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Kim Adrian is the author of The Twenty Seventh Letter of the Alphabet: A Memoir<\/em> and the editor of The Shell Game, Writers Play with Borrowed Forms,<\/em> an anthology of hybrid essays (both University of Nebraska Press, 2018). She has published two books of lyric criticism: Dear Knausgaard<\/em> and Sock,<\/em> which is part of Bloomsbury\u2019s Object Lessons Series. Her essays and short stories have appeared in AGNI, Tin House, O Magazine, The Gettysburg Review,<\/em> among others. She has taught creative writing at Brown University and Grub Street.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet<\/em> is an unconventional, wildly disturbing, and hugely innovative book. It is an intimate portrait of family dysfunction, addiction, and mental illness that grabs the reader immediately. The story is told in razor-sharp vignettes\u2014what Adrian refers to as a \u201cglossary,\u201d saying it\u2019s a \u201creckoning, a love letter.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Adrian has a gift for pinpointing\u2014and extracting\u2014precise, emotionally potent stories from her experiences and those of her family. Each fragment in The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet<\/em> is crisp and wide-eyed and seamlessly provides a subtext of the story, almost a meditation on the structure. Here, she imposes order on a rather chaotic upbringing by assigning a letter to each snapshot, while simultaneously developing compassion for herself\u2014and her mother.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a daughter of a severely mentally ill mother myself, I felt a particular kinship with Adrian. While conducting this interview, we exchanged emails in which Adrian shared, <\/b>\u201cThe whole time I was writing [The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet]<\/i>, I had this feeling of wanting to connect to other individuals who\u2019d grown up in similar situations\u2014kind of like \u2018ghost siblings.\u2019\u201d As I read Adrian\u2019s account, this was palpable. It was remarkably validating\u2014yet disturbing\u2014to read of some of the uncanny similarities between our experiences.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Both Adrian\u2019s mother and mine were sexually abused as children. Both married young and had children before their twentieth birthdays. Adrian and I are both firstborns. We each have a younger sister. Both of our mothers were diagnosed with a slew of psychiatric disorders and spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals. Our mothers both had a penchant for sewing, shredded our father\u2019s suits with shears, had issues with their teeth, and felt the government was \u201cout to get them\u201d or the phone was \u201cbugged.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIt can feel so isolating to grow up with a parent with mental illness, especially when you don\u2019t understand that they\u2019re mentally ill,\u201d says Adrian. \u201cThe world just feels so squishy and unpredictable.\u201d And she\u2019s right, especially about the unpredictability, the isolation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Leslie Lindsay for The Florida Review:<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n Kim Adrian:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n KA:<\/strong> \u201cThere\u2019s something intensely intimate about fragments.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6920,"template":"","categories":[9,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6916","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-interview"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThe title, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet,<\/em> sort of intimates this idea of a glossary, but it\u2019s more than that. We don\u2019t immediately know what the book is about. The title doesn\u2019t give anything away. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the ampersand was considered the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. It wasn\u2019t a sound unit, but a word\u2014and<\/em>. As a reader, I felt we were continually marching on, starting with A and ending with XYZ . . . &. There was a clear-cut path, maybe even a sense of urgency or doom. Can you talk about that, please?<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m glad you felt a sense of urgency. That\u2019s part of what I was going for. Because The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabe<\/em>t isn\u2019t just about my relationship to my mother, and my experience of her mental illness, but also about a feeling of compulsion\u2014the compulsion to tell this story. At the same time, I had no idea how to tell it, because storytelling had always been my mother\u2019s domain. She\u2019s a highly verbal person, a real magician with words. When I was a kid, I often felt incapable of expressing myself because she somehow managed to define my reality, my experience, with her words. She did this in a colorful and confusing way. I try to describe this in a few entries in the book, for example, the one called \u201cIce-Skating,\u201d where she narrates how she thinks an ice-skating outing I\u2019m about to go on will unfold from my point of view. It was uncanny when she did this. I could almost feel myself getting erased. The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet<\/em> came out of a deep need to articulate my own experience using my own words. But readers who looked at early drafts always said the same thing: \u201cYou\u2019re not in it.\u201d<\/em> It was so frustrating. Now, looking back, I think I was just so used to sublimating my own experience\u2014when it came to interactions with my mother\u2014that I did exactly the same thing when I tried to write about our relationship. I somehow went underground. When I finally found the form of the glossary, it opened everything up. Tackling the story in bits and pieces let me access my own experience in a very immediate way. It\u2019s a lot easier to keep your voice present for the length of a fragment than it is for a long narrative line. With the glossary structure, I was suddenly able to tell the story. And the pressure that had built up inside me over the years of writing prior to landing on the glossary form, that pressure comes across, I think, in that sense of urgency.<\/p>\n
