I received a copy of Sarah Bruni’s Mass Mothering last summer, about nine months after I gave birth to my first son. The jacket described a book about the systematic disappearance of boys in a nameless country and how the grief of their mothers evolves into a relentless demand for justice. When our narrator encounters these testimonies on the shelf of her platonic situationship, she travels to this country to find out more about the book and its obscure author, Tomas Petritus, and ends up unraveling an even greater, and more personal, mystery. At the time, I was still simmering in a soup of postpartum hormones, which made the horrors of the news cycle that much worse. I was hesitant to read fiction about children suffering when I was already bombarded by harrowing stories out of Gaza and ICE detention centers. However, what Mass Mothering actually offered was a kaleidoscopic account of all the ways people might take care of each other—in ways great and small, in the face of state violence, individual tragedy, and the daily grind alike. I felt like someone had suggested, in gracious, clear, and elegant terms, an answer to the paralyzing question so many of us had been (and are still) asking: What can we do? The characters in my novel, The Bombshell, also attempt to answer that question, although in more ostentatious and aggressive ways. A group of Corsican militants kidnap a French politician’s teenage daughter, Séverine, but fail to negotiate her ransom. Following a mutual indoctrination, Séverine joins the cell, and they the spend the rest of the summer planting bombs, creating a media frenzy, and nearly causing a revolution. I jumped at the opportunity to chat with Sarah about the unlikely intersections of our novels, how things like current events and reading in other languages inflect our writing, and why we write at all. – Darrow Farr
Darrow Farr: I really wanted to talk to you about Mass Mothering, and how our novels are strange bedfellows, in a way. They’re obviously quite different in terms of character and plot and setting, but I feel like they’re undergirded by similar concerns about how the personal and political are intertwined, forms of state violence, seeking justice, and where love fits into all that.
This book is explicitly about radical care, and I know you were inspired by testimonies that you encountered when you were doing a master’s program in Latin American Studies. But how did you come to write this particular book? Did you start with the desire to represent radical care?
Sarah Bruni: No. I started with this idea of ambiguous grief, and the focus on radical care revealed itself in later drafts. There are two vastly different fictional worlds in the novel, both unnamed, and initially what I understood to be anchoring them together was a type of unresolved grief. And, yes, when I started the book, I was in an interdisciplinary master’s program in Latin American Studies that allowed me to take classes in history, anthropology, literature, and also offered funding for travel research, in my case to Uruguay and Colombia. I struggled initially with how to engage artistically with stories of grief that were very far from my own experience. I had to think very carefully about the space from which I was writing, and consider how to represent the politics of bearing witness without exploiting someone else’s loss.
DF: Were you talking to these mothers directly?
SB: In some cases, yes. More often, I was reading testimonies, ethnographies, fiction, going to marches, archives, spaces dedicated to preserving different versions of recent local history–of the military dictatorship in Uruguay, or of the armed conflict in Colombia. In Medellín, there was a group of mothers whose children were disappeared that took its model from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, gathering in public spaces outside of government buildings, holding up pictures of their children, and asking for justice, for their stories to be heard. I attended some of their meetings and demonstrations. The collective actions of mothers represented in my novel most closely resemble the way that this particular group gathered to ask for justice. But I wasn’t interested in trying to represent them or any of the stories I encountered directly. I wasn’t using any of them as models for characters. I was thinking a lot about the particular form testimonies often take on, and the way in which speakers, collectively, made space for one another. And I wanted to represent that kind of storytelling, and that kind of care.
DF: I ask because I’ve also gotten a lot of questions about research and primary sources with regards to The Bombshell. It’s interesting because readers seem to assume that “research” means you’re talking to people and reproducing their stories in this very one-to-one way, but that wasn’t my experience at all.
SB: Yes, I wanted to ask how much access you had to Corsica while you were writing about it? What was the research process like for you?
DF: I went to Corsica in 2018 hoping to collect stories in a journalistic way, but when I did ask direct questions about the FLNC, which is the militant independentist group I loosely based I Fratelli on, people would go really quiet. Even though the group was inactive at that time, I was an outsider, and they still felt very protective, very wary of Corsica being perceived through this lens of violence. So anytime anybody would ask me a question about my research trip, I could never say, oh yeah, I met this former militant, and he told me all about his time building bombs in the maquis. It was more like, my Airbnb host cooked this amazing meal that ended up in the book, and one of her neighbors told an anecdote about someone avoiding jail time by doing military service, and that became really essential to a character’s backstory. And same as you, I read tons of ethnographies, a lot of memoir, fiction.
