My friend Doris Iarovici has published her short story collection. Minus One follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss—and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities. Amazon link.
As an example piece of writing: She’s written a touching piece on love after losing your partner for the NYT here.
We recently had a conversation on having a writing life as well as another career. The freedom that non-fiction can give you. Whether customer service metrics are overrated. The range of reactions to grief and how fiction can explore this. Why a good writing day can start with reading poetry.
Transcript (grammar and typos expected) below.
Ben (00:00): Hi, welcome. Today we have Doris Iarovici who's an amazing writer. She's also a practicing psychiatrist. She's had work in the New York Times and The Guardian and is a prize-winning author and we're here to discuss her latest book which I have here, Minus One, which is a collection of a short fiction. So we will start with a little reading and then just have a few questions. So really welcome. I'm really glad you could join and perhaps you'd like to read us a little bit from your book.
Doris (00:32): Yes. Thank you very much, Ben. I'm very thrilled to be here. So I'm going to read just a couple of paragraphs from a short story called Bicth spelled BICTH. This is the short story that originally appeared in a literary journal called Meridian.
'The Chanterelles like rain, Casey doesn't. Rain gives his mother headaches, but the bicth like chanterelles, all mushrooms really and Casey's father likes her apparently more than his own two sons. So here they are in a mossy cabin in the most humid County in the state, the second rainiest County in the whole country so they can hunt down mushrooms. The cabin smells of Woodsmoke and mold and desiccated mouse s**t. At least that's what his mother suggested earlier over the phone when Casey complained of the weird earthy odor. They had to drive two miles up Buddy's Creek road just to pick up a signal. Four of them huddled around the Acura in front of some middle school, on a country road just to make their calls.
"Probably Desiccated mouse s**t," his mother had said, and they had both laughed and he had had to arrange his face and say "nothing," when his dad asked what's so funny, had to punch his little brother a hard quick sharp jab to the deltoid when the fool insisted, "Tell me, what did mom say? Why are you laughing?"
Not his fault that the smile caved on his father's face, the smile soft and inviting seconds ago. His father's quiet voice, the feathery touch of his fingers against Casey's shoulder, which Casey shrugged away. His father is so naive. He's heard his mother say his father's eyes went hard with the punch. He yelled at Casey, even though Casey hadn't started it.
This ten-year-old Angus is already bigger than him, taller and beefier. Kid can take care of himself and then the Bicth told his father to calm down, her voice gentle while like an idiot she stuck her own body between his father and Casey and said, "Why don't we all go into Clayton and try that ice cream place." "The dairy queen," Casey made his voice drip sarcasm, deadened his eyes.
Though passing it in the car earlier he had thought it would be nice to have one of those cones where the chocolate hardens into a shell around the soft serve. "You Shouldn't call her the Bicth, even in your head," his mother said, as she helped him pack last week, but she had giggled.
She had laughed outright the first time he had said it. An experiment inspired by the story she'd told him about a guy she had broken up with back in college, who then scrawled the slur across her dorm room white board but he'd misspelled it. "You Bicth," she'd mimicked bringing her voice down and octave, budding out her eyes and Aunt Kiki had said, "I remember that," and cracked up along with her, "what a tool that guy was." "You should probably try to like her," his mother said, and if she annoys you just pretend, she doesn't exist and who takes a 12-year-old to a cabin in the middle of f**king nowhere, f**king raven gap, no wireless, no television, just Angus for company. What does he expect him to do? This last said to Aunt Kiki when she probably thought Casey was out of earshot'.
And I'll stop there.
Ben (04:09): That's amazing. So one question I wanted to ask is, you have a full-time day job as a practicing psychiatrist and yet you also managed to do full-time writing and I guess its kind of tradition where people do have full-time roles and write. I was speaking with a poet friend and he says poets always have another job because you never earn ever enough through poetry and I see that's often true for writing. So I was wondering how do you juggle that and how do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as a writer person or both?
