Contemporary Authors

N/A

• Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: A Novel - March 14, 2017 McSweeney's, https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Disrupt-Peace-Patty-Cottrell/dp/1944211306

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/18/patty-yumi-cottrell-sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace-interview

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I’m not laughing at suicide,” “It’s really an abysmal thing and it’s obviously not something that I would encourage someone to do, because I don’t think it’s an answer. At the same time, I felt like I had to write about it.”

  Patty Yumi Cottrell: 'I'm not trying to hide anything – the novel is not a memoir'
  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is grounded in traumatic experience, but its author is keen to stress that the facts were not what made the story urgent for her
  Patty Yumi Cottrell
  ‘The voice was very immediate for me, very direct’ … Patty Yumi Cottrell
  Richard Lea
  @richardlea
  Thursday 18 May 2017 09.02 EDT Last modified on Monday 29 May 2017 16.30 EDT
  Patty Yumi Cottrell is finding this interview difficult. She’s umming and erring along her fractured train of thought, stumbling from one “you know” to the next. We’re talking about her first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, a debut that she says overlaps with her own life in ways she finds very emotional, and we’re struggling with a slight delay on the line between London and Los Angeles.

  “In the US, I’ve done a few interviews and I haven’t really talked about it because I was trying to protect my family, you know. And, um … ” she sighs. “I guess if people want to do research or something, they could find out whatever they want to find out … I’m not trying to hide anything, I’m not going to lie to people, but the novel is not a memoir. I don’t want people to read it as a thinly veiled memoir, so that’s why I’ve been trying to discuss the book on its own terms without slippage between the book and my life.”

  It may be a very personal book, but she says she never wanted to explore the experience through a factual account. “If people receive the book without any information about me, I actually think that makes it more powerful. Because as soon as that conflation between the narrator and the writer starts happening, people tie themselves in knots asking, ‘Did you really do this, Did this happen, Did that happen?’ and it takes you out of the story. I understand why people want to read books that way, because it’s really compelling, but at the same time I think it’s problematic.”

  Anyone who wants to avoid tying themselves in knots might want to look away now, because here are the facts. Like her awkward narrator Helen Moran, Cottrell was born in Korea in 1981. Like Helen, she was adopted by a couple from the American midwest. Cottrell’s parents adopted two younger boys from Korea, who were not biologically related and lived in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee; the fictional Morans stay in Milwaukee and adopt only one boy. But both the writer and her creation are English majors who have held down crappy jobs. And both of them have a brother who killed himself.

  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace opens on the day Helen learns of her brother’s death and follows her as she returns to her dark, oppressive childhood home to try to understand what drove him to that point. Cottrell was working in a coffee shop in New York City when she began writing it, exhausted and confused after her own brother killed himself. By the time she moved to Los Angeles, where a full-time job teaching in a charter school left little time for writing, she only had a handful of chapters. But the rest of the book poured out over the two weeks of the spring holiday.

  “At that point, the voice was very immediate for me, very direct,” Cottrell says. “It just came to me very quickly. It was out of necessity – I couldn’t have written another book. It was almost like I was possessed.”

  I’m not laughing at suicide. It’s really an abysmal thing.
  Helen is filled with revulsion at her parents’ shabby house, the dirt in the hallway, the insects on the windowsill. “I think she’s just horrified to be alive,” the author explains, “she’s just horrified by living, and everything that’s teeming under the surface of life.”

  As Helen reels from one misunderstood encounter to another, a detailed picture gradually emerges of the circumstances of her brother’s death, with the novel charting her shift from shock to a kind of understanding. Cottrell says this journey wasn’t planned: “It was all about following the voice, the story was rather secondary.” When she arrived at the end of Helen’s story, she found it “very hopeful and uplifting in a way. But I might be wrong about that – that was just my experience of writing the ending.” She didn’t research suicide at all while she was writing and, despite her personal experience, insists she’s not an expert. “All I can write about is a fictional construction that comes from a real place.”

  It was only after she had finished Sorry to Disrupt the Peace that she became aware of the argument that writing about suicide, particularly writing that includes details of methods, can put vulnerable people at risk.

  She’s clearly appalled at the idea her book could encourage anyone to take their own life. “This book makes it fairly clear that suicide is some kind of abyss, and my hope is that it wouldn’t encourage someone to do that,” she says, adding that for all its black humour, her novel is very serious. “I’m not laughing at suicide. It’s really an abysmal thing and it’s obviously not something that I would encourage someone to do, because I don’t think it’s an answer. At the same time, I felt like I had to write about it.”

  While Helen may come to some sort of accommodation with her brother’s death, Cottrell is confident that readers will understand “you can’t really trust anything she says or thinks”. “They’re very smart,” she says. “I don’t think you could read the book and be an idiot.”

  She is still finding the conversation difficult, pausing to search for the right words, repeating that she’s not an expert on suicide, not a professional. “It’s something that has been in my life, and … I don’t know … does that make sense?”

  • In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

  • Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell is published by And Other Stories priced £10 and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £8.50.

  Topics
  Fiction
  The first book interview

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/04/20/real-space-interview-patty-yumi-cottrell/

  Quoted in Sidelights: Although this book is fiction, because of the autobiographical details, I’m sure some readers will read it as if it’s close to some kind of lived experience,” “That tension is compelling. … The autobiographical details that overlap with the book—they’re very emotional, I was writing from a place of emotion. But I wasn’t hoping to create confusion between me and Helen.

  Real Space: An Interview with Patty Yumi Cottrell
  By Colin Winnette April 20, 2017 AT WORK

  I think writers attend M.F.A. programs to meet people like Patty Yumi Cottrell—or at least, I did. When we met in our first semester, she was a quietly focused and deeply intelligent student who sat back from the pack as we clamored for attention and support. Cottrell and I began sending each other work, and the constructions of the classroom soon felt secondary. Reading the forceful clarity of her sentences, how they openly wrestle with their influences while still feeling original—somehow both arch and sincere—I knew I was in on a secret that wouldn’t stay hidden for long.

  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace announces Cottrell’s arrival. A manic detective story about a young woman seeking to understand the suicide of her adoptive brother, her debut novel is prickly, hilarious, and extremely sad. I interviewed Cottrell over the phone, and what was meant to be an hour-long conversation gave way easily to four (and more than 120 pages of transcription). Cottrell talks like she writes—with great authority and considerable anxiety—and I left our conversation as I left her book: feeling electrified and knowing I would have stuck with it for as long as it would have me.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’ve been reading your work for something like six years now, and this book marks a departure for you. It’s more straightforward than your earlier work, which often reads more like a fable—familiar at its core but on the surface very strange. How did the change come about?

  COTTRELL

  I wanted to see if I could keep myself interested in something more traditional. I had a professor in grad school who read my work and asked, Where is this set? What year is this set in? I wanted to write something that could answer those questions—it’s Milwaukee and it’s 2013. I was curious to see if I could sustain that. I was also reading Jane Bowles more closely. Her work employs a kind of curdled realism. It’s off-kilter and has a weird tone, but it’s set in a real place. That was inspiring—that even if you can answer the setting question, it doesn’t have to be strict domestic realism. You can still make it strange. Some of the power of this story comes from the fact that it could be real.

  INTERVIEWER

  Did the subject of suicide influence your decision to move away from a fantastic setting?

  COTTRELL

  If it were set in a fabulist world, it wouldn’t have the same charge. Books that feel close to “real life” have a unique tension to them, because some readers can’t help wondering what’s real and what’s not. Although this book is fiction, because of the autobiographical details, I’m sure some readers will read it as if it’s close to some kind of lived experience. That tension is compelling.

  INTERVIEWER

  So you were interested in playing with autobiographical overlap?

  COTTRELL

  A few years ago, I said I was writing an antimemoir. I was thinking of it as a response to people who suggested that I write a memoir, which I was never interested in doing. The further along I went, the less it became a preoccupation, though. The autobiographical details that overlap with the book—they’re very emotional, I was writing from a place of emotion. But I wasn’t hoping to create confusion between me and Helen. If people want to read the details of my life into the events in Helen’s, that choice has nothing to do with me. That’s the reader’s response, which is private and subjective. I’m aware I need to hold space for all different types of responses, and I’m hopeful I can do that.

  INTERVIEWER

  What do you think people get out of reading in that way?

  COTTRELL

  There’s something powerful about the idea that the story in a book actually happened. That’s why people read memoirs. But I think it can be a very problematic way of reading novels. There has to be space for fiction to be a work of imagination. It came from my brain, and in that way it’s personal—every book is personal—but this is largely invented. That’s why I inserted that note, which is meant to be playful, on the hardcover, underneath the book jacket.

  FROM THE BOOK’S COVER.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was there a process of editing yourself out?

