"I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy"
"I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy"
Talking with Kelly McMasters, author of The Leaving Season, about the male gaze, the divorce memoir, and the anxiety of writing about other people
Kelly McMasters’ The Leaving Season hits with the force of so many American Dreams upturned. In a series of linked essays, Kelly moves from marriage to divorce, youthful love to single motherhood. It’s a coming-to-midlife tale of sorts, about a woman who follows the path women are supposed to seek—falling in love with an interesting man, buying a rural farm home, becoming a mother—only to find herself let down by men, life in the country, and homemaking.
But the book is also a philosophical exploration of some of our mostly deeply held mythologies about gender, domesticity, violence, and identity, and about finding one’s way out of the roles that have been pre-written for women. As Kelly wades through so many shifts in her life and sense of self—most of which come slow and steady—she also studies Americana, whiteness, place, and family, alongside questions about what it takes to leave a life you thought you wanted.
Ultimately The Leaving Season isn’t about one season, but about exploring the ongoing work of studying the shape of one’s desire, how we change almost imperceptibly—“Slowly, piece by piece, and then all at once”—and what it takes to make peace with our own constant change.
As Kelly writes in one essay: “Desire is simultaneously as invisible and real as an imaginary friend, as ephemeral as hope.”
I corresponded with Kelly about her inspirations for the book, advice for writers writing about other people, politics and art, literary form, the elusive concept of home, and breaking the male gaze.
Kelly is also the author of Welcome to Shirley, and co-editor of the anthology Wanting: Women Writing About Desire, which includes essays by Torrey Peters, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, Sonora Jha, and many others.
In The Leaving Season, you archive your ailing marriage to a painter with a “hauntological” gaze. While you track his gaze on his subjects—on you, on other women, on your children—you also return the gaze with your writing, surveying his anger and the pain left in its wake, even deconstructing his art at times in the book. Were you thinking about subverting the male gaze while working on this book?
I’m so glad you asked this question. I thought a lot about both the male and female gaze, seeing, being seen, the predatory nature of some types of seeing, what it means to have one’s image constructed by others, and to whom an image belongs. As the art critic John Berger said in Ways of Seeing, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” I have a line in the book that describes some of the women who sit for paintings as a “dreaming bowl of fruit.” This is not to diminish their role or personhood, but to play on that idea of gaze, that this is how they are being seen.
Here’s the thing. The male artist is expected to be difficult. We are told that this is the cost of living in proximity to brilliance. Brilliant men in general are often excused from the rigors of common decency. Berger was described as having a “bludgeoningly opinionated” gaze, which worked to his advantage establishing him as one of the best critics of the century. Now imagine a flesh and blood person, not a statue or canvas, under that bludgeoning gaze.
Sometimes, this is an expected narrative. When Francoise Gilot first met Picasso, she said, “I knew it was going to be a catastrophe, but a catastrophe that would be worth living.” When, after being together for three years, Picasso took Francoise to visit Matisse, and Matisse wanted to paint her portrait, Picasso erupted in indignant anger. He’d only painted two small black and white portraits of her during their time together. “Even he was surprised by his negligence,” Malte Herwig writes in his book cataloging his interviews with Gilot when she was in her 90s. “He had done everything to get her to move in with him, and in all that time, he hadn’t given any thought to making her the subject of a large painting. …Their joint visit to Matisse had shown him one thing for certain: he wanted to possess Francoise as a work of art as well as a person.”
In her own book, Life With Picasso, Gilot details Picasso’s increased anger at the end of their relationship, just before she takes their two children and leaves. Sensing that she was pulling away from him, he attempts to make her jealous by painting portraits of a new young model and is livid when it does not bother her, calling her “a monster of indifference.”
Gilot tried to make him understand that she didn’t need to be his muse. “I tried to explain to him that it was his work that held me, not the image of myself that I saw in it. What I did see in it, I told him, was him, not me.”
Of Picasso’s two wives and three significant love affairs, two of the women committed suicide and two were driven mad. The only one who survived was Francoise Gilot. She was the one who left. She was the one who was able to disrupt the gaze.
More than subverting the male gaze, though, I worked to reclaim my relationship with art. I have three lyric essays as section breaks in the book and they are titled: Still Life 1: The City, Still Life 2: The Country, Still Life 3: The Suburbs. I intentionally constructed them as small landscapes on the page. I think, in many ways, I wanted to step into the body of the male painter myself, feel what it was like to walk around in it, stare at whatever I wanted, and paint what I saw. That was my own version of Gilot’s breaking the gaze.
