INTERVIEW: Sylvia Brownrigg, Author of The Whole Staggering Mystery

Interview by Michèle Dawson Haber

In the expected evolution of families, parents pass on their ancestral stories to their children, showing them they have a place on the continuum of family history. Of course, this doesn’t always happen, and children adapt, not knowing that anything is missing. But sometimes, as was the case for Sylvia Brownrigg, a family narrative emerges later in life and its arrival is received as a precious and extraordinary inheritance. The Whole Staggering Mystery (Counterpoint; April 2024) is that story. It is a memoir of fathers lost and found, and of children rebuilding bridges burned by their own parents.

Beginning with the fluke discovery of a box of letters and documents curated by her great-grandmother, Sylvia learns about the exotic life of her English grandfather, Gawen, who died a mysterious death in Kenya before he could establish any kind of relationship with his son, Nick. Young Nick, taken to America by his mother, is told almost nothing about Gawen, and later when he becomes a father himself, an early divorce followed by his retreat into the California redwoods to live off the grid prevent him from establishing much of a relationship with Sylvia and her brother. The mementos from her great-grandmother’s box highlight the parallels in the lives of these two men and inspire Sylvia to tell their stories, retying the threads between fathers and their children.

As an established novelist and children’s author, Sylvia never imagined herself writing a memoir, yet she feels compelled to preserve her family’s story, so it’s never lost again. Rallying her tenacity, memories, and imagination, Sylvia decides she doesn’t have to choose one genre over another. The Whole Staggering Mystery is a singularly inventive memoir that combines a nonfiction account of Sylvia’s encounter with her new-found family knowledge with the recreation of her father’s and grandfather’s lives through short stories of varying lengths and styles. It is a bold move.

After finishing the book, the stories — both fiction and nonfiction — stayed with me, as did the characters. It all felt exactly right, as if she couldn’t have told it any other way. I was eager to talk over my impressions with Sylvia when we sat down over Zoom a few months after the book’s release. Our conversation about craft, genre restrictions, and identity was delightful and underscored my admiration for Sylvia’s ingenuity.

Michèle Dawson Haber: Congratulations, Sylvia, on publishing this fascinating and inventive family memoir. This book begins with the mysterious arrival of a box of letters and mementos prepared by your grandfather’s mother fifty years prior and addressed to your father, Nick. When did you know that the contents of this box would grow into a book and how long did it take to write?

Sylvia Brownrigg: There was a gap between our being aware that there was a package addressed to our father and our actually opening it about four years later. The package was discovered in Los Angeles at my mother’s family home, and it was not clear why that (clearly very old) package ended up there. My brother and I presented it to our father, and he took it home with him. Left to his own devices, I’m not sure our dad would ever have opened it. But as his cognitive state declined and he was a little more suggestible, my brother and my stepmother got him to agree to let them open it. It contained a scrapbook with a trove of letters and photographs and documents pertaining to his father, Gawen, whom he had never known, and his whole English family about whom he had told us virtually nothing.

There was so much in the scrapbook meticulously created by my great-grandmother in memory of her son, I couldn’t go through it all right away. I remember telling people this dramatic story, and everybody, especially writers, said, “There is your next book, it practically writes itself.” Well—it did not! Turning this clearly very cinematic/novelistic moment into an actual book wasn’t easy. It took me about five years once I started writing, after my father died in 2018.

MDH: The sections about Kenya and England in the 1930s are so detailed and compelling—it is clear these sections required an extraordinary amount of research. Can you tell me a bit about the process of researching the book and what you might have done differently (or less of) if you had to do it again?

SB: That’s a great question, because, as you know from your work, the balance of research and writing is a difficult one to maintain. I’m mostly a novelist, so I’ve done research for some of my other books, but I’ve never written historical fiction. At first, I thought I’d write a historical novel about my grandfather, Gawen. I did do a lot of research with that in mind, and I had a plot worked out that involved researching pre-war Oxford, and to a lesser degree London, and reading novelists from that time — Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville-West. And then at a certain point, I realized I didn’t feel comfortable writing it as fiction, and that the real Brownrigg story was more the story I wanted and needed to tell, and that my father would be part of the story.

