“I came from somewhere that has a lot of character and really fascinating people who have carved out really beautiful lives, and they don’t fall easily into the caricatures that we see of rural Pennsylvanian people in the news.”
By Lily Meyer
Author, poet, and translator Idra Novey has the rare gift of writing novels that demand to be read quickly, but thought about slowly. Her debut, Ways to Disappear, which is set in Rio de Janeiro, mixes mystery and magic with explorations of art and influence. In Those Who Knew, set on an invented island, Novey writes about abuse of power both in intimate relationships and on much broader political scales. In her newest novel, Take What You Need, she turns again to questions of power, but close to home this time.
Take What You Need is set in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains, near the steel town where Novey grew up. Its two narrators—Jean, a prickly, brilliant self-taught sculptor in late middle age, and her estranged but beloved stepdaughter Leah—trade chapters, each telling the story of how they see not only their relationship, but their home. Leah has moved to New York and, with the rise of Donald Trump, feels increasingly wary of her town of origin; Jean, meanwhile, is committed to her community, though nervously so. When an unemployed young man named Elliott moves in next door, she’s frightened of his presence at first, worrying about opioids and crime. But before long, she’s drawn Elliott into her home and her artistic practice, catalyzing a string of events that transform her relationship with both her stepdaughter and her sculpture.
Novey and I video-chatted about Take What You Know in February, a month before the book’s release. She is reflective, enthusiastic, and a real pleasure to talk to, just as she is to read.
Lily:
What was the first spark of Take What You Need?
Idra:
I grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which was a former Bethlehem Steel town. My family’s been in that western part of Pennsylvania for almost a hundred years. Both of my first novels touch on that area, but I wasn’t ready to set a whole novel there until the very fraught and uncertain time around the 2016 election, when it seemed like everyone was talking about the Rust Belt.
I started feeling an urgency to make sense of the polarization between my hometown and New York, where I was living. I was inhabiting both places, and I needed to write into the incongruence in some way. When I was home after the election, I started talking and interviewing people informally about how they voted and why they voted that way. I did hours and hours and hours of interviews, and I realized the people who were most interesting to me were people without a determined sense of what they wanted politically; people who were more invested in other things and were kind of swept along. In several cases, those people were artists, because they were just outliers anyway.
I ran into an artist I knew from high school who lives in town, and I found that his relationship to the town and the art he was making out of industrial discards was so powerful. I thought writing about an artist like him—though not him—would allow for more uncertainty, more ambivalence, more nuance, and also some sort of sense of not repair, but of building instead of destruction. He took all of this uncertainty and he took this and he made something out of it. He made art out of it, and that gave me the idea for Jean.
Lily:
Jean is estranged from Leah, her stepdaughter. How did estrangement become central to the book?
Idra:
One of my brothers joined a Creationist church, and we had a falling-out over our relationships to science and Darwinism. We love each other, but we didn’t see or speak to each other, for a while. It was just too painful for both of us—and I didn’t see anyone writing about that emotional experience in a way that felt meaningful to me. No one was talking about the psychic toll of being estranged from a family member you love, of not seeing their children and them not seeing your children. I wanted a novel about that and I couldn’t find one—and I always end up writing the novel I want to read.
Lily:
Jean and Leah become estranged twice: once in Leah’s childhood, which is neither of their doing, and once in adulthood, which I would say is mainly Leah’s decision. How did you think about mirroring or intertwining those narratives?
Idra:
I had this idea that Jean wouldn’t be seen as legitimate in the world of art. She wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist because it can be hard for people who are part of rural communities to be taken as seriously as people located in cities. They’re given folk status, rather than high aesthetic status. So I knew she wouldn’t be taken seriously that way. And then I thought it would be interesting to compound that issue with the fact that her motherhood wouldn’t be seen as legitimate or taken as seriously because she’s Leah’s stepmother, which leads to their first estrangement.
I also wanted to explore the idea that the only thing you control is the art you make—and even then there’s no control. But what happened in Jean’s relationship with Leah is out of her hands. What is within her hands is what she does with her hands: making art.
Lily:
How did you decide that she would be a welder? Did you learn to weld?
Idra:
I was named for my great-grandmother, Ida Novey, who in 1906 started a scrapyard in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It still is in the family today. I always wanted to do something with scrap metal. First I started taking welding lessons with a woman in New York, Julia Murray, who was the only woman welder in the welders’ union at the time. She taught lessons in her home, and I learned a lot from her about how women are shut out of welding culture.
