Five Authors, Seven Questions: Tahmima Anam Answers "Female Rage"

Tahmima Anam describes her new novel Uprising in two words: "Female rage." That answer opens the latest Lit Hub Author Questionnaire, a monthly feature that puts seven questions to five authors with new books. This month's lineup also includes Gabriel Bump (Don't Stop Snowing), Siân Hughes (No Such Thing as Monday), Matt Kish (Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page) and Nick Paumgarten (The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game).

The format is strict. Authors must describe their books without summarizing them, discuss influences without naming other writers, and confront the hubris of assuming anyone cares what they think.

What do the new books cover?

Bump lists his territory as "Fathers and sons. Getting better. Friendship. Books. Buffalo. The Great Lakes." Hughes writes about "trauma, and how survivors of child abuse have missing pieces of their memories, and the different ways this impacts them throughout their lives." Paumgarten frames hockey as "a core sample of my life and times." Kish, whose book pairs one drawing with every page of Melville's novel, reaches wider: "the essential nature of imagination."

The influence question produced the frankest answers. Anam cites "the Irish republican dirty protests, the folk songs of Fakir Lalon, and the demon deity of the Sundarbans mangrove forest, Bon Bibi." Paumgarten admits: "I think I suffer less from anxiety of influence than from amnesia of it. A function maybe of a disorganized brain. Or a concussed one."

Hughes traced her novel to a failed short story called "My Brother's Dog," narrated by a boy trained not to see his brother's abuse. "There was no dog in it," she said. Expanding it meant solving a structural problem: building a novel "where the narrative voice is not broken but the narrator is neurologically incapable of telling you the most important thing you need to know."

What was happening in these writers' lives?

Asked to describe their lives during writing, without complete sentences, the answers split between darkness and light:

• Hughes: adjusting to her father's death, running a bookshop that "made zero money," getting dumped, keeping an ancient building from falling down
• Paumgarten: "Empty nest, various aging arcs, some deaths to near-and-dears... the general enshittification of the world"
• Kish: "Aging, milestone birthdays, regret, depression, restless searching, loneliness, and obsession obsession obsession"
• Anam: "Bursting into flames"
• Bump: "Sunshine after a long dark night... Can you believe it?"

How do they handle bad reviews?

The despised-descriptors question drew sharp replies. Kish has been called "Naive, childlike, near-competent." Bump reported: "Pointless. Horrible. Terrible. People on Goodreads are mean!" Paumgarten, a New Yorker staff writer, said being called a "stylist" "smarts," adding: "People get weird about commas. I like commas." Anam's single word was "Triggering."

Hughes took the gentler view: "In character-driven fiction, if someone does not love the character, that is their heart, and no one's fault. You cannot help who you love."

Alternate careers and craft confessions

Dream careers ranged widely. Anam would invent ice cream flavors. Paumgarten would guide rivers or play bass. Bump would play attacking midfielder "for a seventh-division Norwegian team." Kish chose printmaking, because art "should be attainable by anyone, belong to everyone, and be mass-produced instead of fetishized." Hughes, who once worked for a choir for homeless people, would lead music and textile workshops in mental health centers.

On craft, Anam said: "I'm good at endings, but I would like to be vastly better at describing trees." Hughes confessed she writes "easily ten times as much as ever ends up being a useful part of the book," having accepted that characters, not plots, drive her work.

The final question, on hubris, closed the circle. Kish said he refuses "the luxury of that kind of self-aggrandizing anxiety" and makes art "for the stories that matter to me." Anam answered by returning to her opening theme: "By writing what I (and you) would rather not know."

The questionnaire runs monthly at Lit Hub, with the next installment expected to feature another five authors with new books.