INTERVIEW: Jesse Lee Kercheval, Author of French Girl

Interview by Diane Gottlieb

Jesse Lee Kercheval has a new book out! An award-winning writer of essays, the book length memoir Space, lots of terrific prize-winning fiction and translations, and several wonderful poetry collections, the most recent of which is I Want to Tell You, Kercheval had done it all! Or so I mistakenly thought.

Her newest book is a graphic memoir, her story told in few words and lots of pastel drawings. It’s called French Girl, and it is, in a word, extraordinary!

It was my great pleasure to speak with Kercheval on Zoom about drawing—her newest love—the freedoms that writing graphic memoir present to the author and the reader, and the power of love and light in the face of trauma.

Diane Gottlieb: Jesse Lee, I know you as a beautiful poet and essayist, and now I have to add beautiful visual artist to the list. How and when did you come to drawing?

Jesse Lee Kercheval: Very late. It’s the gift of the pandemic. One good thing out of something very bad. I had gone to Montevideo, Uruguay with a semester of grant to work on a book with a poet friend of mine. I’m also a Spanish language translator, and this was an anthology of Uruguayan women poets.

Then in March, 2020, the first COVID cases arrived in Uruguay and the country shut down. They closed the borders and canceled my flight. I was locked in a 10th floor apartment and was just losing my mind. If you remember, we were all doom scrolling through the news. I wanted to get off the computer. At that moment, everyone in America was doing the Marie Kondo thing, clearing out their house, but I was in a rented apartment with four pairs of underwear, so I had nothing to clear out.

The grocery stores were still open, so I bought some school supplies, a pack of paper and some colored pencils, and thought I would draw. I had never drawn before my life. I was the kid that when you were supposed to trace your hand and turn it into a Thanksgiving turkey, the teacher gave me an F. It just didn’t look like a turkey. But I had long days to fill and thought, “Sure, why not?”

And it was wonderful. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I drew little monsters. I drew things outside my window. I drew my one house plant. And I kept going. When I got back to the United States, I took Zoom art classes and kept drawing. I was able to take some wonderful classes from the Royal Drawing School in London online, which is something that could never have happened before the pandemic. I just fell in love with drawing. Being the foolish person that I am, I got brave enough to turn some of them into graphic narratives. At first, lots of words and a few pictures, then fewer and fewer words and more art.

The hard part for me at first was not draw exactly what I was saying. I’m not sure if one of my teachers said this early on, or I invented this, but I had the apple-apple problem: I would write apple and then draw an apple, which is basically only okay for children’s alphabet books. My various teachers kept telling me, “Don’t draw exactly what’s in the text.”

Eventually, I got to take a semester long class in the real world with my colleague of many years at the University of Wisconsin, Lynda Barry, who’s the queen of comics. Lynda’s class helped shake that up. Honestly, her class changed the way I think the relation of writing and drawing completely. She is an amazing teacher.

For now, I’ve found that what usually works for me is to draw first and then began to get the idea of the narrative from the images, add some words, and then finish out with more drawings.

It is much more the way I write poetry. I just sit down with an emotion or a word or a line and see where it goes. I always think with a poem, if I knew where it was going, it wouldn’t be a good poem. I’ve had to learn to work that way with the graphic narratives.

DG: So you don’t sit down to write first, you sit down to draw?

JLK: Yes. Or I stand up to draw (I work at an easel with soft pastels). In 2020, when I started, I decided I would do a drawing every day. I called it my “daily sketch” even though it wasn’t really a sketch. My rule was once I started, I couldn’t tear it up or throw it away. I had to finish it, take a picture with my iPhone and put it on Facebook. People would say nice things about it because they were my friends on Facebook. And posting the drawings kept me going, learning as I went along.

Now, I can’t say draw every day. I was just in Bogotá for five days. I did not draw at all. But when I’m home, I draw. Right now, I’m working on my first pieces post-book. I started drawing based on family portraits in paintings and photographs. I think it is pulling together into an idea about what my family would look like in a portrait. There isn’t a single picture with me and both my parents. I don’t know why, but there isn’t.

I’ll write once the idea gets clearer, once the drawings show me what is there. But I do still sit down to write. I have been writing (all word) essays as well as a series of prose poems.

DG: How do you decide what kind of writing day it’s going to be?