Doris (04:49): Yeah, so it's a great question. So one first of all, I think of myself as a writer. I would say I've been a writer my entire life and did that while I was a kid, while I was a teenager. So it predates my going to medical school and becoming a doctor and I think that as I was growing up and being an immigrant myself, being raised in an immigrant family, the idea that writing would be a job was kind of outside our frame of reference. So, it was always like, of course you write and you should keep doing that, but you should get a job. So that was kind of how I was brought up and I was also interested very much in the brain and brain science, neuroscience and then in psychiatry in part because there is such a wonderful opportunity to actually talk to people and hear people's life stories. Ideally all physicians would be engaged in that but I think more and more, at least in the US physicians don't have the opportunity to really get to know their patients because of all the time pressures and other kind of administrative burdens that get in the way but I think that it's difficult to be both a physician and a writer. I think both demand a lot of time and emotional energy and I feel like for me, it's worked because I've been lucky enough to be able to work part time as a psychiatrist. So I started working part-time quite a while ago and I think that psychiatry lends itself to that kind of practice because we can have sort of set hours and kind of, we know that someone is covering for us when we're not in the office. I think otherwise it would be very difficult to do. So I do set time aside in my work week for writing as well as for my clinical work.
Ben (06:48): Great. And kind of interesting that one of the major themes in the book seems to me to be grief and obviously that's something which also comes up in sort of psychiatry work and actually in what you were saying in terms of just conversation. Were you drawn to that as a theme because you come across it and have come across it in your life? You also wrote that really amazing New York Times essay, which deals with grief or looking for love after grief.
Doris (07:19): So I would say that I was probably trying to avoid writing about grief just because it's painful and I didn't necessarily want to dwell on it myself or kind of pull other people through stories of grief so these stories emerged as I was actually working on other projects. So I was working on a longer project but in between working on that project, I found myself turning to these stories that would pop into my head. So I lost my own husband, I think you know when I was 40. So he was quite young. I was quite young. And once that happens, first of all, obviously it's a very life-defining experience but what starts to happen is people introduce you to other people who've been through similar experiences, who've lost a spouse or lost someone else who's very close to them and over time I became aware that the experience of grieving is both very universal and then also very particular. So although we may feel we know what another person is going through and I felt like I could understand what especially other widows were going through and in some ways I could, and in some ways I really couldn't. So the experience was different for different people and then also had these common features. And I found that I became interested in the differences and how different people handle grief and how sometimes there's an idea that there's one way to grieve, which is absolutely not true and that really anything goes when it comes to grief. So it can look quite different for different people and at different points in our life. And certainly, I also have experience with grief as a clinician and watching patients go through very painful losses. I do think that being open to thinking about and writing about grief has made me a better clinician and more able to sit with my patient's grief and loss experiences. And I think that the stories as I started to write and not kind of avoid writing about grief were also an opportunity for me to explore my own grief and see the ways that we can connect with each other and the ways that we can kind of emerge on the other side where it's not kind of a constant presence in everyday life.
Ben (10:11): It makes it sound like grief is almost a wider spectrum and more complex than love when you think about it on the flip side because like you say, there are so many of these complexities and so many ways of approaching it. Perhaps that's one of the powers of fiction is that you can explore ideas through characters, although you also write nonfiction and you're working on memoir and there's been an explosion in kind of, I guess, this nonfiction narrative type of genre. Did you think it was kind of... And you said it is a side project, do you think it was quite interesting to sort of take that fictionalized route to be able to explore what characters' inner minds are thinking about and how do you think that compares to what we're thinking about memoir at the moment?
