Mona Awad on Enchantment as a Sinister Force

This week’s story, “The Chartreuse,” is a few girl who has change into obsessive about a costume. She first noticed the design in a boutique in New York and has since scoured the net for it, shopping for many variations in several colours and lengths. When did you first begin fascinated with utilizing this conceit as the premise for a narrative?I really like clothes. Although they’re simply items of reduce material, they really feel charged with a sort of fairy-tale magic. They characterize the opportunity of transformation in on a regular basis life. They’ll make you’re feeling wonderful and highly effective, the most effective drag. However as anybody who’s contended with an unbecoming costume in a becoming room is aware of, they’re additionally potential areas for profound disappointment, even existential disaster and dread. The incorrect form, the incorrect shade could make you’re feeling wretched. It could reveal issues about your self you’d slightly not see. For me, placing on a costume can completely remodel how I really feel about myself (and the world) in any given path—horrific or wondrous. It’s that inherent potential of a costume, the query mark of it, that drew me as a story engine. It is a story about somebody who’s addicted not solely to clothes, however to the wild-card nature of their risk. There’s a British horror film I really like known as “In Cloth” a few pink costume that kills whoever wears it. It appears to be like very stunning on.The story describes the second after she’s discovered a brand new hue—chartreuse—and has determined to purchase the piece: “One finger, just a few clicks, that was all she needed to do. Add to cart. Checkout. Then Google would know her, the machine would let her. . . . All the time a hesitation with the credit-card click on, that was a part of it. The held breath, the raised finger, the uncertainty, a way of underlying stakes.” How necessary was it to explain that hesitation after which the purpose at which she acts?Oh, it’s important. It is a story that explores dependancy and I needed to seize that headspace as viscerally as potential. Her hesitation provides the reader a way of what’s at stake and a way, too, that she is considerably conscious of these stakes. She is aware of she shouldn’t do that. However understanding one thing and doing it are in fact two totally different international locations. One can know and know and know. One could be very cheap. However cause alone can’t prevent in the long run. Not once you’re within the grip of dependancy, as she is. There’s a horror in that that I needed to activate early on, in order that the story rapidly begins working in a spot outdoors of cause. And, absolutely, we’ve all been there.We progressively be taught that she’s left New York and is now dwelling in a shabby condo advanced within the ritzy coastal neighborhood of La Jolla, in San Diego. Why did you wish to set the story right here? Does the condo constructing characterize a unique world inside La Jolla?I really like La Jolla. It’s jaw droppingly stunning however, like all stunning issues, it additionally has a shadowy aspect. I really like the thought of the sketchy condo constructing in an in any other case ritzy setting. That one thing darkish, disturbed, or rotted lurks in a spot of sunshine. It’s very California gothic in that manner. Actually, there’s additionally an aspirational aspect to the setting that’s essential to the engine of the story and to her need for the costume. The narrator doesn’t really feel she belongs right here, she’s misplaced, but she stays. The costume turns into a passport to the opportunity of assimilating and maybe that accounts for the urgency of her need. We be taught that the web mannequin for the costume is blonde and pale and that our narrator is neither. So there’s some magical considering in her buy. She longs not solely to slot in however to change into the sort of particular person she imagines belongs right here. This longing manifests as costume obsession. It’s a part of the pantomime of the glamorous life she’s telling herself she’s dwelling.She’s been monitoring her FedEx supply on-line, ready for its arrival, however the parcel by no means appears to achieve her. When did the thought of creating FedEx so central to the story’s plot come to you?The story is admittedly being dispatched from deep inside her consciousness which makes it really feel fairly surreal. To steadiness this storytelling fashion, I needed the plot to hinge on one thing very acquainted. A girl ready for a costume to be delivered from FedEx appears like a really on a regular basis, even banal setup. However due to what it means for this girl, and due to the singularity of her obsession, ready for it turns into a hallucinatory expertise, even a religious reckoning. There may be additionally a barely uncanny facet to FedEx that felt becoming. I by no means knew that there was a FedEx and a FedEx Specific till I wrote the story.The girl appears to be experiencing a very solitary interval. Her mom and uncle have died, she has no pals in La Jolla, and the one individuals she interacts with, excepting any FedEx employees, are her neighbors, most notably “Quantity Twelve,” whom she suspects is each a supplier and a consumer. Why is she so scared of Quantity Twelve?Neighbors could be horrifying, particularly once you stay alone in a constructing with skinny partitions. They arrive to know you in methods you could not wish to be identified. I believe Quantity Twelve represents the horror of a sure sort of neighbor, not less than for an introvert like my narrator (and myself): the neighbor who needs to have interaction, the one who watches you, who feels compelled to touch upon the way you look. For somebody like my narrator, who has quite a bit to cover, however who additionally simply needs to be left alone, this can be a nightmare. However I do suppose her worry of Quantity Twelve comes from her personal needs as properly. Quantity Twelve is a drug supplier, and my narrator is deeply susceptible to dependancy, to what she has to supply.Instead of conversations with others, she’s primarily speaking to herself, or, generally, with the imagined presences of her mom and uncle or a pal she’s conjured up. May you hear all these totally different voices in her head as you had been writing? How necessary are italics to the story’s development?Italics are essential to the story’s fashion and to my narratives extra broadly. I actually love dispatching from deep inside a narrator’s head, taking part in with the kind of self-talk all of us have interaction in. And there are normally layers to that self-talk, totally different imagined audiences, and many others. On this story, my narrator is sort of alone, so her self-talk is especially wealthy and diverse. Generally it’s directed inward, and generally outward—at some imagined cherished one, or on the flowers or the water, even a sidewalk or a door. Generally it’s self-aware, generally it isn’t. The italics assist me create these totally different layers of consciousness. In addition they heighten our sense of her isolation and this unusual psychological place to which her obsession has introduced her.