  COTTRELL

  I’ve been tempted to write more directly about my life—the person I am and how I experience the world—but the way I apprehended this book was as a work of imagination. I had fictional tools at my disposal, so characters, events, et cetera are shaped and constructed with deliberation. There might be elements of my personality, exaggerated to an extreme, in Helen, but I put myself at a remove, as the writer of the book, so I’d argue that there is an ironic distance between us. This experience of editing myself and my own thoughts out wasn’t weird at all. It was like having a tree-shaded picnic near a riverbank—very pleasant.

  INTERVIEWER

  I read in another interview that you started this novel, hung out with it for a little bit, and then wrote the first draft in a blast. Do you think that energy helped produce the book’s propulsive energy or did you have to tease that out?

  COTTRELL

  When I started, I had a handful of chapters, and then I moved from New York to LA and had a long time away from it. When I went back to it, I was able to write it quickly, partly because the voice was relatively immediate for me—it never really left. It was just there, like a cactus in a pot on a desk. Plus, if I wrote every day, I think I would start to dislike writing, but if I’m doing other things, I can muster up the motivation to do it.

  I also took a break from contemporary fiction, and I think that helped—not having any idea what the trends were and what other people were doing. I only read older books, and that helped create the space and the freedom to do whatever felt natural.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’ve folded the words of other artists’ and writers’ into your text. In most cases, they’re quietly quoted alongside your words or in the middle of your words. How did you come to that approach?

  COTTRELL

  Helen is a sponge and also maybe a bit of a parasite. She absorbs things from art and from reading and from other people, and she uses these other words and ideas to help make sense of her world. We had to get permission for a few of the quotes, and at one point, it looked like we might not be able to secure the Nabokov one. I decided to try to rewrite it and thought, This is so easy—“flattish and faded.” Three words, one of them is “and,” but it was impossible to write anything to replace them! I couldn’t do it.

  INTERVIEWER

  How did the selection process happen?

  COTTRELL

  To be honest, they were lines and texts that I remembered reading in high school. Or sometimes, in the case of Clarice Lispector, from books I read more recently and that stayed with me. My influences are very obvious. When I’m writing, I gravitate toward the writers and the books that I love. Helen’s mind is like a collage of all of her influences, and it’s interesting the way she absorbs them, takes them in, and utilizes them for her own purposes. She doesn’t give them credit or cite them. Unlike Helen, I gave the writers credit in the back.

  You described the book as propulsive earlier, and that’s funny because I felt like I was writing the slowest book ever, like unwinding an endless spool of thread. Not much happens. It takes several chapters for Helen just to move from one room to another.

  INTERVIEWER

  It’s striking, and funny, how you handle that. We get so deep into Helen’s thoughts that the physical world drifts away, until she offhandedly describes having entered another room or someone interrupts her train of thought. That’s something you see in Bernhard, too, that juxtaposition of intense interiority looping back to a quick reminder of how little progress is being made on the physical plane.

  COTTRELL

  Right. She walks through the house, but progression in the book occurs more through voice than physical movement. My family moved around a lot when I was young, so I got used to moving and inhabiting new houses. Maybe that’s why, even as Helen goes from room to room and eats a cake or kills the flowers, she’s not giving much description in the narrative about the details of place.There’s a loneliness to a person who’s moving without any kind of big event happening and who’s going through an intense, individual experience. Certain places can be psychologically loaded, but it has less to do with individual objects—a cup or a picture frame—than with the fact that they’re settings for emotion. Childhood homes are like that. So when Helen goes back to her parents’ house, where she grew up, she feels a mixture of fondness for and ambivalence about those objects. There’s an element of recognition and reunion, but sometimes the objects are not as she remembers them—they’re distorted. It’s an eerie feeling, and it sets up the house as a kind of haunted house, or a gothic one, where strange events can happen, like when she imagines her parents’ grief entering the house as a balding European man. In this way, the house functions as a place of emotion, sadness, loneliness, isolation, daydreaming, and passivity.

  INTERVIEWER

  You use repetition—which we also see in Bernhard—to create a sense of urgency, almost mania at times, but it’s also a grounding element. Every time a word or phrase is repeated, it becomes more familiar. Helen will use a particular phrase every time she describes something or someone, and every time we hear it, it carves out a space for whatever or whomever she’s talking about. Helen also becomes known to the reader in this way—her speech patterns sometimes reveal more about her than what’s she’s saying.

  COTTRELL

  That’s definitely influenced by reading Bernhard. For me, it gives the story energy—it’s about rhythm, the way Helen’s voice sounded to me. It’s also meant to mimic the way people repeat themselves when they deliver stories verbally. The repetition pushed the book forward and also seemed to draw attention to her feeling of estrangement from her family and other people in her life.

  INTERVIEWER

  The repetition of “adoptive parents” and “adoptive brother” not only highlights that dynamic, it also reveals the desire to communicate that distance.

  COTTRELL

  It asserts a distance, while pointing at it. The repetition of adopted and adoptive makes visible the feeling of being adopted, which is sometimes a feeling of invisibility. Using it repeatedly helps ground it. It also draws attention to the fact that the arrangement of the family is artificial. Not that adoption itself is artificial, but in this story, Helen feels that the fact of her adoption is outside of her, separate from her. She feels a clinical detachment from her experience of adoption, and the adoptive qualifier is a constant reminder of that detachment. There’s an estrangement from her circumstances as an adoptee in relation to the parents who “chose” her. It stems from something I remembered reading as a child when my parents introduced me to books about adoption, from the experience of being an adoptee. Sometimes adoption was presented as “magical,” and the adoptee is “special” and “chosen” and “unique.” In my novel, this relationship is deflated with every utterance of “adoptive.” It’s dry, it’s grounding, it’s not magical at all.

  INTERVIEWER

  I like that you approached the story as an “investigation.” A detective is someone whose job it is to remain on the outside of something, while working hard to come to an intimate and comprehensive understanding of it.

  COTTRELL

  I suppose aloofness might be a good characteristic for a detective. For example, I think Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote sometimes runs into trouble because she’s a kindhearted person. She trusts people who seem decent, and that trust always seems to be undermined or eroded by the end of the episode. But Helen’s view of reality is askew, and she’s not a good detective by any means. She is estranged from the people in her life but thinks she can see them clearly, in her own way. Really, she has no idea what she’s doing. The investigation is a distraction from the horrors of what’s happening.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was it hard to leave this novel?

  COTTRELL

  As far as mentally leaving the novel and getting distance from it was concerned, that wasn’t hard. There’s pleasure in seeing a project through to completion. But it was a great joy to work on the novel with my editor, Andi Winnette. She’s a special person, very well-read and intelligent. In that sense, it was hard to leave the book.

  INTERVIEWER

  At what point has an investigation come to its end?

  COTTRELL

  I suppose an investigation has come to an end when a person has exhausted all possibilities.

  Colin Winnette’s most recent novel, The Job of the Wasp, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press this year. He lives in San Francisco.

• LA Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/patty-yumi-cottrell-living-los-angeles-best-way-shape-ones-grief-object-7-eleven-pastries-look-like-vomit/

  Patty Yumi Cottrell on Living in Los Angeles, The Best Way to Shape One’s Grief into an Object, and 7-Eleven Pastries That Look Like Vomit
  Rita Bullwinkel interviews Patty Yumi Cottrell

