Our Conversation with Nicole Haroutunian

Recently, we sat down with Nicole Haroutunian, whose story “Jesus Louise” appeared in Issue #18, to talk about how she created such an incredible story and how it fits in her story collection, Choose This Now (Noemi Press, 2024). In addition to the story, Haroutunian discusses how a story collection comes together, the book’s publication in light of Small Press Distribution folding, and other aspects of the creative life.

This interview had been lightly edited for clarity.

INTERVIEWER

The first question I wanted to ask is about the title of your book, Choose This Now. It’s in one of Valerie’s sections that your characters ponder the question: can and should the choose and “unchoose” things as they go through life, using examples like marriage and children. It seems as if this is a mentality some characters have in order to live their best, happiest lives. How would you define the “choose this now” mentality?

HAROUTUNIAN

So, I think that it did start from that idea of revolving the book around these choices from that story that you identified and that line that Taline says to Valerie like marriage is just you saying ‘I choose this person now.’ So I think it’s about agency, and also, permanence and impermanence. When you’re in a moment, it seems so monumental to make these choices, and sometimes it takes somebody outside of yourself, a friend, in the case of this book, which I think is at its core about friendship, to let you know you have other options and that what you’re doing doesn’t have to be the end.

When you are making a choice, it can feel like there’s so much pressure on you and that you’re choosing something for the rest of your life, and in some cases that’s true, but in some cases it’s true but it doesn’t have to be as narrow as you might think it is. I also hoped that what came across in the book is that at least at certain places and with the help of their friends, these characters understand the privilege they have in making the choices that they make, and that not everybody has the option to choose if they’re going to have a child or when they’re going to have a child, or if they’re going to have the marriage they want or have the ability to leave a marriage that they want, and these characters, they do have that privilege through the stability that their race and class affords them. So, kind of like an awareness and sort of grappling with that, if not on the character level, at least on the book level is something that I hope that comes across. So, there’s a lot to it, but I feel like that sort of pervades the entire book, which is what you picked up on. There are lots of angles to it.

INTERVIEWER

Going off of that, one thing I noticed when reading was how many moments there are in which certainty versus uncertainty of the future or being sure or unsure of oneself pop up in conversations between the two main characters, Taline and Valerie, like when Taline assures Valerie that she knows what to think without her that and she is only there so Valerie can hear herself and the moment when Valerie wonders if things are how they are supposed to be and if they are in the right timeline, to which Taline replies that they just don’t know. What would you say, if any, is the difference between the way these two characters think about themselves in relation to the world around them? Is one more certain of their place and decisions than the other?

HAROUTUNIAN

Yeah, I think that Taline’s role is sort of reassuring Valerie, and Valerie is pretty indecisive and unsure of her choices, and, you know, does obsess over these other timelines and if something else was meant to have happened that didn’t, and Taline is always trying to get her to move past that way of thinking and to just kind of live her life and not second guess herself so much and second guess her choices. But, I think secretly, Taline kind of does the same thing. She just doesn’t let herself do it as outwardly and she kind of keeps it a little more internal. She tries to get herself passed it too, but I don’t think that she’s that much more confident in her choices. She just kind of fakes it until she makes it, and maybe tries to do that thing I feel like I get advice about a lot or, you know, see on social media that you should treat yourself the way that you treat your friends, or not talk to yourself in a way you wouldn’t talk to your friends, and I think Taline tries to do that, even if she secretly, on the inside, is a little bit more like Valerie.

INTERVIEWER

Yeah, and in the second example I talked about, Taline doesn’t say “No, we are in the right timeline.” So, it’s almost like she’s just comfortable not knowing rather than more knowledgeable which is super interesting. Thinking back to how I was introduced to your work, which was by reading Issue #18 of Story, which contains your piece, “Jesus Louise,” I think it was its themes of motherhood and female friendships that made it especially enjoyable for me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a piece of your recently published book, which would contain those ideas on a larger scale. What led you to pull that piece in particular out of your book to be its own short story? Did you try anything else or was it always that one?