Second, my hometown has this amazing place called the Center for Metal Arts. It’s a former factory with a hundred-year-old forge. People come from all over—Europe, the whole United States, anywhere—to use this old steel-mill machinery to create art. Dan Neville, who runs the Center for Metal Arts, helped me weld boxes. We just gathered pieces of scrap metal off the floor and turned them into boxes.
Finally, I studied with Norman Ed, the artist in my town who gave me the idea for Jean. I’d ask him how she would choose her metals, and he told me about his trips to scrapyards to get his material. He, Dan, and Julia all helped me become a better welder and all had very different ideas about how to weld. I got to learn that even if you’re welding something as rudimentary as a box, you can make very different choices. I found that fascinating, because it’s the same thing with sentences. People who don’t weld sentences don’t realize how many choices go into how you put the sentence together.
Lily:
As a translator myself, I can’t help hearing you as a translator right now—there’s nothing that makes me think about the choices involved in a sentence more than translating does. Could you tell me about the ways your translation practice influences your writing, or influenced this book?
Idra:
When I translate, I have to hear the writer’s voice in order to re-create it in English. In fiction, though the voices I’m creating don’t already exist, I still have to look for their cadence, their tempo, the little idiosyncratic things that differentiate that person from other people. Working on this book, I wanted to capture the cadence of the way people speak where I grew up. I wanted to have Jean speak that way—and in the books I’ve read, her voice wasn’t there. I certainly have never come across a book narrated by a Jewish female artist in the Allegheny Mountains. I had to create her voice, or re-create it, because it didn’t exist as a literary idiom yet. I wanted her to be smart and sharp and driven, and I wanted her to be and speak of the place where she’s from—and I wanted those things to all happen at once in her voice.
Lily:
You create such an interesting contrast by having Leah, who has lived in Peru and is raising her son bilingually, be comfortable switching between Spanish and English, but not being comfortable switching into the dialect of her hometown.
Idra:
For a long time, I could own my voice in Spanish or in Portuguese more easily than I could while speaking the way that I do where I grew up. It’s so hard to believe that a regional dialect will be taken seriously—and I wanted to be hired to teach. And, you know, in my ten years teaching at Princeton, I have only had one student who went to a rural public high school in Appalachia. One in ten years. I find that troubling.
Lily:
Do you think that working on this book has changed how you’re willing to be in the classroom, or how it feels natural to be in the classroom?
Idra:
Yes. I have talked about where I grew up more since starting this book than I ever did before. And I see people react, which has been unnerving and also has compelled me to do it more often. We all come from somewhere. I came from somewhere that has a lot of character and really fascinating people who have carved out really beautiful lives, and they don’t fall easily into the caricatures that we see of rural Pennsylvanian people in the news. That whole culture gets collapsed in such a flat way. And that was a real motivator to write this novel. I wanted to grant the complexity to the lives of artists and people in a way that I think the media rarely allows.
I also want to have a more active role in fostering serious artists from rural areas participating in more urban arts communities that have a lot of funding. I think that’s really important for getting rid of stereotypes about where art takes place and who’s making art worth paying attention to. I don’t think people need to be seeking to do art for the larger country. I think that can dilute the granular nuances of what you’re doing. Norman Ed, for example, really sees him as himself as making art for and about Appalachia. But the rest of the country should still see his work! I remember a curator in Pittsburgh saying to me about him, “If somebody from the Biennial came out and saw what he’s doing, they would be wowed, but nobody comes.”
Lily:
We haven’t spoken about Elliott, who doesn’t get to narrate but is central to the book. How did you think about balancing him with Jean and Leah?
Idra:
I wanted to grant equal complexity to Elliott, to Jean, and to Leah. I wanted to give their fears equal nuance, and their fears are very different. Instability in Appalachia looks different to Elliott than it does to Jean as an older woman, or to Leah, who lives in Long Island City. What they perceive as a threat or what puts them in a high-alert state is very different.
Lily:
One very unusual aspect of Take What You Need is that I have encountered very little fiction about women fearing men in a way that isn’t justified. In Take What You Need, both Jean and Leah fear Elliott, who is absolutely not a threat—and they handle their fears in very different ways. Could you talk about that?
Idra:
When I was doing interviews before I started writing this book, I realized how much we have villainized rural men, especially rural young men. I wanted to write about that issue with complexity and delicacy. Our senses of threat are often inherited, and so baked in that it’s difficult to act against them. At the same time, those sense of threat can create caricatures. When we were figuring out the audio for this novel and I was listening to samples of books set in the area, I was pretty horrified at how villainized the voices were for rural men. They sounded straight out of the movie Deliverance. It was a total misrepresentation. So I found this wonderful podcast, Appodlachia, which is full of interviews with young rural men who were so thoughtful and so sensitive and so articulate, and I sent them to the audio department and I was like, I want someone who can read Elliott’s voice like that.
