CLARA: This is the "Story Behind The Story." I'm Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is Katya Apekina. Her debut novel, THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH, tells the story of two sisters who go to live with their estranged father in New York after their mother's suicide attempt. It has appeared on best-of lists for a variety of publications including Harper's Bazaar, Vulture, Buzzfeed and Publisher's Weekly, and NPR's Michael Schaub described it as "a stunningly accomplished book" with a "refreshingly original" structure, storyline and characters. Katya Apekina, welcome to "Story Behind The Story."

KATYA: Thank you for having me.

CLARA: I'd to like to start by asking you to share a little of your background. Who are you and how did you come to be a writer?

KATYA: I came to writing as an undergrad at Columbia. As a high-school student and before that, I had no interest in writing, I don't think. I was pretty into photography and visual art, and when I started writing, I was interested in poetry because it seemed a little bit less intimidating, which now that I say it is crazy, because now I think poetry is actually very intimidating. I was interested with my photography in capturing these off-kilter, weird moments, and I would set them up and have friends be actors in them.

KATYA: And I was getting frustrated with the amount of equipment that was necessary and people that I had to wrangle, and with writing I felt like I could kind of, if I was interested in just creating a sort of mood and the person looking at the photo or reading the thing, I could do that with a lot less stuff. I didn't really need permission, I didn't really need chemicals or a dark room or equipment. I could just do it by myself, and that appealed to me. I don't think I was naturally a storyteller or anything that, but I was interested in describing these static moments, and then eventually I figured out how to combine -- almost like if you're picturing beads on a necklace or something -- static moment after static moment after static moment into something that's a flip book type of thing of a story.

KATYA: When I was interested in poetry it was more prose poetry. I was always intimidated by plot or structure or narrative, and then because I was so intimidated by it, I just focused on it so much more, so I ended up writing a novel that's very, very plotted and very structured. There was so much outlining involved in the novel, but it actually came from a place of that being something that totally does not come naturally to me. The stuff that comes naturally to me is metaphor. That's [something] I could do that all day. I don't know if that answers who I am, but that's how I came to writing, I think.

CLARA: Describe THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH in your own words. What kind of story does it tell?

KATYA: I feel like as an elevator pitch type of thing, it's always been really hard for me to talk about it. I think if I just had to say it in a sentence, [I'd say] it's about two sisters, Edith and May, who as teenagers have to leave their home in Louisiana, where they lived with their mom, to move to New York City to live with their dad, who's a famous writer. They have to move because their mother is committed to a mental hospital following a suicide attempt, and their dad had basically built his career using their mother as his muse when he was a writer.

KATYA: And I guess the thing about the novel. The starting place for me with the novel is actually its structure, and the way it's structured is unusual. It's inspired by oral histories, and it's told through multiple first-person accounts, but it's not quite like an oral history, in that one of the people, Edie -- her storyline is all in present tense, and the rest of the accounts are all people looking back on the past. It's this unusual structure and it came originally from a -- well, originally, I had been doing all this research on a non-fiction book about White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement, and I was going to archives, and I was reading oral histories and reading these documents and stuff.

KATYA: What was so interesting to me was the way that a sense of a person accumulated slowly through these accounts and also the way people would talk about whatever event, and they're always the main character of their own story, but then they might be, like, totally peripheral characters to my story, but they don't think of them -- nobody thinks of themselves as a peripheral character.

CLARA: Everyone's the hero of their own story.

KATYA: Right, exactly. I was interested in seeing how all of these accounts reverberate off of each other, and also the way truth is this contradictory thing, where one person feels like they're telling the truth and it could be in complete tension or contradiction with someone else's truth. It's not necessarily that it's a lie or that one is more true than another. I think truth is this slippery, complicated thing. That was what I wanted to look at and figure out when I was starting off writing, and I feel that's what my book is about even if that's not the plot of it.

CLARA: When you have a book that -- when you have an idea that is so abstract and so tied to these large concepts and structures, where do you actually start writing?

KATYA: I wrote the book pretty much in the order that it exists, and I started from the beginning, and very slowly the story emerged. When I first started writing the book, actually about a year and a half in, I had to start over because when I first started out the character of the mother was dead, and the novel just kept becoming a book about grief, and that wasn't really what I wanted to be writing a book about. Or it just was such a strong emotion that it overpowered everything else that I wanted to be writing about. Then I brought her back to life and started over from the beginning.

KATYA: I don't really think in these abstract ways necessarily. I think I start off with a character and it goes from there, and then these abstract, sort of big ideas are things that, looking back now, I can see and trace and kind of understand that that's what I was exploring. But I don't usually start off with some sort of big theme and then find characters to embody that. I start off from characters or a situation.

KATYA: I was interested in these two sisters. I was interested in this idea of a muse-artist relationship, and just there's something about being a muse that's so unpleasant to me. The idea of being someone else's muse doesn't seem like this wonderful thing to me, and I realized that that's maybe odd and so, I was exploring like, “Well why?”