JLK: Right now, Cassie, my publicist, has me writing essays about making my graphic memoir French Girl, which is a particular kind of snake chasing its tail—writing (all word) essays about writing (graphic) essays. But essays also have a habit of just appearing out of my everyday life. My sister called last week to tell me she was going to mail me some photographs. I was thinking of maybe a manilla envelope. But what arrived is an enormous box that’s taller than I am. So today I was thinking, “She might kill me, but I might have to write about the stuff that’s in here.” An essay. Or it might be an essay with a couple of photographs. Or an essay with drawings in it. Or maybe a graphic essay—ie mostly drawings with fewer words. And then I’ve got my regular biweekly poetry group tonight. I might come up with a poem by then or not. And I have various translation and anthology projects. I try to keep the balls in the air, but sometimes there are too many.

DG: You’ve recently retired, right?

JLK: Yes. I thought I would never retire. As the director of a creative writing program, I loved teaching. I loved building my program. I used to say, “You can’t be too senile to be a professor,” which is probably true. But during the pandemic, I just thought, “I have a lot of things I want to do. And I do not want to sit in another Zoom department meeting, like ever.” I was 64. My parents both died at 65. So I retired and haven’t had a second thought about it. Now I get to wake up every morning and do whatever it is I want to do.

DG: Do you see the pieces in French Girl as chapters or stand alones that make up a collection?

JLK: Now, I see them as a chapters. But when I started, I didn’t think I was working on a book. I thought, “Well, I’ll work on these shorter graphic essays while I’m waiting to work on a book.” I have a book called The Alice Stories, which is a novel in stories. It is stories that were published over time about the same person. When I had a chance to pull them together, I wrote a big, long novella to finish it and only then was it really and truly a book.

French Girl was written in the same vein. I started doing the pieces and sending them off as graphic essays to literary magazines, because that was my world as opposed to the comics world, though I certainly know a lot of comics people now. I would send the pieces in as essays, as if they were all words and no art, and the literary magazine editors would take them, sweet people that they are. They didn’t say, “Wait a minute, these aren’t essays.”

The pieces began swirling around this theme of my childhood, but not in the way I thought I’d be drawing a graphic memoir about my childhood. I thought I was getting ready to draw a more traditional graphic memoir (panels, speech bubbles) based on my (all words) memoir Space, which is about growing up in Florida during the moon race. But these other, less planned pieces began to form together.

When I talked with Rob Clough, the editor at Fieldmouse Press, and he said, “You have a book. We just have to arrange the individual pieces in a narrative arc.” And I knew exactly what he meant. I do that sort of thing for a living. I’ve arranged short stories in a narrative arc. I ordered the poems in my poetry collections. I spent decades telling my MFA students how their MFA thesis should work. It didn’t bother Rob that the pieces in French Girl are in different visual styles, some more surreal, some more realistic, or that they’re not in a traditional chronological order.

And so suddenly I had a book, French Girl. And I love it.

DG: What a book! Let’s talk about “The Body Is a Vessel.” It accomplishes so much in such a small space. We learn about your mother and her spunk. She named her dog Dammit!

JLK: Yes, she really did. A Boston Terrier. She always said it saved time when she had to yell, “Dammit, get off the couch.”

DG: That’s fabulous. And then we learn of her bravery. We also see and feel the lasting trauma of war, your mother’s bullet scar, the bourbon, the prescriptions to “cure her unhappiness.” The men on the ship your mother was stationed on who had lost their limbs and/or their minds.

Then there’s the gift you’ve given her by drawing her with red hair. She had told you that she wanted to be born with red hair because “women with red hair are not afraid of anything.” You also drew yourself and your dad with red hair. That’s so powerful. You telling these stories feels to me like an act of love. It also feels healing. Do you find this to be healing work?

JLK: I always find autobiographical memoir work painful, to be honest. The two books I think I’ve had contracts for before I finished them were this book and my memoir Space. And I sometimes think I wouldn’t have finished either one if I hadn’t had that pressure. But it does feel that the red hair was a way of giving something back to my mother.

DG: The piece Clocks. The dream scene, your friend wanting to work through the loss of her mother in her dream, or was it your dream? We’re not really sure. It doesn’t matter. It’s just the loss, the dreams, the tick-tocking of the clocks. It all blends together so beautifully. What are the freedoms you find working with both words and images as opposed to just one of them?

JLK: I’ll mention genre expectations first. It didn’t bother my editor, nor I think anyone who reads graphic memoir or graphic novels, that you can’t always tell what’s real and not real in that piece, even though it’s nonfiction.

You can’t tell if a little girl dreamed about walking outside into this magical world or whether that really happened.

DG: Or whose dream it was, right?

JLK: Or whose dream it was. Or if they shared a dream. If that was all in words, honestly, you’d have to say it was fantasy. You’d have to say it was fiction. I think people have gotten quite rigid about memoir. It’s like you are writing for the New York Times and every word better be a verifiable fact. Whereas in the past, people lied extravagantly in their memoirs. It was rather the point of writing one. Read The Story of My Life by Casanova.

