Andrew Bertaina is a Washington, D.C.-based essayist. His recent publication, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place, unites a series of essays on relationships, parenting, mid-life, and divorce. I sat down with him to discuss the anatomy of an essay, balancing the writing life with the parenting life, and the debt he owes to Michel de Montaigne.
Can you give us a sketch of your background and your point of entry into essay writing?
I didn’t really know much about MFAs and I kind of just enrolled in one, having only written a couple stories. I decided to take a creative non-fiction class. That was the first time I’d ever written an essay or even thought about writing an essay. I just loved it. I love the classic forms—Montaigne and things like that. To be honest, I’m an off-the-wall kind of digressive thinker and the essay lends itself to that. That’s probably why I ended up comfortable there. But it took some time. Sometimes I think not knowing what you’re doing is the whole meat of an essay. You’re supposed to be answering a question that you don’t have an answer to.
Is there a difference between what you can accomplish in a short story versus an essay? If so, where do you think the main difference resides?
In a basic sense, I think of a short story as character-obstacle-change, or as an opportunity for change. There is a wide variance in mechanics as to how that might look in a short story. Whereas in an essay—at least as I’m teaching it—you have to have a question or complication that you do not have an answer to, and that you don’t need to answer over the course of an essay. That question or complication is the engine that drives an essay. I don’t think of a novel or a short story in the same way. In fiction, you might be exploring with a character, but I feel like the reader expects an arc. You’re creating this narrative so that you can actually come to a conclusion. We can argue about that or talk about that, and we should. But in an essay, I’m fine with an author being on the page and saying, “I don’t really know.” Let me puzzle over it for a while, expand your mind, and fill in some gaps. That’s the difference I think between them.
Do you have a certain audience in mind for these essays?
It would probably be a good idea if I had a better idea of my audience. I seriously just write because I start thinking about a certain topic. I’ll start thinking, “What was I up to? Why was I doing this?” Those are the essays I love. You’d assume that some of the questions you have in life aren’t strictly personal. They may not be universal, but they certainly hit a wider audience. For example, what does it mean when you have children and you’re trying to match that with an artistic career? Well, lots of people have kids and lots of people are trying to write or be artistic in some way, right? So, it kind of hits there. That’s what I’m counting on. I’m not someone who thinks, “This is an essay for people who are over forty and might relate.” I’m just kind of writing out of a sense of curiosity.
Could you expand on the debt you owe to Michel de Montaigne as an essayist?
Montaigne revised his essays over the course of almost thirty years. He would go back in and change his mind and edit. Sometimes within the same essay you’ll find him contradicting himself. I think of an essay as a conversation between you and yourself: you and your subconscious or you and yourself across time. What was I doing four years ago? Why was I doing that? You try to puzzle it out in the present. And I think he does that. He’s in conversation with himself. He’s always revising himself. He’s always contradicting himself. And underneath it, there’s a great humanity and expansiveness that emerges from it. He was drawing conclusions about people that would be aligned with modern liberal thinking. Certainly, he doesn’t have progressive views on women. But, take “Of Cannibals,” for example. He writes that everyone has their own customs and problems, and of course people have different practices. Wow, what an expansive way of thinking about humanity. It’s someone having a great conversation but all in their own head.
Do you have a favourite essay by Montaigne?
I read 500 pages of Montaigne, and I don’t even know if I have a favourite. They’re so digressive and so wide-ranging that I almost can’t point to one. I spent some time in his brain, and it altered mine. I think that’s what we want from great writers, that opportunity for change.
Are there any other major influences on your approach to essayistic form?
Borges. I think I read Borges’ collected fiction and non-fiction over the course of a few months. That changed my fiction more than my essays, but they are influenced a little though. There are many more traces of influences, and when I’m reading essays, I can sometimes find them. “Oh, that’s who I was reading. That’s who my brain was connecting with when I was writing that.” Parts of it I could realize, “I was reading Geoff Dyer when I wrote this essay” because I’m using this joke and this structure. Karl Ove Knausgård is someone who majorly influenced the back half of the book when I started going through some big life changes: marital difficulties and having children. Along with Dyer and Knausgard, Virginia Woolf’s lyricism is one of the reasons I decided I wanted to write.