CLARA: Let's talk about that a little more because I think that is one of the big themes in the book, this artist and muse relationship, and that's something that is explored a lot -- a lot of artists explore it and are interested in it. But it's very different in your book, and especially in how things turn out. How do you go about breaking new ground in territory that is so well traveled?

KATYA: I try not to judge my characters, so I feel like the well traveled territory is seeing the artist-muse relationship from that great male artist's point of view. You get some of that in this book as well -- like Dennis, their father is –--I understand where he's coming from. I don't think that his intentions were malicious in the way that he was using his wife to make art, or I don't think he would think of them as malicious anyway. Then at the same time, I understand that feeling on her end where she can't quite articulate why it is she feels robbed in some way by this experience.

KATYA: I also can somehow -- I can physically feel it in my body, almost that sense of violation, and it's not necessarily rational. Or it's not irrational, but I don't know exactly why. I feel like it's one of those things where I can intuitively understand where she's coming from, but I also understand why it would be hard. We're so used to this other narrative -- to go against it or to have it make sense why it is that she would feel violated by being used in this way.

KATYA: It's funny, I remember my mom had gotten me this book on being a muse in my early 20s. It wasn't a how-to book, but her reason for giving it to me was for a how-to sort of purpose. My mom is actually an artist, but I don't know – yeah, there's just something about it that – I just remember feeling so irritated by that book, by just this idea that I should be somebody's muse as opposed to a book on being the person who gets to do the seeing, as opposed to being the one that's being looked at.

CLARA: It sort of goes back to the idea you were talking about before, where everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, and when you're in that position of being the muse, you're not.

KATYA: Yeah, you're whatever somebody else makes you be. It's funny someone asked me, “This is a book about teenage rage. Did you have a lot of teenage rage?” And, I was like, “No, I didn't. I didn't even know that was like an option.” Even in my early 20s. I feel like now that I'm in my 30s, I have a lot of rage in retrospect for stuff from then, but at the time it just didn't even occur to me. But yeah, this is a book with a lot of rage in it, I think. That is sort of expressed in different ways, usually kind of compressed, and compressed, and compressed inside of people until it manifests itself in some way or another.

CLARA: Let's talk then also about the relationship between May and Dennis, when May sort of inhabits that role that Marianne had before as his muse.

KATYA: I guess I should say that May resembles her mother a lot. She looks like her mother did when she was younger, which is when Dennis had met her. There's a big age difference between Dennis and Marianne, their mother. He'd met her when she was a child, but then they didn't develop a romantic relationship until she was 17 -- so still young -- and he was in his 30s. When May is staying with him, she tries to fill the role that her mother had had as the muse, and she wants to be looked at in that way, and she wants to inspire him to write another book because he hadn't written one in a very long time.

KATYA: I think she really wants his love and his attention, and there's almost a supernatural sense of her becoming her mother in those moments too, which I think isn't -- I don't know that supernatural is the right word, but I feel like when you're very close, or at least I felt that way, I think a lot of women feel that way about their moms. When they're very close with them, it's like you have trouble discerning yourself and them as being these separate entities, and it's kind of hard. Part of growing up is separating yourself from that and figuring out what is you and what is them. You assume that certain things were you, but it was actually just them and realizing that -- anyway, with May and her mother, they have a very blurry boundary between each other anyway back in Louisiana. So being away from her [Marianne] is this really freeing thing for May. To be away from her mother. But then she ends up becoming her mother for her father. The book in a lot of ways is about these family relationships. It's hard to talk about, and it sounds confusing. I don't think it is when you're reading it, but it is sort of like a hall of mirrors of these relationships that replicate from generation to generation in slightly off-kilter ways.

CLARA: One of the things that fascinates me is that -- well, as you said -- May is the one who seeks out that muse relationship with her father and who wants to inspire him. She also pretty clearly isn't satisfied with it when it runs its course.

KATYA: I think she wants his love and I don't think -- she's a 14-year-old girl who doesn't, I don't feel like she really knows entirely what she's doing. It's on him to not use that need of hers for love for his own ends. He very callous or just careless with her and with her feelings. I don't know that he's evil or anything like that. I don't know, it's like thinking about the nature of evil. He's not evil in a specifically malicious way, but if evil is just being -- is obliviousness evil? Is being oblivious when it's convenient and serves you -- I mean that doesn't seem like a good quality. I don't know if it's an evil quality but -- I mean, I don't know if it even makes sense to think about it in terms of good and evil, but he hurts her. I don't think he does it because he wants to hurt her but I don't think he gives it much thought.

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is the Story Behind The Story. We're going to take a short break, then we'll return to my conversation with Katya Apekina.

CLARA: This is your first novel as I understand, but you have written and published pretty widely and other mediums for a while now. What was your process like when you sat down to write this and how is writing a novel different for you from writing a short story or a screenplay?