I began writing about my father and his kind of hippie-ish life on the ranch in the 70s and 80s, and that required internet research — reminding myself when marijuana laws changed, who were some of the other people living around there at that time, and so on. But for my grandfather’s story, I steeped myself in the British in East Africa material, and I read a lot more than what was really required. They’re the sort of stories that become so fascinating — the British characters who were around Nairobi and in the Happy Valley in the 30s and later, one or two of them my grandfather knew. It was interesting and sort of titillating, but it didn’t truly affect Gawen’s life all that much. So that was definitely entertainment masquerading as research.

MDH: What is extraordinary about this book is the way that it defies expectation and genre, approaching the story from many different angles and perspectives. Half of the book is memoir with you as narrator, and half is fictionalized. In the fictionalized parts the reader experiences the events of the story from the perspective of different characters in your grandfather’s life, and a retelling of your father’s life with you and your brother appearing as characters in his story. Can you talk about what led you to combine a variety of short fiction techniques and memoir in a single book?

SB:  For a long time while working on this book, I thought, I’m a fiction writer with those skills, and I feel pretty confident with how I turn material of people I know or things I’ve gone through into fictional stories. I don’t really know how to write about myself as myself. I remember early on speaking with a writer friend who told me very sternly, “You can’t combine the two. I’ve tried it, it can’t be done.” But I consider the strict lines around form and genre to be more about marketing than esthetics. For example, autofiction — fiction that’s mostly about yourself — people have been doing that for hundreds of years, and sometimes it’s called a novel, sometimes ‘creative nonfiction’. This book was marketed as a memoir; the publisher elected not to mention the fictionalized stories in any promotional copy.

As for how I decided to write some of the material as stories: this begins with the fact that I went from having a distant and painful relationship with my father as a child to a more open and affectionate one as an adult. That was a long journey, but I felt that if I started writing about myself as a child in a memoir voice, I wouldn’t be able to keep it from being slightly whiny and complaining. We had good times, but he drank a lot, could be really aggressive, and when drunk could say mean things. So, I didn’t feel confident that I could find a memoir voice that would have the kind of lightness and empathy that would make the stories more interesting.

In writing about my father as a fictional character, I was free to go into his sensibility. The story that encapsulates this best is the one called “The Winch,” about one of my very first trips to the ranch where he lived. It has a dramatic scene of getting stuck in a muddy ditch on a dark and stormy night, and I was pretty scared. It took about an hour to do, but he managed to winch us out of the ditch. It would have been a very different story if I’d only been in the mind of myself as a scared little kid.

It was freeing for me to also be him, and imagine him as a parent, thinking I have this problem and this kid is being kind of annoying. And then later I went back to the Gawen material, which I had narrated in a historic, essayistic form, and it was a little flat, and too stolid. So, I made a late decision, after the book had alre­ady been accepted, that I would turn that material into stories about Gawen from the point of view of people who knew him. And that was also very freeing.

MDH: Was it fun or daunting to put yourself in the persona of your father and write from his perspective? How worried were you that you might not be getting it right? In fiction, this isn’t a worry, but as memoirists we can become obsessed with this. How hard was it to balance the impulse of a novelist to portray an engaging character and the need of the memoirist to ensure we get as close to the truth as we can?

SB: That’s a really great question, because it goes to the heart of how memoirists and fiction writers think of the truth. I tend to think novelists deal in emotional truths, and that’s why novels are powerful in the way that they are. And memoirists have an obligation to stick to historical, factual truth. Having done a lot of moving of characters’ biographies around for fictional purposes, I have good instincts about how that works, and I used those when writing about my father. I wasn’t worrying, say, if he actually did have a glass of wine that day, the concern was only about not offending my stepmother and brother, and I didn’t. I don’t think there was anything I was very worried about getting wrong about my dad, because they’re based on my memories. Some details in the scenes are inventions, and that’s okay, because it’s fiction. Emotionally, the stories are true.

MDH: The excerpted letters are extraordinary, not just the ones from the 1930s, but also the ones written to you from your father including, of course, the one containing the book’s title.  I’m a big fan of including original source material in memoir to convey the essence of a character’s personality. Did you wrestle with how many to include? How did you decide what was essential to the story and what could be cut?