  0 0 1

  FEBRUARY 27, 2017

  PATTY YUMI COTTRELL’S DEBUT NOVEL Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is being published on March 14 to much anticipation and advanced praise. The book follows the consciousness of Helen Moran, an estranged and lonely caretaker of troubled youth who is haunted by trying to find the right means to grieve her brother’s suicide. Helen Oyeyemi calls Sorry to Disrupt the Peace a “wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book.” Jesse Ball calls the novel a “lifeline.”
  The first time Cottrell and I met, we accidentally went to a bar that was closed. We waited and talked for a very long time, alone in a cavernous room that was clearly meant for crowds of drunken people, until the deafening hum of vacuum cleaners overhead halted our conversation and we moved outside into the Los Angeles Chinatown heat. This interview was conducted over email.
  ¤
  RITA BULLWINKEL: What was your timeline for writing Sorry to Disrupt the Peace?
  PATTY YUMI COTTRELL: The book came to me quickly, but I took long breaks from it, too. I began with the narrator’s voice and I wrote five or six chapters in New York City in 2014. It was snowing out and I was listening to the orchestral version of the theme song from Murder, She Wrote over and over. I’ve probably listened to that song hundreds of thousands of times. Then I took a long break because I moved to Los Angeles and began a job at a charter school. I wrote the rest of the book, probably 50,000 words or so, over a two-week spring vacation in March 2016. Working on the book over those two weeks was stressful because, in the back of my mind, I knew that I would have to go back to teaching at the charter school. Also, I had Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen on my desk. I was really excited to read it because I loved McGlue, but I told myself I wasn’t allowed to start reading Eileen until I finished my own book. Reading Eileen was my little reward to myself.
  How has your reading life changed over time?
  Twenty years ago, I read a lot of American fiction: Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Joy Williams, Michael Chabon, David Gates, Dave Eggers, Lorrie Moore. I wasn’t writing anything then. I was just a fan. The role of fiction for me used to be a form of amusement or diversion from my sort-of-miserable life in the suburbs of Milwaukee. When I went to grad school, more than five years ago, I became very arrogant. I stopped reading those American writers. At that point, fiction was no longer amusing for me. Something else was at stake. But I was very arrogant then. I’m amazed I still have friends from grad school because I was insufferable. Today, I don’t know what the role of fiction is or what it should be. Who am I to say? The best fiction is like a handful of white stones you drop to mark your path through a monstrous and confusing forest.
  What are your favorite books that have also been published by McSweeney’s?
  I love Sheila Heti’s The Middle Stories, which is a book of sharp and precise little gems. The stories seem funny at first, but they are all super dark. For people who love language, I would recommend Diane Williams’s Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. In one story, a yellow pastry filling is described as grandmother’s cough-up. That nauseating image has stayed with me for years. What a perfect description for those nasty, absolutely disgusting pastries at 7-Eleven! I had Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty on my desk for a couple months by accident. I ended up with over $50 in library overdue fines from the Park Slope library. It was worth it.
  What is your experience of being an author in Los Angeles?
  I think living in Los Angeles influences my work only because I began writing stories and my novel in New York City. And I don’t consider myself an author. An author sounds very old-fashioned to me. Like my mom would call me an author. But I’m not. I’m a writer. And today everyone is a writer. I think that’s really nice, that everyone can be a writer.
  I have to say, New York City was for me a terrible place to write a novel. I love the city and think it’s exciting, but I was distracted and exhausted so I never enjoyed the things it had to offer. There are such limited resources and you’re in such close proximity with others, you’re always highly aware of all of the things other people have, the things you want and lack. For example, in Brooklyn none of my friends had a dishwasher. Well, one friend had a dishwasher, and all of my friends and I, we were incredibly envious of that one dishwasher-owning person. Living in Los Angeles, a lot of people have dishwashers. It’s not a special thing. I don’t mean to make Los Angeles sound like some kind of Communist utopia. What I’m trying to say is that you’re not as aware of what other people are doing or what they have. It feels like things are more spread out. You can get space away from people who call themselves writers if you want. You don’t have to interact with them if you don’t want to. In this way, I feel more freedom in Los Angeles and that obviously affects what I’m writing and how and when I write.
  So when we moved to Los Angeles, I felt better, physically and mentally. I can do the things I want to do. I can be lazy. I can go months without writing. No one cares. I can go to a reading or not. It doesn’t matter. And my dear friend Brandi Wells lives a few minutes away. She’s an incredible writer. I get to talk to her every day. That’s a huge advantage. Living in Los Angeles, with the threat of an earthquake, you feel yourself every day on the precipice of a real disaster, and yet the surroundings are so beautiful, it’s hard for me to imagine living anywhere else.
  Sorry To Disrupt the Peace is a book that sits almost solely in the interior. How do you understand the narrative effect of long passages of interiority? What was the experience of writing a novel that sits so heavily in the interior?
  Long passages of interiority accumulate effect; they are monstrous, they can overwhelm and repulse the reader. When I see a dense block of text, I tend to become very anxious or I don’t want to look at it. I had a friend who used to send me emails that were giant blocks of text with no paragraph breaks. I asked her to stop or to use some paragraph breaks, because while I enjoyed being in contact with her, the giant blocks of text stressed me out.
  Writing a book set heavily within the mind of a single narrator was joyful and scary. My first intention was to write a book that could be summed up in five words: woman investigates her brother’s suicide. I’ve always had trouble writing a story, but I’ve never had trouble writing sentences. If you’re working on a voice-driven project, you follow the voice. The story becomes kind of secondary. I knew I wanted the structure of the book to be compressed into the space of a few days. I had no idea what was going to happen next, story-wise. For many chapters nothing is happening, the narrator walks around the house and remembers things and talks to herself. I tried to sit back and see where the narrator’s mind would take me and I hoped it would at least be somewhere interesting.
  When I was in graduate school, I fell in love with Robert Walser’s writing. If I could describe his work in one word, I would say it’s artless. His sentences spiral and digress, and I never feel like I’m reading something masterful. He’s a really generous writer. His work will last forever, because it imparts a feeling of joy and surprise for the reader. I love him for that and his lack of “artistry.” Some days I was appalled by what was happening in my own book. But the most joyful moments occurred when I stopped trying to exert control over my own writing, when I allowed myself to be surprised or disgusted. For example, there’s a paragraph in my novel that I’m very embarrassed by, but it felt so right for the narrator in that moment, to cut it would have been to commit a form of violence against her.
  What are some other books that have also devoted themselves to interior prose that you admire?
  Interior books are the books I prefer to spend my time with. I would venture that Thomas Bernhard is the master of interior prose. I remember sitting with Jesse Ball, who is a genius, at The School of the Art Institute in 2010 and he had Correction on the table. That moment of reading Correction and then going on to The Loser, Extinction, Concrete, Woodcutters, Frost, Gargoyles, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, all of those books changed things for me. In the opening 20 pages or so in The Loser, the narrator is standing in a doorway or in the process of entering an inn. There’s no description of his physical movement, it’s simply stated, which was exciting to me.
  I admire Thomas Bernhard and the writers he has inspired, W. G. Sebald and Javier Marías for example. The rhythm of Bernhard’s sentences is something I want to study for the rest of my life. His narrators are repellent and misogynistic, and yet, there’s very little artifice or decoration, and in that way, they seem really pure. I dislike artificial books, books that have nice manners, books that are designed to show off the writer’s ease with developing characters, settings, et cetera. Those books work well as doorstoppers, I think, or you can use them to press flowers or whatever. I have a list of voice-driven novels that I turn to when I forget how to write. Some of the books on that list: Nobody is Ever Missing, By Night in Chile, Fra Keeler, The Face of Another, The Rings of Saturn. My favorite interior novels are written from a feeling of desperation and urgency.
  In the early pages of the novel, Helen fantasizes about how grieving the suicide of her brother with her parents will feel. She says, “I saw us setting aside our various issues and presenting to the world a unified front, I saw us braiding our grief into a rope, a strong and shiny rope we would take out and show people who asked us what it was like to lose someone to suicide.” This idea of grief as an object you take out to show to people is one of the most beautiful descriptions of loss I have ever read. Do you experience grief like this in your own life? Does it ever assume the form of an object? Does your grief for the death of different people assume different or similar forms? If so, what do these objects look like?
  Helen has a very elevated sense of herself and her own world; she has such high hopes for her grieving experience. It seems like the rope is a valuable and special object that no one else could possibly understand or see properly, except Helen and her adoptive parents, perhaps. I think everyone fantasizes like this when something unimaginable happens. We become the most important people in the world when something traumatic occurs, and we have the sense that no one else could understand our suffering. In this way, I think Helen is an incredibly flawed and human character.
  My own experiences with loss have never assumed the shape of an object; I wish they had. I really do. Maybe certain events in my life would have been easier to deal with. My ideal grief object would be a cheap plastic umbrella with a curved bird-beak handle, like the five-dollar umbrellas that the bodegas in Brooklyn set out when it rains, except a little fancier. I would simply throw the umbrella away or give it to someone or drop it down an abyss. What I’m straining to say is grief has taken me down some paths that I wish I had never gone down, especially in my 20s, there were paths of various trouble, all of which unfortunately only led to more loss. I don’t go down those paths anymore. I’ve always been a lucky person. It’s true. I’ve always been lucky and bleak.
  Once Helen arrives at her childhood home, she begins to see a “bald European man” that she believes to be a ghost. Later, in her brother’s suicide note, we learn that her brother thought Helen might be an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Is Helen ill? Or is she the sanest character in the entire book?
  I thought a lot about cutting that line because I was worried people would diagnose or pathologize Helen.
  I’m not sure if Helen is ill or not. I think she and her brother are the most resourceful people in the book. And that’s always been a question for me. What resources do we have for coping with, as Elena Ferrante writes, the insupportable horror of our living nature? For me, it’s not a question of sanity or insanity. Those terms are constructions. And I have to admit my thinking is influenced because I live with someone who studies and loves Foucault. So I think it’s more of a question of how to see the world, and how to live (or not) with what’s right in front of us, whether it’s a death or a ghost or a car accident. And how do we bear, as we get older and older, our accumulation of losses? Some people find life intolerable and they choose not to live anymore. Some retreat to the inside of their imaginations. Robert Walser went to a sanatorium and stopped writing. It’s something, as I get older, I continue to figure out for myself.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/patty-yumi-cottrell-writing-is-not-therapeutic-in-any-way/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “For this book, I knew I wanted to write a dark comedy. That was the only idea I had; I didn’t set out with any detailed plans or outlines or anything like that. … I would tell my friends and relatives I was writing a dark comedy, and everyone thought that was funny, including me. It seemed to fit with the person I was at that time.”
  PATTY YUMI COTTRELL: WRITING IS NOT THERAPEUTIC IN ANY WAY
  ON MORALITY, PENIS LESIONS, AND WRITING FROM LIFE (OR NOT)

  March 21, 2017 By Claire Luchette
  Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)More

  “September 30th, the day I received the news of my adoptive brother’s death, I also received a brand-new couch from IKEA.” So begins Patty Yumi Cottrell’s brilliant debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s). It’s my favorite kind of first sentence: one that provides a map for the whole book. The real emotional weight of this opening confession isn’t the focus. Instead, we’re anchored in time and banal facts. Cottrell’s narrative goes on to explore murky emotional terrain by way of misdirection; the sum is comical, dark, and affecting.