KATYA: When I started writing this, I didn't work on anything else at the same time. I didn't work on any stories or on anything else creative while I was working on this, and I worked on this for many years. For about 5 or 6 years, I worked on this and I didn't have parallel projects. Whereas I feel like with shorter stuff, I usually have a lot of things going simultaneously in various states. This book was so hard to write for a lot of reasons. some of the subject matter is dark and difficult, and it forced me to go into those spaces, and that was hard but then also just having faith that it would all hold together in the end and that it wouldn't just collapse. There are so many storylines, and that it would all coalesce and be compelling ultimately -- it just required such a crazy amount of faith, and I don't feel like I'm somebody who has that much faith.

KATYA: It just took everything out of me, and I thought that if I had any other sources of creative satisfaction, I would abandon this. I just didn't let myself have anything else other than this because I was worried I just wouldn't see it through to the end. I'd never worked on anything of this scope before. It's not like this is the first novel I've published, this is the first novel I've written too. With the script that I wrote, I wrote it with other writers. That wasn't like my project in the same way.

KATYA: And then, you know with short stories there's a lot less riding on it, and also I wrote them all while I was in grad school. There's this support system and there's feedback, and you have deadlines, and somebody is waiting on the other end for you to finish. With this, it's not like anybody cared if I was going to finish or not. It just was completely like this act of faith, and it felt like I could do all this work on this thing and then just have it not work out.

KATYA: There are so many steps along the way where things could have just not worked out with writing it and then with publishing it. It just feels like this huge -- I feel so lucky that it worked out the way it did. Now whenever I look at a published book, I look at it like it's a miracle that this happened, that it came out, that people are reading it, that the writer had the faith in themselves to keep going with it. Because it's really hard. Also, with a book you don't really want to send things out until they're ready, and it's a really long time until they're ready. You're kind of having to trust yourself in a way that I wasn't used to doing.

CLARA: Do you feel you like learned things about writing in doing this? Do you feel like you learned things about yourself?

KATYA: Yes, definitely. I feel like I'm just a much stronger writer now. I feel like a lot of my short stories were, now that I look back, almost studies, like sketches or studies for this novel, and not because they were even -- they weren't similar characters or any like plot things that are similar, but some of them -- like, I was just trying out different voices, different techniques and stuff. I could look at each kind of story and see like, “This was sort of practice for this element in my novel,” even though I hadn't thought about it at the time or anything that.

KATYA: There's a level of emotional depth in this novel that I don't think my stories [had] -- maybe a few of them did, but I feel like for the most part it required really coming back and really getting to know these people in such a deep way and trusting that they would show me things about themselves if I kept coming back every single day. And they did, and I do feel like it's a matter of -- it got to a point towards the end, when I was already confident that it was all coming together, where it was like if I show up things will happen and if I just keep showing up things will happen. And that confidence in myself was a confidence that I don't think I would have had before.

CLARA: What surprised you most?

KATYA: I don't know that with stories I really ever had to this extent -- but I think what surprised me most was the dream state that I would enter, where things would just be writing themselves. I felt like a channel or something. It felt like the stuff was rushing out of me or moving through me, and it didn't feel like I had an active hand in it. I definitely had an active hand in structuring and preparing and outlining, and being ready for it when it came, to catch it and be there for it, but it didn't feel like -- you can tell in the writing when it's just kind of happening, when it feels almost divine, the process, as opposed to me actively forcing it. Because I hadn't worked on anything for so long or stuck with anything for so long, I don't think I'd ever experienced that before, and it was very exciting. Since writing this, I've written one short story and a script. I'm finishing a script. And I've been experiencing that with those other things too, and it's like a drug. I don't know. It's addictive.

CLARA: Sounds like a runner's high almost.

KATYA: Yeah, that's funny, I've never had a runner's high. I keep trying to run and get it, but I've -- yeah, I've never actually experienced a runner's high. It's just very exciting to be able to let go and let this thing happen. It's a very strange feeling when you both are trying to control something and trying to let go of it at the same time. It's very fleeting, so it's like when you catch it, I don't know -- I mean, whatever, there's lots of metaphors for it. It's like a wind, getting it at a certain angle if you're sailing or something.

KATYA: It's just like you feel it and then you're moving and otherwise there's a lot of just sitting and sitting, and sitting, and sitting, and sitting, and you just have to stick with it and it's horrible. And, sometimes just ... I mean it is horrible. It just feels so dispiriting and then once you're in it, it's also very hard to be like, “Okay, now I have to like pick up my kid from daycare and have a,” a balanced life when all I want to be doing is living in my head in this alternate world that I've created. It's hard to go back and forth between reality and your imagination when you're really in it.

CLARA: How did you know when you were done, when you were ready to send it out?