Doris (10:59): Absolutely. I think fiction... Well, first of all, I love to read fiction. I would say the majority of the reading that I do is fiction, although I also read non-fiction and memoir. So I just enjoy fiction. I enjoy the freedom, the experience, both reading and writing it. And so in writing fiction, in some ways I feel like I have a lot more freedom than when I write nonfiction, because I can explore alternate realities and I can put on other ways of responding to the same situation. In using characters that are made up, I can maybe discover emotional truths that are there for myself and also for people. So in some way's fiction is more fun than nonfiction, but it also, I think can be more difficult because in some ways, fiction has to be more true than nonfiction, if that makes sense. So nonfiction you're kind of sticking to the facts of a situation and you also have the benefit of references and you can kind of turn to bodies of scholarship or other people's work and cite from it and include it in your own work. Whereas in fiction even if you're writing about a situation, let's say that really happened, if you write about it in a way that seems too fantastic or out there, people won't believe it. So you have to be in some ways more... Your fictional world has to cohere in a way that sometimes real life actually doesn't cohere and so it's an interesting kind of dilemma and in memoir and creative non-fiction as long as you're kind of sticking to what really happened in a situation, you can write about something that's way out there and we've seen that, right. We've seen that just happen last year; things have happened in our real lives that most of us could never have imagined.
Ben (13:07): Or you wouldn't believe.
Doris (13:11): And wouldn't believe. Right. I mean, certainly when I read the news and some of the things that have happened in the political sphere in the US in the last few years, I think if I was writing some of those things in a fictional work, people would say, that's too far out there. The reader won't believe it but it was actually happening in our world. So it's an interesting kind of balance between, I would say, fiction and nonfiction and the explosion in reality TV and in memoir I think speaks to this appetite for crazy stories that people also can say are real. I'd say reality TV is not really real, it's a form of fiction that we are kind of consuming at the moment but you know, a lot of it is not true [Inaudible:00:14:07] as journalism or nonfiction
Ben (14:12): So you've written these beautiful short stories and they, to me, fit within a short story tradition, although also some of the sentences in it strike me as actually quite poetic as well. So almost verges on that heightened form of writing, which I think you see more in short fiction, although you can get it in longer fiction and prose. And I was sort of interested in read a lot, whether you're kind of conscious or how you see yourself fitting that writing within a certain tradition. Also, I guess, there's these traditions now, and particularly we're seeing more female writing coming through. There's also a sort of theme of writers who've come from another country and have made their life somewhere else, sort of immigrant writing and I was just wondering, are you conscious of these schools of thought at all and do you fit yourself in or is it very much concentrate on story character and sentence and it kind of comes in and fits in after?
Doris (15:08): Yeah, I would say that I don't think about the schools of writing when I'm writing. I don't set out to try to fit into any particular literary tradition but I think I'm certainly influenced by other writers of short fiction and long form novels. I would say that I read a lot of short stories over the course of my life and some of the short story writers that I admire greatly I would hope have influenced my work. In particular, I think starting in college, I was reading a lot of Alice Munro. There are a lot of female short story writers that kind of were coming of age or writing when I was younger and throughout my life. Jhumpa Lahiri comes to mind. She's more in the tradition of like the immigrant short story writer or fiction writer. So I think that I admired a lot of short story writers. I don't know where I would fit in terms of a particular tradition. I'd like to think that I can kind of fit into the immigrant writer in the US tradition. They're also physician writers such as Ethan Canin who started out writing short fiction. So his collection Emperor of the Air came out when I was, I think, still in medical school and I believe he was in medical school when he wrote it and I think that these were people who inspired me to think like, this really is possible. Other people are doing it, that means I can also do it.
Ben (16:54): Yeah. There're all genres, I think, perhaps in the US as well, but certainly in the UK of medical memoirs of some sort, but really talking about the complexities of being either a frontline doctor or a junior doctor or surgery or dealing with brain surgery and the like. So, yeah, great tradition there. Okay. I thought we'd play a little section of sort of underrated, overrated now. So I'm going to throw out a few things. You can pass as well if it doesn't feel anything and you can say, Oh, whether you think this topical subject or thing is underrated, overrated. And we could have a little chat about any of them. So I'm going to start with one we might be familiar with, if you've read your essay but cars particularly an Alfa Romeo, do you think they're underrated or overrated?
Doris (17:46): Alfa Romeos are definitely underrated because they are fantastic fun cars to drive and I think that I don't see a lot of them on the road in the US. For a while they were not being sold in the US. I think they are now being sold in the US again, thank goodness but they're so much fun and I would say in particular manual transmission cars are underrated because as we've gotten into convenience, we've let ourselves lose sight of the joy of driving, which I don't think anything compares to driving a manual transmission car.
