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The San Francisco Chronicle , the Portland Press Herald, and NPR review Florence in Ecstasy. One of Book Riot’s “Best Books of 2017 (so far).” Catch Jessie on tour.
Jessie Chaffee
author of Florence in Ecstasy
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Author photo by Heather Waraksa.
Author photo by Heather Waraksa.

Jessie Chaffee's debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, will be published by The Unnamed Press in May 2017. She was awarded a 2014-2015 Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy to complete the novel, during which time she was the Writer-in-Residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has been published in The Rumpus, Bluestem, Global City Review, Big Bridge, and The Sigh Press, among others. She lives in New York City, where she is an editor at Words Without Borders, an online magazine of international literature.
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Jessie Chaffee

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Jessie Chaffee is blog editor at Words without Borders and the author of the debut novel Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press, 2017). She received a 2014–2015 Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy to research and complete the novel. Her fiction has been published in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Global City Review, and Bluestem, among others, and she has been granted fellowships by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She earned her BA in the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and her MFA in fiction at The City College of New York.

» Visit Jessie Chaffee's Website

Jessie Chaffee's work

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Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.

QUOTED: "I wanted to include Italian in the novel both to convey the culture, which is so bound up in the language, and to enable to the reader to experience some of the disorientation and alienation Hannah feels as she struggles to understand and to be understood. There are also Italian words and phrases that are difficult to translate into English—sometimes because they are ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes for an interesting dynamic."
"So, for example, Luca refers to Hannah as 'una donna particolare,' which can mean 'a unique woman,' but also 'a strange woman.' Hannah isn’t sure how he means it, and neither are we. I am semi-fluent in Italian, but it isn’t my native language, and so I had Italian friends read the book for linguistic—and also cultural—accuracy."

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WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT: JESSIE CHAFFEE DISCUSSES FLORENCE IN ECSTASY
BY EMMA WINSOR WOOD
May 16th, 2017

Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, is out today from Unnamed Press. The book’s protagonist, Hannah, arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But she is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food―as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God.

Hannah joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present: soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past―the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles.

You can read an exclusive excerpt from Florence in Ecstasy here, and below, we talk with Jessie Chaffee about the process of writing the book over the course of a decade, understanding the world through writing, the role of mythology in the novel, and more.

***

The Rumpus: To start off, I’d love to hear about the process of writing this book. How long have you been working on it? How did you come to know and decide to write about Florence?

Jessie Chaffee: It will be almost a decade from when I began the novel to its publication. My relationship with Florence goes back further, though—I studied there in college, kept returning, and then received a Fulbright grant to live there for a year to complete the book. The book has taken twists and turns, but the core was always the same, and the setting was always Florence. I love Florence not only because it is a city filled with beauty and vitality and food—an appropriate and also complicating backdrop for my protagonist Hannah, who is struggling with an eating disorder—but it’s also a place where the past intermingles with the present in a way that is visceral, tangible, and completely unavoidable. Hannah encounters history everywhere she goes, including the history of the Catholic women mystical saints, whose stories help her begin to understand her own past.

Rumpus: The dialogue shifts between English and Italian, sometimes translated, mostly not. It gives the text such a beautiful and soft feeling. Do you speak Italian? How well? Can you talk about what it was like to use a non-native language in this way?

Chaffee: I wanted to include Italian in the novel both to convey the culture, which is so bound up in the language, and to enable to the reader to experience some of the disorientation and alienation Hannah feels as she struggles to understand and to be understood. There are also Italian words and phrases that are difficult to translate into English—sometimes because they are ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes for an interesting dynamic. So, for example, Luca refers to Hannah as “una donna particolare,” which can mean “a unique woman,” but also “a strange woman.” Hannah isn’t sure how he means it, and neither are we. I am semi-fluent in Italian, but it isn’t my native language, and so I had Italian friends read the book for linguistic—and also cultural—accuracy.

Rumpus: Art is central to the narrator’s experience not only of Florence, but of the world—she worked at a museum in Boston prior to moving to Italy. How would you describe the role of art in the text? What does it give Hannah?

Chaffee: In many ways, Hannah understands the world through art. Throughout the novel, she looks to art to make sense of her own emotional state. She finds in a painting in a museum in Boston the embodiment of her depression; she sees herself mirrored in frescoes of St. Catherine, who is depicted as both a stoic healing a possessed woman, and as a woman in ecstasy, seemingly possessed herself. Art is everywhere in Italy, and much of that art is about beauty and the body, both of which Hannah is struggling with. As she takes in the endless representations of women in churches and museums, it allowed me as a writer to explore her feelings about the bodies she is encountering and, by extension, her feelings about her own body. The art in the book is also a way of talking about the problems and complications of how women’s bodies are represented, understood (or misunderstood), and controlled.

Rumpus: What is your favorite work of art in Florence, and why?

Chaffee: My favorite piece of art in Florence is the sculpture that is on the cover, Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Woman. A copy of it in is in the loggia in one of Florence’s main squares, Piazza della Signoria, so it’s impossible to miss. It’s depicts three figures—an old man being crushed under the foot of a young man who has, in his grip, a young woman, who is reaching up and trying to break free of him. The sculpture has an incredible sense of motion, the bodies circling and twisting until you arrive at its highest point, the young woman’s finger pointing upward. Hannah is drawn to the sculpture because of the woman’s gesture, which suggests that there is something beyond her entrapment. I’ve always loved the sculpture because it embodies, for me, the act of writing—of reaching for something that is just out of your grasp, of trying to capture the ineffable in words.

Rumpus: This idea of trying to capture the ineffable is a motif throughout the book; in fact, the excerpt you shared with us ends with the sentence, “There must be words for that moment.” What does it mean, as a writer, to be at a loss for words (or, at least, for one’s protagonist to be at a loss)?

Chaffee: I’ve always understood the world through writing, but arriving at that understanding is a long and indirect process of grasping for the right language, of circling around and back around. As Hannah experiences, trauma complicates this because it strips us of language; it makes the world incomprehensible. Hannah is desperate to understand what she’s been through, to put it into words. In moments like the end of this excerpt, she’s confident the words exist, but she doesn’t have them yet. It isn’t only trauma that leaves Hannah at a loss for words—the beauty, the history, the sense of connectedness that she finds in Florence also leaves her speechless, but in a way that is fulfilling, inspiring, and healing.

Rumpus: Your protagonist Hannah is struggling with anorexia, a disorder that is often romanticized, painted as the peak of asceticism and purity—even historically linked, as you discuss in the novel, to female saints. With this in mind, how did you approach writing about anorexia? Did you ever worry about romanticizing anorexia or thinness yourself?

Chaffee: The majority of the book occurs in the aftermath of the worst of Hannah’s experience with anorexia, and so the focus is on her attempt to extricate herself. It was very important to me that I not romanticize the eating disorder, but in those moments in which Hannah is recalling her experience, I did want to accurately portray the feeling of being inside the disorder, which, as I hope comes across, is both addictive and horrifying. And while the saints give Hannah a language for understanding her disorder—and she does, in many ways, connect with and even envy their ecstatic experiences—she also recognizes their behaviors as extreme and isolating. And ultimately her healing depends on rejecting part of what the saints represent.

Rumpus: At one point, Hannah says, “I was not a reliable source.” And it is true, her anorexia (and, early in the book, her drinking) makes her mind hazy, weak, confused. Would you say she is—or starts off as—an unreliable narrator?

Chaffee: I do see Hannah as an unreliable narrator in many ways. The anorexia takes a physical and mental toll, and, as with any addiction, when she is in the grips of it, she’s in an altered state—she says at one point that when she begins eating again, it’s like waking up to find someone else made war on her body and her life. She was a different person. So she recognizes that her sense of her past—and, when she’s not eating, her present—is distorted and filled with gaps and absences. But while Hannah might be unreliable when it comes to some of the events and details, her emotional experience—the representation of the disorder—is very real.

Rumpus: In the excerpt, there are a number of references to mythological women—the boat named Persefone and then the college students drawing Persephone, Medusa, a maenad. What is the role of mythology to the text? How is Hannah a Persephone figure?

Chaffee: I taught ancient history and literature for many years, and I’ve always been in interested in how people in the past tried to understand their world and make sense of it. Hannah’s crisis is physical but it is also existential, and I don’t know anyone who better captures the experience of looking into the void, of trying to make meaning from chaos, than the Greeks. Hannah is a Persephone figure in that she’s in Florence because she’s trying to recreate/rebuild herself after almost losing herself completely to the disorder. Part of saving herself involves descending into a kind of underworld—that underworld is the parts of her past that she doesn’t want to face, and it is also the rowing club, a kind of underworld in Florence that offers her the possibility of connection and survival and renewal.

Rumpus: At the start of the narrative, Hannah joins a rowing club. The excerpt depicts her first outing on the water in a scull. Why rowing? What is its significance to the story and to Hannah’s sense of self?

Chaffee: As Hannah feels when she’s first pushed out onto the Arno in the scull, rowing makes you profoundly vulnerable, and you can feel that vulnerability with every pull of water, with every breath. The only way to hold a straight course—and not tip over—is to be centered in your body and your mind. It’s a challenge for anyone, but especially for a woman who has been at war with and disconnected from her body. Rowing also requires balance, which is something that Hannah is searching for after living in physical and emotional extremes. And when on the water, there’s no way for Hannah to outrun herself—the river is where she continually comes face to face with herself and grapples with who she is, who she wants to be, who she’ll never be. The social life of the rowing club is also an important part of that exploration—the club is located directly under the Uffizi Gallery, one of the city’s tourist centers, but it is a different world, one dominated by Florentines. It is through the club that Hannah begins to connect with people in the city, including Luca, one of the rowers with whom she becomes involved. The vulnerability of being with another person physically and emotionally is important to Hannah’s survival. So both sculling and the rowing club itself are an opportunity for Hannah to find her way back to her body and herself.

***

Author photograph © Heather Waraksa.

Emma Winsor Wood is Editor of Stone Soup, the magazine for kids by kids. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and tweets @emmawinsorwood. More from this author →

Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

RELATED POSTS
Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy
Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce
The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao
Click Here!
OTHER COOL STUFF

Next Letter in the Mail: Alex Mar
Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling
The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg
TORCH: Over the Borderline
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Rachel McKibbens
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WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT: JESSIE CHAFFEE DISCUSSES FLORENCE IN ECSTASY
BY EMMA WINSOR WOOD
May 16th, 2017

Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, is out today from Unnamed Press. The book’s protagonist, Hannah, arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But she is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food―as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God.