Lily:
Elliott is an object of fear, and yet he is by far the most under threat of the major characters in this book, both in terms of the conditions facing young men in rural Pennsylvania and in his relationship with Jean, which gets very twisty. Where did that relationship emerge from?
Idra:
Elliott is on the losing end of a power dynamic that has an erotic element—which can happen to anybody. Anyone can be sexualized and be vulnerable. It seems like an easy false equation to assume that always happens to a woman. Often it’s women, but not always. When we assume these issues are only women’s issues, we avoid looking at the exploitation of power differentials that’s at the center of the problem. So I really wanted to write about a power differential in which the vulnerable person is a young grown man who we culturally often assume is the one who makes other people vulnerable, but he’s as bound to be vulnerable as anyone else depending on the situation. It’s all situational.
Lily:
Did the #MeToo movement and the rhetoric it has created influence your thinking there?
Idra:
Yes. When I was doing readings for Those Who Knew—which was seen as a #MeToo book because it happened to come out the summer of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and has some uncanny parallels to that story, but which I wrote long before—two fascinating things happened. One was that a man wrote an online review comparing Victor, the abusive figure in Those Who Knew, to the bosses in the factories where he worked in Pennsylvania. I’d actually thought about putting that novel in Steubenville, Ohio, but then I thought that I would be freer and could do more if I invented a country. But that book almost became a book about the Allegheny Highlands, and it was so interesting that this stranger saw that figure, which absolutely came from where I grew up.
The other thing that was really interesting is that I read at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, and I said that Those Who Knew was set on an island—and that, in some ways, the town where I grew up was like an island, because very few people left and very few people came and it was surrounded by these big hills. It wasn’t easy to get in and out. And when I was signing books, all these people came up and said things like, “Well, now I’m going back to my island.” I was so moved by that.
So I think those two moments made me want to write about how these towns can feel like islands, and how they can hold the same power differentials I saw in Those Who Knew. And because Those Who Knew got sucked into #MeToo discourse, this time I wanted to flip the script. I wanted to show that anyone could be the vulnerable one depending on who has the power.
Lily:
For me, spending time in Latin America and translating Latin America has made me understand the extent to which a power problem in Chile, say, is related to a power problem in Ohio. Leah seems not quite to be spotting those parallels. She’s pretty resistant to connecting her life in Long Island City and her life in Peru to her life in Pennsylvania. What was it like to write that resistance?
Idra:
Leah’s 10 years younger than I am. She’s in a very different stage of life at the time of the 2016 election than where I was. So I think for her, she’s newly back in the country. She’s just about to have her first child. She feels very vulnerable in the world. She at that point has no mother relationship. She’s becoming a motherless mother, and she’s full of fears that are causing her to have these escalated high-alert reactions. Her estrangement from Jean comes out of all these unknowns that make her feel that she has to close herself off. To her, that feels the neatest and safest thing to do. But of course, it backfires.
Lily:
She’s in pursuit of neatness. And Jean is exclusively in pursuit of mess.
Idra:
Leah only allows herself to make a mess is when she’s longing for Jean. She lets her son make a mess on the table with pumpkin seeds and press them all over his face. The rest of her days don’t really look like that. And when she goes into the bathroom in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the book, she’s thinking about how she never lets her son be in a dirty bathroom. He doesn’t really go into dirty public bathrooms. He doesn’t go to Porta-John’s. She’s just realizing how much of how she’s added some sort of meaning that doesn’t belong to messiness.
Lily:
As a mother, Jean tries to protect Leah by teaching her to explore and create. It seems to me that, lately, we hear a lot about motherhood stunting or obstructing creativity, and Jean is a portrait of the opposite. Raising Leah wakes her creativity up. Was that an important piece of the book for you?
Idra:
Absolutely. I knew early on that I wanted to include a scene of Jean continuing to chalk up the driveway with castles long after Leah had left for school. Motherhood was the occasion for Jean to get on her knees and start drawing, to cover the whole driveway with drawings for the sheer joy of it. I’ve had many experiences like that with my children and feel a debt to them as an artist that I wanted Jean to recognize as well, in the novel, her gratitude for those instinctive, freeing hours together when Leah was small, experimenting with chalk and cardboard boxes, discovering her talent for abstract sculpture that she might not have discovered if it were not for her years raising Leah.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her first novel, Short War, is forthcoming from A Strange Object in 2024.