\nI find the linked collection\u2014the glossary of fragments\u2014endlessly fascinating. It allows a good deal of freedom, while affording a sort of distillation. One can shine a light on specific moments without necessarily needing to create connective tissue between them. It\u2019s precise and expansive. Would you agree? What did you find liberating about this form\u2014what was challenging?<\/p>\n
\nFor me, the glossary structure removed the necessity to \u201ctell a story\u201d in the classic, conventional sense (which in any case never sat right with me in regard to this particular material). To create a classically linear narrative would have been to betray the confusion inherent in the experience I was writing about. But there\u2019s also something intensely intimate about fragments. A fragmented text enlists a reader\u2019s participation in a very real way. Readers have to connect the dots, create that \u201cconnective tissue\u201d in their own minds. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s asking too much of a reader. Engaged readers actually enjoy being challenged. Fragmented texts offer something almost like a mystery to solve.<\/p>\n
\nThe book moves largely chronologically, but not entirely. I\u2019m sure the structure required a bit of thought and experimentation. It\u2019s flexible: events can weave in and out. Did you impose\/assign letters to the vignettes first, or write and then piece together?<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m glad you brought up chronology. There are actually three chronological strands moving through the alphabetical arrangement. The first is pretty basic, just the chronology of my growing up; the second unfolds in the \u201cpresent day\u201d \u2014my current interactions with my mother, and my own domestic life as a mother of two young children; the third\u2014which is a bit rougher\u2014tries to trace my mother\u2019s childhood and give insight into her family of origin. It took a lot of refining of entry titles to work it all out chronologically because, with this structure, the chronology obviously also has to be alphabetical. Some of the entries happened to land right where they needed to be, but others required some shoe-horning. Take \u201cIce-Skating,\u201d for instance, which I just mentioned. That\u2019s a perfectly fine title for that entry. I used it because the Letter \u201cI\u201d is exactly where that entry needs to be in the flow of the chronology. But it\u2019s not a very poetic or evocative title. Originally, I think I called it \u201cTall,\u201d which has much more emotional resonance with the material. So, yeah, I shoe-horned some of the headers, and lost some of the original poetry or power of my first-choice titles. But that seemed like an okay price to pay for the overall glossary structure, which has its own metaphorical value.<\/p>\n
\nAt one point in the story, your mother says something like\u2014and I\u2019m paraphrasing\u2014\u201cIt\u2019s okay. You can write about me. I know I am your material.\u201d What was the emotional process of writing like for you? Were there things you feared putting in the memoir?<\/p>\n
\nThere were lots of scenes and details that I worried I shouldn\u2019t put into this book: my mother\u2019s \u201cbooger board\u201d; my father stabbing a man; my mother throwing me on the ground or across the room when I was little; my father beating her unconscious in front of me. The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet<\/em> took me twelve years to write, on and off, mostly on (though in a quasi-paralyzed state). Part of that long gestation period, that quasi-paralysis, had to do with what I was talking about before\u2014the drive to tell this story coupled with an inability\u2014or, perhaps, an unwillingness\u2014to tell it in a conventional way. But the other thing that slowed me down was worrying about spilling so many shameful family secrets. It seemed obvious that my words might hurt people\u2014my parents\u2014but that was confusing, because I only wanted to reveal things that were part of me,<\/em> part of my<\/em> history, my<\/em> lived experience. I know a lot of writers come down on the other side of this decision. They reconcile themselves to holding off on writing a story like this until their parents are dead. But I went the other way. The fact that my mother said that she knew she was my \u201cmaterial,\u201d and I could write about her if I wanted to, meant a lot to me at the time. It was very generous of her, in a sense. But even these words made me feel trapped, because when she said them, I realized I didn\u2019t want her to be my material forever. I wanted to get this story out and be done with it. More than that, I didn\u2019t want her to be the one to tell me what I could and couldn\u2019t write. In the end, I had to give myself permission to tell the story. And, actually, that was probably the hardest part of all.<\/p>\n
\nHas your mother read it?<\/p>\n
\nWhen it came out, I told her not to read it unless she was seeing a therapist, which she wasn\u2019t, and still isn\u2019t. At the time, she said that she wouldn\u2019t ever read it because she didn\u2019t want it to damage our relationship, and I thought that was smart. But since then, she\u2019s said a few things in ways that seem informed by what I wrote in the book. So, I think she probably has, and just hasn\u2019t told me.<\/p>\n
\nI felt the way this story was told, it mirrored a real relationship; we got to deeper wounds as we spent more time with you, your mother, father, sister, even your husband\u2014the characters\u2014in this memoir. There was a slow peeling back of layers. Plus, the structure lends to the episodic aspect of mental illness. Can you talk more about that, please?<\/p>\n
