Olivia Gatwood on Her Debut Novel, Whoever You Are, Honey
Olivia Gatwood, poet and author of Life of the Party, has released her long-awaited debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey. Set in the liminal space of Santa Cruz, California (a town grasping on to tradition as modernity threatens to destroy its past), we meet Mitty, a reclusively introspective protagonist whose rejection of the world reveals a stormy interior contrasting with her unassuming exterior. She lives with Bethel, a wisecracking former aspiring actress, in a dilapidated, molding home that embodies the old ways of life.
As her uncannily beautiful neighbor, Lena, moves in next door with her boyfriend, the charismatic tech mogul Sebastian, Mitty’s worldview is shaken as Lena’s autonomy and relentless pursuit of the truth surrounding her artificial nature grows. Gatwood’s debut novel contains all of her trademark lyricism; she weaves a deftly told story about the fulfillment and fearfulness of what it means to embrace existence.
As she drove down a highway, Gatwood gave me a call, and we sank our teeth into her novel, discussing the process of her first foray into novel writing, her ongoing literary canon about dimensions of womanhood, America’s cultural sickness of admiration to the point of consumption, and how Lena, despite being a fembot, ended up being the most relatable character in the novel to her. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Isabella Maria: Congratulations on the book. It’s absolutely magnificent. What was the transition like from writing poetry to writing a novel?
Olivia Gatwood: Well, thank you for saying you like the book. I’m so glad. The transition was really hard. When the story started developing in my mind, it was very obvious to me that it was a novel, but I had to figure out how to execute it. It took a really long time to understand my voice as a novelist and understand the mechanics of writing a novel. Poetry kind of thrives in blank space, which really allows a reader to have a lot of autonomy in terms of interpretation. And on a very simple level, it just uses less language, and you don’t have to worry as much about the logistics of storytelling. I found that while writing a novel, some of the hardest stuff for me was simply getting a character from the kitchen to the bathroom and managing that much language, making sure that it remains fresh and propulsive; that it’s both engaging and sensual without being grasping. It took me a long time to figure out the right methodology for myself, and it was a lot of understanding how my brain works.
IM: When you started this book, you chose to investigate the usage of AI before it became so mainstream. What sort of questions were you asking yourself then, and what sort of questions do you feel like you answered in writing this novel?
OG: I started writing this at a time when the themes around AI felt much more explicitly science fiction, almost comically so. As I wrote, the conversation became much more evolved as our access to it became more immediate and the technology became more advanced. It progressively felt less and less like science fiction. I had someone ask me: “What are you warning the public against?” I’m not warning anyone against anything. I don’t care about tech, but I do care about humanity, and at this point, those two things are inextricable. I went into it asking: What would it feel like as a woman to interact with a fembot? Every story I had seen about fembots was about a man’s relationship to his invention and how he grappled with her sentience, how he grappled with his feelings towards her, and sometimes how she grappled with her own sentience, but always within the context of him. I asked myself: What would I feel or see or think interacting with a woman who was invented by men? Then I realized, I was invented by men in a way; [I realized] so much of my personhood was dictated within a male gaze.
The answer I came to was that we are all in some capacity an invention, and we are all in some capacity an invention in the context of a very, very powerful gaze that’s rooted in and motivated by some sense of desirability, and so the story stopped feeling like a story about AI [and] started feeling like a story about people.
IM: While reading this book, I noticed a link between grief and femininity. These women all carry a heavy weight, from Bethel’s mourning of her former beauty to Mitty, the protagonist. She is a character who is completely separated from “regular” social cues, who is somehow constantly grieving the person she feels that she is supposed to be. Where did this character come from, someone with such internal ambivalence to the self she portrays?
OG: Mitty is a mystery to herself. Literally part of the reason why she avoids mirrors is she doesn’t want to face herself; she doesn’t want to engage with her external self. I wanted the reader to have that same experience, so I never describe what she looks like. I modeled Mitty after myself in certain ways, not in a way that I was seeking to write an arc for my own story, but more so that she was the vessel through which I was processing certain ideas and asking certain questions. This is a really exaggerated word, but I almost was trying to capture the essence of a female incel—if it’s possible to mean that in the least sinister way, I do. I wanted to explore what it means to be traumatized by causing harm accidentally, then to become so afraid of yourself that you isolate and diagnose yourself as unworthy or as potentially dangerous, and within that develop some kind of resentment or anger towards the world for rejecting you. This rejection of self in addition to rejection from the world.
I wanted to write, also, about disposability culture, what that does to people, what shame does to a person. I don’t think Mitty is entirely the victim. I think Mitty has also caused harm. Mitty has also done her own projection, has reduced people to her own gaze. When I talk about Mitty’s shame, I’m also talking about the shame she puts on herself. Shame is an incredibly isolating emotion, and I believe it is often the basis for some of our most dangerous actions. I became really interested in who that character is as a woman in her late twenties [and] what that means for how she has sex, how she relates to her own body, how she relates to her own queer identity.
What does it look like for a queer character to feel shame and that shame not be because of having a homophobic parent? I was interested in how shame can manifest just entirely within a social dynamic. Her mom clearly has no negative feelings about Mitty’s queerness, so it’s not an issue of Mitty coming out of the closet. It’s actually an issue of Mitty understanding how to have intimacy with a person.
IM: I thought Mitty’s queer arc was relatable in a painful way, because the source of that shame doesn’t come from her queerness inherently, but it comes from being perceived as predatory. As a bisexual person, that is my biggest fear when pursuing people of the same gender romantically. The basis of it is a shame not from identity but from actions.