SB: I assume a lot of the research you were doing was in French? I wonder if you still read in French, or other languages, and if that practice informs your writing at all? I ask because I feel like once I started spending time in other languages–mostly Spanish–it made me feel more free as a reader and a writer.
DF: Because so much of Corsican literature and literature about Corsica is untranslated, I was very much in a French mindset as I was writing and researching this book. I actually wanted to ask you a related question. I was a Romance Language major—my two languages were French and Spanish—and I felt like there was such freedom in the novels we read coming out of Latin America. Not only in how a story was told, but the use of language itself. And I never felt that same sense of freedom in French literature. In fact, I feel the opposite. Like, there are…
SB: Parameters.
DF: Yeah. So, actually, it was kind of fun writing in English after reading in French. But tell me more about being immersed in Latin American literature and then writing in English.
SB: I spent time in Montevideo, Uruguay, in my late 20s, and I started trying to read literature in Spanish before I had a firm grasp on the language. I had come from an MFA program not too long before that, and I was very much used to reading literature in English through the lens of analyzing how things were constructed. Not being able to do that in Spanish was a gift, because I was just reading purely to find out what was going to happen next. Like, I was reading the way that I had read as a child again. And then, as my language skills caught up with me, I was blown away by what was actually going on formally, thematically. Things felt so much freer than what I was used to encountering in North American fiction. And, there was more room for fragmentation, for experimentation, for talking about social issues in a way that didn’t feel didactic. I just felt activated by it.
And at the same time, because I wasn’t using English much in my day-to-day life, when I turned to English to write, I felt like I had more room to play. And so even after I left and I was in New York working odd jobs, I kept turning back to some of these books that were important to me, to conjure up that reading and writing experience, which in some ways led to me wanting to write this novel.
DF: I very much felt that influence in Mass Mothering, completely independent from the subject matter. I kept on thinking of Bolaño while I was reading. You have such a graceful touch, and you’re able to alight on all these varied, complex topics: grief, different forms of care, fraught interactions with men, forgiveness. At the same time, there’s a page-turning mystery at the heart of the story that keeps twisting and spinning out.
It made me want to ask you about the editing process, because the novel feels so superbly edited. How did you assemble this book?
SB: It was assembled in two different sections, the Field Notes and A.’s story. I was writing both of those parts simultaneously, though I wasn’t sure initially whether they belonged in the same narrative, or if they had anything to say to each other. Eventually, I recognized that I needed A. to be a part of this project, because the world she occupied was so much closer to that of my own experience, and I wanted to use her as a filter to think about the complicated nature of bearing witness.
I was thinking a lot about what it means to be witnessing horrific events that happen far away, that we nevertheless have, in some ways, vividly portrayed to us, thanks to the globalized world that we live in … and then sort of having to switch back to making dinner, getting on the subway, etc. Of course it’s so disruptive, and so difficult not to get emotionally quagmired in the news cycle that we’re living through. A guiding question was: What do you do with private pain when you’re also privy to wide-scale, collective grief? I didn’t do a lot of editing. This was a book that I wrote very slowly over the course of about a decade, and when I sent it off, there were some tweaks that happened. But a lot of the initial structuring was just thinking about how I wanted to move back and forth between those two distinct worlds.
DF: You started writing this book ten years ago, so like, 2016?
SB: 2015.
DF: I started writing The Bombshell around the same time, in 2016. It goes without saying that the world has changed a lot since then. First, what was your experience of writing a book largely about state violence as repression was getting worse and worse in our own country?
SB: Ha, oh yes. This is a question I have for you, too.
DF: And secondly, what has it been like to publish Mass Mothering and see it taking on new resonances? Most relevantly, as people are being disappeared in our own country?
SB: I didn’t imagine when I started writing the book that these kinds of realities were going to hit quite so close to home. When I started writing this book, I was angry about deportations during the Obama administration, which feels quaint to even mention in light of the events of this past year. Just before publishing Mass Mothering, forced disappearances by ICE were happening everyday in Chicago. In my neighborhood, there were groups of community members walking children to school with whistles around their necks, because our neighbors were getting shoved into cars and abducted. I didn’t anticipate the ways in which these models of fierce care I had observed elsewhere would become a part of daily life here. I did find some solace in seeing these familiar models of solidarity, as terrifying as it was to see the realities that they were responding to at closer range.
