Heather McCalden’s genre-defying fragmentary memoir, The Observable Universe, begins with “this book is an album of grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.” And what an experience it is.
When McCalden was a child, she lost both of her parents to the AIDS virus, her father when she was seven and her mother when she was ten. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she noticed that “the internet was doing some really particular things and virality was being discussed constantly.” This led her down a rabbit hole that became The Observable Universe. In her book, McCalden employs a mix of poetic and plain prose to weave together her personal narrative with science and technology to examine our interconnectedness; how “our evolution has thus been driven in part by negotiating with viruses,” both biological and virtual, and how these viruses live in us and change us, as we change them. And yet for McCalden there is one virus that has often kept her separate from the rest of the world: her grief.
As someone who also lost their parents at a young age and has written a book about it and just completed a second memoir, written in fragments, I felt compelled to reach out to McCalden to see if she was interested in talking to a fellow orphan and writer about her experience of writing her book. We spoke on Zoom about writing the self, fragmentary writing, what it’s like to be orphaned at a young age, and how it impacts a life and the creation of art and literature.
Erin Vincent: I must start off by asking, was it weird to be working on a book about viruses—the virus that killed your parents, the concept of “going viral” online, the internet and how we connect—at a time when a massive virus hit the world and forced us into our homes and communicating online?
Heather McCalden: Oh, yeah, it was a giant headfuck. I’d spent these years researching and writing about viruses and HIV and then life literally came to a standstill because of a virus. So, that felt like… What’s going on here? Is life imitating art? The genesis of the book was completed before Covid but then, all of a sudden, I was existing in this alternative reality.
EV: At one point in The Observable Universe you write, “I felt like a ghost and quite often when I entered a room I felt people pull away from me as if suddenly encountering a cold front.” Did your parents dying when you were a child often make you feel like an outsider?
HM: 100%. When you’re a child reality hasn’t solidified around you so your baseline for what normal is, well, you’re in the process of creating it. So in a sense what happened wasn’t, at the time, crazy disruptive, it was more surreal than anything else. I mean, what it did over time was hardwire into me that everything you love will die. However, that is true of life but, you know, it’s a truth of life that you shouldn’t have to absorb when you’re seven. I now have a really low capacity for things that are frivolous or bullshit, or things that are not transparent because I feel this constant urgency that life can just go out like a candle at any time for any of us, and when you have that knowledge at such a young age you can’t just fit into anywhere. I remember, in middle school my grandmother used to drive to my school so I could have lunch with her, so I wouldn’t have lunch by myself. There’s a section in my book called Culture = Life Content where I try to explain the sense of being an outsider. You know, there’s parental loss but there’s also this loss of being able to look out into the world and say, “Oh, I fit into this groove or this track.” Because I don’t. I don’t have the same amount of skin as other people, I guess. When you don’t know how the world works yet and then something happens, you just get wired differently.
EV: This leads me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot these past few years. After my first book was published, my writing faltered. I tried for years to write another book but everything felt dead on the page. Then I started reading a lot of books written in fragments and decided to try it for myself. Suddenly, everything clicked and I finally was able to write my second book. And now I wonder… does fragmentary writing suit me because I was fragmented in some way when my parents died? Does any of that resonate with you?
HM: Yes. People think I made this purposeful aesthetic choice, but I can’t write any other way. I think that prevented me from exploring writing sooner in my life than I did, because I just could never find the story with a beginning, middle, and an end structure, but I could do all the components of writing, I just couldn’t do that one aspect. I got really frustrated and then I had to make a life decision; I can be angry and frustrated that my mind doesn’t work in a certain way or I can choose to see how my mind works, and maybe make something with what is available to me. I just gave myself permission to do that… It’s in therapeutic literature; we know that trauma alters your memory, it alters how you’re able to access memory, it alters how you’re able to communicate, if you’re able to communicate. So, there is something about fragmenting narrative that I think is very truthful to that experience. What I think is also very interesting, though, which I discovered through the writing of this book, is that culture is now in the same position because culture is entirely fragmented and we absorb culture through the Internet or through apps. So, you’re not in linear time, you’re not receiving information in a logical fashion. People are sort of operating in this fragmented headspace which basically mirrors a trauma headspace. I mean, at this point I think we are kind of traumatized just because world events have gotten so bad. There’s a parallel there. I thought it was important to acknowledge that.