  Peace follows Helen, a 32-year-old woman who, when she learns her adoptive brother has died, leaves Manhattan and flies home to Milwaukee with no plan to return. And really no plan at all, aside from digging up the truth. In Milwaukee, Helen feels she must find answers. She scours her childhood home, trying to discover why her brother would choose to die. Her investigation is filled with moments both hilarious—starring an enthusiastic grief counselor, Chad Lambo—and weep-inducing. Despite its subject matter, Cottrell’s book refuses to become sentimental and melodramatic. Instead, readers get a more honest glimpse of the weird world through Helen’s uneasy, unflinching eyes.

  I spoke to Cottrell about the book’s evolution over e-mail.

  Claire Luchette: Can you tell me about the book’s transformation from an idea to novel? What was the incubation period like?

  Patty Yumi Cottrell: The period in which I’m not writing anything is the most important part of my writing process. That’s when I’m mustering up the courage and will to write. I try to read a lot of books. I try not to think about myself too much. Life dictates when and how I write.

  For this book, I knew I wanted to write a dark comedy. That was the only idea I had; I didn’t set out with any detailed plans or outlines or anything like that. Everything in my life was confusing at that time, but for several months I was obsessed with the idea writing a dark comedy. It sounded strong to me. If you say you’re writing a dark comedy, most people will immediately nod their heads. I would tell my friends and relatives I was writing a dark comedy, and everyone thought that was funny, including me. It seemed to fit with the person I was at that time. It made sense.

  CL: Your prose is so dark, funny, and surprising, but also deliberate. I love how Helen refers to people again and again with qualitative titles: her roommate Julie, her adoptive father, her adoptive mother. And she’s so compellingly strange: evasive in the most surprising ways. Did her voice come readily?

  PYC: My narrator’s voice was immediate for me. It’s an accumulation of all of the books I’ve read and the people I know and the art that I love. That repetition of qualitative titles is a necessary component of her voice. It’s consistent with her character. To my ears, it has a propulsive quality. I’m sure some people will think it’s great, and maybe some people will find it annoying or weird.

  CL: The waterfall on the book’s cover represents one of the meditative strategies Helen tries for dealing with her trauma. But in reflecting on the waterfall—a watermill, actually—she ends up concluding that she has “always experienced extreme fits of jealousy, the type of jealousy that destroys the peace.” What makes Helen’s jealousy is unique?

  PYC: My narrator, Helen, likes to embellish whatever she’s talking about. In that way, she’s an embroiderer in the tradition of Robert Walser narrators. Everything in her world is either enlarged or minimized. But this is an interesting question and something I’ve never thought about before. Over and over, it seems to be the same old story regarding jealousy. Humans tend to be jealous creatures. I don’t think anyone’s jealousy is unique. Am I wrong?

  CL: Helen says, at one point in Peace, that “sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.” How can we know the difference?

  PYC: Foucault once said that morality has been catastrophic. To be honest, I’m not interested in morality. Helen is referring here to a situation with drugs. This is another good example of her enlarging a situation to fit some kind of lesson she wishes to impart. I was also thinking of all the misunderstandings in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. That’s a great book. Reading it is like eating a plate of dark green leafy vegetables. It’s good for you. And all of those black death pages are pretty special.

  CL: Do you find that your writing is influenced by what you’re reading? What were you reading while you wrote Sorry to Disrupt the Peace?

  I am influenced by what I read, so I need to protect myself a little from the toxic garbage that’s out there. I wasn’t reading much while I wrote my book, but around the time when I finished it, I read a book by John McPhee, and the chronicles of D.H. Lawrence from the time when he was in Mexico, and every book by Brandon Shimoda, a poet. I might have been reading a book on meditation, too. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I think.

  “I am influenced by what I read, so I need to protect myself a little from the toxic garbage that’s out there.”

  CL: What are your favorite first-person narratives?

  PYC: I’ll limit myself here because right now I’m thinking of sex and the grotesque in fiction. So with that in mind, I like The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, because it has a sex scene that is graphic and repulsive. I like how the narrator checks the man’s penis for lesions. It seems so right, so true.

  CL: You’ve called this book an “anti-memoir.” The book without its dust-jacket is a gorgeous, arresting thing: bright green, and with an “all persons fictitious” disclaimer in all-caps. Were you involved in this aspect of the design?

  PYC: When I referred to my book as an anti-memoir, I was trying to make light of a situation in which some people might read my novel as a memoir, based on my Korean adoptee identity. This book is a construction. I have the utmost respect for writers who write from life, like Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner. But this book is not a novel from life in the traditional sense.

  There are elements of my life in everything I write, whether it’s a fable or a story about a failed teacher who hates children. But what’s true or not—it doesn’t matter. It’s fiction. Everything is shaped and constructed deliberately. I went into my book with a mental tool, and I carved things and whittled away, and sometimes I added little flourishes. That’s why I would argue that this book is a work of imagination, regardless of what lines up with the events or elements of my life. I emptied my memories a long time ago in a therapist’s office. Writing for me is not therapeutic in any way.

  I’m glad you like the design. The designer, Sunra Thompson, is a genius. I had some input: I told him I didn’t want any human faces or people on the cover. At first I was a little afraid of the bright green, but now I think it’s cool because it’s hidden beneath the matte silver jacket. The disclaimer is funny to me. But all of the credit goes to Sunra and McSweeney’s.

• BOMB Magazine - http://bombmagazine.org/article/9934323/patty-yumi-cottrell

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I have no rational explanation about where the voice came from. “The book began in a state of confusion. The conditions of my life at the time, confusing as they were, created a situation in which the voice could be realized immediately. The narrator lacks the basic ability to understand simple things that everyone else around her understands, yet she is very confident about her confusion and lack of understanding. That was funny to me.”

  Patty Yumi Cottrell
  by Amina Cain
  "I knew from the moment I sat down to begin the book that I wanted something gray and drab and portable and contradictory."

  In Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, the debut novel by Patty Yumi Cottrell out this month from McSweeney's, the reader is introduced to Helen Moran, who decides to investigate the suicide of her adoptive brother. This sounds very serious, of course. By this description you might think you know where the novel is headed, but it's going nowhere you might have imagined. The novel is serious, especially in how far it drops into loss and absence, into how hard it sometimes is to simply be alive, but it manages, in striking ways, to carry other registers of feeling and actuality. And it happens to also be funny. As Lindsay Hunter put it, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace had me opening my mouth to laugh only to hear sobs come tumbling out.

  Here, Patty and I talk about digressions, swaggering, and the abyss.

  Amina Cain When I started reading Sorry to Disrupt the Peace I was especially struck by the narrative voice and these two sentences: "The voice on the other line stopped speaking and started to wail and it sounded like a thousand rusty needle tips scratching across an endless sheet of metal. As soon as I heard it, I was confident the sound would haunt me for the rest of my life." The narrative voice is obsessive and peculiar, but its matter-of-factness leaves room for these moments of intensity, humor, and aesthetic experience. Was this voice with you from the beginning or did it come out of some feeling or thought, or from somewhere else entirely?

  Patty Yumi Cottrell I have no rational explanation about where the voice came from. The book began in a state of confusion. The conditions of my life at the time, confusing as they were, created a situation in which the voice could be realized immediately. The narrator lacks the basic ability to understand simple things that everyone else around her understands, yet she is very confident about her confusion and lack of understanding. That was funny to me. Someone, I forget who, said she has this swaggering posture. Even though I think swaggering is a somewhat disgusting word, I get it. I was attracted to her confidence, how bold she is, her absurd phrasing. I had no plan for what she would sound like or how she should be. I made the conscious decision not to exert any control because as soon as I interfered, the voice became stagnant and brittle. At times I felt I was trapped in a rancid broom closet with a crazy person, but the movement of the narrator's thoughts, the bleak humor of the situation, sustained me. Despite my lack of control, upon rereading it after a lot of time and some distance, the narrative seems lean and tight.