Ben (18:23): Particularly the great US road trip tradition, right? Yeah. I think my dad owned an Alfa Romeo in the sixties and he always used to talk about it a lot as well. Okay. So again, overrated or underrated travel or traveling, which we're not doing a lot of at the moment.
Doris (18:41): Yeah. I would have to go with underrated again, just because I think travel is also fantastic and right, I haven't done any since we went into lock down in March and I would say that many people actually, even when they have the opportunity to travel may not choose to travel. There are many reasons for that. Some people don't have the luxury of being able to afford travel but I would say that among the people who could travel many choose not to and I don't understand that because I think it's [Inaudible: 19:17].
Ben (19:19): Particularly in America, they travel... Oh, I guess you can travel across America. There is that thing, but they go lesser to other worlds. Yeah. I would agree on that one. Okay. Customer service metrics. Do you think that overrated or underrated?
Doris (19:38): I would say these are overrated. From my perspective, we focus... Certainly customer service is important but we focus on metrics that I'm not sure always capture the value of an interaction. And I don't know how it is in the UK, but we are surveyed to death here. Like almost every interaction I have by phone with a customer service person, then I'd get a survey about it sometimes, an online survey, sometimes a live phone call and often the questions in the survey don't really capture the essence of the interaction. So I would have to go with overrated.
Ben (20:22): Yes. You wrote an essay common piece on this, about how particularly it has invaded interactions which are much more complex. So I could see for a transaction, did someone hand you a package over fine? Yes. But something like the relationships you might have with patients, you know, calling them sort of customers, I could see on one hand, the wording might be trying to do one thing but it makes it into something relationship transactional where actually it's much more complex about that and what does five stars mean after a year or something like that or a scorecard? Great. Okay. Romanian food, you think underrated or overrated? We can choose a particular dish.
Doris (21:12): That's a loaded question Ben. I'm going to go with underrated. I think that maybe for a broad swath of people, there is not that much familiarity with Romanian cuisine and for me, it's certainly comfort food. I grew up eating a lot of Romanian food that my grandmother cooked and now that my mom will sometimes cook for me. A lot of Romanian food is similar to other kinds of middle Eastern foods and it has similarities with Greek and Turkish cuisine as well. But there's some dishes that are really quite tasty. So...
Ben (22:00): Do you have a favorite childhood dish from the times or if you were ill would your mum always cook you something up.
Doris (22:09): I don't know if there was a specific illness dish, but I would say that Vinete, which is basically a Romanian version of baba ghanoush. It's an eggplant, like a roasted chopped eggplant appetizer is a staple and I really love it. And so my mom will always make it for me if I'm coming over to dinner at her house. There are also a lot of meat stuffed vegetable dishes, which again, I don't eat a lot of that anymore but they sort of bring back the taste of childhood for me. So stuffed zucchini, stuffed peppers, things like that.
Ben (22:53): Great. Are there any good Romanian restaurants in Boston?
Doris (22:58): I don't know of any in Boston. I went to a Romanian restaurant in Newton, I think a couple of years ago that was pretty good. I would say the best Romanian restaurant I've found actually was in LA when I was visiting my brother out there and he took me to a Romanian restaurant, which was really fun. They actually had things I never had so I think it's also, there's some regional variation in Romanian cuisine that I'm like completely unfamiliar with. So there you go.
Ben (23:29): Excellent. Okay. Well maybe turning back to thinking about short stories or your book. Do you think there's something about what you've written about, what you're writing or maybe just something that you think you understand or do you think perhaps the world or a lot of people misunderstand about the world you inhabit or the characters that you're thinking about. I was just wondering whether you had any observations about what you found through your process, which you thought then, Oh, you know what, people might not know this and this is kind of interesting.
