![](https://www.nereview.com/files/2024/04/Marianne-Boruch-courtesy-of-David-Dunlap-8a74431792970490.jpg)
Photo of Marianne Boruch courtesy of David Dunlap
Staff reader Megan Howell speaks with NER author Marianne Boruch about close listening to your protagonist, drawing inspiration from maternal figures, and her story “The Empty Child” from NER 45.1.
Megan Howell: Throughout the story, the third person narrator never refers to Mrs. Thompson by her first name, which remains a mystery. Conversely, we get the first name of her friend Janet, a side-character, but not her surname. Why refer to the main character in such a formal, distant manner while simultaneously delving so deeply and so intimately into her past?
Marianne Boruch: To be honest, Mrs. Thompson—the main character—just never told me her given name! That may sound odd but in fact writing that story—the first of many about her—was fully mysterious to me. She became intensely real—still is. (Do most fictioneers feel this way?) I just went along with it, knowing nothing about story making. (My son, Will Dunlap, writes fiction in our family, and beautifully so, and has for years). Though several books of my poems have appeared over decades, and prose too—collections of essays, even what I call a we-woir, my memoir as generational as it is personal—I’ve never attempted honest-to-Zeus fiction. Until Mrs. Thompson. The truth is she jumped into my head uninvited during lockdown and started thinking out loud. And I began to laugh.
I found her wildly funny, her arch obnoxiousness unruly and tidy, by turns. I also discovered how playful she is, loving words for whatever weird reason, and her quirky knack for metaphor. She’s a patchwork quilt. She IS old and feels that—and does not feel it too, at the same time. A long life does confuse things. As for that “Mrs.” business . . . A bit older than I am, she expected from me the respect that adults demanded of kids in the 1950s/early 60s: no first names. But that approach allowed my narrator the distance required for irony, amusement, even empathy. I know real fiction writers have a category for this roundabout nevertheless straightforward way of telling; I’ve forgotten what it is. In any case, that entry gave me a lot of tonal room to complicate Mrs. Thompson. And that voice came easily, from the get-go. I just sat back and let it fly.
I had no plan. (I’m figuring all this out now, in retrospect). At the time I was merely writing like a clueless person playing clock chess, one sentence triggering the next, trying to keep up with her crazy thoughts. Such fun really. As I like to say about the other stretch of narrative prose I’ve done, my we-woir, The Glimpse Traveler: wow, free beer! But sobering too. The process did resemble how poems come. There was that crucial similarity: the attention, the care, the close listening, the sweet timeless on-the-spot of a step-by-step doing. In short, a pleasure far away from the medieval pandemic raging outside as I wrote.
MH: When I started reading your piece and encountered the titular “empty child,” I assumed that Mrs. Thompson had come up with this concept of empty children on her own. However, at the very end, while gossiping about the girl with Janet, Janet says, “Empty is as empty does,” and Mrs. Thompson reacts the same way I initially had during the opening scene: “What is that supposed to mean?” What does it mean to be “empty” for Mrs. Thompson? Is it just a catchy insult? Or an idea that’s lingered in her head before the events of the main storyline?
MB: Surely part of her obnoxiousness is that Mrs. Thompson is quite judgmental, as older people do tend to be, especially about the young. But she worries about the state of the world in a larger sense too and likes to muse many things into the long dark of possible empty. For what end? I’m not sure. A self-protection on autopilot? Or for solace, company, her smartypants/above-it-all conviction where she puts her sadness and shock and abrupt discoveries? Finally, her shrug? Then her outrage as her friend Janet—and her daughter—push back.
She’s rather nonstop at this, her brain constantly redefining by digression, a metaphorical way to understand whatever, which seems more akin to how poets figure out most things. I began to see her as a female Walter Mitty figure, her mind washing up on shore all kinds of debris and sometimes treasure. “Only connect” after all. But she doesn’t always connect. Still that “empty” business seems to her a way to see the world these days and it was clear to me from the start she convinced and amused herself this way. In “The Empty Child” she lands on movie stars as a particularly obvious source of emptiness, and the child-as-thief a variation on that theme, but even that changes. Where she goes in her head is sometimes right off the cliff though that doesn’t seem to bother her. (See how much fun she is? She really did keep moving off on tangents, often into backstory, and cracking me up! I never knew where she would go next.)