  AC That sense of leanness seems to come from how "close" the narrator is to everything she does and says, how fully she goes into each moment so that none of it is excess. And Helen does have a swaggering posture. I love that: both the characterization and how it plays out, what the swaggering is in relationship to. The book itself is hilarious, but it stays so close to the abyss, which amazes me. What did it feel like to write from that place?

  PYC Writing the book felt healthy and sane, like cooking and eating dashi with steamed vegetables. To some people that might sound miserable, but if you've been eating a steady diet of crap, that type of food is really amazing to digest. I should make the distinction that writing the book didn't feel therapeutic at all. I would venture that in the book there's very little of my own personal experience of the world, or if that personal experience exists in the text, it's warped by the narrator's digression and absurdity.

  When I write I try to remove any sense of a self from the situation, and the way I remove it is through digression. For years, I've been obsessed with digression because I see it as a form of ambiguity. There's almost no purposeful structure in the book; it's probably 80 to 90% digression and evasion. Digression is humorous and playful and fluid and confusing and meandering and upsetting and a sketch of a cloud and a trapdoor. The meaning of the book is ambiguous. I knew from the moment I sat down to begin that I wanted something gray and drab and portable and contradictory.

  AC What you say about digression and evasion is appealing, that digression itself can form a novel, and not in any kind of intentional way. I'd like to hear more about how the word "portable" relates to your book.

  Right now I'm trying to visualize the form of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, and I'm seeing waves that keep washing out deeper into the ocean instead of onto the sand. It's the first time I've seen this image in thinking about your book.

  PYC I was just talking with my editor about form, and how some people think form means the same thing as "structure." She and I were discussing form as the "being" of the book, its essence, its soul. When I went through revisions with her, I started to perceive all of that, even though nothing really changed in the book. Reading her comments helped me to understand that the book even had a form.

  At some point, I realized it was comprised of brief accounts of the narrator's search process and her complaints. Helen struggles to confront her brother's death and estrangement from her parents. She appears to be content with entertaining herself with the idea of an investigation. I have empathy for that choice; I wanted to know more about what was behind and underneath it. At the center of Helen's investigation is her brother's absence. So my sense is this book is made up of holes and people choosing whether or not to exit their lives and in what ways.

  When I say I wanted the book to be portable, I mean that there's some kind of feeling or tone readers can extract from the book and carry with them. People keep saying that the book is sad, that there is a heaviness and weight to it, and I'm aware it's not an uplifting book, but it's not like I think I've written a cinderblock of psychic pain and distress. There's levity, and that is intentional. I'm thinking of the book Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and how most people wouldn't describe it as a comedy, but underneath the embroidery, density, and dissonance of the prose, there is a cheerful and neurotic sense of humor.

  AC In the sweeping quality of the narrative (the waves that keep washing out or Helen sucking things into her void), I see the ways in which some part of it could be swept past the limits of the book. It's no cinderblock of psychic pain and distress at all. It's much more fluid and complicated than that and brings into being something I've never quite experienced.

  As to Pond, I love its jaggedness, the way it can go off the rails for a long time into a discussion of stonework or ovens before swerving into something else entirely, the way the narrator is so particularly in her head, always, not unlike your narrator, Helen. Do you feel a kinship with other authors or books that come from a place of intense interiority?

  PYC Most of my favorite writers are dead, so I'd say that my book was written in relation and in response to dead people. The most direct influence on my writing process was The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, which is not an intimate book even though it takes place in the narrator's mind. The Loser is about suicide. And rivalry disguised as friendship. Glenn Gould is a character, but the setting is self-contained and sealed off from the contemporary. The Loser is really funny and absurd and depressing. When I was introduced to Bernhard's writing several years ago, I had this feeling of, Oh now I can be very still and quiet for a long time. I felt this stillness spreading throughout the rooms of where I lived. I've never experienced anything like that before.

• BWR - http://bwr.ua.edu/an-interview-with-prose-writer-patty-yumi-cottrell-from-issue-42-1/

  42.1 Feature: An Interview with Patty Yumi Cottrell
  Jan 18, 2016 | Archive, Interviews

  Patty Yumi Cottrell’s work appears or is forthcoming in BOMB, Gulf Coast, and LIT, among other places. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
  Interview by JOE LUCIDO
  Black Warrior Review: The protagonist in “In the Room of Fathers” finds herself in a windowless and relatively unfurnished room with three men who claim to be her biological father. How did this idea come to you?
  Patty Yumi Cottrell: The simple answer is I’m a Korean adoptee and when I was in my twenties, my biological father found me…It made me happy and nervous. Something else I felt as I wrote the story was a sense of sadness about my mother in Korea. She’s an optimistic and positive woman with lifelong terrible luck. Although I should say she has recently become a Buddhist nun, so perhaps she has finally reached a place of rest.
  BWR: Reading this story, I’m struck by the formal decision of making the text narrower on the page than a traditional manuscript. It gives me a sense of constriction as a reader, in a way that mimics the confinement of the protagonist. Do you often give formal considerations like this to your work?
  PYC: The writer Jesse Ball has taught me many things. One of the first things I learned from him was to give the work formal consideration, that one must treat it seriously.
  BWR: Just now, writing this interview in the BWR office, I heard a bell ring in the hallway. I feel like this is a sign for me to ask a question about the role of the bell in this piece. It insistently chimes behind the discussion between the protagonist and the three men and is employed in the final scene, a signal of the protagonist’s biological mother. What role does the bell play in the relationship of the protagonist and her biological mother? Why a bell?
  PYC: When I was very little my parents rented a large old house in Pittsburgh. I liked to crawl around everywhere. They tied bells to my ankles so they could find me. I suppose the bell functions as some kind of communication/disruption between the narrator, the biological mother, and the narrative itself. Or it doesn’t.
  BWR: In the story, the protagonist expresses frustration about people always getting “the illogical mixed up with the absurd.” Do you find this sentiment informs your writing? What role does absurdity and surrealism play in your writing?
  PYC: Absurdity is the rigorous and joyful practice of seeing the world as it is and then making something. It’s a humble approach to writing. When I write I like to picture myself as a lonely old man who has just taken a room in a decrepit boardinghouse. He sits at a desk and tries to write himself out of the present moment. Anything can happen.
  BWR: What do you like most to read? Most influential books/authors?
  PYC: Robert Walser I love for his lightness and exaggerated proportion. Other writers I admire: Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, everyone on Dorothy Press, Sheila Heti, Jesse Ball, Agnes Martin, Etal Adnan, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Brandon Shimoda, I could go on…
  BWR: What are you working on right now?
  PYC: I’m almost finished with a novel, an anti-memoir, about a Korean woman who goes home to Milwaukee to investigate the suicide of her adoptive brother. It’s a dark comedy.

Quoted in Sidelights: “excellent debut novel, as unsettling as it is compelling,” “You may well find your peace disrupted, too, but read it you should.”
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Jo Lateu
New Internationalist.
.503 (June 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Full Text: 
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
by Patty Yumi Cottrell (And Other Stories, ISBN 978 1 911508 007)
Learning of the death of her adopted brother, Helen decides to find out why he killed himself: 'Behind every suicide,
there's a door,' she explains. She returns to her adoptive parents' home and starts investigating, but rather than
discovering more about her brother --at least, until the surprising denouement--she exposes painful truths about her
own ethics and mental health.
Order and logic are the building blocks of Helen's world --her solace and a means of controlling her underlying anger--
and she uses them to try to make sense of what appears to her a senseless act by her brother. A neutral and passive
observer, Helen struggles with social interaction and the physical proximity of others. Whether or not she has autism or
Asperger's is never revealed, but hers is a singular narrative voice that offers challenging opinions and questionable
versions of events. In one scene, she puts the funeral flowers in buckets of water--yet the 'water' is diluted bleach and
they all die. An act of ill-judged kindness or of sabotage?
We eventually learn the reason for the suicide of Helen's adopted brother, who, unlike his sister, believed that some
doors should remain closed. Whether Helen finds closure from her investigation is open to debate. By reading Patty
Yumi Cottrell's excellent debut novel, as unsettling as it is compelling, you may well find your peace disrupted, too, but
read it you should.
**** JL
andotherstories.org
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lateu, Jo. "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." New Internationalist, June 2017, p. 40. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495721418&it=r&asid=8ae6d0a788fb369a5ad010a9aa00523f.
Accessed 21 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495721418