How often do you come back over your essays at a later point and revise?
As Montaigne taught me, revisiting the self is essential. “Is that right? Do I still think that?” There was a recent book by an essayist, Elif Batuman, and she was describing revising herself. She had written something at seventeen, and then again at twenty-two, and then she published it at thirty. She ended up using her seventeen-year-old version of the text because she realized that she was kind of insufferable as a grad student, and by the time she was thirty she had the distance to read herself at seventeen and realize that she’d captured something. I think that’s a fascinating thing, to revisit your former sensibilities and reflect on the ways that you’re not necessarily progressing linearly.
It is counter to this whole ethos of productivity, to deny fresh, new output.
We can just continually revise and work on the same things over and over again, and that could be our life’s work. It is our life’s work. We are always revising our ideas. So why wouldn’t we be able to do it in our writing? We have the sense that we need to come up with new ideas or else we’re stale. I already feel that way. I have a certain form that I use for essays and my life is just more stable and easy-going now, which means my source material is more limited. What am I going to do if I have to turn out something new?
Do you believe that there is a strict line between satire and earnestness, or can you move back and forth between the two tones in the same essay?
I think you should be able to move back and forth between tones, and that’s certainly something that I aspire to do. My essay “Eating Animals,” for example, is both serious and playful. There’s a little in there about hunting cows, but it’s also about the nature of relationships. At the same time, there are parts about going out and hunting squirrels in your neighbourhood. And those passages are not supposed to be read in the exact same way. I like work that blends forms. I think it’s hard to do. It doesn’t always work. I’m definitely interested in it when it does.
What are your thoughts on the difference between high and low cultures? Do you feel any affinity towards one at the expense of another, or is that another thing that you think can be blended?
We could have a long conversation about what qualifies as high and low, right? We’re not even supposed to be talking about the distinction between high and low. But I have found a few people talking about it, and I certainly make that distinction in some of the films I watch and some of the literature I consume. High culture is not meant to entertain or appeal, right? It’s meant to be beautiful or to capture consciousness. Whereas low culture is not really attempting the same thing. But that applies more to fiction. The essay feels very playful to me. I naturally want to put the high and the low together in an essay. I think they can be blended. David Foster Wallace did it all the time in his essays. In fiction, I prefer high culture. But as an essayist, no. I like sports. I’m basic about liking sports. But I’ll also read my fancy book. And if I’m going to capture my version of life, it should put the two together.
Now that your children are a little older, do you still speak to them frankly about the reality of mortality and death?
It comes up less frequently. Kids go through this stage where they ask you all the time about death. Then you’re faced with it. I do speak to them honestly about my beliefs on religion and death. I am honest with them as I am in the essays. But writing about your kids as they get older is thornier. My thirteen-year-old was reading the essays, and she was like, “You didn’t like playing with us when we were kids?!” Which is not quite what I wrote at all. We had to have a long conversation about how cuts work in an essay. But I do have a frank, open relationship in terms of thinking through stuff with my kids. I wish I could sit here and say, “It’s because I’ve thought about everything.” I just have weird proclivities and when people head towards abstraction, I sometimes will forget my emotions and just try to explain the way I understand the world in a way that can sometimes be a little removed or frank. Having children who are interested in those topics brings those topics down to their most basic level. You couldn’t have a philosophical or theoretical conversation with a child about death. You have to sort of say, “It’s going to happen to all of us.” Which is comforting to be able to say, in some ways. It’s not a surprise. It’s coming for all of us. Which is frank, but also a weird comfort.
Do you feel that writing about mortality and death is cathartic, that it assuages our ingrained terror in the face of death? Is it something you write about more compulsively or because it interests you?
I think the latter. Writing is nice because I can use all the aspects of my brain to pull things together. So, it makes me feel better, but I think I mean “better” in the sense that I’m using a lot of my brain. I certainly don’t finish writing an essay and think, “Great, I’ve resolved that issue.” Instead, it’s just what my brain is hung up on. Maybe it’s not cathartic. It’s a slight relief. It’s letting a little bit of pressure out, to say, I’m thinking about this stuff.
Can you unpack the title, of this collection The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place?