KATYA: I didn't write the ending until I knew it was pretty much ready to send out. I just kept editing and editing and editing without writing the actual ending because I knew that if I had an ending, I would just send it out. That desire for outside validation is so strong, and it's so easy to feel discouraged and like you need somebody's approval or permission or whatever. I think I just would have sent it before it was ready to be out in the world, and it would have hurt the book's chances of ever getting an agent or whatever.

KATYA: Knowing that about myself, I just didn't write an ending until the rest of it was as good as I could possibly make it. And then I did do more revisions with my agent, and it was so helpful at that point to get an outside perspective. But until it was as good as I could make it, I didn't want -- well, first of all, I didn't want to risk rejection, but also I didn't really want to get -- before I knew exactly what it was, I didn't really want to get outside advice or perspective because I think I would have just taken it, because it would have been easier and more comforting to know that someone was telling me what to do. And then maybe it would have been not the right thing.

KATYA: Because definitely when I was talking to agents, some of them had advice that I've strongly disagreed with, and by that point I knew what the book was. So, I knew I don't agree with this, but if it had been earlier I would have been like, “Okay, I'll make this into a novel about Dennis.” That was one of the notes I got from someone, and it was just like, “Well, this is not a novel about Dennis, this is a novel about his daughters.” It's like that's exactly what it's not, but who knows what I would have agreed to do in my desperation to get published. I don't know.

CLARA: You're listening to the "Story Behind The Story" on KSQD 90.7 FM. For those of you just joining us, my guest is Katya Apekina author of THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH.

CLARA: Where do you write? What's the physical space like?

KATYA: This book was written in a lot of different coffee shops around Los Angeles and also, at two different artist residencies, which were really important in this book. The book was started in an art residency at Ucross in Wyoming. It was a 2-week residency, and being able to completely focus on something and be fed and not have to worry about any of that mundane life stuff is great. That felt like a big push -- it was the big push I needed to start. When I started the book over, it was also at a residency.

KATYA: I think it would have been really hard to do at home, just because I think I would have kept lying to myself that it was working when -- just because it's so inconvenient to acknowledge when something isn't working and just abandon it and start over. Especially because it had been already a year and a half in, so it felt like, “Oh no,” like, "I've already spent so much time," and you know. I think it just had to be done, and being away somewhere for a month where I can just focus on it -- it brought me to the point where I realized this doesn't mean that -- this isn't a failure in some way, this is just part of the process.

KATYA: Yeah, those were the two residencies, and then in coffee shops. I'm pretty sensitive to noise, so I would listen to these -- it's not white noise, it's way weirder. It's like the sound of wind and rain and a fire burning, but it's sinister, and it's just a weird app that I had actually downloaded when my daughter was born to see if it would help her sleep and which she didn't care about. It's kind of a weird thing to play at an infant because it's so spooky sounding, but I would listen to that through headphones while I was working in coffee shops. But now that I have an office, I don't -- I usually just -- it's a lot easier for me to just not get dressed and leave my house if I don't have to.

CLARA: Describe your office for me, describe that space.

KATYA: It used to be my husband's office, and then we turned our attic into his office. I used to have this little desk in the hallway that when a friend was over, he was like, “Is this like a metaphor about women in the workplace?” Because I had a desk in the hallway and he had an actual office with a door. But anyway, now I have the office with a door and he's got the attic. I still have a bunch of his random awards and stuff in the office, which is fine. There's this weird little glass bottle of river water from the Mississippi River that I like that's his. That's his keepsake but now it's become my -- I've inherited it as my weird keepsake, and so I keep that on my desk.

KATYA: I have a lot of weird postcards from -- some of them are probably from even when I was a teenager to now. And I have a big whiteboard with whatever -- right now, it's all this stuff I have to do, like publicity stuff and other writing projects. Because I'm also a translator, and I'm also a screenwriter, and I've been trying to work on some essays. My grandmother -- this is totally a tangent, but my grandmother died last year and she left me with these memoirs, and I've been translating them from Russian to English for my daughter to have. She had survived the holocaust, and they're just really -- she had given them to me actually way before she died, and I just never read them until after she died. Why? There are just so many questions I have now that I obviously can't ask her. Anyway, so I've been translating that and working on this feature script, and I've been doing some radio stuff too -- like radio journalism.

CLARA: How do the objects and the things in your space and the space itself inform your writing?

KATYA: I have a lot of weird or cool stuff around the house that are, like, souvenir-y type weird objects from the many different places that I've lived. But I don't really like -- I like having them, I guess, but I don't really get super attached to things. My office is pretty minimalist. I have a bunch of books, so I have a desk attached to a bookshelf, and then the bookshelf next to my desk is just with stuff that's relevant to what I'm working on, and then I don't have that much stuff. But I guess it's nice to have.

KATYA: I don't want the space to feel sterile, so it's like I have kind of -- that's what like the postcards and stuff are for. Then there's lots of different objects related to different projects that I'm working on because I'm working on a lot of different stuff. There's a lot of different objects that go along with it, but I don't feel I've really I -- I would much rather be at an empty desk than surrounded by a ton of significant objects. I am kind of claustrophobic.