---
Quoted in Sidelights: “tells her story with gutsy style, glowing sentences, and true feeling.”
8/21/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1503374296917 2/3
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p22.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.
By Patty Yumi Cottrell.
Mar. 2017. 288p. McSweeney's, $24 (9781944211301).
Sitting on the brand-new couch--her roommates--in her shared studio apartment in Manhattan, Helen gets a call from
her Uncle Geoff. (She has an Uncle Geoff?) Her younger brother has died; he killed himself. Her adoptive parents
aren't expecting her--she's missed years' worth of holidays at this point--but she decides to go back to her suburban
Milwaukee home and attend the funeral, for their sake. Why did her brother, also adopted, she never forgets to add,
though from a different Korean family, take his own life? Helen launches an investigation, and as she examines the past
and ambles through her home and town in search of clues, we see in her actions and others' responses that she's
unhinged, perhaps ill, or at the very least unreliable, despite the nickname "Sister Reliability" she earned as a caretaker
of troubled youth back in New York (a job her family shakes their heads over). Helen's foggy view of reality is a dark,
dark comedic well, and debut novelist Cottrell tells her story with gutsy style, glowing sentences, and true feeling. --
Annie Bostrom
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244767&it=r&asid=5038129febd496217ea4060953e9d67d.
Accessed 21 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244767

---
Quoted in Sidelights: “deeply human and empathetic.”
8/21/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1503374296917 3/3
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Patty Yumi Cottrell. McSweeney's, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-944211-30-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In Cottrell's stellar debut novel, 32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her
adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen, who like her brother is Korean and was adopted by the same white
Milwaukee couple, is shaken by the news and books a one-way ticket to Milwaukee to find out what happened. But
what starts as a detective's hunt for clues soon becomes Helen's confrontation of her own place in the world--why she's
estranged from her past (she hasn't seen her adoptive parents in five years), and what she is doing with her life as a
counselor for troubled youth. Finally, Helen comes to terms with her adoptive brother's suicide. The real attraction here
is Helen: her perspective ranges from sharp (New York is "a city so rich it funds poetry") to askew ("People who call
themselves photographers are fake ... the real charlatans of our time. Behind a photo is a perfectly fake person,
scrubbed of all flaws, dead inside") to unhinged (her adoptive parents' grieving takes the physical form of a middleaged
European man who walks around the house and helps himself to pizza). Cottrell gives Helen the impossible task
of understanding what would drive another person to suicide, and the result is complex and mysterious, yet, in the end,
deeply human and empathetic. Agent: Kate Johnson, Wolf Literary. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273930&it=r&asid=68f190f9363849fe208be93bbdc628e2.
Accessed 21 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471273930

Lateu, Jo. "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." New Internationalist, June 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495721418&it=r. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244767&it=r. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017. "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 80. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273930&it=r. Accessed 21 Aug. 2017.

• SF Gate
  
  Word count: 738

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Cottrell fills every page with an impossible-to-ignore voice, characterized by its idiosyncrasies and intelligence, “Helen’s pronouncements are shockingly odd, often intrusive on those around her, and entirely honest and unmitigated. She is frustrating on the one hand and endearing on the other, clearly insecure and probably anxious.”
  “instead of the distress of the suicidal, we see that of the surviving.”

  ‘Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,’ by Patty Yumi Cottrell
  By Ilana Masad Updated 10:56 am, Thursday, April 27, 2017

  "Sorry to Disrupt the Peace" Photo: McSweeney's
  Photo: McSweeney's
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  Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel, “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace,” is a strange and lovely thing, and features narrator Helen Moran. Adopted as a baby from Korea into a white family in Milwaukee, Helen is now grown up and living in New York when her Uncle Geoff (she’s not quite sure how he’s related to her) calls with the news that her adoptive brother killed himself. She heads home to her adoptive parents’ house in order to join them in mourning as well as to achieve closure for herself.
  Cottrell fills every page with an impossible-to-ignore voice, characterized by its idiosyncrasies and intelligence. Helen is not a shy narrator; she doesn’t recede to the background of scenes. Instead, she side-steps them with her thoughts and musings, letting her mind wander, missing possibly essential information and subjecting us to the same fate. She isn’t always certain whether she’s speaking aloud or thinking, which creates further uncertainty in the reader: “When a person dies, it is the end of a human life, I announced. Then I said, or I thought, What a difficult time it is! What a toll it has taken! My adoptive mother and Chad Lambo continued to look at me in amazement and disgust, a disgust reserved for cockroaches.”
  Helen’s pronouncements are shockingly odd, often intrusive on those around her, and entirely honest and unmitigated. She is frustrating on the one hand and endearing on the other, clearly insecure and probably anxious — though it would be dangerous to ascribe her any particular mental disorders. Indeed, her own adoptive brother thought she may be schizophrenic or bipolar, a fact that Helen regards with suspicion and surprise. After all, she is the one whose profession involves helping troubled youth (her term) in New York City, brown and black kids who are failing out of school with whom she shares her weed. Clearly, Helen’s logic says, she cannot hold that job and also be mentally ill.
  Besides being unreliable as a narrator, Helen is remarkable in other ways. She distorts reality, is childishly selfish and is prone to obsessing. She also makes her own indiscretions somehow correct due to her particular logic: “I had always promoted early intervention in my workplace; I was a proponent of special medical intervention when it came to my troubled young people, intervention mostly through the administration of marijuana, which was illegal, but I felt it was my ethical duty to give it to them. It calms them down, as I had explained to my coworkers, it helps them focus on real things, they smoke it and they mellow.” Also, Helen is apparently asexual (though, again, she refuses any and all othering labels) and finds sex, with anyone of any gender, rather gross and unappealing.
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  Though it doesn’t seem like there is a big secret to Helen’s adoptive brother’s suicide — certainly no signs point to anything mysterious going on — Helen nevertheless continues to search with the relentlessness of the bereaved, for some sign of his distress. But her brother’s ultimately plain, simple life eludes her grasp, as he slipped away rather quietly and neatly from her and their adoptive parents. Instead of the distress of the suicidal, we see that of the surviving.

  Ilana Masad’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Guardian, Vice and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

• LA Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-waterfall-coping-strategy-patty-yumi-cottrells-sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace/#!
  Word count: 1999

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is rich with dark humor,” the question of why Helen remains alive when her brother is dead is the book’s quiet obsession,” “being at fault for letting him die.”

  The Waterfall Coping Strategy: Patty Yumi Cottrell’s “Sorry to Disrupt the Peace”
  By Nathan Scott McNamara

