Impermanence is the Point
an interview with Aurora Huiza
I’ve been a long time admirer of Aurora Huiza’s fiction. I first encountered her piece “David is Going to Die” when I was with X-R-A-Y many years ago, and every story I’ve come across since has continued to showcase Huiza’s talent for harnessing a strange and specific sort of delight.
“The Frog Parade” is no exception. It was an additional joy—and privilege—to talk with Huiza about how she approaches character-making, how to follow the impulse of your own writing, what it really means to make it to the parade, and what it means to leave once the party is over.
Jessika Bouvier: Everywhere you look in this story there is secrecy. A lot of things that are seemingly obvious to surrounding characters—who Sam, the ex, might be dating nowadays; what it means to appear “serious”—are clandestine to the protagonist. On the flip side, she accumulates secrets of her own in a way that feels equal parts retaliatory and self-soothing: the Gracie Green videos, the torrent of Whole Foods salads, her brief foray into foot fetish sex work. How would you define this aspect of the story? Is the secrecy about power, redemption, manipulation? Some mixture?
Aurora Huiza: I think that’s true, retaliatory and self-soothing. I also think it does have to do with power. At the beginning of the story, that minor character Casey feels power over the protagonist because she knows more about what’s going on than she does about their milieu. I think that psychologically the protagonist gathers all these secrets for herself in order to develop her own world apart from the one she feels locked out of, whether that be Sam’s or something bigger like the elusive world of being a good choreographer and dancer. Being part of that world would mean cracking the code as far as her own insecurity and uncertainty. I think of her as a very isolated person at this moment in life and isolated people inevitably have secrets. She’s also just grasping at anything to make her feel better, however embarrassing her behavior and compulsions might be.
JB: I loved the food writing here, in part because the meals are often described so obliquely, as if they’ve become utterly alien to the narrator. As the story develops, she jumps to the other end of the binary: rather than pushing food away, accumulating it for the sake of watching it rot, she indulges. I paid particular attention to how the verbiage changes—she eats huge bites, she gobbles. How would you describe the role that food plays in this story, how it transforms alongside the narrator?
AH: I feel like food is a faint thread in the background for her, like an inevitable byproduct of all that’s going on. I think at some moments she’s forgetting to eat because of how distracting her negative feelings are, how much energy she’s giving them. I think in a bigger sense she’s struggling to see her future and so she’s also not prioritizing eating because it feels like there’s no point, so this basic necessity is slipping away. She also feels a compulsion to control in other moments, building salad boxes but never eating them, because so much seems out of her control.
As far as the writing goes I just like describing food. I also think sometimes stuff at the Whole Foods salad bar looks insane by the end of the day and I still eat it. Importantly, I think when you go a long time not eating or trying not to eat, food does start to look foreign to you, in its appearance, and also, its texture in your mouth. It becomes more like an object, you turn it into that by alienating yourself from it in order to convince yourself you don’t enjoy it. So maybe that’s where the defamiliarization comes from. I think as the story goes on and she lets herself engage with her emotions and move past them, she brings food closer too.
JB: In the interaction with Jason, after the protagonist steps on his face, there’s this line: “I fished to feel something worse.” It stuck out to me on a reread because it felt so indicative of the protagonist’s conflict. Like she’s pressing on a bruise repeatedly just to confirm that it still hurts, that the wound is present in spite of attempts to distract herself (or, perhaps, because of). Could you speak a bit about how you approach writing about mental health struggles? I feel like it can be hard to do without sounding reductionist, but you do it so beautifully here.
AH: I think with this line specifically, she’s expecting that because she’s doing something new and borderline dangerous, she’s probably going to feel something bad, so she’s almost wincing waiting for something to feel bad, then double checking that nothing did, giving herself the space to decide if she did. I think she is interested in feeling a negative feeling if necessary and that’s how she’s coping throughout the story. I like how you describe it, as pressing on a bruise, and at this moment the bruise doesn’t feel that bad, she actually feels like she’s successfully expressed something by auditioning for this job.
I don’t necessarily think about writing about mental health, but I definitely enjoy writing about people who are in pretty bad or sort of abject situations and lack the tools to fix it. I like people who follow impulses to do things that don’t make sense and whose feelings undermine each other, and who try sort of comically bad methods for solving their problems.
JB: I was endeared by the various dynamics between women in the story. We see a cemented friendship, multiple acquaintances, a potential (albeit fleeting) romance, and a sort of unspoken nemesis. What aspects do you consider when flushing out character relationships on the page? How do you approach balancing multiple dynamics, especially when the depth and nature of those relationships vary over the course of the narrative?