Hannah joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present: soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past―the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles.

You can read an exclusive excerpt from Florence in Ecstasy here, and below, we talk with Jessie Chaffee about the process of writing the book over the course of a decade, understanding the world through writing, the role of mythology in the novel, and more.

***

The Rumpus: To start off, I’d love to hear about the process of writing this book. How long have you been working on it? How did you come to know and decide to write about Florence?

Jessie Chaffee: It will be almost a decade from when I began the novel to its publication. My relationship with Florence goes back further, though—I studied there in college, kept returning, and then received a Fulbright grant to live there for a year to complete the book. The book has taken twists and turns, but the core was always the same, and the setting was always Florence. I love Florence not only because it is a city filled with beauty and vitality and food—an appropriate and also complicating backdrop for my protagonist Hannah, who is struggling with an eating disorder—but it’s also a place where the past intermingles with the present in a way that is visceral, tangible, and completely unavoidable. Hannah encounters history everywhere she goes, including the history of the Catholic women mystical saints, whose stories help her begin to understand her own past.

Rumpus: The dialogue shifts between English and Italian, sometimes translated, mostly not. It gives the text such a beautiful and soft feeling. Do you speak Italian? How well? Can you talk about what it was like to use a non-native language in this way?

Chaffee: I wanted to include Italian in the novel both to convey the culture, which is so bound up in the language, and to enable to the reader to experience some of the disorientation and alienation Hannah feels as she struggles to understand and to be understood. There are also Italian words and phrases that are difficult to translate into English—sometimes because they are ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes for an interesting dynamic. So, for example, Luca refers to Hannah as “una donna particolare,” which can mean “a unique woman,” but also “a strange woman.” Hannah isn’t sure how he means it, and neither are we. I am semi-fluent in Italian, but it isn’t my native language, and so I had Italian friends read the book for linguistic—and also cultural—accuracy.

Rumpus: Art is central to the narrator’s experience not only of Florence, but of the world—she worked at a museum in Boston prior to moving to Italy. How would you describe the role of art in the text? What does it give Hannah?

Chaffee: In many ways, Hannah understands the world through art. Throughout the novel, she looks to art to make sense of her own emotional state. She finds in a painting in a museum in Boston the embodiment of her depression; she sees herself mirrored in frescoes of St. Catherine, who is depicted as both a stoic healing a possessed woman, and as a woman in ecstasy, seemingly possessed herself. Art is everywhere in Italy, and much of that art is about beauty and the body, both of which Hannah is struggling with. As she takes in the endless representations of women in churches and museums, it allowed me as a writer to explore her feelings about the bodies she is encountering and, by extension, her feelings about her own body. The art in the book is also a way of talking about the problems and complications of how women’s bodies are represented, understood (or misunderstood), and controlled.

Rumpus: What is your favorite work of art in Florence, and why?

Chaffee: My favorite piece of art in Florence is the sculpture that is on the cover, Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Woman. A copy of it in is in the loggia in one of Florence’s main squares, Piazza della Signoria, so it’s impossible to miss. It’s depicts three figures—an old man being crushed under the foot of a young man who has, in his grip, a young woman, who is reaching up and trying to break free of him. The sculpture has an incredible sense of motion, the bodies circling and twisting until you arrive at its highest point, the young woman’s finger pointing upward. Hannah is drawn to the sculpture because of the woman’s gesture, which suggests that there is something beyond her entrapment. I’ve always loved the sculpture because it embodies, for me, the act of writing—of reaching for something that is just out of your grasp, of trying to capture the ineffable in words.

Rumpus: This idea of trying to capture the ineffable is a motif throughout the book; in fact, the excerpt you shared with us ends with the sentence, “There must be words for that moment.” What does it mean, as a writer, to be at a loss for words (or, at least, for one’s protagonist to be at a loss)?

Chaffee: I’ve always understood the world through writing, but arriving at that understanding is a long and indirect process of grasping for the right language, of circling around and back around. As Hannah experiences, trauma complicates this because it strips us of language; it makes the world incomprehensible. Hannah is desperate to understand what she’s been through, to put it into words. In moments like the end of this excerpt, she’s confident the words exist, but she doesn’t have them yet. It isn’t only trauma that leaves Hannah at a loss for words—the beauty, the history, the sense of connectedness that she finds in Florence also leaves her speechless, but in a way that is fulfilling, inspiring, and healing.

Rumpus: Your protagonist Hannah is struggling with anorexia, a disorder that is often romanticized, painted as the peak of asceticism and purity—even historically linked, as you discuss in the novel, to female saints. With this in mind, how did you approach writing about anorexia? Did you ever worry about romanticizing anorexia or thinness yourself?

Chaffee: The majority of the book occurs in the aftermath of the worst of Hannah’s experience with anorexia, and so the focus is on her attempt to extricate herself. It was very important to me that I not romanticize the eating disorder, but in those moments in which Hannah is recalling her experience, I did want to accurately portray the feeling of being inside the disorder, which, as I hope comes across, is both addictive and horrifying. And while the saints give Hannah a language for understanding her disorder—and she does, in many ways, connect with and even envy their ecstatic experiences—she also recognizes their behaviors as extreme and isolating. And ultimately her healing depends on rejecting part of what the saints represent.

Rumpus: At one point, Hannah says, “I was not a reliable source.” And it is true, her anorexia (and, early in the book, her drinking) makes her mind hazy, weak, confused. Would you say she is—or starts off as—an unreliable narrator?

Chaffee: I do see Hannah as an unreliable narrator in many ways. The anorexia takes a physical and mental toll, and, as with any addiction, when she is in the grips of it, she’s in an altered state—she says at one point that when she begins eating again, it’s like waking up to find someone else made war on her body and her life. She was a different person. So she recognizes that her sense of her past—and, when she’s not eating, her present—is distorted and filled with gaps and absences. But while Hannah might be unreliable when it comes to some of the events and details, her emotional experience—the representation of the disorder—is very real.

Rumpus: In the excerpt, there are a number of references to mythological women—the boat named Persefone and then the college students drawing Persephone, Medusa, a maenad. What is the role of mythology to the text? How is Hannah a Persephone figure?

Chaffee: I taught ancient history and literature for many years, and I’ve always been in interested in how people in the past tried to understand their world and make sense of it. Hannah’s crisis is physical but it is also existential, and I don’t know anyone who better captures the experience of looking into the void, of trying to make meaning from chaos, than the Greeks. Hannah is a Persephone figure in that she’s in Florence because she’s trying to recreate/rebuild herself after almost losing herself completely to the disorder. Part of saving herself involves descending into a kind of underworld—that underworld is the parts of her past that she doesn’t want to face, and it is also the rowing club, a kind of underworld in Florence that offers her the possibility of connection and survival and renewal.

Rumpus: At the start of the narrative, Hannah joins a rowing club. The excerpt depicts her first outing on the water in a scull. Why rowing? What is its significance to the story and to Hannah’s sense of self?

Chaffee: As Hannah feels when she’s first pushed out onto the Arno in the scull, rowing makes you profoundly vulnerable, and you can feel that vulnerability with every pull of water, with every breath. The only way to hold a straight course—and not tip over—is to be centered in your body and your mind. It’s a challenge for anyone, but especially for a woman who has been at war with and disconnected from her body. Rowing also requires balance, which is something that Hannah is searching for after living in physical and emotional extremes. And when on the water, there’s no way for Hannah to outrun herself—the river is where she continually comes face to face with herself and grapples with who she is, who she wants to be, who she’ll never be. The social life of the rowing club is also an important part of that exploration—the club is located directly under the Uffizi Gallery, one of the city’s tourist centers, but it is a different world, one dominated by Florentines. It is through the club that Hannah begins to connect with people in the city, including Luca, one of the rowers with whom she becomes involved. The vulnerability of being with another person physically and emotionally is important to Hannah’s survival. So both sculling and the rowing club itself are an opportunity for Hannah to find her way back to her body and herself.

***

Author photograph © Heather Waraksa.

Emma Winsor Wood is Editor of Stone Soup, the magazine for kids by kids. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and tweets @emmawinsorwood. More from this author →

Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

RELATED POSTS
Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy
Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce
The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao
Click Here!
OTHER COOL STUFF