  24 0 1

  MARCH 15, 2017

  EARLY IN PATTY YUMI COTTRELL’S Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, a co-worker tells our narrator, Helen, that she developed post-traumatic stress disorder after she saw a person get hit by a truck in Tribeca. She says the person exploded: pieces of the body flew everywhere, and some of it sprayed her in the face. She asks: “How am I supposed to live with that?”
  The question hangs over the entire novel. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a stylized contemporary noir. It’s detached, lush, pulpy with contemporary references, and led by an outsider who feels alienated even from her own reality. 32 years old and partially employed, she ekes out an almost-homeless existence in New York City. One day while waiting for a delivery for her roommate, she gets a call telling her that her adoptive brother has killed himself.
  Nobody in the family saw Helen’s brother’s suicide coming. In the aftermath of his death, Helen returns home to Milwaukee to investigate. She takes on the role of pseudo-detective, though her search leads less to the source of a crime, and more through the dark night of her soul.
  Helen and her brother come from different parts of Korea, but shared the same psychologically exhausting experience of growing up as adopted Asian Americans in a white suburb of Milwaukee. Helen says:
  When [my adoptive father] played Mozart or Schubert the house filled up with white male European culture. We were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once I went to college, I stopped. There is a world and history of nonwhite culture, I wrote to them once in a furious letter.
  Growing up, Helen viscerally channeled the indignation of someone who found no models for fitting in. She even managed to get ejected from the Milwaukee outsider art scene. While Helen tended to wrestle with her situation by escaping, her brother instead folded inward, spending more time by himself at home. The only compatriot Helen had in Milwaukee was a guy who struggled with a similar burden of alienation and lived with his parents until he killed himself at the age of 29. How is a person supposed to live with that?
  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is rich with dark humor. Helen works as a counselor for troubled youth in Manhattan. She likes her job, and is a natural fit in her ability to relate to the struggle of being young, but she’s ill equipped to set the teenagers on a path different from her own. She wonders, “How was it that I was the only person who listened to the troubled people and treated them as peers instead of minions?” while she indulges them with candy and cigarettes — and smokes weed with them because it mellows them out.
  In one scene, Helen ends up thinking, mistakenly, that the kids don’t know what a balloon is, that “they had never even seen a fucking balloon.” This captures the complication of her own slightly elevated privilege in the scenario, as well as her compulsion to connect with the teens but her inability to fully arrive at their level. She drinks several gin and tonics before work the next day and, to address the problem, brings in the 1956 French art movie, The Red Balloon. Helen remembers:
  The overhead lights were on, making it difficult to see the screen. My face was bright red, like the balloon, which one of them observed astutely. I told them to focus on the beautiful film I was screening for their viewing pleasure and to stop looking at me. Then I broke the rules and turned off the lights. I spent the next five minutes or so pointing out for them how each scene was so art-fully composed, it was almost like watching a painting come alive.
  She makes it halfway through the movie, then spends the rest of time in the bathroom throwing up.
  Helen’s investigation into her adoptive brother’s suicide is, above all, a fumbling interrogation of the state of her own life. Helen has enormous trouble focusing and her energy is erratic, which makes her an unreliable detective. She sometimes works intensely, scribing condolence phone-calls in search of case intelligence. Other times she stops concentrating entirely, searching for squeaky drawers and cabinets that need fixing or trying to keep sympathy flowers watered by putting them in a nearby mop bucket that’s actually full of bleach. Remembering the time she went to see a free therapist, she says, “I only went because I wanted to know if there was a way to tamp down my anger, to stop disrupting the peace, my own included. You need a plan, said the therapist […] I never went back.”
  The question of why Helen remains alive when her brother is dead is the book’s quiet obsession. Though estranged from her adoptive parents, Helen had stayed in touch with her adoptive brother via small exchanges. “I began to scroll through our text history and I could say that many of his texts were very basic and practical. KOBE BRYANT!!! said one of them.” It’s not that the two of them shared their feelings — they basically didn’t — but they shared the understanding that there was someone out there that endured the same experiences and kept on going.
  But Helen more often responded to her hard circumstances with anger, whereas her brother tended to withdraw. Shortly before his death, he unexpectedly showed up on Helen’s doorstep in New York. He never left their parent’s home, and this made little sense. “He was not a flexible person,” she remembers, “and therefore he was very uncomfortable when he visited me in Manhattan.” Helen later finds out — after he’s dead — that he was on his way to Seoul to meet his biological mother. It was a final attempt to orient himself in a world where he could find no place. Once in South Korea and afraid, he abandoned the meeting and returned to Milwaukee.
  The gorgeous cover of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace features a black-and-white photograph of a waterfall and evokes one of the therapeutic skills — called The Waterfall Coping Strategy — prescribed in the book. Helen’s co-worker who suffers from PTSD says that whenever she tries to fall asleep at night, she can’t help but think of the spray of that person’s blood on her face, and her therapist told her to instead think of the spray from a beautiful, peaceful waterfall. This encouragement conjures the fragile search for serenity that’s at the heart of this book — the ease with which a feeling can switch from something like the sensation of cool water to warm blood and back again.
  “Like most normal people, my life force ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed,” Helen thinks. “At times I felt euphoric for no reason […] and then, an hour later, I started to feel depressed, like nothing was worth it, everything I did was a waste.” Helen describes the experience of what might be bipolar disorder. Yet she nonchalantly ascribes this experience to just about everybody. This captures the dangerous balance of Helen’s life, or a dangerous struggle for most. The search for peace might be especially difficult for our narrator, but it’s not easy for anyone.
  When Helen comes home after her brother’s death, she turns her confusion and anger — her fear of being at fault for letting him die — on her devastated adoptive parents. She asks what he looked like the day of his death, and if anything was unusual, and what he was wearing. She interrogates them. She thinks, “Certainly something good would come from that, which would counter the terrible circumstances that produced his suicide.” She says, “What were your last words to my adoptive brother?”
  With Helen holding her adoptive parents at arm’s length, it’s pretty easy to see their suffering, too. Even the word “adoptive,” used in every single reference to Helen’s parents, conveys the distance between them that, even under good circumstances, might be difficult to breach. “He never tells us anything,” Helen remembers her adoptive mother saying to her. In one scene, Helen’s adoptive father says that he blames himself for her brother’s death: “I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. I didn’t see it coming at all … He reached out to touch my arm and began to weep again. I let him touch my arm even though I was very uncomfortable and did not know what to do.”
  At times, you want to shake the narrator and shout, “You know this isn’t only hard for you?” But though also emotionally stunted, Helen’s brother was a lifeline for her to the rest of the world — the only person who could relate to her isolating experience. “I want to be white,” Helen remembers him saying to her once. “I want to be white, too, I said to him.” They confess that, as kids, they both sometimes prayed at night that they would wake up white.
  How does a procedural end when the detective has more vulnerability than grit, when the case is far from the point? Late in the book, Helen discovers a document on her brother’s laptop — a calm, measured suicide note that basically details everything from the past year. In some ways, this late touch is perfect: of course Helen would miss so many of the answers in plain sight as she obsesses over dead-ends of evidence and meaning, making her parents and neighbors deeply uneasy. Of course the answers are blatant, right there on the computer. Still, it’s a bit anti-climactic. It suggests a type of closure that feels a little too easy, and a little bit beside the point.
  But the novel recovers its brilliantly churlish drive in its return to Helen’s perspective, and her stubborn obtuseness. After reading the suicide letter, Helen is moved to help the morning of her brother’s funeral, and decides to take on a series of out-of-character tasks. While running a set of errands that would be manageable for most, Helen makes a series of imperfect indecisions that eventually lead her to getting a flat tire in a rough part of Milwaukee and missing her adoptive brother’s funeral. “How do we live with ourselves?” She wonders as she sits on the curb. “There must be a way, but no one has ever told me.”
  Despite their shared hardship, Helen and her brother are different. She remembers the summer when she followed Fiona Apple around on tour across the country, sleeping in 24-hour diners and the homes of innocent-looking strangers. “As I remember that time and how colorless everything was, everything except Fiona Apple, I realize it’s possible I was as miserable as my adoptive brother, and I understood how this misery and depression would lead to suicide.” But just as her brother found meaning in death, Helen finds it in life — in returning to her urban teens, in her ongoing effort to maintain the peace, her own included. Both characters tragically founder in their efforts to serve others, but Helen takes quite a different route. “I didn’t kill myself for some reason or another. Inside me was a force that wanted to stay alive.”
  ¤
  Nathan Scott McNamara contributes at The Atlantic, Electric Literature, The Millions, Vox, and more.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/04/sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace/
  Word count: 1358

  Quoted in Sidelights: Reading this marvelously interior novel, I felt an irresistible intimacy with Helen. She says things to no one—and often. She has philosophical moods. She compares her logic with its gaping holes to a piece of Swiss cheese.” “As much as Helen longs for someone to genuinely ask her how she’s doing, she doesn’t rely on a partner or friend for comfort,”
  THE MYTH OF THE TROUBLED FEMALE IN SORRY TO DISRUPT THE PEACE
  REVIEWED BY LIZA ST. JAMES
  April 11th, 2017

  In a delightful, half-page chapter of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, narrator Helen Moran describes a time when her childhood home was infested with silverfish. For weeks, she and her adoptive brother—both Korean, unrelated to one another by blood—were forced to inhale the chemical residue left by pesticides, because their adoptive parents wouldn’t pay to stay elsewhere. “Sometimes I thought we might have become brain-damaged from the fumes,” Helen offers, “each of us sustaining catastrophic brain injuries, it would have explained so much.”

  The novel occurs over the course of the four days in which Helen returns to her adoptive parents’ home in Milwaukee to investigate the suicide of her adoptive brother. (In the book, there are few, if any, mentions of family members not preceded by the word “adoptive.”) Helen harbors hero fantasies, imagines she alone can quell the grief of her estranged family. And everything, of course, goes wrong. But even as Helen works to uncover a narrative, any narrative, to explain her brother’s suicide, the novel refuses simple explanations. If, as Helen puts it, “Behind every suicide, there’s a door,” this one opens out into a vastness, a positive void.

  Reading this marvelously interior novel, I felt an irresistible intimacy with Helen. She says things to no one—and often. She has philosophical moods. She compares her logic with its gaping holes to a piece of Swiss cheese. She eats heels of stale crusty bread meant for ducks and an entire cake meant for mourners. She has “made a lifetime of studying elegant mannerisms.” She speculates that she might speculate herself to death. She finds happiness in free bagels at work meetings: “Would an unhappy and miserable person find perfect peace and contentment in stale bagels with no cream cheese?”

  Cottrell’s novel will charm readers of Bernhard or Walser. It will also please those like me who appreciate fiction that comes with a bibliography. (Including works cited or consulted has always struck me as such a generous offering; examples that come to mind include Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life and Sprawl, Amina Cain’s I Go to Some Hollow and Creature, Claire Donato’s Burial, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler.) Sorry to Disrupt the Peace concludes with a sweet little “Notes” section with references to phrases borrowed from Nietzsche, Lispector, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, George Herbert, Coleridge, Bernhard, Kafka, and Nabokov. While Helen’s own investigations can feel as though they are carried out in a vacuum, Cottrell gives readers linguistic traces to follow on investigations of their own. And Cottrell can get away with this borrowing because the sentences of this book are a true pleasure.

  Cottrell’s prose is discursive and associative and gripping all at once. When our 32-year-old narrator attempts to calm down using The Waterfall Coping Strategy, a technique learned from a coworker, her thoughts spin out and run elsewhere:

  An image flashed in my own mind of a waterfall, even though I had never seen a waterfall in person. I had seen a watermill, so I switched to that image, to make myself more comfortable: a broken-down watermill surrounded by a forest in autumn. My adoptive mother brought us there when we were young, at a time when her hobby was photography.

