Ramona Ausubel - Lyrical stories arranged around themes of birth, gestation, conception and love. Makes you feel as if you have emerged from a concert of atonal music, every object in the world momentarily transformed by Ausubel’s gloriously eccentric vision

Ramona Ausubel, A Guide To Being Born, Riverhead Books, 2013.

ramonaausubel.com/published-works/

An isolated village tries to save itself from a war through sheer force of imagination—all at the suggestion of a girl.
In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years—across oceans, deserts, and mountains—but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known, and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator—the girl, grown into a young mother—must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.


Reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell—this enthralling new collection uses the world of the imagination to explore the heart of the human condition. A New York Times Editor’s Choice.
Combines the otherworldly wisdom of Ausubel’s much-loved debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, with the precision of the short-story form. Long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. A Guide to Being Born is organized around the stages of life—love, conception, gestation, birth—and the transformations that happen as people experience deeply altering life events, falling in love, becoming parents, looking toward the end of life. In each of these eleven stories Ausubel’s stunning imagination and humor are moving, entertaining, and provocative, leading readers to see the familiar world in a new way.
In “Atria” a pregnant teenager believes she will give birth to any number of strange animals rather than a human baby; in “Catch and Release” a girl discovers the ghost of a Civil War hero living in the woods behind her house; and in “Tributaries” people grow a new arm each time they fall in love. Funny, surprising, and delightfully strange—all the stories have a strong emotional core; Ausubel’s primary concern is always love, in all its manifestations.

"Ausubel is a master stylist of vibrant, concise prose, and these stories, with love most often at their cores, can be appreciated for that alone."– Booklist

"These stories reminded me of branches full of cherry blossoms: fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly. I eagerly read from one story to the next."– Aimee Bender


What is it about?
This unusual short-story collection follows the life cycle from birth to death through different, fantastical stories.
Why are we talking about it?
Ausubel's debut novel, No One Is Here Except All Of Us, was one of our favorite books of last year. This book has received a lot of pre-release attention, showing why Ausubel is one of the most imaginative and provocative rising literary stars.
Who wrote it?
Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, and holds an MFA from the University of California. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Electric Literature, and she currently lives in Santa Barbara.
Who will read it?
People who enjoy fresh voices in modern literature. Fans of George Saunders will find a lot to enjoy in Ausubel's writing, as will readers of Junot Díaz and Argentine fabulist Julio Cortázar.
What do the reviewers say?
New York Times: "Each story in this collection finds a way to record the tensions between the corporeal and the invisible, the forces that animate us but ultimately can’t be dissected, our anti-anatomies."
Publishers Weekly: "A charming, at times precious collection of stories that tackles the frustrations and fantasies of being alive... the author’s greatest triumphs come in narratives that weave the defeated with the absurd."
Impress your friends:
The remarkable cover is adapted from an illustration by the artist and surrealist writer Lou Beach.
Opening line:
The grandmothers - dozens of them - find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be afternoon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes and orthotics, across the slippery metal deck of the ship, not built for human passage but for cargo. Huge shipping crates are stacked at bow and stern. The grandmothers do not know what it means. Are we dead? they ask one another. Are we dying?
Typical passage:
The boys like to watch Miss C walk down the hall, all those hands and fingers moving together under her clothes, beckoning. This evening, when she makes a trip back and forth to her car, the football team turns from the field where the lowering winter sun skates the grass pink. They watch her search in her bag for keys, which come out glinting. Her hair picks up the light in the usual way, but it is her body that receives it in waves, like she is the surface of the ocean and all the water inside is angling for a peek at the great open space of the sky.
Correction: There was a typo in the opening line section, "desk" instead of "deck". It has now been corrected. - www.huffingtonpost.com/     

Ramona Ausubel pushes for her characters to be more, feel more, experience more.