More about her friend Janet: the end of that story is the first time I heard her speaking. She was great fun too. A kind of classic Eeyore get-a-grip voice-of-reason presence—though not always—for Mrs. Thompson from then on.
MH: Most of Mrs. Thompson’s complaints are ostensibly about the modern era and how much worse she thinks it is compared to the past. Health trends, cheesy graphic design, shoplifting teenagers, technology, inflation, so-called political correctness. However, upon closer inspection, the narrative makes it clear that there isn’t that much of a difference between her childhood, her mother’s, her daughter’s, or even that of the empty girl, whom Mrs. Thompson reimagines as a provincial Dutch girl “in some forgotten century.” If the current zeitgeist isn’t the true source of Mrs. Thompson’s misery, then what’s actually causing her discomfort with the world?
MB: Part of it must be age, just getting older. She is aware that she’s mostly ignored, written off, misunderstood as an older woman. Certainly the “empty girl” couldn’t care less, and the guy in that store hiring old people for greeters had clearly mixed her up with someone else, which she grimly realizes. Is she really like everyone else? That would be a stab in the heart to her. She IS forgetful—why was she shopping anyway, and where in the world did she park the car? All these are clues to her growing bafflement. So a certain archness and a drummed-up sense of herself as heroic become necessary to get through the day. Under all that nonsense, she is quite vulnerable. As the stories kept coming, she did begin to reveal more to me about herself. Thus my continuing fascination with her.
MH: At first, readers only learn of Mrs. Thompson’s past through her many complaints. However, as she continues to follow the “empty child”—a random teenage girl—through the grocery store, her complaints turn into almost Proustian reflections on her own life, her past, and her and her late mother’s shared penchant for cottage cheese with peaches. What about the empty girl triggers Mrs. Thompson’s reflection by the end of the piece?
MB: I’m not sure. I’m just a pawn in her game, after all (to work to death that cliché). But it was really interesting to draw in quirky bits from my mother and grandmother’s lives, even my mother-in-law’s. And add what I recall from my own. (That peaches thing was true about my mother, though walking home for lunch from catholic school each day, I always stuck to my toasted PB sandwich as we settled in to watch the soaps on our tiny TV.) Then there was the stuff I could just make up that never happened at all! Lucky for me the women in my family these last three generations mostly had a zany side and loved to report the curious details of the lived world—shaking their heads outraged, rueful and delighted. I got to indulge those memories, mix them up, watch them seed more.
It turns out that now I notice things and wonder what Mrs. Thompson would think of this or that. The recent eclipse, for instance. The huge deal in Indiana about that—porta-potties, say, magically appearing in parking lots of the Dollar General. Or, my God, in cemeteries too (so indecent!, she’d say) to anticipate the crushing crowds coming from afar to look up. And possibly how her first dismissive Really. I mean, why bother? might change and reflect back the diamond and part of the rim, what little light will never get snuffed out under all that dark.
Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment among other publications. Her debut short story collection Softie is forthcoming with West Virginia University Press in November 2024.
Marianne Boruch has written eleven books of poems, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); four essay collections, including Sing by the Burying Ground (Northwestern University Press, 2024); two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011) and, forthcoming, The Figure Going Imaginary, made of notes taken in Gross Human Anatomy (the medical school’s “cadaver lab”) and a Life Drawing class, an experience that triggered poems in her eighth collection, Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Among her honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships/residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), and Fulbright Scholarships (Edinburgh and Canberra). Boruch went rogue and emeritus in 2018 after teaching at Purdue for thirty-three years. She recently returned from two winter months in Budapest where she was a fellow/artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, researching that city’s Roman ruins and writing a long poem about the experience. “The Empty Child” is her first published story.