection, Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press, 2016). Black Cloud and Witch Hunt were reissued as a diptych in an elegant new edition last year by CLASH Books. Her latest collection, You Are the Snake (Soft Skull Press, 2024), finds her returning to the San Diego of her adolescence as a setting for many of the stories, while others take place in her current home of West Virginia, where she lives with her husband, writer Scott McClanahan. The characters that populate You Are the Snake are often women coming of age in the beige suburbs, where the facade of conformity and the boredom of safety are frequently punctured by strangeness and aggression.

Juliet and I met on Zoom in late August. It was 90 degrees in Los Angeles, and West Virginia was having a thunderstorm. A few times, Juliet asked if I could hear the thunder, which was apparently loud. I couldn’t, but I liked knowing it was thundering while we were talking about feminine violence, complicated grandmas, the stickiness of adolescent friendships, drug narratives, cause and effect in fiction and in life, and more. Juliet’s writing is often called exceptionally brave and honest, and it is that, but I get the sense that for her, it’s the rest of the lying world that is the weird thing.

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KATE DURBIN: So many of these stories include violent women, and when I say violent, I mean physically violent. Not just what the psychologists call “relational aggression” between women, which is in the stories too, of course. With the physical violence, though, I feel like you’re revealing something important that should be written about more but isn’t.

JULIET ESCORIA: I guess I recognized that there was violence in these stories, because one of the working titles, which I never actually intended to use, was “Splatter Violence,” but I don’t think I fully understood how much violence was a subject matter in this book until people said so after its publication. But I also felt like a lot of [our culture’s] narratives about women were wrong and that we can be big and scary, in both small and large ways. And then I was thinking about my own past violent tendencies and stuff that I’ve seen from other women. I do feel like [women’s violence is] not really represented much in literature. And [when I write], I’m more concerned with showing emotional honesty, which sometimes comes out in physical violence. I want to show people how they really are, which is not nice all the time. People commit acts of violence, and that doesn’t mean that they’re an inherently abusive person. Anyone can be violent.

There’s also a story, “Roadkill,” where there’s a sexual assault of a man by a group of women. Again, I thought, This is something you just rarely see in literature, but obviously it happens. I know so many men who have been assaulted. How did that story come to be?

That was one of the older stories in the book. It was written during the #MeToo era. I thought there were a lot of good things that came about from #MeToo, but I also felt like it was kind of insulting to women. Acting as though we couldn’t be bad too, as though we couldn’t sexually assault men.

Then my husband wrote a book called Hill William (2013), where a sexual assault is a big part of the book. When it came out, nobody mentioned that or even really seemed to notice it, maybe because it was about a man’s experience. And then I was hearing stories similar to the ones you were saying, which is that this happens to men. Sometimes it happens in a very socially acceptable way of some girl forcibly touching someone’s penis, or something like that, which is still assault, but it’s socially acceptable.

And then some of it is based in truth, which is that my friends and I would go to Santa Barbara and make men uncomfortable as a game. We didn’t do anything as awful as [in the story], but it was very much like us saying, “Show us your dick,” and then laughing at them, which was really fucked up. But we thought it was funny, and it felt subversive in a way, like rather than being objectified and sexually harassed, we were making people uncomfortable. I thought that that was an interesting dynamic because we were young and full of alcohol and being really stupid and bad on purpose. We would do things like ask for money to pay for abortions.

I noticed that the men in that story had this “flicker of fear” in their eyes. Maybe it’s not a fear of being murdered, but there’s still fear there, and humiliation. It’s kind of a power game, right? And that group of women is so powerful together.

Yeah, and I think there’s nothing scarier than a group of teenagers, especially teenage girls. I love teenage girls as subject matter. They’re terrifying.

I am obsessed with your teenage girl stories. You have a lot of collectivity in the book, and mirroring, and this stickiness between kids. There’s that one story, “Dust Particles,” with the dad and the two girls and the creepy sunglasses, where she walks in the room and sees something she shouldn’t, and she feels her friend’s shame so deeply in that moment. It reminded me of that enmeshment we feel as kids with our friends.

