The title of Molly McGhee’s new novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, comes from the mantra her protagonist repeats to himself as he navigates emerging adulthood, a challenging job market, and personal difficulties. McGhee herself has achieved success as an undergraduate writing teacher at Columbia University, but she comes from a small, rural community in Sumner County, Tennessee. “When I grew up, everybody around me was a day laborer. I got lucky and went to college and came out here and started to work in corporate employment, and it’s just the same damn thing. It’s exhausting, repetitive work. But the difference is that when you’re a day laborer, you’re sacrificing your body to it, and when you’re a corporate worker, you’re sacrificing your mind to it,” McGhee said. The experience with both ways of working in modern America led to her book, in which Jonathan Abernathy embarks on a quest for employment, which he hopes will eventually lead to fulfillment. Below, McGhee talks about inspiration, the craft of fiction writing, and how technology shapes modern work of all kinds.
Where did the idea for Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind come from?
I was having really bad anxiety dreams. My anxiety dreams ended up being this novel. I have really severe insomnia, and when I dream, it’s really vivid and very lifelike. I was having these recurring dreams about this guy who has to go into the dreams of other people. They were plaguing me. I was having them every night, and I really wanted to stop having them. The only way I could get them out of my head was to put them onto paper.
Jonathan Abernathy feels like “a really tall child masquerading as an adult” in the novel. Do you think this attitude is timeless, or is it unique to generations that have experienced student debt, housing crises, and multiple, simultaneous wars?
When I was growing up, my grandparents would always say to me, “Everybody’s a child, no matter their age,” and they were very Christian. One of the things that we were taught is to treat each other with the respect that you would treat each other as children. You still carry all those feelings in you. You just learn to hide them better. You learn to get on with it and take responsibility. In a lot of ways, that’s a really good thing. You have to do that. You have to become an adult. But I do think this obsession with it lately comes out of the ways that our elders are stunting the growth of people in their thirties, forties, and fifties. These 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds have held office for fifty years. I have friends who are 38 and still aren’t able to buy a house. In a way, we are held captive by this older generation that insists on treating us like the worst part of children-irresponsible, incapable of making decisions. It’s kind of sad because we could be treating each other like we are the best part of children, like honest, emotional creatures, but as we get older, we distance ourselves from that. But I feel like Jonathan is a little irresponsible himself. He’s definitely a little stunted. But when you’re writing fiction, you’ve got to remember that your characters are just people. I really wanted to portray Jonathan as just a really normal person struggling with the hallmarks of existence. Jonathan is just so sweet, but he’s a dumbass. But the dumbasses deserve to live, too. I don’t think people should struggle that much, especially in one of the richest countries in the world.
Is it really possible to “solve your life” by developing better professional appearances in one’s twenties, as Abernathy tries to do?
I don’t think that’s possible. I think we, as Americans, are very work-oriented people. We’re solutions-oriented people, and our culture is based on productivity, on moving things forward. I don’t know if that’s what life is about. Some of my most cherished moments are just when I’m sitting around shooting the shit. But we can get so scared about the future that we forget to enjoy the journeys. We spend so much of our lives trying to optimize them. But at a certain point, that obsession with optimization takes away from the things that matter.
The line, “We help people do more work…bottom lines need saving” is easy to misread the first time as “lives.” What were you trying to say in this book about the priorities of corporations and employers?
One of my favorite parts of writing is writing on a line-based level. One of the things I love in fiction is the trickster gods of literature. I love when the text is playful and just slightly off. You can do things like have really beautiful misreadings. I tell my students all the time that misreadings can be some of the greatest places to find inspiration. Something I was thinking about when I wrote that line is how close lives and lines are. If that sentence had its priorities correct, it would be about saving lives. But it’s not. It’s about saving people’s investments, which I think is very true to our world. So much of our economy is about saving the richest people money. They don’t even care about the bottom 50% of us. I don’t think they’re factoring in the wellness of humanity. That’s heartbreaking for us normal people to contend with.
I teach a class on apocalyptic fiction and a class on worldbuilding. They are heady classes that deal with the question of, ‘How do we accept reality for what it is? How can we imagine a space that is better?’ My students are incredibly anxious. Their parents have driven this idea of success at all costs. Success is usually presented as a stable career and married with a family. I’m really skeptical if that is a ‘successful’ life. We spend a lot of time unpacking how that mindset can be really destructive to the world. A lot of our tragedies have come out of that ‘success-at-all-costs’ mindset. But with some of these super-rich billionaires, I can feel quite bad for them. It seems like a sickness that has been normalized. In some of my richer students, it seems like a Smaug-like obsession with accumulating wealth. To a certain extent, wealth can insulate you from tragedy, but it can’t protect you from life. No matter how much money you accumulate, you are still going to have to suffer, because that’s just what being alive is.
Why address the reader on p. 31 through the line, “We all do silly things like lying, praying, hoping, breathing. Don’t judge him for the things you yourself would do.” What effect does breaking the fourth wall have on the novel?
I love narratorial tricks that have fallen out of fashion. Right now, in contemporary fiction, it’s very popular to either have a first-person narrator or a very close third-person (narrator) with distance. But when I was growing up, I was allowed to read anything I wanted. I read through our local library pretty fast. I read a lot of Victorian literature and stuff from the 1600s and 1700s. I loved reading those books because a lot of the rules we have for contemporary fiction hadn’t been invented yet. They were a lot freer with the authorial hand. I wanted the novel to have a closeness to the reader. A book is created by the author and the reader. At the end of the book, we have that perspective shift that illuminates a lot of the narratorial decisions earlier in the text. I wanted the book to feel like the ways we can reflect on our younger selves. I wanted to have a narrator who had empathy. I think a lot of narrators present stories as if they are not biased, or as if the narrator isn’t complicit in shaping the story. I don’t think there should be rules for how we create art.