There are writers who show us the world as it is and writers who show us the world as it is not, dropping surreal events and inflections into otherwise believable settings. The latter group often ends up showing us more about “reality” than the former. This is a large and well-established group: Lydia Davis. Miranda July. Steven Millhauser. Kevin Brockmeier. Chris Adrian. And many others. Ramona Ausubel belongs to this group; many of the stories in her new collection, “A Guide to Being Born,” contain elements of fantasy juxtaposed against starkly realistic elements, and the fantastic casts the realistic into relief. But what distinguishes Ausubel from the other writers practicing this near-genre is her expansiveness. Though that quality has its hazards, it hits its mark very securely here, more often than not in an epiphanic way.
The stages of human life, death, or grieving provide the subject for many of the stories here, most frequently birth or childhood, as the title suggests — which means, for this book, the act of being a parent. Ausubel torques these stories in unexpected ways, though, and her parent figures gain our sympathy by never being entirely able to cope with these twists. In “Poppyseed,” an 8-year-old developmentally challenged girl grows breasts and pubic hair, to the consternation of her parents — her body achieves the growth her brain cannot. When the girl’s breast buds are removed to stop that part of her physical development, her parents find a way to cope with the situation that is absurd, and in its own way violent, but believable in and of itself. In “Atria,” a pregnant woman becomes convinced that she is giving birth to various animals. While her extensive imaginings ultimately engulf her experience of birth, making it so she sees a baby seal when gazing directly at her human baby, her prenatal hallucinations reveal a great deal about universal all-too-human fears about what it is, exactly, that takes place during human conception and pregnancy.
Ausubel’s sentences are carefully wrought, each one tipping you over a bit with its surreal, skewed stance. While it would be unfair to call her a “writer’s writer,” this level of craft does help the book achieve transcendence. In “Magniloquence,” a recently widowed professor finds himself in an absurd but typical situation: waiting for a speech by a Nobel laureate who may never arrive. After a lengthy blackout occurs, Ausubel makes the experience seem galvanizing and almost uplifting: “A huge river of light washed into the room, whiting everything out for Faustus, whose eyes had gotten used to dimness.” The opening story, “Safe Passage,” shows us a ship full of grandmothers, headed for (one thinks) the afterworld; when one of them dives into the ocean, Ausubel gives the moment luminescence and profundity: “The ocean is full and the sky is full: how plentiful the elements are! Alice floats on her back at the exact point of their meeting, held like a prayer between two hands pressed together.”
To call these stories ambitious is wholly accurate; Ausubel is constantly pushing for her characters to be more, to feel more, to experience more. In this rush, though, some things are overlooked. For instance, her female characters are often invested with the most personality, the most feeling, while her male characters are often ciphers. The soon-to-be father in “Chest of Drawers,” as if in an unintentionally ironic gesture, has drawers growing out of his chest, as if to suggest how empty he is. Also, the stories are occasionally end-loaded, as if each story’s bulk were an excuse to get to the conclusion, resulting in a mix of workaday sentences with more poetic ones. These slipups don’t change the final effect of the book, though, which makes you feel as if you have emerged from a concert of atonal music, every object in the world momentarily transformed by Ausubel’s gloriously eccentric vision. Max Winter

The strange cover — a beautiful, precise, mishmash of subjects - is perfect for the stories it protects. They, too, are a mixed bag surrounding the subject of familial relationships of one kind or another, whether between mothers and children-to-be; fathers and their desire to carry something around, womblike, in a set of drawers; or lovers and their possible futures as seen embodied around them in the elderly couples inhabiting their neighborhood.
From the very start, this book informs the reader that these stories contain elements of the abnormal; consider the opening of “Safe Passage,” the first story in the collection:

The grandmothers — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be afternoon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes and orthotics… Are we dead? They ask one another. Are we dying?

Call it what you will: the fantastical, the imagined, magical-realism. The truth is, I’m not sure you can categorize it as any of these. The unreal elements, often dreamlike but never cast under the shadow of doubt or suspicious, are part and parcel of the real world, of life, birth and death in these stories. If you have trouble believing something, my advice is to sit back with your favorite soothing beverage; let go, let the story take over, let yourself sink into the deceptively simple language Ausubel uses to tell her stories:

A tiny white spine began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. [. . .] She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heat breaking away from it, warming her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around sniffing her warm cave. She did not know if this creature was here to be her friend or to punish her.

Each story is crafted independently, but they fit together in this volume under the headings that Ausubel has given to the four sections, an optimistic backwards version of coming to life: Birth, Gestation, Conception, Love. The writing isn’t pretentious. The metaphors are beautifully simple, sprinkled sparingly enough not to make the careful reader cringe at the literariness:

Laura and I sat on a picnic blanket in the middle of our suburban front yard. Poppy sat there too, only she was in her stroller bed as always. The grass was craning out of the dirt and the birds were going for all our scraps. We lay on our backs like Poppy does, flat down, and looked at the graying blue of the sky. It came at us. Storming us with its color, with its light.

This is a first-rate book of short stories, and in a time when such books are difficult to publish, I have no doubt as to why this one succeeded in the task. It is a labor of love, and I’m glad it has come to light, a quiet baby of a book, crying when it is hungry but not screaming, sleeping through the night so early that you may wake up seeping milk, wondering if something is wrong with it. It will stay with you after you finish the stories, and you will worry about it a little bit, wondering if you understood it as you should have, cared as much as you could. Like an anxious parent, you may never know, but you can always go back and care some more.               

Ilana Masad

 

“Each story in this collection finds a way to record the tensions between the corporeal and the invisible, the forces that animate us but ultimately can’t be dissected, our anti-anatomies. The dismay of coming to the final page is easily combated by following the example of Ausubel’s characters and beginning all over again.” —The New York Times

“…makes you feel as if you have emerged from a concert of atonal music, every object in the world momentarily transformed by Ausubel’s gloriously eccentric vision.”—The Boston Globe

“Ausubel plumbs the constant mysteries of life, death, falling in love — all these impenetrable things we human beings quest for — and honors them with the magic they deserve.” —NPR

“Beautiful.”—The Atlantic

“A writer whose work is both aggressively nontraditional and universally appealing…above all, Ausubel captures that eyeless beauty in the world — the part that goes on without us inventing or destroying or noticing.”—Barnes & Noble

“Lyrical stories arranged around themes of birth, gestation, conception and love. . . . Ausubel has a gift of language so rich that even the most mundane events are invested with poetry, and many of her characters are in need of all the poetry they can muster.”—Kirkus

“Ausubel is a master stylist of vibrant, concise prose, and these stories, with love most often at their cores, can be appreciated for that alone.”—Booklist

“What’s perhaps most impressive here is how Ausubel is able to connect the stories, despite the distinct and discrete strangeness of each, into a satisfying and cohesive arc, describing a cycle of life from pre-birth and gestation to death and ghostliness.” —The Daily Beast
 

 

Ramona Ausubel, No One Is Here Except All of Us,  Riverhead Books, 2012.