HAROUTUNIAN

I think of almost every story in the book as a standalone story although I think there are a couple that are a little less successful if you read them outside of the context of the book. So, there’s those two main characters that we’ve been talking about, and they have almost every chapter, but then there’s these three third-person chapters that are about other characters, including the Jesus Louise chapter. That one is third-person and it’s not about the two core women, even though Louise is a pretty important character in the book, so that one can very clearly stand alone. I think it has greater meaning in the context of the book, but you can sort of take it on its own. But again, I don’t think it’s the only one that’s like that. There were a bunch of other ones from the book that were published separately in different journals. I always felt pretty confident that “Jesus Louise” was a story that was good and should live in the world for people to read separately and independently. I submitted it to a lot of places and I’m really happy that Story took it. I was so happy to be in that journal, and Michael is such an awesome editor! So, it’s not the only one, but I think it does uniquely sort of stand on its own.

INTERVIEWER

I also just wanted to congratulate you on publishing your book! How does it feel to have this longer work out in the world after producing much shorter stories? What’s different?

HAROUTUNIAN

Thank you! Yeah, I’ve loved getting notes from readers I know and then occasionally others–you know, I know that, in theory, people I don’t know have read the book, but when somebody reaches out on Instagram or something who I don’t know and tells me that they read the book and is like, “Wanna connect?” That’s incredible. Unfortunately, the launch of the book has been sort of a debacle because the distributor that my press uses, Small Press Distribution, closed the same week my book came out. So, from the very beginning, stores couldn’t order it, which is not normal and shouldn’t have happened. And nobody expected it to happen. And it didn’t get fixed.

There are lots of things that maybe could have happened along the way to correct the situation, but some sort of weird publishing industry distribution chaos ensued at every point and sort of snowballed and compounded. So, I think a lot of what maybe could have happened for the book didn’t, and won’t, so that’s the less rosy and happy and hopeful side. I think some of the most important parts of a book’s life are those first three months that it’s out because that’s when people care about ordering it to their stores and when it’s getting the most attention. Now, we’re almost in month five and it’s a little easier for stores to get it, but it’s actually pretty hard still. It’s not impossible, like it was for the first couple of months, but that’s been a real bummer and it’s definitely dampened some of the excitement. And it’s not just me, it’s hundreds and hundreds, thousands probably, of small press authors because it was hundreds of presses that were affected. It was just particularly bad for people whose books came out in March and April of this year, which, mine came out March 15th, so it was at exactly the same time that this major publishing implosion happened.

INTERVIEWER

Wow, I’m sorry you had to go through that, I had no idea! I hope you have more luck during that process for your next writing endeavor, I’ve really enjoyed reading your stories.

 

HAROUTUNIAN

Yeah, hopefully, thank you!

INTERVIEWER

The book includes such vulnerable, raw moments of its characters, from disappointing doctor visits and struggles as new moms to uncertainty within friendships. Why was it important to you to discuss the difficult sides of such beautiful themes along with the good they can bring?

HAROUTUNIAN

I generally write about things that I’ve experienced. The book is not at all about me, but I also don’t really imagine things very well, so if I haven’t experienced something sort of similar or really heard in detail from a friend about something, I don’t really feel confident in writing it. So, even though all of those characters experience motherhood and friendship differently, they’re all sort of like facets of what I have experienced or what I have then imagined based on that experience or expanded out from it or intensified it, just because that’s how I feel confident writing. I have to kind of start from something that is true to my life. I started the book maybe just before getting pregnant and then wrote a bunch of it while I was pregnant, and then took a little break. Then, when my baby was like 10 months old, I started writing more, and then when she was little, like a toddler, I wrote the bulk of it. So, I felt like I was always kind of writing about a phase that I had just been through, something that was still fresh in my memory that I wasn’t quite in anymore.

