"I feel like I am endlessly coming of age"

Today I’m happy to share an interview with my wonderful writer friend Katya Apekina, offered here in final act of promotion for our reading in celebration of Katya’s second novel Mother Doll, newly out in paperback. This Friday, April 11, at Sunny’s Bookshop in Tarzana, Katya and I will be reading with Emma Specter and Melissa Broder. Won’t you RSVP and join us? In my favorite interview I’ve done in a long time, I shared that I’ll be reading something new! So please come.

Twelve years ago I was awarded a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. An arts residency is kind of like a summer camp for adults, and perhaps this is truer of VCCA than other residencies; arriving, I became part of a large group of people, many of whom seemed to know each other, with revolving and evolving alliances and cliques. Intimidated, I decided I would mainly stay in my little apartment—in a bit of luck, I’d been awarded one of the few with its own kitchen—baking yams and listening to music so loudly that the writer occupying the other half of the building, who was writing a biography of Jonah Salk, asked me to tone it down, saying, “I don’t think Jonah Salk rocked.”

But a simple solitude of yams and managing VCCA’s famous stinkbug infestation was not to be my lot. Very soon after getting there, in the first day or so, I met Katya. I don’t remember how exactly; there was a lot of walking up to people and telling them who you were and where you were from. When Katya and I started talking, we experienced a peculiar mirroring. I said I lived in Los Angeles, and she said she lived in Los Angeles too; she said she was managing an apartment building, and I said I was too; she was a fiction writer and I was a fiction writer; she had lived in New York and I had lived in New York. Quickly we realized we had a close friend in common. And then, in one of the great happinesses of my adult life, in a way I have experienced very few times ever and even less after my twenty-fifth birthday, we were friends. Aghast at the food—the chef had quit—we bummed a ride from another artist and bought salami and pudding cups at the Walmart. We walked next to the horses in the field and we gave readings of our work next to paintings by fellow residents.

And that was the beginning of over a decade of a friendship as concerned with literature as it is with everything else. I love being concerned about everything with my friend Katya. I love the healing quality of the way she makes me laugh. She is the only person, for example, who has ever spoken to me of a short-lived, apparently unsearchable reality show called L.A. Therapists in which the cast (of therapists in L.A.) was continuously smoking on camera, including a father and daughter therapist. Just a dad and his adult daughter, hanging out, smoking cigs. I never watched L.A. Therapists (although truly, if I could find it, I would). But I’ll remember forever being on a hike with Katya above the Hollywood Reservoir, listening to her describe it to me. I felt the edges of the world curl up a little to reveal something generous and real. A bare place, plainfaced and straightforward, full of joy and darkness.

That’s what it’s like to read Katya Apekina’s writing, too.

Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German and Italian. Her second novel, Mother Doll, was named a Best Book of 2024 by Vogue. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter and dog.

Where did Mother Doll come from? What inspired you to write this book?

It came from several things.  There was an experience I had translating my dead grandmother's memoirs that she had left me, but which i had refused to read until after she died—and the uncanny feeling I had of being in conversation with her through this text after her death.

There was the absurdist Russian literature like Gogol and Bulgakov, that sort of Soviet magical realism, that I had grown up on, where fantastical things are treated with a straight face. Where painful realities are lived through and then transformed into something else through the imagination.

There were the questions that came up for me when I had a child, and maybe just from entering midlife, of what was handed down to me, why am I the way that I am, and what am I going to hand down to my daughter if I'm not careful. Also, I am kind of contrarian but also a people pleaser, so it is fun to write about characters who follow their bad impulses, who are trying to figure it out.

I think it's a coming of age story, as an ongoing process. I feel like I am endlessly coming of age.  

You are one of the funniest people I know. My favorite moment of humor in Mother Doll is when Zhenia tells someone she’s just met at the Magic Castle that she’s a geneticist. It’s this non sequitur obvious lie in the total deadpan I think of as uniquely Katya. Do you pursue humor when you write, or is it a natural side effect of your storytelling process?

Aww. Thank you. We do have lots of laughs together. I think for me humor is also often a coping mechanism. There is a satisfaction in absurdity, also an emotional distancing. The Soviet sense of humor had a real grim edge to it.

You and I were both studying mediumship when you were writing Mother Doll. Did you practice any channelling in writing this book? Do you ever use the tools we learned in those classes now?