 

Ramona Ausubel’s fantastical and ambitious first novel, “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” was inspired by reminiscences and stories told by her Romanian-born grandmother. Ausubel, who grew up in New Mexico, is several generations removed from Nazi-dominated Europe. She is not a despairing witness like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Tadeusz Borowski, survivors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other camps whose work revealed the terrors of the Holocaust. She is closer in age to Jonathan Safran Foer, whose first novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” follows a young American and his malaprop-prone guide on a journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Ausubel’s novel is concerned with family history, communal memory and the power of the imagination, and maintains an uncanny, sometimes troubling, aura of innocence throughout.

The novel opens with a brief poetic prelude voiced by a woman cradling an infant in her arms: “It began in 1939, at the northern edge of Romania, on a small peninsula cupped by a muddy river. The days then were still and peaceful.” Nine Jewish families called the river valley, in the Carpathian Mountains, home. “Our village was complete and so were our lives within it; our ghosts were quiet under the earth and we were quiet above it.”

From here, the narrative is taken over by 11-year-old Lena, the youngest of three children of a cabbage farmer, who tells the story of her village and how its people reinvented the world as menace loomed.

The imagery in the early chapters brings to mind Marc Chagall’s optimistic and serene paintings of village life in Russia: goats, fiddlers, rabbis, brides, the tree of life. “In our village,” Lena says, “all of us — mothers and fathers, grandparents and children, uncles and great-aunts, the butcher, baker, saddlemaker, cobbler, wheat cutter, cabbage farmer — stood in circles around our tables and lit candles while we blanketed the room in prayer.”

The first intimations of change come as everyone gathers for Sabbath. The village healer, who presides, opens a newspaper with the headline “war. 11 am, september 3rd, 1939.” As the adults react with fear, Lena wonders, “What if I die? . . . What if I don’t grow up?” The healer reads the opening passages of the Book of Genesis, his words “a familiar river.” But soon he is interrupted — Lena sees a silver airplane pass overhead, then hears “a thundering, time-stopping boom.” Later that evening, the villagers find their river overflowing with trout, as well as with other treasures: “two bowls, one jewelry box full of mud, a doll with no legs, a matted sweater, some cut logs, a hand-drawn map of the summer constellations smudged but readable, and a woman. A woman — hair, teeth, feet, fingers all. And she was alive.”

As the villagers comfort and feed the woman, she describes how her village was destroyed by soldiers, her mother, sister, husband and children tortured and killed. The villagers panic. What to do? “We start over,” says the stranger, who has witnessed the worst and lost all. “When there is nothing left to do, and there is nowhere else to go, the world begins again.”

Through some mystical connection, Lena and the stranger help the villagers imagine their way out of reality into a fresh beginning. In chapters echoing Genesis, from the first day through the seventh, Ausubel describes their new existence unfolding. They plan for a grand temple and eventually build it in a barn, adorning its ceiling with constellations created out of broken china — “the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can’t sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone.” They designate committees — the Committee for the Appreciation of the River, the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It — and give the stranger the job of recording everyone’s prayers each day.

Lena’s parents give her to her childless aunt Kayla and uncle Hersh, the village saddle maker, so that in this new version of the world, they, too, can be parents. Lena’s life is reprised in accelerated form, beginning with infancy, so Kayla can experience all phases of motherhood. This plotline follows a convoluted path and is, in the end, distracting, as are occasional treacly passages: “One Friday evening, the sun hung heavy and waiting to drain, syrupy, into the wheat fields.”

Young Lena’s narration is sometimes so naïve, it threatens to diminish the gravity of the historic events she describes. But her voice gains authority with the passage of time. After Lena grows older, marries the village banker’s eldest son and becomes a mother, she considers her home’s third year of undisturbed peace: “I do not wonder so much why we were left alone as long as we were. Why our village was skipped by marching Romanian soldiers with orders to send all the Jews and Gypsies to the other side of the border for the Germans to deal with. What aches in every part of my body is that we did not hear their cries, the lives ending.”

From this point on, Ausubel artfully introduces moments of grim reality, “cracks” in the village’s story, via news flashes and Churchill speeches broadcast over a radio from the “old world” that the stranger, with Pandora-like curiosity, has exhumed. As the village’s myths begin to shatter, the novel breaks into three strands: Lena’s husband is captured and taken away by three relatively benign Italian soldiers who sequester him on an island as a prisoner of war; the doomed villagers prepare for the worst; and Lena makes a harrowing escape through the woods, subsisting on tree bark and stolen potatoes, determined to save her two young sons. “You have to survive to tell what happens,” the stranger insists. “That’s your job now.”

usubel’s novel is infused with faith in the power of storytelling. Its concluding passages invoke a tone not unlike that of Chagall’s tormented and apocalyptic painting “The Falling Angel.” Begun in 1923 and finished in 1947, after the war and the death of Chagall’s wife, the work depicts Satan throwing the world into chaos. Yet light and tenderness persevere — in a shining moon, in a candle still aglow, in a mother’s embrace of her child.