When I think about the body as a gathering place, I’m thinking of all the organisms and things that we’re all made up of. I’m thinking about the self across time, with children, with romantic relationships. All of these different relationships with the people that we’ve impacted. I’m thinking about it from Buddhist light perspective, of the self being something that’s transitory, including the emotions that move through us. To me, it gets at all these different ways that I think about the way that a self is constructed in the world but also constructed moment-to-moment. And of course, per our previous conversation, the way that it is temporary. And then it’s gone.
You express disappointment over the trajectory of your life in terms of your accomplishments. What would success look like to you?
I feel like I am more relaxed now than I was when I was writing these essays. At the time, there was a ton of upheaval in my life, and the essays end when I started to resolve things (to the extent that I resolved anything, as life remains perplexing). I think for a long time, I felt like I was spinning my wheels. I was constantly wondering, what am I doing? I wasn’t achieving anything as an artist. I felt unsettled in my first marriage. Things didn’t seem quite right. I didn’t feel like I was as good of a parent as I wanted to be. I felt that I was falling short in every facet. It’s not that I’ve done that much more. I’m just at peace with that now. I’m like oh, I probably won’t do much more. That’s okay. It’s more just adjusting my perspective about it than being as agitated as I was for a long time. Very unsatisfied. And that kind of comes out in the essays.
Anything new that you’re reading that you’re excited about?
I just picked up Compass by Matthias Enard, The Long Form by Kate Briggs, and Jon Fosse’s Nobel acceptance speech. And then I loved Sheila Heti’s new book. The Alphabetical Diaries. Fitzcarraldo is definitely a press that I’m routinely reading. I love the way they put together their editions and they have some really special authors.Their sensibility fiction-wise is what I’m interested in at this point in my writing life. I feel like they have such openness and fascinating writers. The American scene doesn’t have as much room for that in fiction. Or at least hasn’t found a lane for that.
You’re not the first person to express that frustration to me with what’s going on in American publishing.
I shouldn’t have to go only to Fiztcarraldo for deeper, fuller, richer versions of life. It feels like American publishing is all about what they can sell. And that’s the only bottom line. I get it. You have to sell books. But it feels too much that way these days. Yes, if you love an author and love their sensibility, you’re not necessarily going to make money off of it. But you should still take a chance on it if you think it’s beautiful or interesting. I think American publishing, where I’m looking around at least, does not feel like they’re too into that. They’re trying to find a way to still bleed some money out of this thing.
How did this particular collection of essays come together?
I sent my editor, Michael Wheaton, a bunch of essays and he made a book out of it. I probably have about 200 more pages of essays. They’re different in that they’re a little bit more outward facing. There’s an essay about my mother, and there’s an essay that’s more explicitly about my daughter. He shaped it into a direction that was more about me intersecting with these themes. That’s how it came together. I didn’t have a strong sense of the way that it was moving. He was honestly just a good editor. I give him credit today. I really appreciate the time that it took to read through 200 more pages of essays and find the heart of it.
Is there a favourite essay of yours in this collection?
My favourite essay is probably On Trains and it’s because that’s where I discovered the ability to riff on a subject matter. What does my brain want to do with trains? How can I bring in a research element if I want to? And I feel like it opened something up for me, where I was like, okay if I want to keep writing essays, I have to find other topics. The self, though it’s always regenerating in some way, is not enough. Not enough things are going to happen to me in my life to always use that as the jumping-off point.
Are you working on anything new at the moment?
I have one collection coming out next year. It’s all flash fiction, which I wrote when my kids were young. I wrote a lot of flash because I just didn’t have time. I need to polish those. I’m always writing, but I never know when my brain is going to seize on something and be interested in it. I’ll go weeks without writing anything focused and then my brain will be interested. I just finished an essay that’s similar to the essays in the collection about a trip that I took to Slovenia and Croatia. For whatever reason I started wondering what I was doing there four years ago. I didn’t remember. And that was my point of entry into the topic. I’ve always just followed my interests, which is probably a bad thing.
The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place is now available from Autofocus Books.
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. You can find more of his work at andrewbertaina.com, on his Twitter at @andrewbertaina, and on Instagram @andrew_bertaina
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her Substack. Instagram/Twitter: @monalisavitti.
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