I wanted to ask you a similar question about how it felt to be writing a book about revolution over the course of this past dark decade, and whether events at home influenced at all how you found yourself telling this particular story?
DF: I feel embarrassed to admit this, but I did not have any sense of things going this way in our country, either. I wanted to write about a radical cell, but I thought, if I set this in the US, readers will not take them seriously. They will not have sympathy for this group, and they’ll feel too distant from their beliefs. Then, only a matter of months later, there were people in the US talking about being part of the resistance, and it made my head spin a little bit.
There were a couple things I did end up changing about the story in response to current events. I had initially wanted to make Petra an “I’m With Her” girl, for that to be the generational conflict between her and her mother. Then after Trump’s election, there was a certain rejuvenation of the left within this country, and I felt like it might make more sense, and there might be more to explore, by making Petra an Occupy Wall Street leftist. There’s a tweet that goes, “People on twitter will really be like ‘you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart’ and then not firebomb a Walmart.” I thought that might be a more interesting tension between mother and daughter—realizing your mother was the person who actually firebombed the Walmart, and simultaneously realizing you’ll never be that person and coming to terms with it.
SB: I was blown away by those conversations and those scenes when they’re talking about Occupy, and Séverine as Ramona saying, “But there’s no leadership,” and Petra’s like, “Well, that’s the point of the social movement.” It’s putting past models of social change into conversation with relatively current ones.
DF: Oh good, that’s what I was hoping to get at!
Actually though, the event that most freaked me out, in a good way, was the appearance of Luigi Mangione into our lives. That happened shortly before publication of The Bombshell. A question I was asking myself the entire time I was writing this book was, Am I making this believable? I had initially intended to write a kind of early Almodóvar, John Waters-esque romp about this kidnapping gone wrong, and how this teenage girl ends up taking over then blowing everything up.
But when I started writing it, I realized I actually needed to take the premise seriously, even if it’s outlandish, which was a challenge, but a challenge that energized me. At the same time, I had a lot of insecurity about it making it seem like this could actually happen. So, in a strange way, I was quite comforted by the public’s support of Luigi. Like, if you have this righteous anger, and if you—allegedly—find a violent expression of that anger, and if you are so handsome…
SB: Oh, I love that parallel. I was also really fascinated by the way Séverine’s character exhibits an investment in her own image and performance, which keeps the reader guessing about her motives. She has this insatiable revolutionary spirit, and at the same time she very much craves material comfort and for things to look a certain way. In one of my favorite scenes in the book, the cell is discussing planting bombs, and within that conversation, Séverine has this fantasy of “the four of them living in the old home she grew up in, taking breakfast in the garden with its high walls covered in ivy; a mix of guys and girls scattered about the sitting room’s burgundy Persian rug and the big, beige, American style couch, planning new attacks.”
I’m curious why you were drawn to her character straddling a desire for luxury and one to create real social change. How did you balance and reconcile those two parts of her while writing?
DF: I mean, this is what the term “Champagne Socialist” exists to describe, right? I admit to having those same desires. It’s hard to break out of the desire to be comfortable and to achieve a nice bourgeois bohème life. You think, naively, Even if I’m living with all this excess, we can figure out a way for everybody to be fine, right? The first time I went to El Salvador to visit family and encountered the pila filled with cold water that had to be heated on the kitchen stove, I was like, Okay, I guess I can’t take a 20-minute hot shower here.Furthermore, if people all over the world had access to adequate clean water, I probably wouldn’t be able to take 20-minute hot showers at home, either. It’s very sobering to realize the desires for Western luxuries and global social justice are incompatible. But Séverine is 17, right? She’s figuring it out as she goes. I so distinctly remember being her age, and all the attendant delusions.
SB: When I picked up The Bombshell, I assumed that it was a book about Stockholm Syndrome. But the more that I became immersed in the novel, the less I believed that Séverine is deluded in any way, by her kidnappers or by her youth. This was reinforced in the last act of the book, which seems, above all, invested in trying to recover and reconcile the human relationships within the militant group. And I realized that the driving force at the heart of this book is a love story, and that it’s really about the way this kind of intense connection–intellectual, physical, emotional intimacy–can change a person.
And I was curious if this reading gels with your experience of the story as its writer? And whether writing the relationship between Séverine and Bruno changed what kind of story it was going to be?