Like a mother shielding her infant from brutal reality, Ausubel has found her own muted way of writing about the Holocaust. “As I wrote through deeply sad stories, I found that hope was in the telling,” she says on her publisher’s Web site, explaining how she retrieved and reimagined family fables. “As long as the story was told, it was alive.” - JANE CIABATTARI

www.nytimes.com/

 

“No One Is Here Except All of Us contains so many achingly beautiful passages, it’s as if language itself is continually striving to be a refuge. . . . If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness here is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true. It’s the kind of God we wish for.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“What is most distinctive about Ausubel’s work is her prose, which is acute and beautiful. Her sentences — often funny, usually heartbreaking — are tiny works of art.” —NPR

“Debut novelist Ramona Ausubel casts a vibrant, dreamlike spell in this tale of a remote Romanian village whose citizens try to save themselves from the horrors of the Holocaust by reinventing their own history.” —Marie Claire

“Romanian Jews in 1939 reinvent their own reality in this inspiring novel about the power of community and imagination.”—O, the Oprah Magazine

“The true magic of the novel is in Ausubel’s prose. She weaves complex, thrilling imagery with the deft hand of a master. With its combination of fairy-tale flair and heartbreaking realism, No One Is Here Except All of Us has earned a place among this year’s most compelling and unique debut novels.” —BookPage

“Ramona Ausubel”s first novel, “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” is a poetic fable about a part of history after which some people say poetry is an obscenity… Ausubel”s fable-like tone is effective in creating a sensation of tale and dream. For conveying the full horror of the events surrounding the Holocaust, it is less so, but this isn’t what she’s trying to do. Instead, she is comfortable reshaping, in a safe time and place, stories that were handed to her, using her rhetorical and narrative skill to create something that can be carried without cutting the one who carries it.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Set in Romania on the eve of World War II, No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel, follows a Jewish community’s struggle for survival.” —Harper’s Bazaar – Must Read Books
“Ramona Ausubel’s debut, No One Is Here Except All of Us (Riverhead), captures the magical group-think of a Romanian village that retreats into an imaginary reality at the outbreak of war.” —Vogue


“Here is a world created out of the most curious and beautiful remnants of our own: opera, suitcases, letters, rivers, daughters, strangers and shovels. Ramona Ausubel cracks open the very idea of a book and fills its shell with a thing glimmering, thrilling and new.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else

“Here we are, benevolent and cruel, gorgeous and deranged, in a truly enthralling saga which simply staggered me with its capacity for gratitude. No One is Here Except All of Us is a special work of the imagination, an original gift, dark and light, and Ramona Ausubel colors it all with a glowing wisdom.” —Ron Carlson, author of The Signal

“Beguiling and deeply informative, Ausubel’s novel is a creative account of the recreation of a world full of the visionary’s paradox: the song is a howl, the child is an ancient, “yet everything stays true no matter how much changed.” A wise, compassionate book that even in its darkest turns uplifts.” —Christine Schutt, author of All Souls

“Beautifully written and alive in story, fascinating characters, and place. You can’t help but compare Ausubel’s book with Marquez, with her fantastic vision of history and invention, the small village dreaming the vast world, but she is her own new fresh voice.” —Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“Honestly, I can’t remember reading a more beautifully written book. The author’s use of language is marvelously poetic and vivid; nearly every sentence paints a detailed picture.” —Book Browse
“A fabulist tale of love, loss, faith, hope, community, and, especially, the power of story.” —Booklist

 

 

My conversation with Ramona Ausubel took place in the ether between upstate New York and California, from a small desk in my bedroom to her home in Santa Barbara. I wore something slobbishly inappropriate and kept one eye on my three kids as I typed. A tired Ausubel was herself caring for her newborn infant. So I cannot tell you about her curly red hair, her slippers, or the tone of her voice. I cannot tell whether you can smell the Pacific from her house. You will have to imagine these details, an appropriate exercise for thinking about an author whose debut novel is so wholly original it climbs new heights of imaginary prowess.
While the world might be sick with our busy-making and e-mail interviews, Ramona Ausubel’s debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, offers an antidote. Impossibly she has set her story in both a fabled land where magic is plentiful and in the brutish depths of World War II. Though the novel is concerned with identity and community, there is nothing quaint in Ausubel’s confluence of the domestic and the historic. History seeps through cracks in stories and prayers the characters tell as they reimagine the borders and rulebooks of a small town. The patterns of home replicate into the patterns of the planet, but a reader finds nothing small in these small acts. —Samantha Hunt