CLARA: How do you avoid isolation when you're writing and how do you find community?

KATYA: Well, I think because I have a kid, I have to be present in a way that if I didn't I would -- I think would be able to be a lot more isolated, which is positive and negative. I like being isolated, so I don't know that it's entirely negative.

KATYA: I went to an MFA program, and I'm still very close with my friends from there, and we still share writing and do workshops over Zoom. And anytime any of us finishes a story, we usually send it to each other, and we read each other's novels and stuff like that. Many, many drafts of them as we go.

KATYA: Then also people I've met through the art residencies, too, are also part of that. Having that community is so important. Having good readers for me and being able to read their stuff too. I don't know, I don't think I'd be able to do it without that. It's been very crucial. And then it was great to, I met all these writer mothers in LA here, too. We were all pregnant at the same time, and our kids are all just a few weeks apart. So having them has been just so great for me.

CLARA: For this book, how early did you start sharing material with the folks in your writing groups -- the MFA program and the folks from the retreats?

KATYA: Like right away. I have certain readers who I just share stuff with as soon as -- I was sharing stuff as soon as I was writing it. I don't know that I'd be able to do it without them. They didn't have to give me any sort of -- they weren't giving me any sort of editorial feedback, but just knowing that they were on the other end waiting for pages from me made such a difference for my morale and for not feeling like I was just throwing stuff into a void. And I thank all of them in my acknowledgements.

KATYA: There are so many people, and I'm just incredibly grateful, who have read parts of this book and all of this book and so many different versions, so many different times. I would, if I were them, be just so incredibly sick of this book. There's only so many times you can read a book, and I feel like whatever that limit is, is how many times they read it.

CLARA: How many times did you read your favorite book?

KATYA: It's interesting because I don't think I re-read books very often anymore but as a teenager, like I remember re-reading FRANNY AND ZOOEY, and RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION, and I guess CATCHER IN THE RYE, too. It's like I was so obsessed with Salinger from 8th grade to maybe through college probably, and I would re-read those very regularly. Probably not all those books every year, but at least a couple of them every year. I read those so many times and it's funny because I have not read them as an adult at all. I don't want to, I don't think.

CLARA: It gets scary.

KATYA: I don't know that it would hold up. Yeah, it's scary to re-read it and also, just I feel like things would just irritate me that didn't irritate me then. That I was more tolerant of, you know.

CLARA: And then you'd have to grieve being irritated with them.

KATYA: Yeah, I don't need to have that experience, I don't think. I'm fine just kind of leaving it.

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is the story behind the story. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, Katya will read a passage from her book.

CLARA: I'd like to ask you now to read a passage from the book. Is there something you have in mind?

KATYA: I'm going to read from the beginning of Chapter 3. The first section is gonna be a letter from Marianne McLean -- that's their mother -- to Edith and May, and it's gonna be from 1997.

KATYA: My dear daughters, please ignore my previous letter, a familiar itch behind the eyeballs, words not my own. Can you even read this? It's the medicine that makes my hands shake. Please do not be alarmed, tremors and earthquakes in my hands and feet and face. They'll keep deforming me until there's nothing left to deform. Every morning they put me in an ice bath up to my neck. I've never been so cold.

KATYA: A nurse sadistic bitch sits and watches my teeth chatter. I've developed a nasty cough, but they say some of the fog has lifted, I am writing you girls a letter after all my two lovelies, my ribbit and rabbit. I forgive you and try not to think about you. I'm ashamed of course, I want to keep you, even thoughts of you away from this place. The suffering is in the walls and the floor, under the tables. It's mixed into the pain. It smells shit and fear, it gets into your nostrils and then it's too late because it's in you. My neighbor can't stop crying, can't or won't. I have only recently begun to distinguish between awake and asleep.

KATYA: I've started writing again. Words repeat in my head. The only way to flush them out is to write them down, poems. Your father is no saint, but he is a lot of things. I love you. It's a bell in the fog. The only thing that still exists. Be brave, mom.

KATYA: And this is from Edith in 1997.

KATYA: What have they done to her in there? What did I let them do? The paramedics and the police. I should have lied but I was so stunned. I told them what happened and then they twisted it. The man with the gun holsters pouring me an orange soda into a styrofoam cup. He was younger than the detectives on television shows, practically my age, wispy mustache. He asked me question after question, and stupidly I told him everything, and he rubbed my shoulders and wiped the orange from my mouth with a napkin. Why hadn't I kept quiet? I put her in there. She thinks so, too. Why else would she need to forgive me? And now they're torturing her because of what I said.