Next Letter in the Mail: Alex Mar
Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling
The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg
TORCH: Over the Borderline
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Rachel McKibbens
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ShareThis Copy and Paste:) Creativity has no devil's advocate. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT: JESSIE CHAFFEE DISCUSSES FLORENCE IN ECSTASY BY EMMA WINSOR WOOD May 16th, 2017 Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, is out today from Unnamed Press. The book’s protagonist, Hannah, arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But she is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food―as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God. Hannah joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present: soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past―the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles. You can read an exclusive excerpt from Florence in Ecstasy here, and below, we talk with Jessie Chaffee about the process of writing the book over the course of a decade, understanding the world through writing, the role of mythology in the novel, and more. *** The Rumpus: To start off, I’d love to hear about the process of writing this book. How long have you been working on it? How did you come to know and decide to write about Florence? Jessie Chaffee: It will be almost a decade from when I began the novel to its publication. My relationship with Florence goes back further, though—I studied there in college, kept returning, and then received a Fulbright grant to live there for a year to complete the book. The book has taken twists and turns, but the core was always the same, and the setting was always Florence. I love Florence not only because it is a city filled with beauty and vitality and food—an appropriate and also complicating backdrop for my protagonist Hannah, who is struggling with an eating disorder—but it’s also a place where the past intermingles with the present in a way that is visceral, tangible, and completely unavoidable. Hannah encounters history everywhere she goes, including the history of the Catholic women mystical saints, whose stories help her begin to understand her own past. Rumpus: The dialogue shifts between English and Italian, sometimes translated, mostly not. It gives the text such a beautiful and soft feeling. Do you speak Italian? How well? Can you talk about what it was like to use a non-native language in this way? Chaffee: I wanted to include Italian in the novel both to convey the culture, which is so bound up in the language, and to enable to the reader to experience some of the disorientation and alienation Hannah feels as she struggles to understand and to be understood. There are also Italian words and phrases that are difficult to translate into English—sometimes because they are ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes for an interesting dynamic. So, for example, Luca refers to Hannah as “una donna particolare,” which can mean “a unique woman,” but also “a strange woman.” Hannah isn’t sure how he means it, and neither are we. I am semi-fluent in Italian, but it isn’t my native language, and so I had Italian friends read the book for linguistic—and also cultural—accuracy. Rumpus: Art is central to the narrator’s experience not only of Florence, but of the world—she worked at a museum in Boston prior to moving to Italy. How would you describe the role of art in the text? What does it give Hannah? Chaffee: In many ways, Hannah understands the world through art. Throughout the novel, she looks to art to make sense of her own emotional state. She finds in a painting in a museum in Boston the embodiment of her depression; she sees herself mirrored in frescoes of St. Catherine, who is depicted as both a stoic healing a possessed woman, and as a woman in ecstasy, seemingly possessed herself. Art is everywhere in Italy, and much of that art is about beauty and the body, both of which Hannah is struggling with. As she takes in the endless representations of women in churches and museums, it allowed me as a writer to explore her feelings about the bodies she is encountering and, by extension, her feelings about her own body. The art in the book is also a way of talking about the problems and complications of how women’s bodies are represented, understood (or misunderstood), and controlled. Rumpus: What is your favorite work of art in Florence, and why? Chaffee: My favorite piece of art in Florence is the sculpture that is on the cover, Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Woman. A copy of it in is in the loggia in one of Florence’s main squares, Piazza della Signoria, so it’s impossible to miss. It’s depicts three figures—an old man being crushed under the foot of a young man who has, in his grip, a young woman, who is reaching up and trying to break free of him. The sculpture has an incredible sense of motion, the bodies circling and twisting until you arrive at its highest point, the young woman’s finger pointing upward. Hannah is drawn to the sculpture because of the woman’s gesture, which suggests that there is something beyond her entrapment. I’ve always loved the sculpture because it embodies, for me, the act of writing—of reaching for something that is just out of your grasp, of trying to capture the ineffable in words. Rumpus: This idea of trying to capture the ineffable is a motif throughout the book; in fact, the excerpt you shared with us ends with the sentence, “There must be words for that moment.” What does it mean, as a writer, to be at a loss for words (or, at least, for one’s protagonist to be at a loss)? Chaffee: I’ve always understood the world through writing, but arriving at that understanding is a long and indirect process of grasping for the right language, of circling around and back around. As Hannah experiences, trauma complicates this because it strips us of language; it makes the world incomprehensible. Hannah is desperate to understand what she’s been through, to put it into words. In moments like the end of this excerpt, she’s confident the words exist, but she doesn’t have them yet. It isn’t only trauma that leaves Hannah at a loss for words—the beauty, the history, the sense of connectedness that she finds in Florence also leaves her speechless, but in a way that is fulfilling, inspiring, and healing. Rumpus: Your protagonist Hannah is struggling with anorexia, a disorder that is often romanticized, painted as the peak of asceticism and purity—even historically linked, as you discuss in the novel, to female saints. With this in mind, how did you approach writing about anorexia? Did you ever worry about romanticizing anorexia or thinness yourself? Chaffee: The majority of the book occurs in the aftermath of the worst of Hannah’s experience with anorexia, and so the focus is on her attempt to extricate herself. It was very important to me that I not romanticize the eating disorder, but in those moments in which Hannah is recalling her experience, I did want to accurately portray the feeling of being inside the disorder, which, as I hope comes across, is both addictive and horrifying. And while the saints give Hannah a language for understanding her disorder—and she does, in many ways, connect with and even envy their ecstatic experiences—she also recognizes their behaviors as extreme and isolating. And ultimately her healing depends on rejecting part of what the saints represent. Rumpus: At one point, Hannah says, “I was not a reliable source.” And it is true, her anorexia (and, early in the book, her drinking) makes her mind hazy, weak, confused. Would you say she is—or starts off as—an unreliable narrator? Chaffee: I do see Hannah as an unreliable narrator in many ways. The anorexia takes a physical and mental toll, and, as with any addiction, when she is in the grips of it, she’s in an altered state—she says at one point that when she begins eating again, it’s like waking up to find someone else made war on her body and her life. She was a different person. So she recognizes that her sense of her past—and, when she’s not eating, her present—is distorted and filled with gaps and absences. But while Hannah might be unreliable when it comes to some of the events and details, her emotional experience—the representation of the disorder—is very real. Rumpus: In the excerpt, there are a number of references to mythological women—the boat named Persefone and then the college students drawing Persephone, Medusa, a maenad. What is the role of mythology to the text? How is Hannah a Persephone figure? Chaffee: I taught ancient history and literature for many years, and I’ve always been in interested in how people in the past tried to understand their world and make sense of it. Hannah’s crisis is physical but it is also existential, and I don’t know anyone who better captures the experience of looking into the void, of trying to make meaning from chaos, than the Greeks. Hannah is a Persephone figure in that she’s in Florence because she’s trying to recreate/rebuild herself after almost losing herself completely to the disorder. Part of saving herself involves descending into a kind of underworld—that underworld is the parts of her past that she doesn’t want to face, and it is also the rowing club, a kind of underworld in Florence that offers her the possibility of connection and survival and renewal. Rumpus: At the start of the narrative, Hannah joins a rowing club. The excerpt depicts her first outing on the water in a scull. Why rowing? What is its significance to the story and to Hannah’s sense of self? Chaffee: As Hannah feels when she’s first pushed out onto the Arno in the scull, rowing makes you profoundly vulnerable, and you can feel that vulnerability with every pull of water, with every breath. The only way to hold a straight course—and not tip over—is to be centered in your body and your mind. It’s a challenge for anyone, but especially for a woman who has been at war with and disconnected from her body. Rowing also requires balance, which is something that Hannah is searching for after living in physical and emotional extremes. And when on the water, there’s no way for Hannah to outrun herself—the river is where she continually comes face to face with herself and grapples with who she is, who she wants to be, who she’ll never be. The social life of the rowing club is also an important part of that exploration—the club is located directly under the Uffizi Gallery, one of the city’s tourist centers, but it is a different world, one dominated by Florentines. It is through the club that Hannah begins to connect with people in the city, including Luca, one of the rowers with whom she becomes involved. The vulnerability of being with another person physically and emotionally is important to Hannah’s survival. So both sculling and the rowing club itself are an opportunity for Hannah to find her way back to her body and herself. *** Author photograph © Heather Waraksa. Emma Winsor Wood is Editor of Stone Soup, the magazine for kids by kids. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and tweets @emmawinsorwood. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao OTHER COOL STUFF Next Letter in the Mail: Alex Mar Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg TORCH: Over the Borderline Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Rachel McKibbens You May Like These White Lace Reusable Tablecloth Rectangle … $16.50 (218) Lace Tablecloth, Round Table Cover, 60 in. d… $21.93 (2) AWHOME Bone China Teacup and Saucer Se… $16.99 (24) Ensnovo Womens One Piece Unitard Full … $24.99 - $29.99 (77) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise Creativity has no devil's advocate. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT: JESSIE CHAFFEE DISCUSSES FLORENCE IN ECSTASY BY EMMA WINSOR WOOD May 16th, 2017 Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, is out today from Unnamed Press. The book’s protagonist, Hannah, arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But she is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food―as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God. Hannah joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present: soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past―the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles. You can read an exclusive excerpt from Florence in Ecstasy here, and below, we talk with Jessie Chaffee about the process of writing the book over the course of a decade, understanding the world through writing, the role of mythology in the novel, and more. *** The Rumpus: To start off, I’d love to hear about the process of writing this book. How long have you been working on it? How did you come to know and decide to write about Florence? Jessie Chaffee: It will be almost a decade from when I began the novel to its publication. My relationship with Florence goes back further, though—I studied there in college, kept returning, and then received a Fulbright grant to live there for a year to complete the book. The book has taken twists and turns, but the core was always the same, and the setting was always Florence. I love Florence not only because it is a city filled with beauty and vitality and food—an appropriate and also complicating backdrop for my protagonist Hannah, who is struggling with an eating disorder—but it’s also a place where the past intermingles with the present in a way that is visceral, tangible, and completely unavoidable. Hannah encounters history everywhere she goes, including the history of the Catholic women mystical saints, whose stories help her begin to understand her own past. Rumpus: The dialogue shifts between English and Italian, sometimes translated, mostly not. It gives the text such a beautiful and soft feeling. Do you speak Italian? How well? Can you talk about what it was like to use a non-native language in this way? Chaffee: I wanted to include Italian in the novel both to convey the culture, which is so bound up in the language, and to enable to the reader to experience some of the disorientation and alienation Hannah feels as she struggles to understand and to be understood. There are also Italian words and phrases that are difficult to translate into English—sometimes because they are ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes for an interesting dynamic. So, for example, Luca refers to Hannah as “una donna particolare,” which can mean “a unique woman,” but also “a strange woman.” Hannah isn’t sure how he means it, and neither are we. I am semi-fluent in Italian, but it isn’t my native language, and so I had Italian friends read the book for linguistic—and also cultural—accuracy. Rumpus: Art is central to the narrator’s experience not only of Florence, but of the world—she worked at a museum in Boston prior to moving to Italy. How would you describe the role of art in the text? What does it give Hannah? Chaffee: In many ways, Hannah understands the world through art. Throughout the novel, she looks to art to make sense of her own emotional state. She finds in a painting in a museum in Boston the embodiment of her depression; she sees herself mirrored in frescoes of St. Catherine, who is depicted as both a stoic healing a possessed woman, and as a woman in ecstasy, seemingly possessed herself. Art is everywhere in Italy, and much of that art is about beauty and the body, both of which Hannah is struggling with. As she takes in the endless representations of women in churches and museums, it allowed me as a writer to explore her feelings about the bodies she is encountering and, by extension, her feelings about her own body. The art in the book is also a way of talking about the problems and complications of how women’s bodies are represented, understood (or misunderstood), and controlled. Rumpus: What is your favorite work of art in Florence, and why? Chaffee: My favorite piece of art in Florence is the sculpture that is on the cover, Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Woman. A copy of it in is in the loggia in one of Florence’s main squares, Piazza della Signoria, so it’s impossible to miss. It’s depicts three figures—an old man being crushed under the foot of a young man who has, in his grip, a young woman, who is reaching up and trying to break free of him. The sculpture has an incredible sense of motion, the bodies circling and twisting until you arrive at its highest point, the young woman’s finger pointing upward. Hannah is drawn to the sculpture because of the woman’s gesture, which suggests that there is something beyond her entrapment. I’ve always loved the sculpture because it embodies, for me, the act of writing—of reaching for something that is just out of your grasp, of trying to capture the ineffable in words. Rumpus: This idea of trying to capture the ineffable is a motif throughout the book; in fact, the excerpt you shared with us ends with the sentence, “There must be words for that moment.” What does it mean, as a writer, to be at a loss for words (or, at least, for one’s protagonist to be at a loss)? Chaffee: I’ve always understood the world through writing, but arriving at that understanding is a long and indirect process of grasping for the right language, of circling around and back around. As Hannah experiences, trauma complicates this because it strips us of language; it makes the world incomprehensible. Hannah is desperate to understand what she’s been through, to put it into words. In moments like the end of this excerpt, she’s confident the words exist, but she doesn’t have them yet. It isn’t only trauma that leaves Hannah at a loss for words—the beauty, the history, the sense of connectedness that she finds in Florence also leaves her speechless, but in a way that is fulfilling, inspiring, and healing. Rumpus: Your protagonist Hannah is struggling with anorexia, a disorder that is often romanticized, painted as the peak of asceticism and purity—even historically linked, as you discuss in the novel, to female saints. With this in mind, how did you approach writing about anorexia? Did you ever worry about romanticizing anorexia or thinness yourself? Chaffee: The majority of the book occurs in the aftermath of the worst of Hannah’s experience with anorexia, and so the focus is on her attempt to extricate herself. It was very important to me that I not romanticize the eating disorder, but in those moments in which Hannah is recalling her experience, I did want to accurately portray the feeling of being inside the disorder, which, as I hope comes across, is both addictive and horrifying. And while the saints give Hannah a language for understanding her disorder—and she does, in many ways, connect with and even envy their ecstatic experiences—she also recognizes their behaviors as extreme and isolating. And ultimately her healing depends on rejecting part of what the saints represent. Rumpus: At one point, Hannah says, “I was not a reliable source.” And it is true, her anorexia (and, early in the book, her drinking) makes her mind hazy, weak, confused. Would you say she is—or starts off as—an unreliable narrator? Chaffee: I do see Hannah as an unreliable narrator in many ways. The anorexia takes a physical and mental toll, and, as with any addiction, when she is in the grips of it, she’s in an altered state—she says at one point that when she begins eating again, it’s like waking up to find someone else made war on her body and her life. She was a different person. So she recognizes that her sense of her past—and, when she’s not eating, her present—is distorted and filled with gaps and absences. But while Hannah might be unreliable when it comes to some of the events and details, her emotional experience—the representation of the disorder—is very real. Rumpus: In the excerpt, there are a number of references to mythological women—the boat named Persefone and then the college students drawing Persephone, Medusa, a maenad. What is the role of mythology to the text? How is Hannah a Persephone figure? Chaffee: I taught ancient history and literature for many years, and I’ve always been in interested in how people in the past tried to understand their world and make sense of it. Hannah’s crisis is physical but it is also existential, and I don’t know anyone who better captures the experience of looking into the void, of trying to make meaning from chaos, than the Greeks. Hannah is a Persephone figure in that she’s in Florence because she’s trying to recreate/rebuild herself after almost losing herself completely to the disorder. Part of saving herself involves descending into a kind of underworld—that underworld is the parts of her past that she doesn’t want to face, and it is also the rowing club, a kind of underworld in Florence that offers her the possibility of connection and survival and renewal. Rumpus: At the start of the narrative, Hannah joins a rowing club. The excerpt depicts her first outing on the water in a scull. Why rowing? What is its significance to the story and to Hannah’s sense of self? Chaffee: As Hannah feels when she’s first pushed out onto the Arno in the scull, rowing makes you profoundly vulnerable, and you can feel that vulnerability with every pull of water, with every breath. The only way to hold a straight course—and not tip over—is to be centered in your body and your mind. It’s a challenge for anyone, but especially for a woman who has been at war with and disconnected from her body. Rowing also requires balance, which is something that Hannah is searching for after living in physical and emotional extremes. And when on the water, there’s no way for Hannah to outrun herself—the river is where she continually comes face to face with herself and grapples with who she is, who she wants to be, who she’ll never be. The social life of the rowing club is also an important part of that exploration—the club is located directly under the Uffizi Gallery, one of the city’s tourist centers, but it is a different world, one dominated by Florentines. It is through the club that Hannah begins to connect with people in the city, including Luca, one of the rowers with whom she becomes involved. The vulnerability of being with another person physically and emotionally is important to Hannah’s survival. So both sculling and the rowing club itself are an opportunity for Hannah to find her way back to her body and herself. *** Author photograph © Heather Waraksa. Emma Winsor Wood is Editor of Stone Soup, the magazine for kids by kids. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and tweets @emmawinsorwood. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao OTHER COOL STUFF Next Letter in the Mail: Alex Mar Playing with Genre: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling The Rumpus Mini Interview #106: Louise Marburg TORCH: Over the Borderline Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Rachel McKibbens You May Like These White Lace Reusable Tablecloth Rectangle … $16.50 (218) Lace Tablecloth, Round Table Cover, 60 in. d… $21.93 (2) AWHOME Bone China Teacup and Saucer Se… $16.99 (24) Ensnovo Womens One Piece Unitard Full … $24.99 - $29.99 (77) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise ShareThis Copy and Paste:)