Did you play telephone operator as a child? There’s little pleasure when the passed-along phrase or story doesn’t get altered, right?
Exactly. It’s so enjoyable to watch something get transformed right before your eyes—or ears. It feels like the thing itself wanted to change.
Are you a storyteller when not writing?
I love the safety of writing, the fact that I can privately sculpt something until the timing is right, the build up, the end. I was incredibly shy as a kid, which I’m not so much anymore, except when it comes to telling long stories out loud. I envy those people who always have a great story about something, like their recent attempt to buy Mike Tyson’s old bedroom set. Although, if that happened to me, I’d probably tell you about it.
What did your research for No One Is Here Except All of Us involve?
At the very beginning, my research involved spending a bunch of time with my grandmother in New York, looking at pictures, listening to the family legends. When I first sat down to write, I just kept coming up with second-rate versions of stories she was brilliant at telling, so I gave up. Two years later, I picked the book up, but I did so without notes or research of any kind. I had realized that if I was going to tell a story, then it was going to have to become my own. My imagination was my only source for many drafts. Fortunately, imagination and empathy are pretty amazing sources, especially when the goal is to try to understand what it might have felt like, rather than to catalogue precisely what happened.
Once the book was pretty well formed, I had the opportunity to visit the region where my family came from. I wanted to have a sense of the place—the way it smelled in the morning, what the trees looked like on the horizon, the sound of the river.
When reading about the war and the history leading up to it, my goal was to understand the ghost of the war, more than to know all of the ins and outs. I also read the Old Testament again and some Jewish folklore. I have sometimes found that it’s easy to do too much research, for all that outside information to be burdensome. I’d classify my ideal research strategy as “homeopathic.”
Meaning “like suffering”? Or meaning some sort of natural remedy dosed at home?
Those are also good ways to interpret it, although I was thinking of homeopathic more in terms of dosage, the minimum amount of a missing element needed for the body to take notice. I want to know just enough that I feel comfortable invoking history, religion, et cetera, without knowing so much that those elements start to take over my brain and limit the freedom of imagination.
W.G. Sebald has a character in his novel The Emigrants named Dr. Henry Selwyn. He is wonderfully forthcoming and loquacious, telling the story of his life in great detail but, after saying so much, he finally admits that when it comes to World War II, there are no words for it. It’s an overwhelming moment. In No One Is Here Except All of Us, how did you navigate notions of silence and speaking for the dead?
My immediate family left Europe after the First World War, but the story of the novel takes place during World War II.  I made this move because I wanted only to gesture toward the war, for the events to be almost entirely off-stage, so I counted on readers to bring the weight of those events with them to the story. I think we all carry the impressions of World War II much more clearly than we do for World War I.
Still, the idea of writing about a time and place I have no personal experience with, especially one so unbearable, was more than a little intimidating. The way I chose to think about it was that, inevitably, each of us fails to communicate a thing so huge, so terrible, but perhaps all our voices together begin to describe the truth. I am just adding one more small voice. Also, time is going to pass—we will move farther and farther away from those unspeakable events. After September 11, everyone put never forget bumper stickers on their cars. I don’t think they were worried that the facts of the event would be forgotten, but the feeling. The way to keep from losing a feeling is for each person to find his or her own way in.
I’ve taken to thinking that the rash of fake memoirs that have been published means that in some imagined battle between history and fiction, fiction always wins, that hydra-headed fiction is more truthful than the story of history. But there is a danger in saying, facts aren’t important, yes? In writing No One Is Here Except All of Us, did you feel burdened by history? What of the opportunities reenvisioning old stories might present to, say, Holocaust deniers, who are, in essence, also storytellers?
I like the image of that hydra. You are getting at a really interesting and tricky question. On the one hand, an event happens in one moment. Then and only then is it complete and exact. After that, it’s always a reconstruction, no matter how carefully we try to stick to the facts. At the very least, the event has been altered by point-of-view, by editing out the irrelevant-seeming details, by trying to describe the way it felt to witness the event. But there’s a difference between giving an altered reconstruction and willfully denying evidence because one doesn’t want to believe it. You’re right—the realm of storytelling is pretty wide open, and there’s no way to keep the crazies out. I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about that. For me, I suppose I might have felt more burdened by history if I was trying to replace the previous memoirs, history books, novels, and oral tellings of the Holocaust rather than simply add another voice.
Your narrator, Lena, portrays a certain innocence yet, when the world is remade, she is dealt a cruel hand by her birth parents. I’m reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s story “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Community can have a nasty streak. In writing No One Is Here Except All of Us, what did you come to think of tribes?
That is such a haunting story. It’s true that we often take refuge in the idea that no one else is fixing the awful things in the world, either. And tribal wars are probably the most devastating kind. In the novel, the villagers decide to keep track of their new history by writing down everyone’s prayers. Perhaps this book is my own prayer that between all of us, we find a way to feel the bigness of everything, and go on.
How do you write? Where and with what? Are there certain things you require in order to write?
These days I have a three-month old baby, so I’m learning to be very adaptable. I find that the only thing I really, really require in order to write is a computer, since I cannot compose in longhand. It’s like my brain won’t turn on unless I’m typing. After that, it’s a real mash-up. Ideally, I try to write for two hours or so a day, though sometimes I’ve gotten lucky and written for eight. I wrote the whole first draft of this novel either in bed, where I could trick myself into feeling like I wasn’t working, or in the library. Once, I interrupted a vacation on the Red Sea coast in Egypt to resuscitate the book from certain death—evidence that good ideas sometimes come at inconvenient times. It was actually really lovely. I would sit on the balcony of our tiny room with the miniature laptop, enjoying the locally branded and amazingly named Gordoon’s gin and Boreo cookies. Basically, writing is key to the way I exist in the world, so I’ve learned not to make too many rules—that way, I take it with me everywhere.
A three-month-old baby and a brand-new book? I am raising my glass of Gordoon’s to you.
 - Interview by Samantha Hunt www.theparisreview.org/

