» Interview

All We Have: A Conversation with Amy Stuber

Sad Grownups
Amy Stuber
Stillhouse Press
$16 (232 pages)
Publication Date: October 8, 2024

The seventeen stories in Amy Stuber’s debut collection, Sad Grownups, are filled with moments of beauty, dread, playfulness, and existential probing. With deft prose, Stuber captures these moods within the span of a single paragraph. The stories aim squarely at questioning the ways we live today. As she notes in the interview that follows, the collection’s title is a nod to one of the book’s major themes: how our society has an unfortunate tendency to create sad grownups.

Sad Grownups is out now.

TEGETHOFF: There are a lot of what might be called metafictional elements in these stories. Sometimes they arrive via second person, a “you” interjected that could be the reader, or possibly the writer herself. In other moments, the narrators seem to step back from the stories completely to comment on their progress. The first story in the collection, “Day Hike,” is a prime example of this, with the narrator letting the reader know that she is writing the story. Could you talk about the craft decisions that go into such moments?

STUBER: There’s a Bruce Springsteen song phrase from “Dancing in the Dark”: “I’m just tired and bored of myself.” That’s pretty much where I was when I started writing these stories. I had taken a break from fiction and done a ton of flash and had to lure myself back into stories by making them really different from what I had been doing. I may look back on them in a few years and think, Oh, god, these are gimmicky, why did I add that? But during the time I was writing them, I would finish a standard narrative and think, this needs something else, or I’d write a flash and think, this should be expanded and set beside or within another narrative.

“Day Hike” started as a flash, I think, about a writer feeling jealous of her friend’s life and accomplishments. But I was simultaneously writing another little thing about a couple going on vacation in Colorado, a place I went as a kid and where I still go once a year or so. The seed of that story was seeing a lot of strangers I passed on a hike I took looking miserable, like they’d rather be doing anything other than hiking, and then just thinking about the things we put ourselves through to feel productive and accomplished to ourselves or in the eyes of others. (I love hiking and walking, don’t get me wrong. But I’m increasingly annoyed by productivity culture, and that’s one of the things I think both threads of this story engage with.)

I did not strategically write a collection with metafictional elements, and I didn’t even realize I had until someone pointed it out to me. I was just trying to push myself with regard to what a story could be or do.

TEGETHOFF: Related to the first question, these metafictional moments seem to expose the artifice of narrative structure. It’s like you’re asking why these stories should be told in the first place. For instance, there’s this narrative passage from “Dead Animals”:

Was everything okay? Was everything going to be okay? Tell me this was pivotal. Tell me it mattered. Tell me Frida would be different and better, with a brain less full of noise and better suited to post-modernity.

What do you think these moments add? How do they modify or change a story?

STUBER: With “Dead Animals,” I wrote a fragment of a babysitter story about ten years ago. It was just a woman who was kind of a mess taking care of a kid who didn’t really need care and putting her increasingly in harm’s way. It was about three pages and never worked. I picked it up again in maybe 2019 and saw it from a totally different perspective, saw the woman’s backstory, saw how she was always questioning herself, her life choices, and I wanted to make that questioning piece into something outside the narrative, something that could almost be pulled away from the storyline. I wanted the story, all parts of it, to engage more directly with storytelling as a construct, and I hope doing so makes readers think more about building character and, ultimately, building self.

Generally, adding these other moments and elements is, I guess, somewhat for texture too: a break, a kind of chorus, something to distract or defuse for a second.

TEGETHOFF: Most of the women in these stories feel guarded but also seek some sort of validation for their existence. There’s Sage in “The Game,” for instance, who puts a piece of masking tape on her forehead to see if her husband or sons will notice, but they don’t. Elsewhere, men are more sinister, and the women seem creeped out or exhausted by their presence. Multiple women in Sad Grownups say they prefer the company of women over men. Could you talk about the world the women in this collection inhabit?

STUBER: Oh god. This is probably, embarrassingly, the story of my life, feeling guarded but seeking validation: The Introverted Attention Seeker, a memoir.

But with regard to the book, I think there’s a continuum here, from women who have decided to simply surround themselves with other women as a preference but also as protection (the mother in “People’s Parties”), to women who want men in their lives, and enjoy their company, but also feel frustrated by the behaviors of the men they interact with and with some of the manifestations of maleness in America (like Sage in “The Game”).

I think women have to be on guard. This country is often inhospitable to people who identify as women. Women are constantly being assessed in ways men rarely are for their performance and attitude and appearance, their moods monitored and commented on. We’re denied medical care and access. There are so many physical safety things women think about as a default that a lot of men rarely have to think about. But then we’re also often trained to seek validation—it’s a bad conundrum. So it’s just a reality that filtered into many of these stories.