So that’s one thing, the expectation that the reader is willing to go with me when I wander in search of a metaphorical, rather than literal truth, but also think it’s that images touch things deep in our subconscious. You draw something and someone believes in it. They really believe in it. They can see it and so it is real. They don’t say, “Wait a minute, you don’t open a door in someone’s suburban basement and then you’re out in a magical forest. It just does not happen.” The drawings make it real.

DG: Why do you think that is?

JLK: I think visual images, drawings tap into earlier parts of human history, when we told stories for different reasons. There are even fairytales in the book. One piece is based on “Little Red Riding Hood” and the other, “Once,” mentions several fairytales. Before I started drawing, I would’ve told you that I really didn’t like fairytales or contemporary stories based on fairytales or myths. And yet with this work, I realized what powerful archetypes they are, how well they still do work. They work particularly well when they’re drawn because we think of them illustrated. We all know what Little Red Riding Hood looks like. We know what the wolf looks like.

DG: Let’s talk “Wolf.” When your mother was dying, she spoke to you very broadly of trauma. I don’t know whether she did that in real life, but in the book, she trusts you to fill in the blanks, as you trust us to do the same.

Your mother turns the “Little Red Riding Hood” story on its head because in the piece, your mother portrays the wolf is the hero, the protector. When you attempt to set her straight, your mom says, “God dammit. This is my life, not a fairytale.” Did you have that inversion in your mind before you wrote the piece or did it just kind of happen?

JLK: It just happened. When you think about archetypes like fairytales, you start to think about who is bad and who is good. Was the grandmother good? Was the wolf bad? It fits families. I’m certainly not the first person to play around with “Little Red Riding Hood.” You could have a big fat anthology of that.

But I was surprised because my first impulse was to find a fairy tale that’s less familiar so I could tell it the way I want it to. But then I realized it is the inversion of something you’re so familiar with, that the wolf is the mother who’s protecting the child and the grandmother’s evil, that clicked with the true family story I knew wanted to tell.

DG: Can you tell us about the piece “French Girl” and why you chose it as the title for the book?

JLK: I’ve always thought of myself as a French girl. I was born in France. When we moved to the U.S., my parents took me to this enormous, cavernous building in Washington, D.C., to get my naturalization papers. The bureaucrat in charge said, “You’re going to be an American citizen.” And I remember quite clearly saying, “But I’m a little French girl.” Then he stamped my papers and said, “Not anymore you’re not.” So, I felt that was this dividing line between my childhood and the rest of my life.

“French Girl” tells the story of how, when we lived in Fontainebleau, France, I ran away, ran into the Chateau where Napoleon said farewell to his troops. The guards found me. When my mother came to get me, they wouldn’t give me back because she was so clearly American, and I was so clearly French.

The piece ends with the idea there is an alternate universe in which I never left the Chateau, where I’m still French. So, it is sort of fairy tale, imagining that there’s another ending altogether in which I had a different life.

DG: These are intergenerational stories with a fair share of intergenerational trauma. There’s family trauma, war trauma, medical trauma.

There are hard family dynamics and lots of loss, but it never feels like a trauma dump–ever. What stands out most is the ferocity of the love. That wolf. Your mom. That ferocity runs through all the stories. Does it feel like a love story to you?

JLK: It does. That’s the importance of “Bang,” which the last piece I drew, after I knew the shape of the book. I’d just been in Italy where I’d seen all these images of angels, all these images of Madonna and infant Jesus, all these strange babies that look like no human baby ever. This all came together in an idea I had of intergenerational trauma. When I was a teenager, one night coming back from roller skating with friends, of all things, I realized I felt like there was this black hole in my chest. I could just feel it, and I imagined my mother had felt it. I imagined it being in her mother’s chest, too.

I drew this sadness, this hereditary depression, as a black hole in the chests of all the women in my family, drawn as Italian angels, going back through time. In “Bang,” when my daughter is born, I’m afraid it’s in her chest, too. I’m afraid to look. I imagine the darkness as a tunnel going through all the women in my line, back in time, back to the Big Bang. There I see the explosion, the light, and I think, “Why hasn’t the light gotten to me?” And then I see the light come streaming through all my female ancestors, through holes in their chests, all the way through to illuminate first my daughter, then all the children.

I think that’s the love. The light is the love. And that’s what you can give. Everything else is not a given. You can be in a terrible war. You can’t protect your children from that. You can’t protect yourself from that. You can’t protect your descendants from that. But you just send the love forward. You send the light forward and you hope for the best.