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Italy, Two Ways: Jessie Chaffee and Minna Zallman Proctor
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Literature : Interview September 18, 2017
Italy, Two Ways: Jessie Chaffee and Minna Zallman Proctor
"There's often a gap between what we're trying to say and what we are able to say. Sometimes I'm successful and sometimes I fail. Sometimes it's painful and sometimes I get into that space where it feels right. That's the high."

Jessie Chaffee (l) photo by Heather Waraksa, Minna Zallman Proctor (r) photo by Sandra Dawn.

We can't always be in Italy, so we love the books that can transport us there. Jessie Chaffee's debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press), and Minna Zallman Proctor's collection of essays, Landslide (Catapult), both feature American characters who go to Italy to get away only to find themselves even more tethered to home. Hannah, the protagonist in Florence in Ecstasy, embeds herself in the local community but has to confront the internal ruthlessness of an eating disorder. With poetic and incisive prose, Chaffee gives us access to an emotional world seldom explored with such grace. In Landslide, we follow Proctor on her trips to Italy and back, as she sifts through her complicated relationship with her mother, who passed away fifteen years after a cancer diagnosis. The essays, though they form a kind of elegy, are warm, humorous, and probing of life's absurdities and joys.

Neither writer is a stranger to the places she writes about. Chaffee received a 2014-2015 Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy to complete her novel, and was also a Writer-in-Residence at Florence University of the Arts. Proctor is the author of Do You Hear What I Hear? An Unreligious Writer Investigates Religious Calling and has translated eight books from Italian, including Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives (New Directions). Chaffee and Proctor met for the first time this summer, to conduct this interview. At Bosie Tea Parlor in New York's Greenwich Village, they spoke for hours about many things including the pleasures of crewing under the Uffizi Gallery, the pathology of addiction, and the forces that propel writers to chisel out the contours of a story.

—Raluca Albu

Minna Zallman Proctor You were working on Florence in Ecstasy over many years, and then spent time in Florence on a Fulbright completing it. How much did the book change over the course of the writing?

Jessie Chaffee The core of my novel has always been the same—an American woman, Hannah, who has lost herself to an eating disorder and is trying to rebuild in Florence. She becomes obsessed with the Catholic mystical saints, who were famous for their ecstatic visions and for starving themselves for God. Initially, I didn't intent for the saints to be a part of the book, but once they appeared—

MZP They took over.

JC They took over! There were so many of these women in medieval and Renaissance Italy, some of whom you don't hear much about, like Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, who was local to Florence and becomes central in the novel. So that element of the book shifted quite a bit as I learned more about the saints. Hannah's voice changed as well.

MZP That's interesting. In the final drafts?

JC In the final drafts. Hannah is, in some ways, an unreliable narrator—she shares what she believes to be the truth, but she doesn't share everything. I think I was sometimes withholding too much—and maybe this has to do with what we expect from a woman protagonist in a book written by a woman. I didn't set out to create a likeable character—I wanted Hannah to be real and complex—but I still shied away from having her say things that were overly negative. I remember my editor saying, it's okay for Hannah to be judgmental. He pushed me to include more of her perspective, including her judgments, and to make her less passive.

MZP It seems like that's the critical note to hit with an unreliable narrator. Because if she's not saying enough, then her unreliability gets entrenched—the question becomes: Is she just withholding, or is it something much more interesting, that we have to sort through? Which is a much more engaged perspective for the reader—we're trying to figure her out as she's trying to figure herself out. And then that becomes the plot of the story.

I wanted to ask about the crewing in Florence in Ecstasy, because Hannah rows in the novel. Did you actually do it?

JC Yes. When I studied abroad in Florence during college, I joined the rowing club there and learned to scull.

MZP I've always thought that rowing was the one thing you could never do if you weren't Florentine. Florence is a very insular city to live in. There's a kind of real old guard provincialism, and rowing seemed part of that old school—as a foreign woman, there was no way that you could do it. But you just walked in and said, "I want to do this"?

JC I did. I was nineteen, I had a kind of boldness, or maybe just obliviousness. I didn't know Florence, I didn't know how tight the circles were. But I did know that I didn't want to spend my time only with Americans. So I learned to scull and I got to know that community. Years later as I was working on this novel, I was trying to find ways to provide a different perspective on the city, and to get Hannah plugged into the social life there. And the rowing club, as an old guard Florentine community, seemed the right place to do that. And though I wasn't dealing with an eating disorder when I learned to row, having later had some experience with anorexia—

MZP It all made sense.

JC It made sense—you have to be so in your body and so present to be able to row successfully. It seemed like the right kind of activity for Hannah.

MZP What a different book it would've been without the rowing, if it had just had the city and the saints and the men. The rowing anchors the exotic backdrop of Florence in that you're deep in the city and it's not a Florence that people are expecting to see.