DF: The main pillars of the novel, from the beginning, were: Girl is kidnapped; girl joins the group that kidnapped her; girl enters into a romantic relationship with her kidnapper; girl blows things up; then there’s the fallout. I never intended this book to be about Stockholm Syndrome, but at the same time, there’s something about being cloistered in the bergerie and the intensity of their time together that makes it so that Séverine and Bruno can’t fully let go of each other. I knew this was going to rankle some readers, but I wanted to embrace the twisted tradition of the kidnapper-kidnappee romance. Like I said, I’m a huge Pedro Almodóvar fan—I love Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down—and I wanted to pay homage to that. But again, I had to take it more seriously than I had initially anticipated, so there ended up not only being this intense, sexual dynamic between them; like you said, they developed an intellectual connection, an emotional one. They enabled each other to be the people they wanted to be. It seemed natural that these characters were always going to have something between them.
Speaking of sensual and emotional connections, I loved the role that dancing played in Mass Mothering and how you describe the physicality of dancing. I love that N and A dance salsa or some similar partnered dance; there’s something formal and a little bit courtly about it that is right for their relationship. Was it important to you to have these moments of pure physicality when so much of the book is psychological?
SB: Yeah, it was important to me. I danced salsa in New York City for about a decade, and as someone who really needs help getting out of her own head, I found it tremendously useful, the practice of reacting in real time, within the beat of a measure of music. You don’t have time to analyze choices. You’re given a suggestion through touch, you have a second to interpret it and respond. I also found that my dancing community drew together so many vastly different types of people. People that you don’t necessarily share a language with, people of different socioeconomic classes, from different countries, embodying different styles of movement.
I very much wanted A. to have a space in which she could communicate through touch, and could express this kind of physicality in a moment when she felt like her body was betraying her, and when she had less access to other forms of physical intimacy. I felt that dance was a way for A. to be able to be free in her body in a way that she wasn’t elsewhere, and that it was also a way for her to meet someone who was completely unlike herself. And I wanted the initial intimacy she feels with N. to be derived from this physical thing they share.
DF: Yes. And dancing can code sexually, which goes on to create some confusion between them.
SB: Yes, definitely. Especially with this kind of dance where you’re very often performing some form of gender roles through movement (though, increasingly, there are alternative spaces where everything is not coded in that way). But, yes, that performance can absolutely lead to interpersonal confusion.
DF: This leads into my next question. The men in Mass Mothering are not totally well-behaved.
SB: No.
DF: But they’re not totally condemned either, by the narration nor the women they’re interacting with. How did you think about writing those relationships and representing men in general?
SB: I hoped for this to be a book in which people could do morally reprehensible things, and still be engaged with as characters, and not be completely written off. In earlier drafts, N. was more violent with A., and I ended up toning him down a bit, because I hoped for him to occupy that gray space, and for the reader to be able to understand how maybe he could have misinterpreted some of the signals that he was getting. Despite his transgression, my intention was for each of them to feel deep intimacy for each other, even while being very guarded with their secrets. I don’t know to what extent I succeeded with that goal for him, but…
DF: Very much so! I had a lot of sympathy for him. At the same time, I was like, Oh my god, you fucking idiot.
SB: Good! Related to that, thinking about the few male characters that populate my novel, and the few fellow female characters Séverine encounters in yours, there was this moment that surprised me when Séverine is talking to Lydia. It’s perhaps the first time we see her interacting with another woman since her kidnapping. Lydia says to her, “There’s more to revolution than bombs…guns aren’t the only weapon, so is softness and care.” This was an unexpected grace note, momentarily tempering Séverine’s desire to ruthlessly push forward without really taking the time to think.
I wondered, where did Lydia’s voice come from? If she was always there, or if she emerged in response to something in particular?
DF: No, she did not appear until the later drafts. Then, of course, when she did arrive, I was like, she should have been here from the beginning; she needs to be here. As I admitted before, my interest in radical movements was initially an aesthetic one. So, it didn’t even cross my mind to look into other modes of social change in Corsica. But when I went in 2018, I was impressed and moved by these more grassroots movements. At that time, the FLNC was defunct; it’s back now, in a new form, but at that time, there was no clandestine movement, so it was just people who were non-violently trying to protect the sea, be good stewards of the land, advocating for people in tenuous housing situations. Corsicans are really galvanized to really take care of their own; it’s functionally a colony. You feel like no one’s looking out for you, so you have to look out for your own. Seeing that and learning more about these grassroots movements, I decided I needed to represent them in this book as well.
