Your story “Attila” revolves around an English professor caring for her aging mother, who has dementia. It takes its title from the name of a pet rabbit, who plays a minor but crucial role in the narrative. Was it the idea of the rabbit that set the story in motion for you?
I didn’t start with the rabbit. Sometimes when I’m falling asleep things occur to me, and this time it was the first sentence: “Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage.” I knew that Martha was someone who’d lived alone until recently, and that her mother, Judy, had dementia. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure. But the sentence was still in my head in the morning, so I started this story. My family has an indoor rabbit, in Brooklyn, but the name Attila (the Bun) belongs to a friend’s rabbit, who lives an idyllic country life in Montana.
Martha, the daughter, is single, in her late forties, and Judy, the mother, is also on her own, divorced from her husband and estranged from Martha’s older sister, Molly. It’s clear that Judy needs and depends on Martha. For Martha, Judy is a huge responsibility. Do you think that her caregiving is dutiful only, or does she also get something from her mother’s presence in her home?
It’s true that Judy is a huge and probably unsustainable responsibility for Martha. There’s certainly an aspect of duty to her caregiving; since she was a child, Martha has embraced the role of the good kid—good student, good daughter, good sister. That’s a role that doesn’t always serve adult women, though. In order to sustain it, Martha has had to avoid thinking about certain uncomfortable facts related to Judy’s rupture with the rest of the family. I don’t think that Judy is company for Martha at this point, but her presence forces Martha to think about the past and about what kind of daughter and sister she’s been. That reckoning may inspire her to make some changes in her life.
Judy’s current erratic behavior can be explained by her dementia. But she was always somewhat unpredictable, and she sabotaged two of the most important relationships in her life. What do you think has driven her treatment of those around her?
I think that Judy is a woman who didn’t get the education she deserved, and who gave up her work to have children. My own mother got her college degree (and read obsessively) after my sister and I got out of her hair, and I know many other women of her generation who went back to work after their children left home. Judy’s a smart person (and a good liar), but she didn’t exercise her brain in those ways. I don’t think she meant to hurt her family members—I think she created drama in her life because she was bored. I’d like to write another story someday about what she was like as a young woman.
Judy often doesn’t register or sympathize with others’ emotions. It’s something that Martha has also been accused of, by boyfriends and friends, though she thinks of herself as quite different from her mother. Do you think it’s a family trait?
Yes. Martha thinks of herself as very different from her mother. Judy’s the kind of woman who would straighten her pantyhose without a second thought in the communal part of a women’s restroom, or ask another woman for a tampon—a kind of “assumed sorority” that makes Martha uncomfortable. But both of them ignore the emotions of people around them—Judy willfully, to stir up trouble, and Martha because she avoids confrontation. She’s surprised when a boyfriend of several years leaves her to pursue other goals, even though (I imagine) outsiders who observed the relationship would have seen clues that the breakup was coming.
Some of Martha’s academic work has revolved around the seventeenth-century English poet Katherine Philips. What made you choose Philips?
I’ve always loved seventeenth-century English poets—John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others. When I was looking for a specialty for Martha, I went back to an anthology of seventeenth-century poetry and prose that I used in a wonderful course taught by the great Milton scholar Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Philips was the only woman in that anthology, and the editors included only one of her poems. Lewalski and other scholars brought many more serious female poets from this period to light. While I was working on “Attila,” I read more of Philips’s poems and was especially moved by the two elegies she wrote for her son, who died in infancy. I was also interested in Philips’s relationship to the idea of privacy, which was in transition in her time (as I think it is today). When a version of Philips’s poems was published without her permission, she wrote a letter to a friend, in which she complained, defensively, “But I am the only unfortunate Person who cannot so much as think in private, who must have all my Imaginations and idle Notions rifled and expos’d to play the Mountebanks and dance upon the Ropes to entertain the Rabble, to undergo all the Raillery of the Wits, and all the Severity of the Wise, to be the Sport of some that can, and Derision of others that cannot read a Verse.”
As Martha tells her student Ava, it could be shameful for a woman, especially a woman without an aristocratic title, to publish poetry in that time period; it seemed immodest, crass, and money-grubbing. But Martha is also thinking about her mother’s secret, and what happened to her family when it came out in their community. Sometimes when I’m writing about people who seem to have nothing to do with me, I recognize uncomfortable facts about myself that I haven’t faced in any other way. When that happens I think it’s a sign that the story is working. Martha tries to explain this private aspect of writing to her student, without much success.
As the ending of the story perhaps presages, Martha is on the cusp of a change in her life. Her mother is becoming too ill to live with even this degree of independence and will perhaps need to be moved to a care facility. That will leave Martha alone to focus on herself. Have you imagined a future for her?
I usually leave people where I leave them. But what I hope for for Martha is that she’ll continue her career on her own terms, and also get back on the dating apps—I want her to meet someone who gets her. And I hope she adopts another rabbit. ♦