JC I love that the club is literally under the Uffizi Gallery, this very touristy place, and yet is a completely different world. It did become the anchoring thing—for Hannah, too. Because the saints are important in that they help her think about the meaning she found in the eating disorder, the experience of ecstasy through denial, the desire for a sense of self and identity, even if it's in a self-destructive way. But Hannah ultimately has to reject some of the saints' extremity, whereas the rowing remains and it provides balance. For somebody living in extremes, balance—and literally having to be balanced in a scull—is the goal.

MZP I recently reviewed Daphne Merkin's This Close to Happiness. There's a scene where she's in a clinic and sitting at the lunch table with the depressives. The anorexics are at the next table over—because they have to eat together. While the depressives just kind of bunch together in all their misery. Merkin looks over at the anorexics with so much envy. This is one of the canny insights I love about her memoir—she's jealous of the anorexics because depression is like a sin of indulgence—too much sadness—while anorexia is a sin of restraint, abstinence, a cultural virtue taken to the extreme. Abstinence is also the disease of the saints—such a constant theme in your book. I love the commentary of Merkin sitting in a mental health clinic, wishing she could have a more virtuous disease.

JC One of the tricky things about eating disorders is that there is—as with the saints—a kind of support for them, a cult of diet and exercise and beauty. Somebody begins losing weight and people respond positively—the restraint or denial is seen as virtuous. But I wanted to write about an eating disorder as a loss of self, which I think is an aspect of the experience of depression as well. There are differences, but there are also parallels, particularly in the net result, which is isolation.

MZP Well, you know the literature better than I do, but I have this impression—from when I was a teenager and anorexia was exploding as a cultural touchstone—that it was important to distinguish between an eating disorder and dieting, that it wasn't about losing weight but about control, and pathology to stay little, childlike. That removal from the culture of beauty, may have been even an overcorrection—to absolve people of the positive reinforcement of pathological abstinence. But there's no positive reinforcement for misery.

JC Whatever one is struggling with, there's the reality of being within it. So whether it begins as something that is culturally supported—like beauty or self-control—what it becomes is something else. The disorder becomes the meaning. In that way, it's like many things.

MZP No other character in your book can enter into Hannah's meaning. She operates boldly in the world but everything going on in her head has nothing to do with the stuff around her. That's drawn really nicely.

JC Part of Hannah's struggle is that she's experienced something she feels incapable of articulating—it has its own language. Her isolation grows out of that divide in experience.

MZP For you, as an artist, is there some kind of addiction in creativity?

JC It's certainly addictive. There is this desire and impulse to do it. And it involves the same impossibility and frustration that Hannah faces, because creating is all about taking the ineffable and giving it shape, giving it form, communicating it, but there's often a gap between what we're trying to say and what we are able to say. Sometimes I'm successful and sometimes I fail. Sometimes it's painful and sometimes I get into that space where it feels right. That's the high. That's part of what keeps me coming back to it. But I also come back to it because I have to, because I write to understand—it's how I make meaning.

MZP How exactly would you figure it all out otherwise? (raucous laughter)

JC In thinking about constructing meaning, what was the impetus for Landslide? What was the meaning you were trying to give shape to?

MZP My first book was for my father, about him and to him—he was my reader in my head as I wrote. This is my mother's book—it's made up of small pieces, like the ones she wrote as a composer, tightly but not overtly linked, and there are themes and variations. And it's kind of a funny book because the world is absurd and she appreciated absurd things, and it's sad because in many ways it's an elegy.

JC I loved this line: "if I could just invent rather than just observe, I would, because fiction writers have so very much more access to truth, to some kind of truth, at least." Why do you feel that about fiction? And then within memoir, how do we arrive at truth?

MZP That's sort of the eternal question. In poetry, for example, there's so much secret code: this giant well of deepest, darkest secrets and vulnerabilities and emotions, totally laid bare but processed through an enigma machine. You're bleeding, your heart's on the table, but there's a pretty teapot over it, so nobody can see it. Yet it's there, and there's the satisfaction of that expression. In fiction, you can write anything you want, and then you just change your mother's name to Helen, make your father a piano teacher, and put a red wig on your brother—voila! Of course much fiction comes from a place of "total" invention—which is revealing too, the way dreams are—but in most senses fiction is truth in a red wig.

With nonfiction, all of that gets far more complicated. You can't encode because nobody wants to decipher nonfiction. That's not the point of the genre. If anything, you're supposed to be doing the deciphering. That's your job. You can't put things in code, and you can't put wigs on people. I think one of the reasons I'm drawn to memoir is that at least I'm dealing with my own reality, which belongs to me. The stories I'm telling—with one exception—are mine to give up. They're also the ones I know best. I'm not building a world. Imagination is the primary tool of fiction—even if you're building off of reality. You, for example, imagined a Florence for your novel—you imagined a Florence that could contain your novel and your character, then you imagined characters that could interact with her and provoke the things that they needed to provoke from her. In nonfiction, the equivalent tool is observation. The skill is seeing the story through observation. You can't make the world do the thing, you have to see the world, figure out Where's the story in there?

JC I loved the section where you're talking about the different aspects of memory—semantic and autobiographical. Maybe that's where things come together. Because even though you describe nonfiction as observation, you discuss the idea of autobiographical memory as depending on imagination.

MZP It is.

JC There is this creative sort of fiction-making aspect to memoir—because it is the extent of our imagination that allows us to create a narrative.

MZP To remember well.

JC To remember well and to make sense of it.

MZP That's key—to make sense of the facts.

JC Or our emotional response to them, in any case.

MZP It's the same if you were interviewing someone or doing research: you meet with the person and talk or take notes, and then you go to write and think, wait a minute, this isn't enough. You go back and ask more questions about the same thing: What was she wearing? I need something physical. Was it sunny out? You ask more questions. So, she had this dog, did she like the dog? Was the dog a formative dog or was it just a dog that she had? And if it was just a dog she had, then why did she have a dog that she didn't care about? Was it like a trophy dog, and what does that mean about her? You go back again and again. When you're writing memoir, you have to research your memories in the same way—you have to go back and revisit them. I think, as a teacher, that a lot of what I find in early drafts is that they are under-observed. Observation is still an imaginative quality because you have to look and say, "Yes, this pylon has significance." If I need to remember this scene in this coffee shop in five years, I'll need to think about the importance of the orange flag waving outside. Does it have any relationship to our conversation? Probably not. Except that this coffee shop is really quite empty, even though we're in the middle of New York City. There's no one in the street, there's no one in the coffee shop—maybe because of the construction signaled by the pylons and orange flag. We have an emptiness around us, you and I. We'll make imaginative leaps to find the meaning in that.

JC Translation comes up a lot in Landslide. When you talk about the Italian writer you translated, there is a great line about understanding her through her words. But then there are also references to things that are untranslatable, and there's this recurring idea of being an echo or a translation of your mother—or not. And so I'm wondering if, in a conscious way, your work in translation affects how you think about your work in nonfiction.

MZP I think about that a lot—the relationship between nonfiction and translation and photography. Those three forms seem quite related—distinct from ballet, painting, novel writing—they are art forms derived from choices. Here's the world—what are you going to put in the frame? Or, Here's the word—how are you going to say it in another language? And, Here's the street—are the pylons important or not? How are you going to frame your observation of the street to represent this? Nonfiction doesn't describe a form; it's just a constraint. Ultimately the big difference between fiction and nonfiction is that nonfiction has to based on facts and truth. If it's not true, it's a novel. That's the bottom line of the genre. Translation also has some kind of factual master, the original. It wrestles with the original and asks you how to perform it in your own language. Nonfiction wrestles with the world around you and asks how are you going to decipher it to make a story?

JC Part of the book is this kind of search for origins and digging through your own history and circling your mother and circling your experiences with her. And part of it seems to be about locating the story's end. I was really interested in the moment when your mother is describing trying to find the end of a piece of music, and then she describes it as the bells, the interrupting bells.

MZP You have interrupting bells in your ending, too!

JC I do! I have bells throughout—the bells in Italy. And you describe a friend as a kind of a bell in your life. And so, I want to talk about bells! What those interrupting bells are, and what that image or symbol or sound, which is so "Italy," means in terms of memoir.

MZP I guess I have three different answers. I think that that story about my mother looking for the ending of her piece and the joy that she got—it was as if she understood what the Italian countryside sounded like all of a sudden. And that she identified the bells as the end of her piece—it's so purely aesthetic, which I'm sure you appreciate. The bells are exciting but they don't have any intrinsic meaning—this is just a sound. It can be an ending, aesthetically, because it interrupts the ongoing noise; it interrupts what's there and changes everything. Interruption is a moment when everything changes and so, of course, it's also the moment of the new beginning. The period of my life that my book covers is mostly about interruption. So to sort of segue into another answer to that: My mom left all these secrets. She was like a poet—all of her emotional life was totally codified into music. Maybe a mathematician could understand the extraordinary language that she was speaking, but she wasn't speaking a language made of words.

JC You also said that she didn't like to use explicit language, right? If it wasn't complicated, if there weren't levels to it, she wasn't going to put it down.

MZP She had a lot of secrets, which I talk about in the book. When she died, we were better able to put together pieces of the puzzle of her. I'm not sure exactly why they weren't put together while she was alive except that I think some of the most exciting stories were, for her, enshrouded in shame. They represented her mistakes of youth. And also shrouded in this stupid painfulness of a lost time. I think that as we get older, sometimes we realize that thinking about the past is painful just because it's gone. She had this incredibly vibrant moment in her twenties. She, like your protagonist, went to Italy; she was running away from a marriage, she was running away from her fiancé, she was running away from her father. When she died, I found all these letters, and all these pictures, and all these diaries, these journals that she kept. Letters to herself, drafts of unsent love letters. Also all these letters from her father and ex-husband, and some of her replies, which were minimal. And I realized then how much she was withholding from her family. There's pain in her non-response, because she's too ashamed to write it. The magnitude of that pain, the painfulness of that period was so clear in her silence, which was my mother's weapon. My mother was just a weapon with her silence. Maybe that's the bells too—they interrupt the silence. I went into this project thinking that the end of the book was putting together the pieces of her puzzle. But there are no pieces. She just lived a life that was painfully like mine in its missteps and just that big emptiness, that silence. It weighs, all these years later.

