Helen Phillips is Scared of Her New Novel
Helen Phillips is scared of her new novel, The Need. “The questions this book raises are uncomfortable,” she says. “And it was uncomfortable for me to write.”
The Need is also uncomfortable to write about, but for a different reason entirely: I don’t want to reveal too much about the plot. Part speculative thriller, part literary horror story, the book’s narrative tension is a tractor beam which pulled me late into a few nights, well past my usual bedtime. Phillips turns the suspense to eleven from the first sentence, which finds Molly, a mother of two at home alone, cowering with her kids in their bedroom, sure she’s heard the footsteps of an intruder in the next room.
“This is a primal moment,” Phillips says. “A mother, clinging to her children in the dark, scared of an unseen threat. Isn’t this what mothers have been doing forever?”
The nature of that mysterious threat to Molly and her family twists and turns as the book progresses, each revelation unlocking a new set of questions, flipping Molly’s, and the reader’s, expectations on their head. This is compelling, masterful plotting, and Phillips tells the story in a crisp, sharp style.
The Need is the kind of book that, especially as a parent, keeps you up at night in more ways than one. It’s unsettling in the best of ways, a wake up call to your limbic system.
*
The day we meet to discuss this dark material is as perfect a spring day as you can imagine: sunshine, birdsong, cotton ball clouds, the works. Helen Phillips bounds up the steps of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden looking like a rock star, dressed all in black with dark glasses and a stylish fedora, the imaginary love child of Patti Smith, Joan Didion, and Audrey Hepburn. We’ve come to take the evolutionary plant walk in the garden’s conservatory, since in the book Molly works as a paleobotanist, uncovering plant fossils and other artifacts from an archaeological site. We find that Phillips’ book cover, with its symmetrical, intertwining ferns on a field of black, blends in perfectly with the ancient greenery, but the walk is short and devoid of signage, so we journey outside in search of the garden’s famous bluebell wood.
“Having a child feels like such a unique experience. Except it’s not, it’s the most basic human experience.”
As we walk, Phillips tells me that though the book is in no way autobiographical, the seeds of the story are intensely and heartbreakingly personal. Her older sister, Katherine, whom the book is dedicated to, died when Phillips’ daughter was only eight weeks old. Katherine had Rett Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder which stopped her brain development around the age of one, though her body proceeded to grow in typical fashion. People with Rett Syndrome don’t usually live a full lifespan, but Katherine’s death, at the age of thirty-two, still came as a surprise.
Phillips’ parents grieved and she grieved too, but at the same time, she was caring for and bonding with her newborn girl. “It blows your mind, those early days with a baby. You’re so dazed from lack of sleep and hormones, love and wonder, it’s like being on drugs. And yet while I was falling in love with my first born daughter, my parents were mourning theirs. That simultaneity of love and loss is where The Need arose from.”
As she speaks, her voice thickens. This won’t be the first time she chokes up during our jaunt. Though The Need veers into the fantastical, the emotions at its core are very real for Phillips, and close to the bone.
Phillips grew up in Denver, Colorado, and though she worries this sounds boring, she knew from the age of six that she wanted to be a writer. When she was eleven, she lost her hair to the auto-immune disorder alopecia universalis, an experience which taught her that nothing in life is permanent. Now, as a parent, she thinks about impermanence all time.
“Any day that goes by when your kids are OK is a good one,” Phillips tells me. “And yet, you can’t walk around in a state of raptured bliss all the time. Even if that were possible it wouldn’t be ethical, given the many injustices and inequalities of the world.”
It’s easy, she says, to forget the joyous, treasured aspects of having children and focus only on the daily burden of providing childcare. And so The Need puts a mother, Molly, into a dire position where she can no longer take her life or her family for granted, because she may lose them. Fear—glaring, cold, instinctual fear—brings her to an awareness that her reality is as fragile as her children’s little bodies. They look to her for protection and care, and her youngest, still nursing, literally needs her for food. Molly’s lactation runs throughout the book, a very palpable reminder of how motherhood has shifted her identity; she needs her children as much as they need her.
Years ago, Phillips’ friend, novelist Jenny Offill, told her that nursing is the first time she really, fully understood that humans are animals. When Phillips became a mother, she felt the same. “When you start lactating it’s such a wild experience, and I felt like I hadn’t heard or read a lot about it, so I wanted to include it in the novel.”
Phillips and I have arrived at the Spanish bluebells, which cover the ground beneath a copse of oaks. From a distance, the flowers form a field of purple, but up close, each indigo blossom is unique, and there’s space between them, a larger space then you might think viewing them from afar. We’re quiet, appreciating the sweetness of their exhalations.
After a moment, Phillips says, “Having a child feels like such a unique experience. Except it’s not, it’s the most basic human experience.” She says this relates to writing too. “I tell my students: you can find the universal in the most personal of details.”
*
The Need began as a huge list of random ideas, plot points, overheard dialogue, newspaper clippings, and images from dreams. From that list Phillips wrote what she calls her “draft zero,” a completely organic, unplanned version of the story. If it goes off the rails—and it always does—she lets it. From that raw material she then trims and cuts, refining and shaping what she keeps, distilling a first draft. This process was also how she wrote her first novel, the critically acclaimed The Beautiful Bureaucrat. It means that the draft process typically yields shorter, tighter drafts, much in the way of a sculptor bringing forth a form from a rough mass of stone.
“Confronting yourself is no different than confronting any other human being; The Other is also yourself, though with a hugely different set of life circumstances.”
Once the plot has shape, Phillips brings her meticulous organizational skills to bear. She makes outlines and charts, particularly regarding chronology. Temporal organization, she says, is important not just to her logical brain, which appreciates accuracy, but also as a guiding structural principal for the narrative. By the time the book is done, this work is relatively invisible to the reader, but it’s important to her that it feels right.
In this case, she wanted The Need to suck the reader in, to have an addictive, page-turnery quality to its pacing. And indeed, it does; when I passed the book to my wife to read, she also found herself up late, unable to put it down. But though that effect feels effortless, it required a lot of work. The slim volume took Phillips five years to write.
*
After skirting the bluebell wood, Phillips and I find a bench in the shade. Just in front of us, the plots of the Children’s Garden lie exposed to the sun, deserted in a way that’s both peaceful and unsettling. Our talk pivots from parenting to an even deeper question, that of empathy.
Phillips says that the book asks, “Can you take someone else’s pain as seriously as your own?” And it answers this by confronting Molly, and the reader, with a situation in which the ethics are slippery.
“Molly’s identity, her self-hood, is not as stable as she thinks it is,” Phillips says.
And isn’t that true of all of us, especially where our kids are concerned? Peaceable parents become lions when they perceive a threat to their children, and desperation comes quick when you feel like everything you love, everything that makes you you, is on the line. In such situations, Phillips suggests, we may be our own worst enemy. “Confronting yourself is no different than confronting any other human being; The Other is also yourself, though with a hugely different set of life circumstances.”
Crafting a story in which these existential questions play out so viscerally required tapping into her deepest anxieties as a parent, letting those fears, that everything she knows as normal may change with a snap, run wild. “I wanted to think about grief—my parents’, my own—and confront it. And I wanted to express my anxieties and relieve me of them, though perhaps that’s not fair, because now I’ve passed them on to the reader.”
With that, we head our separate ways to pick up our kids from school, though with Phillips’ words ringing in my ears, I find the breeze raises goosebumps, and the sunlight appears more eggshell then it did a couple hours ago. And when my son dismisses from school, running to me with his arms wide, I wrap myself tight around him, and hold him close.