SB: That’s an essential question, and I doubt whether there’s just one correct answer for any given book. With any kind of massive amount of material, you have to find a narrative thread running through it, and then certain elements are going to fall away because they’re not really part of that narrative. My father wrote me endless letters, and there certainly could have been a volume of just his letters, but in that instance, my editor, Jack Shoemaker, who’s wonderful, gave me some guidance on how to pare them back. I think Jack felt he wanted the reader to hear Nick’s voice — which was funny, irreverent, distinctive — but not let the book stray too far from my own story, the one anchoring and centering the two men, Gawen and Nick

MDH: I’m interested in the idea that knowing one’s family history helps one know oneself better, and I’m wondering if this is true for you. Setting aside the years spent bringing this book into the world and all the growing that came with that, would you be the same person today if you had not learned all that you did about your father and grandfather?

SB: I love that question. You know, it’s so interesting — there’s the writing of the book, and then there’s the book coming out into the world, and some of that process is watching your story become more meaningful and available to other people, but it also comes back into my own sense of myself and who I am. I do think that the private writing, followed by the publication of the book, have made me feel connected to a family story in a way I didn’t feel before. It’s given me a feeling of wholeness that I didn’t have. It is and was very emotional to create connections where they were broken. I think that’s a bit of a theme for me in my work: staying connected and forming and keeping connections. (The epigraph to my first novel, The Metaphysical Touch, is “But how to say connected?”). It’s been powerful for me specifically in relation to my father, because he left when I was born, and I wasn’t raised by him. That was a fundamental early weak link that I spent many years thinking didn’t really matter since I had a wonderful stepfather from age seven and was lucky in so many other ways. And yet this book is a way of saying, it did matter. My dad is part of who I am, even if I did not grow up with him.

MDH: What a beautiful answer, I love that. There’s a line in your book that caught my attention and I wonder if it’s related. You write, “…it is not an accident that I am often drawn, in love and friendship, to people who are missing someone.”

SB: It is very much related. I don’t think I connected it before, although I did realize at a certain point in college that three of my closest friends were adopted. And then as years went on, many of the people I became close to are people who lost a parent early or had a very broken relationship with parents. Tragically, two close friends of mine lost their fathers to suicide.

MDH: Did you wrestle with structure as many memoirists do? For example, you don’t write a lot about yourself in the present day, your relationship with your mother and your stepfather, Philip—how hard was it to draw borders around this story? What ended up on the cutting room floor?

SB: It was a struggle all along the way to know how much of myself to put in the story. Some of the editorial decisions I made were from tact — I wasn’t going to delve into certain relationships, just to keep the story simpler. I also didn’t want it to be any kind of grievance memoir, not that I have a lot of grievances. My impulse was always to guide it more in the direction of love and connection. However, underlying this was my feeling that it was wrong of my mother and of my father’s mother to cut their children off from their fathers in the way they both did after divorce. We have two generations of that. I wrote about it in a very disguised way in my children’s book, Kepler’s Dream. I wanted it to come out in this book in a more positive way.

MDH: Who is your ideal reader? Who do you think needs to read this book? 

SB: What I’m discovering is that a lot of people, more or less my age, are thinking about their family history. People are grappling with their family stories, and often they ask, how did this person lead to that person, and then lead to me? And I think that’s why the story has this broader interest, and I’m happy that the book is finding that audience. The other thing I’m learning as the book makes its way out into the world is that it is, in a sort of implied way, also about parenting. The last line in my acknowledgments — “Here you go” — is directed at my two children. I didn’t grow up with one of these, a colorful account of past relatives, and family history; but you can.

MDH: What’s next for you?

SB: I’ve started work on another children’s book. I’ve only written one children’s book, Kepler’s Dream, which was turned into a film and mined some of the same material. That book was a fictionalized version of my paternal grandmother, an outlandish character who is in this story too. I am eager to tell a different children’s story with new characters and I’ll write that under my other writing name, Juliet Bell. I write children’s books under a pseudonym so I can have a separate authorial identity from the one that writes for adults.

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction, including The Delivery Room (winner of the Northern California Book Award) and the Pages for You series (winner of a Lambda award), as well as a middle-grade novel Kepler’s Dream, published under the name Juliet Bell, which won a Mountain Prize and was turned into an independent feature film. Sylvia’s works have been included in the New York Times’ Notable Lists and Los Angeles Times books of the year, and her short stories have been read on NPR’s Collected Shorts and BBC Radio 4.