\nI\u2019m so glad you felt that way. One thing I struggled with at the beginning of the writing process (and by that, I mean the first ten years\u2014ha) is something I see a lot of my memoir students struggle with, too, and that\u2019s the almost irresistible urge to say all the important stuff up front, especially about very complicated characters. One of the reasons I had such a hard time getting past the first fifty pages or so of the early drafts was because I was trying to show my mother in all her complicated glory, all at once. My mother can be incredibly selfish, cruel, really abusive, gas-lighty, manipulative, and, frankly, gross, but she can also be the opposite of all these things: empathetic and sensitive, elegant, funny, creative. She\u2019s a great reader. Super smart. Super insightful. And she\u2019s a fabulous cook and gardener. If her spirit hadn\u2019t been so deeply damaged by the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, I think she would be doing amazing work in this world. Because, despite everything, she is one of those extra-alive kind of people. Unfortunately, because of her trauma and mental illness, she winds up bending most of her formidable energy toward destructive ends. In any case, back to your question . . . When I started writing this book, I tried to get all of that kind of information about her on the page, right away. I described my mother more or less the way I just did, though more elaborately. I figured that, in this way, I was being fair to her character. But writing like that is simply doling out information. And information doesn\u2019t convey a sense of lived experience. Figuring out how to let the characters in this book, especially my mother, unfold in their own time, over the course of sentences, paragraphs, and pages, was a steep learning curve for me, but it was very liberating, once I got the hang of it. I was able to let the prose be more gentle, less rushed, less informational, and, most importantly, I think, non-judgmental because I wasn\u2019t summing anybody up, or quickly sketching anyone with editorializing strokes.<\/p>\n
\nI think it\u2019s important to talk about personal mental health, too. You\u2019re an avid yogi (another similarity we share), plus you knit, bake, and write. You must maintain your own artistic development, your own . . . can we say, sanity? Did it feel important for you to let the reader into that part of your life?<\/p>\n
\nI knew I had to show some of those self-help activities on the page in order to be a reliable narrator. Because it\u2019s happened so often, in \u201creal life,\u201d that when I get to know someone new, and eventually tell them a story or two from my childhood, they almost inevitably express disbelief. \u201cBut how did you get so normal?\u201d is the usual question. Billions of hours of yoga, is the answer. Also, some fairly manic knitting and baking. And, let\u2019s not forget, bubble baths. It sounds so ridiculous, but bubble baths have been very healing for me. I wanted to show at least some of that activity, even though, on some level, I feel embarrassed by it (thus the entry title \u201cEmbarrassingly Large Collection of Self-Help Books\u201d). But you can\u2019t come out of a childhood like mine, or maintain a relationship with a mother like mine, and just \u201cbe normal,\u201d whatever that is. Healthy-ish. You have to work on your own mental\/emotional state, and I have. I do. It takes a lot of time, a lot of energy. It also takes a certain amount of anger. And a certain degree of selfishness, to be honest. There\u2019s an avid edge to these activities, at least when I do them. I\u2019m not the world\u2019s most peaceful, copacetic person. But I strive<\/em> to be peaceful and copacetic. LOL. It\u2019s how I funnel a lot of the ragged, sad, frightened energy that still circulates inside me into something more or less positive. I actually learned how to do this kind of work from my mother, who\u2019s always been big on \u201cself-improvement.\u201d Not so much with things like yoga, but she\u2019s constantly making all these little micro improvements to everything in her life\u2014from jerry-rigging the bird-feeder in some ingenious way to trying to straighten out her crooked pinkies with popsicle sticks. There is, of course, a tremendous difference between doing these kinds of practices in the spirit of self-improvement versus doing them in the spirit of self-acceptance. It\u2019s only when I understood that difference that I started healing in a real way. Unfortunately, I don\u2019t think my mother\u2019s ever quite grasped the distinction, which breaks my heart.<\/p>\n
\nI want to end on hope. Because there\u2019s so much of that within these pages, too. The last two years have tested us all\u2014in different ways\u2014and really, at the end of the day, what gets us through is cookies and warm socks. And a good book. Maybe a lotus blossom from the muddy depths of a lake.<\/p>\n
\nYour phrasing is interesting, the way hope gets entangled with comfort in that question. Which I get. Hope can be as much of a comfort as warm socks and good books and cookies, all of which I love. But frankly, these days, my relationship with hope feels pretty strained. I find myself seeking out more . . . prickly . . . forms of comfort, too. I\u2019m reading Theodor Adorno, right now, for instance. Minima Moralia.<\/em> It\u2019s excruciating, honestly\u2014it\u2019s just so painfully insightful about the pathological structures of the capitalist, consumerist system in which we\u2019re all so deeply embedded. I know I was just talking about bubble baths. And I\u2019ll never give those up. Not if I can help it. I read Adorno in the tub. But hope and comfort feel very\u2014I don\u2019t know\u2014cheap, these days? Everything just feels so dark. Because of Covid, yes, but also the war in Ukraine, the environment, the extremism everywhere you turn, the way democracy seems to be evaporating in front of our eyes. One of the reasons I wrote this memoir is because I think mental illness isn\u2019t given enough attention, considering how prevalent it actually is. It\u2019s not treated with enough honesty or seriousness or urgency. And without those things, a bad situation won’t improve, no matter how hopeful we may be. Without those things, hope is just a fantasy. Collectively speaking, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to say that humanity is dealing with something that looks a lot like mental illness writ large. We\u2019re suffering. And the planet is suffering because of us. Hope sounds lovely, but far away. All I can manage, at the moment, is to try to be more honest and serious and urgent about the things I would someday like to be hopeful about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"