Doris (24:03): I think a number of the stories in the book deal with characters trying to rebuild their lives after a significant loss and it's not all after loss by death. Some of it is loss of family structure from divorce or other kinds of reconfigurations and I would say that in writing the stories again, kind of along the lines of just the variability in grief, I think there's also just a lot of variability on how people rebuild a sense of family and connection when they've had some kind of disruption. And I guess I hope that readers would come away with an understanding of just how difficult it can be to kind of have families come together in a new way. And yet that it's also possible, you know, that it's certainly possible and that a certain kind of openness can make it happen better than obviously characters who kind of dig their heels in and really resist change. So maybe that's what I'm trying to say, that change is easier when it's not actively resisted. Maybe that's the lesson that I learned both in life and in writing a book, if that makes sense.
Ben (25:29): Yeah. No, it does. I mean, you talked about it a little bit and actually some of the characters when you're talking about that openness the reflection about having a little bit of that flexibility and actually that's rooted in your New York Times essay about being open to finding love after someone has passed or moving on in that way. When you write, are you one of those writers who also reads a lot during your writing process, or do you have to kind of separate out the two because you kind of feel you might get over influenced by all of the things that you're reading?
Doris (26:06): I read all the time and there was a time in my life where I would stop when I was working on a novel. I actually stopped reading novels thinking that maybe the voices that I was reading would get into my writing and at some point, I realized that that didn't really happen and so I don't really think about not reading a particular kind of writing when I'm writing, but I will say I don't necessarily turn to writing if I get stuck in my own writing. I don't turn to fiction; I turn to poetry and so I appreciate you saying that you found some of the lines poetic because I do read a fair amount of poetry and I have a collection of books some by poets that I'm friends with and some poets I don't know but admire. And so part of my process is that if I'm having a really bad writing day and I just am stuck or I don't know where to start, or I don't know where to go in the middle of a project, I'll just pull poetry off my shelf and randomly start reading and I find that that works much better for me to kind of get me re grounded in my own work and then able to write again. And I've done these writing residencies, which are kind of I would say absolutely critical to my ability to keep especially my fiction writing going. But when I go on residency, I often will start the day by reading poetry and then I'm able to, I feel like, work for many more hours continuously and feel more productive and engaged than when I don't do that.
Ben (27:45): Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Poetry as the catalyst. It strikes me... Do you edit as you write or wait or is it a mix? Because I guess this is also a form in short fiction, but your sentences are particularly often very well constructed and seem to have a lot of care and attention to them. So I'd be interested if you do edit as you go along and whether you have almost a poetic sensibility over your choice of words and the structure, or is it something that kind of flows just more naturally without you thinking about it too much?
Doris (28:22): Thank you for saying that. I do edit as I go, which I think makes the writing process really slow. So I'll be working on something and start my next day working on it by rereading what I wrote and then I'll kind of edit as I'm doing that and so I've actually tried to do less of that so that I can kind of move things along.
Ben (28:44): Get more words in.
Doris (28:46): But I do a lot of editing and once the story is done, I'll go back obviously and rewrite parts of it or rewrite all of it sometimes. Some of the stories in this particular collection are older than others. There's one story in there that's quite old. I think it's like 10 years or something like that. Maybe a little older. And so when I put the collection together, I did another round of editing on some of the older stories and then there are two very new stories in there that I wrote when I was at a writing residency last summer that I kind of added once the collection was under consideration and in some ways, I liked some of the newer stories better. I don't know if that just happens anyway with time, but I feel like the paying attention on a line-by-line level is something that I've done more as I've written more. So I think I'm more attuned to the language than I was perhaps 10 years ago
Ben (29:51): Obviously different writers, different techniques and things. But I think I read somewhere or maybe heard in an interview that's what Zadie Smith does. She also edits pretty much sentence by sentence as she goes. Like you say, it might be a bit slower but if that's part of your process, because you have that love of word or sentence or structure it is what it is. Great. Well, I thought maybe finish, we've touched on it about sort of your writing process and how you fit in your writing day, or it would seem like your writing week or month or year because you sort of have to fit it in different days cause you're working your medical job and you have residency, so I'd be interested to see, and you've touched upon actually how reading poetry can help. Is there anything else about your writing process or how it fits in the day that you'd like to share?
