Clare Sestanovich’s Shelf Life

Clare Sestanovich, named a ‘5 Under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022, is the author of the story collection Objects of Desire, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Harper’s Magazine. Ask Me Again is her debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

How and where are you?
I’m in Brooklyn, where the thermometer—that is, my phone—reads ten degrees. To New Yorkers, that’s a big deal. In addition to telling me the actual temperature, my phone also tells me what temperature it “feels like.” I’ve always wanted to know how this second, illusory number is arrived at. I presume there’s an algorithm, as there is for everything these days, but I prefer to imagine the meteorologists engaging in a bit of metaphysics. What does it feel like?

What are you reading at the moment?
The first two books I read this year were The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas (published last June) and Audition by Katie Kitamura (to be published this April). Substantively, they don’t have all that much in common, but I became fixated on one superficial similarity: the characters in both novels eat pastries seemingly all the same. Savas’s story takes place in an unnamed city that sounds a lot like Paris, so her protagonist is regularly popping out for what I can only imagine is the ideal croissant. Kitamura’s narrator starts every day with a trip to a West Village cafe for a bag full of treats. There’s some larger significance to this decadent breakfast fare—the couples in both books make the meal into a kind of marital ritual—but I suspect my interest in this detail is far more prosaic: I’m envious! My daily cereal tasted especially dull while reading.

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
I’m terrible at watching TV: I can never pick a show from the zillions on offer, and finding the necessary keys to the streaming castle—I have no logins of my own—is another gauntlet I can’t face. So it was particularly momentous when I watched not just a few episodes but the whole first season of “Severance.” Now, after a three year hiatus in which I failed to complete a single other show, the second season has landed. My anticipatory excitement feels sort of old-fashioned, like a throwback to the era when we all had to wait to watch our favorite TV. This all might be the set-up for a very big let down, but for now, I’m enjoying the suspense.

What did you read as a child?
Just about any book that wasn’t “for children.” I’d gotten the sense that those books—for so-called early readers—were somehow not as real as all the other books. And I wanted reality! I probably subscribed to the foolish logic that if I read like an adult, I could be an adult. Of course, now I do the former all the time, and the latter still eludes me.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
I could never name them all, or be precise and effusive enough about my debt to them, but here’s a very specific lesson I learned at the end of working on Ask Me Again. One of my favorite books in the world is Housekeeping by Marilynnne Robinson. Its influence is all over my own work, in some ways I’m aware of and probably in many others I’m not. I happened to be teaching the novel as I was reviewing copy edits on the manuscript, and though I’ve read the book many times, this time I found myself newly attuned to something about Robinson’s style that I’d never properly clocked before: she’s absolutely unafraid of repetition. I lost track, for example, of the number of times she uses the word “ordinary.” Part of why it jumped out at me is that repetition is something I can become absolutely fanatical about when I’m reading and rereading my own work, as if by scrubbing my prose of any redundancy, I can finally make it truly “clean.” But as a reader, the wrong-headedness of this couldn’t have been clearer. In a masterpiece like Housekeeping, repetition is a feature not a bug of the novel’s design, a prosaic patterning without which the thematic scaffolding of the book wouldn’t stand.

What's the worst review you’ve ever received?
I think the only truly bad reviews are the ones that you could have written yourself—the ones that voice your own doubts. That kind of criticism makes you feel you should have revised longer, tried harder, been better. It makes you believe you could have done things differently, in a way that unanticipated criticism doesn’t (at least not in quite the same way). And of all the unpleasant things bad reviews can make you feel—anger or shame or fear—I think regret may be the worst.

Tell us a little about your creative process.
I wish I could say that I get lightning bolts of inspiration and stay up all night writing, but the truth is much less glamorous, much more dutiful. I get up early, I drink coffee, I sit down at my desk, I pull the shade so I don’t get tempted to stare wistfully out the window, I start typing. I’m a big believer in routine. If I write every day, I end up writing quite a lot. The days add up. If I only wrote when I felt like, or when I had a brilliant, burning idea, I don’t think I’d ever write at all.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I’m quite private about my work. I don’t like to show it to people, I absolutely hate talking about it. And so the very premise of publishing, to make a private thing public, makes me a bit queasy. I want it to happen, of course—and I’ve been very lucky that it does—but I don’t really want to think about it happening. And so among the many minor and major miracles that my publishers have achieved, one that I am endlessly grateful for is their ability to help me bridge this gap between the internal and the external. They do this in a million different ways: they edit the book, they copy-edit the book, they print it in an elegant font, they put a beautiful cover on it. Even the most tiresome thing they do—ask me to read it a dozen different times—is not only essential but truly magnanimous. By the time I’ve finished the last read, I can’t wait to do exactly what I’ve most feared: let go of it.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
It’s advice that Martha Graham gave Agnes de Mille at a time of great doubt. She said: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open… No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

What are you working on right now?
Today I’m writing a short story. I’m trying to fit a lot of big stuff into the small form, which is always the challenge of short stories. The challenge and the reward. So far this one is about civil disobedience and marriage and psychiatry and the power of the mundane. I’ve already written a scene with a pastry!