Christine Sneed loves short stories. She has read them all her life. She taught them at DePaul University for a decade, and since 2012, for the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. She has selected and edited them for anthologies and other publications. And, of course, she writes them. In 2008, her story, “Quality of Life,” was published alongside works by Alice Munro and T.C. Boyle in The Best American Short Stories, edited by Salman Rushdie. Soon after, her debut collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, was awarded the Grace Paley Prize by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and named 2011 Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association. In the last year, she’s published three books: Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos; Love in the Time of Time’s Up, an anthology of stories she edited; and Direct Sunlight, a short story collection that came out in June.
Like much of Sneed’s work, Direct Sunlight is insightful, frank, compassionate, and above all, funny. A woman finds squashed bananas under her pillow, left there by a pet monkey dressed in a T-shirt that reads “Daddy’s Girl.” A nondescript man from Queens decides to anoint himself “The swami Buchu Trungpa.” A young couple hires Judy, a “squirrel whisperer” to lure animals from the walls of their new house, wondering if she uses “a stud sensor, but for squirrels.” And yet, Sneed rarely encourages the reader to laugh at her characters (with the possible exception of the swami). More often, the ridiculousness of their situations puts their pain into sharp relief, a pain Sneed does not shy away from. “‘You think this is all very funny,’” cries Anne, who adopts Molly the monkey to compensate for multiple miscarriages. “But it’s not. This is our life!”
It was a pleasure to talk with Christine Sneed about her stories, which swept me off my feet and left me satisfied and hungry for more. We spoke on Zoom in August, a conversation I have condensed and edited.
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Kathryn O’Day: I had so much fun reading your book.
Christine Sneed: The short story has long been my favorite fictional form, and in my opinion, it’s unfairly maligned by the commercial powers that be. And I find that very frustrating, because I think people actually really like short stories if they’re given the chance.
What do you mean by the powers that be?
Publishers have sort of decided that short story collections are the poor relations in the literary world. With very few exceptions (Alice Munro and George Saunders, for example), publishers have decided they don’t really care about marketing story collections because they’ve convinced most of their target audience that they should prefer novels. Which is bollocks. I mean, Best American Short Stories is a bestseller every year, right?
It’s odd, because people these days have such short attention spans, and you don’t have to commit that much with a short story. And there’s so much delight in completing an entire story in a single sitting, although I suppose it can leave the reader a little hungry. But then, they can simply read another.
Well, Bloomsbury bought the paperback rights to my first book, which won the Grace Paley Prize in 2009. And then they published my second book Little Known Facts in 2013. But you know, when I was trying to place Direct Sunlight, they weren’t willing to acquire it. And then eventually I ended up placing it with Marisa Siegel at Northwestern University Press. It’s really difficult to sell books. Every single week, if you go into a bookstore, there are new books on the tables waiting to be picked up.
And yet you have managed to put out three books in less than a year. How did you do that?
By not selling a book for eight years! I sold Virginity of Famous Men, my second collection, in July of 2013, along with Paris, He Said, my second novel. Most of the stories in Direct Sunlight were written, I think, starting in 2014.
So, you worked on your anthology, Love in the Time of Time’s Up during the pandemic?
Yes. I was very frustrated. I’d been trying to sell Direct Sunlight and a novel manuscript. I left one agent and began working with a different one, and eventually, another agent. My thought was that if I couldn’t publish a book of my own, I would put an anthology together because a) I love short stories, and b) I really like the writers in the anthology.
I guess it helped that the unifying theme (the MeToo movement) was so timely. Which leads me to a question about current events —about the public and the private. I notice this intersection in much of your work—Love in the Time of Times Up, corporate decisions in Please Be Advised, and also the title story in Direct Sunlight, which is about a family who lost their father on 9/11.
Well, we’re all affected by corporate and government decisions and major cataclysmic events which are often political, like 9/11. But as far as the public or the private in my work, it’s not conscious—it’s instinctual, organic, which is what I hope for in everything that I write. It’s like getting into the flow of a river and letting it carry you or cultivating a seed of an idea. Usually, the seed is the title. I often have a title for a story, and subsequently, I’ll hear the narrative voice. Or sometimes I’ll get a first line. That was how I wrote poems when I was a student pursuing an MFA. I would have a title and that would spark the poem.
What about Direct Sunlight, the title of your collection?