AH: I really appreciate you saying that. I guess sometimes there is a sort of stand-in person from real life that makes it easier to just get an overall vague sketch of who the person is to the narrator. Not always. A lot of women characters also feel like composites to me or combinations of traits in real people I’ve encountered, so then I think about interacting with those people/traits. Isabelle, for example, I think has a lot of “good friend” qualities.
I think the balancing part has maybe to do with following instinct about what lines about each person belong at what point in the story, and how they speak to the character’s overall problems. And how important each person is to the narrator’s main “story.” I think it’s nice if each relationship has at least a little bit of change throughout, even just a ripple. My stories used to become way too long because I liked a lot of characters and giving room for each relationship to play out. Really depends on the story but I do like having multiple threads, as in, there’s the Amber thread, there’s the Isabelle thread, they intertwine and then hopefully land somewhere.
JB: Somewhat related: the questions you raise about gender and sex were so unexpected for me as a reader, and hopefully I don’t ruin the subtlety you’ve crafted by asking about it. There’s Gracie Green’s extremely early-2010s sex help videos and that exchange between Sam and the protagonist at the zoo (“I sometimes feel like a little boy when I’m panicked . . . I feel flat-chested and panicked and flailing. Like a little boy.”), but I wanted to put pressure, specifically, on how her feet become a metaphor for her struggle for embodiment more generally—the feet are molded by ballet but “fail” to amount toward professional dancing, and are instead demoted, in a sense, to sexual objects, tasked with smashing the faces of random male patrons. This is a fairly open-ended question, which is to say it’s barely a question, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how gender, sex, and performance are speaking to one another within the piece. Is this an intersection you frequently explore in writing, or even reading?
AH: I like how you describe them as demoted. I guess when you ask this I remember when I quit dance, for several reasons, but in part because I knew I wasn’t going to be good enough to be a professional ballerina no matter what. I remember thinking that now I could use my body for whatever I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted with my body, there were so many other uses for the body. Dancing ballet seriously is very rigorous and so to release all of those restrictions was liberating even if also very sad. I think that’s part of it here. Finding some other “use” for your body, as in, sex work, trying to feel different sensations because you can, but maybe still not quite feeling the level of power you hoped to. I’d say this character mainly uses her body when interacting with the world, because she started as a dancer.
With regard to the gender question–-I really do feel like a little boy when I’m panicked and stressed. I feel bare or stripped of something, maybe of my womanhood, which has always felt protective. And I think the narrator is saying she feels less beautiful or attractive, as well as inadequate, naive, useless, lost, unconfident, not like herself. How you did in middle school, before you come into your own, before you even know who you are. I think the character is at a place in her life overall at which she feels completely uncertain in these ways, there’s not a lot to hold onto.
I’m not sure if that answers it. I think I definitely am interested in gender and sex and performance in my writing, for sure. And I think I’m just interested in how to be a person.
JB: The titular section of the story, where we’re given the description of the frog parade and what it means (or used to mean) to the protagonist, knocked the breath out of me when I first read it:
. . . cartoon frogs with placid wide-set eyes pump their scepters, slam cymbals . . . Frogs in party hats and red clown noses and festive collars, colored confetti flecking the sky. It was just the frog parade, the most fun you could hope for, making it there, and now things like that seemed impossible, nothing felt fun, there was nobody to share the joke with.
Right after this, the protagonist mourns the frog parade, now dead in the wake of her breakup. In a weird way, the description of the frog parade reminded me of writing, or at the very least publishing. I once heard a writer say the joy in writing is having written. Having written is bliss, whereas writing, present tense, is hell. Like the frog parade, the most fun you hope for is to make it there, which begs the question of whether you ever really arrive.
Does this resonate with you? In your own practice, how do you maintain motivation to keep creating? Or, in other words, do we ever really make it to the frog parade, or does that defeat the purpose?
AH: Thank you for saying that. I think, in her mind, the parade is kind of a carefree high and complete happiness that she felt when with Sam. I think it also refers to the world you create when you’re in a relationship, animating the space between the two of you, populating it with frogs. On the flipside, it’s not real, you can’t stay there all the time. Which is why the animated guy is referenced, and is crazy, because he wants to stay there and that’s a bad thing, it’s all fake. (The movie I had in mind was Paprika).
Writing can be really hard especially when you just can’t make something work, but I also think a challenge can be motivating and there’s something about that that I like. I also think it’s important maybe to accept time periods during which you’re not confident in the outside world responding to your work. I try not to let that seep too much into the actual process of it. I think you have to try to just focus on whatever the thing is and why it’s even worth writing in the first place.
Now that you’re asking me, I think maybe we do make it to the parade. I think we do and we can’t stay. Once you write something good and someone publishes it, it feels amazing and you hit the high. And then that fades and it’s time for something else.