JC And yet looking at it in a certain way, you do create the meaning. There's that wonderful moment where you challenge the notion of epiphany. You tell the reader, this would be the moment where there would be an epiphany, and there isn't one—in fact, we're still stumbling in the dark and it's about how we're still stumbling in the dark. And I loved the scene when you're looking for the right grave marker for your mother—the kind of literal obelisk in the book—and all the different stones are reflecting the light in different ways, and you're looking for the one that feels like her. But the sense I had reading that scene was that all of those different reflections were the point. You never say, this is the one answer or this is the one story. In circling around your past, your mother, your own self, you create the shape. It's not fixed, but it's there.

MZP Well, that's reality. That's the nonfiction part. Because I can't sort of tie it up. But as a novelist you know that story is trying to build narrative lines. I held that out for myself. Like, this book will work because there will be this narrative line, this search, and then it will be revealed. And it just wasn't. I couldn't find things I thought I'd seen in the boxes of paper. What I thought was the plot, was almost like the red herring.

JC I think that's true in fiction, too. We start out with what we think we're talking about, and then it gets upended in the process of writing.

MZP It turns out we were talking about something else the whole time!

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QUOTED: "I hope that Florence in Ecstasy will resonate with all those who have ever lost themselves, be it to addiction, abuse, or simply the inevitable pitfalls that life presents. Because what is most challenging for my protagonist, Hannah, is not recovering from an eating disorder, but rather figuring out how to rebuild from the wreckage, how to find meaning and move forward. And I think that’s something most people have struggled with at one point or another."

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Self-Care as Rebellion: An Interview with Jessie Chaffee
Paula Bomer interviews Jessie Chaffee

192 0 1

AUGUST 9, 2017

IN JESSIE CHAFFEE’S debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, a young American woman travels from Boston to Florence, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But Hannah is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with anorexia that has left her life and body in ruin. Hannah is determined to recover in Florence, a city rich in beauty, vitality, and food. She joins a local rowing club and is drawn into Florence’s vibrant present, but she is also entranced by the city’s past ― especially by the lives of the women saints. I asked Chaffee about her novel, the saints, eating disorders, and women’s stories over email.
¤
PAULA BOMER: Many have made the point that women who write about their interiority are dismissed as speaking only to a female audience, or navel gazing, while men who do the same are praised for pondering the deep meaning of what it means to be alive. I’m going to skip past that — and I’m thankful for all those who made that point — and just state that your novel, and Hannah’s life, is absolutely an examination of what it means to be alive, period.
JESSIE CHAFFEE: I appreciate that. I hope that Florence in Ecstasy will resonate with all those who have ever lost themselves, be it to addiction, abuse, or simply the inevitable pitfalls that life presents. Because what is most challenging for my protagonist, Hannah, is not recovering from an eating disorder, but rather figuring out how to rebuild from the wreckage, how to find meaning and move forward. And I think that’s something most people have struggled with at one point or another.
Many of my favorite writers focus on the interiority of women who are, in one way or another, outsiders or on the fringes. I was conscious of writing within that tradition and I believe we need more of it — and we need more people validating work that explores women’s interiority, rather than sidelining it as “women’s literature.”
From a technical perspective, you use the first-person present tense, which usually gives the reader the sense of immediacy and being “right there” with the narrator. And yet there is something so subdued and controlled about Hannah’s voice, in particular her interior voice, which is strong and consistent throughout the novel; it feels removed, the opposite of “right there.” It mimics Hannah’s own many removes — her ability to see herself from outside, her removal from Boston to Florence, her depriving herself of food as a way to control her body and life. Was this intentional or did it just happen?
When I was beginning the novel, I experimented with tense and perspective — I literally wrote the first chapter in first and third persons, present and past tenses, before committing to the first-person present tense for all the reasons you mention. I wanted the reader to be “right there” with Hannah, to feel as immediately and viscerally as possible her anxieties, her fears, and her moments of triumph. The present tense is also the precarious tense. A story told in retrospect offers a kind of assurance that the narrator will arrive, often wiser, at the future moment from which they are telling their tale. But Hannah doesn’t know where she’s going, she doesn’t know if she will, in fact, survive — and neither does the reader. The present tense was vital for maintaining that tension and uncertainty.
I love your question about the feeling of remove and control in Hannah’s voice. It wasn’t something I tried to do intentionally, but it grew out of what I knew about Hannah emotionally — that she is, in many ways, removed from herself. When she was in the grips of the eating disorder, she felt like she was a different person. As she says, it is as though “someone else made war on my body.” A large part of the experience of anorexia is isolation — like any addiction, the disorder becomes the center and everything else drops away, leaving Hannah completely alienated from family, friends, colleagues, herself. So I think anything controlled or subdued about Hannah’s voice grows out of that isolation — a refusal, or inability, to let people in. And that sometimes includes the reader.
On the other hand, despite the deeply introspective interior life of Hannah, she is also constantly looking out at her world. It’s funny, I teach freshman composition and I discuss this idea to write as “Look out, Look in.” And your novel seems to be a perfect example of this process. Hannah is constantly beautifully observing this new city, the world around her. Florence very much becomes a character — setting as character has a long history in the genre of the novel. The importance of place enriches narratives. What were some of your reasons for using Florence in such a way? What works influenced you?
Florence is a very “written” city, and I was aware of writing within and against romantic depictions of it. This isn’t a book in which the place is the answer — rather, Florence is a complicating character for Hannah. One of my main influences is Jean Rhys — in particular, her novel Good Morning, Midnight, which chronicles a woman’s descent into alcoholism. Her protagonist is an outsider in Paris, and the city becomes a friend and foe, sometimes embracing and sometimes attacking her. Hannah’s relationship with Florence is similar. It is a city filled with beauty, vitality, and food. Sometimes that vivacity helps Hannah, and sometimes it threatens her. Florence is also a place filled with history, and Hannah finds that history everywhere — especially the history of the women saints, whose stories help Hannah look inward and better understand her own struggles.
Ecstasy has a multilayered meaning in the novel. I want to focus on how it relates to the high of starvation. Basically, Saint Catherine starved herself to death, and Hannah struggles with the high of food deprivation. When Hannah relapses with her food disorder toward the end of the book, she thinks, “But I am not foggy. I am clear. I am attuned, so attuned, my nerves pulled tight, waiting to be struck.”
Absolutely. Hannah becomes obsessed with the saints because their descriptions of being in ecstasy mirror her own experience with anorexia. In their writings, the saints talk about the high that their mystical visions provide, and then the intense pain and longing that they experience when they are no longer in ecstasy. For many of them, achieving that spiritual state involved not only prayer but also extreme behavior, including extreme fasting. Both their stubborn refusal to eat and their confidence in their mystical experiences ring true to Hannah, for whom anorexia was about much more than not eating. It became her meaning, her church. And part of her survival ultimately depends on rejecting some of what the saints represent, and letting go of the seductive high that this disorder provides.
Two other aspects of “ecstasy” I’d love to hear you comment on are sexual, orgasmic ecstasy on the one hand, and spiritual ecstasy on the other. Do you identify with any religious or spiritual existence? Do you believe in God? This book is so rich in Catholicism because of the saints, and because it’s set in Italy.
A friend once told me that she feels the hidden character in the novel is “Eros,” or desire. I’ve always thought about Hannah’s relationship with anorexia as a kind of abusive love affair. As she describes, “I loved the body that had been wrecked by that stranger. I loved the body and the stranger.” She desires the high that the disorder provides, and that desire is what makes it so difficult to extricate herself. The saints’ descriptions of ecstasy are also filled with desire. They are intensely sensual — it’s incredible that in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries the saints were recording what read like orgasmic experiences. It’s spiritual, but it’s also bodily. It’s about God, but it’s also about these women and their desires. What’s paradoxical for both Hannah and the saints is that in achieving ecstasy, they’re also in some sense erasing their bodies and beings.
I don’t subscribe to a specific dogma, and Catholicism is not a part of my own personal history, but I’ve always been drawn to the ritual and quietude that religious spaces provide, and I often seek them out. And I’m interested in how others find meaning, whether it’s the Ancient Greeks looking into the void, calling it chaos, and creating their own reality; St. Catherine envisioning a mystical marriage to Christ; or Hannah giving herself over entirely to the strict behaviors that an eating disorder dictates. Because Hannah is in Italy, it’s inevitable that she encounters Catholicism, which is so present and so local, but what she finds isn’t the Catholic Church — it’s Catherine in Siena, and Margaret in Cortona, and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi in Florence, women who give her a language for understanding herself, a language that for them was rooted in religion but that for Hannah speaks to a broader search for meaning.
Hannah often says, “I don’t feel lonely,” but as the reader, I didn’t really believe her. Loneliness is truly one of the worst things in life, in my experience — alienation from the world around us, too — and Hannah desperately wrestles with these feelings. In that way, she’s somewhat unreliable.
Hannah is lonely at many points in the book, and she sometimes denies the extent of her loneliness. Like any addiction or trauma, an eating disorder has its own language, reserved for those who have lived it, and that isolates Hannah, too, because she feels others won’t be able to understand it, or that she won’t be able to find the words to articulate it. There are also moments in the book in which Hannah feels her solitude acutely, but in a way that is not lonely or alienating — when she’s alone in a scull on the Arno River or when she’s walking in the hills outside Florence, for example, and she experiences a kind of ecstasy of place and self, a feeling of connectedness that can only be experienced alone. In those moments, solitude is a balm for her.
I love Hannah. I love her weaknesses, her vulnerabilities, her strengths, her super “attuned” relationship to her body in regard to food, exercise, sex, but mostly I love that she is trying so hard to take care of herself, and knows that she must. Sadly, in a conversation with her sister, this is seen as “selfish.” She thinks, “I am selfish. And I was selfish before.” This irks me, but it’s a truth I’d like you to comment on — why is taking care of ourselves seen as “selfish” as opposed to necessary?
In a recent review, the writer described Hannah as being selfish in the way that a drowning person is, and I think that’s exactly right. Hannah is trying, quite literally, to survive, and that means stepping out of her life and trying to find another path forward. Her presence isn’t going to be of use to anyone if she doesn’t manage to stay alive. And of course there are all the complications of the expectations placed on women to be nurturers, to be self-effacing, to sacrifice themselves for others, which brings me back to your first question — I think it is far more likely that a woman caring for herself will be labeled as selfish or self-important, while the same charge won’t be leveled at a man in similar circumstances. So in some sense, Hannah’s self-care/selfishness is an act of rebellion. She’s not unlike the saints, who stepped out of the lives they had been expected to lead, as wives and mothers, and found their own paths.
¤
Paula Bomer is the author of the novel Nine Months, the short story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and Other Stories, and the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. She lives in New York.