I’m fifty-five and feel increasingly loosened from needing to care about men’s approval or disapproval, which is liberating, but that doesn’t change the fact that as a woman, I have less power and fewer rights.

TEGETHOFF: Many of the men in this collection are unpleasant. This characterization might go double for Adam Zanger, the protagonist of the final story, “The Last Summer.” Adam is a poetry professor—and not very good at poetry or teaching, from what I can tell—who has found out he’s dying. He’s lonely, perhaps angry he hasn’t accomplished more in his life. But we see some redemptive qualities in him, mainly as he learns about himself via two sorority girls. How does this story play off the others in the collection, especially in its depiction of men?

STUBER: Two-part answer. First, I think there are maybe two tiers of men in these stories. Some of the main characters who are men are a pretty equal mix of good and bad, which I think all people are, like the Adam Zanger character, who is a little isolated and maybe a little misanthropic, but who also sees beauty in poetry and the world and worries about things and wants things. Also like the main characters in the title story and the main character in “Dick Cheney Was Not My Father.” All kinds of fucked up people, but hopefully nuanced and with some, as you said, redemptive qualities.

But second part: Yes, a lot of the antagonists in the stories are men. I’ll be honest and say that while I’ve grown up with pretty solidly remarkable men in my family of origin and my current family, I have had a lot of negative experiences with men, ranging from assault to abuse, plus the more insidious sexism that infiltrates daily activities. I think that a number of our current ills can be connected to a kind of hyper-masculinity that’s infused our society and that is concerned more with greed and power than with taking care.

I realize that’s a generalization. There are a lot of women who’ve done or do terrible things. I’m extremely imperfect and have done my own bad things, so I’m not setting myself apart from this in any way. But I do think our country needs a shift away from an obsession with strength and toward a concern with caring for people and places and communities. Deemphasizing masculinity is one important way to do this—raising all children to have empathy and express emotion instead of encouraging some kind of inhuman toughness. I think the story “The Game” tries to engage with this, and same for the “Dick Cheney” story. This ties back, for me, to what I see as one of the book’s big themes: that American society, as it is now, is kind of set up to create sad grownups. It’s depressing, I realize, and hopefully I’m wrong.

TEGETHOFF: The climate crisis shows up throughout this collection. Characters are blunt about their anxieties and often fairly pessimistic about humanity’s chances. How did you approach this very real emergency we’re living in? Did you feel it was important to be direct about the crisis?

I have two teenagers. I see how kids carry the weight of this. Some people might say, “Well, every generation has its issues,” but I don’t think every generation’s issue is so unflinchingly dire. Yes, growing up with the threat of nuclear war was scary, but I think it was somehow less pervasive or maybe easier to compartmentalize. I definitely thought at times about war potentially happening when I was a kid, and I know that brought its own umbrella of fear. Climate crisis feels different. It’s coming at you all the time, from all sides. Fires here. Floods there. And with the recent Supreme Court decision that basically threw regulations out the window [Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, more commonly known as the Chevron case], it’s even more bleak, with corporations holding the bulk of responsibility but being unwilling to make choices that would (if money is all they care about) preserve their future earning power.

So I end up mentioning this in a lot of my writing because it’s always there. I would like to be more hopeful about it all, and every now and then I read about something, some technology, some company that cares, some government doing more, something that gives me hope that we may evade whatever worse version of disaster, but it’s hard to think that. I think the only way to move forward under these circumstances is to focus on small, joyful things each day, accumulating those things over a week and a month and a year.

TEGETHOFF: There’s this roving search for meaning among the characters in the collection. It almost feels paralytic at times. I’m thinking, for example, of this passage from “Dick Cheney Was Not My Father”:

I was one of those people, like so many people I knew, who didn’t have any absolutist sense of trajectory and what should be next. The things people my age knew seemed unessential and thin: how to play board games at big tables with friends while drinking whiskey and how to hibernate for days while binge watching almost anything; most of the rest of the life stuff, the grown-up stuff, we still somehow didn’t know.

Could you talk about how moments like this capture the dread of modern life?

STUBER: In “Dick Cheney,” the character is wrestling with how to make meaning in his life, when he’s not getting meaning from his job, and with how to be a different kind of man and father from the kind his father is and was. He finds many things in his life trivial, but he ultimately finds that he gets meaning from being a parent and from parenting in a way that allows his child, a boy, to be however he wants, something his own father very much did not do for him. So, yes, a lot of these stories reflect the dread of modern life. But I also think that each story intentionally gives the characters moments of escape or happiness or abandon. I think that’s all we have, really.

Amy Stuber has published fiction in New England Review, Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She’s a flash editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her debut collection, SAD GROWNUPS, comes out October 8 from Stillhouse Press.