An Interview with Elizabeth Gonzalez James
The first thing I read by Elizabeth Gonzalez James was a story in my Idaho Review queue called “Children of a Careless God,” which became a sensation among our readers and staff. A kind of refrain passed between us: have you read the cat story yet? We were lucky enough to publish the story in Issue 18. What we loved about the story is its ability to draw in the reader with its comic surface—it is a story told from the perspective of a pack of cats living in an apartment with their dead human—but behind all the humor, the emotional undercurrent still manages to rage. For the human understanding of these felines to spark to life on the page felt like some kind of magic. Elizabeth Gonzalez James brings this same charm to her debut novel Mona at Sea.
As the novel opens, we are acquainted with young Mona, a recent graduate who lost a dream job offer due to the 2008 financial collapse. Known as “Sad Millennial” from a viral video of her meltdown in front of the shuttered financial giant on what was to be her first day, Mona wades into the unknown looking for work, purpose, and happiness. Her frustration at not being able to attain these very lofty goals is both humorous and relatable. A coming-of-age story at its core, Mona at Sea boldly faces the pains of early adulthood—its listlessness and its overwhelming sense of loss for the what-was—but all at a comedic clip that reminds us the only way out is through.
I had the privilege to chat with Elizabeth Gonzalez James about Mona, writing, and the process of putting a novel out into the world.
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IR: We are first introduced to Mona at the job seekers event where we learn quickly about her unemployment, her viral/meme-able status as Sad Millennial, and (shortly after) her cutting. And while we meet Mona at a low point, we find the humor in her situation, in her observations, and her trappings. With both "Children of a Careless God" and Mona at Sea, you manage to take things that are disturbing, sad, and uncomfortable and find the touch points of humor. Have you always written in this darkly funny space? Did you originally envision Mona at Sea as comedic? How did the book change over time?
EGJ: I have a very twisted sense of humor, probably honed during a childhood and adolescence spent watching Ren and Stimpy and Space Ghost Coast to Coast. For whatever weird reason, I wanted to see if I could write a funny story about cutting. Initially I wanted to write a graphic novel called “Mona the Mutilator,” about a young woman who was dealing with her compulsion to self-harm by creating a comic book alter ego whose power was cutting. Except I don’t know how to draw, so that idea didn’t go anywhere. But somehow or another the story of Mona was always intended to be funny.
Dark comedy is my favorite genre, and I think I’m drawn to it because it rings very true to me. There are awful things in this world, but comedy helps us face them head on and takes the sting out of them a little bit. Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley, is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while, and it’s a film about entrenched systemic racism and worker exploitation—two very unfunny concepts—and yet it’s hilarious. It’s uncomfortably hilarious—you’re watching this poor guy get humiliated and exploited in horrendous ways—but you’re cringing and laughing because you know it’s so horribly, horribly true. That’s a great space, artistically, to be in. Where you’ve bashed your audience over the head with the ugly truth, but they’ve enjoyed it and are thanking you for it.
IR: As Mona wades through life, navigating family troubles, friendships, dating—how did the pieces come together? Did you always know that Mona at Sea was a novel? How did you approach it differently than short-form projects?
EGJ: In college I’d taken one screenplay writing class and one online short story class, and that was the sum total of my literary education before I decided to try writing full-time. In my recollection (although this is reaching all the way back to 2011) Mona was always going to be a novel. I seem to recall thinking, “Screenplays are too hard. I’ll do something easier and write a novel.” Cue the hysterical laughter. But I knew nothing about writing novels, and I was home with my newborn daughter and was not able to take classes, and so I had to learn how to do it on the fly. I taught myself by reading a lot of novels and trying to analyze how they worked, and I read Robert McKee’s Story, which is a screenwriting book, but gets very granular into scene construction and plot movement and is helpful for understanding what a story is. I like to set wildly unrealistic goals for myself, so I made a new year’s resolution that in 2011 I would finish the rough draft. I used to type chapters with one hand while my daughter slept on my shoulder. And through sheer stubbornness, by that summer I had a rough draft. It was a very bad rough draft, but it had a beginning, middle, and end, so it counts.
But then the real work began, because I slowly realized, over years of drafting, that I’d made tons of mistakes. I originally started the book with 100 pages of backstory. I had a whole digression about the melamine poisoning scandal in China. I had a whole chapter about Mona learning to knit. It was a mess. So very, very slowly and painfully, I spent years getting it into something recognizable as a novel. In 2015 I sent it out to agents and I signed with a wonderful young woman right away (who has since left the industry). Then we went on submission and no one ended up acquiring it. I put it in a drawer and moved on to other things, sending it out to contests here and there, and in 2019 I was chosen as a finalist in the SFWP Literary Awards and offered a publishing contract. Then, after all those drafts and all those years in a drawer, I had to go back into the novel to get it ready for publication. SFWP paired me with an incredible editor, Nicole Catherine Schmidt, and she helped me bring Mona to a whole new place. So the very long answer to your question is that all the pieces eventually came together through almost a decade of drafting and patiently just learning how to be a better writer. The old “butt in chair” time.
