You're going to want to read the latest from helencphillips, even if you aren't a mother
"Some early readers have said, 'Your book is so disgusting! In a good way, but so disgusting,'" said Helen Phillips, laughing at the visceral reactions her latest novel, The Need, has inspired—laughing too at the fact that so many people get profoundly disturbed when their sanitized, Instagram-friendly vision of motherhood is shattered, intruded upon by things like anxiety, instability, and, like, so many bodily fluids.
The Need has stayed with me in every possible way; I still feel it in my body. So I wanted to start off by asking you about the genesis of this story, how you knew that it was eating its way out of you? There's that dichotomy where you've just brought life into this world and you're feeding it—I mean literally, obviously—but also in every other way. I mean you're doing everything you can to support this growth, but then, it almost feels like too much power in this other sense, like, what gives you the right to have such power over life and death? It's intoxicating and inhibiting all at once.
Molly enters the situation at the beginning of the book with an assumption about who this intruder is, and we, too, bring the same assumptions. And over the course of the book, those assumptions get challenged and peeled away until the person who seemed to be such a threat is proven to be, perhaps, an ally.
Yes, yes. And this is probably true always for life, right? You could get hit by a car any day, or you could get a terrible sickness, things can happen, but there's something about having young children that makes the veneer of tranquility and control... you realize how thin that veneer is, and everything can be going along fine and you feel somewhat balanced, and then everybody gets stuck in a plot twist, and you're just down in the ground, like reduced to your most basic self.
There's a lot of role-switching and code-switching that you do as a working parent. Also, she loves her work, and I really wanted that to be a part of it. You know, it was important for me that her work was a source of great joy, and her children were a source of great joy, and, in a sense, there's a similarity, like something that you're passionate about, something that you don't understand, something that you're in awe of, something that's mysterious to you.
It is so fascinating to think about this kind of discovery, because, of course, there is so much that we can't contextualize and so we make sense of it by expanding our context, but also what if we're not expanding it actually as far as it can go?
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