 

The Rumpus Interview with Ramona Ausubel

By Malcolm Forbes

 

Ramona Ausubel’s debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, was a powerful, dreamlike fable in which the inhabitants of a small Romanian village reinvent their own history to stave off the encroaching horrors of war and holocaust. It was a novel full of storytellers and storytelling, of overlapping realities and interwoven myths, and it showcased Ausubel’s talent for invention and made her a writer to watch.
Since then, Ausubel has concentrated on short stories. She has been published in the likes of The New Yorker and The Paris Review Daily and has received special mention in The Best American Short Stories. Like her novel, many of her stories are built around fantastical notions, while at the same time remaining anchored in humdrum, everyday routines to explore real-life situations. Ordinary meets the extraordinary, and the fusion makes for captivating reading.
Now comes her first collection of short stories, A Guide to Being Born, and each one is strange but beguiling, some even unsettling and deeply affecting. The book charts the life cycle from birth to death, by way of motherhood. Oddball zaniness alternates with cool, calm observation and honest emotion. Ausubel gets the balance just right: when the madcap antics and ideas have dizzied us enough, we are brought back to earth with perfectly-realized thought or feeling: heartache, joy, longing, loneliness, despair. Linking most of these stories is love in all its guises, and Ausubel constantly delights with her take on it. Our lives can be as wild or as wacky as Ausubel’s fictive worlds, but in the end, as one of her characters puts it, “Everyone wants to be alone in someone else’s heart.”