A good chunk of the book explores masculinity in the country, American gun culture, and white supremacy. What I appreciated about these sections is how you offer the people you study their own humanity, even as you critique the belief systems they move within. You also illustrate how moving within those systems, as a woman and a wife, felt for you—like you didn’t have value unless you were a mother, like you had stumbled into a world with which you didn’t align.
Obviously this is all very topical at the moment given the pervasiveness of gun violence in America, which emerges from ideologies about the family, race, and gender. How were you thinking about the intersection between the political and the aesthetic while you worked on this book?
With my first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, I only realized I was writing a political book when a mentor and professor, Richard Locke, pointed it out to me. I was surprised he saw it this way, and he laughed, said something along the lines of: you are taking the Department of Defense to task. How could that not be political?
I think it is easier for me to tell myself that I am just telling my own story, and it happens to involve the Department of Defense and Superfund sites, or, in the case with The Leaving Season, gun culture and antisemitism and toxic masculinity and Trump country. But here’s the thing: in those years, which were a decade pre-Trump, I didn’t see this as illustrating the dramatic split in our country that we now know it to be. In the first writing of it, I did not see the story as political, necessarily; I just saw it as deeply personal. Of course, those two are intrinsically intertwined, especially for women, especially for mothers.
In my own reading life, I prefer mixes of personal and informative. In my classroom, I tease my students that this is the “spinach inside the brownie” approach; build a beautiful scene on the page, and then lace in facts before the reader knows what hit them (the beauty being the chocolate, the facts being the spinach). It sounds manipulative, but if you were a mother in the late 2000s, you know that sometimes a spinach brownie is the only way to get nutrients into your child! Same with the reader. If I told you my book was about nuclear devastation and poverty, no one would want to subject themselves to that. But a blue-collar girl’s bittersweet love song to her hardscrabble hometown? Sign me up.
This is why I love the essay form. I was able to take each thing I was holding in my sights in this book and change my approach when necessary. Masculinity? Let’s get a cow in there. Heterotopias? Hmm, how about Truman Capote and some neighborly murder-suicide? I also think that since my main theme here was motherhood, grappling with these big intellectual ideas was a way to quiet my anxiety of writing a “domestic” book.
There’s been a wave of books about divorce and midlife written recently by women, but of course there’s also a rich tradition of writing that precedes these books. What were your concerns or inspirations as a writer about working within this tradition?
Lots of concerns, lots of inspirations. Most of my concerns were commercial, which I try not to think too much about, because that will drive a person mad. Or they were personal and fear-driven, which still keep me up at night, but I don’t want to give them weight by naming them.
I’ve been so lucky to have incredible inspirations, even before I realized what I was writing towards. I recently wrote a roundup of Single Mother Stories for Electric Lit, and one book that struck me in particular was Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions. When I first read this book, I was not yet a mother, much less a single mother. In my mind, I categorized it as an addiction memoir. Sonora Jha’s amazing book, How to Raise a Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto, is another incredible example that I wish I had when my sons were younger, when I was still married, when I hadn’t yet understood that I needed to leave. I think a lot about books that are not squarely about motherhood, yet are by mothers and have mothering across every page, like one of my desert island picks, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. I was lucky enough to study with her at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference last summer and it was as magical as I imagined. I also studied with Emily Raboteau there, whose work on mothering, politics, and the environment is crushing in all the best ways, from her book Searching for Zion to her imaginative Covid essay in The Nation, “Eventually, Does the Whole World Go Away?” Camille Dungy, Rachel Cusk, Joy Williams, Rebecca Woolf, Shirley Jackson, Anne Sexton, Abigail Thomas, Edwidge Danticat, Claire Dederer, Sheila Heti, Jessamine Chan, Maggie Smith. Lucille Clifton: quotes from each of these women are strewn across my journals.
I have a great photo that I keep on my refrigerator of my youngest son as a baby on the floor literally eating Elisabeth Badinter’s book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which I’d been trying to read during bathroom breaks between breastfeeding and diapers and naps and chasing his toddler brother and work. That image describes my experience so perfectly. Here are all of my intellectual intentions and here is this adorable, smiling, chubby baby, swallowing it whole.
In one essay, you revisit an intense string of events that led to a CPS call. The investigation, though short-lived, comes after your children’s father posts a revealing image (an artwork created under his gaze) of them online without your consent. In the book, however, you also thoughtfully implicate yourself as a writer: “Am I not simply painting my own portrait?” you write. “Showing my version of the world through my own limited and biased point of view, building a narrative around it, turning it into metaphor? Placing art above parenting?”
We met at AWP where you led a panel on this issue. It was SUCH a good conversation that I wish I could reproduce here! But many of the panelists noted that women writers are frequently pressured to defend any inclusion of children and husbands in their work, whereas men aren’t held to such standards. I kept thinking about the many questions I get from women writers who are anxious about the ethics of making art out of their lives—lives that are shared with children and other people. What thoughts do you have for those writers?