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QUOTED: "Being in Florence was crucial to the book."
"I spoke to locals in Florence and elsewhere—almost every time I mentioned my research, someone would have a story for me about another saint, often a personal story. Those conversations helped me to better understand the role that these women played and continue to play, and they also confirmed something I had suspected—that I didn’t simply make up the fact that Hannah would encounter the saints. She would. They are present, tangible, and would, indeed, be a presence for her."

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Home » Interviews » Process and Place: An Interview With Jessie Chaffee
Process and Place: An Interview With Jessie Chaffee
Author: Patrice Hutton |
Jun
29
2017
Posted In Interviews

On June 4, I attended Jessie Chaffee’s reading at DC’s Politics & Prose, where she read from her debut novel Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press, May 2017). Afterward, over pizza, we decided to extend our conversation about her process and the role of place in her work into an interview.

Jessie Chaffee was awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy to complete the novel and was the writer-in-residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has been published in the Rumpus, Slice, Electric Literature, Bluestem, and Global City Review, among others. She lives in New York City and is an editor at Words Without Borders.

Patrice Hutton: I’ve heard you say that it took nine years for this novel to come into the world. Could you talk about the different stages of putting this story together and how the novel progressed toward its final form?

Jessie Chaffee: While in the MFA program at City College, I was given the assignment of writing the first chapter of a novel I’d never write, along with a brief description of the book. I’d been reading a lot of work by women who write—in a way that is visceral and psychologically immersive—about women on the fringes struggling with alienation and addiction, and so I decided to write a chapter that was in conversation with that work. I wrote what would become the prologue of Florence in Ecstasy, and then a few paragraphs describing the rest of this never-to-be-written novel—it would focus on a woman’s relationship with her body in the aftermath of the addictive experience of an eating disorder, and it would be set in Florence, a city where I had spent a good deal of time, but that was distant enough for me to imagine the feeling of being a outsider there. After I turned in those pages, I decided that I wanted to write the full novel. The prompt was important—it allowed me to approach writing a book without feeling intimidated, and freed me to pursue content and a style I was passionate about with second-guessing myself.

While writing the first draft (which took about four years), I realized that the Italian Catholic mystical saints, women famous for their ecstatic and sensual visions, were relevant to my protagonist Hannah’s experience with an eating disorder, and that this story of a contemporary woman was actually about the much longer history of women’s relationships with their bodies and searches for meaning. Once it was clear that the saints were going to be crucial to the book, I applied for (and, fortunately, was awarded!) a Fulbright grant to Italy to research these women from the past in order to incorporate their stories into the novel I was writing in the present.

PH: Tell us about how your recent year in Florence shaped the novel. I know you’d studied abroad in Florence but then returned to live there after years of already writing about the city.

JC: Being in Florence was crucial to the book. In part because of the history of the saints—during my year there, I studied their writings and depictions of them in art (much of which isn’t digitized and so had to be viewed in person). I also traveled to small towns throughout Italy where the saints practiced, or are entombed or memorialized, and attended a festival dedicated to them. And, perhaps most importantly, I spoke to locals in Florence and elsewhere—almost every time I mentioned my research, someone would have a story for me about another saint, often a personal story. Those conversations helped me to better understand the role that these women played and continue to play, and they also confirmed something I had suspected—that I didn’t simply make up the fact that Hannah would encounter the saints. She would. They are present, tangible, and would, indeed, be a presence for her.

Language and culture are tightly bound, perhaps especially in Italy, which was for so long separate states rather than a united country. The language reflects that, and living in Florence—living with the language—allowed me to be more deliberate about the choices I made regarding the Italian that is used in the book. The year also enabled me to discover less-touristed parts of the city and to better understand the social nuances. And I made good friends, who later became readers and gave me vital feedback on the novel; Hannah is an outsider, so she doesn’t always get things right, but I wanted to be sure that anything she gets wrong—linguistically or culturally—was intentional on my part.

PH: Did you write most days in Florence? Or was your time more about immersing yourself in research and life there?

JC: I was fortunate to be able to write most days (except when I was traveling to do research). And I made sure to get out every day and to actively participate in the life of the city. I was also working with Florence University of the Arts, giving guest lectures in classes on women and religion, travel writing, art history, and “The Grand Tour”—I loved working with the students, and the lectures ended up giving me new ways of thinking about the novel as I discussed it from those various angles.

PH: New York is another city you know intimately. It’s also a city much written about. In Florence, or New York, or any city so well trafficked by people, language, and story, how do you rise above expectations of place and offer up an alternative (and more personal, more intimate) version of place? I’d love to hear if you were hesitant to include any aspects or parts of Florence, given how depicted the city already is.

JC: Florence is a place that is very written about, often through a romantic lens, and it was important to me to capture a different Florence—one that is beautiful and romantic, a city that rightly inspired “Stendahl Syndrome” (an ecstatic response to art), yes, and there are many moments when Hannah is overwhelmed by beauty and history. But this isn’t a story where the place is the solution, and I wanted the book to reflect the city’s hard edges, the aspects of it that are complicated and less romantic—characteristics that emerge in Hannah’s specific and intimate relationships with people rather than any general statements about the city itself.

One of the most exciting things about writing about (and living in) cities is that they are dynamic and changing, and they change according to the viewer, too, so the perspective that Hannah brings to Florence, as a woman struggling with her relationship with her body, inevitably alters the depiction of the city. For example, when she visits the Uffizi Gallery, which is filled with famous works of art that are frequently seen and written about, what she observes is not simply Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned or Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, but bodies and eyes. She sees the reflections of her own concerns and obsessions. So I didn’t try to avoid the icons, but I did filter them through a different set of eyes. I also chose to focus on some of the more hidden parts of Florence, because, like any city, it has plenty of layers and hidden spaces, such as the rowing club that Hannah joins. The club is located on the Arno River directly below the Uffizi Gallery, but it is a truly Florentine space that is worlds away from the city above.

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QUOTED: "Women like St. Catherine were famous for their ecstatic visions and were also incredibly powerful, and Hannah is drawn to them for those reasons. And their more extreme behaviors—like self-mortification and starving themselves for God—resonate with her own experience of finding meaning, and ecstasy, through denial, and help her to understand why the eating disorder was/is so seductive and difficult to extricate herself from."
"Of course, while the saints were creating lasting identities for themselves, they were also practicing self-erasure and martyrdom. And so part of Hannah’s recovery involves rejecting some of the saints’ more extreme behaviors as she rejects those behaviors in her own life. Nevertheless, these women from the past become a community of sorts for her as well. This is not a book about a woman finding religion, but it is in the lives and writings of the saints that Hannah finds the language to articulate, and thus better understand, her own struggles."

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Home » Arts & Life, Fiction, Interview
Up Against Art: An interview with Jessie Chaffee
By Steve Danziger (August 1, 2017) No Comment

Author photo by Heather Waraksa

Not many people would think to deal with their eating disorder by holing up in Florence, but Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, is not concerned with pat reasoning or easy answers to complex questions. Her protagonist, Hannah, unable to confront the anorexia that has left her jobless, loveless, and in a precarious mental state, leaves Boston for Italy. There, she immerses herself in the joys of the local culture – rowing, soccer, seductive men named Luca – while cultivating an obsession with ascetic female saints and the pleasure and debilitation of self-starvation. Shunning, and often upending, the conventions of the redemptive travelogue, Chaffee instead offers through Hannah a dimensional portrait of a flailing soul trying to find hope in the “cradle of the Renaissance.”
Here she speaks with OLM about community, communicating truth, double standards of self-awareness, and the appeal of the Unflinching Female Writer.

Steve Danziger for Open Letters Monthly: So, you’re a first-time novelist with positive reviews from, among others, Publishers Weekly, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and pre-publication blurbs from writers like Alice McDermott and Claire Messud. Do all of your friends hate you, or just me?

Jessie Chaffee: Ha! I hope not! If it helps, it was quite a long journey to the novel being out in the world—almost ten years.

But it does bring up something that I think is crucial for a first-time novelist, or really, for any writer, at any point in their career: I have been buoyed again and again by the generosity and kindness of other writers, people who have supported me, offered advice, given endorsements. There are plenty of obstacles to building a writing career, and my mentors have always emphasized that it’s essential that we support and sustain each other in the face of those obstacles.

I’m grateful for the kind words from talented writers and reviewers, of course, but more than that, I appreciate that the book is being read deeply, that what I was trying to convey is being understood, and that readers are bringing new insights to it. For me, the point of writing is to connect, to communicate a truth (whether or not it comes from one’s own experience), but there’s a substantial gamble in that—will that truth resonate? Will readers find themselves somewhere in the story you’re telling? And because I was exploring subjects that many people have had direct experience with—eating disorders, addiction, and isolation, for example, and also Italian culture and the highly visited city of Florence—the stakes felt high.

OLM: Both in terms of establishing a dialogue with your readers, and a responsibility to respect your character’s vulnerabilities and pain?

JC: Exactly. While writing, I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that there are many people, myself included, for whom some of Hannah’s psychological and emotional struggles are realities. And so while it was important to present, for example, Hannah’s anorexia and depression in such a way that readers would have a palpable sense of both regardless of their own experiences, I had to be thoughtful and diligent in the way I approached the topics, and I was cautious to not romanticize them.

Some of my most gratifying experiences since publication have been hearing from strangers with whom the psychological, emotional, and geographic landscape of the book feel authentic. Because that’s why I began writing this story—to connect with readers around ideas that I feel are important. I think there’s always a question of whether one’s work will resonate, and to see that happen feels like I’m making a contribution, helping to foster the sense of community that has sustained me throughout my life and career.

OLM: Considering Hannah in that light, it seems that at least part of her distress stems from her inability to find a similar, nurturing community, or sense of belonging.

JC: I think that’s true. Hannah flees her life in Boston in large part because she isn’t able to find—in friends, family, colleagues, therapists—the support and community that will help her to heal. She arrives in Florence with the intent of healing herself, and is initially quite isolated, but she also joins the Florence Rowing Club, a vital community that ends up, in many ways, sustaining her. And then she discovers the Medieval and Renaissance mystical saints, who also play an important role in her understanding of her relationship with anorexia.