The collection had a few different names. It was also called The Common Cold. And before that it was The Petting Zoo. But ultimately, I decided to title it Direct Sunlight. Direct sunlight can help you to see something very clearly, but it can also blind you. I like the kind of double entendre with the title. And it’s a two-word title. It’s compact and sort of sets the tone for the piece which is about looking at things clearly, or illuminating a piece of terrain: a room, a sidewalk, a street. Someone’s life, too, metaphorically.
In the title story, the theme of direct sunlight also manifests itself in the context of plant care. One character gives another an African violet as a gift, a plant that dies when exposed to direct sunlight. This strikes me as true of so many of your characters—people who have difficulty facing the truth.
Yes, it’s a kind of dramatic irony.
It makes me wonder about your relationship to your characters, about how much you identify with them. In your story, “In the Park,” one of your characters says that the secret to a happy life is being “easily amused.”
That’s my motto! Being amused is key to having a life that’s bearable. I listened to a fascinating podcast episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain. A sociologist was saying that she’d done some sort of study and concluded that many people stop laughing regularly at age twenty three.
At that point most people assume a certain amount of adult responsibility, right? And they also begin to denigrate humor. People who don’t seem to have a certain gravitas are dismissed. But humor is so essential to having a well-maintained psyche, because if we take ourselves too seriously, we’re probably going to be miserable. So Please Be Advised is just joke after joke. I’d say my default mode is comedy.
You can definitely see that in Direct Sunlight. Especially in “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” which is about a monkey adopted by a childless couple and “House of Paine,” about a man learning that he bought a house without full knowledge of the upkeep expenses.
If you open yourself up, if you get over yourself, you’ll see that many people are actually funny. I used to teach a class in postmodernism and satire at DePaul, but I think a problem with political correctness and cancel culture is that people are afraid to tell jokes now, because they’re afraid they’ll offend someone. It’s sad, because we need jokes now more than ever. I’m not talking about mean humor—instead, comedy in the everyday. That’s what Please Be Advised is about—the absurdity of everyday, especially as it’s seen in the corporate office.
In Direct Sunlight, comedy seems to be a way of disarming the reader. I’m thinking especially about “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” which made me laugh again and again. But then, in the end, the story felt quite tragic.
I initially thought the story would be satirical. But I soon realized the story was actually about the pain of not being able to conceive a child. Louis and his wife find Bill and Ann laughable and strange. (Because, of course, everyone else’s marriage is always stranger than your own, right?) And I also eventually realized the story was about real suffering. That was the moment of self-knowledge. Louis has a moment of self-knowledge where he sees the enormity of his sister’s pain.
I didn’t know this until I got there, though. I was in the river flowing with the story. But yes, I do think life is incredibly painful, especially as we get older. The pain piles up. My dad lost two of his closest friends in June. They both died within a couple of weeks of each other, one from cancer, the other from a lung condition. And I look at my own friends, of course—we’re still in our early fifties, but I have several friends and acquaintances who have had cancer, and they’re my age, or slightly older, slightly younger. At this age, it’s only going to get worse.
I’ve been working on a young adult novel for three years now, which is based in part on family members, although it’s not autobiographical. And I wonder, why is this such a slog? Why can I not finish this book? And I realize one of the problems is that I’m not letting myself write it humorously. That was an epiphany for me.
But if you look at stories that win awards —the National Book Award, the Oscars—comedies never win, with few exceptions—Shakespeare in Love is the only one that comes to mind. Otherwise, it’s always drama. Comedies do not sell the way dramas do. We’ve been trained as a population to privilege tragedy over comedy.
So, comedy is not just for your readers, but for you, too, as a writer.
Oh, yes.
I notice that your characters, too, tend to be quite likable.
I don’t think I write villains—not in any traditional sense. I’ve discovered this about myself—I don’t really have any characters who are awful.
The one exception to me is the swami in the first story.
Yes, he’s truly insufferable.
He drops some apple seeds on the floor and leaves his girlfriend to pick them up. And she’s supposed to be grateful because he’s hugging her! I came away feeling angry.