So many of my [young] friendships very much mirrored romantic relationships later, where they seemed really codependent or unhealthily close. Like depending too much on one person. I love stories about female friendships that you have before you’re a fully fledged adult and the toxicity of them and also the beauty of them. We moved a lot when I was younger, but I always had a really good friend, and sometimes that friendship would end, and I’d move on immediately to the next one, and it’d feel like serial monogamy, but with friends.

I thought the grandmas were interesting figures in this collection too. The grandmas are all complicated. Were you thinking about specific people you know?

The story about my dad’s mother, “Hazel: A Diptych”—part of it is fictional, but the part of Hazel was true in that I literally did the things that the character does in the book in terms of trying to “channel” her. I don’t know if I was really channeling her. I think part of it was my imagination, but who knows, maybe I was getting something. But that’s what I was basing this half of the story on—this woman, whom I never met, who abused my dad and fucked him up and did the same thing to my uncle and my aunt, yet I had this weird empathy for her. She seemed shadowy to me. This woman I was told I inherited bipolar disorder from, who was really smart, who met my grandfather when she was having a hypomanic episode and therefore really charmed him, even though she was 10 years older than him. I wanted to know her, but there was no way for me to know her, so I decided to write about attempting to know her. There’s stuff made up on the Ada side, but the stuff on the Hazel side all came from what I was doing to try and make things appear in my head.

What did you do in your séance, if you don’t mind sharing?

I did so many different things: I did automatic writing, I did tarot, I lit a candle and stared at the candle. I tried scrying, which is when you look at water and see what’s in there. I did the same sort of thing with a crystal. I just kept trying all these different methods. I was like, “Let’s just see what happens and I’ll write down the interesting stuff.” Some of it just seemed like a fantasy of 1930s movies I’d seen, but some of it was so bizarre that I was like, “I’m definitely going to put that in the story.” Like the pickle jar thing, that was weird.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you were really channeling her.

It felt like something was happening. And my dad—I was really nervous about him reading that particular story because he seems so obviously scarred by his mother and he never talks about her. And he was like, “This felt like a gift to me because I was finally able to understand her. I really feel like you got it there.”

Wow.

I wasn’t expecting that reaction. It was cool. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of the process of writing it.

There’s a lot of empathy in that story.

I just thought, What if I was her? What if I was raped by my dad and grew up when she grew up and was expected to marry and have kids and not be on medicine. And be a housewife. Would I be like that too? Which is a scary thought.

It’s a moving and really unsettling story. I also wanted to tell you: I loved the Christian school sections. I also went to a Christian school, weirdly also named Valley Christian like the one in your book, and you captured it so perfectly. I was laughing at Jesus, the sex pervert, and being on fire for the Lord, and those horrible Christian pop songs and how embarrassing it all was. I have a question, but first, I want to make sure you actually went to Christian school.

My parents sent me there for junior high because I was getting into a little bit of trouble, and the public junior high was bad, and the Christian school was the cheapest private school. My parents grew up Catholic, but they raised me as nothing, and I knew nothing about Christianity, and I fucking hated that school. There’s nothing worse than Southern California Evangelicals. They’re the worst type of Christian as far as what I’ve experienced. It’s such a different breed from the cultural Christians I see around here [in West Virginia]. I could rant on.

I’m curious. What difference do you see?

The Southern California Evangelicals are just very sterile, and there’s a lot of prosperity gospel stuff in there. The aesthetics of it are displeasing—there’s no aesthetics; it’s boring.

It’s conference rooms and weird shopping center buildings.

Yeah, and weird lighting and weird songs. The songs are bad. It’s showy in a way that it isn’t here. Here, people just go to church, and they pray, and they don’t really think anything of it. And at the Christian school, it was like, “I’m a Christian. I’m going to go get saved again at church camp.” It’s one of the mistakes I think my parents made, sending me to that school.

That kind of Evangelical Christianity is so dishonest and hypocritical, like the way you write about how they just ignore the kid masturbating in class. You write: “They always ignored everything that mattered.” It got me thinking about how your work is like the opposite of the Evangelical Christian code of silence. Do you feel like your time at that school influenced your desire to have this cutting blade of honesty to all you write?