I began Florence in Ecstasy while in the MFA program at City College, where I found great readers in my peers and vital writing mentors who became powerful guides in the process, including Linsey Abrams, whose empathy and emotional intuition, on the page and in life, are profound. Linsey instilled in me the importance of “finding your people,” by which she meant finding that supportive community. It made sense that part of Hannah’s journey would involve finding her people, and it was certainly essential to me as a writer—as I think it is for all writers—to have those trusted readers and guides to help me in realizing the novel—people who would tell me when what I’d set out to communicate was coming through, when it felt off, when I needed to go deeper.

OLM: So in many ways, Hannah’s experience is the obverse of yours. It’s interesting to note how you’ve created a very personal novel using a very unorthodox strategy; what gave you pleasure in writing it coincides with the same elements that Hannah is using to find hope and invigoration, but your pleasure stems from a place of support and encouragement, while hers comes from a place of almost desolate isolation.

JC: Though I had the support of readers, writing itself is still intensely solitary and a certain amount of isolation is unavoidable. Much of the work of building Hannah’s interior world required solitude, and every aspect of that world came from a place that felt real in the writing—I had to project myself into Hannah’s emotional state in order to write it.

OLM: And in that lonesome state, is that desire for community, and inability to find living mentors, part of what fuels Hannah’s interest in the lives of the saints? For instance, with Saint Catherine, we have an example of a woman whose flesh was desecrated in life and consecrated in death. It’s as if Hannah is finding her strongest sense of community in the possibility that she too is experiencing a suffering that might one day be thought holy.

JC: Women like St. Catherine were famous for their ecstatic visions and were also incredibly powerful, and Hannah is drawn to them for those reasons. And their more extreme behaviors—like self-mortification and starving themselves for God—resonate with her own experience of finding meaning, and ecstasy, through denial, and help her to understand why the eating disorder was/is so seductive and difficult to extricate herself from. Of course, while the saints were creating lasting identities for themselves, they were also practicing self-erasure and martyrdom. And so part of Hannah’s recovery involves rejecting some of the saints’ more extreme behaviors as she rejects those behaviors in her own life. Nevertheless, these women from the past become a community of sorts for her as well. This is not a book about a woman finding religion, but it is in the lives and writings of the saints that Hannah finds the language to articulate, and thus better understand, her own struggles.

OLM: One of the most illuminating scenes occurs when Hannah retreats to a restaurant bathroom during a dinner date and subjects herself to an agonizing self-examination. It’s painful to read, but makes stunningly clear how her affliction has trapped her in an existential state somewhere between her world’s collapse and the transcendence of the mystics.

JC: That was one of the more difficult scenes to write, in fact, because it is so painful. But it was also inevitable that it would occur. It comes at a moment when Hannah is making a conscious decision to connect with another person—she agrees to go to dinner with one of the rowers—but the draw of the disorder is so strong that it upends her efforts. It has dominated her life and extricating herself from it is something she both wants and doesn’t want. As she says at one point, “How could I wish it away? How could I wish myself away?” Letting go of the disorder is not only difficult, but means ceding the very thing that, unhealthy as it is, has provided meaning for her. And it means ceding a part of herself.

OLM: I’m curious, given the various aspects of your protagonist’s struggles, if you are picking up on patterns emerging in regards to what readers are responding to, or want to know about you and/or the novel?

JC: People often ask why I chose to set the novel in Florence and whether I had any anxiety writing about a place that’s already been written about so extensively. I love that question because bringing Florence to life in a new way was a conscious part of the process and it’s a joy to speak with readers about the decisions I made when creating the portrait of the city. Florence is a small enough city that you can feel close to it quite quickly. But the more time you spend with it, the more you recognize the city’s layers, the things that exist below its veneer—like the rowing club, an authentically Florentine community where Hannah learns to scull and where she is drawn into the complex social dynamics of the city. I’ve had people identify with the book on both levels—the depiction of the better-known parts of Florence, as well as the less obvious social and cultural nuances. And going back to the importance of finding one’s readers, I had a number of Italian friends read the book, and their feedback was essential.

Occasionally people have asked for a single reason for why Hannah developed anorexia, which I think speaks to some false assumptions about eating disorders, including that they are diseases that can be attributed to a simple, identifiable cause (or causes). I’m not sure people would ask the same question of a character dealing with depression or alcoholism or another form of addiction. The catalysts—and the way that they manifest—are a complicated, layered mix of the physical, cultural, psychological, emotional. The same is true of eating disorders—the reasons that they are occur aren’t simpler to define than any other human experience, and I wanted the novel to convey that.

OLM: And part of what feels so fresh about the novel is how free it is of any reductive tropes that often taint redemption narratives. Do you think this is part of the identification readers are experiencing, that you’ve brought to light a confounding, debilitating condition so far underserved in contemporary literature?

JC: I hope so! In the same way that it would have felt artificial to offer a single cause for Hannah’s struggles, it would not have felt right to offer a single solution. There are—and need to be—moments of redemption, or at least hope, but like any addiction, an eating disorder isn’t something that disappears. You learn to survive it, live with it, live in spite of it. And there’s a spectrum—there are many people who struggle with their relationships with food and their bodies, who diet or eat or exercise to unhealthy extremes. Though they may not be diagnosed as anorexic, or go to some of the extremes Hannah does, I think they do still experience the feelings of, by turns, shame, self-loathing, isolation, power, and elation that accompany disordered relationships with food and the body. And so I hope the book sheds light on not only anorexia—which is, on its own, quite widespread—but also broader issues around eating and body image that can be debilitating.

OLM: This is my second interview in a row where I’ve interviewed a female writer whose work is consistently characterized as “unflinching.” What do you think there is about the Unflinching Female Writer that reviewers/readers are finding so appealing?

JC: Many of the novels I love—Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, for example—could be described as “unflinching.” They are close, intimate, intense depictions of descents into the altered states that result from addiction and alienation, when the world as one has understood it becomes a stranger. You experience what their protagonists do in a way that feels authentic but unfamiliar, offering a new understanding of the interior lives of the women at the center of the works. I’ve tried to achieve that in Florence in Ecstasy both through the closeness of the narration (first person present tense) and the honesty of my protagonist Hannah’s telling. Hannah isn’t always reliable—she admits that she’s lied to people in the past and she is sometimes lying to herself—but she’s honest about the horror and euphoria of her experience with an eating disorder.

I think people are drawn to unflinching work because they crave authenticity in fiction. When I open a book, I want to be fully transported, to believe the story I’m reading even when it’s uncomfortable, claustrophobic, raw. Why are reviewers/readers drawn to unflinching writing by women in particular? The cynical answer is that that label might promise a certain kind of voyeurism or sensationalism. But voyeurism involves taking in, from a distance, someone’s experience—of pain, joy, grief, pleasure—rather than inhabiting or illuminating it. I think that a work that is truly unflinching is one that invites empathy rather than creating distance. And I hope that that is what readers are drawn to. And that they desire the same complexity and strength in women protagonists as they do in their male counterparts.

OLM: So do you think there’s pressure on women writers to keep that more voyeuristic distance? To avoid self-investigation?

JC: I won’t be the first to say this, but I think there’s plenty of excellent writing by women or depicting women’s interior lives that gets criticized for being overly confessional or navel-gazey in a way that the same story told by or featuring a man would not (for some astute criticism on this, see Melissa Febos’s recent essay in Poets & Writers, and Meg Wolitzer’s classic New York Times piece, “The Second Shelf”). I wanted to write a book that was, in part, inward looking and that asks for emotional engagement and vulnerability on the part of the reader—those are the types of books I like to read, and I think it’s vital that women continue to write them and to validate those experiences.

Whatever your identity or experience, when you turn the lens inward, I think you also make a pact with the reader—that you’ll do the work to make that interior landscape as rich, specific, and interesting as our internal lives are. And that includes how our interior selves come into contact with the world. Hannah doesn’t live in her head alone, but in Florence, up against art and history, the people she encounters, the physical world, her own body in that world, and so, as a writer, I also turned the gaze outward and (if this makes sense) backward, and that took me outside of myself in a way that was good for the book. Researching the saints, the art, rowing, and Italian language and culture was one of the most exciting parts of the process, and at a certain point, I realized that the story I wanted to tell was not only about an individual contemporary woman’s experience of anorexia, but rather the larger experience of women’s relationships with their bodies and searches for meaning and expression.

OLM: And for Hannah, the search is by turns physical and metaphysical, both of this world and somehow beyond it.

JC: Her search is an existential one. For many years, I taught ancient history and world humanities, and I love the Greek sense of the world, their understanding of the human experience as a reckoning with a universe that is chaotic and indifferent. They looked into the void and came away with the belief that any meaning has to be created by us. Hannah is also looking into the void and attempting, quite desperately, to create some meaning beyond the disorder that will enable her to move forward. She descends into the underworld of the Florence Rowing Club and learns to scull in a boat named Persephone—like the mythological figure, she is trying to find her way back from the land of the dead, from the edges of existence. Throughout the novel, she frequently encounters the classical, including in art, where figures like Medusa and Venus serve as both echoes and foils.

OLM: With that in mind, was your use of Rape of the Sabine Women for the cover an attempt to redefine this very Florentine icon, as a symbol of emergence rather than abduction?

JC: I was thrilled that my publisher used that image on the cover because it is so important to the story. It is, like Hannah’s experience with anorexia, both horrific and beautiful. Hannah is drawn to the sculpture because it captures her feeling of being entrapped by the disorder. But in Giambologna’s piece, there is no escape for the woman who is attempting to break free from her attacker—the abduction is inevitable. What is remarkable is that, in spite of the futility of her efforts, she is still resisting, reaching for something beyond the moment of entrapment. The entire sculpture twists and rises to her single finger reaching toward the sky, and so that is where your eye goes. That gesture, the strength and hope in it, is for me the sculpture’s meaning. You can’t erase the horrific aspect of abduction, but the dogged and desperate belief that is that finger reaching up is beautiful. And for me it also speaks to the act of writing, to trying to grasp the ineffable, as impossible as that might be.

____
Jessie Chaffee is the author of the debut novel Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press). She was awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy to complete the novel and was the writer-in-residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has been published in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Slice, and Global City Review, among others. She lives in New York City and is an editor at Words Without Borders. Find her at www.JessieChaffee.com.

Steve Danziger is a contributing editor at Open Letters Monthly. His interview with Paula Bomer appeared in the June issue.

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