I’m glad you had such a specific response! That’s what I want as a writer: to have someone who responds very keenly to a specific detail. If you want to write a good story or a poem or a book or an essay, you have to be specific. Abstraction may work if you’re writing philosophy. But I have to admit, the philosophy classes I had to take as an undergrad, I found them maddening. The pleasure of reading is not in an abstract concept. “George drives to the corner market, which has a bright green awning, and there is a German shepherd tied to the lamp post, and he goes in to buy blood oranges…” If you wrote, “George went to the store to buy some things,” the pleasure is gone. We live in specifics.
This makes me think of your story, “The Petting Zoo,” which was my favorite in the collection, in part because of the specifics around time in place. The story takes place in the summer of 1995, a time I remember, and you really nailed that era. And I love your description of Chicago as “this vast, unruly grid of streets and parks, the lake hemming them in all on one side,” and how that sentence gives me the map of Chicago, but also that strange, claustrophobic feeling that Chicago can get. But I also love it for the passages about what you call the “nostalgia factor.” So, I’m wondering, what brought this story about?
The story was published, I think, in 2017. At the time, I had been reading a lot of Rachel Cusk. I love her. She has this way of writing—similar to what I was trying to do in my description of Marc’s beauty—which “charged toward her at full gallop, sword extended.” Cusk describes things in this sort of strange and beautiful way.
I can’t remember what spurred me to write specifically about that time. Maybe it was the heat wave–I might have read something about the 1995 heat wave when all those people died because they didn’t have AC. And that led to the start of the story.
I often will have a little idea, or it’ll trigger some impression or emotion. Often, it’s emotion, or longing. That’s one of the things that’s great about being a writer, like when I was first keeping a diary as a kid and I was trying to manage my unruly feelings, writing page after page about some dorky boy. And then, years later, I think about that person and write a story around him. I think we all have someone in our past, a person we had a crush on for years. What a great skill —to imagine an alternate history and live in it without ruining your life! So many people Google people from their pasts because they’re feeling lonely, but instead, I can try to imagine it and put it in a story.
Speaking of nostalgia, I loved the playlist you published for Direct Sunlight in Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes. Thinking about the songs took me to another place, which makes me wonder what role music plays in your writing practice.
I don’t play music when I write. It’s easier for me to focus if I don’t, but I do think music is a time machine, like the sense of smell. It’s a good dramatic device.
So, your playlist came after your stories, not before.
Yes, I wrote that a couple of weeks before the book came out. I’ve done them for my other books, too. Two or three other playlists, I think.
I love it when an author makes those kinds of connections with readers outside the text. Or when writers show up in their own stories—little surprise cameos. This leads me to my last question, about your story, “Wedding Party,” which is about members of a wedding, including guests, a planner, a caterer, and a psychic hired as “entertainment.” Reading the story, I wondered if the psychic was you in disguise. Her life story doesn’t sound like yours, but still, you have a similar role in the story, because you know your characters better than they know themselves.
Thank you, I like her a lot. She’s not me, but she definitely is someone I feel great sympathy for, because she actually does have a gift. She isn’t making it up. And then I end the story invoking her mother being critical and saying essentially that the psychic is a con artist. I think a lot of people have to endure unfair criticism, whether it’s from their parents or a loved one—whoever it is. But it’s unfair. And I feel she’s the moral compass of the story—she’s not necessarily unhappy, but she’s observing other people’s unhappiness in a way she can’t really do anything about her own other than try to live with it and accept it. Not very different from a Buddhist way of being where you regard the emotional obstacle, but walk away from it (figuratively speaking).
I find that sort of emotional poise enviable. I was trying to write a character who is very steady, despite all the turmoil that she herself feels internally, but also witnesses and senses, and all the people who come to her for readings or consultations. She’s kind of like the crow in the tree, but she’s not passing judgment cruelly like she imagines her mother doing, or what her mother did do when she was still alive.
She sees things accurately. Her mother sees things critically.
As I get older, I just think many people are too eager to find fault in others, and they don’t necessarily admit to their own faults. It’s not like I’m blameless either, but I do feel we’re often blind to our own. That’s a source of fascination for me, too, because I’m always writing toward a character’s moment of self-knowledge.
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Kathryn O’Day writes about work, friendship, cities, and forgotten moments in pop culture. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Pangyrus, Another Chicago Magazine, Prose Online, and TriQuarterly Magazine, and she is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. Much of her free time is spent wandering around the Cook County Forest Preserve, composing long, elaborate lists, and dreaming of the day her memoir about her former life as a high school English teacher becomes a bestseller.
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