When I was writing about having a newborn, I had a baby or a little toddler, so I still remembered, but I didn’t have a newborn anymore. I wasn’t in the midst of it so I had a little bit of perspective, and I wanted to try to capture this sort of dimensionality and the different facets of all of those experiences. Having a baby is really hard, and negotiating friendships across having babies is not necessarily hard, but it changes them, and I think it’s really interesting to explore that and to think about how there’s sort of a before and after even when you just want the continuity, and you have to wrap your mind around how things have changed. That was really interesting to me, those sorts of changes, so I had to do the bad with the good for that.

INTERVIEWER

That makes a lot of sense. And, an idea you mentioned actually leads into my next question. I thought it was an interesting detail that Taline has a creative outlet in painting that seems to slow when she’s busy or unsure of her capabilities. Are those struggles similar to things you’ve dealt with as a writer? You said you did kind of slow your writing when your baby arrived, how did you get past that and know when to start up again?

HAROUTUNIAN

Yeah, it seemed long, but when I say that I had a break, it wasn’t that long. I mostly started writing again when she was ten months old. So, what helped a lot is that I’m in a group called CUT + PASTE Artist Residency in Motherhood. There’s an artist named Lenka Clayton, and she had this idea for an open-source residency for mothers who are artists, and it basically lets you declare your time and say “I’m an artist in residency right now,” and hang a little sign on your door. You figure it out and you work within the constraints of motherhood on your art. It started out as mostly writers, but now there are people in the group who have different art forms. It really kicked off at a very good time for me, when I had a 10-month-old, and these two writers, Stella Fiore and Amy Shearn had the idea that we could all do it at the same time. We weren’t necessarily in the same place but we worked during the same week. We were all like, “OK, we’re going to do an Artist Residency in Motherhood. We’re going to figure out times to write, and we’ll update each other and cheer each other on.” So, I was like, OK, I’m going to try this.

I never had babysitting or childcare or anything, but I had my dad come in and watch the baby and I went to a coffee shop, and I was like, oh. I can do this. It was maybe two hours, but then there were all of these other moms who were so proud of me, and we were exchanging pictures of ourselves at our computers, and then sharing what we did, and I was like, OK, I can really do this. And then, sort of similarly, and around that same time, my baby was such a bad sleeper. She started taking naps where I’d have to hold her. And it’s a problem if you have to hold your baby while they’re sleeping the whole time. So, once I could put her in her crib, then I would have like an hour where I could write, and because I knew I’d have to stop when she woke up, I would just work, whereas before I could just, you know, go on Facebook, do some shopping, load my grocery cart online, but now, I didn’t do any of that. I was like, OK, this is my writing time, she’s going to wake up in maybe an hour, maybe in two hours, maybe in 30 minutes, I better get something done. I started getting better and more efficient at writing and using my time right around then. I think it was actually really helpful for my writing process. She’s seven years old now, and I still use my time a lot better than I used to. So, those two things: time constraints and the support of other mother-writers.

INTERVIEWER

What gives you joy about writing when you have those rare moments to do so? And what drives you to write the different stories that you do, Choose This Now and others?

HAROUTUNIAN

I think there’s sort of two things. There’s one that’s just for myself when I figure out a story, and it’s usually in the editing phase. The first draft is usually pretty hard for me and it takes me a long time to figure it out and to sort of get it down, but then, once I have a draft and I get to go in and make it better, I love that part. Cutting things. Moving things around and adding. When it sort of clicks and I’m like, oh. This is what I was thinking. That’s sort of the feeling that I’m going for, and that’s what keeps me doing it myself. And in terms of publishing, it’s hearing from individual people. My favorite thing ever is when somebody will screenshot or take a picture of a page from one of my stories or a book with something highlighted and tell me what they related to in that scene, whether it’s a stranger or a friend of mine. Recently this mom that I was friends with when we both had newborns who I don’t see or talk to that much anymore has been reading my book and she just started texting me every day when she finished a story to say what she loved about it. She was like, “Is this annoying to you or do you like this?” And I was like, “Oh my God, I love it. Please keep it coming.” So, she just gave me a summary of every story as she read it, saying what she liked about it, which was the best thing ever.

 

This interview was conducted by Erin Mayle, a journalism major at Denison University.