On the narrative level, Lydia became a really important foil to Séverine because the men in her cell are never able to tell her no. She is very comfortable around men and knows how to work them, and it’s other women who are her Achilles heel. So it seemed effective to bring in this older, sophisticated, accomplished woman who had a completely different view on how to address Corsica’s issues. I also felt like this encounter would make Séverine even more determined to push forward with her plan to assassinate the Minister of the Interior. Different people needed to be throwing gasoline on her fire. Lydia ended up being a really functional character, even though she doesn’t occupy a lot of page space.
SB: I would like to take a moment to talk about sexual assault in The Bombshell. As Séverine relives her encounter with Jonnart, she reflects that “despite her revulsion and bewilderment, a part of her was curious…if he could teach her something invaluable about herself and the world even if she found him disgusting.” The revelation of her assault comes later in the novel, and it made me read Séverine’s earlier sport of taking her classmates’ virginity through a different lens. The book seems interested in teasing out victimhood and power dynamics that young women often experience in early encounters with sex. Was this always present in your thinking about the themes of the book, or did it emerge in the writing?
DF: That was definitely baked in, but it took me a few drafts to get to this more complex experience that Séverine had with Jonnart. Talking about how our books ended up responding to current events, I was writing during peak #MeToo, when we were having lots of conversations about age gap relationships, what constitutes assault, who gets to decide what happened to them. I felt like there was a lack of nuance in some of those conversations, so maybe I was being a bit of a troll, but I was trying to troll productively, to show that these are very gray areas and lean into that grayness.
Séverine oscillates between being a victim and a perpetrator; sometimes she’s both at the same time. It’s been interesting to talk to readers who don’t have a lot of patience for Séverine because they often forget she ever was a victim. We make a choice about how we judge her, depending on our own personal experiences. She’s a litmus test.
On the subject of larger cultural conversations, I wanted to ask you about literature’s current role in American society. In Mass Mothering, during A’s meeting with Petritus’s editor where he reveals Rita Zapo as the true author of Field Notes, he says, “Do you think anyone here would have paid attention to a book of testimonial prose from a female poet? Do you think any readers in your language will care about its translation? How many copies will you sell of the posthumous book? 500 at best, 1,000 if you’re very lucky?” It’s a really interesting, meta question.
The market is the thing we all secretly stress about but want to pretend we’re above, because when we talk about sales, we’re arguably talking about “readership.” So in the context of the editor’s pessimistic rant, how much power do you think literature actually has? How much of a tool is it? What are we as authors doing all this for, what’s the purpose of writing these novels?
SB: I’m really of two minds about this question. On the one hand, I feel that the patience required to sit with a text, and to sit with a character’s ambivalence or contradictions, or whatever, teaches tolerance. And I believe that’s something that is very necessary to get through this moment. I also continue to believe that the practice of imagining different realities through the portal of different fictional worlds allows us to imagine alternatives.
At the same time, you know, I taught high school English for five years around the pandemic, while I was working on this book, and just seeing in this particular moment what’s happening with reading comprehension–it’s very alarming. And I’m not trying to suggest that this problem is unique to high school students. That’s happening to all our brains, right? As we all become more prone to pause in everything we do to pick up our phones and scroll. So there is plenty of evidence to suggest writing books is not the correct medium to reach anyone at all.
I wrote this novel wanting very much to create a space for me to think through complex political issues, and while I hoped it would be engaged with by readers, I honestly didn’t think much about whether the book could serve as any kind of tool. I find that the practice of writing a book is above all about articulating problems clearly to myself on the page. I don’t know if that’s the right response, if that’s terribly myopic. But for me, silencing that second part of the equation is what allows me to get the work done at all.
Can I ask a similar question about the transition of watching your novel become a product in the marketplace? How did that feel, to let it go? Was it a transition that you were able to anticipate?
DF: Honestly, no. My publishing team and I had a lot of conversations about where the book fit into the marketplace, how it could straddle commercial and literary markets, and they assured me that was a boon. But that flexibility also made me feel like every choice I made—while editing, prepping the book for publication, talking about it during the publicity cycle—was potentially the wrong choice.
SB: Right.
DF: I was really looking forward to publicity. I love yapping, I love an excuse to get a blowout. And it was fun! But the most disappointing realization I had—because this was my first book—was that the real pleasure of this entire process was in the writing, doing the actual work. Ugh.
The other obvious realization I had is that the idea is to have a career, you know? You don’t just publish one book, and your life completely changes, and you’re living in Disney World forever. You have to go back and start all over again, then do it a third time, then a fourth time, till you die. My husband keeps saying to me, “Sisyphus must learn to love the stone.”