KATYA: Between the ice baths and the pills they're giving her, it's a miracle she can write it all. Her handwriting was always so small, neat, round. She would press down hard enough that it was almost an engraving. You could run your fingers over the paper and feel the words. Here, though, her handwriting looks like a ghost sneezed. There's nothing in the way it looks that is hers. It could have been written by someone else. Her sobbing neighbor. Some slob in a turban. It makes me feel better to think it was somebody else's hand shaking over the paper, that mom was just dictating. I read the letter again a third time, a fourth time. I start to hear the words and not see them. “My two loveliest, my ribbit and rabbit.” That sounds like her.

KATYA: The sound of her voice in my head calms me -- “bell in the fog” -- even though the things she is saying -- “tremors, deforming me” -- are not very calming. I get to the beginning of the letter again and stop. “Please ignore my previous letter.”

KATYA: “Where is the other letter?” I ask Dennis. I never saw it. He must have hidden it from us.

KATYA: Dennis doesn't answer me. He's busy reading over our shoulders. He's squinting because he's too vain to get glasses. Has he gotten to the part about him yet? “No, Saint.” If he has, he gives no indication of it. I don't know what she means when she says he's a lot of things. I assume it's bad.

KATYA: “What did you do with the other letter?” I asked him again. “What letter?” he says, looking down at me with his wet lame eyes. Is he lying? Where did he put it? “She said she sent another letter. You can't hide things that from us.” I feel the blood rushing into my face. “It's not right.”

KATYA: “I'm not hiding anything. You're with me all the time. You see me get the mail.” This is true, but it's not like we pay attention to it. He could easily have hidden it in a magazine and read it later in his room. “She probably never even wrote it,” May says slowly. “She probably just thought she did or dream she did and got confused."

KATYA: That's May. She will take any opportunity to make mom look foolish. It's disgusting. “Or maybe the doctors held onto it,” Dennis says. “They monitor her correspondence.” I imagine a doctor unfolding and reading my mother's letter, and then folding it back and putting it in a manila folder in her file, evidence against her, word,s she said to us in anger, that will now be used to keep her locked up.

KATYA: “I think you're lying.” The chair falls backwards as I stand, bangs against the tile in the kitchen floor. May puts her hand on mine, but I shake it off, that little know-it-all traitor. She probably knew about the letter all along.

KATYA: Dennis must have showed it to her, and she told him it would upset me too much to see it. Well, I'll find it. “Edie, what are you doing? Please don't touch my desk. Edith.” Dennis follows me into his room. He crouches gathering the papers I threw on the floor. “Enough,” he says as I try to swipe at a stack of papers on his bedside table. I open the book he's been reading and shake it out. A bookmark flutters to the ground, nothing else. “Edith, that's enough.” He holds me by the back of my shirt but I leap forward like I'm on a leash. I'm looking at the window sill. That's where he probably sat reading it, smoking, reading, crying.

KATYA: “Why is there so much in the ashtray?” I say. He burned it. Lit the tip of the match and watched the words melt. “Edie, Stop.” May's voice is quiet. She's embarrassed. I look at her face. No, she's not embarrassed, she's scared. Of me. I place the ashtray back on the window sill, careful not to spill any of it.

KATYA: And, this section is for May.

KATYA: I was the one who threw out the first letter from mom. I could hear the whistle of it hurtling towards us, so I intercepted it. This was difficult since I was almost never alone, but desperation makes you crafty. The envelope felt heavy and hot to the touch, and it contained 10 illegible pages, each word a barbed hook. I skimmed it, careful not to let any of the words catch me before I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.

KATYA: I didn't want Edie getting any more agitated about mom than she already was. I wouldn't say I wanted mom dead, I'm not a monster, but I wanted her vacuum sealed somewhere where she couldn't get to us. In New York I was happy, happy and safe from her, I thought. I failed to intercept the second letter. It arrived, narcissistic, well wrought, barely legible and full of those elliptical riddles that get under your skin and tug. Edie became obsessed analyzing it to death: What did it signify that nothing was capitalized? Mom's low sense of self-worth, her aversion to order, her artistic temperament? Was she a frustrated creative person with no outlet for her artistic energies? Was this the true source of her unhappiness? Would poetry prove to be her salvation? I let Edie talk and talk about it. I didn't contradict her even though I knew that none of what she was saying was true or relevant. She did not understand mom at all.

KATYA: The third letter came a few days after that. Edie was already wound up and she pored over the new one like a cryptologist. It wasn't really a letter. There was no "dear" or "love." It was a poem. How coy of mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way. To demand that we guess what it was she was trying to say like she was Sylvia fucking Plath. “What do you think it means? What do you think it means?” Edie kept saying, standing too close and watching me as I read it. The poem was gibberish, the unpunctuated words together, unpleasant sounds repetitive, oppressive. goatman's goatpelt fur mouth spackle coat grind down water in the throat ears choke. But reading it filled my mouth with the fetid taste of lake water.

