INTERVIEW: Jonathan Corcoran, Author of No Son of Mine: A Memoir

Interview by Lara Lillibridge

Jonathan Corcoran, born and raised in rural West Virginia, writes about the messy estrangement from his mother in No Son of Mine: A Memoir, out now from University of Kentucky Press. Jonathan, who teaches writing at New York University and resides in Brooklyn, is also the author of The Rope Swing: Stories, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and a Lambda Literary Awards finalist. His essays and stories have been anthologized in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia and Best Gay Stories.

From the book description:

Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.

When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart….

Earlier this summer, I had a chance to speak with Jonathan about his creative process, writing in multiple genres, and his publishing journey; here’s our conversation which has been edited for clarity.

Lara Lillibridge: I finished No Son of Mine today and there are just so many things I want to talk about. First of all, your first book, The Rope Swing, was fiction, and I’m curious about the experience of writing fiction with similar themes before choosing to write memoir.

I want to read two quotes from this book, No Son of Mine. And the first is regarding The Rope Swing:

The book contains stories set in a fictional West Virginia town, not unlike the one I’d grown up in. There were stories about gay people and straight people, many of whom grappled with the choice to stay or go, there were details from my real life that I’d use to craft this world. But no one seemed to understand how fiction works. At all of the readings, the audience wanted to know what it was like growing up, they’re gay in that little dying town. It’s fiction, I’d start at first, but then I soon relented.

 And then the other quote, in juxtaposition is from the end of No Son of Mine, talking to your sisters:

 “I told them, I tried to write this book many times over the course of my life, but that I didn’t want to hurt her [our mother] while she was still alive.”

 So I was very curious about, exploring similar themes in fiction—perhaps it was a way to approach the material with less vulnerability? But then your mother’s death sort of catapulted you into this book, whether you wanted to write it or not.

 I think you said that writing the book was like a funeral for your mother. If you can find some sort of question in there. I’d appreciate it..

Jonathan Corcoran: It’s really interesting—I never thought I was going to be a memoir writer, or a nonfiction writer. I cut my teeth in fiction—when I learned how to write fiction, I learned how to tell stories. And I didn’t think that I was going to turn the lens on myself.

Fiction allowed me to imagine alternative worlds and alternative endings and alternative paths, which with nonfiction you’re forced to mind or confront reality. So there’s something about writing this book that feels a lot more confrontational, both personally and just with the work itself.

LL: You don’t have that ability to sort of imagine a different ending than the one you’re given.

JC: You have to make sense of the ending that you’re given in your own life, and the story of the lives around you. It’s a wholly different process than short fiction, or fiction in general, which allows you to imagine and mold and change the world around you.

LL: You write a lot about uncertainty and memory, which is again, something that’s different in nonfiction. And in one place you wrote about a stolen photo album, and finding a photo in it that seems impossible based on your remembered timeline.

And you wrote, “I began to distrust my own memory, I begin to ask myself, if I can’t trust my own recollection of events? How am I ever supposed to make sense of what happened to us?”

And further on in the chapter, “was I wrong about everything?”

And that, to me, is a question that I’m asked so often when I teach: if you can’t remember things, how can you write about them? If you can’t trust your memory on this one small thing, How can you trust your memory on the big things?

I appreciated how you confronted that in your book and how it felt very much like I was watching you write this book as I read it—watching you struggle on the page.

JC: I think I’ve learned the importance of sticking what you do and don’t know on the page as much as possible. At first, to allow people to understand that you’re telling a story from a singular perspective, which is the way you’ve seen the events or felt events. That word felt comes up for me when I think about memory, because I think writing this book was about processing my mother’s loss and trying to figure out what happened to us, which was realizing that memory was inextricably tied to feeling right.

And so the memories I had of my mother in our relationship and the things that happened to me, while not all of them, were crystal clear, in my mind, the feelings were.

LL: Right.