What are your thoughts on the question Abernathy poses on p. 48: “Money has to have a reason for existing, right? Other than its usage as a constant source of shame?”
I don’t know if I have an answer. But we are going to continue doing this until we figure out a healthier, more sustainable way of living because it’s the way we’re taught to live. Unless we have the courage to think radically about how we can live as a community, it’s just something we’re all going to have to deal with. It’s our belief in it that makes it real.
Abernathy’s job as a dream auditor requires that he “forget” his daily life. Are there certain types of jobs where it is more possible to “forget” the other aspects of one’s life than others?
I think part of being a professional is intense compartmentalization. You’re no longer reacting from a place of your personhood or history. I don’t think living like that is the best way to live. I think all jobs require it to a certain extent, especially corporate jobs and hard labor, where you’re treated like a cog in a machine. I think corporate workers get treated a little better. They get paid more; they have some social mobility. But corporate employment is really socially restrictive. Blue-collar work is also extremely socially restrictive. Both can be suffocating in their own ways.
Conversely, what does this book have to say about the opposite idea, that we must bring our whole selves to work?
I don’t like to say, ‘This is what I was trying to do,’ because the book is co-created. I don’t want to invalidate any reader’s experience. Part of the joy of reading is that it allows you to reflect privately on your life, emotions, and experiences while you’re reflecting on the story. I think that’s invaluable. For all of us, the question, ‘What do we bring and what do we leave behind?’ is a very fraught question, because the more we bring, the more exploited we are. But not everybody has the ability to compartmentalize or to be private.
Is the right answer some sort of middle ground? How could we create that?
I think, like everything, it’s all about finding balance. I think the biggest thing we can all do is that we can advocate for what we, as individuals, need. A place where that conversation is happening right now is that people are like, ‘I should be able to work from home.’ You’re going to hear stuff like, ‘Suck it up; you have it better than anyone else before you.’ But the thing is, that’s how time should work. We should always be trying to be more humane. The trick is not to let cynicism infect you.
What are the similarities and differences between Abernathy and his neighbor, Rhoda? When you write about her relationship with her ex-husband, you say, “When she should have stopped, she kept going.” This strikes me as being true of him, too.
Their relationship was very organic because they just exist for me. Who are the people that we’re drawn to? What does attraction look like? Are the people we’re attracted to partial reflections of ourselves? The relationship you as a reader project for them is a fantasy in the same way the work life Jonathan projects for himself is a fantasy. They have so much chemistry, but when you look at their core personality traits, they are totally incapable of communicating. And a child is involved. They both have major flaws that are just not compatible. As a writer, it’s all about your motivation. There are writers whose main motivation is entertainment, and that’s totally valid. But I’m really interested in emotional realism, showing us something about ourselves that we turn a blind eye to. Even though this is a speculative novel, I want it to be rooted in realistic behavior.
Do you think that one of the reasons Abernathy is drawn to Rhoda’s daughter, Timmy, is that he identifies with her in certain ways?
I think so. To me, all my characters are like people. There are things I know about them, and things I discover about them. The tenderness between Timmy and Abernathy is one of the things that surprised me in the writing of it. For Rhoda, I’m sure it was very strange to watch. Our social trust is at an all-time low, especially with men. The way Abernathy and masculinity work together is one of my interests in the text.
On p. 215, you write about “the hope and happiness that comes with meeting your basic needs.” Can money in some ways buy happiness, and is this what Abernathy is trying to do?
There’s a huge percentage of the population whose basic needs are not being met. Meeting their basic needs requires finances, but the poorer you are, the harder it is to get money. I just don’t think the people who are creating these policies realize the extent to which they affect people’s lives. You cannot work your way out of poverty. You have to get lucky because poverty is incredibly expensive. Rich people get to go to Costco and buy in bulk, and poor people have to go to the corner store and buy individual portions that are marked up 30%.
Can you answer the question you pose on p. 218: “What does it mean to be successful?” What does it mean to you to be successful? Do you think success is different for everyone?
I think it’s highly individualized. For some people, having a lot of money is their answer. But I think we can have a little more grace. I don’t think that needs to be everybody’s answer. Society just couldn’t operate like that. Right now, we’re forcing everyone to operate like that. But throughout your life, your entire lifetime is getting to know yourself and trying to honor and accept yourself.
How did you choose what each character in the book would deny about themselves or their circumstances in order to succeed?
When you’re writing fiction, a lot of it is just extending logic. Asking, ‘What would this character actually do?’ I really don’t know how inspiration works. Talking about fiction is so hard because you can’t really explain how it works and what the mechanics are. It’s like magic, in a way. It’s finding a feeling and having faith in the process. I think one of the reasons I can be a fiction writer is because I grew up very, very religious. The process of having faith is one that I was taught. You really just have to have faith in the novel. Maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense to people who aren’t novelists. You’re making something out of nothing, which is a very strange, unexplainable process.
Why shift from third person to first person at the end of the story? Did you always know how it was going to end?
When I was writing the narrator, I always knew that they were coming from that spot, but allowing the reader to see that was a decision I made in my final draft. I realized the reason I was reticent was because I was scared of taking that risk. Once I realized I was scared, I thought, ‘It’s time to jump off the diving board. If that’s the reason you’re not doing it, that’s not a good enough reason.’
McGhee’s novel is ultimately about the search for community in the midst of isolation. In this way, she says, we are all a bit like Jonathan Abernathy. Through a novel that offers a critique of the competitive, modern corporate workplace, Jonathan Abernathy questions what it is, exactly, that modern employees win.
FICTION
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
By Molly McGhee
Astra House
Published October 17, 2023
Southern Review of Books 