KATYA: It made me think of those night trips when mom would disappear into Lake Pontchartrain and I would nervously pace the shore, waiting for her head to break the surface. I was dry and on land getting devoured by mosquitoes, but I could only feel the algae squishing under my feet, the black water burning my nose. Once mom emerged from the water with an enormous catfish latched onto her arm. On the drive home, the fish flapped and struggled in the backseat while mom laughed so hard I had to steer. She was laughing, but what does that mean? It wasn't an expression of joy. It was just a sound like something in her was trying to get out.

KATYA: Edie said, “What?” She sensed that I had been able to decode it in some way. It was clear to me the poem was a suicide note. It might as well have been an acrostic that spelled out: GOODBYE! FOREVER! How selfish, how grotesque. Why pull us into all that again? We were children. And the texts, the handwriting jerky and weak. It forced me to imagine her in the act of writing, which I also resented. I did not want to imagine her at all because if I allowed her in, I felt like I would lose myself again. It was better to take this rare opportunity that forced her off of me and leave it that way.

KATYA: I never told Edie what that poem really meant. I think I made up an interpretation involving mythology and even tried to convince myself of it, but I couldn't get the images out of my head of mom floating face down in a lake, in a bathtub, in the neighbor's pool. I remember hugging Cronus at night and burrowing my face in his fur, letting his purring replace the static that her words had left in my head.

CLARA: There's something almost cinematic about that, about the way that the letter and the present tense narrative from Edie and then May's reflection are strung together. How did you choose the order of those perspectives?

KATYA: I think I read somewhere some writing advice about how, like, think of it as when you're driving, you can just see where your headlights are pointed to. You can't see the destination, but you just keep going. And I think it was really [that] each perspective would lead to the next one naturally. It would just organically evolve. And a lot of the perspectives that are kind of -- like, they'll overlap just a little bit. It's not like looking at the exact same event from three different points of view necessarily, but there'll be some amount of overlap, so you are getting enough of a sense of each of the different takes on the situation without retreading, while still feeling like there's kind of movement forward.

KATYA: This one sort of lent itself naturally to, you know, you have the mom's letter and then you get their reactions to the letter. I don't know why I chose specifically to do Edie first and then May, but you get the immediate reaction, in the moment reaction from Edie and then the reflection afterwards. I think that just makes the most sense when you're just thinking about it as you're kind of like -- almost like you're zooming out or something. You see the document, and then you move out a little bit to the immediate aftermath, and then you move out more to get the zoomed out version of with time, you know.

CLARA: You mentioned this earlier but Edie is the only person for most of the novel who is literally present, who is speaking in the present moment and is experiencing the events as they happen. Even, for example, Marianne's letters. They're letters, they're written artifacts, so it's at least unclear whether we're seeing them at some point in the future or as they're being written. Why is it Edie who is the only one with that perspective? Why Edie, why not May or Marianne or Dennis or any of the other characters?

KATYA: Well, the original reason was very practical. I had started this novel about two sisters and I couldn't keep them straight, so I needed to differentiate them for myself. I made one in the present and one in the past to keep them more distinct for me, so that they weren't blending together. And then eventually once I got to know them, they became very distinct for me, I wouldn't have needed that device. But it was just an initial device for that. I didn't want people to read this as if it had been all past tense reflections. I think there's an expectation in the reader that like, “Oh these are documents or statements that are being gathered for some specific purpose in the present and that are being put together by a character.” I feel like I've seen so many kinds--

CLARA: It's the Law and Order effect.

KATYA: Right, right. I've just seen so many books like that, and I feel like that's fine, but it's just not what I wanted to do. I had no interest in following that kind pat structure. I understand why it's satisfying but I don't like to be satisfying. I like to be difficult -- I think like, in life in general -- like, I just feel I'm rarely like, “Let's do this the easy way.” It's always like, “Let's do this the stupidest, most complicated way possible for everything.” So why would it be any different with this book? I don't know, it just didn't seem like that compelling to me.

KATYA: I feel like there's something in a person's brain when they're like, “Oh, I get it, that's what this is.” They just stop really thinking about it or paying attention or trying to understand it. I think when you can categorize something so easily, you don't really engage with it very deeply, and so I think that's probably part of why I resisted having a very clear form. Because I made this choice very early on, as a result, Edie evolved for me as a character who exists in the present tense. That affected who she became, what her personality was and stuff when I was writing it.

CLARA: How so?

KATYA: Well, I feel like she's very passionate and reactive, whereas -- because she's responding to all this stuff very in the moment and it's very raw for her, and she's very vulnerable, and very -- emotions are very easily accessible to her, you know what I mean? Whereas I feel for May, she's the kind of character who's a little more withholding with herself. Having her be an artist and having her have all this time to reflect on it is what allows her to be more honest, whereas I feel like Edie, if she had more time to reflect on it, she would probably do something else. I don't think time would make her more honest. I think it would make her less honest. And she's somebody who has these immediate, honest responses, who then probably would kind of, with more time, maybe disregard them or deny them or something in a way that is very different from her sister. But who they are just came out as a result of a tense choice that was sort of arbitrary at the time.