JC: And so writing about memory for me is approaching writing about how it felt or how it felt to me then—it’s like you’re staking your current self against your past self. I think that when I think about memory, it’s clear that no two people have the same recollection of events. And so it’s important to state what you do remember, but also what you felt. And to let people know that this is where you’re coming from..

LL: Yeah.

JC: I had an interesting experience recently, which was that the book is started shipping and printing early. And my sisters both read the book, and I just heard from them.

 LL: Yeah?

JC: I was so scared, because they had individual relationships with my mother, right? They had individual relationships with my mother, sometimes fraught, and sometimes wonderful.

The conversations I had with my sisters were wonderful and meaningful, and I realized at that point that just putting my memory on the page created this bridge toward understanding each other in a way that we hadn’t always before.

And they said to me, I didn’t know these things happened. And so even the things that you think that people in your lives are aware of, their memories also don’t work the same way as my memory. So I’m helping them see the world the way I saw it.

Something that was really moving to me was to have my sisters read that and say, ‘I didn’t know these things happened, and it was meaningful for me to read this.’

By them reading my account of this events, they’ve had access to a part of my life that may have been hidden from them in some ways. Also, they didn’t say to me, that didn’t happen. So it was really nice—shocking to me actually—to have them read this and they didn’t call me out for something not happening the way they remembered it, which I thought was really gracious of them.

LL: Right, right. Because, you know, people do remember things differently. And there was an age gap too, wasn’t there?

JC: My sisters and I were spread out roughly like seven years apart each, so there are 14 years between my oldest sister and I. She’s almost like an aunt figure at times.

LL: And how neat that they were interested enough to get ahold of your book on their own and read it, as opposed to you begging them to read it or sending them an advance copy. the fact that they took the initiative to me just speaks highly of them.

JC: It was sweet. I actually did send one of my sisters a copy, but she had already ordered and received it. And so she was like, ‘I didn’t think you were going to send me a copy, but I really appreciate it, and I just read your book.’ So it created a lot of openings with my sisters.

LL: That’s the ideal situation—so many of us are terrified of our family’s response. It’s really great to hear a story where it turned out better than our fears.

JC: Yeah, no kidding. I’ve probably spent the year of waiting for this to come out into the world just terrified of when they were going to get this book.

LL: Nice to have that over with now!

JC: It’s a smooth sailing for me here.

LL: I also want to talk about your writing process, because I think it’s neat how you talk about the act of writing in this book. At one point, you wrote about going to a pocket park, and writing on your on your phone’s Notes app, and you wrote,

 “I’ve become fond the little yellow notepad that comes standard with iPhones, like the little park itself, there’s a comfort in the smallness of the screen, I sit on a bench and I pull up the yellow notepad. And some days I type whole memories, whole chapters.”

 I found it interesting because I can never write on my phone. It needs to be my laptop, Microsoft Word, the blue bar at the top.

 In another point, you wrote that,

 “I tell myself I need to look presentable to sit down and write this. So I gather my most professional clothes and lay them in a neat pile on top of the toilet. I grabbed the Wahl clippers, every day that I tell myself more of the story, I pretend that I’m going to work.”

Can you talk about your writing process? And your reflections on writing itself?

JC: Yeah, this book was really different for me and how I wrote it. The writing process was a huge part of it. I woke up one morning, and I said, ‘I’m ready to dive headfirst into this book. I teach, and I found myself luckily with a summer with no teaching commitments, and so it was just a blank slate of a full three months with nothing on my calendar, which felt amazing and terrifying.

So I sort of woke up and I made this plan that I was going to start end of May after my semester ended and just write. I realized this was also coming out of COVID and we’d all been stuck in our homes for so long. And I had to I really had to sort of transform my environment to make it feel like I was breaking out of habits.

When I want to sustain writing, I both have to I have to create new habits, but I have to break out of old ones too. So every morning I would get dressed, put on the nice clothes, you know, and I would sit down to write this book. And initially, it came out really quickly because I think, with some books, we have parts of the story that are just exploding out of us. There are parts of the story that we, need to get out as quickly as possible in order to move forward.

