Even without the cover, Katya Apekina’s sprawling and very funny new novel Mother Doll would’ve reminded me of matryoshka dolls. There’s Zhenia’s story, a twenty-first-century tale of reckoning with an unexpected pregnancy and a dissolving marriage. Then there’s the story Zhenia receives from a medium, the one that belongs to her bardo-bound great grandmother Irina, who played a divisive role in the Russian Revolution. But the matryoshka is more than just a pneumonic for stories within stories. “Of course this was our national toy,” Apekina writes, “your real self needed that much armor, that much posturing, that many identities before you got finally to the smallest one, featureless and dense.”
I spoke to Katya over Zoom.
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, LitHub and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German and Italian. She has published stories in various literary magazines and translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Boston, and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter, and dog.
JN: I finished Mother Doll last night—I’m still reeling from the final images. How did you first conceive of this book?
KA: The central premise of a person talking to their dead ancestor came to me when my grandmother died. I started reading and translating her memoirs. During that process, I felt like I was in conversation with her. I’d put off reading them for a long time—I didn’t want to take on whatever was in them. But in reading them, it was clear that I had already been taking it on. Knowing it was actually going to make it easier to separate myself from what was handed down to me. What did I want to keep? What did I want to let go of? In Mother Doll, Zhenia communicates with her great-grandmother, Irina, embodied as a Ghost.
Also while I was writing, my grandfather was dying. I was with him in his last days. He was dictating his memoirs to me into a tape recorder. The feeling of bearing witness that was already in the writing became more embodied and concentrated.
I knew I wanted to write about the [Russian] Revolution. My first book [The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish] wasn’t even out yet, and I was in Mexico City, doing research, visiting Trotsky’s house. That combined with the present day plot and what I was talking about with my grandmother. I was also taking psychic meditation classes at The DEN Meditation in Studio City. A lot of descriptions of the afterlife came from those guided meditation journeys.
JN: This novel feels quite prismatic to me! I wonder if it’s a consequence of the omniscient narrator, which reminded me of Tolstoy and other Russian heavy hitters. At the same time, the story is so contemporary in its themes and structure.
KA: My first book was in first person, from multiple points of view. I wanted to do something omniscient—I wanted to write about characters who don’t know themselves. There’s a refusal to acknowledge their emotional truths. It would only make sense to do that omnisciently.
This is a coming-of-age story, but not for a teenager. Zhenia is young—in her twenties—but these big life events of having a child and listening to her great-grandmother’s story and understanding her family’s history and healing, transforms her and connects her to her desires. She’s able to integrate this ancestral trauma. As for Irina’s transformation, she’s stuck in her narrative of her past.
It was important to me to have the stories refracting off of Irena’s. There’s a hall of mirrors feeling between the storylines of history iterating in slight variations. Braiding so many storylines is difficult. It takes a part of my brain I don’t use very often, almost a spatial part. Making sure the balance was right came in editing.
JN: The book is titled Mother Doll, and the motif of the doll recurs. There’s a bizarre game called “Doll” that Irina recounts playing with her teacher, where one person rearranges another person’s body into a pose. Why are dolls so important to the book?
KA: The teacher uses Irina as a triangulation point to lure men. Irina is sort of the object. As a woman, it’s hard not to feel objectified by large chunks of your life or maybe that’s just as a person more broadly. So when Irina blows up the hotel, it’s so different. On the other hand, she’s very passive. She does things impulsively, but they don’t go anywhere. She doesn’t feel like she has agency in her life, which I think is very doll-like. That changes as the book goes on. She makes definitive decisions that change her life dramatically.
JN: One thing tracked was the use of the word “stupid.” People often describe their own behavior as stupid or call other people stupid. I kept thinking about how children are often taught that stupid is a “bad” word. But stupid is everywhere.
KA: That’s really funny. There’s a Soviet bluntness where people aren’t afraid to use the word stupid, to be direct and negative. That’s definitely the way I grew up. Not that I was being called stupid, but as an immigrant, I knew other Russian or Soviet families who thought Americans were so fake. They’d be like, why are they smiling all the time? Is there something wrong with them? There’s a suspicion and confusion around American friendliness and social conventions. If someone asks, “How are you?” you’re like, “fine.” You don’t go into a long rant about your teeth hurting or something. These characters have so much self-criticism. Irina is a physical embodiment of this shame and denial of self-compassion. When you’re in that state, you call out other things for being stupid more easily.
JN: Do you see this book fitting into the literature of immigration?
KA: I don’t know. I mean, I’m an immigrant myself. I came to the US when I was three, so I was probably drawing on my life experiences rather than engaging with written work on the topic. But I’m drawn to books that involve the immigrant experience or living between two worlds. There’s cultural chasms between children and parents anyway because of generational cultural reasons, but when there’s a language and a cultural difference and you learn to exist in both worlds, it makes you aware of culture being not one monolithic thing. Instead, there’s a sense of the existence of multiple cultures and being outside them all.
JN: This novel takes the reader on the prenatal and postpartum roller coaster, cravings, fluids, everything. How did you approach writing about pregnancy, the pregnant body, and motherhood? How much did you draw on your own experience?
KA: I wanted to write about ancestral trauma and the processing of it. When I was pregnant, I started thinking: What am I passing on to my child? I thought of myself as between the past and the future. In the book, pregnancy was always kind of central to the story of transformation.
My own pregnancy was a while ago—my daughter is almost 10 now—but I drew on the early days of babyhood. For me, it was a really fun, joyful time. I spent a lot of it with other mothers, with babies of the same age. It felt very expansive and great. The relationship Zhenia has with Chloe and that sleepy baby time is something I remember. As for the physical, childbirth brings you into your body, at least for the parts you’re not sedated: it’s intense pain and you’re very present. There’s such a physicality in pregnancy, too. You’re taking up different space. You’re bumping into things. You’re constantly made aware of your body.
JN: In Mother Doll, intergenerational trauma becomes contextualized and fit into a narrative structure. Do you think story is helpful in processing intergenerational trauma?
KA: Creating a narrative is how I make sense of things, but in some ways, having narratives that you become wedded to can be unhelpful. It’s in being with feelings rather than the stories around the feelings that, therapeutically for me, has been the most useful. Without giving away specifics, the ending is about Zhenia being able to offer Irina empathy in a way that she was not able to at the beginning. Being able to offer compassion is more what I think is the healing process. It’s not so much about naming the story—though when things aren’t named, it’s harder to know them or encounter them. But it’s the emotional process of accepting those things or having compassion for those things that really shifts. Those things are aspects of yourself. It’s not really about the history of your grandparents: it’s about whatever legacy that has left in you.