CLARA: One of the other interesting -- I don't know if structural elements is exactly the right way to say it -- but one of the other interesting pieces of the puzzle that is this book is that Marianne is a poet. Marianne, the mother, is a poet, and her poetry crops up in a few different places. How did you approach writing the poems that you use in the novel?

KATYA: I mean, I'm not a poet. It's nice because she's maybe a competent poet at best in the novel. She's not supposed to be necessarily like a brilliant genius of a poet because I feel like that would have been really setting myself up for failure. I was reading a lot of poetry at the time. I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and other poets that I was modeling her after and just letting it absorb. It was really fun actually, to write that stuff. I love doing things that are not -- like, I love writing outside of my medium just because it's -- I don't have any high expectations for the results. And so it just ended up being pretty fun.

KATYA: I don't want to give anything away about the book but yeah, I think it was fun. I read a ton of poetry. Basically, I had to -- I thought that there was gonna be this whole section that was gonna be in verse, and I tried to do that and that was insane. Then I abandoned that, which I think was not a bad choice. But yeah, I did get a hotel room for one night and just like -- I ended up working on a lot of the Marianne stuff in that hotel room, like non-stop. It helped to just be working on it for a very, very long stretch of time, uninterrupted. Something about that in particular. I guess that's helpful for working on most things. It's good to be able to not have to stop after 4 hours or 6 hours, but particularly with writing her poems, to be able to just completely immerse myself in that stuff was good.

CLARA: What did you want them to reveal about her as a character? And were there aspects of poetic construction or particular techniques that you employ to try to get there?

KATYA: Dennis and Marianne are, when you're reading the beginning of the book, you're getting to know them really through -- there's like some journals, some letters, some documents but really, they don't get their own voices. You're just getting a sense of them through their daughters. The poems were important in that they were supposed to give you enough of a flavor of who she [Marianne] was, but also how she wanted to present herself to the world through her poetry. Some of the poems are like marginalia in his writing, so you get her response to his take on her, and his response to her take on him basically through the poetry.

CLARA: What were your favorite parts to write?

KATYA: The poems were really fun to write, actually. Those were maybe some of my favorite parts. The parts that I edited a lot more, when I look back on [them], I feel less excited about just because I've seen them so many more times. The beginning is the part that -- because I've read it in order, right -- that I probably edited the most, and the end is the part that I would have edited the least in this process. So for me, the end is the most exciting part because it's the part that feels freshest to me. But I don't know, if I were to think back to what it was like to actually write the beginning part before the endless revisions. I don't know, I think there's something about Edie's sections that felt very -- like I was definitely in that kind of dream state writing them. Maybe it was because it was in the present tense that you really had to embody it completely. It was like this kind of strange thing happened while writing them. It's was like a little bit magical, I guess, and so I did enjoy that a lot.

CLARA: I wanted to ask you a little bit about Louisiana. I did just a little research beforehand and it seems to crop up in a lot of the stuff that you write. What's your relationship with that place?

KATYA: I used to live there. I moved to New Orleans after Katrina to volunteer, and then I ended up living there for a few years. It's actually where I met my husband, and then we moved to St. Louis when I went to grad school, and then from there we moved to LA. But after college, I basically ended up moving to New Orleans, and it was my first time as an adult -- like a completely separated adult. I felt this kind of rebellion because I had grown up -- I was from Boston, and then I went to school in New York, and I feel like I hadn't really left.

KATYA: I'd traveled I guess, in Europe or whatever, but I hadn't really traveled in the US at all, and I hadn't really left the Northeast much. And so to be in New Orleans -- it's just so completely different, and it felt so freeing. Then also, I was actually doing something that was helping people for the first time in my life with the hurricane relief stuff, and that felt pretty significant too.

CLARA: What's next for you?

KATYA: I've started researching another novel that I've been working on. I don't want to talk too much about it, but it is set in revolutionary Russia. Or at least that's what my research is. I feel like this [novel] was set in the 1950s in the South originally and evolved into being something totally different where that was just the backdrop. I guess it's possible with my novel that it'll also just evolve a lot. And I've been working on that script, too, which is about four teenage girls and told, also, from four different perspectives.

CLARA: Thank you so much for coming to talk to us today.

KATYA: Thank you so much for talking to me and having me on your show.

CLARA: Katya Apekina's book is THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH, and you can buy it pretty much everywhere books are sold.

KATYA: Thanks.

CLARA: Katya Apekina is the author of THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH, published this past September by Two Dollar Radio. Next time I talk to a first time author M. K. England about their young adult space opera THE DISASTERS. I hope you'll join us. "Story Behind the Story" is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Lanier Sammons is our sound engineer. He also wrote our theme. Special thanks go to David Weinberg who lent us his studio for this episode.