I would say about halfway through the book, I realized I was becoming trapped again by my own patterns. And so to get new perspective on the book, I did have to get up and get out of the house, and write on a different utensil in a different location. That allowed me to see new perspectives for parts of the book that were challenging me. And so I wrote most of this book on Google Docs.

I live in this 400-square-foot apartment. I’ve converted my foyer, which is the entryway which doubles as my writing room, my shoe rack, my coat rack, it’s all of these things. And I got one of those Shoji screens, and I unfolded it so that my husband could walk back and forth. And I couldn’t see him unless he had to leave the apartment. And then I had to get up and move. I did that every day.

I sat in this little tiny square space, and I would write for about four or five hours straight. And then I about halfway through the book, I had to switch my routine up to access things that I wasn’t able to access in that space.

When I went to this park, there was something freeing about sitting on a bench watching people and realizing that I couldn’t type quickly. I could only type slowly and I had to sort of sit with these memories of the story. And so parts of this book were written sitting on a bench, simmering on a memory staring at my little iPhone and staring at people in the park. It just opened up something new in me when I changed the medium itself that I was writing.

LL: I like that idea that if you’re stuck to try something different. And I would imagine that writing on my phone would be more concise. I’m an over writer who has to go back and cut a lot. And when it’s that much work to write something, I would have to consider my words perhaps a bit more carefully.

JC: I remember how these scenes that were composed on the notepad sort of came into existence. And it was because it’s such a small screen. And because you’re sitting there, it’s almost like you’re jotting down in a notebook, right? And so I would type literally a word or a memory, or a sentence. Sometimes it would be something that my mother had said to me, like it would be a line that I just have in my head.

I was sitting in the park, and I just started writing a word and then another word, and then another word, and then each of those words turned into a sentence and then each of those sentences turned into a memory. And because the iPhone can sort of flow back and forth in a way that I can’t do on a typewriter. The iPhone also allowed me to sort of expand these tiny things into larger things. So yeah, there is something about the medium there’s something about changing the medium and to gain a new perspective and new access into old memories.

LL: You also talked a little bit about feeling like ta gay evangelist going on your book tour for The Rope Swing. I think is hard when you’re one of the few people that represents in literature, a small minority. It’s easy to feel like a poster child. How have dealt with that when you were selling the book? You know, is it an Appalachian story? Is it a queer story? Is it a grief story? I feel like how we picture our audience influences how they market our books.

JC: I had a really hard time with that. Because the book is all of those things. It’s a grief memoir. It’s a memoir about coming into your queer identity. It’s also a memoir about intergenerational trauma and what it means to be a woman in America at a particular time and place.

I am lucky in that I found support across all of these groups. This book made me realize that despite my hard times, growing up in West Virginia, some of the first people to come to my rescue were the people from my small town who loved me and cared for me. And likewise, I found a really strong new chosen family outside of West Virginia. And I think the third thing about this is that I left home—I guess it’s almost 20 years ago now. I have gone back, but when I go back, I realized that I’ve frozen this place in time and memory. I’ve had to learn how to view that place with a fresh set of eyes. And when I’ve done that, what I found recently is there actually is this beautiful, flourishing queer community rising up in rural areas. There’re all kinds of great authors who are writing these lovely challenging works in ways that I don’t think I ever would have even allowed myself to write about the place.

But I see these lovely resilient communities on the ground now, and I’ve been getting to know some of these people and that’s also been a healing process to see hey, these are the people who stayed and fought to make this place what they wanted it to be. That’s been an amazing experience for me.

LL: Any last thoughts as we end our official interview?

JC: I guess my last thoughts are that I have been feeling extremely supported by the community I’ve built up over the years of other writers and readers. And I think it’s so lovely as a sophomore book to realize that all the hard work you’ve put in early in your career supporting other writers and getting to know other writers and nurturing readers and getting to know your readers does pay off in dividends over time. And the release of this book feels like a celebration—like I am being celebrated by people who I’ve met across all stages in my life and career, and it’s just wonderful.

LL: That’s such positive, happy way to end.