I think writing for me when I am in the flow is always channeled, though I didn't do any of the rituals I learned about through the classes. When I was writing the book, and taking the class my grandfather, who I lived with growing up and who shaped me in a lot of ways, died. So, mediumship went from this abstract fun activity to an attempt to talk to him specifically, and it felt bad. It felt like I would be willing to believe anything because I wanted it to be true, and it felt bad because my grandfather had a lot of darkness, and I was scared of communing with it.

You dedicated your first novel, The Deeper The Water The Uglier The Fish, your daughter, a decision you described to me as complicated—you wrote it in honor of her and out of love for her, but in no way about her, you said, observing a certain black comedy in dedicating a book full of dysfunction and abuse to your beloved child. Familiesare an organizing principle of your work; unlike many other modern novelists I can think of, your characters are inextricably linked to their generational trauma and also just to the shit of their lineage, old furniture, forgotten books. Have you written yourself forward in these projects? What’s your relationship to your family history, your familial dynamics, like now?

My first book was actually dedicated to David [my husband], I think exactly because it seemed weird to dedicate such a dark and fucked up book to a baby!  But Mother Doll is dedicated to her and also to my parents and grandparents, because it is a book about the generational passing down of...well, trauma, I guess, but also of other things. Of love and pain and meaning. 

[Thank you Katya for gamely answering a question in which I got the basic premise totally wrong. — Ed.]

You and I met soon after you had moved to L.A., and now you’ve been here over a decade. I love the way you write about L.A. How are you feeling about life in the city now, in the wake of the fires? What inspires you about this place?

We met at a writing residency, and we were both building managers in Hollywood at the time. I love the way YOU write about LA.

I feel so complicatedly about living here. My life here is so nice, and my community is so fun and exciting and supportive, but I feel so disconnected from this place, and I feel a lot of guilt about abandoning my family on the East Coast. I want to be with them, and I also want to be free. After the fires I made my family move into my parents’ living room, and this was not ideal in some ways, but I felt so deeply satisfied being there.

I don't think I will be happier if I move back. In fact, I will probably be less happy in a lot of ways, but I think I will feel more connected. I guess that sense of roots and rootlessness that I feel as an immigrant comes up in my writing too. I do think I need to go East for a year or so and either get it out of my system, or stay there. All this is hard to do when you are in a family of your own and they do not share your desires.

We talk about our inner children a lot, and our shadows, and our mothers and fathers. What else do we talk about?

We talk about it all–high to low. The Teen Mom franchise. Gossip. Complaints. Joys. Our inner and outer children. Our fears and frustrations. Our petty grievances. Our serious grievances. Books. Publishing gossip. Hairstyles. Astrology. Tarot. Jung. Therapy. Omg, I feel like I am doing that thing for searches–hot words? What's it called? Anyway, you have been there for me through a lot a lot a lot. You are such a good friend. I love you.

I love you too, Katya!

The first of the hot weather is here and in my household we are grinding. We are skeptical of grind rhetoric, but feelings aside, my partner and I have been working to almost midnight every night for weeks. He’s on deadline for the magazine he edits, and I’m making bad choices about emails, but also writing sometimes, making new big batches of my eczema-abatement tea (there is definitely an eczema edition of this newsletter headed your way sometime in 2025), and when finally I go to bed, reading.

A nice side effect of being on nervous system total arousal high alert mode since the evening that I packed my belongings and fled my home in forty minutes (now officially three months ago, on January 8, 2025) is that I’ve been reading a lot because it is the form of entertainment I can best bear. We watch very little television, which has created in me a childlike craving for it—but after just a few episodes of the series of unpredictable quality of which my partner and I are currently consuming the third season, I can lay awake in bed, replaying images, scaring myself with things that were not scary when I was not trying to go to sleep. And that is to say nothing, nothing at all, of the world outside, which is of course also the world inside, through which I must walk my two-and-a-half-year old every day. Thank god for books, their pleasing heft, the way they teach and offer. I’ll write about some soon!

Also, I’ve painted a few watercolors. My favorite one is of my morning cup of coffee.

I mentioned it above but I wanted to say again here a huge thank you to Danielle Lazarin for interviewing me for the In Process With… series at her excellent newsletter Talk Soon. The interview is paywalled (which is not the case with every issue of Danielle’s newsletter), which is a message from the universe that you should subscribe so you can read it. Don’t you want to know the context of this image?

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.