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The Rumpus: First of all, congratulations on a hugely enjoyable and wildly inventive collection of stories. The adage of “write what you know” seems very apt here. You became a mother last year, and the stories are clearly a response to motherhood. Was the whole pregnancy-birth-motherhood journey an experience too good to live and let go, that you felt compelled to use it as a creative source and fictionalize elements of it?
Ramona Ausubel: Thank you so much! It’s actually funny you mention my son, because I actually wrote all the stories in A Guide to Being Born a couple years before he was born. I had arrived in my mid-twenties and was newly married and suddenly having a child became a very real possibility. It sort of snuck up on me. Moms were grown-ups and they always knew what to do, but I did not feel either of those things yet, at least not completely. It all felt very outsized and unbelievable, from the physical reality of pregnancy—what’s more fantastical than a creature who has never existed before growing in your guts?—to the whole project of parenthood.
Reportedly, you love in ways you never imagined; you are suddenly not only able, but at least sometimes enthusiastic about superhuman levels of devotion to another human being. You are more vulnerable than it seems reasonable to be. And it’s a total mystery: no one knows what kid they’re going to get, or what it will feel like to be this new version of yourself. When I was pregnant with my son, people were always asking me if I felt ready, and I could not imagine how anyone would ever answer “yes” to that question. I wanted to be like, “Ready for what?” We pretend like we know what we’re up against, but actually, it’s a huge, huge mystery. The stories were born out of that mystery.
Rumpus: In the author’s note to No One Is Here Except All of Us, you mention that for research, you interviewed your grandmother about her childhood in a remote Romanian village. The stories recounted felt like legends and fables to you, to the extent that you later decided, “This was not a story I knew how to tell.” When you resumed work on it two years later, it was more your own work; you weren’t entirely sure which direction to go in, and yet: “My head was quiet, but something in my chest knew what to do.” Was a similar gut-reaction at work in the composition of your stories? Or better—and at the risk of being saccharine—did these stories come from the heart?
Ausubel: Isn’t it frustrating that the word “heart” has those over-sweet connotations? That’s part of why I feel compelled to write (and to read)—our language is inefficient when it comes to emotion, and we’re all living lives full of unimaginable beauty and sadness and strangeness, but we are hungry for ways to talk about those experiences. So yes, these stories definitely came from the heart. Unlike in the novel, I was writing pure fiction, so I never had to figure out how to make the leap into my own imagination. The questions that prompted the stories—how do we navigate the many transformations our lives and bodies make—were my own true questions, very much on my mind in real life, but I felt free to invent worlds unlike my own in which to explore them.
We often talk about writing in construction terms, as if a piece is engineered and crafted, which it certainly is, but I also think it’s impossible to overstate how much of that creation and the subsequent sculpting is done using instincts and gut feelings. The fact that I had all this “factual” information when I was working on No One Is Here Except All of Us meant that my brain wanted to be in charge, when what I really needed was a very different kind of knowing.
Rumpus: You describe your novel as being a book about “the bigness of being alive as an individual, a family member, a resident, a member of a tribe, and a participant in history.” Do your stories operate on as large a scale, or does the short story form require the author to, in some way, think smaller?
Ausubel: The stories are working at situations just as emotionally complicated as those in the novel, while other elements like time and space are much more limited. People often talk about the iceberg theory, that most of what’s going on is submerged and what we’re reading is just a small point, up above the waterline. Or to use another metaphor, short stories are like eggs—you can hold the whole thing at once, yet what is contained within is gigantic. And in a way, because the piece is smaller, readers are more willing to suspend disbelief and I think bigger risks are possible as a result.
Rumpus: These stories chart the cycle of transformation from love to conception to gestation to birth—only in reverse. The first pair of stories come under the title “Birth,” the second cluster “Gestation,” and so on. Why did you choose to present them in this way?
Ausubel: If something looks the way you expect it to, it’s easier to just file it away without really considering it, so I always at least consider the unexpected option. In this case, I liked that opening with birth and going backwards created an immediate tension and a question in the reader’s mind before he or she has even begun. Some of the stories in A Guide to Being Born are about actual birth, but most are about another kind of transformation, and one of the things I wanted to get at is the idea that we are all in a constant cycle of being born in new ways throughout our lives. We are transformed when we fall in love, when we become parents, when we have to care for our children as adults, when people around us get sick, when we ourselves look toward the end of life. It’s a loop, and we run the course of it again and again.
Rumpus: The first story, “Safe Passage,” features a group of grandmothers sailing on a freighter towards an unknown destination. Spliced with their pooled remembrances of the past is a scene with one of the women in a hospital bed and her family gathered around her. This story is in the “Birth” section and yet the tone is unmistakably elegiac, the women’s journey patently a transition from one world to the next. Are you telling us that dying is a kind of birth or rebirth?
Ausubel: Death and what happens to us after we’re gone is the biggest question there is. Biggest by many, many powers. Maybe we simply disappear and maybe we go to a fluffy white cloud place, where all our childhood dogs are waiting along with everyone we’ve ever loved (and they all somehow get along), or maybe we come back as stinkbugs or sparrows. Until each of us gets there, the answer to the questions is None/All of the Above. When I was writing “Safe Passage,” I had the sense that Alice, the main character, found a kind of peace in her strange surroundings, and that she walked out into that peace (or swam, in this case) and there was something there, as opposed to nothing. As long as there is something, as long as there is matter, there is no ending. Birth into what, we don’t know, but, at least in the world of this story, death is a rebirth.
Rumpus: Your second, extremely poignant story, “Poppyseed,” is about a couple coming to terms with their severely disabled child, one with the body of an eight-year-old but a baby’s brain. The letters the mother pens to her daughter are touching, but they are offset by comical and unexpected scenes and situations: the father conducts ghost tours on a haunted ship, and the end—without revealing too much—involves a jaw-dropping act with “almonds” in a hospital. Is it fair to say this is your modus operandi: blending absurd situations or ideas with the (often painfully) real? Is all-out absurd not your thing?
Ausubel: I love absurdity, all-out absurdity, but that’s not where my own pen goes. I’m always trying to write about the real world, even though I sometimes choose to do so via exaggeration. My allegiance is to emotional truth, which doesn’t always easily fit into the box of reality. I think we’re all walking around doing the things that need doing and meanwhile we have these crazy, strange, huge emotional lives going on. That’s what I want to write about, that’s what I want to get right. And for me, the way to give the tangle and thump of the emotional truth a voice is to let the characters act on their feelings, let those inner worlds manifest in the outer world, even if their actions are bigger than we’re comfortable with. When we see the act, the feeling behind it immediately becomes real in a new way. I’m also sure that people are doing very strange things everywhere on earth every single day—stranger than anything I’ve written.
Rumpus: By incorporating fantastical elements there is also, surely, a tendency to get carried away. Do you ever have to rein in some of your ideas, trim any of that abundant excess?
