A Review of Teresa Carmody’s
A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others
by Anne Osmer
Stories within stories. Threads that start, stop and pick back up again. Intriguing characters and lots of gossip. Teresa Carmody’s latest work of autofiction, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is profound and playful, complementing her earlier works, The Reconception of Marie and Maison Femme.
In this latest narrative we follow Marie across twenty-five years, beginning in her twenties with her self-discovery as a writer and realization of queerness. Marie is finding her way in California, returning home occasionally to Michigan where she must grapple with her identity. There are tensions between her smalltown, Midwest roots and newfound communities in Los Angeles, yet there is comfort in the familiarity of home and while mind-opening at first, L.A. proves to be close-minded in its own ways. Through Marie’s ever-curious and precise lens, we undergo conflicts and events that are philosophical and existential as well as mundane and petty.
True to its autofiction designation, A Healthy Interest defies easy categorization and encompasses elements beyond simple narrative. Illustrations accompany the beginning of each chapter, depicting the stories in symbols and shapes. The paratext plays a role: The cover is pleasing in terms of colors and design but look more closely and you’ll see a book cover within a book cover within a book cover—a never-ending funhouse mirror of images, literally the embodiment of the narrative we are about to experience. Pastel-colored letters in the title of each book cover spell out the word “STORY.” The reader is alerted up front that this novel is a puzzle, with meaning to be found within and without.
But I’m making it sound serious and academic. A Healthy Interest, while deep with multiple meanings, is fun and funny—even hilarious at times. We see Marie and the characters as they navigate the insular world of their chosen literary community that at times borders on precious. This is where the theme of gossip is especially strong. A panoply of characters populate the novel. Frederick is grandiose and likely a narcissist, sitting in judgement of everyone he encounters and offering up opinions vast and humorous. (He writes literary pamphlets on acid-free paper so they will last long into the future.) Joel is new to the literary scene, outwardly confident and obnoxious and also judgmental of others; we learn he hasn’t dealt with some serious family stuff that has left him damaged and, quite frankly, unbearable. Michele, a longstanding friend of Marie’s, chooses to write about the fictive death of her father as Marie undergoes the actual death of her own father (yes, writers steal material but the timing here is insensitive at best). We watch as Marie scrambles to understand why a friend will no longer talk to her, polling her friends for their opinions on the matter. Communities and friendships form and break apart, sometimes with no discernible reason. The anecdotes are comical and true-to-life: who hasn’t experienced similar moments and wondered if we ever really grow up?
Interspersed in the loosely-related chapters of stories are unnamed and unpage-numbered mini “chapters” featuring a childhood Marie and a character name Monette. Sandwiched between ampersands, these tender vignettes depict Marie’s burgeoning sexual awakening. She later will have boyfriends and girlfriends, and eventually a wife (a questionable character who simply must take a trip to Paris just as Marie begins a first round of chemo for breast cancer). The Monette interludes harken back to a less complicated, yet foundational, time in Marie’s life, where the discoveries of childhood are free of the detritus and prejudices of adulthood. These interludes serve as a refreshing counterbalance to the more fraught adult chapters.
Intentionality is everywhere in this narrative. The language is precise and compact: every word matters. Carmody likes working under self and externally-imposed constraints, and while I don’t profess to have identified all (or even most) of them, constraints figure throughout the novel, including the shifting points of view, the Marie/Monette interludes, and the various rules of the chapters, for example one that describes a literary event where spectators participate in an animal theme. Another chapter features seven days of finding trash and an inverse of the seven deadly sins as structural elements.
Gossip is also everywhere. I couldn’t help wondering how events in the narrative “really” played out, and whether the characters are identifiable in real life, either by others or themselves, and what their reactions might be. This dynamic—of conjecture, and even embarrassment for the characters-as-real-people, plays into the omnipresent theme of gossip, one that serves as a throughline for the novel. The effect is one of depth and surface all at once, which are, of course, fascinating attributes of gossip itself.
While I’m sure I don’t understand all the nuanced meanings in this novel, here is what I do know: A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is captivating, replete with writing and characters that feel vulnerable and true.
BIO
Anne Osmer is an MFA in Writing candidate at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her writing has appeared in Promethean and Peninsula Writers.