I think these anxieties usually fall into two camps: 1. Will someone sue me, and 2. Will someone hate me?
The first is often scarier in a more amorphous way. The idea of entering a courtroom, of opening your journals or your family to an investigation, is paralyzing, especially to someone like myself who has had experience with “the system” between CPS and divorce. At a certain point, this paralysis switched over to motivation. I’d already been through the worst, I figured. I never want to go through that again, but the pain of that time became galvanizing.
My advice to writers concerned about lawsuits is: talk to a lawyer or two (or four). The law is so complex, and chances are you are focusing on the wrong thing anyway. One wise lawyer I spoke to put it very plainly: “Truth is not actionable.” I wrote that on a sticky note and taped it to my wall. Truth is subjective, of course, so that is not foolproof. My personal litmus test was to interrogate my intention at every turn. Is it to tell my truth, or is it to destroy another, tell on someone, vindicate myself in some way? If so, that’s fine for a draft, but then I try to write through that and figure out why I am trying to do that on the page. In my experience, when I did that it turned out it was during periods when I felt my voice—off the page—was being silenced or disregarded. When writing real life, there is always going to be a connection between what is happening at the breakfast table and how you are showing up on the page.
As for the second concern, I wish I had an easy answer here, but I don’t. In the case of many essays in The Leaving Season, and the one you are talking about in particular, I wound up writing to protect the wrong people in many of my initial drafts. That’s the beauty of a draft—you are in control of whether anyone ever sees it. I do so much of my working out my thoughts on the page during the writing. I had to give myself permission to go to the dark places, the complicit places, in order to come back out the other side. In the end, I hope in my final draft I was protecting the right people—my children—and holding myself as accountable as I did any other character on the page.
Can you talk a bit about the memoir-in-essays form? It’s a rather elusive structure, but you handle it so deftly in this book. Why did you feel a series of linked essays was the right shape for The Leaving Season?
This was an intuitive choice at first, but one that I came to understand was necessary as the book crystalized into its full self. Here’s why: The primary heartbreak of divorce is grief. Grief is simply not linear. For a period, my editor and I tried to harness the book into a more conventional memoir form, but the pages just weren’t having it. There is no straightforward story arc. While divorce seems like it would have a clear before and after, the truth is there are many—there is the before and after of knowing you need to leave, the before and after of accepting it. The before and after of saying it aloud the first time, maybe even just quietly to yourself in the shower, then to someone else. Then there is the saying it aloud to the person you are leaving. And then, of course, there is the actual leaving itself, which, as anyone who has done it knows, has its own layers of logistics: legal, domestic, geographic, financial, scheduling, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.
And then there are the moments when you backtrack, when you forget, the moments of familiarity, of shared space and time, of old intentions. Every divorce starts as a love story, and often those two worlds continue to collide, over and over, even after the leaving begins.
The essay form allowed me the flexibility to dart into different aspects of leaving and explore those individual layers and complexities. I imagined the book like a prism, the essays offering different ways into the center.
Throughout the book you also explore another elusive concept—the concept of home. Though we often think about the home as a source of freedom, you explore how home, like marriage, can become a source of loneliness or possibility, fantasy or “mundane worries,” fear or pleasure. What do you think about “home” now, after writing this book?
I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy. Meaning, we all have this idea of what it could be like, of possibility, of hope. In the essay “Finding Home,” I come to grips with the fact that my own idea of home doesn’t really matter, because while I am busy trying to build our security and safety, get the perfect posters for my kids’ room and the right dining room table, they are experiencing their childhood. This is the home they will remember, that they will either push against or spend their lives trying to return to as adults. And I was missing it. This home—where it is the three of us—is ephemeral and temporary. My oldest son woke up one morning taller than me this year; I will never look down into his sweet face again. Soon, they will be driving, then leaving for college, then leaving forever. Home is simply whatever we remember after it’s over.
In The Leaving Season, you mention a game of chance you used to play in times of uncertainty—a parlor trick a friend taught you, in which you’d reach for a book, open to a random page, and point to a line before looking, as a form of “literary tarot.” Can we play a round of this? It feels like the perfect way to end our conversation.
I’ll go first, with the book that’s closest to me at the moment, as I write these questions to you from my couch at home (the book is Dragons Love Tacos!):
“Too late…”
Okay, your turn.
Fuck, I love this game. I had The Changeling by Joy Williams next to me. It might be unfair, because I have so much of this book underlined that my fingers probably cheated, but here it is:
“You cannot keep things the way they are. They go away. They change. There has never been an exception to this rule. No mercy has ever been shown.”