OG: I relate to that a lot, and I feel the same way. When you’re coming of age, there’s supposed to be so much comfort around bodies—like you’re changing in front of each other, or you’re in a locker room. But if you’re a queer kid, you feel not just afraid that people are going to find out that you’re queer, but then that people are going to perceive everything you do as, like you said, predatory. I guess I also wanted to show a character that is complex within that. She’s causing her own harm, she’s also projecting, she’s also inventing Esme [Mitty’s teenage love interest] in her own mind.
IM: Lena, to me, was the most compelling character in the narrative; she reminded me a lot of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, but with a growing terror to her self-awareness. What was it like crafting this character?
OG: Lena kicked off the story when I was thinking about what it would be like for a woman of this nature to become self-aware. But when I sat down and wrote the first draft, I realized that Lena only existed through the lens of other people, so I was perpetuating the same problems that I was trying to interrogate. Once I started writing from the perspective of Lena, she just really came to life. She was one of the easiest characters to write because as soon as I started writing from her view, it was really obvious to me what she wanted, what she needed, the questions she was asking—it just came so naturally. I came into the book thinking I related most to Mitty, and I left the book feeling I related most to Lena.
IM: I think it was a beautiful character arc, in part because her reclamation of autonomy almost felt like a coming-of-age story. As someone who didn’t grow up with and is not in any proximity to wealth, it felt like seeing inside the fishbowl about which we, from the outside mostly, say they have the most power and freedom in the world—what could they ever be upset about?
OG: Yeah, yeah. I also didn’t grow up wealthy, and what I imagined is the pain that exists from wealth. What exists then is feeling trapped inside of your abundance, this myth that you have everything, so what could you feel sad about, and that resulting in its own kind of deep and existential sadness, which is only a feeling that felt really clear in Lena.
IM: Bethel observes this, but her observations tend to be a little one dimensional, like when she says, “When [wealthy] women are alone, they have too much time in their head.” Yet with Lena, she’s trying to find where and what her head even is.
OG: I think Bethel’s perspective on Lena does end up being one-dimensional. I wanted to show that side of misogyny, too—Bethel’s internalized misogyny. That’s Bethel projection. This is related to her own experience of beauty, in her loss of beauty. That loneliness of feeling like your entire value is based on other people looking at you, and what happens when nobody is looking at you, or what happens when you start to seek out some other kind of intimacy or other kind of relationship, and you realize you don’t have the resources or tools to do that.
IM: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of admiration to the point of consumption—we see this in so many aspects of life, and your description of the ruthless consumption of fembots by the men who create them, like Lena’s relationship to Sebastian, her boyfriend and creator, reminded me of this. Do you feel like by the end of the book, anyone really knew Lena, like Mitty, for example, who loved her so much? Do you think she knew her or Lena knew herself?
OG: I think that we see that idea echoed across a lot of different spheres. I think it is something we do to public figures. I think it’s something we do to people that we want to have sex with. I think it’s something we do to people who we think we have power over. It’s something we do to kids. Dehumanization by way of admiration is a pretty chronic problem, especially in America, where we are obsessed with trophies and turn everything into one. We are obsessed with reward, with decoration, and I think in that way, Lena is totally dehumanized by everyone who claims to love her.
I think Lena started to understand herself, and in that, Lena began to recognize how much she doesn’t know. The first step of understanding something is understanding all of the things you still need to learn. The fastest way to not understand a person is to assume you know all about them, because that’s when you stop asking questions. So the fact that Lena is asking questions means that she is [starting to understand herself]. I don’t think she knows herself by the end. I do feel that she is on a journey to do so, and I think Mitty recognized towards the end of the book that she didn’t know Lena after all this time. That’s Mitty’s journey, looking at the person in front of her and going, Do I know this person, or am I just infatuated with them?
When Lena reveals certain things about herself, things she’s wondering, things she’s feeling, things she’s afraid of, Mitty has to look at what was in front of her and recognize that the person in front of her needs to make choices for themselves; that Mitty can’t decide [Lena’s] future for her, that Mitty can’t hold on to her. Really, loving someone is listening to them, and sometimes that means letting them go. I don’t think that anyone really knows Lena by the end. Maybe Mitty.
IM: What do you feel like writing this book taught you about yourself?
OG: I think it was a really compelling thing to realize that the character of Mitty, who I thought I identified with the most, ended up feeling more like a character I wanted to take care of, and Lena ended up feeling like the character I really identified with. I’ve had a public career that has oftentimes hinged on themes of empowerment. There’s sometimes this perception of: I know who I am, and I make all these choices for myself, and I’m incredibly autonomous; and I think that’s true in ways, but I think there’s other ways, especially when I think about [the] more intimate relationships in my life, where I have been quite moldable and influenced. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing, but I don’t think I fully knew I had been before writing this book. I don’t think I had fully worked through the impact of that on a person’s identity and a person’s ability to liberate themselves into some deeper truth. I was surprised by feeling that deep of a connection to a character who presumably is so disconnected from who she is that she doesn’t even remember her own past. Writing the book really, really helped me see that through in a therapeutic way.
Isabella Maria (@bella__thoughts) is a writer and teacher currently based in Barcelona. She has been published in Remezcla, Galore, Pop Poetry, and Euphoria, among others, and currently works as an editor for FilmDaze. She hopes every seedling of her soul planted in her words connects with a human ache in you to exist more brightly in your sacred dimensions.
Olivia Gatwood (@oliviagatwood) is the author of two poetry collections, New American Best Friend and Life of the Party, and the co-writer of Adele’s music video for “I Drink Wine.” She has received international recognition for her poetry, writing workshops, and work as a Title IX Compliant educator in sexual assault prevention and recovery. Her performances have been featured on HBO, MTV, VH1, the BBC, and more. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, and The Missouri Review. Originally from Albuquerque, she lives in Los Angeles.