Ausubel: I’ve done plenty of trimming and shoring up, and I’m sure sometimes it has been in the wilder parts of stories, but it has just as often been in the mundane sections. Because I’m trying to write about that emotional truth, there’s a natural gravity that keeps things from going to nuts. I’ve never been interested in reinventing everything—my brain gets the most interested when there is just one small change.
Rumpus: Absurdity is toned down but still present in the third, and for me, best story here, “Atria.” A girl’s teenage pregnancy (again, very real—at least realistically portrayed) is given a mind-bending spin when she starts to imagine giving birth to a series of animals. There is a subtle line about how the girl, Hazel, was also unplanned—”a very surprising accident followed almost immediately by her father’s diagnosis.” We then get a killer line: “While Mother grew fatter, Father grew smaller, and everyone felt certain that they were watching a direct transfer of life from one body to another.” Life mingles with death in these tales, and many characters have lost a soulmate and are soldiering on as single parents or abandoned lovers still smarting from the “pressing absence” of a partner. Is it fair to say you write bittersweet stories, flitting from laughter to tears?
Ausubel: I’m glad to hear you liked that story! Origin stories are always fascinating to me, partly because the stakes are so high—this is why you exist, these are the conditions that made you—and also because they are so purposefully constructed. If a person comes into the world by accident and her life is always shadowed by the death of her father, how much would that change how having a baby felt to her? The idea of new life is heavier in that case, and carries death right along with it. And then I thought about what it would be like to be pregnant so young, and without love being involved. It seemed natural to me that Hazel would have a hard time seeing her baby as safe and human and expected, but might instead transpose her unsteady emotional state over the fetus and begin to see something unusual there.
I have to say that when I was pregnant, though I did not expect to give birth to a three-headed giraffe, I was pretty awed by the amount of unknown involved in the project. I didn’t know who this person would be or who he would turn me into. Human, sure, but goodness, that still leaves a lot open.
Rumpus: These stories are titled A Guide to Being Born. But how are your stories born? Do you come up with a quirk, and then flesh it out from there? Or is your starting point more thematic?
Ausubel: The starting point varies between stories. For some, it’s a situation that strikes me. I thought, What if you were pregnant but didn’t believe the baby would be human? And I followed that idea until it became “Atria.” I don’t know where it came from, but I thought of the title to “Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations” and then wrote the story afterwards, following scene by scene, not knowing where it would end up.
No matter where the idea comes from, what I’m always looking for is a fizzy feeling in my chest. It’s the writing version of a crush. I need the right combination of known and unknown, a puzzle for which I have enough pieces to begin, but not so many that I can already see how it will be put together and am therefore bored before I start.
Rumpus: In a similar vein, do you map each tale out in advance, setting out all the components, and then join the dots, or do you make things up as you go along?
Ausubel: I’m a huge make-up-as-I-go-along writer. I cannot outline, no matter how much I’d like to be able to. Part of that is what I was saying before about not getting bored. I think it was Mark Twain who said something like, “If I knew what I was going to write, why would I write it?” Of course, once I have figured out what the story is, there’s plenty of work ahead, and then I do plenty of restructuring and joining of dots. I’m big on messing with the order and thinking of all the component parts like blocks that can be put together in many different ways. I wonder if this is a trait I would have developed had I been writing in the times of typewriters or pens (I hear those are still around, but I can’t compose with them), or scrolls. I love the cut-and-paste. When I’m stuck, that’s one of the first things I try.
Rumpus: To what extent would you consider yourself a comic writer? There are some wonderful comic touches in these stories, without the stories being entirely comic. I’m thinking of the bored audience of academics in “Magniloquence” that ignores the dreary speakers on stage to play spin-the-bottle on the floor instead. Or the couple who make love to The Golden Girls in “Snow Remote.” At other times, we get more laughter in the dark.
Ausubel: I find myself looking for humor on a very instinctual level. I once heard someone say that an itch is just the smallest possible pain, which I don’t think is actually true, but I like that idea, and I think of humor in sort of the same way. It’s a tiny volcano, but beneath the joke is the whole mountain range of sadness or hurt or hope. Sometimes the full scope of the situation is too much to feel, too overwhelming, yet a sliver of comedy can slide right through and stab you. I love that. I also love that it’s physical. A reader who cries or laughs is no longer watching from the sidelines. Whether I succeed, my goal in each story is to make sure no one leaves without a little dirt on their hands.
Rumpus: Who are your literary idols and influences? There is now quite a crop of writers who blend surrealism with realism, from Aimee Bender to Karen Russell, and of course George Saunders. One of your stablemates at Riverhead, Manuel Gonzales, is also going down such a road.
Ausubel: Surrealism is a good road! I love stories that give me the world in a new way, and all the people you’ve named are favorites. Manuel’s book, The Miniature Wife, is so, so wonderful, and I’ve been a George Saunders fan since the early days. I read my first Karen Russell story while floating on a boat in Greece and I’ve never forgotten it. There are stories like John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” that push quietly into the fantastical, and I love writers like Márquez, who spread out all over that land.
But I also think some “realism” can be as strange as anything we think of as being magical. Raymond Carver’s worlds are as bizarre as any of Aimee Bender’s. Both of them are using microscopes to exaggerate human experience. The stories always come down to emotional truth, whether it’s four people drinking themselves into nighttime or a man evolving backwards. It’s all exaggeration and it’s all­­­ absolutely true.
Rumpus: Is it easy knowing when to stop writing a short story? Some writers start a story imagining it to be a novel but later decide it is better kept short. Others realize their story has legs and expand it into a novel.
Ausubel: It hasn’t happened to me that a story turns into a novel, though the reverse is sometimes true. In the new series of stories I’m working on, a couple started out as longer pieces but were much more interesting when cut way down. In general, the way I know I’m done with something is that a) I’ve gone over and over it fifteen or twenty times, over months or years, and done everything I can think of again and again; b) I’ve gotten lots of good eyes on it at various times and really paid attention; and c) my heart is elsewhere. If I looked at the stories in A Guide to Being Born in six months, I’m sure I would be able to see possible changes, and if I looked at them in ten years, I might go in yet another direction. But I think it’s important to remember that art takes place in time. We’re all working on things while also being alive in a particular moment. At least for me, one of the things that makes a story work is the chemistry is has with my lived-life. Once my head and heart are pulling in a new direction, it’s time to let that story stand.
Rumpus: Your writing suggests you are brimming with ideas, spoilt for choice. Am I right?
Ausubel: Man, I wish it always felt that way! Sometimes ideas do come in a heap, and I have to write as quickly as I can to catch them before they flutter away. Other times I have to be very patient. For a few months after I finished No One Is Here Except All of Us, I was pretty spent and it took a while for ideas to start brewing again. I would guess that most writers have a moment of concern that what they’ve just completed will be the last thing they ever write. It’s hard, when you’ve been so deep in something, to face that blank page again. But things do begin again.
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Featured image of Ramona Ausubel © by Teo Grossman.