Doris (30:46): I think the part that I underestimated is how important community is actually to the writing process. Writing itself is very solitary and I have to be kind of by myself. I can't really be in a room with other people when I'm writing normally and yet the need for a writing community is absolutely critical for me. And so I have found it actually much harder to write in the context of the pandemic isolation. I think there are many reasons for that. Not just the lack of community, but lack of community is one of them. I haven't been able to get together with writer friends. We haven't been able to talk in the same way, we've tried to substitute zoom and other ways to connect but...
Ben (31:36): They're quite as good as meaningful coffee or...
Doris (31:38): That's right. So, I guess I would say that that's a bigger part of my process than I ever realized. I was aware of it because in the writing residencies, it's like that perfect balance of solitude and community but even in my day-to-day life, I mean just the community of going to work and having my psychiatry community as well. We haven't had that. We've all been working virtually since March. So I would say that it's really interesting that in some ways that working from home has opened up all this time and I think there's a misconception that all you need to write is time and certainly time is absolutely important. Obviously, if you don't have it you're not going to get anything done, but it's necessary but not sufficient. So I would say that the community piece is very important. And interestingly, what has gotten me writing, especially fiction again, is that a writer that I knew through a writing residency started a scheduled writing time over zoom twice a week from this time to this time. There's a zoom link and all these writers log on and then we just, you know, we...
Ben (32:48): Write together.
Doris (32:49): And it's really... I mean, it sounds silly, right? Cause we're, you know... I obviously turn off the zoom while I'm writing but I have it in a little box on the screen. But you know that everyone's there for that period of time and we don't talk to each other, we just kind of... We all gather and we write and then we all say goodbye at the end. That has helped me writing again. So I'm very grateful that someone thought of doing that. I certainly hadn't.
Ben (33:16): Yeah. Shared experience. Well, it's kind of almost brings that full round to this idea that only certain aspects of grief can be shared. The willingness to share it can be shared [Inaudible: 33:26], but the actual grief or like the actual writing process can be very solitary. So that's very neat. Okay. Would you like to tell us where we can get hold of this? So I think Kindle, US bookshops, can't get it in UK bookshops so easily yet, or you might have to get it online.
Doris (33:47): Yes. I believe Amazon UK is carrying it. I don't know if bookshop... Is bookshop.org I don't know if [Inaudible: 33:56] the UK, but it is available on bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores and obviously from the publisher directly. I thought that they had a UK distributor, University of Wisconsin press but I know for sure it's on Amazon in the UK.
Ben (34:18): And you can look it up on the web. So yeah. So bookshop.org for independent bookshops. Is there any one bookshop in Boston that you particularly like or would recommend if you were supporting an independent bookshop? You might not have one off the top of your head and bookshop.org Is pretty good like that, but it is interesting how there is a community of readers and actually bookshops and independent bookshops are very helpful and useful in that way and that's one of the things that... I used to go a fair amount as a reader, but not every week or anything like that of late, but missing that as being able that in the middle of the pandemic has been sort of notable for that loss. So I don't know. Do you have a favorite bookshop?
Doris (35:04): I have lots of bookstores that I like to go to. I would say... Well, I have a reading coming up in January with a bookstore called Belmont books in Belmont, Massachusetts, which is just outside of Boston. So I think they're one great option within Cambridge. There are several bookstores in Cambridge and then in Boston itself, there's Trident books which is in downtown Boston and it's a nice independent bookstore. I feel like we're lucky to have it right in the middle of downtown.
Ben (35:40): Okay, excellent. Well, I look forward to reading the novel and maybe the memoir hopefully they will happen. We know how precarious though the whole writing process from start all the way to the finish, to getting in there. So thank you very much for joining me in this conversation. Really wonderful and actually very provoking to think about grief and all of those aspects and the difference between fiction and non-fiction. So great. So just one last time, Minus One, do pick it up in a bookstore and thank you very much.
Doris (36:16): Thank you very much Ben. Really good talking to you.
Minus One follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss—and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities. Amazon link.