  Before we know it, we’re among decaying oak leaves reminiscent of pores, overzoomed by her mother’s telephoto lens, hiding with a nearly twelve-year-old, newly menstruating Helen and her nine-year-old brother behind a watermill as they make up a game called Confession. In the game, Helen makes her brother atone for his sins through bodily humiliation. He is covered in dirt and she tells him he’s going to die, they both are, forgiveness doesn’t matter, it’s just a game.

  Helen’s brother’s favorite foods were white rice and white chicken. Her childhood home brims with white soap, white foam. From college Helen writes to her adoptive parents, “The two white people raised their Asian children to think Asian art was decorative: Oriental rugs and vases! Jade elephants! Enamel chopsticks!” In her childhood home, new knicknacks replaced old knickknacks, wicker replaced leather, and her adoptive parents are the cheapest people in the neighborhood. As Helen attempts to carry out her investigation, strangers and relatives colonize rooms “like bacterial pathogens.” She sees grief incarnate as a European man, and later dreams she has become a European man named Jacques and murdered someone herself.

  Somewhere in the middle of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a pamphlet written and distributed by Helen, titled “How to Survive in New York City on Little to Nothing.” Back in New York, Helen works with “troubled young people” who have dubbed her Sister Reliability, and this pamphlet contains practical information such as, “An investigative and probing spirit will give you a tour of the boarded-up and condemned house that every rich white person keeps inside herself.” Being of service is a way out of a bind for Helen: “I hadn’t yet come into my Sister Reliability role, I wasn’t of service to anyone, not even myself; I was just another troubled female.”

  Helen does in fact seem to be in conversation with the narrators of some of my favorite contemporary novels of the troubled female, where troubled means a combination of independent, grieving, resourceful, probing, and fiercely intelligent—often in a manner that causes (and stems from) friction with the exterior world. As much as Helen longs for someone to genuinely ask her how she’s doing, she doesn’t rely on a partner or friend for comfort. A “spinster from a book” who has been mistaken for a man, for a homeless person, her primary relationship seems to be with reason and logic, however distorted—with attempting to comprehend death amidst the absurdity of being alive. This is a metaphysical tale of ratiocination gone awry. Even as Helen lays claim to rationality, she challenges a certain accepted reasonableness.

  Helen says, “I’m sorry to disrupt the peace was my stock apology… because it could mean so many different things to people. It could mean, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I’m sorry, I’ll ruin you, bitch.” But in flashes of insightful communion with the reader—through the entrance of characters who knew Helen way back when, along with a key point of view switch late in the novel, the book itself provides a more complete picture than we’d get from Helen alone. The novel takes a turn I wouldn’t dare give away, less for fear of spoiling the surprise than because Cottrell puts it best. Helen’s four-day investigation comes to a close in a propulsive way—no small feat for a novel that ends with the same suicide with which it began.

  In a book in which death itself is the most orderly, least disruptive conduct, the question becomes what we take for peace in the first place—and at what cost we work to preserve it. As Helen writes in her pamphlet, “Ethical positions should never be laid in concrete, sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.”

  Liza St. James is a writer and translator from San Francisco. She teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. More from this author →

• Electric Lit
  https://electricliterature.com/sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace-is-deeply-moving-and-honest-6f9a44835e23
  Word count: 953

  Quoted in Sidelights: “draws the reader in right away with her stream-of-conscious thinking. It feels like she grabs your hand and starts running, dragging you behind her. You don’t know where she is going, when she will turn a new corner, but you follow her anyway. You want to follow her.” “is unlikable enough to be interesting but not too unlikeable that the reader doesn’t care about her.”

  Erynn PorterFollow
  Writer, Cat Lover, Candy Eater. Assistant editor at Quail Bell Magazine. Words at Bust, Brooklyn Magazine, ROAR Feminist Magazine, and others.
  May 19
  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is Deeply Moving and Honest
  In her debut novel, Cottrell masterfully renders the controlled chaos derived from loss

  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell has one of the strangest narrators that I have read in a long time. Helen, the main character and narrator, draws the reader in right away with her stream-of-conscious thinking. It feels like she grabs your hand and starts running, dragging you behind her. You don’t know where she is going, when she will turn a new corner, but you follow her anyway. You want to follow her. Once you are adapted to her train-of-thought it is easy to follow her along as she investigates her adoptive brother’s suicide.
  The thing about Helen is that she thinks everything is supposed to go a certain way. Akin to following the plot of a movie or book, she’s the hero. She is the center of the universe. When she gets even an inkling that’s she’s not, she becomes wounded and lashes out. One example, for instance, is when she decided to show up to her parents’ house to help them with their grief. In her head she pictured them welcoming her home with open arms and a plate of warm cookies. The thing is though, she didn’t let them know she was coming —
  “It hurt me a little, that my adoptive parents were not expecting me, that they were so astonished by my arrival, that they seemed scandalized by my suitcase, by the mere suggestion that I would be staying a few nights with them in my childhood home… I made a note to myself that they had not greeted me with a plate of cookies and milk, not even tea and stale muffins, as I had pictured. Then I forced my way into the house because I was certain my adoptive parents were too astonished by my sudden appearance to invited me in.”
  When she finds out that a grief counselor has been helping her parents through the loss, she tries to undermine him at every turn. She rolls her eyes, she makes snide comments, scoffs at any religious comfort he tries to bring to her parents. She becomes jealous that they are relying on him instead of her. She even tries to make her adoptive funeral about her —
  “I had heard them talking about the funeral in the kitchen, it was scheduled for tomorrow morning, even though no one directly asked me to go, not even my adoptive parents. I’ll show them. I’ll just show up and sit in the front row of the church, right in front of Chad Lambo, and everyone will see me and my sisterly mourning, I will create a mourning spectacle of myself.”
  Her reactions to things makes the reader question her sanity, and highlights her self-centeredness. Like immediately after finding out her adoptive brother killed himself, she focuses on buying the perfect black sweater. In fact, she gets overwhelmed with the options for sweaters since she is used to wearing whatever clothes she finds on the street.
  She then turns her focus on how the suicide is really at the worst possible time for her since she is on probation at work. When flowers arrive for the funeral, instead of just placing them on the table, she dumps them into a mop bucket full of bleach. She points out what she did to her parents and waits for approval like a little kid and doesn’t understand why they died and why her parents are upset.
  The Dark Side of the Sunshine State

  Sarah Gerard’s sophomore book explores homelessness, addiction, and going diamond in Florida
  electricliterature.com
  Not many writers can pull off this sense of controlled chaos like Cottrell does, let alone adding that on top a suicide mystery, tension of race, and exploring adoption. Cottrell does a great job of balancing these many plates and keep them spinning. Helen is unlikable enough to be interesting but not too unlikeable that the reader doesn’t care about her. She uses Helen’s family and friends as a dose of reality, reminding the reader that what Helen’s doesn’t necessarily match everyone else’s.
  They are constantly exasperated by her antics, some the characters flat out say they don’t like her. She uses body language to show the chilly distance between Helen and parents and partner that with key flashbacks. The choice to not use dialogue tags creates more confusion and forces the reader to really focus on the words. If read too quickly, you might missing something and have to reread the conversation again. You cannot read this book quickly.
  She creates empathy for all her characters, whether they are likable or not. She also creates a conversation about suicide that should not be ignored. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a book you can’t put down, and once you do, the whole world shifts.

• Guardian/Observer?
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/07/sorry-to-disrupt-the-piece-patty-yumi-cottrell-review
  Word count: 280

  Quoted in Sidelights: “existential detective hunt,” \ “equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.”
  Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell review – an electifying existential detective hunt
  The freshness of this debut is a delight – much like the hilariously untrustworthy protagonist
  Patty Yumi Cottrell: deadpan in her strangeness.
  Patty Yumi Cottrell: deadpan in her strangeness.
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  Lucy Scholes
  Sunday 7 May 2017 07.00 EDT
  Patty Yumi Cottrell’s remarkable debut Sorry to Disrupt the Peace possesses something of the deadpan strangeness of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, yet the book is electrifying in its freshness. Her narrator is 32-year-old Helen – otherwise known as Sister Reliability, a name she claims she’s earned in the course of her work with “troubled young people”. Do we trust her? Hell, no! But this is just one of the many delights of the novel, which takes its title from Helen’s stock apology: “It could mean, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I’m sorry, I’ll ruin you, bitch.” This is Helen in a nutshell: she’s unhinged one moment, then astutely observant or empathetic the next. Having returned to her childhood home in Milwaukee, she sets about investigating her adopted brother’s unexpected suicide. The result is a sort of existential detective hunt – equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.

  • To order Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell for £8.50 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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