EV: You write about halfway in the book that initially you thought you were writing a book about viruses, but then you write, “When I lifted my head from the page, I saw something else – My book is about grief.” When did this occur to you and how did that feel?
HM: Late in the process. Originally, I wanted to do an art installation about going viral and virality. So I just started researching that stuff but no visual imagery was occurring. I thought, how am I going to create art from this if I’m not getting any visual inspiration. I thought, the more information I have, the better chance that a creative spark will ignite. I was like, okay, viruses, biological viruses. But then I started to ask, maybe the bigger question is, what is metaphor? I went down the rabbit hole of just interrogating every thought. And then I had 300 fragments, pages of notes, and it was very clear it was never going to be an art installation and at the same time a very small part of my brain said you’re interested in going viral because your parents died of a virus… maybe that’s actually what you should be talking about.
EV: On The Writer’s Bone podcast with Daniel Ford you said, “I’m always trying to create… something of beauty, something of harmony… I can’t flirt with darkness, I’m not interested in it. I’m not going to mine my trauma for anyone.” You say that your goal is to try turn the things that have happen to you into art. I feel the same, but less artfully I call it my attempt to turn shit into gold.
Over time [it] was hardwire into me that everything you love will die. That is true of life, but it’s a truth that you shouldn’t have to absorb when you’re seven.
HM: Yes. It’s a process of transmutation. It’s the only way that I’ve found that is kind of like healing. I’m a pretty kinetic person, I don’t like to feel stuck, either physically or in my emotions or in my thought pattern. So, if there’s something that isn’t working, or that I feel is hurting me, the only way forward is to flip it or transmute it. Basically, it’s sort of the occult practice of alchemy… take a substance, and through ritual, distill it to the most harmonious version of itself. And these darker feelings, well… Without darkness you can’t define happiness, right?
EV: Yes! So, was this your first time writing about your parents and your grief? Was it more difficult than you anticipated? This question particularly struck me when I read the section in your book titled Five Images of My Parents Dying of AIDS. I became quite sick when I wrote Grief Girl as I’d lied to myself about the impact my parents’ deaths had had on my life. I used to say, “So my parents died, what’s the big deal?” When I was in my twenties and thirties I would even say to my husband, “Isn’t it amazing I came away unscathed.” Was writing this book the first time you deeply examined your grief? If so, what effect did it have on you? Did your reaction surprise you?
HM: Well, I knew that I wasn’t dealt a great hand of cards. It always felt like I was peering over a cliff’s edge, into the darkness of a ravine, but there was no place in my life where I could explore that, so I put it off limits. I don’t know how useful it is to fully delve. When I was writing the book I realized, oh actually, I can’t fully delve, and the book explains that. That’s why the book shifts to these very like clinical passages. By sleight of hand, I’m showing you that I can’t go there; arrows point to what cannot be said.
EV: What has the response been? Are you finding that people want more orphan angst or some such thing?
HM: I think some people want more trauma mining and they’re confused as to why the book doesn’t “come together” at the end.
EV: Ha! The way life does!
HM: Yeah, that’s my response. Like have you existed in life? When has anything fully resolved? I just have to respect that readers that have had certain types of experiences will automatically understand what I’m doing and why the book is the way it is, and people who don’t get that will either still appreciate some aspects of it, or they’ll just think it’s garbage. You know, it is what it is. I mean… how can you describe the unspeakable if you can’t speak it?
EV: In the book you call your parents David and Vivian, not mom and dad. Was this a way to have some distance or did you always call them by the first names?
HM: It just felt weird to keep saying “my mother” or “my father.” I think that can become maybe too generic for a reader or it’s an opportunity for a reader to put in their idea of what a mother is or what a father is. It wasn’t consciously literary or consciously emotional either. It’s what naturally happened.