I think I got sick of Southern California bullshit very young. The Christian school was in seventh and eighth grade, but where I grew up was a very shiny beach community. I just didn’t like it. I didn’t relate to it. It seemed fake to me, and that fakeness made me angry. So that’s something I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about my whole life.

I know you grew up in the San Diego area. One of the things, though, that I like about San Diego in your stories is the landscape. And then when the book moves to West Virginia, it’s interesting to see that landscape too, and the cultural differences. How do you see the role of place in your stories?

Place is important in all of my work, but people haven’t asked about it for this book, so I’m glad you asked. One of the stranger things that I miss is the way that Southern California looks. During the pandemic lockdown, I didn’t go there for like a year and a half, and I had this physical longing just to see it. I have a similar feeling about West Virginia. I feel like if I left here, I’d miss the way it smells and it looks, the shape of the land. I think that the way where we are from shapes us is really interesting, and having lived in different places, I like being able to see what they have in common and what is different about them. I really enjoy thinking of place as almost a character in itself. It’s something that shapes the characters and causes their behavior to change. I also just like the natural world, and I like to describe it.

You also portray the unnatural landscapes so well. Like all these non-location locations, all of which are very Southern California: freeways or parking lots outside movie theaters or shitty hotel rooms. These all contribute to a feeling of alienation. And then surrounding that is just the breathtaking beauty of San Diego’s natural landscape, which sometimes just kind of plops itself into the stories: for example, there’s that big sandstone boulder in the middle of the road in one of the stories, blocking the character from driving where she needs to go.

What I stole that from in real life is the opposite. My friend and I were 13 years old, and there was a sandstone chunk that had fallen toward the side of the road, and we were just being shitty, and we put it in the middle of the road, which means something very different from what I wrote. I don’t know why I changed that—it’s one of those things that happens when you’re writing fiction, where you change something, and you’re not even thinking about the fact that you’re changing it.

That’s interesting. It makes me think of cause and effect in your stories. At first, I thought you were fucking with cause and effect, but then I realized you’re really showing how cause and effect is not real. So many of the characters get away with doing or thinking “bad” things with no negative consequence or even a positive consequence.

There are certain things that have happened to me, or thoughts that run through my mind, and I’m like, “That is a funny thought to have,” in that it’s just so socially unacceptable. And I imagine that other people have these types of thoughts too. Maybe they don’t note them in the way that I do and then laugh at myself in my head for thinking this horrible thing. I think that’s an interesting aspect of human nature. I still do good deeds, but I’m also a believer in “no good deed goes unpunished.”

Totally.

You go out of your way to help somebody, and it just bites you in the ass later. And I don’t think the reverse is true—that you should go around doing bad things—but I think sometimes the universe just doesn’t care. Like you do something that’s fucked up and awful, and nothing happens, or maybe something good happens, like you said. I’m really interested in the parts of us we don’t like to talk about or acknowledge.

That’s one of my favorite things about your work. As a reader, there’s this sense of recognition, and you’re like, “There I am.” I didn’t even realize I was hiding that part of myself from myself.

The complexity of cause and effect in your stories leads to this question of empathy in the stories too. In general, empathy is held up as this universal ideal, but it’s not how it really works. To be a limited human is to care about some people and not others, and your stories explore that: for example, there’s the story where the protagonist’s fellow student dies, and she doesn’t even remember him, and yet all the other students are performing their grief in a way that is irritating. She’s also on meth in the story. It made me think of something my brother said to me once he got sober. He said, “I think you have more trauma from my drug years than I do, because I was on drugs the whole time.”

That’s one thing that I find compelling about drug narratives. Drugs can shut that empathy off. Or cause empathy to act in really haywire ways that don’t make any sense. And that’s something I find puzzling about my own past behavior [before sobriety]. I’m like, “Was I a bad person? What happened there?” I don’t fully understand what happens in somebody’s brain or psyche that drugs can just kind of shut that off. And then part of it is that you just can’t control who you have empathy for, like you said. Some people perform empathy because they think that they should, and then you might have actual empathy for someone and you feel like you shouldn’t, for some reason. And I think that that’s beautiful too. It just happens sometimes—you see something or hear something and you feel for that person in a real way. And we also do this social thing where we pretend we feel things because it’s kind, even though we don’t necessarily feel them. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.