And as far as approaching it differently to short stories, I always say I wrote a pretty good novel before I wrote a pretty good short story. For me, short stories are so much harder to master. A story is a quick little jab, in and out, where you get almost no space for character development and backstory, and everything’s got to be so freighted with meaning. In a novel you can just push out sideways and back and front all you want, with almost nothing to stop you. Novels just feel so much easier structurally, although I really love writing both. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about short stories, though. I just read The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado, and her facility with the short form is just astounding to me. I need to spend some time studying her work and figuring out how she packs so much into so few pages.
IR: When we first meet Mona's brother, Danny, there is this great admission from Mona about how their parents, ``Had one Mexican kid—him—and one white kid—me. Looking at a family photo it would seem my father and mother independently budded us like hydra." I just read your essay "Sacredness of the In-Between" in the Ploughshares blog—can you talk a bit about bi-racial/ bi-ethnic tensions in Mona?
EGJ: That was difficult to write about for sure. In early drafts of Mona I left her ethnicity unspecified because I hadn’t sorted out my thoughts and I wasn’t ready to write about ethnic identity. But when I signed the publishing contract in 2019 and was getting the book ready to go out, I knew I wanted to make it clear that she is Latina. And being half-Mexican American and half white myself, making Mona also bi-ethnic created a space for me to explain a little bit of what it’s like living in that in-between space.
It’s a difficult place to be in, because when you’re biracial or bi-ethnic, other people feel that they get to decide who and what you are. I grew up on the border in Laredo, Texas, and was the only kid in my elementary school who had blue eyes. So in elementary school the other kids said I was white. Then we moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where there were a lot of white students, and there, because my last name was Gonzalez, I was Mexican. I stayed Mexican until I got married and took my husband’s last name of James, and then all of a sudden I was Elizabeth James, and I went back to being white again. I’ve had to “come out” as Latina a number of times to friends and acquaintances, which always feels super awkward. Then I also have a lot of feelings of fraudulence: I’m only half-Mexican, so can I really call myself Latina? Can I really lay any claim to that heritage? The answer of course is yes, but when you don’t look like you belong to a group, it makes laying claim to that identity really fraught. Then there’s the whole white privilege aspect of my Latina identity—because I look how I look, and because Mona looks in the book how she looks, she and I benefit from white privilege, too. I didn’t address this directly in the novel, but it’s there just the same. Although for Mona this comes out as jealousy that her brother looks more like a Mireles than she does, as well as her wishing to be taken for who she truly is. It’s…a lot. I’ll probably be seventy and still writing about this.
IR: As a debut, what has been the most surprising part of the publishing process?
EGJ: The most surprising thing for me has been learning how long everything takes. I signed the contract in September 2019, almost two years before the book came out. I had no idea how long it takes on the back end—submitting the cover, the blurbs, the e-book files, the marketing language. At one time I had a fantasy of running a small press like Virginia Woolf and Hogarth, but now that I know how the sausage is made, I don’t think that’s something I will be doing.
IR: What are you working on next? Short stories? A novel? both?
EGJ: After Mona was rejected in 2016, I started working on my second novel, a magical realism western about my great-grandfather who was a bandido. I just signed with a new agent this spring and we’re hoping to go on submission soon. So I’m firmly in the novel space for a while, but I would love to get back to writing short stories when I have a break between drafts.
IR: Will you be doing any in-person or virtual events that we can share links to with our readers?
Elizabeth Gonzalez James will be doing a hybrid tour of virtual and in-person events. The full schedule is available on her website: https://www.elizabethgonzalezjames.com/events
Here are some highlighted events. Be sure to catch her here:
July 2, 6pm PT: Virtual conversation with Janis Cooke Newman, Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA
July 6, 6pm PT: IN PERSON: Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James and The Violence Almanac by Miah Jeffra, The Sycamore, San Francisco, CA
July 13, 5pm CT: IN PERSON: Reading and Q&A The Twig, San Antonio, TX
July 15, 3:30pm PT: Virtual conversation with Galadrielle Allman, Square Books, Oxford, MS
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Before becoming a writer, Elizabeth Gonzalez James was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She’s an alum of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. In 2021 she is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog. Her first novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, June 2021, from Santa Fe Writers Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.
You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: @unefemmejames
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Jacqui Reiko Teruya received her MFA from Boise State University where she taught fiction and served as the Associate Editor for The Idaho Review. She is the winner of the 2018 Summer Flash Fiction Contest in The Masters Review and was the second-place finalist in the 2019 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize judged by Elizabeth McCracken. Her work has appeared in the Best Small Fictions 2020 and is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press). She is the recipient of the 2020 Glenn Balch Award judged by Hester Kaplan. Her work has appeared in The Masters Review, CRAFT, and Passages North. She lives in Boise, Idaho where she is currently at work on a novel.