EV: Do you think you’re done with writing about your parents. I thought I was done but then I found I needed to look at it again from a different angle in a different form.
HM: It’s hard to say because writing about them is really writing about absence, So it’s likely I’ll write about absence in some form or another, forever. I’m sure you know that what is really difficult about parental loss is that each year of your life it becomes clearer and clearer the extent of what you lost, and not just in terms of those relationships, but in terms of a support system, in terms of just learning how to be a person at certain ages. So, unfortunately, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. People think someone dies, and you are kind of fucked up for like two or three years, but that’s really not what it is. You’re just different, like you die with them. And then each year of your life you change and your relationship to that changes, so I can see myself writing more into this. It brings to mind when Lou Reed passed away and they found an unopened tape of music that he mailed to himself when he was young. No one had ever heard it, these songs that he made as a young man. There’s a version of “Heroin” on it, him singing it as a folk song, kind of in the style of Bob Dylan. So, this is a piece that was composed, let’s say, at like age 18. And he sang that song with different artists over a career of 60 years. That’s remarkable, what started as something that you sang in your bedroom becomes a highly influential piece of music. That story is just wild to me. I’m here for that, or whatever that could be in my future.
EV: There’s part of me that thinks, oh no, am I going to keep writing about my parents, and loss and grief and death forever?! And then there is a part of me that thinks how interesting it would be if someone did that. If they kept writing about the same thing in a different way, so every time was a different experiment.
HM: I’m only going to read something if I think it’s going to change how I view myself, the environment, reality, or geopolitical circumstances. And I just think that many novels are about women that hate their lives, and that’s not exciting to me or beneficial to anyone really. Except, you know, I am aware that most people aren’t reading to fill gaps in themselves. And I think, because we’re orphans it’s very natural that the art you consume is sort of like plugging these heart holes or you learn very quickly to divine knowledge from books or movies, to replace knowledge that you don’t get around a dinner table.
EV: Is there anything you hope readers will get from the book?
Without darkness you can’t define happiness, right?
HM: Someone said to me, “Oh, I really liked your book because it made me feel less alone.” That was wonderful. I thought… my work is done, I can retire now. (laughs) And then… it’s so hard to explain this, but I guess I would just hope that someone would pick up my book and feel a spark in terms of… I don’t know. I just feel like so many people are having such a hard time right now, because they feel like their life is a mess, and the truth is, it’s not a mess, life is messy and there’s value in that and if you can figure out what about it is exciting or curious or beautiful, there is value, and you can make something happen from that. There’s a lot of social conditioning that says if you don’t come from a conventional household, and you don’t think conventionally, there isn’t a place for you, and I just wanted to show through my writing that yeah, I was fucking depressed for a really long time and I didn’t know how to communicate that to anyone, and the only thing I knew was that art would always be there for me in some shape or form. My goal in the writing was to show that even if you have horrible or weird circumstances, you can do something with that, you can take the mundane and make it remarkable, and then you can sleep at night and have nice dreams.
EV: That really resonates with me. We’re not these destroyed people. We can create something beautiful. I’ve sometimes asked myself, is what happened to me a blessing or a curse? It’s neither, it’s both, it’s so many things. I don’t think I’d change anything. It’s made me who I am; made me the creative person that I am. Would I have this way of seeing the world without it?
HM: I feel the same way. I think I get a lot more out of the day than most people. That wouldn’t be the case if my life had turned out differently. I wouldn’t be at all like this. It’s an interesting game to play… blessing or curse. Yes, it’s both, it’s neither. I did think the other day, I was in London on the underground, and I was thinking all the stories are about orphans anyway. It’s never a kid from a happy household, it’s always the kid running away from something that is unsafe or total annihilation. I think that’s cool, it’s interesting that that exists in literature to kind of show us that it’s the outsider or the person that’s gone through something kind of heinous that is the hero. I’m definitely not saying I’m a hero by any means!